Posts from — November 2007

To those who love our city, here’s your assignment:

First: Understand The Three Rules.

David Sucher loves cities. He hopes to foster what he calls “urban villages,” cities that are vibrantly urban but yet also in some way cozy and neighborly. Kinda like what many of us want in Fort Wayne.

His Three Rules are his attempt to help urban planners consider site plans as the key to urban vs. suburban:

If the problem is to create a walkable, pedestrian-oriented neighborhood, much of the answer is architectural. Actually, it is not so much “architectural” in the usual sense of the word, for it ignores style. Site plan trumps architecture.

The Three Rules, in brief, are:

1. Build to the sidewalk (i.e., property line).
2. Make the building front “permeable” (i.e., no blank walls).
3. Prohibit parking lots in front of the building.

Second: Download and read Chapter 3 of “City Comforts.”

In this 11-page chapter of his book, he expands on the rules and gives examples, photos and sub-rules.

Download the chapter here (PDF).

If you love cities, you’ll find this chapter all too short. You’ll probably want to buy the whole book sometime, but for now, stay on topic.

Third: Tell the author he’s full of it.

Really. Sucher has the crazy idea in his head to expand the chapter on The Three Rules into an entire book. But he wants your advice:

Praise it if you like but I am even more interested in hearing the reasons why I am full of it, why the “Three Rules” is naive, incomplete, simple-minded and overall just plain wrong and/or misleading. Let me have it. Bring it on, in the words of our bumbling leader. Tell me in as much detail as you are able why I should drop this project immediately and not embarrass myself any further by my clueless rantings.

So be sure to leave some comments at his blog (feel free to jot them here, too) when you’re done reading his chapter.

The prizes

If he really, really likes your critique, he’ll give you a book. If you convince him that he’s out of his mind and he drops the project completely, he’ll buy you dinner at a restaurant of your choice — in Seattle, naturally.

Now, if you win dinner with Sucher, I’ll want to see the photos. And you’ll have to take a ride on the Bainbridge Island ferry for me. But in the meantime, read, consider, discuss and distribute his short chapter. I believe Sucher has a lot to say to Fort Wayne at this juncture in our urban history.

– Jon Swerens 

Not sure if this is a problem in the Fort, but it caught my eye because on my street in NYC we had a Pigeon Lady who almost daily fed these beguiling birds, no doubt to the consternation of her neighbors.

Anyway, are there any pigeons in Fort Wayne? Though I wouldn’t feed them, I’d sure like to see them…

– Scott Greider

I don’t know what reader of The Good City wouldn’t also be a reader of the Downtown Fort Wayne Baseball blog, but just in case …

The guys at DFWB are all over the developments surrounding Harrison Square. I’m just going to point you to their blog and say, read up about

• the Harrison Square groundbreaking
• the condos going on sale Friday
• the bridge across Harrison Street getting approved
• the construction webcam going live

and lots of other news.

And although I previously stated a strong opinion against the sky bridge, I at least appreciate some of the steps the planners are taking to not damage the Indiana Hotel beyond repair.

– Jon Swerens

If you want to feel how desperately dependent on the automobile you are, simply arrange for your only vehicle to break down.

This happened to me and my family recently, and suddenly, getting a daughter to a distant doctor, getting a dog to the vet, and getting groceries became either difficult or impossible.

At least for us, this was not a new feeling. Back when we were living in western New York State on a newspaperman’s salary, we could not afford both food for a growing family and a car. So we had to rely on walking and an inadequate transit “system,” which in its entirety consisted of one small bus making one circuit around town once an hour.

James Howard Kunstler, in his admittedly caustic book “The Geography of Nowhere,” identifies three groups of people would are discriminated against in an automobile dominated society:

• The poor, because they can often not afford a car.
• The young, because a parent has to drive them everywhere.
• The old, because once they lose the physical ability to drive, they are helpless.

I know it is thought to be a conservative value to oppose subsidies for public transit, forcing things like train lines and city bus companies to fend for themselves. But cities and states remain committed to spending billions building new highways and interchanges to support an urban culture in which an automobile is a necessity for everything in every day life.

