“Despite a six-day-a-week work schedule, Derr always makes time to take pictures. His images of DUMBO, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Red Hook, and Brooklyn Heights can be seen on Flickr — and purchased through Imagekind — and have appeared in the Gothamist, the New York Times, and Brooklyn Heights blog. They’ve also been published on dumbonyc.com and used in the promotional materials of Arts at St. Ann’s and the DUMBO Neighborhood Association. . . .

“‘DUMBO was rough when I arrived,’ he begins. ‘There is a building complex on Sand Street that is owned by The Watchtower where about 900 staff live. When I first moved in, the area was not as refined as it is now, with galleries, shops, and brand name stores. Before, there were art collectives and there was more of an artist presence in the community. Right up the street there was the Between the Bridges Bar, which looked like a dive. I guess something was lost, and something gained.’

“Among the losses, Derr says, is DUMBO’s once-gritty feel—the abandoned warehouses and factories, broken concrete, and glass shards that used to litter the ground. He is saddened, he says, by the destruction of numerous art deco structures, one of which, the Purchase Building, was knocked down to create a parking lot that now houses the Brooklyn Flea each Sunday.” (more @ The Brooklyn Rail, via Dumbo NYC)

A recent conversation turned, as many do, to travel — but not so much the logistics thereof, about which any flyertalker can expound for hours, but rather what it is that we’re seeking away from home. Is it better weather, time with loved ones, a tastier cup of tea, or just that weightless sensation of being lost?

It seems that I like to see the world as a laboratory of urban policies. Untangling and uncovering the layers of human interventions that result in our built environment still interests me more than even the most stunning of natural settings. We can’t understand a decision without understanding the assumptions and the context surrounding it: how the rationales made sense at its moment in space and time. Steve Mouzon likes to repeat the line “we do this because” throughout his pattern books — although that genre typically tells you how to do things and how they’ve always been done, but rarely why. Such practices are meaningless if not grounded in a place and its history.

Similarly, it always troubles (and frankly astonishes) me when I meet small-c conservatives who apparently listened when the Wizard declares, “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” To be blind to history, to accept that the world was evidently created just yesterday without any human intervention, to accept that the status quo shall always be such and that any attempts to change are futile, dangerous, and heavy-handed — this attitude strikes me as willful disbelief. When those with libertarian tendencies parrot this, it amounts to (to quote Sondheim) “keep the status quo permanently so!” For instance, I recently had occasion to point out that “making driving ‘as unpleasant as possible’ is no more heavy-handed an intervention than 80 years wherein government strove to make driving as pleasant & easy as possible.” A society’s attitude towards driving has nothing to do with economic freedom, either: by far the two most free economies in the world, Hong Kong and Singapore, have some of the world’s strictest policies discouraging car ownership — punitive registration taxes, high road tolls, and high gas prices. Why? Because they’re also the world’s two most densely urbanized economies, and mass car ownership — and the pollution and congestion that would ensue — would impinge on others’ freedom of movement, and damage the economy besides.

“It is amazing to go out to the end there, look around, and wonder just why they did this.” (Jack Hartray was speaking of Wacker Drive, pre-Lakeshore East, which resembled this Indiana steel-mill viaduct.)

In the past, I’d study these things more closely here in North America: it’s easier to sell an idea once it’s been tried somewhere with a substantially similar legal or cultural background. Besides, it’s also substantially easier and cheaper to get to. And yet it’s sometimes more interesting to stumble across a great public policy idea implemented amidst greater odds. It’s humbling, for instance, to see carefully built public infrastructure (like TranSantiago’s efficient prepaid bus stops) in countries much poorer than the US, land of the affluent society.

