Category:

Shrubbiness: When a tree isn't a tree

7/25/2018

Photo by author

This post is a preview of a sidebar in my upcoming book about the neglected city, Design by Deficit. Also posted on Medium.

Syracuse, New York, the city where I used to live, is a shrubby place. By that I mean that unmaintained land within the city quickly becomes colonized by woody vegetation above waist height, but below the height of shade or canopy trees. This is the ecological process of succession, but it’s succession with a twist: it’s being done by what Peter del Tredici calls, “cosmopolitan urban vegetation.” This mix of natives and exotic invasives includes several of the Most Wanted on the list of invasives in the US: shrubby honeysuckles, autumn olive, Japanese knotweed, and of course, public enemy #1, buckthorn. This paper called out Syracuse as one of the only cities in the US where overall tree canopy is increasing, probably because of the buckthorn. That’s a lot of buckthorn. At least it’s too cold here for kudzu ...so far.

Syracuse isn’t alone. Cities in the eastern US, particularly those that have lost industry and population, have shrubby places in part because of this collection of large invasive shrubs, and the rainfall to support them. Numerous other trends converge in shrubbiness: vacant land, abandoned properties, tight municipal budgets that restrict mowing, but also an increased value placed on wildlife habitat and natural-looking landscapes.

Urban shrubbiness sits at the junction between two established findings about human behavior and vegetation. In this research, tree canopy is the panacea, or nearly so. Tree canopy does it all - we think better, behave better, feel better, and like places and communities better when there are shade trees, to paint this research very broadly. Yes, these are largely studies finding association, not causation, and experiments are hard to design on this topic, but the association is consistent across many studies by many people, and in the end, there’s not much downside to planting trees, as we argue here. But on the other hand, there’s cues to care and loose space, research and theory that argues that we generally perceive apparently unmaintained land (such as that covered with successional vegetation) as out of control and outside the rules, fit for transgressive activities like vandalism. Tall dense vegetation - shrubbiness, again - has been shown in numerous studies to be a less preferred environment that makes us feel insecure, perhaps because we doubt our ability to navigate through it or discern threats within it.

So shrubbiness is both good and bad, from a human behavior standpoint. Which wins out- the positive or negative impacts, or is it a draw? For that matter, invasives, or the cosmopolitan cocktail of urban vegetation, are a mixed bag ecologically as well. Invasives (like buckthorn) are demonized because they damage biodiversity and don’t do all the good things that their less-competitive native counterparts do, but sometimes, well, a tree’s a tree. They all photosynthesize, and mitigate heat island, and help slow stormwater runoff - or do they? There’s an implied balance sheet here, weighing the good and bad impacts of unmaintained urban understory vegetation in terms of social, economic, and ecological good.

A tree isn’t a tree when it’s buckthorn vs. white oak, but many of our best and most sophisticated ways to measure urban vegetation in quantity (meaning on more sites that you can visit in person) sees those as the same.

In the lack of distinction lies the mystery; this devil’s in that detail.

What’s the impact of the shrubby city, and how do we find out? What about drier cities or ones without a Syracuse-caliber winter? Is the impact different there? If the environment matters, shouldn’t these differences matter, too? As climate change makes some places wetter as it dessicates others, and we all get hotter and hotter, we may find we want to know whether shrubbiness is working for or against us. Invasive large shrubs aren’t going away. We might as well understand what they’re doing to us.

"The Healthy Wild City" Lecture 11.3.17

10/10/2017

If you're going to be in Albany (New York) on November 3, stop by and say hello! I'm speaking about the health aspects of urban wilds on the panel on Shrinking Spaces and Community Development. Keynote looks great, and... it's free! For a bonus point, City Wild Seminar alum Jordyn Conway is helping plan the conference in her current position with Albany Law's Government Law Center. How can you resist? See you there!

Full conference info here.

Immigrants and rustbelt revitalization

2/6/2017

Blaming immigrants is nothing new. As a nation composed almost entirely of immigrants (brought by force or by choice) and their descendants, xenophobia has shadowed the American immigrant dream across the centuries. We honor the grit and drive of our own forebears even while we loathe new arrivals.

