CityStates: Commentary on an Urban World

On the Idea of a Private Park as an Integral Component of a High Rise Residential Apartment Complex

In previous posts I have set out our inherent need for contact with nature and the deficient arrangements with which the forces of urban development have attempted to meet this need in high-density urban areas.  I would like now to propose one means of creating a closer tie between humanity and factors in our spiritual bond with the natural environment whose presence, whether near at hand or at a remote distance is felt by human beings only by their impact on our sense of sight, sound, taste, or smell.  Accordingly I draw your attention to the architectural drawing below. 

It is the ground floor plan of a high-rise apartment building complex conceived by the architectural firm of Praxis Architecture Inc. of Esquimalt, B.C.  The striking feature of this ground floor plan is that it contains as an integral component of the high-rise residential structure, a built-in private park belonging to the residents in common.

The site of this architectural concept is located in the Corporation of the Township of Esquimalt, a local government authority whose area of jurisdiction lies in a fairly narrow strip along the eastern boundary of the City of Victoria, B.C.  The property on which the design is based is privately owned.  The owner, however, is unaware that it has served as the hypothetical site for this imaginative development concept.  It was selected by the architects for this exercise because they are located in Esquimalt and familiar with its development potential, but are also aware that there are sites in the high-density area of any city which can be developed with a high-rise residential building of which a private park is an integral component.

For our present purposes it is only the ground floor of this hypothetical complex that is relevant.  The architects who produced the ground floor plan also had in mind the residential component of the total project.  They assumed an apartment structure rising some 14 stories above the ground floor with approximately 104 apartments.  But that item like the ground floor design itself is part of the total imaginative concept that need not be dealt with specifically in the present paper since the purpose here is to examine the private park component of the concept.  It is only the ground floor plan with its private park and other contents and the site on which the concept is located which are relevant here.  However it should be noted that the complex would only function successfully if it were in condominium ownership.

The site on which this hypothetical complex is located is itself an interesting item.  It is bounded on its east side by Admirals Road, and on its west side by Constance Avenue, but between these two traffic arteries its rocky contours drop about 12’ from its Admiral’s Road side on the east to Constance Avenue on the west.  

The total area of the site is 12,000 square feet.   Admiral’s Road is a bus route and one of the main arterial roads into and out of Esquimalt.  Automobile access to the building however is only from Constance Avenue.  Entry to the underground garage for vehicle parking is from the semi-circular drive off Constance Avenue.  Access into the building is through two main doors – one on the east side giving entry from Admiral’s Road, the other on the west side giving entry from Constance Avenue.

The door on the Admiral’s Road side opens into a large landscaped garden area or “atrium” which in effect is a private park and is an integral component of the complex – the treatment of its walls, the furniture, the plants and trees etc. would best be left to the management committee (or a subcommittee) of the condo complex.  The maintenance of the atrium is also a matter for the resident-owners of the complex to manage and would probably be arranged with the advice and assistance from professional sources.  

The elevators up to the residential units are located near the centre of the atrium.  If one is a resident of one of the units in the building, but is outside and approaching the building on foot from the Admiral’s Road side then he or she must have a key to that access door to gain entry into the building.   That person must also have a separate key for the door to his or her dwelling, which would not be the same key as the one for the access door into the building.  The key to the building access door from the Constance Avenue side is the same as the one for the building access door on the Admirals Road side.  Clearly then each would have to have two keys – one for access into the building from either side, the other for access into his or her residential unit.  This may seem at first glance to be an elaborate arrangement but it ensures that the atrium is in effect a private garden or park and is an integral part of the residential complex and is not available to the general public at large.

On the Constance Avenue side the 12’ drop in the gradient from its level on the Admiral’s Road side provides the vehicle entrance to the ramp which leads to the parking level.  Pedestrian access to the building proper requires ascending an exterior staircase in order to reach the entry door to the building.  On the way up this staircase one passes by an exterior landscaped roof garden shown shaded on the plan.  The exterior landscaped garden area is directly accessible from the top of the exterior staircase but direct entry from the roof garden is not.  Adjacent to the roof garden is a room in the interior of the building which abuts the roof garden.  Access to the roof garden from inside the building is only one way - through the adjacent room whose door to the exterior only opens one way, outward to the exterior but not inward from the exterior.  From the top of the exterior staircase one can gain entry into the building and proceed along the corridor to the elevators and the atrium.

Underlying the comfort and livability of an apartment dwelling in a tall residential structure are a number of factors.  These include, among others, such items as the layout of the unit, the facilities available, the services and upkeep of both the building and the unit, etc.  Some of the underlying factors are also related to the personality and preferences of the apartment residents.  But generally speaking interpersonal communication among the residents of tall apartment buildings, in dense urban areas, is not as close or as frequent as it is among residents in single family dwellings in smaller rural communities.

The comparative infrequency of interpersonal contact among residents who live in dwellings so closely packed together is a puzzling phenomenon.  Perhaps it is due to the fact that people are drawn together personally by forces other than the occupancy of neighbouring dwellings.  Occasionally the same personal remoteness exists between the next-door-neighbours in single family dwellings.  On the other hand it may be due to the fact that each resident’s concern over property matters ends at the property line but matters of personal interest lie beyond the property line and persons with compatible interests must be found elsewhere. 

