#mallorybaches

Submitted by Mallory B.E. Baches for The Civic Hub

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It is nearing the last days of the school year, and while I’m thrilled with the progress my daughter has made and glad to have a bit more time with her over the summer, my thoughts keep returning to her teacher, and to all of the teachers, staff, and administrators at her school, and at public schools across the country.  Because many of the educators at my daughter’s school are friends, I know that with a collective exhale of another year in the books comes the collective steeling of preparations for the coming one.  Soon enough, August will be here and the students will return and the national public education merry-go-round will start up again.  Despite best efforts, students will slip through the cracks, parents will demand better and get worse, teachers will be overworked and underpaid, budgets will fall far short of need, and the nation will be disappointed.

My degree is in architecture, and I’m a certified planner, accredited with two additional professional agencies.  I design and support the development of communities, and for my work, I am compensated fairly.  I bear a personal level of responsibility for the quality of the communities that I create, and the level to which citizens are able to thrive as a result of their environment, and yes, there is some professional liability I bear, albeit to a minor degree.

At parties or gatherings, when I describe what I do, I refer to it as my practice.  I am a certified professional, and society rewards that fact by deeming me a practitioner, no different in status from law or medicine or engineering or accountancy.  I “practice” my profession…think about that turn of phrase that we all use so unthinkingly…I “practice” my profession, I continue the work of perfecting my craft.  I’m accountable to my certification for my ongoing maintenance of its standards, and I’m accountable to my clients for adhering to contracts we negotiate.  And to the extent that the communities where I practice thrive as a result of my work, well…

Education is an entirely different matter.

Have you ever thought about the standards we hold teachers to?  In any given classroom, if even one child fails to thrive, that is an unacceptable failure on the part of the teacher/school/district/state/nation, isn’t it?  And indeed it should be, particularly if that child is YOUR child.

The extreme level of our collective expectation is that in the ideal classroom, every child thrives in pursuit of his or her greatest potential, through the masterful guidance of the teacher leading that room.  In his or her hands are a mix of external circumstances that must be negotiated, for each child in the room simultaneously, to the best outcome of every child, regardless of whether the heat is on in the building, or the child sleeps nights in the family’s car, or a personality conflict with the teacher or another student or a family member prompts the child to reject the learning environment, or the teacher’s mother has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer.  For that level of expectation, we pay that teacher extremely little.  We argue that he or she “gets summers and holidays off” without consideration that there might be extra work to do outside the hours that the students are in seats.  We rationalize our low valuation by arguing that it is an “easy” profession with a low point of entry, while (some of us) support merit pay based on standardized tests and (some of us) cry out against teacher unions and (some of us) cast off the dismissive, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.”

We certainly never refer to professional teachers as “practitioners.”  We want perfection from them, while treating them as if they are capable of anything but.  If you bother to look, the conflict is appallingly evident.

We hold teachers to a standard that very few of us could ever adhere to ourselves.  In my line of work, that would be like saying that every place I design and help develop *had* to lead every citizen that came in contact with it to thrive.  Think about that, the next time you are driving from home to work to the store…how many buildings that you come across stir your spirit?  How many neighborhoods or communities that you pass through even *seem* to be places where you would thrive, never mind whether you actually *would* thrive there should you invest your life there?

Much of our cities are filled with junk buildings.  They get built because they have to get built, because there is demand for a super-grocery and there is a large property that could hold one and most people will be driving there and that parking lot has to have ample room or people will choose somewhere else and it is cheaper laying it out that way anyway.  Few if anyone’s life is measurably better because of that grocery store.  No one stops as they are passing by to enjoy a quiet moment taking in the beauty of this expertly crafted structure.  And we as a society are OK with that tradeoff because there was a need and the need was fulfilled, and in large systems like cities, process is sometimes worth more than progress.  As a designer, I might do my best in committing my own practice to something better and encouraging others to do the same, and I also might often have to merely accept my own best efforts toward our collective progress as just desserts.

