Bringing the City Council meeting to a (participatory) stage

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I have read through decades of City Council and other local commission minutes for research projects. Thus, I was intrigued to find out a playwright had taken real City Council experiences and put them together into a participatory performance:

Inside a hushed theater, a voice on the loudspeaker instantly lets the audience know this isn’t your typical performance.

“By joining us tonight” a soft female voice says, “you’ll be standing in for someone who was actually part of a local government meeting somewhere in the U.S. in the last three years.”

The show, for the most part, doesn’t use actors. Instead, theater goers are asked to volunteer to play the role of city council members, the mayor, and regular citizens at a city council meeting. The performance is staged just as if it were a real meeting, with real people participating in a play that reflects the good, the bad, the ugly, and the sometimes nail-biting tediousness of participatory democracy…

“How do you take someone whose way of speaking or obvious demographic might be very different from yours and respectfully put it in the room?” Landsman asks. “How do you give voice to someone else’s language? For me it’s like walking a mile in their shoes – verbally.”

I would love to see this and to participate. The play takes something mundane to most people and provides an opportunity to see how things work and different people approach their community.

Here is why this has the potential to matter: Americans say that they like local government but their involvement is often limited (as exhibited by low turnout rates for local voting). And much of the time in local government boards, committees, and groups may involve arcane discussions of local ordinances, approval of paying bills, and odd local political or interpersonal disputes. Yet, these meetings help shape the character of communities. Even if there is a sizable public discussion about a development project or an annexation or a significant change, it is in the local government meeting that the vote actually takes place. These discussions and decisions can make a difference and set a community down a particular path for decades.

I would guess those who see this play do not immediately show up at all the local meetings eager to observe. However, at the least, it could help reveal some of the local processes that have the potential to impact all of our lives and communities.

Fox Business defines a McMansion, misses teardowns and broader social patterns

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McMansions are still alive and well – or at least in public conversation – if news sources are still trying to define them. Here is a recent definition on the Fox Business web site:

McMansion is a term that refers to a large house — typically in a suburban neighborhood — that looks like every other house in the neighborhood. The style was popularized during the 1980s and 1990s.

Their structures typically follows a similar pattern, as noted by Curbed, including a central core with a multistory entryway, a side wing and a garage wing.

According to real estate website Trulia, they tend to range between 3,000 and 5,000 square feet, or 1.5 to 2.5 times larger than the median-sized new home in 2000…

The word is a play on McDonalds items, indicating the homes are generic and mass-produced.

The definition above cites a Curbed article but it should really point to the author of that piece, Kate Wagner, creator of McMansion Hell. From the beginning of that piece, here is Wagner’s one sentence definition:

The typical McMansion follows a formula: It’s large, cheaply constructed, and architecturally sloppy.

These definitions do indeed get at two traits of McMansions: their size, larger than normal, and their architecture and construction, generally poor quality and mass produced. But, I argue the definitions are missing two important traits:

  1. Some McMansions are teardowns, large homes on relatively small lots within neighborhoods with smaller homes. Here, the absolute size is less important than comparative size. And these kinds of homes could appear in urban, suburban, and more rural settings.
  2. McMansions are connected to broader issues or concerns about American society, including sprawl and excessive consumption. This means that a lot of homes that might not technically fit the definition of a McMansion or might not appear on McMansion Hell could be part of broader patterns of McMansion like homes.

McMansion is a broadly used term but does not necessarily mean or refer to the same thing when different actors use the term. Big house? Yes. But, not the biggest houses and big might be relative. Problematic architecture and construction? Yes. But, not the only homes that might suffer from this (depending on who is examining the homes) and connected to larger American issues.

5G over what percent of America? T-Mobile: covering over 5,000 cities and towns, 200 million Americans

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T-Mobile is running a commercial touting their new 5G network. They claim it reaches 200 million Americans and over 5,000 cities and towns. What if we put those numbers in context?

On one hand, both figures sound impressive. Two hundred million people is a lot of people. This is a lot of text messages to send, TV shows and videos to stream, and social media and web pages to visit. This is a potential large market for T-Mobile. And 5,000 cities and towns sounds like a lot. I don’t know how many places Americans could name but many would probably struggle to name 5,000.