It may be that the concept of a ground floor private park – in which the identity of ownership of each individual apartment unit is erased and extended to the mutual ownership of the entire atrium - offers an environment in which the personal concern of the individual resident can find some basis of mutual interest among the co-owners of the atrium garden.  Again, much will depend on the furnishings and the management of the property.  But even if the extension of mutual interests isn’t fully achieved by the large attractive common private garden it would neverthe-less provide a very pleasant place to spend time away from the confines of the apartment in the broader ambience of a landscaped private park, perhaps even to discover mutual concern among some of the other resident - visitors to the park.

The total floor area of the ground floor is approximately 10,000 square feet.  The area of the atrium is approximately 2,800 sq.ft. and that of the exterior roof garden is about 2,600 sq.ft.  Taken together the combined area of the atrium and the roof garden is about 5,400 sq.ft.  which is approximately half of the total ground floor area.  All the dwelling units have exterior privacy areas, i.e. patios or balconies.

In addition to the possibility of finding new friends and better interpersonal relationships the atrium offers a park to the residents all year round and the roof garden offers that amenity during the seasons when weather is appropriate.  The spiritual bond between the residents and the natural environment is thereby strengthened and maintained throughout the entire year and is a constant attribute of that specifically created residential–garden complex environment.

By Dr. Earl A. Levin

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"When the Cities Lie at the Monster's Feet..." Do We Need to Destroy Society to Save the Earth?

In my previous post, I cited the work of Derrick Jensen, who, in his massive two-volume book Endgame  holds that civilizations cannot, in fact, be sustainable -- or, indeed, redeemed. Every aspect of what we refer to as civilization is in his view merely a form of violence and domination. His work is based on twenty premises, two of which are:

"Civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilization, and probably the planet) collapses. The effects of this degradation will continue to harm humans and nonhumans for a very long time...The longer we wait for civilization to crash—or the longer we wait before we ourselves bring it down—the messier will be the crash, and the worse things will be for those humans and nonhumans who live during it, and for those who come after."

Therefore, according to Jensen, civilization must be “brought down” by whatever means necessary before it destroys the global biosphere and with it, humanity.

In the summer 2009 issue of EnlightenNext, Alex Steffen of WorldChanging muses on just this prospect. Citing the poetry of Robinson Jeffers, (as quoted in the title to this post) Steffen wonders if there's any point to letting civilization go on. He describes how, parking along the Colorado River one night, he imagines letting civilization crash, and, in his words, "watch it burn and build[ing] something newer, stronger, cleaner in the ashes."

This is precisely what Jensen argues for in his books: resistance to and the destruction of the material and political structures of our civilization. However tempting this vision may be to some ecologists, though, Steffen argues that such an accomplishment would have horrific consequences:

"Real apocalypses are sordid, banal, insane. If things do come unraveled, this presents not a golden opportunity for lone wolves and well-armed geeks, but a reality of babies with diarrhea, of bugs and weird weather and just everywhere, of never enough to eat, of famine and starving, hollow-eyed people, of drunken soldiers full of boredom and self-hate, of random murder and rape and wars that accomplish nothing, of many fine things lost for no reason and nothing of any value gained. And survivalists, if they actually manage to avoid becoming the prey of larger groups, sitting bitter and cold and hungry and paranoid, watching their supplies run low and wishing they had a clean bed and some friends. Of all the lies we tell ourselves, this is the biggest: that there is any world worth living in that involves the breakdown of society."

Not all extreme ecologists seek this breakdown. As Murray Bookchin has pointed out in his writings, there are some "eco-brutalist" Deep Ecologists who, instead of advocating tearing down existing structures of power to save the Earth, believe even more draconian structures will be necessary to force humanity to dial down its attack on the ecosphere, primarily through extreme forms of population control. Deep ecologists, Bookchin argues, have adopted a highly misanthropic outlook that includes, (in addition to government-led population control) the pointlessness of foreign aid to famine-stricken nations and the need for stricter anti-immigration policies.

However, a healthy and socially just human society is integral to resolving the ecological crisis. As such, Bookchin also argues against an ecologically-inspired crusade against human society, for it, too, is a part of nature:

"Human society, in fact, constitutes a 'second nature,' a cultural artifact, out of 'first nature,' or primeval nonhuman nature. There is nothing wrong, unnatural, or ecologically alien about this fact ...This second nature is uniquely different from first nature in that it can act thinkingly, purposefully, willfully, and depending up on the society we examine, creatively in the best ecological sense or destructively in the worst ecological sense...Taken together, all of these human traits---intellectual, communicative, and social---have not only emerged from natural evolution and are inherently human; they can also be placed at the service of natural evolution to consciously increase biotic diversity, diminish suffering, foster the further evolution of new and ecologically valuable life-forms, and reduce the impact of disastrous accidents or the harsh effects of mere change."

