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.

Main Plaza Farmers’ Market

My girlfriend, who just wrote an article on the San Antonio Food Bank for San Antonio Magazine, tipped me off to a new farmers’ market in Main Plaza organized by the Food Bank on Tuesdays. We went down there today to check it out. It’s pretty small — the first image below shows about the entire extent of it.

The only thing missing from this photo is a booth selling some pretty tasty fish tacos, courtesy the Food Bank’s Catalyst Catering program. The market’s just getting off the ground, and it’s only there for a few hours around lunch time on Tuesdays. But for at least those few hours, this farmers’ market provides the best tomatoes within a five mile radius of my house. The carrots are quite good as well.

Tags: farmers' markets, food, Main Plaza, San Antonio Food Bank

Regulations: downtown food vendors

I was digging through San Antonio regulations this week, and thought I’d share a few of my favorites.

Allowed food vending downtown:

10.26.1 Raspas

10.26.2 Pre-packaged, Non-potentially hazardous food items (not allowed on Alamo

Plaza)

10.26.3 Hot Dogs (not allowed on Alamo Plaza)

10.26.4 Steamed Corn (not allowed on Alamo Plaza)

10.26.5 Ice Cream (not allowed on Alamo Plaza)

And, assuming you do want to sell steamed corn to tourists:

6.11.2 All petitioners are required to receive approval of their cart design by the City’s Historic Preservation Office (HPO).

On the other hand, if you want to take your canoe out in the San Antonio river, go here to apply for a free permit. But beware:

Willful body contact with water is prohibited.

Tags: downtown, food vendors, improvisation, raspas

Autenticas Carnitas

Tags: carnitas, photos, west side

All my friends

Just a quick follow-up on my Facebook post from earlier this week. The problem here isn’t just one of moving existing social circles online. It’s the fact that they all get lumped together. We each maintain overlapping identities that come into play in different social situations; we show a slightly different face to our family, our drinking buddies, our coworkers, or our neighbors (or our rock-climbing friends vs our car enthusiast friends). The very idea of privacy means different things in each context. But while Facebook allows grouping of friends, it’s sufficiently awkward that people rarely limit their messages to a particular social sphere. So I think this leads inevitably to a sort of uniformly bland online identity, and ultimately stifles creativity. We all become politicians trying to keep multiple constituencies happy. To be fair, this is a problem that pre-dates Facebook. But the external identity control inherent in a service like Facebook makes the problem much more pressing. As Anil Dash said a few months ago:

Perhaps by engaging more with its users in an honest way about its radical stance on public sharing, and by clearly articulating the social costs that can arise from that stance, Facebook can become as truly inclusive as it strives to be.

Tags: identity, social networks

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

Uprooting the jungle

The Conversation (opening scene in Union Square)

For many years, anonymity on the Internet was taken for granted as the natural state of things. Everyone used cryptic handles, and even respected journalists used these nicknames for attribution; it was considered pointless to try to verify the real identity of someone posting on a message board or commenting on a blog (or, in many cases, even writing a blog). Pioneering social networking website Friendster, struggling to bring real identities online, was overrun by fake user profiles (aka the “fakester insurrection,” shortly followed, of course, by the “fakester extermination”).

Where Friendster failed, Facebook has largely succeeded, ushering in a real name only culture, and bringing us to an inflection point in the nature of identity on the Internet. Nearly everyone I encounter on Facebook uses their real name. The light blue leviathan is now leveraging this victory by exporting identities to other websites. Already, on too many sites to name, you can login using your Facebook account, further cementing its reality and its usefulness as a commodity.

Bill Owens, Untitled (from Suburbia)

I’m convinced this stabilization of online identity echoes the movement from urban centers to the suburbs in the 1950s and ’60s. Where the city’s core was a chaotic mix of different ethnicities and social classes, the suburbs provided a safe haven: a place where you could have a pretty good idea of the background, value system and income level of your neighbors. To be sure, much of this was driven by racism, which I certainly don’t see in the appeal of Facebook. But I do think that the unwillingness to deal with unstable social groups and unknown value systems has a lot to do with the widespread embrace of both the surburbs and Facebook. Your online community is now made of your friends, whom you’ve carefully selected and sorted over a lifetime.

What’s troubling about this is the amount of control a single website is able to have over the way that our identities are expressed and perceived. What if this safe zone on the Internet eats away at our social and aesthetic variegation as much as the suburbs have? What if the way Facebook chooses to cycle posts, and limit post lengths and resize images, has as much impact on our sense of social space as the way that suburb developers chose to lay out streets and design homes? The bland uniformity of Mark Zuckerburg’s social container should be obvious to anyone who used MySpace (or Tumblr or Twitter or WordPress or…). But the implications go much deeper than aesthetics.

Tags: Facebook, identity, suburbs

Low traffic, expensive downtown

The Express-News reports that San Antonio’s congestion rates are lower than any big city in Texas. A trip in San Antonio during rush hour takes 16% longer, on average, than it does during free traffic flow times; in Dallas, that figure is 22%, Houston clocks in at 25%, and Austin is the worst at 28%. (The number of hours each person wastes in traffic each year is lower in Austin than in Houston or Dallas, however, presumably because people living in Austin have shorter commutes.)

