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.