In other words (and contrary to the propositions of Derrick Jensen) it is in our nature to have the capacity to save nature -- willingly, and within the constructs of our societies. Like Bookchin, ecotheologian Thomas Berry also believes we are genetically coded as such (akin to Edward O. Wilson's Biophilia hypothesis), and have the potential to undertake what he refers to as "The Great Work". In the words of Stephanie Kaza,

"{Berry argues for] a reinventing of the human—with critical reflection, rethinking, readapting, and reevaluating our role in the universe. The challenge is enormous, impossible in its scale. Berry urges us to confront the 'profound cultural disorientation' of the deep entrancement with industrial civilization. Rethinking ethics is a place to begin, but ultimately a deep cultural therapy is required, one which will overthrow the governing dream of the twentieth century. For Berry, the most powerful recipe for liberation is awakening to the grandeur and sacred quality of the Earth process. This awakening is 'our human participation in the dream of the Earth, the dream that is carried in its integrity not in any of Earth's cultural expressions but in the depths of our genetic coding.' (The Great Work, p. 165).

(Myself? I wouldn't be in the business of city planning if I thought civilization had a terminal disease requiring euthanasia. Like most environmentalists,  I just hope I can contribute to the "cultural therapy"...)

Michael Dudley

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A Sustainable Civilization?

In his book Macro History, Lee Daniel Snyder describes civilization as a

 Culture-System…in a continuous process of 1) preserving…the integrity of its shared behavior patterns, against internal disintegration…and 2) adapting its structures to changing historical circumstances (p. 50).

The crisis of climate change is a result of historical and contemporary global civilizational arrangements that enable some broadly-shared behaviour patterns (e.g., a culture of industrialized mass consumption) that are quite incapable of being sustained indefinitely. Our “culture-system” cannot both preserve such behaviours and survive; nor can it “adapt its structures” to the “changing historical circumstances” of climate change without meaningfully disrupting these “shared behaviour patterns.”

How, then, can our “Culture-System” be made more sustainable? Will the transition to a post-carbon society be achieved through more sustainable city-building, or will it need to involve a reappraisal of the nature of our civilization?

I suggest that if our efforts to “colonize the future” are to be viable, they must, following Guy & Marvin (1999) be much more modest in their claims for the sustainable city (p. 272). While the prescriptions for the sustainable city are indeed important and essential components of a sustainable future, they do not, in and of themselves, comprise the ingredients of a sustainable civilization.

In his forward to the book Natural Advantage of Nations Alan Atkisson sets out his principles for a sustainable civilization, including the complete redevelopment of our energy systems, building technologies and agriculture as well as the preservation of the world's remaining species and ecosystems in the context of long-lasting international peace. Yet we can see that these principles, while admirable, are not in themselves the ingredients for a successful civilization. Indeed, given the revolutionary nature of these prescriptions, an already successful civilization – one with sufficiently sustainable social, political and economic structures – would be a prerequisite for carrying them out.

Derrick Jensen, in his massive two-volume book Endgame (2006) holds that civilizations cannot, in fact, be sustainable -- or, indeed, redeemed. Every aspect of what we refer to as civilization is in his view merely a form of violence and domination and therefore must be “brought down” by whatever means necessary before it destroys the global biosphere and with it, humanity.

In his classic 1961 book The City in History, Lewis Mumford acknowledged these violent “unbuilding” tendencies inherent in metropolitan civilization, but stressed that the will to dominate, control and exterminate that originally came with the institution of kingship and forms of political hierarchy have always coexisted with life-affirming reciprocal relationships, spiritual aspirations, arts and learning. These contradictions are expressed in the web of our social, religious, economic, cultural, political and, yes, spatial arrangements.

Therefore, any vision for a sustainable civilization must address this contradiction directly, and not be confined solely to spatial planning and technological considerations. For, while spatial patterns can impose constraints on these arrangements, they are not synonymous with them.

As I pointed out in a previous post, too often the prescriptions for sustainable cities are overly technical and instrumental, and essentially divorce the city from the currents of civilization, thus making impossible the articulation of alternate political arrangements. If we are to have truly sustainable cities and a habitable future, these currents and arrangements must be more vigorously contemplated, articulated and pursued. 

In Snyder’s (1999) definition of civilization we may discover a useful model: that of a resilient civilization “adapt[ing] its structures to changing historical circumstances” (p. 50) – provided that such structures are not comprised merely of mortar and stone. 

Michael Dudley

(This posting is adapted from a paper given at the 39th conference of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations, Kalamazoo Michigan, June 4th 2009).

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Problematizing the "Sustainable City"

There is a growing consensus that climate change represents one of the greatest challenges to the project of civilization we have ever faced. Not only would abrupt climate change be ecologically devastating, it threatens to be a significant new source of war and conflict. In order that some of the causes and consequences of this threat may be partially addressed, the urban planning literature has in recent years promoted various schemes for "sustainable cities." Frequently cited elements of the sustainable city include increasing urban density, building mass transit, improving cycling infrastructure, building "green" structures and investing in renewable energy. The form of the city is seen as a vital means of reducing energy consumption and the production of greenhouse gases. Sustainability has become one of our era's most deeply embedded meta-narratives.