We put all of our eggs in one basket, and now there is no wonder why there are no trains leaving from the Baker Street station. We’ve starved every other mode of transportation to feed our appetite for the automobile. I’m glad I will be buying another minivan, but our community is poorer for not having more options for moving people around.

– Jon Swerens 

Transparency. Conversation. Collaboration.

In a post below entitled “How not to fix your city,” I ended with an off-hand remark:

But the way to retain young business people can be as simple as making it easy to start a small business.

Kevin Knuth, chairman of the Allen County Democratic Party, rightly thinks I’ve left a few things unsaid:

I would appreciate you explaining how the city can make it easy to start a business. Are you referring to financing? incentives? I am not wanting to sound snarky, I really do want to hear your viewpoint on this.

I’m not talking about incentives. I’m no expert in that area. My area of expertise is communication. And it’s my belief that any city that successfully talks with clarity to its own citizens will shine like a beacon among U.S. cities.

I propose something I’m calling open-source government.

Maybe that’s not the best term, because many advocates of what’s called open source governance go too far with applying software terminology to government, replacing one kind of jargon with another. No thanks to that.

What I mean by open-source government is the application of some of the philosophy of the open-source software movement to government, not necessarily the technology. This idea is not too far-fetched — open-source software got much of its inspiration from the workings of democracy.

The three core principles of open-source government as I see them are:

• Transparency: All details of any of the workings of government are open and understandable.
• Conversation: The government speaks and listens to its citizens as though they are intelligent, but not as though they are already savvy insiders.
• Collaboration: With transparency and conversation in place, the citizens are invited to have intelligent involvement with their government.

This sounds easy, but consistently putting it into practice takes a lot of dedication. If it were easy, why was there no information about the city of Fort Wayne’s election on the city of Fort Wayne’s Web site? A claim such as, “Oh, that’s the county’s job,” goes against everything I’m proposing. Citizens have every right to expect the city government to have information about its own elections, or at least be able to point to the information elsewhere. Not having election information on the city Web site is embarrassing.

In fact, although “conversation” may sounds like the easiest component of my proposal, it may be the hardest to do well. The typical city is divided into many separate departments, organized not for the understanding of the citizenry, but for the understanding of the people inside the government. So a citizen with an opened-ended question — such as, “What do I need to know to open a small business in Fort Wayne?” — has to file through department after department, looking for all the bits and pieces of information that may or may not be applicable.

Why is such communication difficult? Those of us in journalism know that the more you understand a concept, the harder it becomes to remember what it’s like to not understand a concept. So for a communicator, it’s not enough to understand the complex. You must also understand how to make the complex understandable.

That should be a function of a good city government: Making the complex understandable. Without transparency, conversation and collaboration, government remains distant to most of its citizens.

More can be said about the topic, but that’s enough from me for now. What do you think?

– Jon Swerens

… needs to be higher than this if we’re to have a good city! Thanks to Charles Langley for providing the numbers.

First District:
11,669 voters on Election Day
Total Residents: 42,164
Percentage of Residents who Voted: 27.7%

Second District:
9,696 voters on Election Day
Total Residents: 41,109
Percentage of Residents who Voted: 23.6%

Third District:
8,812 voters on Election Day
Total Residents: 42,888
Percentage of Residents who Voted: 20.5%

*Fourth District:
10,794 voters on Election Day
Total Residents: 41,593
Percentage of Residents who Voted: 26.0%

Fifth District:
6,225 voters on Election Day
Total Population: 41,749
Percentage of Residents who Voted: 14.9%

Sixth District:
4,646 voters on Election Day
Total Population: 42,114
Percentage of Residents who Voted: 11.0%

Average Percentage of District Residents Voting: 20.6%

* Denotes first city election for Aboite residents.

Rachel commented over on Charles’ post that this doesn’t reflect non-citizens and those under 18. True, and those numbers would be nice to see, also (I think the newspapers ran them). But still, this comparison is not without value: an overwhelmingly small percentage of the total population is calling the shots. Sure, the outcome might have been the same had more people voted. But that doesn’t change the fact that 8 out of 10 people you pass on the street (or in your car) on a daily basis didn’t exercise the right many around the world still die to gain. Amazingly disappointing.

