Cynthia Morgan is a well regarded hypnotherapist in Los Angeles. She was recently interviewed for an article in Westside Today for an article about how one’s state of mind can bring opportunity where some believe there is none. ( http://www.westsidetoday.com/m1-770/mind-over-matter.html ). She states in the article that one “…cannot have emotional health without healthy thoughts. Emotion follows thought. It’s not the other way around. First the thought, then the emotion. In order to change the emotion, you must go back to the thoughts you are thinking. And not just conscious thoughts, but rather thoughts in your subconscious mind”.   

This idea touched on an area that interests me. As an environmentalist and a designer I think it is important to attempt to understand the impact of environment on our formation as human beings. Environmentalism, to be real, must go beyond the surface of 'saving the planet' to an understanding of how we relate to the environment. Karl Menninger was a well known child psychologist who's family founded a foundation and clinic in Topeka and in Houston. The Foundation does a lot of work with emotionally disturbed children. In tracking this topic, during his career Karl performed many studies of the effect of environment on childhood development. Some of his most well known studies were of identical twins who were separated at birth. Although genetically different, when raised in differing environments, they developed very differently with differing interests and habits. Of course there are also the effects of violent environments, war zones, religious extremeism and so forth.  

Karl's thesis was that environment affects the development of personality which is, to a certain extent, a reflection of how we relate to our surroundings and situations. This also implies that we can shape humanity through the environment that we create for living, at all scales. The home environment affects the development of a person while the global environment affects the development of humanity. Quite simply, environment is another lens through which we see different things when looking at the same thing from different places.

A Bear Market Rally

My reading tells me that the recent optimism in the economy is wishful thinking. The technical indicators- based on trends – say “buy” but the business fundamentals do not back it up. Most traders pay more attention to trends than fundamentals, because it is easier. The current ralley is an artificial run up being headed by traders who are watching for the trend to peak before getting out. Or, they think that the market has bottomed and that it is safe to "get back in". In either case, I do not believe that the market fundamentals support a meaningful recovery based on the fundamentals, at least not yet.

Usually the private sector leads the public sector out of a recession as the increase in tax revenues lags behind growth by a year or more. This time it may be different as the fed floods the public sector with money to stimulate private growth. I don’t see much happening now except for bargain hunting. The stimulus package doesn’t seem to be hitting very hard so far, and municipal tax revenues are definitely not up enough to support municipal spending. I hope I am wrong but at this point I am not going to gamble on it.

I do think that the cities stand a good chance of getting substantial infrastructure and transportation money from the stimulus package, but even on a fast track, we are a year away from seeing real movement, or even the initial design work for new projects.

Another real danger lies down the road in the form of inflation. That is what happened in the late 70’s. There is no better way to pay for a lost war than to make your currency less valuable, assuming that the debt is payable in that currency.

Old Morrow

Good news: the rail line described in last week's article is dead. The Georgia DOT board ousted the head of the department and immediately thereafter dropped the lawsuit which had been filed at the last minute in order to allow for heavy rail to pass through Atlanta's Piedmont Park. 

On another front, the interactive water feature located in the town green of Old Morrow, in Morrow, Georgia, has been started and appears to be a great success. The latest phase of construction at Olde Morrow is now well underway with the completion of the town square fountain. This  interactive fountain features dancing jets of water surrounding a 20 foot tall central jet. Kids and adults alike can interact with the fountain which will provide a wonderful combination of sound and action all year round. The fountain is the centerpiece of the new town green. When the water is turned off, the cobblestone basin also serves as a central point for special events while the rest of the town green can do double duty as an amphitheatre or festival lawn. 

Moving forward, the walks and streets surrounding the town green connect a variety of uses including restaurants, shops, entertainment, small businesses and homes providing Morrow with a fun and safe entertainment district which is also close to home. The project is an effort to create a downtown in a suburban town which evolved largely during the middle of the last century in an auto centered suburb without a center. The town has been buying endangered old houses from all over the state and relocating them to Old Morrow and reconstructing and renovating them on site. Of note, the houses include the home of a former governor, a very pretty victorian house of about 3500 square feet, and two antebellum mansions of 6 to 7 thousand square feet. One of the mansions came from  downtown Macon and the other from a farm. The old houses will be primarily used for restaurants, retail and office space around the town square while residential uses will be concentrated in a ring of modern live-work spaces which surround the core area. 

