untitled 09

untitled 09 (ariana huffington's powder room: self-portrait of iphone with owner)

This post isn't much of a cause or much of an action, but it does fall flat in the middle of what most undergrads lovingly refer to as 'spring break'. Right now, it's a place holder - like Brad Pitt's pink project in New Orleans; it's a promise that I will be back after the ACSA conference in Portland to write more about stats and its relationship in particular to birth control, infrastructure, religious freedoms, and books. Things are most definitely brewing - stay tuned.

The image is merely proof (as images are) that my iphone and I somehow found ourselves in Ariana Huffington's powder room last week (how crazy is that?). A guest of my Obama group friend, Andrew, we had an opportunity to hear Elizabeth Alexander recite her inaugural poem, eat mini grilled cheeses, and marvel over the sheer quantity of personal portraits that surrounded us in the Brentwood-based villa. Want a signed hard copy of the poem itself? I might just have an extra. Leave a comment; let me know.

As a nod to the honorary event, here is the text of the poem. It felt a little bit like being at the inauguration, only smaller, warmer, and unfortunately Obama-free (though he was in LA, and we were kind of hoping he might come by).

You could say, I imagine, that poetry is actually its own kind of cause, and this one, prosaic as the phrases might be, certainly endorses its own call to action.

So, there we have it - the cause this week is poetry, and to 'praise song for the day', this day, this spring, this week.

Praise song for the day.

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others’ eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, “Take out your pencils. Begin.”

We encounter each other in words, Words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; Words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, “I need to see what’s on the other side; I know there’s something better down the road.”

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by “Love thy neighbor as thy self.”

Others by "first do no harm," or "take no more than you need."

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.

a question of significance

Today is the Sunday before exam week, winter quarter 2009. I'm being explicit with the date because it is more than likely the close of the quarter that signifies not only my last bit of real required coursework in this PhD, but also the end of the first and likely only statistics course I will ever take. By Tuesday, 11:30 am, I will (hopefully) have lodged into my brain the range of quantitative methods that began with the probability of drawing an ace of spades, and ends with multiple regression, bivariate correlations, and the importance of R squared. We've most certainly come a long way.

Our final lab project ('our' here is my fabulous partner Naji and I) utilizes a multi-country global data set from 2000 in an attempt to discern which factors reported (independent variables) ultimately have a significant effect on income inequality (the Gini index). The fact that I can even write that sentence and know what it means is substantial progress for those of us who live primarily in the right side of our brain. On several occasions, I have compared the mental process of taking a math class to the slow turning of a giant freighter in a narrow canal (not so unlike the intended mission of the bailout package on the US economy) or the struggle to crank a wheel that has sat hidden and rusted for years (not so unlike that cartoon of a thing that seems to unhinge the island in time on LOST). Nine and a half weeks in, the gears have loosened and the fallout is at least comprehendible, if not comprehensive. Though I won't hide my excitement that the end of the struggle is near, I also can't help but be just a bit excited about the baby steps of inchoate bridging something like statistics provides. As someone consciously and laboriously building a bridge between the humanities/arts/architecture and social sciences, an awareness of the vocabulary and concepts that form the basis for 'substantiating' quantitative research might very well come in handy.

On the flip side, however, it also reveals itself as a shaky house of cards. If I've learned nothing else, I've most certainly learned that randomness is very important business and is the key to predicting everything (as in you must have random samples) and simultaneously the key to determining just how possible the probable might be (how confident or not you are in your results). Yes, what the 'outside world' (outside of quantitative methods) has been lead to believe is a more precise and exact form of research, is mostly the task of laboriously proving that results do, at best, hold some truthiness (thank you Stephen Colbert). Which is, actually, its own kind of rigor.

What statistics can also do, though, is gauge significance. By using the SPSS computer program (the wizard for us stats adolescents), you can determine the degree to which one factor in a data set influences another factor. (You stats people are laughing out loud at my over simplification. You other people are thinking - why on earth does this matter at all?) Briefly (taken from our current lab project), if we're trying to determine why a country has income inequality, we can test a correlation hypothesis in SPSS and it will tell us that, yes, how much a country spends on health care is significantly correlated to its level of income inequality. And then if we run that same test with other variables - say life expectancy or degree of urbanization - ultimately, we hope, we can find more and more of the factors that relate to income inequality and then, in the long run, work to change those factors to make societies more equal. Ah, if it were only so easy....