- Scott Greider 

Shouldn’t the city of Fort Wayne’s web site at least acknowledge that there is an election today?

A link to a slate of candidates would be nice, too.

Go to the indianavoters.com web site if you need to find your polling place. Don’t assume it’s the closest polling place you know of. (There are two other polling places between my house and my polling place.)

And you don’t have to vote in all of the races. If you just want to vote for mayor, that’s perfectly all right. Just leave the other races blank.

Has anyone ever successfully used the Allen County GIS system to determine his own precinct or polling place?

I appreciate the effort that went into gathering all the information and pulling it into one system. But the county system is a classic example of enterprise software being written for programmers rather than for end users.

If you’re like me, you just jump into a site like the county’s, thinking that you’ll figure it out as you go along. But see all those folders down the sidebar in the picture? Some things in there are already selected, which is why you see so many colored lines in your map.

Good luck finding all the checkboxes that go with the renegade lines.

Next, you may try the instructions for finding your election information. This actually works, as far as it goes, although it does take nine steps.

But the big problem is that you get the address of your polling place, but all of the polls remain marked on the map. So, if you’re like me, and you’re unfamiliar with many Fort Wayne streets and buildings, you could end up at a closer, but incorrect, polling place.

My polling place is not the VFW, a polling place actually located inside my precinct. The VFW is a polling place for a different precinct. My polling place is located two precincts to the north at the Eagles Club — meaning that if you don’t have a car, you have to either get a ride or take public transportation.

Why so far away? I believe it’s because of Americans with Disabilities Act concerns, which are valid as long as everyone has equal access to transportation — and that’s an unlikely prospect in my neighborhood.

A good city features polling places that are easy to find and, at least in the urban core, easy to get to by foot. Let’s hope better polling places — and maps — arrive before the next election.

– Jon Swerens

Richard Florida of “creative class” fame links to The Where Blog, where Brendan Crain looks at five common mistakes made by businesses looking to be innovators. Crain then turns around and applies these myths to how we go about fixing cities.

Below are the five “innovation myths” with an excerpt of Crain’s comments, applying them to cities. All of these are related to the myth of the silver bullet — one shining project that will rescue the business, or city:

• Over-reliance on high-profile, “sexy” projects

Big projects can be important to cities, but it’s even more important to pay close attention to what trade-offs will need to be made in terms of basic services (transit ain’t the only thing hurtin’ in Chicago) in order to pull off a good piece of stunt urbanism. Millennium Park is an innovative piece of landscape architecture, but as an urban regenerator it’s as archaic as they come.

• Unhealthy fascination with unique, charismatic civic leaders

… (I)t is important to remember that the best and most innovative mayors from the past … were willing to take risks; that is to say that great mayors have often made names for themselves by bucking trends and trying new ideas that were responsive to their specific cities than following standard procedures being cut-and-pasted into other cities.

• Misapplication of other cities’ approaches

… (I)t is often assumed that because Idea X worked in City Y, it will be equally successful in City Z. This is absurd. … The misapplication of this lesson would be for a flat city to assume that building a cable car would be a good idea since it worked in Medellín (pictured).

• Descent into a cycle of self-recrimination

Untold energy is put into trying to make the city cooler and more attractive to young people. Meanwhile, (Pittsburgh’s) draconian tax system that discourages start-ups … go unchanged because Pittsburgh fails to realize that music festivals and extensive bike paths aren’t going to save them.

• Resignation to superficial changes

Cities have a long and storied history of believing in the power of cosmetic changes only to be let down by the results. A phenomenon that you might call Trinket Urbanism had a death grip on North American cities until relatively recently as every city rushed to have their version of one-off amenities built in other cities.

Most Harrison Square supporters seem to already realize that even if successful, Harrison Square is no “silver bullet.” That’s good, and I really hope for its success.

But the way to retain young business people can be as simple as making it easy to start a small business.

– Jon Swerens · Photo by (sean) on Flickr