Is Rick Scott the Anti-Christ?

Wednesday the Portland City Council adopted a new Climate Action Plan to achieve 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. http://www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/article/531984 In 1993, Portland was the first city in the United States to adopt a plan to reduce its carbon footprint.  Since then its  population has grown by 31 percent, but carbon emissions have dropped by 14 percent.  This accomplishment secured Pope Francis's invitation to Mayor Hales to attend the Vatican summit on climate change.

Biking and walking are the most ecological forms of transportation, and reducing automobile dependency is key to the Portland initiative.  The tipping point occurred in 1996 when a new freeway project, the "Western Bypass," was killed.  LUTRAQ, a definitive study assessing the interconnection of Land Use, Transportation, and Air Quality, determined that investing in transportation options would secure a better return of public funds. http://www.friends.org/resources/reports  Replacing a drivable suburban standard with a walkable urbanism pattern centered on light rail also achieved the goal METRO, Portland's Regional Government, set in its 2040 plan.  Building on this foundation, the new Climate Action Plan expects to reduce Vehicle Miles Traveled by 30 percent from 2008 levels by creating "Complete Neighborhoods," where "residents can walk or bike to meet all basic daily non-work needs and have safe bicycle or walking access to transit."

Portland's regional rail corridors and walkable urbanism sites 

This week Florida Governor Rick Scott, a notorious climate change enabler, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121341/florida-gov-rick-scotts-ban-climate-change-hasnt-halted-action dealt a death blow to Orlando's plan to become one of "the most environmentally friendly cities" in the Southeast.  Scott vetoed 15 million dollars slated to build an urban campus for the University of Central Florida (UCF) in Creative Village, the linchpin in Orlando's quest to create a "series of unique vibrant pedestrian-friendly urban villages." http://www.cityoforlando.net/greenworks/livability-2/

Creative Village occupies a prominent 60 acre infill site on the edge of downtown, and building an urban campus for nation's third largest university (its 60,000 students attend a sprawling suburban campus) could ignite Central Florida's tech industry and revitalize Parramore, the adjacent historic African-American neighborhood.  UCF's energy and expertise was set to activate plans to improve the health: physical, social, and economic, of a historically underprivileged population. http://www.cityoforlando.net/city-planning/plans-and-studies/parramore-comprehensive-neighborhood-plan/ In a state burdened by a history of racial injustice, this project offered an essential prototype to offer, as one city council member put it, "a hand up and not a hand out."

Scott's actions are part of a depressing pattern.  He rejected federal dollars for the Affordable Care Act and high speed rail, delayed the construction of SunRail, emasculated the state's water management districts, and hijacked Amendment 1 http://www.1000friendsofflorida.org/amendment-1-funds-allocated/ Rick Scott is directing the systematic failure of Florida's urban and natural systems.  He is the anti-Christ to Pope Francis's encyclical calling Christians to "Care for our Common Home."

Sermons and Deeds of the Anti-Christ

Add horns and Rick Scott is a stand in for the demonic prompter in Luca Signorelli's iconic "Sermons and Deeds of the Anti-Christ." The Anti-Christ, who appears to be Jesus delivering the Sermon on the Mount, is literally hand-in-hand with the evil perpetrator.  Scott does have the ear of his party.  Moreover on the defining issues of the day, health insurance, climate change, and income inequality, his position is irrefutable.  Rick Scott is the voice Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio cannot forsake, however "moderate" their speech.

Signorelli's message is timeless.   A pile of riches lay at the feet of the Anti-Christ, who obviously had a successful fund raising campaign.  Notice the demonic figure is sharing information, perhaps the secret to leech more wealth from his audience.  Rick Scott spent millions of his own money to get elected, perhaps that is the saving grace.  Who would listen to him?