In 2015, I published Immigrant Pastoral: Midwestern Landscape and Mexican-American Neighborhoods, a book about how new and old Mexican heritage communities inhabit and shape the physical form of their neighborhoods and small cities. I completed this research in 2009, but it presaged the current national conversation, both about the perceived value or hazard of welcoming immigrants and about "forgotten" places like the small cities of the rural Rustbelt.

Immigration from Mexico has since fallen, mostly due to birthrate decline in Mexico and to economic conditions in the US - fewer jobs, fewer people come to take them. Nonetheless, here we are in the midst of the most intense episode of immigrant-blaming in my lifetime.

I grew up in rural Indiana, and I’ve seen the changes wrought in small Midwestern cities by globalization – economic changes in agriculture and manufacturing as well as the surge of new immigrants in the 1990s. The Rustbelt’s problems are real, but blaming immigrants (much less refugees, which are an entirely different group) for them is just plain wrong – factually wrong and morally wrong.

Immigrants aren’t the problem in small rustbelt cities – they are part of the solution. When your town has lost its major employer, its sons and daughters to brain drain, and struggles with falling enrollment in its school, you need people. Not just any people: people with ambition and energy in the prime of their working lives. People who will renovate houses and shops, start businesses and church congregations, and send their kids to the local schools. People like immigrants.

Much of what's being said right now positions these as opposing sides in a zero-sum game, as if anything gained by immigrants is a loss for pre-existing residents. That's not at all what I saw or found. While immigration from Mexico has decreased in recent years, the need for rebuilding small cities like the ones I studied has only increased. In this effort, every hand is needed. Insisting those hands must be white and native-born simply makes solving difficult problems even more difficult. No one can turn the clock back to 1950 or 1960 for these communities, and anyone who says he can is delusional, lying, or worse, conning you. No matter where the new arrivals come from, they are an important part of the future of these places - not the end, but the future. As I said in Immigrant Pastoral's final chapter:

Today new immigrants will step into the United States for the first time. As you read this, someone is renting their first home or starting their first day of work in their new life north of the border. New ethnic businesses will open, and somewhere in the US, a native son or daughter of Mexico will buy his or her first home.

Someone will drive through the center of his hometown and wonder when the old hardware store became a tienda. Someone else will discover multiple Spanish-language radio stations on the dial in rural Ohio, and somewhere someone will curse the new arrivals in her town for speaking Spanish, for standing out, for being the face of change in a place she thought was unchangeable.

All these people, together, are the future of small cities like those in this book—the future of Wellington, of Springfield, of Unionville. The worn condition of the town around them attests to the challenges of its recent past, to its inability to relinquish a way of life that has vanished into the globalization of the United States. There is no future in attempts to recreate the past. Instead these people, Mexican-Americans and other Americans, have to learn to live with each other to create a future for these small cities. The next chapter of these places will be written in both Spanish and English.

#Inequalityis infrastructure failure.

3/25/2016

In case you’ve somehow missed it, our public infrastructure is falling apart, especially in urban areas, especially in older parts of the country. You’ve seen the headlines, including this recent one from Philip Kennicott at the Washington Post, and some of you will have seen my previous post on Neglect as covert sculptor of cities.

If you missed the media coverage, you still can’t have missed the power outages, the crack in the sidewalk you stepped over today, or that monster pothole you couldn’t help but hit on the drive to work. We’re all thinking a little more about urban infrastructure and its discontents in recent days, because of the news of the drinking water contamination crisis in Flint, MIchigan. How could this happen in an American city in 2016? Aren’t we better than this? Isn’t it our birthright as Americans to have safe, potable running water in our homes? Well, 1)it did happen and is happening, 2) apparently not, and 3) I bet people in Flint thought that, too.

Water pipes are about as mundane as it gets - out of sight (literally, below ground), and for most of us who aren’t civil engineers, out of mind. We notice when it doesn’t work, and when it doesn’t work on the caliber of the Flint crisis, it’s news. But here’s bit of the news not to let slip by you in the (justified) acrimony over who should have done what when and didn’t: Flint isn’t alone. Those headlines above mean this is a problem many places, not just in GM’s hometown in the Wolverine state. Their pipes break; our pipes break. Their river’s polluted; our lake is. What’s the lead content of the pipes in your house? How about the pipes under your street?

