A Side By Side Comparison of Car-Free vs. Carmageddon Developments

I took this picture of two apartment buildings on Rampart just south of Temple. It's a great contrast of the differences created when a building is built around cars and parking, and when it is not.

On the left you can see the sickening result of what happens when developers are required to spend huge amounts of a project's money on installing usually grade-separated parking structures. The rest of the building suffers enormously, not just because the project runs short on funds for things like design and landscaping, but also because the entire complex is built to be entered and exited by car, to be seen through a windshield, to offer an experience on par with the little metal sarcophagus in which its residents spend large parts of their days. Notice the giant FOR RENT banner on the building? The building on the right also has a For Rent sign, but it's stuck into the grassy sidewalk median where people walking by will see it, because there is no parking and the tenants don't bother to advertise to drivers.

On the right you see the result of a project built before Angelenos relied so psychotically on cars, before our city government mandated such pathology and before our citizenry sat by placated, breathing toxic fumes and dying of diabetes. The building on the right has an aesthetic appeal that is meant to be observed for some time, at a walking pace, or even at a standing pace, as someone might have actually been out in front of the building simply enjoying the day. Imagine that! On a street! I mean, not today, because the street is as desolate as a freeway, and the only thing to stroll to is a stripmall on the corner. The building on the right maintains a pedestrian level facade, creating places where people want to enter, unlike the building on the right, which looks like people get dragged into it to have bamboo shoved under their finger nails. The building on the right maintains a consistent streetscape, making it safe for pedestrians and bicyclists to travel in front of it, while the building on the left has a giant driveway with two tons machines roaring in and out of it...doesn't it just look like some kind of Machine-Monster Den?

The building on the left looks like it was designed by a fourth grader, while the building on the right obviously received lots of care and consideration in its design, took its surroundings into account, understood its residents' humanity. These are things we used to do in this country, in urban areas...at least for wealthy people.

But it must be said that clearly when the building on the right was built, the demographics of the area were much different than the demographics of the area in which the building on the left was built. As our city centers emptied of white middle class residents, buildings like that on the left became the norm, because wealthy tax payers now lived 40 miles from where they worked, and none of them lived in apartment buildings in the middle of the city where requiring 1.5 parking spaces for every complex would end up making everyone inside the complex feel like they wanted to stab someone.

And still, around this country we are mystified by urban areas, we criminalize behaviors as the only means to solving the problems we create, we spend hundreds of millions of dollars on guns and prisons and when none of it pays off we buy more guns and more prisons. If we spent even a fraction of that money making sure that buildings like that on the right got built more often, you'd see a city transformed and an entire industry of "public safety professionals" put to shame.

al principio...

This is a blog, like all blogs, which is mainly about the person who writes it. Most specifically it is a way for me to keep track of my developing interest in what I can only uncomfortably title urbanismo, and more vaguely though satisfyingly call placemaking.

Since I've obviously already felt that introductions are due, the blog title is a spin off of a short lived archive of the numerous tricks-of-the-trade I learned to best live as cheap and fulfilling as possible in a suburban college town in Southern California, a project I called Claremont Libre. I solemnly swear to pass that whole thing off to someone back in Claremont, someone much less short sighted and more complacent with unappreciation than myself, as soon as possible. Or turn it into a zine, print 100 copies off in the Pitzer College computer lab, and distribute them for free. Anyway, that project was what spurred my initial interests in alternative urban practices. Actually the Green Bike Program at Pitzer College is what REALLY spurred those interests, but that's a whole other story.

Before I get off the whole title thing, libre is a throw back to an incredible Italian man named Egidio, whom I shared a bunk with while living in a hostel in San Francisco, who deserves love and praise at what I think is egidiolibre@yahoo.com (tell him I said hello). Finally libre is also a tip of the hat to what I think is an appropriately direct call to Spanish Anarchism, and, well, to anarchism in general.

So to the actual theme of this new project, Urbanismo Libre. The idea of urban planning, place making, livable communities, community organizing, urban geography, and by all the other names it goes by has always interested me, but most recently, with my firm belief in my anarchist teachings, has become strangely befuddling; how can one really plan urban spaces? Is no one else disturbed by the massive construction projects defining urban planning, in China, most recently in Paris, and even in Long Island? Did international communism not come crumbling down solely from the weight of enormous, drab apartment complexes and the utter lack of culture passed over in the minds of those projects' creators? Did medieval centers, the oft cited arbiters of contemporary planning models, ever have city plans or planning departments?

Yes my interest is most firmly, smack dab in the middle of the intersection between planning and culture. As an anarchist, I write here to advocate for a whole new approach to planning, one that is unplanned, like a life, free and spontaneous and confused and beautiful, tired and hungry and happy and horny, human, human above all, and what is more human than the culture of humanity. It is an idea I will be developing as this project develops, one I think can be a niche of some sort, but holy shit! I am no original! I have encountered and already spoke with Olympia Tveter of Pomona, California on the topic of Anarchist Planning! I must read her/his every word...wow that was truly unexpected.

Stay tuned for further developments. Oh! Well I might as well catch everyone up to the most recent. Having graduated from college about a month ago, I'm free at last to do what I want. And what did I do? Camped in 5 National Parks in 6 days, and landed in the Twin Cities, the nations second most biked metropolitan area. I worked an interesting event today concerning community outreach around the proposed Jefferson Bike/Walk Street, with Community Design Group, "a people centered, asset based approach to urban planning, policy and design." Wednesday I meet with Twin Cities Streets for People, an organization recommended to me almost immediately upon arrival. Found an awesome space known as the Sibley Bike Depot, hope to participate in Experimental College of the Twin Cities classes and mooch of of Macalester College, in more ways than one, but most relevant to everything here, their Geography Department.