On the other hand, the figures suggest that the 5G coverage still does not reach a good portion of Americans or certain parts of the country. According to the Census Population Clock, the US population is over 329 million. So covering 200 million people comes to roughly 61% of Americans covered. This more than half, not quite two-thirds. Additionally, 5,000 cities and towns sounds like a lot. Some older data – 2007 – suggests the United States has over 19,000 municipal governments and the Census in 2012 also counted over 19,000. With these figures, 5G from T-Mobile covers a little more than one quarter of American communities.

Perhaps T-Mobile is doing the best the can with the coverage they have. The numbers are big ones and I would guess they could catch the attention of viewers. Maybe the numbers do not matter if they are trying to be first. However, just because the numbers are large does not necessarily mean the product is great. Significant segments of Americans will not have access, even with the big numbers. The numbers look good but they not be as good for some when they look into what they mean.

Trying to convince Illinois drivers to use zipper merges

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New recommendations from the Illinois Department of Transportation mean drivers should expect to see more zipper merges:

Most people aren’t familiar with the zipper merge and have never even heard of it. But with construction season just a couple months away, the Illinois Department of Transportation wants drivers to use the zipper merge technique when approaching lane closures…

Experts believe that is the quickest way to get through construction sites and entrances on highways during busy season.

So much so that a new law for 2020 mandates the zipper merge be included in this year’s Illinois Rules of the Road handbook, following many other states that already use the technique like Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Montana and Nevada, to name a few…

Not only is the zipper merge a safer and more efficient way to merge into traffic, it’s the law and carries a $164 fine, not including court costs and fees.

Changing decades of ingrained patterns is not an easy task. New drivers can be trained on this from the start but many drivers have been operating with different methods for decades. However, I would guess the presence of police and the use of tickets in situations where zipper merges will now be expected could help prompt people to follow the new guidelines. Or, imagine a campaign on public media where drivers who do not follow the guidelines are highlighted.

The one thing I do not get about resistance to zipper merges and the drivers who look to block traffic is that it is inefficient to not follow the zipper merge. Theoretically, everyone wants to to get where they need to go as quickly as possible. Hence, rampant speeding and other behavior intended to save time. Zipper merges are supposed to help with this which should be a win-win for everyone.

A nation beholden to cars: a record number of pedestrians die in US in 2019

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A new report highlights the dangers to pedestrians in the United States:

Based on data from the first six months of 2019, the Governors Highway Safety Association predicts there were 6,590 pedestrian deaths that year, which would be a 5 percent increase over the 6,227 pedestrian deaths in 2018.

The 2019 figure is the highest number of such deaths in more than 30 years, according to the association…

While there’s been a significant increase in pedestrian deaths over the past decade, the number of all other traffic deaths increased by only 2 percent…

“Following 30 years of declining pedestrian fatalities, there has been a complete reversal of progress,” Retting said in the release. “Pedestrians are at an inherent disadvantage in collisions, and we must continue to take a broad approach to pedestrian safety.”

While there are particular aspects of driving and pedestrian behavior that could be debated and addressed, there is a larger point that can be made with such data: the priority on American roadways goes to vehicles. This has been the case for decades and will continue to be the case for years to come. While efforts to make streets more amenable to walkers and bikers, these efforts are often limited to only a few areas. The goal of roadways in many places, included dense, populated areas, is to move as many vehicles as quickly as possible to where drivers want to go.  Tackling specific issues may help reduce the number of deaths but still leave the larger problem: Americans like cars and driving and our lives are often organized around driving.

Trying to make vacant suburban office parks more attractive

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Filling vacant suburban office parks can be hard. Here are some Chicagoland efforts to renovate these spacess:

At the former OfficeMax headquarters in Naperville, his architecture firm and developer Franklin Partners cut away portions of large trees, put in new smaller ones and strategically replanted some flower beds as part of a multimillion-dollar redevelopment to make the 350,000-square-foot property more appealing to a variety of companies…

For one, grand front desks typically found just inside the entrance of office properties built in the 1980s and 1990s no longer work. Those are being hidden and replaced by amenities that generate the most activity, like coffee bars, fitness centers and conferencing space. “It’s not unlike walking into a hotel,” says principal Roger Heerema. “There’s a feeling of life that is immediately apparent.”

