27 April 2002 - 23:50

Crud!! Diaryland ATE my entry. It was weird. I was typing away when I was whisked to another page, and I couldn't get back to the entry page. I should know better than to write on-line. Well, I type fast. This will remain essentially unchanged.

The week went by fast. This morning I got my computer back, and I'm using it now. Turns out that the hard drive cable shorted. Luckily, nothing else was damaged. They gave me the old cable back. It has a burn mark in it the size of my little fingernail.

I missed my computer.

Around dusk today, Wheel and I walked to Winn-Dixie to pick up something for dinner. It's a stretch of road we've traveled often. NC straddles highway 41, aka Tamiami (as in Tampa-to-Miami) Trail. Naturally, sprawled along the highway are ugly cheap motels as well as Pleasures II, the nasty porno store where many a NC student has attempted to pay off her student loans. Local legend has it that that's the porno place in Sarasota where Pee-Wee Herman got busted (remember that?). I tried to look it up, and I don't believe it... the papers say he got arrested at a porno theater on South Tamiami, although none of them give the name (ironic that the porno place's privacy was protected where Reuben's wasn't). Anyway, that stretch has sidewalks on either side of the road, although they're barely seperated from it. A constant flow of smelly noisy cars streams by day and night.

Yet familiarity breeds content far more than contempt. This bit of road is right off of the college and leads in the interesting direction--South, towards downtown and beaches. It's not far to the shopping strip on Myrtle, and so we have traversed it very often. On foot, bike and as passengers in bus and car. That ugly soulless bit of trail is overlain with memories.

We took two recycled plastic garbage bags and picked up trash and recyclables along the way. There wasn't so much as there often is, only about half a bag of each (but from only one side of the road). We all know that litter can harm animals that get trapped in it or try to eat it. Most notorious is fishing line entanglement and plastic bags in the water, which look like the jellyfish eaten by turtles. There's a lot of garbage in the Gulf. I see it when I go out on the research vessels--mostly balloons, plastic bags and bottles, and styrofoam cups (you know, visible white stuff that floats). What we're only more recently figured out is that organisms will hitch rides on it, much as they will on floating treelimbs and such. Unlike the tree limbs, however, the plastic doesn't ever fall apart. Enterprising invasive species can get places they never dreamed of before. Add that to the fact that the Arctic water temperature is rising (for whatever reasons...), and there's the potential for even more dramatic ecological changes. Brought about in part by us.

Of course, my actions are very very tiny. I'm not even sure that the handfuls of garbage we gather justifies using and disposing of the two extra garbage bags. Irregardless, I'm little. Which reminds me.

Yesterday we went downtown so that Wheel could buy a patch to cover up the corporate logo on his free promotional sling pack. I plan on similarly covering up the logo on my free promotional back pack, but said logos are so large that even the $8 patch wouldn't cover them all, and it just wasn't worth it. I'll rip out the stitching and patch over it with something pretty one of these days.

So we were at the Emporium, along with Arcanologist and Elvinone. Not wanting to spend money, while the others browsed, I skimmed part of a book on environmentally conscientious consumerism by people from the union of concerned scientists (The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices). It was pretty reasonable. The first chapter was bitingly titled "How many simple things do people need to do to save the planet?", a jibe at the booklet "50 simple things you can do to save the earth." They argued, reasonably, that that sort of laundry-list approach of many tiny, seemingly unconnected individual lifestyle changes left people confused and guilty. At the other end of the spectrum, approaches that blame everything on "overconsumption" and "the system," while in some ways more accurate, are entirely unproductive and make people feel helpless, which no one really is. They talk about the rise of recycling, and various other things. At the beginning of part two, a chapter called "Priorities for personal action," they talk about the most effective changes that people can make in their habits. The first half of these have to do with driving cars less and more effectively. They claim, and I mostly agree with them, that car-related things are the most impactful single-and-direct actions that most people do (the second half concerned eating local, low-on-the-food-chain, and unprocessed). They talk about many of the reasons that Americans do drive so much--it's relatively cheap, it's flexible, our urban landscape makes it necessary. They talk about how people in other countries drive less. They talk about biking and walking sometimes as being good alternatives. They even have a little panel about someone who decided to try living without a car for a while, even though she had to walk two miles to the nearest bus stop.

And even though they directly discuss the fact that urban planning is one of the major reasons Americans drive, and need to drive so much, and even though they directly mention the fact that other places in the world do not require so much driving, and even though the book is supposed to be about targetting a few very effective actions that individuals can take...... they do not mention involvement in the local politics of urban planning. LLLllllll! [01] It made me so angry I started venting right there in the store. It is much easier to be active in local politics than in less-local politics, yet it is often much more overlooked. Involvement on that level is available to all citizens. I think that if more people had a simple grasp of New Urbanism (not necessarily technical or in depth... perhaps akin to the public's grasp of Environmentalism) some real changes could be made along those lines.