Which brings us to the class I am teaching at Otis. Two weeks ago we had an 'intervention' of sorts. Struggling with the students' lack of commitment to the assignments, my astute co-teacher recommended we have an open session within which we could air our concerns, hopefully address them, and move past them to some real progress. It was a fantastic session and one really enlightening issue that emerged was, also, this question of significance. Here we are working with people who are homeless, one student said, and we're talking about making art. What good does art do - shouldn't we be doing something more significant? And, in turn, is promoting 'awareness' - one of our project options - a significant enough concern of art making? (As a short aside, it is interesting to imagine this in statistical terms, to ask if there really is some sort of correlation between an increase in awareness and a reduction in homelessness, or a reduction in the abuse that those living on the streets frequently receive.)

Of course I'm a strong believer in the fact that, in lieu of finding a way to house everyone in a single semester, there are thousands of alternative ways to contribute meaningfully to the lives and plight of people who find themselves marginalized. And, to bring this back to the cause of the week, that doing something with the smallest degree of significance is better than doing nothing at all.

I so often find myself speaking to people who are immobilized by the magnitude of the world's problems. Particularly now, when they seem so huge and so close to home. So, in honor of my stats final and my new found direction with my Otis class, I'm asking everyone to get unstuck, to turn the crank of small possibility, and do something that may seem insignificant, but isn't. And then do it again. And then do something else. Don't worry for now that you're not solving the big problems, not answering the big questions. Don't let the magnitude of need hold you back. Give yourself permission to warm up to greater things, greater risks even.

An easy one that I've noticed is buying a box of Girl Scout cookies. According to USA Today, Girl Scout cookie pre-orders were down 19% this year due to the economy and particularly harsh winter weather. Much of the funds they raise go to scholarships and community projects; one troop in Atlanta has used creative capitalism techniques to get buyers who can't or shouldn't eat the cookies themselves to purchase a box to be given to Operation Sandbox and sent to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. It may seem insignificant, it may even be insignificant, but what stats has taught us, is that the most unlikely contributors might also prove to be vital. This week, allow even the smallest of opportunities - picking up trash, recycling something you usually don't bother to wash, giving away the 75 cents in your pocket - to become significant in its own right. Building on the small acts is the very thing that makes them worthwhile.


**thanks to the poster design team in my Otis class for this bit of visual research.

A quick follow-up

For those who have not already seen this on Archinect, here is a link to their recently completed survey on the state of things in architecture as well as articles on the profession and the economy. It's not particularly optimistic, but near the end of the survey there are several participants who echo the possibility for opportunity this disaster has cracked open. There is one article as well entitled 'Reading material for unemployed architects' which I was hoping was going to be a survey of the most common books we all own but have never had the time to read. Alas, it was just another advice column. So I'm adding my interpretation of that title to the list of things to do during your unrequested vacation. As we turn the corner towards spring, is it those classics you skimmed in high school, Delirious New York, Complexity & Contradiction, Deleuze, Kant, or Lacan that you've never had time to really read? Marshall McLuhan, Richard Sennett, Kerouac (the new version, as written originally, is out in paperback!)?

And on a completely lighter note (isn't humor supposed to be the best medicine?), I wrote a few months back about the Ben & Jerry's flavor, Yes PeCan! that was being sold as part of a pro-Obama fundraising effort for the Common Cause Education Fund. This past week I received a follow up email forwarded from my friend Alex. Here is a selection of the George W Bush alternatives to Yes PeCan! as suggested to Ben & Jerry's by a comic (and fictitous) public. Enjoy:

- Grape Depression
- The Housing Crunch
- Abu Grape
- Nut'n Accomplished
- Iraqi Road
- Chock 'n Awe
- WireTapioca
- Guantanmallow
- imPeachmint
- Heck of a Job, Brownie!
- Neocon Politan
- The Reese's-cession
- Cookie D'oh!
- Nougalar Proliferation
- Death by Chocolate... and Torture
- Freedom Vanilla Ice Cream
- Chocolate Chip On My Shoulder
- Credit Crunch
- Mission Pecanplished
- Country Pumpkin
- Chunky Monkey in Chief
- WMDelicious
- Chocolate Chimp
- Caramel Preemptive Stripe


Personally, I'm sticking happily with my Yes PeCan!