Strategic use of light fixtures and canopies over entrances make a difference, he says, as does making sure tenants are actually noticing them. At the Westwood, a half-empty, two-building office complex being renovated in west suburban Lisle, the tenant lounge is located near a main visitor entrance. So Wright Heerema designed new lounges for both buildings near second entrances where most employees come and go…

In the suburbs’ corporate heyday, office buildings “were machines for working—you packed people into them,” says OKW Architects Chairman and CEO Jon Talty. “That attitude has changed profoundly. The lifeless machines need to have meaning to them to be relevant.”

How office space is designed goes through phases.

It would be interesting to hear more details about these approaches:

  1. How often do the changes involve asking current employees what they want as opposed to executives or designers making decisions and/or focusing on what potential employees might want?
  2. The argument above is that a redesign is going to attract a leasee or new employees. What exactly is the return on investment in good or cool design?
  3. Do companies and designers consider larger changes, such as adding more mixed uses to these campuses or opening up the buildings and spaces to reintegrate them into the surrounding area, or is the primary goal to make a quick fix to fill them with users again? In other words, is the bigger question how to move away from office parks and separate and move to a denser and more integrated suburban landscape?
  4. Does the design for a space work until someone moves out and then a refresh is needed? How often do companies proactively change their spaces in response to changing goals or employee needs?

 

The development of a changing and global northern Virginia

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Alongside the rise of Washington, D.C. as an American center, the suburbs of northern Virginia have expanded and evolved:

One such non-DC-centered book was published in 2013 by the scholar Andrew Friedman. “Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia” stands out as a serious application of academic history and landscape studies about the Dulles Corridor. It just may be the first 21st-century attempt to mold a critical perspective on Northern Virginia…

The book is built on Friedman’s understanding that “there is no American place that’s not also a global place.” He establishes a dichotomy between the “Overt Capital” of Washington, where the Capitol dome represents the public sphere, and the “Covert Capital” of the Dulles Corridor, where the CIA and Pentagon manage their operations in relative privacy. As Friedman examines how foreign policy and foreign interventions shaped the domestic landscape, he locates the cross-border flows of material and people that have made our region what it is today…

For Friedman, the history of the Dulles Corridor begins with the construction of the Pentagon in the 1940s, followed a decade later by the CIA headquarters. These buildings took advantage of car-oriented development to gain a new kind of hiddenness, obscured behind forests and parking lots. A drive through Langley can reveal nothing about what takes place behind the agency’s doors.

Friedman sees the seven years since his book was published as the beginning of a “third generation” in the development of the Dulles Corridor. It’s no longer characterized by leisurely semi-rural landscapes nor by McMansions, but by “lifestyle centers” and “placemaking,” as in the Mosaic District or The Boro. These centers, Friedman says, are in danger of becoming “fortified cells… reinventing the ‘urban’ into subdivisions, compartmentalized, buy-in-based.” Rather than creating an inclusive environment, he worries that lifestyle centers will only create a new form of “landscapes of denial.”

On one hand, this like the development of Sunbelt suburbs after World War Two. With defense spending, the spread of highways, and sprawling suburbs, this could describe any number of regions from D.C. to southern California. Over time, communities developed and became part of a global system: new immigration flows starting in the late 1960s brought new people, multiple generations of people lived in the new communities, and suburbs began to differentiate themselves. On the other hand, few places have the CIA and Pentagon – defense spending in suburbs could run the gamut from aircraft plants to military bases to government offices. And individual communities and regions have their own particular histories that affect local development character.

More broadly, looking at regional development – not just at cities – is a worthwhile endeavor. Major cities, like Washington, D.C., cannot be separated from their suburbs and vice versa. Considering the variation within a region versus connections between particular parts of the region and other parts of the United States is fun. Tyson’s Corner, cited above would be a good example: is it more like edge cities or northern Virginia. And what lessons could northern Virginia provide for the rest of the country about what to do or not to do?

Quick Review: Suburbicon

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I try to keep up with movies, books, TV shows, and music about the suburbs. I recently watched the 2017 film Suburbicon. Here are three thoughts:

1. The basic plot of the film extends a decades-long emphasis on the underbelly of suburban life. The main focus is on what looks like a typical suburban family – white, middle-class with the father working in a corporate office, one kid, in a recently-constructed suburban community – but they turn out to have family issues. The question at the end of the IMDB summary – “Who would have thought that darkness resides even in Paradise?” – is one that dozens of works have considered.