That’s a trick question of sorts, because the location of pipes made of outdated material is not really random. Tell me how old your house is, and I can guess what your pipes are made out of, especially if you also tell me what state you live in and how old the other houses on your street are. Your house is in a subdivision built in the 1990s? Stop worrying, at least for now. Your house is in a 1920s streetcar suburb? Maybe you should worry. You rent an apartment in a converted house near downtown? Worry.

So if there are patterns in where the worrisome pipes show up, are there also patterns in who’s doing that worrying? If I’m a non-Hispanic white highly (over)educated professional person, as I am, which one of those houses is most likely to be mine? If I’m an African-American single mother working for minimum wage, which one of those houses is most likely to be mine? There’s clearly a relationship here, between income (and race, often collinear in the US) and neighborhood age and type, and between neighborhood age and type and condition of water pipes. Poorer neighborhoods, which are often non-white, suffer more problems with failing water systems. It’s not true all the time, but it’s true enough of the time in enough places to be worrying. And to be inequality.

On top of that, add this: where one infrastructure system is failing, others are likely failing nearby. Old pipes tend to run under old roads to old houses served by old power lines. Old sidewalks run by them, built long before ADA standards. Old standards for storm water management mean that the rainwater there runs into combined sewers and occasionally overflows, sending sewage into the river. A lot of this is about age - that things wear out over time, and we’ve done a poor job of replacing and maintaining systems like these over the past several decades, especially in urban neighborhoods beset by public and private disinvestment. Some of this could be about other factors that make systems wear out faster - less stable soil, perhaps, or a higher water table. Whatever the cause, there’s at least some evidence that these failures of different parts of infrastructure can occur simultaneously in certain neighborhoods, like potholes and water main breaks in Syracuse. Add to this other urban systems that are shaky at best in too many of our cities: schools, certainly. Public transportation or any kind of non-motorized transportation. Social services. Constructive relationships with police, sometimes. Ask yourself where these kinds of system failures happen, and the answer, frequently, is the same kind of neighborhood. That is a disproportionate burden on the people who live in those neighborhoods, and that is inequality.

An ugly feedback loop here is the role of household income in this, and how income level dictates your options. Individuals have the ability to make choices, for their own good and for the welfare of their families. But money gives you options: options to move to the suburbs, options to buy water filters and generators, options to get your water tested and take your kids to the doctor for preventative visits. The other side of this coin is that lack of money limits your options. So the concentration of infrastructure and other urban system failures in poorer neighborhoods concentrates the impacts of these failures onto those least able to withstand or avoid them.

If my logic is correct about how the most vulnerable among us are the ones bearing the heaviest burden, this is a dismal state of affairs. But it’s also the beginning of a remedy, or at least a powerful tool to detect hidden infrastructure failures before they balloon into Flint-sized catastrophes. If points of failure in urban systems tend to align within the same neighborhoods or areas, and these neighborhoods also tend to be those with the most vulnerable residents, these system failures and vulnerabilities could form a set of conditions that reliably occur together. If they reliably occur together, it follows that where one or two or maybe three kinds of system failure or vulnerabilities occur together, it’s likely that the other kinds of failure or vulnerabilities also occur there - even if we can’t readily see them or measure them. What we need is a way to test this out, and ultimately to detect where visible system failures align, as a watchlist for other system failures. The name of the game is predicting where the next water main break or drinking water crisis will occur *before* it occurs, and this idea - that neglect accumulates in certain urban spaces - could be the crystal ball to do exactly that.

Studio|Next: Final Project: Energy in the Landscape, Part I

3/4/2016

“[New York State’s] energy plan's goals for 2030 are a 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from the energy sector compared with 1990 levels, a 50 percent share of electric power from renewable sources and a 23 percent reduction in energy use by buildings.”
- from “Power projects fire up N.Y.'s 'Reforming the Energy Vision'” http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060030769

The need to address climate change and national security by transitioning to clean energy is central to current efforts at the international, national, and state levels. Our main project this semester engages with NYS’s Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) initiative and energy community collaborators to identify opportunities to meet REV's goals within central Syracuse, developing a research-based framework for selection of appropriate sites for the implementation of these opportunities. Each student will then refine one of his/her concepts to a design development level, on a site selected using the framework.
Plans like REV are often composed of goals that are too large, too abstract, or too vague to direct individual projects, while the clean energy industry is dominated by technical detail, frequently at the scale of electrical circuits. In this project, we explore the middle ground, uniting broad goals with practicalities through urban design. In this era of great reluctance to invest in large public projects, tying small, implementable designs to overarching goals becomes an essential skill to enable change, one step at a time. In the process we will apply design thinking to one of the most urgent issues of our time.
How can design in urban environments capitalize on the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy to improve life for all residents?