To read more on racal injustice and city planning in Florida, consult my article in the forthcoming issue of VIEW http://lalh.org/magazine/

While Portland's Mayor is going to the Vatican, Jeb Bush has a reservation in Purgatory

Portland Mayor Charlie Hales is one of 16 mayors from around the world invited to meet with Pope Francis next month as part of a global summit to discuss climate change. In 1993 the city adopted a plan to curb greenhouse gases and Hales, then a member of the Portland City Council, was instrumental in implementing a central tenet of the plan, reducing auto dependency. "Choo Choo Charlie" pushed to extend the light rail system, and to establish the first urban streetcar line in nearly half a century. Since 1996 Portland is the only city to have its per capita Vehicle Miles Traveled drop, while its greenhouse gas emissions reached 1990 levels a decade ago.

Hales also championed the Pearl District, a dense transit-oriented New Urbanist neighborhood where I recently moved.

I enjoy the benefits of a healthy quality of life, without a car I can easily navigate the city and meet the standard of good health by walking 10,000 steps a day. http://www.thewalkingsite.com/10000steps.html 

Unfortunately in autocentric Orlando, where I resided when Mr. Bush was governor, staying alive was the concern. Orlando had the highest pedestrian death rate in the nation, followed by Tampa Bay, Miami and Jacksonville. Orlando and St. Petersburg were ranked as the nation's angriest cities and, in 2000, a study by the Sierra Club named Florida (led by Orlando) the most sprawl threatened state.                          
           
                              Sprawl Threatened Cities by Size

Sprawl in problematic because it forces future generations to subsidize quick profits generated in the name of "free enterprise. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG1T03NuZKM Climate change exacerbates this problem. In Miami, Mr. Bush's hometown, $1.5 billion is allocated to restructure an imperiled system of drains and sewers. This is only a down payment. Of the 4.2 million Americans living at an elevation of four feet or less, 2.4 million reside in South Florida.

Jeb Bush is the poster boy for burdening society with externality costs by prying profits from a low-lying peninsula prone to natural disaster.http://economics.fundamentalfinance.com/negative-externality.php In the early 1980s he established Bush Realty with Armando Codina, a wealthy supporter of the President George H.W. Bush. Deering Bay Yacht and Country Club exemplified their product line. The project lost millions after being battered by Hurricane Andrew, and it was unloaded to Al Hoffman, a wealthy developer (who George Bush appointed ambassador to Portugal). The free market took a much harder hit. Hurricane Andrew decimated the private insurance industry and, in 2002, Governor Bush established Citizens Property, a state insurance company to underwrite high-risk homeowners. State mandated insurance—socialism—is cost the Bush brothers--Jeb, George, and "Silverado" Neil--exact with the snake oil they ply. "A magical conception of the market," to quote Pope Francis. It is also what 1980 Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush called "voodoo economics." http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/opinion/voodoo-jeb-style.html?_r=0

Do you want your taxes insuring this project?

No wonder Mr. Bush is upset with the Pope. How would you like to confess the above project? Climate change is redefining sin, and not just for Catholics. Conservatives demand personal responsibility, but Deering Yacht and Golf Club will not survive without massive government investments. Bush faces a moral quandary. Christ's most elemental teaching, the call to sacrifice so others can live, is the testament Pope Francis preaches. Jeb Bush can ignore the teachings of Christ and St. Francis, but to what moral authority does he ascribe? Is he a nihilist?

Lewis Mumford, the acclaimed urbanist, observed that the natural environment was the common denominator in human life. Ensuring its health demanded virtue, the sacrifice of private rights for the public good. In 1938 this precept centered the plan he prepared for Portland, a prototype for modern urban civilization. Mumford encouraged envisioning new living patterns, provided they were tethered to nature. To ignore nature's constraints and hold to palliative "social myths" risked leaving future generation's with, he wrote, "nothing or rather nothingness." https://archive.org/stream/storyutopias00mumfgoog#page/n280/mode/2up

Pope Francis's encyclical is a call to embrace the life Mumford outlined, and that Portland eventually embraced. https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/article/87292 A shift is occurring here, as new living patterns emerge. Although Mr. Bush will not accompany Mayor Hales to the Vatican, he will eventually have to embrace God, life, or nothing. The decision offers unmatched political theater.

