Living With the Difference is the Hope

These days, sidestepping the shadow of hate feels like bathing in sunshine. So when Emmanuel Macron became president of France, besting a candidate who seemed sure to turn immigrants into victims, I took it as prompt to breathe easy. That betrayed my bias, of course, and I bet it shows more about my need for comfort than my command of Euro geopolitics. We humans mainly feel more thoroughly than we assess - but maybe we can find a way to turn that feeling to productive ends. 

That's because one application from France amounts to acting as if people will support the idea of living with people unlike themselves.

I don't know you, I probably never will meet you, but I can't escape knowing you're part of my day. 

the crises trapping our politics might seem impossible to square without volumes of study and boatloads of luck. Few among us can map how to shore up health insurance or stoke business without coddling big banks. Unlike times of slavery or cold war, we scrape against differences of degree and design. Can you replace coal jobs with solar ones? Can you draw wealthy young families to cities without edging out older low-income ones? Can America snap the opioid epidemic? The answer always comes back to: well, I think so, but I dunno...

And here's where a simple jolt like a pluralist victory in France can act like a flashlight in whatever course you're trying to manage. Because the course toward brokering compromises on public policy might just start with the commitment to live with people unlike yourself. 

We've read about the "great sort". The finding shows that more Americans cluster among people who share our attitudes in virtual life - but we also live, work and go to school with think-alikes. Small wonder that a guy comes along and succeeds by exploiting electoral math with the message that nobody has to try to understand people on the divide's other side. 

In that chilly context, the commitment to design cities and schools so that people live and learn with people of different backgrounds feels like a radical vision. Programs like free (you know, subsidized) college tuition, or urban codes that downplay parking, or incentives for communities to set up their own solar networks turn negotiation on and leave it on. They make for at least some conflict, some adjustment, and some progress. 

And so the faith in urban design that sustains these pages sticks with me, even as politics challenge my faith in psychology. Poke around this site and see how you can make use of the premise that designing places for contact ups the odds of governing places with confidence. 

Talk (or Comment) of the Town (and Towns)

I had the good luck last week to work with Sommer Mathis at CityLab, the site where people who think about urban issues go to learn and teach. I wrote a piece reviewing zoning, court and economic data to raise and linger on the idea that the rules restricting what you can build in most towns end up enforcing racist practice. 

I expected the piece to come and go in a day. Instead, it took root. 

I humbly saw more than 900 people share it (no more than 15 of whomo could have been my dad) and watched comments unfold. The comments got into that hairy I-can't-see-you-so-I'll-egg-you territory we know too well in cyberspace. Someone called me a racist, others called each other names, and many people said the choice they faced as to where to live indeed turned out narrower than they'd hoped. 

My conclusion remains that higher sea level and heavier storms will force Americans to live in closer, higher buildings than most places have seen in a century. The reaction to this story about what preserves single-family spread shows that we could all stand a few drills in how to talk productively with each other. Please read and react as you see fit. 

The Making of a Room Where it Happens

In my house these days, dish cleanup and homework groove to the bop of the Hamilton cast album. The album conveys the musical's tale of what happens when a person cast aside from the elect yearns to make history. You get tragedy, heroics, and this ongoing experiment we call democracy.  It bolts some lift into your heels when you have to snap on Tupperware lids, to remember that wars and compromises led us to overuse fossil fuel, overbuild sprawl, and grapple in stretches and struggles with the mandate to treat all humans with respect. 

The plot turns on a moment when Alexander Hamilton, the ferocious and far-thinking immigrant, cuts a deal with plantation-bred theorists Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Aaron Burr, the show's narrator and the man who killed Hamilton, busts out a show-stopper about craving access to deals like this- knowing how to lay out the terms and arrange the perks to make an agreement among rivals. "I want to be in the room where it happens," croons and growls Burr- and so does my family, with a broom or a pencil or a toothbrush for percussion. 

Well, as in the muddy young republic so it is today in the contracting one. With coastlines shrinking and solar power spreading, more talk turns on who gets a deal then on how the deal assembles. And that flows from the human longing for safety- we need to first feel protected before we can yield up the brain cells to figure out how to build the shelter. This time, though, the tragedy involves millions losing out on paths to durable urban living because they don't get to tap into political calculations.

And in that morass, a quote from architect Louis Kahn points toward some of the agreement techniques we need to teach our kids and ourselves.  An immigrant like Hamilton, Kahn explored how light can bring complex stories to simple walls. My architecture prof in college - or at least my notebook from that prof's lecture- quoted Kahn as saying that "a street is a room by agreement." The architect's romance in this quote never meant to describe political reality, of course- it sets forth goals for public design. When people share a space, they should be able to treat it as a space to which they claim equal rights and for which they divvy responsibility. 

All that depends on education, wellness, rule of law, a sense of history, and a sense of hope. And those psychological assets require a confidence that the systems determining your lot can open and can change to provide more safety, more light and more hope.