Finding Opportunity in Catastrophe

In the last month and a half, cause of the week has expanded somewhat from its initial objective of easy actionable items to a broader set of calls, contextualized in positive ideological frameworks that support larger and more long-lasting evolutions. This is primarily the work of the four invited guests who raise the very valuable points that external change requires a kind of systemic vision of interrelationships (the taco and immigrant rights; health and the planning of sidewalks) and internal change a kind of reinvention of identity and purpose (practice as an activist and you are one step closer to being one). Encouraging everyone to capitalize on the vast value of design and designers has both internal and external implications and, by the day, seems more and more timely. Both small actions and shifting beliefs are valid and valuable, and I hope to continue to balance the small and the large, providing easy opportunities to act now with bigger inspirations for long-range influence.

This week's 'cause' is inspired by an email exchange among friends and former UNCC students. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of unemployed in the US increased an additional 598,000 in January to 11.6 million total. The percentage of unemployed rose from 7.2 to 7.6%. I can't quickly locate the numbers for architects alone, but I can tell you from simple anecdotal experience, reductions in the field are massive and pervasive. Not one person I have spoken to in practice remains unaffected. Everyone is either laying off or being laid off, cutting benefits or cutting jobs all together. As we're all beginning to realize, this is a problem that starts and ends at the banks. The layoffs are not simply from a loss of new work, but also from a freeze in work already awarded or in early stages of development where necessary financing is no longer available to move the project forward. In this instance, trickle down economics is most definitely working - to the detriment of all. Less loans mean less commissions mean less construction; a loss of jobs in architecture firms means the ranks of unemployed construction workers from drywallers to day laborers will be growing exponentially. No wonder the AIA sent lobbyists to DC to fight for a slice of the stimulus pie.

The loss of jobs and the overall downturn of the economy is most certainly disastrous. Yet, as Naomi Klein reminds us in The Shock Doctrine, and Lawrence Vale and Thomas Campanella in The Resilient City, the flip side of every disaster is opportunity.** Not to downplay the direness of the situation, but this email exchange I referred to above and the other conversations I've had with peers in floundering firms, seems to be proving Bryan Bell right and then some. Our training is solid and broad; our ability to be inventive and resilient is inspiring in the face of uncertainty. What the down turn in the economy seems to be doing for architecture and its aspirants is multi-fold, and well worth capitalizing on. Here are several ways to imagine collective optimism rising from the ashes of economic catastrophe:

First, the growth machine has come to a screeching halt. Finally. The neoliberal insistence on growth for the sake of growth has been a prime contributor to a quantity over quality mentality that has left our built environment a collage of steroidal disasters. The opportunity here is to shift the priority from quantity to quality and consider more carefully the what, where, and how of design and building. Or of shopping, for that matter, or of eating, or of our precious leisure time. With less to go around, it's twice as important to make wise decisions rather than simply make decisions. Some of the projects that have been halted are probably better off dead.

Second, we are a profession always short on money and even more short on time. This is the chance to hit a reset button and take back our lives. This is a chance to amend the abusive practices that have become ingrained in the architectural habitus. This is a chance to reconsider the 60 hour work week, the unpaid overtime, the under-paid intern. When firms rebuild post-recession, let's ratchet up the expectations we have of ourselves to be good stewards of our peers, our colleagues, our clients, and our employees. Let's not sell ourselves or our abilities short, but recognize that good work takes time, energy, vision, and commitment, all of which grow more sturdy in healthy individuals. This is not a call to laziness, but a call to some kind of normalcy we have lost. Reset.

At the same time, let's also reset our egos - but not our confidence - and embrace the opportunity to become a less autonomous part of a larger, interrelated world. At the same time, let's make contributing to the people and the places less likely to be served by our expertise a part of the new priorities.

An opportunistic part of these layoffs is also the current luxury of time. What I was most impressed with in these email exchanges among UNCC graduates is how many of them are using new found time to explore things they have had to shelve for years or to move forward on objectives they normally would have had to squeeze in between work and sleep. They are studying for and taking the Architectural Registration Exam (go Fish!), LEED certification tests, and the "NABCEP photovoltaic system design and installer certification" (go Nick!). They are attending workshops on energy and green design and going back to school in record numbers, according to Archinect and the latest stats on grad school enrollment (go Joe and his MBA in Real Estate!); and they are doing design competitions - a freedom of time, energy, and creativity often sucked away by the daily commitment of office work.