Check livingnewurbanism.com Community Voice for my Orlando Sentinel editorials assessing then Governor Bush. ttp://www.livingnewurbanism.com/#!editorials/c1219

Portland's Sustainability: Rooted in History

I celebrated my first week in the Pearl District by taking a 2 minute saunter to get a cup of coffee and read the Oregonian at Lovejoy Bakery, a definitive third place. http://www.pps.org/reference/roldenburg/  On a cool morning, conversation, coffee, and contemplation abound in this  synergistic mix of public and private space. There is a sense of repose here, a comfortable spot to take in the ballet of life.

Spaces like this are rare, they are works of art blending history and innovation--the essence of New Urbanism. The Pearl District is a model of New Urbanism http://www.pearldistrict.org/about-the-pearl-district/ Twenty years ago it was a decaying  industrial district, now, with a 95 walk score, it is a prototype of the future.  

Craig Ustler, the developer of Orlando's Creative Village, arguably the most promising urban infill project in Florida http://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/os-ed-racial-zoning-injustice-042415-20150423-story.html is a student of the Pearl District.  It informs his plan to blend transit, parks, and mixed-use development to create a definitive urban neighborhood.  Ustler http://www.ustler.net believes the intersection of Lovejoy and 10th Avenue, the site of Lovejoy Bakery, demonstrates "why Portland gets it."  The lesson is not lost on my students, who study Portland with Mr. Ustler and then incorporate this knowledge into plans to form and activate Creative Village. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/29405235/CreativeVillageExec.pdf 

Currently, Portland and Orlando are worlds apart.  The sprawling Orlando metropolitan area is saddled with the the nation's highest pedestrian death rate, and applying its driving death rate to the nation would result in 15,000 addition fatalities per year. By contrast, applying Portland's driving death rate would reduce fatalities by 15,000. Yet, Central Florida is not without hope.  Orlando's new Greenworks Plan envisions the city becoming the Portland of the southeast, and investments in commuter rail and a significant pedestrian-bike system signal change.http://www.cityoforlando.net/greenworks/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2014/03/gw_cap_plan2013.pdf But Orlando is also tied to its past, a history defined by the creation of a Magic Kingdom divorced from civic responsibility. http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300098280

Portland has invested in civic art for over a century.  In 1904,  the Olmsted Brothers prepared one of the nation's first plans for a park system in Portland. The idea of integrating a range of parks, from urban squares to large outlying preserves, was a novel concept. It set the foundation for American city planning profession, which came into fruition in the 1910s and 1920s, a "golden age" of civic design in the United States.  Ladd's Addition, Laurelhurst Park, and Washington Park speak to this tradition. 

                                      

Portland's history is not seamless, it is filled with fits and starts.  It took nearly a century for the Olmsted Brothers Park Plan to reach completion.  In 1939, another milestone was set when noted urbanist Lewis Mumford came west.  In a presentation to the City Club, he declared Portlanders "could do a job of city planning like nowhere else in the world."  But after seeing the neglect in "letting this fine land with its wonderful scenic beauty get away from you, it made me wonder if you are good enough to have it in your possession." Mumford deeded a regional plan to the city's leadership, but it was ignored until the early 1970s (the same time Walt Disney World opened) when a young cohort of reformers, led by Mayor Neil Goldschmidt, incorporated Mumford's major concepts. "Portland is a better place thanks in large part to the wisdom and foresight of Lewis Mumford," Goldschmidt noted in 1982. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01944369908976056  

Portland is one of the nation's most sustainable cities because of its civic culture and its history. History provides a point of origin for citizens to join experts in tethering humanity's boundless potential to a set of time-tested principles and new ideas. This is the art of city planning and stay tuned for another exploration of its application in the Pearl District. 

John Nolen's Legacy in Cambridge: God's Art, Ecumenical Profit and the Harvard GSD

As a new resident of the Pearl District, I had intended to blog on Living New Urbanism but a brewing controversy over John Nolen's legacy in Cambridge drew my attention.  

In Cambridge, Massachusetts controversy has arisen over St. James Church’s decision to allow the construction of 46 condominiums on Knights Garden. Designed by the preeminent town planner John Nolen in 1915, the idyllic green testifies to Nolen’s skill in ordering the urban environment on artistic lines. Besides bringing an aesthetic balance to a busy commercial district, Knights Garden buffers St. James from Massachusetts Avenue and highlights the vestibule’s beauty. It came to fruition through support from parishioners and neighbors, who want to preserve a special space that defines their surroundings. http://www.nolensknightsgarden.org With property rights and profits at play, it is difficult to price a work of art that honors God and embellishes a community. 