Anyone who spends time in these cities knows that San Antonio’s traffic is pretty mild, especially if you manage to avoid the area around 281 and 1604. But it occurred to me as I was sitting in SmartWay SA meetings last year that this low level of congestion could be hampering San Antonio’s will to diversify transportation options. After a light rail plan was voted down in San Antonio in 2000, the idea was effectively killed for a decade. Now we’re coming back around to the idea, although it looks like a slower (and probably more politically savvy) strategy is in place: start with Bus Rapid Transit and downtown street cars, and slowly warm voters up to the idea of light rail. Meanwhile, Dallas, Houston, and Austin already have functioning light rail systems in place.

I wonder if there’s an analogy here with downtown San Antonio’s reliance on tourism. I’ve heard that because the city can fill big hotels downtown, real estate is pricey, so offices and residential developments are difficult to finance. (Although developer Ed Cross thinks it’s possible, and certainly has put his money where his mouth is). So while the tourism industry has kept the core of the city somewhat lively during the decades of urban decay experienced throughout the United States, it may be holding back growth now that people are actually ready to move back into urban centers. We usually see the number of downtown residential units pegged at around 3,000 (although depending on what you consider “downtown,” the figure could be as high as 23,000); it’ll take a lot of Vistanas — at under 300 units a pop — to get to Cross’ magic number of 10,000 downtown residents.

If San Antonio’s successes in highway infrastructure and downtown tourism are analogous in that they both create a risk of complacency, they are also linked in a more literal way: a thriving downtown will partly be driven by a robust and diverse transit system. The City is working on both these problems simultaneously, as are developers prescient enough to see the long-term trends and ignore the immediate lure of Stone Oak’s high income levels. But educating voters about the need for these improvements will be that much harder; after all, traffic isn’t that bad, and downtown seems more like a nice tourist stop than a rotting core in desperate need of attention.

Tags: development, downtown, Ed Cross, hotels, light rail, tourism, traffic

Street view: forgotten again?

Have we already forgotten the Alameda again? (Street view)

Tags: Alameda, forgotten, street view

Silence and Void

In 2008, Anjali Gupta, then editor of Art Lies, asked me to write a feature on the relationship between John Cage and Buckminster Fuller. I certainly wasn’t an expert on Cage, and hardly knew anything about Fuller. I dug through what I had, bought some books, and sent many queries to Google. I ended up writing Silence and Void: Cage, Fuller, and Urban Space, tracking the two thinkers’ similar philosophical foundations and ultimate divergence, concluding with:

[Cage] had come to believe that harmonically structured, emotionally fraught music could live alongside formless, chance-based compositions. Meanwhile, at the time that Cage gave this interview, Fuller was still railing against the failings of Bauhaus architects. With this in mind, we can see why Fuller’s vision of the future, in some ways, missed the mark. While the increasing availability of inexpensive travel and communication has certainly changed the way our society functions, it has not changed the human need for shared social space. Fuller’s Dymaxion house disregarded the socioeconomic and emotional aspects of urban architecture in favor of lightness, portability and conservation of materials. The idea of rootedness might have had little interest to a man who constantly moved about the world. But the ability to move freely and communicate over long distances has never displaced our need for stable social space any more than the ability to appreciate chance sounds has diminished the enjoyment of structured music.

While I was writing this essay, I was also exploring the south side of downtown San Antonio, riding my bike by vacant buildings transforming into architecture offices and condos. Living among these developments while reading about urban space and structural principles sparked an interest that I haven’t been able to shake.

Later, reading Jane Jacobs, I became more deeply aware of the importance of “stable social space.” While criticizing New York’s destruction of “blighted” neighborhoods in the 50s, Jacobs eloquently demonstrates the value of social networks for promoting safety, well-being, and general civic responsibility. When the neighborhood is destroyed, and the inhabitants scattered, the social fabric is disrupted with far-reaching consequences. This is the familiar argument against gentrification. In San Antonio, we’ve seen this happen with the construction the Victoria Courts in the 1940s, HemisFair in 1968, and the Alamodome in 1993, to name a few of the most well-known displacement projects.

Jacobs spilled a lot of ink railing against government intervention in neighborhoods that, though perhaps poor, are safe and functional. Certainly some of this displacement had a racist motivation, as the black community was pushed steadily to the east side, in the case of San Antonio (although San Antonio is less segregated than many cities, as can be seen in these fascinating “race maps” of American cities). Despite all this, city planners are, of course, capable of doing good things.

So the question becomes: How can we, as a city, allow the aleatory to live alongside the structured? Or better, how can we create structures, like Cage did, that allow us to see the beauty in the unstructured decisions of each individual?

Tags: Alamodome, Buckminster Fuller, downtown, gentrification, HemisFair, Jane Jacobs, John Cage, racism, social networks