Parks Instead of Parking - Literally
Talk about cultural creatives!
Via a blog reader, here's a nifty story about a "landscape remixing" effort in San Francisco that illustrates a point we've long made in a small, powerful way.
Between noon and two on November 16, a collective called Rebar turned one of the city's parking spaces into a small park. They fed the meter, rolled out some turf, put up a park bench and a tree, hung a sign, and encouraged people to hang out, read the paper, and enjoy the greenery that would usually be taken up by a vehicle. (Watch the slide show.)
Their aim was to:
"...transform a parking spot into a PARK(ing) space, thereby temporarily expanding the public realm and improving the quality of urban human habitat, at least until the meter ran out. By our calculations, we provided an additional 24,000 square-foot-minutes of public open space that Wednesday afternoon. "
We--and many others--have long talked about the disadvantages of devoting so much urban space to parking. Nice to see a visualization of the positive side of that coin. Is there a Rebar in Cascadia?
Christmas Sneer
'Tis the season to be jolly, and all that. But, apparently, not if you want to accuse someone--or a lot of someones--of being naughty. This past Sunday, author Joel Kotkin launched a broadside against Portland, Oregon by publishing a dismissive op-ed in the Oregonian that derides the city thus...
Portland is becoming what I call an Ephemeral City. What do ephemeral cities do? Not much by traditional standards. They don't create a lot of jobs for working or middle-class people. Instead they mostly exist to celebrate themselves and provide an attractive setting for visitors and would-be migrants...
An ephemeral city doesn't compete with lesser places -- you know, those ugly cities with functional warehouses and factories, Wal-Marts and strip malls -- for jobs, companies or investors. An ephemeral city's economy relies largely on a high level of self-esteem among its residents.
Not to put words in Kotkin's mouth, but he seems to believe that Portland is simply too focused on creating an enjoyable city--the horror!!--and not enough on...well, manufacturing or strip malls or something sturdy and middle-American.
Now, I happen to feel that most of what Kotkin is trying to pass of as "analysis" is simply sneering. And if you scratch the surface, much of his case simply falls apart.
Toward a Biodiversity Accounting
It's no secret that native biodiversity is on the ropes, in the Northwest and around the world. And because we frequently care so deeply for the places and species that we love, we tend to make conservation decisions with our hearts but not our heads. I don't believe for a moment that passion isn't important for conservation, but better information about the most severe threats may be even more important.
So it's a good first step that a number of conservation scientists recently published an roster of 794 species that are not only on the brink of extinction but, even worse, are hanging on in only a single location. By mapping these critical places--there are 595 of them--we can get some sense about where to direct our conservation resources in order to protect species from vanishing altogether.
Of course, this map, and other biodiversity "hotspot" maps shouldn't be the last word in conservation decisions. A number of other factors must be included in the accounting. Among them, how likely (or capable) is the host country of actually protecting conservation areas? Are there distinct evolutionary lineages that are at risk? Is it very expensive to conserve land in some areas? Is it possible to protect entire intact landscapes in some places and not others? And there are many more, I'm sure.
But still--though many questions still need answering--this map is a good step toward helping conservationists make wise investments. (Read fuller coverage in the the New York Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.)