2. The twist to this film is that the under-the-surface issues of the white family are juxtaposed with the experiences of a black family who moves into the home directly behind the white family. As soon as I heard the last name of the black family (Mayers), I thought of this incident from 1957 in Levittown, Pennsylvania:

It began on the afternoon of Aug. 13, 1957, when the Levittown Times newspaper (the precursor to the Bucks County Courier Times) reported “The First Negro Family to buy a Levittown home” had moved into a house at 43 Deepgreen Lane in the Dogwood Hollow section that morning. The family included William Myers, his wife, Daisy, and their three small children…

Day 1: Within hours after the newspaper hit the streets, small groups of agitated Levittowners are already gathering in front of the Myers home. Throughout the evening, the crowd continues to grow. By midnight, more than 200 shouting men, women and children cluster on the Myers’ front lawn. A group of teens throw rocks through the Myers’ front picture window, and 15 Bristol Township police officers are dispatched to the scene. Soon, the county sheriff arrives, and orders the crowd to disperse. By 12:30 a.m., two adults and three teens have been arrested. Now, with the violence increasing, the sheriff wires the Pennsylvania State Police asking for immediate assistance. His request states, ”…the citizens of Levittown are out of control.”…

Day 7: As darkness settles, a group estimated at about 500 men, women and children gather directly across the street from the Myers house. Despite repeated warnings to leave, many in the crowd stand defiant — screaming, shouting and cursing at police. Finally, 22 state troopers, swinging clubs, charge into their midst. Men are slapped across their backs and knocked down; women are slapped across their buttocks. Many in the crowd become hysterical. Curses, cries and shouts of “Gestapo” are hurled at the troopers. Following the melee, remnants of the crowd linger along Haines Road well into the early morning hours. At one point, they defiantly join together to sing “America” (better known as “My Country ’Tis of Thee.”).

Day 8: About 500 men, women and children gather along the Farmbrook section of Haines Road. A rock is thrown, striking a Bristol Township police sergeant on the head and knocking him unconscious. He is rushed to Lower Bucks Hospital, then transferred to Rolling Hills Hospital. He suffers a concussion and ear lacerations, but fortunately will soon recover. A 15-year-old boy is seized in the incident, but later released. State police inform the protesters, “A police officer has been injured … Absolutely no more crowds will be permitted in the area.”

By midnight, the crowd has disappeared.

There is no direct commentary about the contemporaneous fates of the two families but the connection is interesting to consider. The white family cannot hold themselves together while the black family simply wants to live a quiet suburban life? The two boys are able to interact even as the adults lose their heads? The community cares about skin color more than they do about violent acts?

3. I wonder how much narratives about the hidden negative aspects resonate with viewers. For those who already dislike the suburbs, perhaps it feeds the critiques. But, for suburbanites or for those who aspire to living in the suburbs, does a story like this seem credible? It reminds me of a quote from sociologist Bennett Berger after studying a working-class suburb:

The critic waves the prophet’s long and accusing finger and warns: ‘You may think you’re happy, you smug and prosperous striver, but I tell you that the anxieties of status mobility are too much; they impoverish you psychologically, they alienate you from your family’; and so on. And the suburbanite looks at his new house, his new car, his new freezer, his lawn and patio, and, to be sure, his good credit, and scratches his head bewildered.

If there are plenty of racists down the street in suburbia or families that fall apart, does this stop others from living in suburbia?

Living in the shadow of Heathrow and other major airports

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A reporter travels to a neighborhood just next to the runways at Heathrow Airport and tries to understand how people live there:

It’s a nice perk, if you don’t mind the to and fro of planes overhead—one taking off or landing every 45 seconds, every day, every year. They soar within a few hundred feet of the rooftops, blocking the sky like giant aluminum birds. And they make a helluva racket too. “It’s almost deafening if you’re standing underneath,” says Bertie Taylor, who photographed Myrtle Avenue for his series Under the Flight Path.

Feltham has been a transportation hub since the early 20th century, when it hosted Britain’s second largest railway yard, targeted by German air strikes during World War II. But it didn’t become the consistently noisy place it is today until January 1, 1946, when an Avro 691 Lancastrian departed Heathrow for Argentina, marking the airport’s first flight. In the 1960s, its two main runways—one located just a quarter-mile northwest of Myrtle Avenue—were extended a few thousand feet to service even bigger planes like the Boeing 747.