I know that there are a whole lot of mindfully hard-working and dedicated educators out there with that exact same approach to their own profession’s system.  They are practicing their craft every day, and some days they are exhausted and the district just announced cutbacks and they are worried that they are last-in first-out and their student with an abusive caregiver is out of control and CPS is running late for the eval.  Some days, it is all a sort of perfectly choreographed poetry, when they know for a fact that they have made a difference in the lives of every one of the children they have been entrusted with the future of, and those are the days where they know that they are living up to their educations and credentials and honors, the practice that they have invested toward educating our children.

Submitted by Mallory B.E. Baches for The Civic Hub

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Here at The Civic Hub, a big part of our work includes talking to everyday citizens.

This means that we are constantly learning about the local community: what the high school football team’s prospects are...who hung out a new shingle, and who had to let their employees go...how the shops downtown are faring...who might throw their hat in at the next election...the best restaurants in town...whose grandmother makes the best pecan pie.

Topics can range from fascinating to mundane, but if you know what you are looking for, anything can provide at least some amount of useful data.  If the high school football team’s prospects are good, you can expect a real surge of community pride around a shared interest in the coming months.  Newcomers to the political scene will be people who want to see change, and it is always worth learning why they do.  If lots of folks are opening or closing up shop, you know that the economics of the place are in flux, and the population may be as a result.  The best restaurants in town will be nightly spontaneous town squares full of personalities and popular topics of conversation.  If the shops on Main Street are busy, you know you can collect a whole lot more data from the shopkeepers because they are unknowingly serving as the eyes and ears of the consumer community. And whoever’s grandmother makes the best pecan pie, well, that’s someone you ought to try and meet before you’ve left town, at least if you like pie (and I most certainly do).  Chances are that grandmother knows a thing or two about a whole lot more than just pie, too...

Something we frequently hear is a dissatisfaction with people’s disassociation.  Folks cite their frustration over how it seems like they don’t recognize anyone on their street, or their concern about how few people seem to show up for community events, or their confusion with why they can’t seem to find new activities and meet new people.  But what those and so many similar comments boil down to is the fact that people feel disconnected (and they don’t feel happy about it, either).  Folks are tired of feeling isolated, not feeling comfortable (or even being able) to go next door and ask for a cup of sugar.  They live lives separated from the people living around them, by design or by distances, and many times they are embarrassed to admit to us that they don’t even know their neighbor’s name.

credit: szczel via flickr

And how could they?  On any given day, they get into their car in their garage, drive 15 or 30 (or more) minutes away to work or their children’s school or for their groceries, pick up a coffee or a prescription or dinner at a drive-thru on the way home, and return to their garage and into their house without ever personally passing by their neighbor’s home.  They probably even reached through the car window to get the mail from the mailbox on their way in.  They pay others to maintain their yard to the level required by their neighborhood association’s covenants (who has the time?), and with so many “features” throughout their recently-built house, they rarely even find the desire or reason to venture out into that yard anyway.

It is then at one of our Civic Camps or Co-op Conferences that these dissatisfied citizens deliver their solemn confessional: they are afraid that maybe they don’t even have a “real community” in the first place, at least not one that they are a part of.

And if you step back and take look at how we categorize groups of people any more, you see the pattern plainly.  We are not a society, we are a “spending group.”  We are not people, we are “market segments.”  We are not citizens, we are “consumers.”

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While financially devastating for a large number of Americans, the Great Recession has shone a light on important things we were getting wrong in previous decades, not the least of those being the strangely isolated way so many of us have been living.

In the economic boom times of the early 2000s, the easy solution to the disconnection in our daily lives was simply to pay for connection.  We outsourced our connectivity through purchases or payments, and we subsidized those activities with enormous vehicles with enormous gas tanks that we drove enormous distances as we spent our way to socializing.  And when that wasn’t enough, we would actually buy our way on to the next better place: we would move to solve our social and cultural needs, seeking better schools or better neighbors or better lifestyles someplace else. 

But in the past five years, many of us have been forced to curtail our more consumerist tendencies, and in doing so, we’ve become much more aware of the hidden burdens of the lives we have been leading.  With gasoline over $4.00/gallon, driving to all of our daily needs and activities is uneconomical.  With unemployment high, paying for the entertainment that gives us connection with others is untenable.  With real estate in a slump, hop-scotching through houses is unfeasible.