These layoffs, awful as they are, also are an opportunity to re-evaluate what you have been doing and what you hope to be doing next. Many, many of the emails and calls I have received start sentences with, "I will never again...." ... work for the man, sell my soul, be trapped inside for 60 hours a week, 'design' another hospital, sacrifice my health. Or, even more simply, will never work at a large firm or for corporate clients. So many of us boarded the train of architecture and followed its trajectory rather than leading it. Now is the chance to take that trajectory into our own hands, or hop this train for another one - even a very related one. My good friend Tim first thought that when his impending layoff came, he would come to California, camp on the coast for a few months and paint. He's an amazing landscape painter and never has had the luxury of time to pursue it fully. Yet, when he did get laid off about a week ago, he fortuitously found himself in conversation with representatives from the state about getting a job documenting and evaluating state park structures, a way to get back in touch with nature and interact with and serve the public - something he's been missing while sitting behind a computer for the last decade.

Finally, there is the question of the architecture that already exists and what's to be done with the market glut of the unsellable and the unleasable. Again, this bursting of the bubble is a form of much-needed market leveling, but that fact doesn't do much for the millions of vacant square feet of leasable space and thousands of unsellable or undervalued homes. Nate brought up this issue, as his property firm alone has 1.5 million square feet of unleased office space, and suggested that there must be alternative adaptation/reuse/reinvention strategies for what's already out there, underutilized. LA Forum ran a design competition in 2004 that sought new uses for dead malls. The conclusion in their case, I would say, was that the market-driven, privatized, single use model of the mall is no longer a naturally sustainable one. The best entries converted the inward focused and locally isolated mall into a region-specific, multi-use, public/private framework that capitalized on large spans, vast areas of flat pavement, and cheap space to invent new, socially-conscious and sustainable models of collectivity and commerce. Nate's question is a good one - and likely to be THE question for the coming generation of designers: what can we do with the underutilized stock we already have? Vertical farming, anyone?

Personally, as always, I'm inspired by the proactive nature of our UNCC grads and, generally, most of the architects I come across who work on a regular basis for long hours and for little money to make a mark on the landscape that elevates the experiences of all who pass by or occupy. It's no easy task, even when times are flush, to do good work. Yet, it seems this latest catastrophe might be the impetus for some reconsideration, and (fingers crossed) this stimulus package might go beyond repair to reinvention. This week, these weeks, how can we use this as a moment of pause on the often too fast road of our career pursuits? Like that sign I found in Biloxi post-Katrina, the house may be gone, but the people and trees are fine, so let's get to work.

And Obama, if you are listening, I know some hard-working experts looking for new opportunities.



**a much greater consideration of disasters and architecture from our PhD colloquium, Uneasy Urbanism: Incidents and Accidents under Dana Cuff, will be published this spring in PLACES magazine.

LA and the Global Warming Diet

I've met Frances Anderton three times. First, through her monthly radio show on KCRW, DnA (Design and Architecture), which includes discussions with guests from a wide range of design-related fields, both LA-centric and beyond. The second time I met Frances was at an event for GOOD magazine in December called GOOD Design: LA where she was one of roughly ten designers presenting bite-sized versions of single design-based solutions for pressing urban issues (a version of this presentation serves as her guest blog entry that follows below). The third time I met Frances was when she appeared in Dana Cuff's PhD colloquium as a guest judge for our first weekly challenge - a kind of architecture methods meets top chef model for quick, deep research with a dash of competitive angst. That particular challenge asked us to evaluate the LA Times' recently published list of the ten best houses in Southern California. Though my team didn't win that challenge, we did, serendipitously, quote Frances's own incisive list of 'must see' architecture from the Time Out guide to the city. Her critiques that day were insightful, focused, useful, and brilliant. Anyone put on the spot to play judge to the careful and constructed research of ten sensitive and serious PhD students knows what an art it is to absorb, synthesize, evaluate, and return with original commentary that simultaneously expands and critiques what is on the table.

Frances has been in LA since 1991, when she moved here from England to become the editor of LA Architect. Her first taste of Los Angeles came through a special assignment for The Architectural Review, a long-standing and well-regarded monthly magazine where she was an Associate Editor. Before that, she studied architecture at the Bartlett and traveled globally. Her early taste of LA has turned into a career of thinking and writing on her now home city through contributions to dwell magazine and the New York Times, lecturing at REDCAT, the Hammer, and the Skirball among others and, after first volunteering at KCRW, becoming the guest host of DnA and the full-time producer of To The Point and Which Way, LA? both hosted by Warren Olney. Though Frances is not a contributor to the Expanding Architecture publication, she most certainly is expanding architecture through her work in media, public media in particular.