Noise levels are allowed to reach up to 94 decibels during the day (equivalent to a jackhammer 50 feet away) and 87 decibels at night (a gas-powered lawn mower)—though they’ve fallen in recent decades with quieter engines and smarter flight paths. Still, last year Heathrow received an average of one noise complaint every seven minutes. Noise isn’t the only nuisance. Nearby communities also receive an extra dose of air pollution from vehicle and aircraft traffic, not to mention the occasional scare: In 2008, a Boeing 777 nearly slammed into Myrtle Avenue after its engines failed.

All this sounds nightmarish—and indeed, it troubles locals. But when Taylor visited Myrtle Avenue in September 2018, curious to see what life near an airport is like, folks seemed more irritated by having their driveways blocked in by planespotters’ cars. Aviation enthusiasts from as far as Germany and the Netherlands throng to the green park near the airport fence to ooh and aah at landing Airbus 380s and Boeing 777s. One middle-aged man even stood atop his van in a nearby field, livestreaming the spectacle on Facebook.

Humans can live in all sorts of conditions, including regular noise and visitors. So what would motivate these residents to stay in this location? A few hypotheses:

1. Housing is cheaper here. The noise would bother a lot of potential homeowners so a dwelling that might be more expensive elsewhere (and this is the expensive London region after all) might be less expensive.

2. Proximity to jobs, particularly in the transportation sector. For people with jobs at Heathrow or in something connected to the air industry, this could be a convenient location.

3. They grew up in this area or have long-term connections to the industries (railways, flying) in the community.

On the other hand, perhaps some of the residents do leave when one of these factors that once pushed them to stay becomes less important. With some personal experience living near a busy railroad line, I know people can get used to noise and rumbling but wouldn’t the average resident leave when they could?

Since airports are not usually too far from dwellings these days (they might have been in previous decades but many metropolitan regions have expanded), someone has to live near the airport. Maybe even some come to like it. But, living that close with the noise and the shadows is a different experience many homeowners would look to avoid.

Seeing the nuclear family in a suburban single-family home as a historical blip

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David Brooks argues the idealized American family in the suburbs is a historical anomaly:

For a time, it all seemed to work. From 1950 to 1965, divorce rates dropped, fertility rates rose, and the American nuclear family seemed to be in wonderful shape. And most people seemed prosperous and happy. In these years, a kind of cult formed around this type of family—what McCall’s, the leading women’s magazine of the day, called “togetherness.” Healthy people lived in two-parent families. In a 1957 survey, more than half of the respondents said that unmarried people were “sick,” “immoral,” or “neurotic.”

During this period, a certain family ideal became engraved in our minds: a married couple with 2.5 kids. When we think of the American family, many of us still revert to this ideal. When we have debates about how to strengthen the family, we are thinking of the two-parent nuclear family, with one or two kids, probably living in some detached family home on some suburban street. We take it as the norm, even though this wasn’t the way most humans lived during the tens of thousands of years before 1950, and it isn’t the way most humans have lived during the 55 years since 1965.

Today, only a minority of American households are traditional two-parent nuclear families and only one-third of American individuals live in this kind of family. That 1950–65 window was not normal. It was a freakish historical moment when all of society conspired, wittingly and not, to obscure the essential fragility of the nuclear family.

In a sweeping historical perspective, Brooks is right (nor is he the first to make this argument): the American arrangement of small nuclear families in large private homes is unusual. It is even relatively unusual among contemporary living arrangements throughout the world. Fifty years from now, will this period look even more like a historical blip?
And yet, the idea has a strong hold on American life. This particular lifestyle became a significant part of the American Dream, supported by the federal government, promoted by films and television, and defining much of popular twentieth century sprawling suburbs. To move away from this ideal will take some work, even if there are reasons pushing Americans away from this life. Brooks proposes some different alternatives, from multigenerational dwellings to cohousing, but each will take time to develop. It is hard enough to get politicians to talk about housing, let alone discuss all the social arrangements and family life attached to it.
At the least, this is a reminder of how social arrangements can come together through a  confluence of forces and come to seem like normal – until things have changed.