Many of us feel like the things we consume are actually consuming us instead.

And it looks like the shift may be long-term.  A 2010 PricewaterhouseCoopers study predicts a lasting legacy of reserved American consumerism, thanks to the Great Recession, with only 7% of shoppers saying they have made no changes whatsoever to their buying habits, as compared to 34% who have made significant changes.

Unlike our previous decades of consumptive decadence, it is possible that we won’t be spending that way again at any time in the near future, and that can actually be good for our communities.  Because the interesting thing is, that problem of not having a “real community” that folks speak of was only being compounded by the spending solutions so many of us had come to rely on.

As we systematically outsourced our experience of community, we simultaneously eroded the strength of our actual communities.  We lost (or failed to make) connections with those around us, with whom we shared geography or perhaps much more.  As the web of social capital became unwoven in our towns and neighborhoods, we made ourselves vulnerable to those factors beyond our community’s control.  We do not collectively share personal investment in our common place, and we now lack the benefits that a cohesive society can bring.

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The word community is derived from Latin, effectively meaning “to give among each other,” a sharing view of how citizens interconnect.  It calls to mind a sort of American ideal, Mayberry or Walnut Grove or Walton’s Mountain, but it also suggests trends that have taken off in the past couple of years, crowdsourcing and crowd-funding and the sharing economy.  What we might have done manually a century ago, convening at town hall meetings or investing in a friend starting a business or bartering our skills in exchange for a neighbor’s skills we lack, we are now finding ways to do digitally.

credit: Choconancy1 via flickr

But there is still much more restitching of our local societies to be done.

When everyday citizens talk to us about their fears of lacking real community, we often ask them to explore the ways that they do manage to feel connection.  Sometimes they tell us about their church, or the sidelines of their child’s sporting events, or the local farmer’s market.  Often they express doubts over how to reconnect again, or whether the connections that they do experience are actually meaningful, or what they might do if they really needed the help of their neighbors.  Every time they tell us that if they knew where and how and why they could and should get far more deeply involved in their community, they certainly would.

credit: jsaull via flickr

Citizens are anxious to start building connections again.  The question for their communities is this: who will lead the charge to restitch the fabric of their citizenry?

Particularly in the small towns where The Civic Hub often works, we see municipality after municipality reducing administration and removing departments that might have addressed such an effort in the past.  And we understand, how the era of limited resources and the popularity of restricted power means that even the good that can come from government must be gone.  But if it isn’t our cities and their staffs, our towns and their managers, our neighborhoods and their organizations, then who is going to sponsor and support and speak for a return to civic investment?

Part of our work is to learn who is is willing to lead the civic restoration in their community, and then help support them as they do.  More often than not, those conversations we have with everyday citizens help us in our quest, though as a colleague said recently, it is hard to make the role of local leadership seem sexy.  Leading the charge toward civic change can be a thankless task.

Submitted by Mallory B.E. Baches for The Civic Hub

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Last week I had the extreme honor and absolute pleasure of being a part of Next City’s Vanguard Conference in Cleveland, as a member of the 2013 Next American Vanguard class.  I’m fairly humbled to be included with this impressive group of young people because, having become “family” with them during our time in Cleveland, I’m confident that if you don’t know them yet, you will soon.  The things they are already doing in remaking our cities, and the ideas they have for how to do it even better, are nothing short of inspiring.  I definitely returned to my desk refreshed and refocused, thanks to the conversations we all shared care of Next City.

credit: Quardean Lewis-Allen, Made in Brownsville

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Reflecting on the experience, I keep coming back to the feeling I got from the first moments spent together in the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative downtown space, which was something along the lines of, “we all speak the same language.”  I’ve been to many conferences and I’ve attended plenty of professional development, but I’ve found it rare that, in a room full of diverse backgrounds as with the 2013 Vanguards, the group will nonetheless feel an immediate kinship of shared values.

A few of those common threads that I noticed amongst the group:

Be productive.