Yet these and other conceptions of the sustainable city and sustainable development in general have come under some criticism, not so much in terms of their practical merits but for the ideological deficiencies and unwarranted assumptions common to the literature in which they are espoused. For example, architect Jeffrey Inaba criticizes so-called “sustainable” architecture for inspiring minimal scrutiny and resulting in “regressive urban environments”. On socio-political grounds, Guy & Marvin (1999) note that the literature's emphasis on technological solutions brings with it a concomitantly narrow conception of contemporary social relations, while Adrian Atkinson in his Cities Afer Oil series finds that, owing to the profound distributive issues at stake "there are philosophical/moral issues to be considered...before it is possible to think of physical (planning) solutions" (p. 203).

Peter Marcuse framed this problem succinctly when he observed (1997) "sustainability is not enough", and indeed is, strictly speaking not even desirable, as the conditions of the poor both “cannot be sustained [and] should not be sustained” (p. 106). An especially common fault with this discourse, according to Guy & Marvin (1999) is its "singular" vision of what a sustainable city would look like, and reducing it to a list of so-called "best practices," the realization of which requires a prescribed set of technological advances which are regarded with "determinist and celebratory" praise (p.270).

Sustainable city discourse is also criticized for its sheer inadequacy in the face of the actual threats facing humanity. Adrian Atkinson warns in his aforementioned Cities After Oil series that we are facing nothing short of societal collapse when globalization breaks down as energy supplies dwindle, forcing a dramatic reduction in scale of all human activities. Yet, he argues, all attempts to articulate a "sustainable city" have failed to meet the challenges he describes. Atkinson shows how sustainable city discourse has emerged from an Occidental world view of progress that mediates against the adherence to natural limits. All current trends, he believes, point to an exhaustion of fossil-based energy sources and an inexorable collapse of modern society. A few generations following such a collapse might render unrecognizable any vestige of our civilization as we know it, a fate for which the sustainability discourse has done little to prepare us.

The threat that dramatic climate change poses to our global civilization is such that we need to consider whatever ameliorative measures we can. However, because spatial planning intimately connects to multiple levels of social and power relations it is essential that changes to the city undertaken under the exigencies of crisis are done so in such a way that we avoid to the extent possible injustice and other unanticipated negative consequences.

Michael Dudley

(This posting is adapted from a paper given at the 39th conference of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations, Kalamazoo Michigan, June 4th 2009).

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Guest Post: The Problem of Parks Provision in High-Density Areas

The high densities we see in many urban residential developments leave very little land for adjacent gardens or planting. Yet the need for emotional comfort which the natural environment has traditionally provided is still a human requirement, and various measures have been adopted to try to satisfy this need. Public parks became the principal item in the new world of massive, high-density urban structures which sought to retain the primary bond between the human spirit and the natural environment. 

Other items included in the urban development program to reduce the harsh appearance of the concrete asphalt street systems was to line them on both sides (and sometimes down their centre lines as well) with trees and other smaller plantings. The effect of these measures is quite remarkable. One has only to move down any street on which the dwellings front directly on the street and are separated from the paved street only by a fence, and then move onto a different street where such trees and other plantings have been located and the contrast is astonishing. The bare, unplanted street is not only visually repellent but emotionally depressing, creating the impression of an impoverished community. On the planted street the immediate view is that of the lush foliage, and the emotional uplift which comes with that view is a sense of community balance and bonding with the natural appearance.  

Regrettably the efforts of city councils to provide an adequate supply of parks and landscaped open spaces have not been very successful. Access to these spaces is not easy for residents in the high-rise residential towers in our urban centres. This is especially true for elderly residents. Some relief has been found in the provision of outdoor balconies or decks which are directly accessible from the living rooms of many apartments in the residential towers. These balconies are usually open-aired and the residents generally provide trays of flowers and other plants and decorative items on them so that they can enjoy this glimpse of the natural environment while relaxing in their deck chairs. Access to the public parks and playgrounds however is not easy, particularly for the elderly and children. Transportation is often required to and from these facilities and may not always be readily available.

One approach to resolving these difficulties has been to try to provide an open-space area adjacent to the residential towers but this has rarely been successful. Part of the problem in this approach has been the fact that the construction of the residential towers on the one hand, and the provision of public open space, on the other hand, are the responsibilities of completely different authorities. The design and construction of the residential buildings is in the hands of the private developers and the design and construction of public parks and other recreation facilities is in the hands of the city council through its parks division. The objective of the private developer is to ensure that the residential project is completed and occupied within the limits of original financial analysis; the public parks authority is limited by the availability of land in a desired location and the cost of acquiring that land. The private developer is limited by the market demand for their product, the head of the city’s parks division is limited by the overall demands on the city council’s budget.

It seems an irresolvable dilemma. And yet it has been resolved on a few occasions. Those occasions occurred when the responsibility for both the apartment project and the related park were in the hands of a single authority and that authority was the private developer. The occasions when this occurred were very few and far between. But they did happen. However they did not often combine the two components – the park and the residences – very successfully. But even if they were not entirely successful they indicated that a more satisfactory level of success may be possible if the dilemma of the differing responsibilities can be solved. In the next post, I will suggest one means of addressing this barrier.