       

   Knights Garden

Knights Garden exemplifies the artistry Nolen championed.  A semester at the University of Munich studying Italian Renaissance Painting and Camillo Sitte (author of the iconic City Planning According to Artistic Principles) convinced the aspiring reformer to enroll in Harvard's landscape architecture program. Mentored by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., Nolen, in 1905, published the first significant assessment of Olmsted's work. Olmsted Sr. set the foundation for landscape architecture, but Nolen wanted practitioners to extend their craft into the civic art of city planning. Civic Art not only highlighted pubic structures and spaces, it united the city with "nature which has happily been called God’s art.”

                                            Hampstead Garden Suburb, Prototype for Nolen

By World War I, Nolen and Olmsted Jr. stood at the forefront of the novice city planning profession. Nolen’s most prescient book, New Ideals in the Planning of Villages, Towns, and Cities (1919), proposed using World War I's "peace dividend" to build cities "more fit for democracy." During the war, the federal government employed planners to house workers crucial to military industries in compact neighborhoods modeled on the English Garden City, and with easy access to transit, shopping, parks, and civic institutions.  Despite the program's success, it was terminated.  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20911617-new-ideals-in-the-planning-of-cities-towns-and-villages  Crestfallen by the decision, Nolen persevered and regrouped his Harvard Square office to confront the the nation's unprecedented suburban expansion. 

With the rush of new development, Nolen secured clients eager to invest in the blueprint presented in New Ideals. In the 1920s he designed a series of model new towns, employing the principles of civic art in comprehensive fashion. His most complete commissions, Mariemont, Ohio and Venice, Florida (both listed on the National Historic Register), exemplify how nature and urbanism produced what Nolen called, "permanent beauty," the essence of Knights Garden. 

                                           Mariemont Sister City of Hampstead Garden Suburb

When Nolen’s practice faltered during the Great Depression, he took up teaching at Harvard’s School of City Planning.   He was a longtime associate of Henry Hubbard, the school’s director and former chair of the landscape architecture department.  Nolen encouraged students to view the city as a biological organism and plan it to reproduce life.  “Humans are organisms, not machines,” was a constant refrain in Town Planning, a course devoted to designing pedestrian-oriented communities.  Students utilized a range of archetypes including Classical Athens, Renaissance Florence, American new towns, and Cambridge, where they assessed components of human scaled neighborhoods, such as St. James Church and Knights Garden.

In the 1930s, Nolen concepts were challenged by a Modernist vision that venerated the machine. Aligning urban elements with formulaic precision and quantifying the human experience became the new modus operandi.  City planning, according to Modernists such as James Hudnut, Harvard’s Dean of Architecture, was a social science not an art.   Despite protests from Hubbard and Nolen, Hudnut convinced the administration to close the School of City Planning.  In 1937, it reopened as a department in the new Graduate School of Design (GSD).  Walter Gropius, the renowned Modernist architect, was the GSD’s first hire and he waged a war for Modernism with military ambition.  City planning was torn from its mooring in landscape architecture, leaving it the forlorn stepchild of another profession. 

Nolen died in 1937, wondering if he left a legacy.  He remained largely forgotten until Mariemont and Venice inspired the plan for Seaside, Florida, the prototype pedestrian-oriented New Urbanist community.  Nolen is now closely studied, and New Urbanism has moved from novelty to policy. 

It is hardly surprising that the GSD, especially Charles Waldheim, chair of the landscape architecture department, is dismissive of New Urbanism. Waldheim’s “postmodernist” critique is difficult to decipher, but the civic art Nolen pioneered is foreign to his vocabulary.  Knights Garden defines the practice of landscape architecture before the GSD, but does it resonate in Gund Hall? An answer could have far-reaching results. https://www.newsociety.com/Books/L/Landscape-Urbanism-and-its-Discontents 

The John Nolen Medal honors contributions to New Urbanism in Florida