Her entry that follows takes off from the previous three by discussing a single small act with large repercussions that relies not only on the change of human behavior but the adjustment of our built environment to support that change. The shift away from indolence, lethargy, and apathy, is most certainly one of human decision, but is also one of environmental, infrastructural, cultural, and urban support. If we wait for everyone to start walking before we build the sidewalks, we are too late. Our task as designers, visionaries, thinkers, writers, activists, neighborhood members - at whatever scale and in whatever capacity that comes to us - is to produce the city that enables the population to better produce itself.

Thanks to Frances and all of my guests for their brilliant and thoughtful contributions to cause of the week. Reimagine your role, hire an architect, eat a taco, walk your kid to school - they are small, and huge, all at the same time. Here is the final installation to the guest blog series:


LA and the Global Warming Diet
Frances Anderton, host of DnA

There is no question that physical design can solve many problems. But sometimes problems are of our own making and can be tackled through changes in our own behavior.

A huge problem in LA is traffic: congestion, air quality and carbon emissions; another big problem is a large population of children at risk of obesity. I decided to put those two together and look at how we might help alleviate both, simply through ceasing to drive kids to school. Places implementing this plan call it the Global Warming Diet.

I was inspired to focus on this when I happened to see a movie called Strangers When We Meet, made in 1960. The movie is a strange melodrama featuring Kirk Douglas as a “modern” architect having a passionate affair with a housewife played by Kim Novak. What really made an impression on me was the opening scene, which depicted kids in affluent LA walking or cycling to the bus stop in their comfortable, hilly LA neighborhood - the spatial and temporal origins of auto culture - rather than being ferried in cars to their school.

Fast forward almost 50 years: I walk my four year-old daughter, Summer, to her preschool, which is a few blocks from our apartment in Santa Monica. With the exception of a couple people walking dogs, and maybe one or two parents and kids, Summer and I are alone on the streets. Typically, the streets, even in our very safe neighborhood, are empty. I find this distressing. Where are all the kids, and their parents? Even if they live just a few blocks away, Summer’s classmates tend to be driven to school.

In the past 50 years the number of kids who walk or cycle to school has dropped from around 90% to almost 10%. Not only are kids missing out on a basic, healthful, childhood experience -- walking or cycling in the neighborhood with their friends or parents – but many of the children that are not walking or cycling are in cars and that means more cars on the streets, which in turn means more congestion, more bad air, more carbon emissions and, additionally, more children not getting enough exercise.

My solution for LA is to reduce cars simply by encouraging kids to walk or cycle to school or to the school bus. While my focus is on children, and on traffic at a specific time of day, I believe the lessons of this could be applied to other kinds of trips and other demographics.

Here’s a quick look at some stats, provided to me by two national advocacy groups, Environmental Defense and Active Living By Design, as well as the Centers for Disease Control.


CONGESTION:
It is estimated that 25% of morning traffic during the school year is parents driving their kids to school.

That’s a quarter of all cars!!!


CHILDHOOD OBESITY:
Forty years ago, nearly 90% of children who lived within a mile of school walked or biked to school. Today only 13% of all trips to school are made on foot or by bike.

In that same 40 years the number of overweight children has doubled! And 35% of kids do not get regular exercise these days.

The Surgeon General says we should all have 30 minutes of physical activity per day. You can get that walking just half a mile to school and back.


AIR QUALITY
Taking cars off the streets would obviously help improve air quality, but note how driving a child to school specifically worsens their personal air quality:

Moving cars expel VOCs (that’s Volatile Organic Carbons AKA foul air pollutants) but when a car is idling, as when waiting to pick up kids from school -- it puts out 3 times the normal amount of VOCs! And if you are idling behind the tailpipe of another car, your car sucks in the air pollutants, even when you turn off the recycled air. It’s like putting kids in a smoking room. That’s what parents are doing when they sit in an idling car at school.


CARBON EMISSIONS
For each mile you drive, your vehicle creates 1.29 lbs of CO2. Multiply that by 200 days in the school year, and one mile to school (there and back, twice). Add fifteen minutes each way of idling time and you’ve expelled 1872 lbs of CO2 per year.