One of my favorite discussions of the conference happened during a workshop led by Lou Huang of Code for America and Dan Miller of Fundrise.  Both are working on projects that serve long-range goals and empower long-term systemic change in our communities.  I am awed by the important work that both are doing, but the real gem I took from them was to just get on with it already.  Great opportunity exists when you have the courage and initiative to actually start, even when the journey is long and even if you don’t have every answer already.  It is easy to get bogged down with perfecting every aspect of a project still on the drafting boards, but none of the Vanguards would have been there without actually producing a lot already.  So go ahead and put it out there, whatever it is.  The best things are a work-in-progress.

Be positive.

It is no surprise that, amongst a group of young stand-outs, the core character trait of positivity shone through again and again.  It is an especially important attitude for change-makers to have because change necessarily causes friction.  It is a lot easier (and maybe even natural) to react to that friction with negativity, but progress isn’t going to be made in response to the inevitable friction except with a positive attitude.  The problems the Vanguards are addressing in their work are difficult: gentrification, authentic revitalization, legacy cities, governmental transparency, financing innovation, social equity.  Positivity is the only opportunity to find the path forward.

Be both.

At the start of the conference, all Vanguards were challenged to introduce themselves and the work that they do in 60 seconds or less, and I chose to illustrate how I have moved from the realm of idealism (e.g. land planning) to the nuts and bolts of the practical (e.g. community development).  I continue to stand by my description, yet I noticed something significant while learning about my fellow Vanguards: it isn’t one or the other, but both.  You should be both idealistic *and* pragmatic if you are going to affect real change.  Idealism without pragmatism leads to great rhetoric that can never be achieved; pragmatism without idealism achieves, but at a far lower level than might otherwise have been possible.  Strike a balance between the two, and your work will enjoy the enormous benefits of both.

Be patient.

The one area where I was ahead of many of my peers at Vanguard was in calendar years, and with that comes the life lesson of the necessary element of time in most all real successes.  Many of the projects of the Vanguards are still in their infancies, by most success standards, a fact that can be as frustrating as it is exhilarating.  And even in my (relative) advanced years, it is a lesson I know I continue to need frequent reminder of: be patient, as you nurture your great ideas, to give them the time they need to truly succeed.

Submitted by Mallory B.E. Baches for The Civic Hub

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Across the country and throughout the media, we’re hearing about the resurgence of cities.  “Our cities are back!  Urbanism is making a return!  Density is desirable!”  Or so the conversation seems to be going.  And that’s just great, as far as I’m concerned.

I’m a long-standing lover of cities, borne primarily out of my childhood spent living about fifty miles outside of one of the greatest cities in the world, Chicago.  I had the good fortune of benefitting from all that city has to offer: I witnessed my father commute by rail to work every day, I saw theater productions at the Auditorium and Chicago Theaters, I did my holiday shopped along State Street and Michigan Avenue, I swam at North Avenue and Oak Street Beaches, I visited the work of the Impressionists at the Art Institute, and I visited my father’s office high up in the Sears Willis Tower where I could take in the commanding view of the people and places and network of streets reaching outward in every direction.

At the same time, I happened to be lucky enough to actually live across the road from farm fields, a five minute drive into the downtown of St. Charles IL, which sits along the Fox River Valley, an area home to about a million people spread among a couple dozen historic small towns much like my own.

credit: cbishop66 via Flickr

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Ours was typical of any older and wiser and more well-built place from the past.  It had a main street called Main Street.  Along it was a (locally owned) department store where my mother would drag me whenever I needed a new dress, a (locally owned) drugstore where I remember wandering aisles of strange products and contraptions while my mother filled prescriptions, a (locally owned) sporting goods store that was the only place you could buy your completely unflattering public school gym uniforms, a (locally owned) single screen theater with dollar movies that were perfect for teenage tastes and budget constraints, a (locally owned) diner where my high school sweetheart and I fell in love over bottomless cups of coffee, and of course, a (locally owned) corner store that sold every type of soda pop and novelty candy under the sun, and so naturally it holds some of my fondest memories of childhood.

A model young person, I was nonetheless quite anxious to *leave* my small town as soon as I could, and I did so with gusto.  I struck out with a collegiate year abroad in Rome, a summer internship in San Francisco, and after much debate I eventually chose Washington D.C. over New York City as my first post-collegiate home, though the final decision could have gone either way.  Then it was on to Miami, for a job that flew me to Mexico City and Hong Kong and Paris and Sydney and Kuala Lumpur.  When I wasn’t working in a city, I was vacationing in a city, Tokyo and Los Angeles and London and Athens and Singapore.