So anyways, here are some highlights from the past few months of wandering about:
- Of course, I walked The High Line in July. It was, indeed, pretty magical to be suspended over the city, but plenty enough’s been written about that.
- I’ve written about Liberties Walk [full set of photos] before, a small-scale pedestrian mall flanked with townhouses over independent shops in scruffy Northern Liberties, Philadelphia. Another, much more ambitious phase recently opened, called the Piazza at Schmidt’s, and the Walk itself has been extended two more blocks. Future phases will add more multistory buildings, notably including one building fronting Girard (an adjacent arterial) with a supermarket and parking. (That phasing strategy is notably offbeat: usually you’d lead with the supermarket anchor to build traffic and then follow up with specialty shops, but this has proceeded in exactly the opposite manner.) The architecture might seem aggressive at first glance, but its weight and massing do strike a balance between industrial buildings on the east and residential on the west. The public spaces themselves are pretty sparse, which works for the narrow Walk but not the broad Piazza. Critics have weighed in on the Piazza, notably Philly Skyline and the Inquirer’s Inga Saffron.
- I’m always intruiged to see other instances where off-street retail has been introduced to an urban neighborhood, so two examples from Santiago de Chile caught my attention: the block-sized Patio Bellavista complex on Pio Nino, and the tiny but elegant Plaza del Paseo Barrio Lastarria.

Well, this is disappointing. I’ve always been proud of the fact that I went to integrated public schools in a Southern inner city — especially since moving up north and seeing the damage that de-facto school segregation wreaks upon city and suburbs alike. What seemed normal as a kid was, as it turned out in my social-policy classes, a national model of how to do the right thing.

The magnet-school system in Raleigh not only provided remarkable education opportunities (my high school offered three orchestral programs, multivariate calculus, and Latin), but left me with enough street smarts to easily and respectfully navigate multiethnic city life. Getting bused across town for school also, in a way, taught me about educational opportunities across the entire city — museums, other libraries, the university. Although half of my peers lived in the lower-income, mostly African American neighborhoods of southeast Raleigh, nearly 90% of us went on to college. All this despite spending some 30% per student than failing urban schools in the North.

The school system’s strong commitment to integration — suburban and city schools merged long after the courts had shifted away from forced busing — means that there are no bad schools, no schools worth fleeing or closing or “reconstituting,” in a county just shy of one million residents. Indeed, in Raleigh it’s the city schools which are better. This fact arguably played a huge role in making Raleigh one of the best-educated, most prosperous, fastest-growing cities in America:

For comparison’s sake, imagine that instead of merging in 1976, the Raleigh and Wake school systems had continued to be separate. And not only that, but Raleigh was one school district and every other town in Wake County had a separate school district of its own, like Wayne County [suburban Detroit]. Would Raleigh today be affluent? Or would the affluent people of Raleigh have long since moved to Cary, Apex and the rest of the suburbs, leaving a poor inner-city school system behind? [Bob Geary, Independent Weekly, writing about Gerald Grant's new book Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh]

And yet there are others who inexplicably see such policies as failures, who insist that geography should be destiny. A small minority, likely drawn to Raleigh by its reputation for great schools, has consistently railed about the constant churn of school reassignments — necessary for a district that opens several costly new schools every single year. Maintaining integration has become more difficult as sprawl marched farther afield and as patterns of socioeconomic segregation ossified. (In this regard, the spread of suburban poverty and inner-city gentrification have actually helped to maintain some integration.) The usual right-wing hue and cry over “socialist social engineering” (never mind the right’s continual insistence on deeply interfering with private lives) becomes double-speak for perpetuating segregation. One school board member wants to have his cake and eat it, too — disband the magnets and somehow offer their programs at every single school, while decrying the “high cost” of busing. (Is there demand for AP Latin at every school? Even if there were, who could afford it?) Yet busing costs much less than trying to rescue failed schools with vast infusions of cash.

I’m only writing about this since, of course, the fringe has won a crucial battle: apparent control over the Wake County school board. NC Policy Watch argues that only 3% of voters — just over half, largely in the suburbs, in a poorly attended election — have come to dominate the debate, and that the considerable achievements should be better marketed; “the school system itself could do a better a job telling its impressive story and acknowledging the work it must do to address its problems.” I can only hope from afar that Wake County doesn’t turn its back on one of its few progressive policy achievements.

We didn’t save. We spent, we lived and one day everything was gone. The system threw us outside and, in exchange for taking everything we had, we received permission to sleep on the streets. It’s great out here: fresh air, we connect with the weather, no fixed abode. We own nothing but whatever we can carry on our backs and in our hands. We’re free, I tell you. We are really free.