Of special interest, no cars will be allowed into  the central area; it is to be totally pedestrian. Parking will be in  lots on the edges of the downtown core area. Morrow is growing by leaps and bounds. Clayton State college is located in town as is the new State Archive. The new town center is seen as an attraction which will allow residents and students to find a diverse shopping and night life experience without having to drive to Atlanta. Old Morrow has been located within sight of I-75 and next to a mall which is being converted to a broader mix of uses including a civic center and office space. Design and engineering for the project has been done by the Landscape Architecture and Civil Engineering studios at Pond & Company in Atlanta. 

Regional Chauvinism

I had the opportunity to spend last Friday morning with several thinkers and doers in the fields of urban design, landscape architecture and park design. The event was a walkabout on the site of one segment of the Atlanta Beltline and the participants were made up of a group of leading landscape architects from around the country – mostly people involved in urban issues of park planning, transportation planning, communications and education.

We in Atlanta tend to think of Atlanta’s urban issues as being universal. A few years ago Atlanta had several dubious distinctions. We were first in the Nation in pedestrian death and injury along our roadways. Likewise, we were at the top of the statistics on traffic related air pollution, time spent in traffic, miles driven to get to work, lack of sidewalks, lack of overall connectivity, fuel consumption per capita, and so on. The numbers, and experiences were, and remain, so bad that much of the great reputation Atlanta built as a livable city was becoming tarnished. Companies were choosing other cities over Atlanta for expansion and relocation.

Atlanta is perpetually at odds with the State of Georgia. In truth, Atlanta is a relatively small city. The population within the City of Atlanta is only 520,000. On the other hand Metropolitan Atlanta, is the 9th largest metropolitan area in the US with a population over 10 times that of the City at 5,200,000. Politically, the City and the close-in suburban areas tend to be liberal. Most of Metro Atlanta is conservative, as is the majority of the State of Georgia. For many years the City allowed itself to be walked on by the State. The State began to see the City, in its traditional role of a hub of transportation, to be subject to the State’s need to speed intrastate traffic through with as little hindrance as possible. The urban fabric was ripped with massive freeway projects which divided neighborhoods and destroyed property values. White flight was blamed for much of the City’s neighborhood decline but, in fact, it was largely due to the fact that long stable neighborhoods were being ripped apart by large scale transportation projects.

Mayor Andrew Young based much of his mayorship on an effort to assist the state with plowing an expressway through a string of stable inner city neighborhoods along a route which had been earlier killed by neighborhood groups in a twenty year long series of lawsuits against the Georgia Department of Transportation. Mayor Young’s predecessors were also big highway men. Much of this approach was brought to a halt as the City began to regain its sense of self in the early 1970’s. Law suits were filed against inner city expressway projects and those projects were ultimately halted. Neighborhoods banded together into political action groups and the City began to elect mayors, legislators and councilpersons who would stand up to the forces which put freeways ahead of neighborhoods. Local politicians began to see themselves more as advocates for city life rather than actors on a national stage.

Things have improved. The Atlanta Regional Commission has promoted a series of successful planning efforts called Livable Centers Initiatives wherein grants are made to communities to improve connectivity and a more urban sense of community, These studies often include planning for creating downtowns in the midst off sprawl, where none had existed before.

Business also jumped on the new urbanism bandwagon in an effort to find ways to improve connectivity and create environments which would be attractive to the forces of growth. There are 6 universities in the City limits and another two in nearby Decatur. The Universities, led by Georgia State University president Carl Patton, began to promote urban activities to bring life to the City at night and to improve safety for pedestrians. The City got on the band wagon and began to promote itself as a college town – this really worked – there are a number of new dormitories and classroom buildings in downtown and midtown. Neighborhoods began to heal; a healthy street life has taken hold in many areas of downtown and midtown. There are a number of quite nice urbanist projects at or near completion in the city, including a dense transit oriented development located around the Lindbergh MARTA subway station in the north midtown area and another in an area reclaimed from a large steel mill.

The result of these efforts has been a shift in perceptions. Atlanta is now the number one most desirable location for recent college graduates and for young adults in general. A good and improving intown lifestyle combined with a good job market and a sense of ‘cool’ has brought the City back to life. Employers are taking notice and are beginning to come back as well.

