Scattered Work

One thing led to another…

When I started Scattered Work, I was excited to move beyond my focus on arts writing, to grapple with social structures outside of a gallery. I showed my project to an editor at Plaza de Armas, and she asked me to contribute to the San Antonio-based web magazine. I agreed, happy to find a wider audience and an editor to help me sharpen my work. So far, I’ve written two columns, with another coming out next Tuesday. I’ve also been trying to keep up with posting here, and am investigating several ideas that should lead to new posts in the next week or so. For now, here are links to my columns:

Carne asada is not a crime — in this article I explored San Antonio’s prohibition on downtown mobile food vendors. I came at this issue from two angles: first, the practical effects of allowing kitchens on wheels into city center, as explored by by William Whyte in “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces”; and second, the pride San Antonio has in its culinary culture, and the potential power of sharing that culture with both natives and visitors within the urban core. This is just one way, albeit a very compelling one, of sharing culture on a human scale.

The needs of the many v. the rule of capture — this is about an ongoing dispute over water rights in Texas (although this is playing out in various ways in many places). It’s a thorny issue with lots of legal ins and outs, but ultimately we need to recognize that ranchers and other land owners cannot all own the groundwater under their property, and this fact needs to be recognized and clearly codified in our laws. State lawmakers are currently unwilling to bring real clarity to ownership rights underlying the regulations, and until they do groundwater conservation districts and farmers will both be held back by legal wrangling.

Thanks for staying tuned.

Discovering Urbanism

The project of writing a blog has a lot to do with engaging in dialogue. And so the decision to relaunch Scattered Work as a planning blog for San Antonio has led me to start exploring the urbanist blog scene. One site I’ve just come across this morning is Discovering Urbanism (via Market Urbanism via this Kevin Drum post). The newest entry on the site makes a very important point: the idea of revitalizing the city core is at heart an ethical project. Downtown gives us a place to encounter people different from ourselves; and without those encounters we have very little reason to think about ethics or the nature of community.

This relates to my previous post about Facebook and the balkanization of the Internet. But the big question is whether we are going to allow ourselves to embrace social instability on a personal level, and bring improvisation into our interactions. It’s a very difficult and awkward thing to do. Most of us are very relieved to move past our teen years, where the bulk of our social improvisation happens. I hope to make the case in the coming months that our spaces can and should be constructed to encourage the exploration of new social patterns. I currently have no idea how this would look, but with the help of blogs like Discovering Urbanism, I’m going to take a crack at it.

My first real post on Scattered Work mentioned the importance of stable social space (i.e. the deep social connections formed in neighborhoods where several generations stay basically in the same place), and now I’m praising instability in our personal interactions. Yes, both are important, and yes, I think this is a central paradox of planning, and well, living. I expect to be banging my head against this paradox a lot.

Tags: ethics, identity, improvisation

Repetition

I’ve come to the conclusion that this blog should be built on the ruins of my old blog, wiping away that history and starting over. But the name will remain.