Multiply this by 700,000 children (the approximate number of kids in the LA School District) and that’s 6,552,000 tons put out into the atmosphere by LA parents per year.

Those are four good arguments for getting kids out of the car and onto foot or pedal. But there’s tremendous resistance from parents, on the grounds of time and distance from school, and fears -- of a child being abducted or hit by a moving car or subject to violence en route to school.
Some of these fears are legitimate, specifically accidents and, in less safe neighborhoods, violence on the street – though it’s worth noting that the most common place for a child to be hit by a car is, guess where, at a school, by another parent.

Some fears border on the paranoid, like abductions.

As one Pasadena mom who cycles with her son to school – and he is the ONLY boy in his school who does -- pointed out: “as rates of child abduction and abuse move down, rates of Type II diabetes, hypertension and other obesity-related ailments in children move up. That means not all the candy is coming from strangers. Which scenario should provoke more panic: the possibility that your child may become one of the approximately 100 children who are kidnapped by strangers each year, or one of the country's 58 million overweight adults?
And some concerns, like distance, have some validity but not enough to warrant the huge drop in kids’ walking and cycling.

CHILD ABDUCTION
Kidnapping makes up less than 2% of all violent crimes against youth and of those only 4% of all kidnappings occur near a school. Of the 800,000 abductions or so that occur annually, only around 100 were by a stranger or non-family member. Stats show that child abductions have been moving downwards over the last 20 years.


DISTANCE FROM SCHOOL
Over the last 40 years the number of schools has decreased relative to numbers of children, meaning that more children are living at a distance from their school.

In 1969, 34% of children lived less than a mile from school, and 33% lived 3 or more miles from school.

By 2001, 21% of children lived less than a mile from school, and 50% lived 3 or more miles from school.

Yes, that is a challenge, but. . .

Active transport to school has also significantly declined among children who still live less than 1 or 2 miles from school.

Not to mention, in the last five years there’s been a turnaround with 76 new schools built in LA alone.

I believe one could alleviate most of the concerns by having the parent or older family member or teacher accompany kids to school, which affords the added benefit of more leisurely time spent with our kids enjoying the neighborhood.
I also believe, following Jane Jacobs' thinking about cities, that the more kids there are on the streets, the more visibility they have and the greater safety in numbers.

This kind of thinking is already being applied elsewhere. In other parts of America – many of them as hostile to walkers and bikers as LA – communities are introducing Kids Walk-to-School programs in which convoys of kids and teachers walk together. Where possible, they are combining them with efforts at traffic calming and the creation of bike and walkable routes. You can get more info about this by clicking here.

But the real challenge here is changing a pattern of behavior and assumptions we’ve become used to.

It’s commonly viewed these days that today’s 30 and 40-something parents are the most overprotective ever, terrified of letting kids experience the big wide world - and that’s an attitude shared by overprotective schools. The Pasadena mom who rides with her son says that the school asks children NOT to cycle. I know of schools on the Westside that prioritize drivers over walkers at drop-off and pick-up.

At the same time, our careers and electronic lives are so consuming that it’s easy for us not to take time out to walk with a child and smell the roses.

But in doing so we’ve lost touch with our bodies and with our neighborhoods. So while we wait for LA to develop its public transit system, while we wait for everyone to drive a low emissions, low gas consumption car, let’s urge parents and policymakers to take a simple step towards minimizing the traffic, cleaning the atmosphere, regaining children’s health, and enlivening our neighborhoods, by getting kids back onto the streets.

Requiem for a Dying Dream?

This past week I had the good fortune to be invited to the limited LA simulcast of the fantastically-inspiring TED conference. So as not to divert too much space from our third guest, I will mention now just one of the speakers and his serendipitous relevance. The founder of Twitter (which, if you don't know, is basically a free service that allows you to send mass text messages of under 140 characters to your friends/subscribers for an instant update on your current activities) was a surprise guest among the fifteen I heard speak on Friday. Though he told the story of this side project gone viral (his last side project was 'blogger' by the way) its inventive and entrepreneurial applications devised by users themselves are far more intriguing than its original limited intentions of social networking. For example, Twitter was used in the recent LA fires to report spreading flames and property conditions to an entire neighborhood in a matter of seconds. Lately, though, it's been used in LA to send salivating amateur gourmands the most current location of the hottest new meal (yes, it is mobile). Jonathan Gold, our Pulitzer prize winning food columnist, wrote just this week on Kogi, the Korean taco truck that has people lining up for HOURS in vacant parking lots to get a sliver of spicy pork, shredded cabbage, sesame and citrus (according to the expert). By subscribing to their Twitter feed, not only can you find their location, you also feel like one of their friends. Alice sends out short notes with capital 'L's which gives the slight sense that we are all in an anime with pigtails wearing knee-high leather boots (ok, maybe that's just me). The point is, our guest this week is particularly timely and relevant; beyond the objects of interest, he speaks to the deeper content of the battle over public space that mobile culture, and mobile food in particular, instigates. At least in LA, three people with a small refrigerator are combating new legal restrictions with high technology to resist the sound of the requiem.