How do you teach that confidence? One method involves training young people to read the ecology as one of several systems affecting their well-being. Another involves teaching history, social studies and STEM with callouts for the ways one opinion can mesh with another opinion to produce a third approach. I've tested role-play means of getting kids to think critically about where they can intervene. Schoolwork can also include critical reading, reenactments, projects, service and applied science. Excellence in school- and in internships and in jobs- should reflect how thoroughly a student reads the systems around her and how precisely she pinpoints a way to make those systems more inclusive and stabler. 

Our kids and thousands of others thrill to Hamilton in part because it gives a rush to see the story of making America as a chain of ideals and deals, mutable and full of passion at all times. 

They stick with it because the play's final songs (no spoilers) bet firmly on the possibility of accord. People realize they can share space with their competitors and share credit with people who take different paths. Facing down climate change means laying bare some painful secrets- that prosperity burned our coastline, that safety for a few heightens danger for the many. The more we can use words and models and tools to open those secrets, the sweeter will be the light in all our (water-tight) rooms. 

Reflections in a Cold Brew

I had the surreal experience yesterday of drinking velvet-smooth espresso and cold brew to match, on a Modernist table, with service by someone in an Australian accent. These usually land me in the sea of signifiers of a "frontier" neighborhood just becoming unaffordable. But this time they found me in the tweedy neighborhood where I grew up. It's surreal to begin with to consume so much carefully harvested coffee in a carefree spending habit. But this neighborhood, Manhattan's Upper East Side, looked like a refraction of itself. This was Manhattan's "safe" neighborhood when I was a kid, while industrial zones of Brooklyn and Queens registered for me like soundstages for the urban horror movies my parents wouldn't let me see. 

Wake up in 2016- former industrial zones have become prime ground for real-estate investors. Big quick glassy towers rose there in the past few years, with the result that renters no longer can afford the numinous "edge" of these coasts. And they make their way to the six-story walkups of the neighborhood where I grew up safe. And coffee vendors open branches where these renters land. On one front, it's the least remarkable "trend" story you could brew. 

Look deeper in the cup, though, and you see some patterns that can cause jitters. (And that's plenty of coffee puns, for today anyway.)

We participants in the market for land, such as it is, have sanctioned a pattern of marking territory in New York.  A lease to an espresso bar, a pilates studio, a food store selling "essentials" like sriracha and salmon- these show a place caters to folks whose income either will grow geometrically in the near future or doesn't need to grow at all. No disdain for those goodies or their vendors comes with that observation. But neither does a sense that a neighborhood's full breadth, or anything like its potential social strength, plays out in its commercial changes. Developers and owners look for income security- which comes from promising lifestyle security.

Somewhere in there a chance for neighbors to meet and build something that enriches everyone's health turns to steam. (Oops. That's a metaphor, not a pun.)  Drinking coffee in a neighborhood that bored me as a teen excited me because it reminded me how human work can change the city's stock of services. But the excitement faded. It would have stayed if I'd found a workshop teaching kids art or coding, or a space like the Lower East SIde Girls' Club, or some hint that the mix of aging German-speakers and faithful Silk Stocking dwellers and newcomers were finding ways to work together on coastal design or street cleanup or programs for youth. 

They may be doing all these things, or they may yet. (The espresso's smooth enough that I will come back alert.) But the visit reminded me that neighborhoods change thinly when they become cool. They risk becoming brittle if that's all they become. 

And with more heat waves, floods and cracking infrastructure on the way, they need to become fuller of skills, lines of communication and open exchange. The market can recoup human investment in these things- even if it takes a little while to steep.  

That pun seemed worth going out on a sweet note. 

Streetcars and Streetlamps

New York's Mayor has decided to find money for  a streetcar to run through the resurgent (ie, gentrifying) neighborhoods along the east side of the East River waterfront. I'm all for more mass transit and for more waterfront living, but it got me thinking about why streetcars feel so romantic to many folks who think about urban design. 

I think they strike the same note that streetlamps and neon signs do: they prove you're not alone, someone new is there, you can find your way. 

In a book proposal I'm working on, I’m going to argue here that urban design shows, in physical form, human efforts to shrink loneliness. When fossil fuel was cheap and we couldn't know its true cost, we flowed between that resistance to loneliness and a desire to settle. We got big cars, big tracts and big urban entertainment zones. 

Now, I'm going to show, the onset of climate change means that we have to couch our anti-loneliness surgery in a campaign to provide support to each other in disasters and in chronic shortages. 

It will get too hot, too chaotic, too crowded. That means our urban forms should guide patience, attention to the quiet, consideration for the old and young. 

And it means those forms should trace new lines - along the water and upland- now that we live in a century of weather we can’t predict and fuel we can’t treat as cheap. 

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.