This project will proceed in two phases: the development of a logic for selecting sites and application of that logic to the city of Syracuse, followed by designs for selected sites within the city.
Products for Phase I should:

As a class: Determine what's most relevant to Syracuse from designated REV resources.
Spatially represent (eg: map of the city and keyed points) land use type or parts of the city for which these goals are most relevant or best suited.
Illustrate connections or ideas and connection between goals and city parts using sketches and diagrams.
Identify highest priority goals/city parts - what's the most urgent? What's an ideal pilot project? What parts will be easier after other parts have paved the way or focused public support?
Provide selection criteria for sites for most urgent goals/city parts.
Represent all sites within city of Syracuse (not metro area) selected with your criteria
Select three of these sites for your own design, and represent initial ideas for the design (sketches, precedents, etc.)…continued in Phase II.

Project schedule:
Tu 3.1              Guest lecture in CoE 508: Micah Kotch, NYSERDA. Class discussion and directed group work at CoE.
Tu 3.8              1:00-2:00 Guest lecture in CoE 203: Richard Yancy (BEEx) (short class meeting)
                        6:00-7:00 “Disruption and Design Thinking” lecture by Susan, Slocum Auditorium
3.14/3.16       Spring Break – no class meetings.
Tu 3.29            1:00-2:00 Guest lecture in CoE 203: Aseem Inam (TRUlab) (short class meeting)
Th 4.1             No formal class meeting - no studio deadlines week.
Tu 4.5              NY Power Dialog: Digital sketchbook discussion of work in progress (details TBA)
Th 4.6              Upload pdf of sketchbook work to class folder
…to be continued on Part II brief…

Deliverables:
Digital sketchbook representation of your work to date for discussion on 4.5. “Digital sketchbook” means:

Images are intended to be viewed on laptop screen, tablet, or other device as native format (not as hard-to-see reductions)
Images are viewed individually, not as a unified composition (eg: on a board)
In-progress work is *encouraged* over final presentation drawings.

Audience will be primarily professionals from other fields and students from outside Architecture.
Your digital sketchbook images must support discussion of your work-in-progress with this audience.
Digital sketchbook images must *also* be suitable for sharing via web or social media (eg: be able to stand alone with limited additional text narrative).

Evaluation Criteria:

All elements listed above under “Deliverables” present.
All elements listed above under “Products for Phase I should” present.
Deliverables exhibit a clear logical connection between components and steps.
Deliverables communicate well and at an appropriate level of detail to a professional but non-design audience.
Deliverables demonstrate good graphic representation and craft.
Online posts made as directed and final pdfs uploaded to course folder.

Studio|Next Project 2: System Restart, Part II

2/11/2016

Cities are systems, systems within systems. Government, infrastructure, food, healthcare, education, taxes, ecosystems - these are just a few examples. We live in a time characterized by dysfunction and lack of investment (#neglect) in many of these systems. Some of these are spectacular – levee failure – to mundane - a crack in the sidewalk. As we’ve seen in #Flintwatercrisis, catastrophes happen when multiple system failures align in the same space.
Understanding the systems operating within cities lets us understand cities and how to accomplish tasks (change, built work, permit approval) within them far better. In this project the systems of the city become more visible to us through the places where they break down. We reframe these places as opportunities for design.

How can design utilize dysfunctional urban systems to create more just, healthy, and sustainable environments?

Project site: Chosen by individual student for his/her Part II design. Choose a site that:

Is within the city of Syracuse.
Includes one or more points of failure in your selected system from Part I
Is 0.25-1.0 acre in size (that’s about ¼ of Shaw Quad)
Demonstrates a clear rationale for your site choice (eg: the most influential, the most visible, the most typical…)
I approve.