Written by Dr. Earl A. Levin

Photo: (Top): Nagyman; (Bottom): Tommy Weir (flickr.com)

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Guest Post: Urbanism and Our Bonds with Nature

In the beginning, when human beings first began to walk on the Earth in communal groups, their primary objective was survival. In order to maintain life, food was the fundamental necessity. Fortunately for the species their habitat was the natural environment and in the natural environment there was enough food both in quantity and variety to sustain them. They were hunters and gatherers and the necessary foods for their sustenance, as well as the basic materials for the provision of garments and of shelter were adequately available in the natural environment, which was their habitat. Under adverse weather conditions which must have been part of the normal environmental occurrence they sometimes were able to take shelter in vacant caves. If such shelters were not available, they could put together sufficient cover from tree branches and animal hides to serve the immediate shelter purposes. The natural environment was the fundamental source of all the requirements to sustain life and support its continuity. All of these requirements were of a physical nature – food, garments, shelter etc. They were so basic to the survival of the species that ultimately and inevitably there evolved a firm bond between the species and their natural environmental habitat. It would be appropriate to regard this connection between the early humans and their natural environmental habitat as a physical bond.

There was, however, another type of bond which ultimately evolved between humans and their natural environment. The basis for this other environmental connection was the emotional reaction to phenomena that occurred in the natural environment and which were perceived visually or audibly but had nothing to do with their sustenance requirements. The phenomena of night and day and those events which occurred in the sky above involving the sun, the moon, the stars, sunsets, lightning, the awesome presence of mountains, the landscape elements of lakes and rivers, the foliage of the trees, the recurring colour and scent of the seasonal floral growth, all of them evoked a sense of wonder, of visual pleasure, of breathtaking awe and self-identity. They were moved by these events to the realization that their habitat had other dimensions to it and their own visceral pleasure in experiencing these mysterious phenomena ultimately found its way into the basic sub-stratum of the various religions of the world. The bond with the emotional components of their habitat can be regarded as the spiritual bond while the bond which nourished their physical existence can be regarded as the physical bond. Through the emergence of these two types of bonding the personal relationships between the individual human beings in any group were strong, warm and commanding.

These close individual relationships among group members probably declined as the physical and spiritual bonds were loosed by emerging new lifestyles and population growth and increasing population densities. As technologies advanced and the production of human food moved from the primal source and methods to agriculture and manufacture, the bonding between humans and the natural environment in which they lived also underwent changes. The greatest change was, of course, in the production of food – that is, in the physical bond. With the advances in agricultural production and processing the hunters and gatherers were replaced by the farmers and ranchers who produced the foodstuffs in their grain and cattle farms and ranches.  The acreages involved in these new food technologies were large but it was customary on most farms to reserve some small part of the acreage to grow items that continued the spiritual bond with the natural environment, although in a modified form. Space was usually provided on most farms for shrubs, bushes, ornamental trees, fruit trees and fruits and vegetables. The bond with the natural environment was maintained in its spiritual sense as well as in its physical sense although both in greatly modified form.

Eventually the profound changes which were occurring in virtually every branch of technology produced correspondingly profound changes in the lifestyles of people which resulted in the inevitable movement of population from rural areas to urban areas. At an early stage in this urbanization the new resident population was housed in single-family dwellings. It was typical of these dwellings that they were built on lots with some space left as front yards and back yards. It was also typical that the occupants of the dwellings planted grass and gardens in these yards in a way reminiscent of the plantings which the farmers of a preceding era had put into the spare acreages of their grain or cattle farms.

However, it was not long before the low-density urbanization of our cities became a flood of high-density development with a heavy concentration of rental apartments and condominiums in the central areas. The resulting isolation of people from their former close connections with nature has come at a price. In future posts I will discuss how modern urban developments have sought, with varying degrees of success, to address this problem.

Written by Dr. Earl A. Levin

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The Long 9/11: The Economic Crisis and the Fate of the New World Trade Center

As the foreclosure crisis and subsequent economic meltdown have devastated America's cities, it is perhaps unsurprising that observers are evoking the 9/11 attacks to try to describe what they are seeing.

Recently, Tom Engelhardt likened the impact of the economic crisis on New York to a dirty bomb or a "second 9/11", taking the reader on a tour of what remains of his once-vibrant New York neighborhood:

"Broadway in daylight now seems increasingly like an archeological dig in the making. Those storefronts with their fading decals ("Zagat rated") and their old signs look, for all the world, like teeth knocked out of a mouth. In a city in which a section of Broadway was once known as the Great White Way for its profligate use of electricity, and everything normally is aglow at any hour, these dead commercial spaces feel like so many tiny black holes. Get on the wrong set of streets -- Broadway's hardly the worst -- and New York can easily seem like a creeping vision of Hell, not as fire but as darkness slowly snuffing out the blaze of life."

Similarly, the use of the term "ground zero" in regards to the mortgage crisis has become so commonplace that any number of U.S. cities lay claim to the title. Orange County has earned the name because of its onetime concentration of subprime lenders, but Dayton Ohio, Cleveland and Orlando are all apparently "ground zero" for the present crisis, with waves of abandoned houses and displaced residents.  

