Voices

From Cyburbian Maister: Most people would agree that art in public spaces has the potential to beautify or otherwise enhance an environment. Public art at its grandest scale can serve as an iconic landmark, as in the case of the Eiffel Tower

or the Christ the Redeemer statue

Why then is there a popular perception that public art seldom delivers what it promises? Why does it so often seem that if there’s, say, $50,000 dollars of public money to spend on a sculpture, it ends up in the form of, well….nothing. That is, no recognizable forms part of our normal sensory experiences.

Unless you have been living in a cave in Tora Bora, you have read and heard the words “sustainability” and “sustainable development” a lot in the popular media. The words are put before you in magazine articles, television interviews or conference flyers daily.

So what is “sustainable development” and where did it come from? Did Al Gore invent it? Well, all evidence to the contrary, Al was a little late to the sustainability party. His 1992 book, “Earth in the Balance” and the subsequent Oscar winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” were only about 35 years after the fact.

Ballot initiatives for laws that consider a downzoning a partial taking if it hurts property values, along with new barriers to land acquisition through eminent domain, will be the unraveling of the environmental and land use planning gains made in the United States in the 20th century. writes Richard Carson.

Every once in a while a state voter initiative catches people's attention, and it takes the center stage nationally. Examples include creating term limits, setting property tax caps, and banning same-sex marriages. The next big trend is all about property rights, and it is well under way in 23 states.

A convergence of renewed interest in urban downtowns, attractive retail rents, and the popularity of do-it-yourself home improvement and interior decorating could result in downtown being tomorrow's hot "furniture row," writes Michael Stumpf.

Give HGTV some credit. They did not invent the home improvement show, but they have built it into an enormously popular entertainment venue, reaching 89 million households and capturing over 800,000 nightly prime time viewers. It has been called one of the most widely copied formats on the television landscape, giving rise to such shows as Trading Spaces and Extreme Makeover on other channels.

This is the latest essay from Perry L. Norton, FAICP. The complete text can be seen by clicking on the "read more" link below.

Got a minute, pilgrim? I'd like to talk with you a little bit about statistics. You already know, of course, that they are the bane of intelligent discourse, but it's useful to reflect on just how baneful they really are. It was a line on a radio broadcast that caught me up.

The very idea of being a member of the Planning Profession and of a jury in a high profile murder trial is a frightening one. For openers, you don't for more than five seconds have any confidence that the court system is going to protect your anonymity. And you know that there are wild eyed Pro and Con people "out there" with assault weapons who are going to kill you when the trial is over -unless you come up "hung" - no decision.

Surely someone has, by now, written a PhD Dissertation on the subject of the Migratory Patterns of the Snowbird. If so, however, I haven't seen it, although I confess to not having searched very far. Snowbirds, as you know, are those of the human specie who have the wherewithal and the inclination to flee the ice and snow of their northern nesting places to take up temporary residence in warmer climes. When migrating, they travel in caravans, not gypsy caravans, Dodge and Plymouth Caravans - towing their Jaguars.

Memories are made of ribonucleic acid and protein synthesis operating with undamaged temporal lobes and hippocampi in both hemispheres of the brain. And I haven't the faintest idea what that means - I read it somewhere.

We've all read enough to know that things can get awfully complicated whenever you deal with a function of the brain; and there are many books and much important research all geared to learning more about that function we call memory. But for most of us the important thing about memory is whether we can remember what we want to remember and forget what we want to forget.

What we perceive in City Planning today seems to take ages to happen. And it is even further from our reality to consider history in other terms. But it might be interesting to relate another time to our own struggles.

Before 1750, in the New World, only France remained to challenge British dominion. And France's presence was formidable, with explorations and settlements from Quebec to New Orleans, claiming lands both east and west of the Mississippi, from the Alleghenies to the Rockies. The claims were challenged, and for seven years the French and British-Indian War raged (1756-1763). At its conclusion, Britain won all of Canada, and all of the interior lands east of the Mississippi River.

At the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, in the suburbs of Tucson, there are at least two hundred volunteers who devote a day or more per week helping visitors understand, better, what they are seeing as they go from one end to another of these magical paths. There must be another seventy five volunteers who work with staff, helping them unravel the mysterious tangles of the many life forms extant. And all of these volunteers work free of any charge for their time.

Life in our land seems to have turned vaporific or vagabondish. Anything but real. And we can examine this by taking a quick look at a couple of squints and squats that are not normally examined together.

Take, for example, American Inventions.

Thomas Alva Edison did not invent the light bulb. In 1844, three years before Edison was born, Jean Foucault made an arc light strong enough to illuminate Place de la Concorde in Paris. And Robert Fulton did not invent the first steamboat. These ships had been running on the Potomac River and the Delaware River twenty years before Fulton built his ship - which was never called the Clermont.

What we perceive in City Planning today seems to take ages to happen. And it is even further from our reality to consider history in other terms. But it might be interesting to relate another time to our own struggles.

Before 1750, in the New World, only France remained to challenge British dominion. And France's presence was formidable, with explorations and settlements from Quebec to New Orleans, claiming lands both east and west of the Mississippi, from the Alleghenies to the Rockies. The claims were challenged, and for seven years the French and British-Indian War raged (1756-1763). At its conclusion, Britain won all of Canada, and all of the interior lands east of the Mississippi River.

(This review brings enlightened language to an area usually bereft.)

Focussing on swift multicultural movements, "Bypass208", which opened yesterday, is a long awaited link between the brassy cacophony of the north and the subtle gentility of the south. While a far cry from the gripping but humorless Jones Productions of the 1960's, it does pay technical homage thereto. What sets Bypass208 apart, and some might say above, the set-in-concrete styles which dominated for several decades, is the gracefulness of paths the production takes, extending even to the generous, almost playful, ramps, with sufficiently subdued back lighting. Certainly a candidate for technical nomination.

(From the Fall 1996 edition of Planning Commissioners Journal)

In thinking about the role of the professional planner, it is helpful first to look back. Before there were professional planners, there were “citizen” planners. They weren’t initially called “citizen planners,” they were members of civic improvement associations which came into being after the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago — a spectacular showcase of buildings, architecture, and civic design, which inspired business and community leaders across the country to see what they might do to improve their cities.

In connection with the PBS TV series "Power of Myth" Joseph Campbell wrote, "The rise and fall of civilizations can be seen to have been largely a function of the integrity and cogency of their supporting canons of myth...when the mythology of a culture no longer works, there follows a sense of both disassociation and a quest for new meaning."

In his notes of introduction to his powerful play "The Kentucky Cycle", Robert Schenkkan wrote, "The Myth of the Frontier is a fascinating construct, an extremely seductive and ultimately very dangerous myth, composed of two lesser myths. The first of these is the Myth of Abundance, which says, 'These resources are so vast that they will never end, You cannot possibly use them up.' The other half of the Myth of the Frontier might be called the Myth of Escape. It says, 'Only today matters, The past? Who cares? If you don't like where you are, literally or metaphorically, well, pick up stakes and move. Change your address, change your name, change your history.'."