What to do:

Choose any system from among those presented on 2.11.16 as part of System Restart Part I. You *do not have to use the same system for Part II that you used for Part I!*
Use the information from Part I as the foundation for your Part II design, and to inform your design process. Sharing of information and graphics from Part I between students is strongly encouraged! But all work you turn in must be your own (eg: do your own drawings).

Site functions (program): Part II designs must:

Include a clear connection to an existing urban system within Syracuse, as explored in Part I.
Include a clear rationale for site choice based on existing conditions.
Mitigate (lessen the impact of) the system’s dysfunction.
Improve the system’s function, at least in a minor way.
Improve the city or a part of it (even if small) as a place for all residents.
Be primarily sitework (not buildings). Designs may include one or more structures as well.
Provide a single cohesive design that includes sitework and any included structures (ie not a design solely for a structure or building).

Project schedule:
Th 2.11            Part I in-class presentation, posts to social media/your online portfolio, tagged with @samedelstein and @Andrew_Maxwell, #iteams (+other hashtags at your discretion)
Part II project brief posted via @susandieterlen and on City Wild (blog)
Tu 2.16 &        No formal class meeting-
Th 2.18            no studio deadlines week. Email me with questions or to meet by appointment.
Tu 2.23            80% complete; Regular studio meeting
Th 2.25            Poster Session with Syracuse I-Team (location and details TBA)
M 2.29           5:00 p.m.: Parts I and II due in pdf to class Google drive folder. Please submit your Part I work as completed for 2.11.16, even if you used a different system for Part II.
                        Post final boards to social media/your online portfolio, tagged with @samedelstein and @Andrew_Maxwell, #iteams.

Deliverables:
Pdf of final boards uploaded to course website, AND
For poster session: 2 – 24”x 36” boards in hardcopy, unmounted, oriented horizontally (eg: 36” wide). Also include a separate paragraph explaining your design intent (300 words or less) – details about how to submit this paragraph will be forthcoming.
Boards should include:

Plan/perspective/section(s) presenting your design for your selected (and approved) site. Include at least one drawing showing *all* of your design, such as a plan or a bird’s eye perspective.
More detailed drawings (sections/perspectives/enlargement plans – your choice) to aid in communicating your design to a non-design audience.
Supporting infographics to communicate connection to existing conditions of your chosen system within Syracuse, and rationale for your choice of site within system.
Context map, aerial photo or other graphic locating your chosen site within your chosen urban system, and that system within the city of Syracuse.

Designs should be realistic in terms of scale and relationships of site elements, with materials specified for key elements.

Evaluation Criteria:

All elements listed above under “Deliverables” present.
Design provides elements listed under “Site Functions,” above.
Design safeguards public health, safety, and welfare.
Deliverables communicate well and at an appropriate level of detail to a professional but non-design audience (eg: the I-team).
Deliverables demonstrate good graphic representation and craft.
Online posts made as directed above and final pdfs uploaded to course folder.

Flint: Water + Lead + Infrastructure

2/5/2016

If you've been following the news about the drinking water crisis in Flint, Michigan, or if you haven't, but you care about cities, their most vulnerable residents, public policy, politics, power, and the dismal state of public infrastructure, check this out. A simple guest lecture for my current class, Studio|Next, has grown into what promises to be an excellent session with a congressional rep from Flint and two local faculty members. Those of you in the Syracuse area around lunchtime on Tuesday are welcome to bring your lunch and come by the Center of Excellence. Those of you in other places can join us via the web. Either way, link is below for the free registration site. If you're missing City Wild Seminar or the first version of Studio|Next, this will remind you of old times in the postindustrial wild! Take a look-

-S

Flint:
Water + Lead + Infrastructure

Tuesday, February 9, 2016, Noon to 1:00pm

REGISTER HERE TO JOIN IN PERSON
REGISTER HERE TO JOIN VIA WEBINAR

Flint, a city of about 100,000 in southeastern Michigan, is known as the birthplace of General Motors and for subsequent Rustbelt decline. Two new words define the city nationally: lead poisoning. Contamination of the municipal water supply and a shocking list of resulting health problems are a product of uniquely toxic chemistry, politics, and power within the region and the state. However, aging infrastructure and social inequality, problems shared by many other American cities, were also key ingredients in this disaster, prompting the question of whether this could happen elsewhere, and how to prevent it.