Now it has been announced that the latest casualty of the economic crisis is the actual Ground Zero itself: a Port Authority study has concluded that the remaining two towers on the former World Trade Center site will not be rebuilt for years, perhaps decades. 

At first glance, this might appear ironic -- that a crisis being described using the rhetoric of 9/11 would in turn derail the rebuilding of the very site that gave rise to the rhetoric itself. It might, that is, if one views these events as distinct. They are not.

The destruction of the World Trade Center was exploited relentlessly by the Bush administration and its partisans in the media and Wall Street to promote a radical and rapacious campaign of aggressive foreign wars and the looting of domestic wealth. Any opposition, dissent or questioning of these policies was labelled as treasonous, even akin to terrorism; for all these policies could be justified with reference to the mourned crater in lower Manhattan. 

Now, between the costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, domestic tax cuts and exotic, unregulated forms of financial thuggery, the American economy has been shattered. The debris -- scattered across the nation in hundreds of communities -- includes abandoned homes, homeless families, shuttered businesses and halted construction projects. 

Among them, the new World Trade Center. 

The Bush Administration and those who blindly supported them in everything they did must now bear part of the responsibility for the perhaps fatal harm done to this site, this symbol they so fervently exploited in their ruthless campaign to reshape the country and the world. 

Bush may or may not have been able to prevent the destruction of the original World Trade Center. But his policies since may well have made its full reconstruction impossible.    

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"A Bar Street" -- Not so Cool

On Sunday, April 12th, the Winnipeg Free Press ran a ridiculous op-ed by University of Manitoba film student Jeff Schellenberg entitled "A Bar Street - Cool!" While the piece runs for 843 words, its essence may be gleaned by its opening sentences:

"I think Winnipeg needs a bar street. Wouldn't a bar street be cool? Imagine -- one small street with nothing but bars...Winnipeg city council should construct a bar street."

Never mind that the author clearly has no idea how urban development actually happens (city council can authorize and fund public works like bus rapid transit, but cannot "construct" a strip of private businesses). 

No, what is truly astonishing about the piece is the complete failure of its author to understand the nature of good city life. The key to successful urbanism is diversity. A range of stores, shops, apartments, houses, restaurants and -- yes -- bars and nightclubs are the ingredients for a successful urban district that people will want to live in and come back to on a regular basis.

By contrast, Schellenberg's vision -- in his words, "one small street with nothing but bars" -- would be a social and economic disaster. The sheer concentration of venues for alcohol would mean that the "social interaction" he promotes would likely deteriorate fairly regularly into anti-social interactions such as brawls, to say nothing of being a magnet for prostitution and drug dealing. Inevitably, the negative spillover into surrounding neighbourhoods would lead to declining property values and the abandonment of the area by families.

As well, a strip with a concentration of any one kind of business is deadly for urban economic vitality as it does not have 24-hour use (heaven forbid) and would be vulnerable to changes in the wider economy.

Yes, Mr. Schellenberg, a bar street certainly would "radically change the reputation of this city." I'm sorry that you feel there is nothing in this city you can take pride in. Perhaps when you are a little older and no longer haunting pubs you'll see that this is actually a pretty terrific -- and diverse -- city.

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Towards Ecologically Literate Universities

Nearly 20 years ago, David Orr gave a famous commencement address in which he chastised our educational institutions for turning out endless streams of ecologically illiterate graduates:

"In the modern curriculum we have fragmented the world into bits and pieces called disciplines and subdisciplines. As a result, after 12 or 16 or 20 years of education, most students graduate without any broad integrated sense of the unity of things. The consequences for their personhood and for the planet are large. For example, we routinely produce economists who lack the most rudimentary knowledge of ecology. This explains why our national accounting systems do not subtract the costs of biotic impoverishment, soil erosion, poisons in the air or water, and resource depletion from gross national product. We add the price of the sale of a bushel of wheat to GNP while forgetting to subtract the three bushels of topsoil lost in its production. As a result of incomplete education, we've fooled ourselves into thinking that we are much richer than we are."

Since then, this illusion of wealth has dissolved, and this "incomplete education" is surely one of the core factors behind our global economy's present dissolution, overseen as it has been by a degreed and credentialed elite emerging from the world's finest educational institutions. At the same time the perceived disconnection of this economy from the ecosystems on which it depends has only gotten more profound, in particular concerning its dependency on ever-diminishing supplies of oil.

Educator Jason Peters, writing in Orion magazine, believes that our cultural myopia about our civilizations' tenuous existence is largely owed to the fact that most academics are not just peddlers of ecological illiteracy but are actually destroyers of place:

"[Those] of us with impeccable academic credentials...are the confessors of an educational creed that dismisses the value of the domestic arts and sends graduates out into a world of surrendered skills and purchased necessities. We are the diploma retailers who have allowed students to assume that the machines and the ungraduated will supply all their real needs. We have let these students major in Getting Ahead. We have strip-mined the local talent, converted it into 'graduates,' and shipped it to Big Important Places. Deracinated and deracinating vandals that we are, chasers of whatever grant money inflates our egos, we have taught students to be as we are: citizens of every place, which is to say citizens of no place—that is, not citizens at all, but parasites."