José L.S. Gámez is an Associate Professor of Architecture, a member of the Latin American Studies faculty, and currently a Research Fellow with the Institute for Social Capital at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. I was lucky enough to teach with José at UNCC where he also now serves as the Coordinator of the Design + Society Research Center for the School of Architecture. His research and design practices explore questions of cultural identity in architecture and urban design, the impacts of Latino immigration upon urban space, and critical practices in Chicano Art. In addition to his co-authored introduction in Expanding Architecture, his research is published in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies and Places: A Forum of Environmental Design. A big thank you, thank you to José for spanning space and time in this cause of the week, Requiem for a Dying Dream?


José L.S. Gámez
Requiem for a Dying Dream?


About a year ago, I wrote an essay examining the emergent public realm fostered by Latino immigrants and the mobile architecture of Taco Trucks. My aim was to show how places like Charlotte and Los Angeles are really not very different given the influences that transnational forces have brought upon urban centers across the country. Times change and what a difference a few days (well, weeks and months) can make.

Two things have happened since that essay went to print (forthcoming in a book titled Global Charlotte):

1). The economy tanked—even in recession proof Charlotte. This means that much of the construction labor force in the region, which happens to be about 90% Spanish speaking, has found itself idly biding time—a stark contrast to the Charlotte construction market just 6 months ago.

2). And, the City of Charlotte, in its infinite 21st century wisdom, passed an ordinance that limits the operating hours of Taco Trucks (they must now close up by 9:00pm), forces Taco Trucks to maintain a 400 foot distance between both residential areas and other Taco Trucks, and establishes that activities associated with Taco eating (talking loudly, listening to music, maybe even gathering to eat together with friends) can be a nuisance to local neighbors.

In these two things, Charlotte remains LA’s younger queen sister city. Our economies are, like those across the country, seemingly at a standstill. While each of us feels this in direct ways, the extent of fallout of this economic downturn can sometimes be easily overlooked—my Taco Trucks (objects of research, cultural fueling station, last bastion of public life) are vanishing. This tells me that the public policies created by officials in Charlotte and in LA (yes, LA has had an on-going Taco-based urban drama for quite a while) are putting a final nail into the coffins of some dying dreams.

So, what does this have to do with “something, one thing, that we might each do or one action that we might each take” in order to address social injustice? Last week Gail Peter Borden suggested that we hire an architect—that the value an architect can bring to any scale problem would/can be transformational.

I agree. But, with one caveat. We as designers, architects, planners, civic officials, must see that our role involves creating systems, plans, policies, programs, buildings, spaces, places and actions that are enabling not limiting. Small action with a big point—eat at a Taco Truck.

We are the architects of change and by frequenting these now embattled culinary carts, you can send a message that both supports the micro-economies of newcomers (in the case of Charlotte) or re-affirms the importance of an economy with deep historical roots (as in the case of LA). Charlotte’s Taco-based legislation illustrates how space itself is differentially allocated to various sectors of the public. Tacos have been criminalized while hot dog stands, bar-b-cue carts, and other mobile culinary ventures are allowed to move about the city without impunity. LA’s struggle is portrayed as one framed by property rights and competition in a marketplace. And, yet, for those who have no access to physical space, competition in a place of commerce is already closed. If the right to work, to participate in public culture, to life, liberty and freedom of expression are all basic freedoms to be afforded to all human beings, then those freedoms must be granted access to physical spaces in which they may be pursued.

With these cases, we see, as Ed Soja and Barbara Hooper pointed out a few years ago, processes in which difference is actively created in space not for the purposes of declaring a coalition unified in a common goal but, rather, to specifically deny access to a select group.

