I will never have to travel anywhere ever again. I’m going to project Streetview of Hawaii, Italy, Seattle, etc. onto my wall and order souvenirs online. Just kidding. But I like exploring Hawaii because I will never go there and no one ever talks about how it’s built.

I have been thinking a lot about regional government and getting things done for our local areas – well – locally, instead of going through federal and state programs. Meeting LVEJO in Chicago really inspired me – they were so active in getting their neighborhood clean and beautiful and what they did really worked. It’s different in Chicago…they have Aldermans. Aldermen? I don’t know.

Anyway, I got to thinking about my neighborhood, Alger Heights, and how the planters on Eastern and Alger are mostly empty. That little strip has roughly 20 businesses operating along the 400 foot stretch, but its streetscape is nothing to look at.

Then it dawned on me. With some simple Googling, I found the Alger Heights Neighborhood Association. They have community meetings on the second Tuesday of every month at 7:00 pm. Duh. Why didn’t this hit me before? I should totally be participating in this. I’ve been preaching local action for six months and I have yet to attend a neighborhood meeting, which my mom has probably told me about, too.

It takes me awhile to catch on to things.

I love this line from The Boulevard Book:

“We became aware that the boulevard epitomizes a completely different paradigm for urban street design–one that embraces complexity and coexistence of movement over simplicity and separation, and one that insists that access to abutting uses is as central to the functionality of city streets as swift through movement.”

That’s why I’m learning how to draw and diving into design and trying to do this the right way. I sometimes give up on things because they’re too hard. But it’s usually the most complex of tasks, the things we work hardest on that make us happiest. It’s correlation, not causation, because who would work so hard on something they didn’t love?

It’s easy to drive down 28th Street or US-131. It’s also easy to speed and get into an accident. It’s also easy to ignore the landscape, the backdrop to your everyday existence, the people in that landscape who are your neighbors. It’s probably easier to plan areas for cars because there’s no resistance against that anymore. But that doesn’t mean it’s right.

I bet my science degree friends would agree that everything about the created world is incredibly complex, that the more we study it the more mysteries we find. A city is equally complex. We study how it works but there are still many mysteries. It has a life of its own, and it’s not under our control. Creating banal, boring places for cars with ugly stores and endless parking lots simplifies and paves over the life of our cities. We lament when a shopping mall gets built over a thriving marsh, but we’re part of that natural system we say we’ve escaped from. We’ve destroyed habitat: our own habitat.

I am staying because blighted neighborhood is not a death-sentence label. 20 years can change any place. We have full control of our urban environments. All we have to do is organize.

Grand Rapids is a beautiful city.

I’ll be paying close attention to Robert Israel’s plans for Bridge Street in the coming years.  The problem I stated in my last post about being able to do anything with enough money can also be a solution.

The most confusing thing about planning is that you can’t plan for anything. No one knows the future. Urban planning is more like the laying down of dreams into reality, not planning how future populations will live.

Because how would you do that? How do you plan where people will want to live in 50 years? Do you create places where they’ll want to live, or do you let them choose from the blank slate and then build for/around that?

Do we follow the natural pattern of what people will do or do we create a pattern for people to follow?

I don’t think suburbs were a natural occurrence. Maybe in our minds, we wanted to get away from the troubling inner city and have yards for our kids, but a lot of work went into creating these suburbs and selling them to families. Are we doing the same with Transit-oriented town centers? Is it a bad thing?

You can’t tell someone where to live. But you can lure them into it. Planners and developers and realtors are so dependent on the general public, on what people want out of life. It’s a real temptation for planners, developers, realtors to tell people what they want out of life and then give it to them. But what business doesn’t do this? TV ads tell us every day what we want. They are just creating attractive merchandise, or providing services people need. Is there any shame in creating attractive neighborhoods and convincing people they need to walk more?

I think most people don’t even think about the width of their streets or their commute to work. Or building frontages. It’s undercurrent, because they do notice how safe their kids are, and people will move to a place that feels safer. Or emptier. Or busier. But they can’t stop what other people will want (to live next door, to play their music loud). The question of freedom and rights gets really confusing here. The answer has been private property. If you have enough money, you can buy the amount of land you want. But not any location you want, because of zoning.

We’re a free market and we’re very market-driven, but we make bad decisions. A lot. That’s why we have laws.

How should planning be done in the future? How does it become democratic and not market-driven? Anyone read any good books about this?

I don’t know if you knew this about me, but I used to only listen to Christian music. It was better, I would’ve told you. It doesn’t all sound the same. There are good lyrics.

Then I only listened to noncommercial music. Anyone on a big label was NOOOOO for me. I liked acoustic, I liked songs with heart, I liked intimate live performances.

Now I listen to glam rock. There’s nothing good or bad about any of these times in my life. But I have changed my outlook on recording artists. Why do some of them take themselves so seriously? I used to write songs, too. And I took myself somewhat seriously. Well, definitely. Especially when I wrote only Christian songs.