Nevertheless, the state transportation authority continues to express its regional chauvinism in unpredictable ways. Recently, on the eve of the passage of an element critical to the expansion of Atlanta’s intown park and light rail system (Google ‘Atlanta Beltline and GADOT’) the state filed to block the transaction so that they could force a heavy rail line through the middle of the City’s finest park and several of its most desirable inner ring neighborhoods. You would think that they had learned a lesson from their last effort to do something like this. Or at least that they had enough common sense not to attempt to tackle the professional and intellectual (and financial) heart of the City with some half cocked scheme to introduce heavy rail into a series of popular and stable parks and neighborhoods. The City was so completely surprised by this effort, which could only be classified as an ambush, that the Mayor put a half page op-ed into the local newspaper vowing to fight back by taking the state’s attack all the way to Congress and the White House. The State’s move not only surprised the City, but it hurt the City’s efforts to bond some of its park and transit efforts as well. This State scheme is not likely to go anywhere unless the State can find a way to put the rail lines in a tunnel, but the whole affair is indicative of the low level of regard and communication between the City and the State.

As someone who is involved in urban design and planning, I think that I tend to see the urban experience in general as being similar to that in Atlanta, as do many people in Atlanta.

Shenzhen, City of the Future 5

Not much new to post this week, but I did find a great web page for anyone interested in modern and contemporary design of all types. It is MoCo Loco - at mocoloco.com.

This led me to check up on the web site of my favorite design magazine, "Abitare". Upon looking, I found that it has received a significant upgrade since the last time I visited the site, when it was basically a review of a few articles in the current edition. Much better now - abitare.it.

And, speaking of Cities of the Future, check out the article on the new housing projects in Shenzen, China on the Abitare site. Here is an excerpt and a link:

"The rapid development of Shenzhen and otherareas has led to massive influxes of workers from other regions,bringing about the formation of “urban villages” - low-costhousing. Here, inside the city, lie densely-clustered areas with plotratios of more than 3, formed by homes extended by formerpeasants. These are home to millions of laborers and employeesin the service industry; the high mobility of residents and lack ofurban administration in many of these urban villages have led tosevere social problems and security concerns." More...

The City of the Future 4: Dubai

The biggest speculative real estate boom ever. (Market Study?We don't need a market study!) Environmentally, socially and economically unsustainable. Now, if you read the media reports, becoming a ghost town. Thousands of cars abandoned in parking garages and at the airport as those able to leave get out. The spector of debtors prison for some who can't get out. 90 per cent of population are foreigners. Lots of really bad architecture. Some good, but not much - but that is typical everywhere.

How does this become a real city, with all the diversity and life that define a city of this scale?

The City of the Future 3

Venice and Mars

The last two times that I visited Italy were in the Spring. There is no better time, especially for a trip to Venice. In fact, I think that Venice at Easter must be like being on another planet - it is just so  different from Atlanta that it is hard to believe that it is really on the same planet. If you can make the trip to Venice during holy week you should. Like most of the popular Italian tourist cities, Venice is very crowded the week before Easter and the prices are at peak, but the energy level has to be experienced to be believed - especially if the weather is nice. Venice when crowded is much nicer than Florence or Sienna - I think that the lack of cars and motorcycles makes the difference. The Venetian crowds have promenade pace, whereas crowds in Firenze and Sienna are just crowded. 

As long as the air is blowing in from any direction but north the Venetian air is clean and invigorating. The water in the canals is a pale opalescent green - a very beautiful color that I have not seen elsewhere. At this time of year the water is also clean and not infragrant. 

No where else can you visit a city like this. Dense and compact yet utterly clean, quiet and, even with great crowds, unhurried. 

Then stay for a few days after Easter. The crowds evaporate and you have the most beautiful city in the world almost to yourself. 

Venice shuts down not long after dark. It is as if everyone is exhausted from all the walking. It becomes very quiet. You may hear the occasional sounds of footsteps echoing off the stone and water. Murmured words. An acapella trio chanting a chant in a spot known for its acoustic reverberations. 

Every part of the city has a refined beauty. Most of it has been in place long enough to have been reconsidered and rebuilt if it was done wrong the first time. You know instinctively as you walk, or float, through that you are a part of a continuum of admirers, and you feel good about this.

I try to think of an analogy to cities of another time but I don't think there is one. Even before the industrial revolution most real cities were filled with carts, and the streets were filled with waste. In an utopian world, Venice could serve as a model for the City. Yet the Venetians are moving away. The City resident population drops annually. The locals are moving away in order to live in - what - more exciting places? Places with better internet? Places where you can get in your car and drive? 

And the boats. Never on earth have you seen such beautiful boats.