Context for Caring, Caring for Context

I learned, with tens of thousands of other marchers this past weekend at the People's Climate March, that you can travel by human blob from the US Capitol to the White House  in about 80 minutes. A normal mile's walk takes a quarter that time, and an earlier march moved more slowly. In this case, temps reached 91 degrees and marchers carried parachutes. The heat and the breeze offset each other.  My son, pounding his heart outside the White House, judged it all worthwhile. 

Did we change anybody's mind about how to address climate change? The fact that I set up a dangling rhetorical question betrays how thinly I can tease out an answer. For sure I saw more signs decrying offenses than proposing compromises. Compared to what I try here, the march drew a line: government that claims to represent the American people will not get away with lying about what pollution does to our habitat. 

But how do you get people ready to engage in the dealmaking, restating, listening and experimenting that can make the debate about "coal jobs" into a work session about safe jobs? It starts by understanding what it's like to live in a town where coal built schools and streets, and by understanding what it's like to still believe everyone deserves a livelihood that absorbs what we've learned from science about coal's effect. You can sympathize and stand firm at the same time. It feels itchy, but with good health and lots of company it feels motivating. 

A piece I wrote in January gets at a relevant principle: when you speak to traumatized youth about their trauma in the course of training them for jobs, those jobs become easier to keep and often become the seeds for careers. 

It turns out the insight driving Hopeworks, the organization I covered, spreads throughout funding and reform in public health and job training. Everyone you meet, a learned friend tells me, comes from a context he or she can't unwire- and to steer all of us onto terrain we can co-use, you'd better find ways into that context before you presume to get anyone out of it. 

I hope this page, this story and this writing help us before the heat makes more of us weak. 

Learning to Steer (Without Fear)

FastCoExist, part of the Fast Company network, runs my article today on the New York Harbor School and its partnership with the Billion Oyster Project. Of all the fascinating ideas in this model, I think most about Pete Malinowski's contention that kids can learn to communicate and manage with "authentic problems to solve." 

That requires knowing strangers, knowing your style, and knowing your strengths and weaknesses. All of which can feel plodding or lonely on dry land as well as on water- but all of which can come through any effort to connect systems so that everyone in them can get healthier. 

Read the article and let me know what you think about how we should steer learning on the coasts and upland. 

The Gift of Constraint

Earlier this spring I published an article on an experiment in Westchester, where a stalemated settlement over fair housing became the occasion for a day-long role play with a software that helped adults see what changing one variable in urban design would do for other variables. 

My sources for the article, academics and designers and public servants, all talked about the energy they drew from looking at limits rather than from asserting their wants. 

I can relate every day, as I commute to work along the eastern flank of the Manhattan Bridge. I have a lane, sometimes less in glorious sunshine like New York's seen this week, and a steep pitch. I grimace when I'm pedaling hard, but the shape of my head configures the grimace as something that suggests a smile to people coasting downhill in the other direction. So they smile back, and I smile back back. 

For me, riding to work brings on the alert eyes of a new adventure and the relaxed spine of a hometown stroll. It's a slice through a lot of systems I can't singly change, and a chance to focus on what I do want to change in the next day or two. 

And the context for this experiment consists in a condition most places in America: a lack of easy places to build. (I'd write more here, but I'd love for you to read the article. ) The lingering suggestion leaves me humble. It's that in an America without frontiers, we haves need to get as fluent with the uses of constraint as 20th Century planners were with the uses of want. 

And what I work on here aims to test the idea that most of us really want something that becomes clearer with constraint- a chance to play a game, a chance to share an ideal, a chance to redesign what's brittle around us. 

I hope the article and its heroes help clarify your own useful constraints. 

Uphill Learning

We city-dwellers have made a lot of progress since the horse-and-buggy days, but we have yet to budget for designing cities that can handle snow. We also haven't figured out how to train most people in cities to become fluent in urban design.

This plays out in slush piles and squandered school days. It also shadows the urban celebration of snow, as I realized after leaving a whoop-filled afternoon in Central Park with friends and family and realized how closely the population there mirrored what you'd find in SoHo House. But weigh no heavy matters on a sled run. Snow comes rarely, feels transporting and builds on itself before it goes away. We needn't rig public space to absorb it. 

We do need to rig public space to absorb differences and aggression, and turn these emotions reliably into productive energy. That means we need to teach kids -and voters- how different design and material choices predict different patterns of play, temper and commerce. 

Models for this kind of training come from big cities and small. In this week's New York Observer, you can find my opinion piece about New York's project to smooth barriers between sidewalks and public spaces. It's a climb to change how we assume cities disperse the kinds of goods we can't price. But it's a thrill to imagine the changes we can carve once we learn the techniques for making that change.