I’ve earned my city clearance credentials, is what I’m saying.  You name it and I’ve been there or have plans to go, and I would love to talk to you about it either way.

All that said, as an urban designer I feel a fair level of confidence in reporting that for the most part, the cities: they’re alright.  Yes, we could be doing much better at reducing gentrification as a displacement factor and demographic segregator.  Yes, we should have greener solutions for all of our physical investment, from building materials to transportation systems to commercial provisions to public engagement.  Yes, I’ve made it my personal past time to help make our public education system better, and the statistics show that nowhere is that more pressing a need than throughout our inner cities.

The list of ways that we can and should be working on improving our cities is long.

But here’s the thing: we’re on it.

The young folks, in particular, are all over this one.  Plenty grew up in places where there was no there there, homes in subdivisions named for the types of trees that were torn down in order to build the houses and pave the streets, schools that were completely mistakable for the local pillow factory or the county waste management offices, a town square that was more likely spelled “Olde Towne Square” and was actually a mall with a food court and a cheap carousel.  You can’t blame the kids for fleeing to the cities to remake them in a better image, given the deserts of sub-urbanity that they grew up surrounded by.

We aren’t done fixing cities, but we’re talking about it and we’re writing about it and we’re basing entire conferences and think-tanks on it, and we’re arguing about it plenty in the planning world.  It is hard to decipher whether it is the creative class that is going to save cities, or whether it is green infrastructure, or maybe form based codes will do the trick.  I would venture to say that *all* of them are going to contribute, plus a couple dozen more trends and initiatives and avenues of change.

But what of our towns?

While specific numbers depend on what your personal definition of “city” is, about 3/4 of Americans live in or around a major urban area.

The federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) defines 388 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (urban areas based around a cluster with populations over 50,000) and 541 Micropolitan Statistical Areas (urban areas based around a cluster with populations of 10,000-49,999) spread across the United States.  Yet only a couple hundred Statistical Areas are places that most people would describe as a “city,” complete with the tall buildings and sizable economies and population densities that necessarily come with the moniker.

New York?  Of course.

credit: AngMoKio via Wikimedia Commons

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Walla Walla?  Probably not.

credit: jfranklinwillis via Flickr

(If you have a street clock along your main street, you probably aren’t a city...)

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Portland?  Sure.

credit: Jamidwyer via Wikimedia Commons

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Athens?  No offense, University of Georgia fans, but not really.

credit: J. Stephen Conn via Flickr

If this (gorgeous!) drawing can function as your “city guide,” you probably aren’t a city.

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Toledo?  Yes.

credit: NorthernMagnolia via Wikimedia Commons

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Beaufort?  Not a chance.

credit: Main Street Beaufort, USA

When you are named Coastal Living Magazine’s “Happiest Seaside Town,” you probably aren’t a city.

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America has some of the greatest cities there are, and even 9 of the 66 so-called Global Cities of the world.  But we also have a far larger number of great towns, and Beaufort SC, where I have called home for nearly a decade, is unmistakably one.

When I walk down Bay Street in Beaufort, I know the owner of every shop because they are right there personally selling their wares, and when I need a new dress or a watch battery or a book for this month’s book club selection, I purchase it straight from them.  When I meet someone from Beaufort that I haven’t met before, it is guaranteed that we will know at least a dozen people in common, and before long we are fast old friends who suddenly find ourselves bumping into each other all the time.  Beaufort doesn’t have more than about a dozen “hipsters” and those seem a bit surprised to be here, as if they were maybe washed in on a particularly high tide, although the rest of Beaufort welcomes their arrival (and their remaining) as a sign that we haven’t lost “it” just quite yet.

Our tallest building is 4 stories, and it isn’t even in our historic downtown.  Our widest street is the four-lane state highway running into town, but it respectfully reduces down to two lanes once you actually get into Beaufort proper.  Our biggest employer is the county government, and our largest tax draw comes from the Golden Corral even though they give away free meals once a week to honor our town’s large population of military personnel.