Nancy Fraser, the legal scholar, eloquently describes architecture and urban design (and their various collateral forms) to be part and parcel of the processes that help to define acceptable models of the public and the public realm. As such, our disciplines, more often than not, aid in the marginalization of constituent members of the public at large in part by typically promoting the notion of a public that is singular (albeit sometimes diverse). For Frazer, this limits our vision. We should think in plural forms—in terms of multiple publics each with commensurate and equal rights.

We must think differently about space itself (be it urban, rural, suburban, developed, underdeveloped, etc.). While witnessing the plight of Latino immigrants in Charlotte, I have come to see things as fundamentally tied to questions of human rights--not civil rights, which assume a sovereign state and its visible membership (this is, by definition, a limited group), but as a basic freedom to which we are all entitled.

As designers of things spatial, we must define our practice and products in terms of human rights. All people deserve equitable access to shelter, to the “public realm,” to space. And, we should demand that space be made available for those who have none. Eat a taco. Support a local immigrant entrepreneur. But most importantly, through our practices, send the message to policy makers that differential access to local spaces, places, streets, and neighborhoods is unacceptable.



** image courtesy of Izel Vargas

any action people can make?

If you have been reading at all about the stimulus package currently under debate in our Congress, then you know one of its main contentions is what seems to be a kind of ideological split between 'projects that provide jobs' and 'projects that improve America for the future'. This split is not so unlike the Republican / Democratic divide where the former has a history of rebuking criticism of country as unpatriotic and the latter more typically sees the country as a work in progress. The hot topics right now are education and infrastructure (coincidentally, two of the things most near and dear to my own heart). Teachers, school administrators, parents, and students are cheering the $160 billion the Obama team has allocated to education, though job advocates are asking what short-term relief such funding will offer. The infrastructure argument is also divided between those who believe 'shovel ready' will translate into status quo priorities and results, and those who believe it's simply better to build something and pay someone to do it now for the sake of the economy than to wait, get it right, and begin to shift the very nature of American mobility. We really do find ourselves in a moment of 'disaster capitalism', where we could allow the economic catastrophe to sidetrack our ambitions in a way that is short-sighted OR we could insist on a vision that, in the long run, will catapult the intellectual and literal shape of our country into a global position of leadership. In the meantime, allowing teachers, janitors, principals, nurses, librarians, engineers, designers, concrete suppliers, etc etc to keep their jobs is no minor contribution in combating the country's economic woes. Doing it right, while capitalizing on the skills present and in process to help lead these troubled times, is its own good investment.


For this week's guest spot, Gail Peter Borden proposes such an action. Gail is currently on the faculty at the University of Southern California School of Architecture and taught previously at North Carolina State University, Catholic University, The Boston Architectural Center and Harvard University. He has worked at a host of architectural firms including Gensler and Associates, Frank Harmon Architect, and The Renzo Piano Building Workshop in Paris where he was a designer on the Potzdamerplatz Project and the renovation of the Centre Georges Pompidou. He started the Borden Partnership in 1998 and has since won numerous design awards, been featured in exhibitions from Raleigh to Hong Kong, and is regularly at national ACSA conferences presenting the latest of his prolific writings. His essay in Expanding Architecture is entitled "Propositions for a New Suburbanism" and here is his cause of the week.

any action people can make?
Gail Peter Borden, AIA

The idea of changing the world with a simple action is an inspirational vision. Hire an architect.

We live in an amazing time of change - some for the good some for the bad, some that will hopefully stay with us and some that are bumps in the societal, formal and intellectual road. To help get through these hire an architect.

Architecture and its relationship to the broader conversation of global finance, social interaction, energy, and culture is at the heart of everything and yet seems left out of the conversation. Hire an architect.

If there is one small action I can suggest that people do - it would be to: hire an architect.

The knowledge and passion and ability held by the profession is immeasurable, yet when I look at the world class talent of my designer friends and colleagues they are all underutilized and looking for opportunity with hearts full of hope. Hire an architect.

As a profession that has implications on how we learn, shop, develop our built environments, interact in the public and private realms, impacting how we grow intellectually and physically, helping to determine how we find happiness and comfort in our environments, these are all the realm of an architect. Hire an architect

Whether you want to turn your front yard into a vegetable garden or devise a new city plan. Hire an architect.

Regardless of scale or scope - perceived significance or permanence, hire an architect.

If you are worried about cost, thinking you cannot afford the services, you might be surprised. I am not trying to devalue the services offered by an architect rather promise you the return will be tenfold. Hire an architect.