Travelogue: East Texas / Northwest Louisiana

The initial contrast is a bit jarring – derricks and refineries should be creatures of the plains, not the great forest primeval of this wet place. The Delta may have been devastated, but the North of the state has seen nothing but windfall from an energy-starved world. Yes . . . but . . . the trees. The trees. Wall after wall of impenetrable shafts sixty and eighty feet high. As a son of the prairie it’s claustrophobic. There is no horizon in this place, no way to know what’s up ahead, no sense of your place in the larger world. This the home of the world-cowing nuclear bomber base; the unsuspecting populace accidentally stumbling their way through global power. Here is another slice of the infinite internal campagna that funds and fuels and creates the Great American Hegemony Machine. The world is conquered in such a small way; a treasured paycheck and a tiny clapboard house. You can keep your trees, and your river, and your casinos crassly clustered at waters’ edge. I’d rather be able to see my future coming.

What We've Lost

McKim Mead & White knew to design to a scale that the average person could understand / absorb / interact with / touch & feel. So much of Modernism and after is hyper-scaled; all about macro-shape and abstract space. The in-your-face visceral language of the personal scale has become a lost art.

It didn't have to be this way.

Eyes on the Street

A little while back, WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show did a story on a writer aghast because he was mugged outside his building in Park Slope in Brooklyn (called “Brute Market Force", the mp3 is here.) It’s interesting for a couple of reasons. The first is his opinion that Brooklyn is more dangerous than the classically “bad neighborhoods” of Manhattan because in Manhattan there is more pedestrian traffic on almost every street. A classic “eyes on the street” Jane Jacobs argument. The other, and in many ways diametrically opposed, point of interest is that if crime is unavoidable and ever-present in Brooklyn, why pay millions of dollars in a “market frenzy” to live in Park Slope when there are lots of other neighborhoods that are much cheaper? (One of his examples? Long Island City – shudder.)

Although kind of wandering, the basic point he was trying to make was the effects of the speed and contrast of gentrification. i.e. that income disparity per se was a fundamental social problem when two vastly different neighborhoods are placed next door to one another; sort of the resentment school of criminology. Of course, all of this ties in with Our discussion of Urban Safety, but even beyond that, it gets to the kind of ideas that drove both mid-century zoning ordinances and the phenomenon of white flight. Is harmony possible between the haves and the have-nots in the same place, and if so what are its ingredients?

I, for one, adore Park Slope.

By way of comparison . . .

This is my block, closer to the center of the city. Note that there are no freestanding single-
family houses on either of the two blocks shown. (See Notes on Density below.)

Notes on Density

The PBS affiliate in Dallas recently ran a little documentary – no, make that polemic – by a local artist bemoaning the death of community and how suburban development is lifeless and soulless. Nothing surprising there. I was a little surprised by the interviews with not only the author of the ubiquitous Bowling Alone, but even Andres Duany. Both of them went on, as they are wont to do, about the importance of the dense, walkable community, and how important it was to have access to shopping, etc. without being required to use a car. Nothing new there. The structure of the film was comparing the neighborhood where the maker grew up to where he moved later (Allen, TX – see my commentary on Collin County.) Fine. Good. All of this we’ve heard before, the Geography of Nowhere / Edge City / Sprawl / On Paradise Drive / Timeless Way . . . debate goes on as usual. There were even interviews of residents talking about how tight-knit and happy their community was and how it was a great cultural place. Feeling a sense of obligation, I went over one sunny Saturday afternoon to see this oasis of urban living in the great anti-urban carbuncle of Texas. It’s what I found that was telling.



This is our filmmaker’s “urban” neighborhood, from whence all of the diatribes against “the suburbs” are launched (in the center.) It’s a rectangular grid of single-story, single-family houses, isolated by a through street of mostly fences (the unnamed yellow line) on one side, heavy rail tracks on a second, a dead-end terminus street on the North (Old Gate,) and a dangerous six-lane high-speed boulevard on the fourth (Gaston Pky / Garland Road.) The lake at the top lies between this area and central Dallas, and the neighborhood is a good twenty-minute drive from both the historic and de facto centers of life in Dallas. Rapid transit is nowhere near.

Before I went, the obviously commercial parts along the two edges gave me some hope; they look promising from the air. In real life, the Old Gate complex is a very large Methodist church, a smaller church, and the derelict shell of what used to be a corner store. Nothing else. The strip along the artery is more promising, but holds things like a rough mechanic’s shop, a down-on-its-luck garden center, and a small convenience store with bars on its windows. The strip on the lake side is an actually viable neighborhood strip center, but it’s once again across a dangerous 150 foot wide traffic artery. Not exactly The New Urbanism.

Which got me thinking: The issue (explicit or not) on this guy’s mind isn’t really density – the housing is a fraction as dense as the multi-family blocks in my neighborhood (famous for being bucolic – go figure) – or even urbanity in a broad sense. It’s socio-economic and architectural. The themes referred to again and again are “we know our neighbors,” and “look at the character in these funky little houses.” It never ceases to amaze the difference between the purported issue and the actual issue. This man simply wants the people around him to be friendly (and, I’m assuming, of a non-intimidating social class) and his surroundings to be interesting. The great elephants of urbanism really don’t even factor into the equation. In fact, it continues to amuse how little many people in Texas understand what “urban” is. Christopher Alexander and friends are, I suppose, still right on the money.

But how to translate it into a buildable form?

Now let us learn from the ants

One of the things that fascinates me about complex systems is that the most successful ones seem to be the ones with the simplest rules. I.e. systems that self-organize around a few key principles in a chaotic environment – thousands of micro-decisions adapted to ultra-local conditions making up an unintentionally unified whole. There’s been some fascinating artificial intelligence research on this for some time at MIT under the rubric of “artificial life,” where small robots navigate their environment by trial and error. WNYC’s RadioLab took a more recent swipe at the concept of self-organization here. (You owe it to yourself to check out RadioLab anyway.)

I think the key to the whole thing may be the parallel processing nature of the enterprise – “distributed intelligence,” I think is the term. For a process to be successful, it has to be dynamic and flexible. The invisible hand is the most-cited version on the economic front, but there are echoes in things as diverse as the biology of neurons to congestion-avoidance in traffic patterns. For the timid beginnings of how to apply the lessons economists have known for centuries to the building of the city try Virginia Postrel on Dynamic Cities. My favorite example is the ill-fated Bolshevik takeover of the Russian economy – specifically the failure of Leninism in its pure form and the forced transition to the New Economic Policy of 1921. Who, indeed, is in charge of supplying the city of London with bread?

But how to plan for the chaotic? Maybe Hayek knew . . . .