Please join this panel discussion as Hon. Dan Kildee, U.S. House of Representatives, of Flint, Michigan. speaks from Washington, D.C. about the current drinking water crisis and its connections with the city's infrastructure. Rep. Kildee is a lifelong Flint resident who founded the pioneering Genesee County Land Bank and co-founded the Center for Community Progress, a national organization promoting urban land reform and revitalization.

This session was created as part of:
ARC 407 Studio|Next: Building the Post-Carbon City #citybynext

Panelists:

Telisa M. Stewart, Assistant Professor, Upstate Medical University
Paula C. Johnson, Professor, Syracuse University College of Law

Session chair and organizer:

Susan Dieterlen, Research Assistant Professor, Syracuse University School of Architecture, Faculty Research Fellow, SyracuseCoE

*There is no charge for participating in this event.

Studio|Next Project 2: System Restart

2/2/2016

Cities are systems, systems within systems. Government, infrastructure, food, healthcare, education, taxes, ecosystems - these are just a few examples. We live in a time characterized by dysfunction and lack of investment (#neglect) in many of these systems. Some of these are spectacular - the levees failing in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina - while others are mundane - a crack in the sidewalk.

Understanding the systems operating within cities lets us understand functioning cities and how to accomplish tasks (change, built work, permit approval) within them far better. In this project the systems of the city become more visible to us through the places where they break down.

What design opportunities are created by dysfunctional urban systems?

Project site: The city of Syracuse. Some systems may include areas beyond the city or even its suburbs (eg: watersheds).
What to do:

Brainstorm as a class the systems of the city - social, economic, ecological, physical (infrastructure) - natural or constructed. Which of these are functioning and which are not?
Choose a system or related group of systems to investigate from the list.
Educate yourself about your chosen system in Syracuse: how it functions, what's involved in it, why it matters to a functioning city. How is it supposed to work? How do you know it's working well or measure success (#data)?
Identify failure within the system. What does failure look like? How do you know it's occurred (the opposite of measuring success; #data)? What are examples? Real-life case studies or profiles of failures? These could include maps of local failures or depictions of examples from other places.
Add space into the process: where are these failures located? How do they relate spatially to the rest of the system? What do you learn about the system and its failures by looking at it spatially?
Learn/hypothesize about causes of dysfunction in the system. Failing urban systems typically have multiple causes, which makes them complicated to fix (#wickedproblem). One way to think about causes is as pre-existing conditions, which set the scene (#neglect), and as “last straw” events, which provide the last step needed for failure to appear.
What other site analysis information is missing from your dossier? Track it down and find it.

Project schedule:
M 2.01             Project brief posted via @susandieterlen and on City Wild (blog)
Tu 2.02            Guest lecture by Syracuse I-Team’s Andy Maxwell and Sam Edelstein (CoE 508); go over project brief; begin Part I
Tu 2.09            Flint water crisis panel (Room 203, Syracuse Center of Excellence; noon-1:00)
Th 2.11            Part I finished; in-class presentation, posts to social media, tagged with @samedelstein and @Andrew_Maxwell, #iteams (+other hashtags at your discretion) Part II begins (see separate project brief)
Th 2.25            Poster Session with Syracuse I-Team (location TBA)
M 2.29           5:00 p.m.: Parts I and II due in pdf to class Google drive folder.
Tu 3.01            Post final boards to social media, tagged with @samedelstein and @Andrew_Maxwell, #iteams

Deliverables:
1 – 24”x36” board (digital) OR equivalent in Prezi including:

Explanation and illustration of your chosen system
Infographics (Venn diagrams, timelines, flow charts…) as appropriate
Map of Syracuse and/or parts of the city as appropriate

Evaluation Criteria:

Product clearly communicates chosen system, and locates it in space within Syracuse.
System’s function or lack thereof is evaluated, with support for evaluation of success or failure.
Product identifies at least 3 specific failures in the system, and locates them in space.
Causes of system dysfunction are provided (OK if speculative, but provide evidence).
Product enables a classmate to start on Part II (identifying opportunities and sites)
Deliverables communicate well and at an appropriate level of detail (including how design resists and incorporates entropic process).
Deliverables demonstrate good graphic representation and craft.

