Ho‘ohana Aloha

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.

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.

As Ryan Avent shares,

The political story that is Rick Perry’s candidacy obscures the metropolitan roots of the Texas story.

He also points out another root cause, perhaps a bigger, and more telling one (Hawai‘i, are you listening?)

Yet the big secret to success is Texan cities’ willingness to capitalize on their advantages through an extraordinary openness to growth.

Sure would love to see a project like this one launch in Hawai‘i — with the caveat that it include the neighbor islands in a meaningful way: Our media (and governance… another subject…) is so, SO very O‘ahu-centric.

bobulate:

E.B. White outlines that there are roughly three New Yorks:

1) The New York of the man or woman who was born here
2) The New York of the commuter
3) The New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something

On the third:

[T]he greatest is the last — the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.

I returned to visit the place I grew up this weekend to take a trip with my family. “Home” is how I’d referred to the place for years. Yet slowly there was that tension between the place you lived and the place you live, the “were” and the “is,” the past, the present, and perhaps the future. And “home” — a four-letter word of a different kind — transforms.

More than a decade ago, I arrived in New York, but never intended to stay. I might (if I may), say then there are roughly four New Yorks:

Fourth, there is the New York of the man or woman who was born somewhere else and came to New York never intending to stay. Of these four incomparable cities, it may be the fourth that is the most unflappable, the most infallible, the most loyal. You see it is she who has understood love of a city, of its natives, and its commuters, of its messy seams and its buttoned-up asphalt, of its uptown arts and its devoted downtown. And she’s been spat on and praised, she’s been carried home, and cheered on. It is she, who embraces the city, knowing she had a choice otherwise. Yet her goal is to make this her home.

This can be said of Hawai‘i too and the “melting pot” we always speak of having, claiming it quite proudly. Perhaps these things can be said of where you live, and your Sense of Place about it.

We all want to be those “settlers (who) give (a place) passion” and wonder if we do. Sooner or later, we’ll all sit ourselves down, and ask ourselves, “why do I persist in living here?” Those answers we come up with are so, so important.