And all of that may sound rather sad and small to ardent city lovers, but you should know something else about our town: we’ve been here for more than 300 years, and we aren’t about to go anywhere any time soon, either.

Small towns are often forgotten, in a world where size matters.  In fact it is a critical detail in the American narrative, that anyone growing up in a small town can (and as the narrative goes, should) eventually move to the city to make something of themselves, reinforcing the notion that small towns are supposed to be left behind.  Think: Jay Gatsby, Howard Roark, Abraham Lincoln, and Mr. Smith.

Still, we shouldn’t forget that without all of those great small towns quietly raising fresh new talent for it to then up and leave to the opportunities of the big city, there wouldn’t be the narrative to begin with.  Towns may seem small and un-noteworthy from the skyscraper view of the city, but they are an unsung breeding ground that serves to first support and later cheer the successes of great people, great ideas, and great changes.

Towns have smaller populations and simpler demographics than their larger urban counterparts, and while that sometimes feels stifling and uninspiring, it also means that towns are well-suited to serve as support systems for larger networks and larger communities and larger regions.  Towns provide the essential building blocks to larger metropolitan areas while remaining responsive and responsible within their own cohort.  Groups of townspeople are scaled such that accountability need be no more than a feeling of personal responsibility to friends and neighbors.

Townfolk thrive from a sense of loyalty to each other, and while that sometimes means that your neighbors know more of your business than you prefer, it also means that your neighbors faithfully support your actual business (and you theirs).  Towns serve as excellent incubators for thoughtful family enterprises like Viking Range in Greenwood MS, Interface (makers of FLOR tiles) in LaGrange GA, L.L. Bean in Freeport ME, and even Walmart in Bentonville AR. Both the failures and the successes that happen in towns are shared amongst the townspeople through a collective sense of ownership and pride of community.

Towns are relatively closed-loop systems, and while that sometimes means that you are forever bumping into the couple of people that you would certainly prefer not to, it also means that towns are excellent legitimizers for beta testing.  Towns are populated with real people interacting through real systems that produce real outcomes, without having to control for economies of scale.  Anyone can quite literally take an idea or project or initiative to a small town, launch it, and immediately receive direct feedback that can in turn be incorporated back into the idea or project or initiative, again and again and again without pressure to expand or institutionalize or keep up with outside forces.

Towns are workshops for proving concept.

Towns matter, because they are the microcosm of all of the characters and components and criteria that we work so hard to quantify and organize, as we seek to enact change in our cities.  There are hundreds upon hundreds of towns across America, ripe for influence and full of opportunity, if we are able to expand our collective definition of urbanism toward a more manageable scale and an equally worthy subject of attention.

Towns matter, because they can provide healthy and helpful testing ground for the next big thing(s) in urban design, just as they did for the big thing(s) that came before.  Our nation is dotted with endearing towns that have endured decades and even centuries in modest statement to the power of consistency and character and community, and they are waiting with example upon example of what to do wrong and what to do right.  Our role as urbanists is simply not to fail to look.

And towns matter, because they also stand the most to lose, the most talent and the most  treasure and the most time, as we grow ever more urban-loving as a nation.  They operate on much-reduced margins of capital, physical and fiscal and human and social, and yet they also have lost the most from our economic busts while often gaining the least from our economic booms.  What they lack in quantitative resources they often more than make up for in ample desire and sheer willpower to survive, but they need the help of those who have something to give to their futures.

We shouldn’t fail to remember, our cities once started as towns.  In fact, our greatest cities started as many towns, and it was only with time and growth that those towns have slowly seamed together into an endless web of metropolitan neighborhoods.  And especially in the most thriving of those, we still see the same characteristics of friendliness and shared ownership and community pride that make towns so special, and we have the same opportunities for streamlined and simplified concept-proving.

So yes, let’s continue our good work on expanding alternative transportation options, promoting open-data resources for civic involvement, and establishing crowd-funding platforms that open new opportunities in improving our cities.  And while we’re at it, how about we give these same issues more than just a passing glance in our nation’s towns, too?  The ones that many of us came from, and the ones that some of us still choose to live in today.