Neglect: Covert Sculptor and Next Big Thing

1/21/2016

"America's G.P.A.: D+. Estimated investment needed by 2020: $3.6 trillion."

No one’s surprised by that quote, right? We hear this at least once every four years, when the American Society of Civil Engineers releases its report card. The news is always bad, because guess what? We still didn’t do anything to rebuild, replace, or make redundant all those rickety bridges and crumbling dams.
I regularly drive under an interstate overpass near my house (that’s Route 80 in Tully, for you local folk). It’s best not to look to closely at it, the rusted steel and crumbling concrete. When the traffic light stops me under those tons of decay, I look up and think, “how did we get here?”

Well, you know how we got here. To oversimplify (because this is a blog post, not the book), we, as a country, used to invest massive amounts in public infrastructure, and now we, as a country, do this no longer. This means not only do we not build new or replace or even maintain old, but it means that we have a large number of structures that are all reaching the end of their lifespan at once. It’s a bit like if you buy all your socks at once, they all wear out at once. If you bought one pair of socks every few months, you’d always have socks in various states of repair: some new, some wearing out, some in between. Because we’ve coasted for a long time on the infrastructure investments of the past, we now have a lot of it wearing out at once, and as all those bridges and dams and roads have aged, we’ve changed into a country that doesn’t really do huge public projects any more. This lack of investment dovetails with other urban problems, creating terrible multiplier effects like Flint's water supply crisis.

The city where I work, Syracuse, New York, had on average more than one water main break EVERY DAY in 2015. But Syracuse is nowhere near unique in its infrastructural woes. Our failing infrastructure is one fruit borne of our politics over the last few decades, the inescapable sum of gridlock and budget cuts and starving the beast. I have my politics and you have yours, but we share the broken water main (although those of us with the wherewithal to live in the suburbs or exurbs don’t have nearly the share of broken water mains as those in the city, but that’s another post).

I propose we acknowledge our nation’s epidemic of failing infrastructure as a typical, if not universal, condition of urban design projects. Expect the pipes to break or be clogged, the combined sewers to overflow, the pavement to crack, the streets to flood. This makes the actual condition of failing urban systems part of the landscape, not as we think they should be or wish they were. They aren’t swept under the rug of inhibitions, but instead can be viewed objectively and incorporated into the catalog of opportunities and constraints that designers make at the beginning of a project. Like every other site condition, those failing systems can provide constraints…

…and opportunities.

Wait - really? Could failing systems in urban infrastructure create design opportunities? Could those opportunities include ways not only to fix or mitigate the failure, but also advance toward cities as more sustainable, healthy, and just places?

Consider this: failing infrastructure, public systems, and neglect of all forms is already a major shaper of our cities. The whole idea of urban wilds is based on neglect, the shaping force of lack of intention, what happens while we’re looking the other way. Disinvestment is neglect. Fraying social fabric is neglect. Less directly, all the myriad compromises required by years of tighter and tighter budgets, of doing more with less, are neglect of a sort, because something (or someone) always loses that compromise. Choices must be made, and the expendable things become neglected. We choose sidewalks over mowing, roads over sidewalks, highways over side streets, and everything over public transportation.

Neglect shapes the city through lack of intention. We don’t mean for it to happen, but it does, and when we’re consistent in what aspects or places we overlook, neglect becomes their primary shaper.

How does neglect present itself in our cities, how is it shaping our cities, and most especially, how does it or could it make those cities better places for people?

Let’s find out.

WHAT DO I DO FOR CLASS?

Read this post and click on all the links within it.
Read the articles; review (that means look through, but don’t read every word) the websites.
Think about what you agree with, what you disagree with, and what doesn’t make sense to you.
Come to class prepared to talk to your classmates about it.

Nature in an abandoned home

6/4/2015

From Tim

‘Flower House’, An Abandoned Detroit-Area Home Filled Top to Bottom With Fresh Flowers

Full story with lots of photos

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City Wild
Unraveling Urban Life and Space