To begin to resolve this damage, Peters proposes that the University needs to take up a new function: that of actually connecting students and faculty to the community and the natural region in which it exists. Much as David Orr advised that all education needs to be environmental education, Peters envisions the academy as an anchor to nature:

"On every campus we need large, highly visible vegetable gardens that are tended by everyone who likes to eat; cafeterias that provide, insofar as they can, only local foods; compost heaps steaming next to these cafeterias to remind us to pay our debt to the soil. We need administrators committed to dismantling, not enlarging, our vast system of technological dependencies, and professors committed to living defensibly and responsibly and competently before their students. Our foreign studies programs must become local studies programs."

There are encouraging signs that universities are coming around: Many universities are engaging in ambitious environmental objectives, including efforts to reduce energy consumption and their waste streams.

However, authors R. Michael M'Gonigle, Justine Starke and Briony Penn believe much more is needed. In their 2006 book Planet U, they position the University as a necessary linchpin in the transition to an ecologically balanced society. Universities, they write, have often been at the forefront of social and political change. Campus protests in the 1960s, for example, helped turn the American public against the war in Vietnam. Now, however, we are facing a deepening global crisis and the very institutions most needed to address it are exacerbating it through their failure to make the necessary connections between their mission and the problems we face. As they put it, "a gap exists between what we learn for tomorrow and what tomorrow needs from us today" (p.12).

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A Farewell to Cities and Civilization on Battlestar Galactica

An occupying force trying to mould an alien society in its own image. A government co-opted to act as a puppet regime for the occupying army. Civilians recruited to serve on behalf of the occupiers to hunt down terrorists and saboteurs. Resistance fighters striking back and recruiting suicide bombers to kill their fellow citizens en masse in punishment for collaborating.

An uninitiated television viewer tuning in to see this war unfold, and to watch hand-held camera footage of armed soldiers wearing night-vision goggles and kicking in doors to search for terrorists, would be surprised indeed to learn they were not watching a documentary about the American occupation of Iraq, but rather an episode from the third season of the remarkable science fiction series Battlestar Galactica.

Except of course that American audiences were now required to sympathize with the terrorists, to recognize the cynical justifications of an occupation force, and to understand – if not condone – the motivations of the suicide bomber. None of which would likely have been possible for most audience members had it been a show about the war in Iraq. But as cast in the fictional universe of a civilization adrift in space pursued by robots and synthetic humans of its own making, it became fascinating and compelling television. 

On March 20^th the series came to a spectacular yet downbeat conclusion -- as it turns out, one day after the 6^th anniversary of the launching of the “shock and awe” campaign against Iraq. 

When it debuted in 2003 the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica (BSG to its fans) faced a skeptical world, one half-incredulous that anyone would bother to remake that cheesy warmed-over Star Wars clone from the late ‘70s.

What a shock it was, then, to see the new series emerge as a deliberate and uncompromising attempt to confront the aftermath of the September 11^th attacks and the “war on terror.” From its inception as a mini-series in which humanity is all but wiped out in a sneak attack by a seemingly inhuman enemy, to its almost unrelievedly bleak portrait of a civilization trying to retain its fundamental values in the face of an ongoing threat – and often failing spectacularly – Battlestar Galactica has acted as nothing less than a kind of immersive therapy for post-9/11 America.

Over the past four seasons (spread out over six years) BSG has been widely praised for its outstanding writing and its willingness to tackle – in a fashion almost unheard of on American television – almost every imaginable contemporary controversy you can name. As C.W. Marshall and Tiffany Potter note in their book Cylons in America,

"Indeed, one can almost make a checklist of contemporary issues that the series explores. Plots turn on abortion and reproductive rights, torture and prisoner rights, unions and worker rights, racial division, suicide bombing and terrorism, prostitution, drugs, election fraud, the separation of church and state, the underground economy, police violence and genocide" (p.6)¹

Perhaps one of the few issues not tackled by the show was homosexuality, which was refreshingly treated as completely unremarkable and non-controversial.

The identification of the show with these and other important issues is so widely recognized that the day before the series finale several members of the BSG cast and production crew were invited to speak at the United Nations Creative Community Outreach Initiative, at which delegates watched clips from the show and discussed their moral implications. Craig Mokhiber from the U.N.’s office of the high commissioner for human rights was quoted as saying, "We are all Cylons, every one of us is a Cylon, every one of us is a colonial. And you have to get rid of the idea of good guys and bad guys, because the truth is today I may be victimized and tomorrow I may be a victimizer."

BSG gained this impressive reputation for its refusal to moralize or instruct the audience how to feel about these issues. The deeply flawed and troubled crew of Galactica as led by Admiral Adama (Edward James Olmos) and the civilian president of its fleet President Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell) must face a morally ambiguous universe and make their own choices. Just like us.

That these characters are just like us is driven home by the series’ naturalism and realism. They are not from Earth but come from ‘12 Colonies’ including the oft-seen planet Caprica, which is depicted by location shooting in Vancouver, British Columbia. Apart from a few establishing shots of some futuristic buildings and the occasional spaceship in the sky, almost no effort is made to have their culture appear in any way alien from ours or futuristic. Their clothes, homes, cars, technology, food and interior decorating are wholly familiar to us. 

