Susan Dieterlen
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Unraveling Urban Life and Space

Will This Last? Temporary Bike Lanes, Expendable Cars

6/24/2020

 
​Seeing a lot of talk about whether temporary bike and pedestrian lanes like this will last. Is it a new day for bikes on the American street? 

No. People want desperately to go back to pre-pandemic normal, and “normal” is not having half your street blocked off for bikes. But-

Yes. We are getting a new day for bikes from the pandemic. Just not that particular new day. 

Cars look expendable, more than they have in decades. All these (temporarily) closed lanes say that, but so does the reduced overall traffic volume and all of us staying home and not driving to the closed restaurants and shops. Suddenly we can do without cars, at least some of the cars, at least some of the time. What we can’t do without is all the essential supermarket clerks and warehouse workers and hospital staff who’ve been on the job since March. How many of these essential folks drive a private car to work versus taking a bus, riding a bike, or sharing a ride? Isn’t “essential” transportation what gets essential workers to work and back? The stockbroker’s car sitting in the garage looks irrelevant by comparison.

A monster recession (or maybe a depression) is looming or already here, depending on whether you’re still employed or not. Hard times mean expendable expenses tend to get expended, budget-wise. Cars are expensive to own, to maintain, to drive, and to insure. Suddenly that fixed cost in the household budget doesn’t look so fixed. Cash-strapped local governments might see it that way, too, if reduced traffic can mean less road maintenance and repair. Bikes and pedestrians put far, far, far less wear on pavement and other infrastructure, so maintenance costs are much less, a drop in the bucket compared to maintaining roads for cars. 

Chaos always brings with it opportunities, and we surely are living in chaotic times. When everything is turned upside down, the status quo can lose its momentum and new ideas can look surprisingly plausible. Maybe the expendable car is here to stay. 

​

How to (Not) Speak in Stone

6/9/2020

 
Picture
What's on this memorial? What's missing?
​Indianapolis has a Confederate monument? Has anyone told Indy they’re in the north? 

The story gets weirder when you look into it, and ultimately worse. Yes, Indiana was on the side of the Union during the Civil War, despite snark about it being the northernmost southern state today. It was so Union that there was a prison camp in Indianapolis, where a number of Confederate soldiers died. Hence a monument to those dead Confederates, in a cemetery, appropriately enough. But wait: that monument moves out of the cemetery and into a prominent public park in the 1920s, when - here it comes - the Klan more or less ran Indiana. The official reason for moving the monument to the park was to make it more visible to the public. Seems safe to say the real reason was to emphasize the Klan’s power, especially to African-Americans and their other targets. What’s really damning in my view is the century or so that the monument remained in that park. Meanwhile the remains of the dead Confederates were moved to Crown Hill, the city’s most prominent cemetery where all the historic stuff seems to be, and a second marker went up there, making the original monument redundant as well as Klan-tainted.

Monuments speak, often saying things other than what they literally say.

I used to spend a lot of time road biking past historic markers in upstate New York. At the (slow) speed I move, there’s plenty of time to digest what the marker says, and what it leaves out. Or who it leaves out. Like, say, the bronze roadside plaques marking the oldest of old farms on rural roads, established in 17-whatever by some colonial guy - let’s call him Josiah Smith - and celebrated for remaining in the family’s hands to this day, more or less as an operating farm. A couple centuries in farming is an accomplishment, but it’s an accomplishment largely done by people who weren’t Josiah.  When Josiah broke ground on the edge of civilization back when, he was doing the same thing that all his neighbors, assuming there were some, were doing. The farm didn’t become plaque-worthy for a century or two, time when that farm continued to run because of descendants, hired hands (enslaved hands, other places), generations of women… All of whom hide behind that plaque. Nameless.

Last night I learned about the struggle to memorialize the 1887 massacre of black sugarcane workers in Thibodaux, Louisiana, from the current issue of Oxford American. The story mentions historic buildings and plaques around town, and I imagine there’s a few mentions of Confederates among those, but the town scarcely remembers the massacre, even forgetting the mass grave under the American Legion post. (!) 

Compared to a mass grave, what’s a few farm women? What’s history, and what isn’t, is malleable, easy to erase or revise. Set it in stone in a obelisk in the town square, and your version becomes the only version, instantly respectable, still silent about so many things that mattered. 

Also posted on Medium.