(note that I was just skimming aforementioned book, and I didn't finish skimming it at that. I'll have to get it from a library and actually read it...)

Granted, there are some conflicts between environmentalism and new urbanism, but for now I think they have so much in common that they can be complementary philosophies for a long time (certainly more so than environmentalism and animal rights).

What is New Urbanism, some of you may ask? Well, if you're a NC student you should go ask Professor Brain or one of his students about it, since it's what he teaches, and I am just an amateur. I haven't ever taken any of Prof Brain's classes, sadly. In brief, it's sensible design of the urban environment, based on human livability and enjoyability. Practically, this means making places more walkable, infill (restoring decaying, but once-developed city space rather than expanding ever outwards into more-or-less virgin land), mixed-use zoning (so that work and shopping aren't lumped together and homes lumped together somewhere else, necessitating commuting and a haunting schism between work and home... other effects are things like reducing the need for parking space, as people who drive need to park in business lots during the day, and people who live in apartments and work during the day need to park at night...), mixed income zoning (so that, for example, poor college students might live in the same neighborhood as middleclass families with kids... the former in a small, inexpensive place and the latter in a comfortable middleclass dwelling). It means changing the way space is distributed, how houses are positioned along roads, how close they are to it, how the roads are built, how wide they are, what's alongside them. There's rationale and research behind all of the design principles, although a place which integrates the lot has not yet been built. Nor is that necessarily the goal--right now most planners working in the field are trying to shape the city spaces we already have.

Recommended reading: Suburban Nation, by Duany & Plater-Zyberk. A very good read and nice introduction. NC students who give a rat turd about Sarasota take note--this is the pair who wrote up our 20-year downtown development plan. The Geography of Nowhere by Kuntsler, is more general and much more sarcastic and anti-car. I loved it, but others might reasonably take offense. A Pattern Language by Alexander et. al. is not technically part of the New Urbanist canon...it came before, in 1977, and has a different feel and flavor. It's very much part of the same philosophy though. The book is a delight, and worth the price. It consists of two or three page descriptions of 250 patterns, or design principles. These start with the very large (what sizes cities should be in relation to other cities) and gradually progresses to the very small (principles for constructing a single building). This makes it broadly applicable, useful for citizens who care about local landscapes, city planners, architects, and anyone who wants to build a house. It's fun to read, easy to browse. Each pattern is cross referenced to related patterns above and below it. Each pattern has a black&white photo, and many have little pen sketches illustrating them. Most are backed up with supporting references--information about their use in real cities, sociological and architectural papers, even pop cultural references. It's a bit on the pricey side, but I can't recommend it enough.

One of my idle dreams (right up there with OpenGlyph, Instar, the dolphin media project, the homeschooling book idea, the ride-sharing registry idea, the shopping cart reclamation idea, and the sex toys shop idea...IguanaCog, sadly, I have had to leave to Turquoise and Therm) is to do something to help popularize New Urbanist principles. I don't think that this has really been done. The abovementioned books are great, but not so much for that--Suburban Nation left ME saying, "Well, that all makes sense, but what can I do about it?" Pattern Language is much too obscure (also long and expensive), and Geography of Nowhere too cynical.

I'll go ahead and spill my plan, and if anyone steals it and never credits me it's just as well, so long as the thing gets done. Goodness knows I'm not actually sure if I'll ever have enough time and motivation to do it, though I want to.

What I would like to do is lay out the most basic concepts, along with their rationale and the relevant examples. I'd like to keep it fairly short, very upbeat, and try to relate it to planning processes that citizens can speak up about or directly work in. I think a comic book medium would be absolutely ideal for this handbook. Architecture and urban planning are very very visual fields, and the iconic language that Scott McCloud makes such fantastic use of in Understanding Comics is powerful and will stick in people's heads. Plus comic books are friendly and easy to read... I mean, think about it, if there's a comic book around, you'll pick it up and start reading it, right? It doesn't even take as much effort as picking up a book and starting to read it. Finally, Scott McCloud's work (also Larry Gonick's work!) has firmly convinced me that the world needs nonfiction comics, and that comics has some great latent power.

Of course, authoring such a book would require not only a ton of research (yay) but also a great deal of polishing up my neglected drawing skills, and actively building my comics layout skills. Then the work of actually writing it, and revising, revising, revising. Then finally a couple years trying and failing to find someone willing to publish it. All of that in my "free time," while pursuing my primary ambitions.

Still, it's not outside my bounds. I have the love for it, and I could do the research. The field is still small enough not to be overwhelming. I'm a very good writer, and I can draw well, though not brilliantly, I know how to improve. Time will tell.