So when we see this society destroyed, its loss is all the more real; further, when we see the grieving survivors of the colonies setting up a makeshift shrine in the hallways of Galactica using photos and other mementos of their loved ones, the audience’s own memories of similar shrines on the streets of Manhattan is instantly evoked. Over the course of the series the characters return there repeatedly, reminding us both of their losses and ours.  

It is this continual and courageous confrontation with the impacts of war, terrorism and torture that has made BSG such essential viewing. While many conservatives latched on to the show early on for its depiction of a civilization under attack by a fanatical, monotheistic enemy, any attempt to identify “good guys” in the Galactica universe was quickly scotched. The show’s main characters have at one time or another plotted to steal elections, tortured, killed civilians, committed acts of terrorism and betrayed one another and their government. Indeed, most of the “humans” we have identified with were revealed to be artificial humanoid Cylon sleeper agents, yet fully retain our sympathies. BSG has constantly challenged the audience to question what it means to be human, to reflect on how easy it is to dehumanize others in a time of war, and to understand how war itself dehumanizes us.

This was particularly true at the end of the show’s second season, in which the fleet had settled on a world they called “New Caprica,” only to be discovered by the Cylons, who swiftly invaded, imposed total control over the humans and co-opted the weak and selfish then-President Gaius Baltar (James Callis) to be their Vichy leader. In the third season, most of the main characters formed a secret resistance force while the Cylons, publicly stating their intention to create a unified, peaceful New Caprica, recruited humans to serve in the civilian police force, and used them to hunt down the resistance fighters and imprison them. Later it turns out that the characters leading the resistance were, in fact, all (unknowingly) Cylons themselves.

This continual upturning of expectations, destruction of moral certitudes and identification with the “other” only intensified in the fourth season when the long-sought planet Earth – the mythical “13^th Colony” – was finally discovered, only to be revealed to be a blackened ruin from a 2,000 year old nuclear war. With the loss of this final myth – the one thing that had held Galactica and the fleet together through their desperate flight though space – human society began to unravel badly. Morale cratered, people turned on one another violently, and a mutiny and coup erupted. Even the very structure of Galactica itself started to give way, and the ship is largely evacuated for a rebel Cylon base ship.

In last week’s finale, however, it was revealed that this irradiated “Earth” was not the one we live on, but rather a completely different world known to the Colonials by that name. Our planet shows up in the final hour – inhabited by spear-carrying hominids – and is dubbed “Earth” in memory of the lost, destroyed colony.

But by this time the humans and Cylons alike have apparently lost any faith in the project of civilization. Convinced that rebuilding their cities and returning to their former social structures will lead once again to self-destruction, both peoples scatter in small groups across Earth. Sadly, the show’s main characters even decline to remain part of any community at all but go off on alone or in pairs to live as hunter-gatherers or farmers.

Flash forward 150,000 years later and the series closes with images of our own gigantic cities and the latest advances in robotics. Despite the Colonists’ chosen isolation many millennia ago, civilization has returned, with all its glories and injustices. True to the series’ spirit producer Ron Moore and his writers leave open to interpretation whether or not we will avert the fate of the 13 Colonies. What is less clear is if they share their characters’ cynical fatalism about civilization – that all attempts at forming human societies are necessarily doomed, and should therefore be avoided.

For four seasons we have heard the Colonists’ religious precept that “all this has happened before and will happen again.” In this portrait of cyclical histories, appeals to the supernatural to explain events and leaving open the hope that something will emerge to prevent history from repeating itself, BSG (perhaps unwittingly) adopted a highly Toynbeean view of its universe. As such, it’s worth reminding ourselves what the great Arnold J. Toynbee wrote on this theme in his classic A Study of History, which was written at the close of World War II but seems equally applicable now:

 “A civilization is not like an animal organism, condemned by an inexorable destiny to die after traversing a pre-determined life course. [A] succession of catastrophic events on a steeply mounting gradient inevitably inspires a dark doubt about our future, and this doubt threatens to undermine our faith and hope at a critical 11^th hour which calls for the utmost exertion of these saving spiritual faculties. Here is a challenge that we cannot evade, and our destiny depends on our response.”²

In this light, the entire four-year run of Battlestar Galactica may be read as a meditation on Toynbee’s assertion that “civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” Following years of technological hubris, near-genocide, tyranny, competing attempts at theocracies and civil war, Colonial and Cylon civilizations were quietly allowed to expire, in the belief that civilization itself was at the root of their suffering. As we face our own calamities of crashing economies, deepening wars, decaying democracies and a planet becoming ever-less forgiving of our excesses, we would be well advised to heed Toynbee, who, to the contrary, would argue that it is when a society faces its most severe crises that our “faith and hope” in the project of civilization are needed most.

 

1. Marshall , C.W. and Potter, Tiffany. (2007). Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica. New York: Contiuum.

2. Toynbee, Arnold. (1987). A Study of History. (Abridged). New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 553-4.

 

 

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