More Empty Pedestals

6/4/2020

 
Picture
Dead white guy, but from Grant's army, not the rebels. You get the idea, though. ( www.stockvault.net)
From the fire hose of news about the massive wave of protests following the death of George Floyd comes this: more statues and monuments are coming down. Confederate soldiers, even Lee, but also other notable men (so far, all men) from our racist past. Richmond, Birmingham, and Alexandria (VA) join this list, but given the renewed focus on these monuments and the intensity of the protests, other cities are likely to join the club soon. Stay tuned. While you do, revisit these 2017 thoughts about losing statues and what empty pedestals say.

Empty Pedestals (8/18/2017)

​The statues are coming down. Some are surprised how easy it is to physically remove a statue, or just pull it down. It’s true: removing a bronze statue can be as simple as cutting through a handful of bolts, far less effort than it takes to reach consensus about whether the statues should stay or go. Statues of this kind, that commemorate famous men (and sometimes women) in public places outdoors generally sit upon a plinth or platform of some kind. That pedestal is by far the more difficult piece to remove, being a large block of solid stone or other masonry extending well below the soil’s surface.

The pedestal is essential to the statue - it keeps Stonewall or whoever from sinking into the ground or tipping over - but people don’t have strong feelings about plinths. It’s just the stage for the main event. A grand pedestal makes its statue higher, but also elevates it figuratively, saying that whatever stands atop it is worthy of attention, if not veneration. When the statue goes, that stage becomes empty. The way things are going, we may soon have quite a few of them.

What hen happens to the empty pedestals? The obvious choice is removal. Removing a pedestal is not so emotionally fraught, just a surprisingly expensive bit of demolition. Demolish the plinth, excavate its substantial footing, fill in the hole, and cover the spot with grass or pavement. You can make it look like no statue was ever there. That’s erasure, and some will say that is exactly what should happen. That park or avenue can look as though this entire argument we are living through never happened at all.

From an urban design standpoint, statues are more than who or what they honor. They are often the focal point of a space. The kind of traditional statues of soldiers and statesmen in question here typically form part of a symmetrical, classical layout, as the center of a circle or endpoint of an axis, for example. As focal points, they do not simply say “look at this person,” but also “look at this spot,” highlighting a location where lines cross or an important space is entered. If that focal point is totally erased, it will be odd, like a missing tooth. In other places, Confederate statues are one memorial among many, grouped on a courthouse lawn or in a park. In those situations, one memorial more or less won’t matter so much. 

What else can you do with an empty pedestal? You can put something else atop it, a new player on the stage. This could be another permanent (sort of) memorial to a less controversial hero. Or you could sidestep permanence and use that spot as a rotating gallery of sorts, like the Fourth Plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square. Replacement is erasure, too, in a different, more dynamic form. 

The empty pedestal itself calls to mind cathedral niches deprived of their saints during the Reformation. Those niches speak eloquently of the history of their churches and abbeys, before the Reformation and after. The empty pedestal and the void above it are themselves history. They are questions rendered in stone: what was here? why is it gone? why was it here in the first place?  
 
Over 150 years have passed since the end of the Civil War, and we are arguing, bitterly, over these statues and what they mean and to whom. One hundred fifty years far surpasses the duration of the war itself, from 1861 to 1865. Our divisions over race, which are inextricable from the Civil War and its memory, are of course far older, essentially beginning with European settlement of North America. As a shaping force, these centuries-long divisions may be more influential than any war, even one as bitter as our civil war. If our public space should highlight important elements of our history, perhaps these divisions deserve a mention. But how do you memorialize a rift?

The empty pedestal makes a statement of its own. Here something was venerated, for some reason, and then it was not, for some reason. Perhaps these questions and the rifts they highlight deserve a spot among our war heroes and founders. A few of our soon-to-be empty pedestals could remain vacant, filled with questions about who we’ve been, and who we are. 

(Also posted on Medium here.)

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    Assorted drafts, previews, and outtakes from the book I'm currently writing about the impact of vegetation and neglect on urban life. I also take other thoughts for a test drive here, including nascent design and research ideas.

    City Wild carries on the discussions and spirit of my 2011-2014 class, City Wild Seminar. This began as a forum for websites, articles, and other intriguing stuff sent to me (Susan Dieterlen) by current and former students, colleagues, and other well-wishers.  

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