Now’s the time to enter the smartest thing Kurt Vonnegut ever said. Ever. Well. Maybe.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

Anyway, onto the list.

1. Joanna Newsome. At the top of my list is the strange-sounding songbird who plays harp very well and has descriptive complex lyrics. I read an interview with her once and she spoke with semicolons. Odd Bird. I don’t know her personally, but I think if she didn’t take herself so seriously her music would be more fun. She works with good themes. The Peach Plum Pear music video is really funny when the people are eating. I just have the sneaking suspicion it’s not meant to be. And when there’s like 9000 Joanna’s singing at once. hehe. Is she worried people will mock her?

2. Arcade Fire. There’s like 9 people in that band. How do they not laugh? They’re like, one banjo away from the New Mainstreet Singers.  They got David Bowie’s approval, so they’re set for life. Why not just have fun with life?  They have this thing like The Cure where I feel like I’m in a dark basement in the 80s, but instead of the basement being full of black balloons, it’s full of dead babies. Or something. Like…they all have too dark of a persona for what their music is. You know what I mean?

3. Okkervil River – I think these guys metaphorically look into the mirror of their own music for too long every morning. Concept albums. You know, concept albums can be great. Like Time (The Revelator) by Gillian Welch. But she had to work up to that. She had to be established first. You don’t try to get attention by saying “Oh I’m going to write a biographical album about some obscure person who lived an amazing life.” Or “I’m going to write an album about every state in the US” (oh my gosh, you should read about Sufjan’s hilarious existential crisis).

4. Iron and Wine. Sam Beam’s whispering voice. Lozl.

5. Bright Eyes.  I saw him in Nashville. He was trying to do this whole country thing back then, but I guess that tour had a lot of him coming on stage drunk. He didn’t take his tour seriously, and then he takes himself WAY too seriously. He is just a songwriter. He writes little songs. With a lot of lyrics. And country music doesn’t need him to save it, by the way. Country music sings cliche with a winking eye. And this is a very good thing. Stop trying to make country cool, Jenny Lewis, Neko Case, and Bright Eyes. Stop it.

So yeah. Those are five people I think need a pie in the face. They’re going to look back on their lives when they’re 90 and say, why didn’t I just have fun sometimes? Will their high art albums still be remembered?

I don’t know if any of these artists are still making music, come to think of it. They’re from my indie years. Should Look Them Up.

or Livelittleable.

I’m having a blogstorm kind of day. Some days, the urban planning blogworld overwhelms me and I ignore it, but today I patiently sifted through my Google Reader and found so many good ideas.

I wanted to apply them to my home city.  Grand Rapids has a sizeable downtown but probably 4 or 5 times more land dedicated to suburbs. Streets like East Beltline and 28th Street and Plainfield suffer incredible blight and traffic problems, mainly because they’re stuck in the 1950s. There are so many suburbs that walking anywhere for many residents is impossible. Division Street looks like hell in most places. Homelessness is rampant.

But back to the good ideas. Heere are five I’ve read about today that could work in Good Ole GR:

1. Google Maps should include Bike and Transit directions/estimations. And they are working on it. Chicago’s Transit Authority is set up so you can google directions that find the best combination of subway and bus transit to get to where you need to be. I used it all the time in Chicago. Grand Rapid’s bus system is used  and functional, but it’s not practical for quick trips. Aside from most buses having half hour between stops, it’s hard to know which routes to connect to get where we need to be. Google Transit has four cities from Michigan participating (Ann Arbor, Holland, Lansing, Detroit) but not Grand Rapids. Come on now!

As for bikes, there are plenty of trails in Grand Rapids, and one brochure that tells you where they all are. But what if you could use trails to get places? What if they were used for more than just recreation? The trail by my house on 28th and Eastern connects me to Division street in a much safer (and more pleasant) way than using 28th. If we had the trails on Google Maps, we could measure distance, map routes, and with our buses’ bike racks, fluidly use bike and transit instead of cars.

2. LEED-ND for new neighborhoods. LEED-ND is the newly approved system for neighborhoods, grading them on diversity, walkability, and green infrastructure. It’s like LEED for buildings and done by the same company. With Grand Rapids still expanding, this could be a good tool to create more neighborhoods where people actually want to live (real estate demand is proven to have moved from suburbs to walkable neighborhoods). So if new neighborhoods get to market themselves as LEED-ND Platinum instead of garages with rooms in the back, maybe we’ll get more residents and more money flowing around.

If you don’t believe me about walkable places, look at Woodland Mall. That place was failing once Rivertown was built. It was seriously suffering. But then the Bar Louie/Red Robin/Cheap Theatre/On the Border square popped up and the mall is doing great. So great, that Barnes and Noble wanted in on the action, reversing the trend of big box retailers moving farther and farther out into the boonies (like TARGET). Yeah, it’s still a mall surrounded by a sea of parking lot, but at least it’s showcasing the success of a good common area.

3. Bypassing Suburb Roads. Plans for an Oregon suburb to make it more connected really excited me, especially since the connections were not for cars.

