Ho‘ohana Aloha

Wonderful description… This is what Sense of Place sounds like:

powells:

“There are certain places that feel charged. Visiting them gives me an electrical surge, as if I have plugged in to some current. The headwaters of the Metolius River are like that. So is Short Sands Beach on the Oregon Coast. And the tunnels snaking beneath Edinburgh. And the Von Trier bar in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The horror section at the downtown Powell’s makes me feel the same way. I grew up in Central Oregon, but my grandparents lived in Portland, so every few months, we’d cram into the truck and growl over the mountains for a visit. We had no local bookstore — outside of the sad little Waldenbooks in the Bend River Mall — so the Powell’s visit took a lot of time and strategy. This was our literary haul for the next two months. We had to choose wisely.

For those who have never visited, the downtown Powell’s takes up a whole city block. A giant concrete split-level sarcophagus of books. There is a ghost that haunts the water fountain. An urn of cremated remains that moves from room to room, depending on space. The shelves spill books, used and new, and the aisles buzz with the kind of diversity you’ll only find at the DMV: dudes in suits and dudes in mud-caked cowboy boots, a woman with dreads and a woman with a tiara and a woman with bright blue hair. A carnival of wonders for a kid from the boonies.

We would push our way through the 10th and Burnside doors, and the smell of paper and ink and glue (and oftentimes patchouli) would result in a sensory overload. I would feel jittery and starved. I cut through the Blue Room (which I always thought of as English class, home to all of the serious lit-e-ra-ture) and slowly, slowly made my way through the Gold Room, where all the sci-fi and fantasy and thrillers and horror novels could be found.

The smell there — sort of mildewy earthworm meets mottled paper — is one of my favorite smells. I remember the horror aisle as shadow-soaked, far from any window. Over the next few hours, I would pull down books and read from them and build a dark tower of mass-market paperbacks, the greatest treasure of my childhood.”

Author Benjamin Percy is guest-blogging all week at Powells.com

Sense of Place is key 8 on www.ManagingWithAloha.com: The 9 Key Concepts

My Monday recharging on this glorious day in May:

When I meet Alaka‘i Managers (managers who are the Great Ones), and am able to visit their workplaces, I consistently see the Sense of Place commonality they share as culture-builders. I will feel it in my surroundings, for while sound and solidly built, their place pulses with its deeply veined character and vibrant energies.

Alaka‘i Managers know that this is what every single workplace represents: The wonderful opportunity to create a special place…

latimes:

For Pennsylvanians, Penn State football was a revered, life-changing institution, one most people would never dream of questioning.

Suddenly I couldn’t stop noticing my own deference to athletes — the way I’d overlook the superior attitude they took around my male friends who weren’t athletic, the way they got dibs on the easy classes while the rest of us pulled all-nighters and never complained. The way I’d listen, rapt, to their sports homilies, like a geisha. I began to distance myself from football. I started hanging around with pre-med students, pot smokers, Young Republicans, kids who majored in economics, kids of other ethnicities, foreign kids.

This awareness, of what has shaped your world view, is not often easy to discern. What are you aware of most within your “sense of place” and is there anything cult-like about it?

Our values do change as we grow up and make our own discoveries, and our own choices - this is the fact of the matter in “Managing with Aloha.” —-What have you discovered? —-What have you chosen? Or are you still pre-programmed on automatic pilot?

Utterly fantastic. Want some great ideas where you live? Just ask everyone else who lives there, and then…

This summer the Institute for Urban Design asked New Yorkers to submit ideas for making the city’s public spaces “smarter, more beautiful and livable.” Some 500 responses later, the institute then asked designers from around the world to shape these raw ideas into concrete projects for the city.

Be sure you click through for the slide show of ideas.

This is fascinating.

How did the geometry of your neighborhood affect your Sense of Place? It certainly did mine, now that I reflect back on it.

BIG Mahalo to Steve Sherlock for pointing me to this wonderful essay.

Read it if you love writing/publishing, and wonder about sitting, and the possibility in fully noticing (a tumble/blog post last week) …

Could anyone ever fully exhaust their Sense of Place?

Kaid Benfield:

For a long time, America’s environmental community celebrated wilderness and the rural landscape while disdaining cities and towns. Thoreau’s Walden Pond and John Muir’s Yosemite Valley were seen as the ideal, while cities were seen as sources of dirt and pollution, something to get away from. If environmentalists were involved with cities at all, it was likely to be in efforts to oppose development, with the effect of making our built environment more spread out, and less urban.

We’ve come a long way since then, if still not far enough. We were and remain right to uphold nature, wildlife and the rural landscape as places critical to celebrate and preserve. But what we realize now, many of us anyway, is that cities and towns – the communities where for millenia people have aggregated in search of more efficient commerce and sharing of resources and social networks – are really the environmental solution, not the problem: the best way to save wilderness is through strong, compact, beautiful communities that are more, not less, urban and do not encroach on places of significant natural value. As my friend who works long and hard for a wildlife advocacy organization puts it, to save wildlife habitat we need people to stay in “people habitat.”

I like that… “people habitat.” “Compact community” (as opposed to urban sprawl) is also a fresher, Sense of Place way to consider density.

Now if we place our hopes where the money is, we have yet another arena where business large and small, can lead the way via the choices they make with their physical footprint. To pick on one of the big guys, here’s another article in counterpoint: Critic’s Notebook: Apple’s new campus will be a retrograde cocoon. In writing for the LA Times, Christopher Hawthorne says that Apple’s “proposed headquarters wraps its workers in a suburban setting, removing the feeling of a collective metropolitan realm.”

It’s always dangerous to draw too neatly the distinction between the endlessly sprawling suburbs and the dense, vertical city; more and more the lines between the categories are blurred. The rise of Los Angeles over the last century is itself a powerful argument against the idea that low-rise development precludes the kind of vitality or diversity we associate with the most progressive cities.

Still, the new Apple campus, which the company describes as “a serene and secure environment” for its employees, keeps itself aloof from the world around it to a degree that is unusual even in a part of California dominated by office parks. The proposed building is essentially one very long hallway connecting endlessly with itself.