The point of this is to cut down the distance one would have to walk or bike to get somewhere. The mess that is suburbs-on-a-map would not be less of a mess, however.

4. Better bike parking is an overlooked need when thinking about alternative transportation. I can easily bike to Meijer for most of my needs, but I don’t usually because there’s nowhere to put it. The Artprize-featured tree bike racks are not only made and designed locally, but they provide parking and shelter for bikes while not being an eyesore.

Talk about a community identifier. Bike parking is so easy and cheap. It takes one parking space for a car to park roughly ten bikes.

5. Using the River. At Green Grand Rapids, an idea charrette I attended in May, I loved the ideas of better farmer’s markets, bike lanes, and storm water management. I shot down the white-water rafting on the Grand River idea, though, because when it was lined up with other ideas, it didn’t seem as important. But as I walked up and down the Grand River during Artprize, I realized how beautiful parts of the riverside are. The park off of Monroe is nice, and there’s a waterfall by the pedestrian bridge. But there’s no reason for people to be by the river except for to walk. What if we did use it for canoeing or kayaking or white water rafting? Or energy?  Is it possible? I have no idea. But it could add to a list of things to do in GR, and generate more revenue.

The bottom line here is that we all know how badly this state is doing. But leaving isn’t the solution. Time for new dreams. What are your ideas?

I can’t think of a more relevant topic than Climate Change for Blog Action Day 2009. Last year, it was poverty. I think my post on that is still on here somewhere. If you search for October 15, 2008, maybe?

Many people have asked me if I think global warming is real. The question exhausts me. I have no idea if it’s real. I haven’t done the research, really, and there’s so much propaganda on both sides. BUT. It’s a genius strategy for getting people to comply with environmental regulations and lifestyle changes–not even the scare tactics but the tax incentives and green jobs. It’s a huge impetus for many changes, touching every industry in America. How do we drive less? How do we waste less? How do we be more sustainable? How do we do all this while still invigorating our economy?

The idea of Climate Change, as I said, is a genius way to get America back on its feet. After the Great Depression, we had WWII and also the mass production of the automobile and the idea of the nuclear family and private property to recharge the economy. Were those ideas false? Maybe. Does it matter? It can’t matter.

I have a feeling we are in some environmental danger, and action needs to be taken. But climate change is not the only motivation for these changes. I see it more as an excuse. For example, in the planning world, people are saying that better planned communities will allow people to walk and bike and use public transit more, which would reduce their carbon footprint. But there are so many other benefits to this lifestyle – health benefits, social benefits, economic benefits – and I don’t see why these are ignored. For the aging generation of legislators and county officials who believe in climate change like they believe in Santa Claus, what is the climate change incentive going to do for them?

Don’t play the silly game of political debate. What I mean is that it really doesn’t matter if it’s scientifically real, because the idea has become so big that it is real, and it’s affecting everything already. I just want everyone to look beyond the politics of climate change and see if the solutions have other benefits. If they do, why not support them? This nation is far too polarized and it’s really too bad, because a lot of exciting things are going on.

What was most interesting about the meetings we held for area planners a couple weeks ago was that none of them wanted to plan where the population might go. They only wanted to predict. I kept hearing “This is probably how it’s going to happen, not what I want to happen.” As if some indestructable force was making everyone comply to a few people’s desire to live on a 2 acre lot.

Weird. I thought planners were supposed to have visions? This is how our car culture came to be. Don’t think it’s what everyone wanted. They had to seriously destroy the railroad system and SERIOUSLY fund the highway building to get cars to be the number one priority of each American (whether they know it or not).  If Robert Moses had listened to everyone saying “Oh things will probably go on the same way, we can’t change that…” then we wouldn’t have highways cutting through neighborhoods and awful subdivisions. Oh dear!

Visions are dangerous, motives can be evil, and agendas sneaky, but without any of them, we will die as a nation. I truly believe that.  Michigan will sink into a black hole and all the other states will follow quickly. We need to create places again. How many times do I have to say it!

Honk if you agree!

I didn’t see the piece that won Artprize, so I don’t really see why it won. But it doesn’t really matter. I had ULTERIOR MOTIVES with this whole shindig. It did wonders for Grand Rapids’ community and economy, and I’m almost like, who cares about the art?

But I really enjoyed the art. Don’t get me wrong. You know which ones I enjoyed! See my top 10!

Anyway. I took the bus yesterday and it only comes every half hour on Eastern. It was quite full when I finally got on it. Still worth it though. Walking down Wealthy Street is a Pleasant Experience.

Thought from boyfriend’s grandpa: Why did they rename Campau Circle to be Rosa Parks Circle?  Not a rhetorical question.  It was noble? of people to try to change neighborhoods by changing their names, but if the name had nothing to do with the place then it’s just misnamed, isn’t it?  Every city seems to have a Martin Luther King JR Drive–it’s like a rite of passage–but does it really change anything?  What’s in a freaking name?  A lot, I think. But you have to choose the right name.  I guess my friend Max got me thinking about this first. I can’t not give him credit.