Saturday, October 06, 2007

LAUN-CHair tomorrow

Just a reminder that tomorrow (Sunday, October 7th)will be the first LAUNCH event! It is called LAUN-CHair and should be an interesting time. As you can see I got about as much cardboard as I could get into my car without totally impeding my driving ability.

I hope we can get some interesting people to attend, and don't forget some cardboard, tape and something to cut said cardboard with!

I would like to thank Buckeye Beer Engine and Design Rag for helping put this on with LAUNCH.

See you there.

Sprawl and Northeast Ohio - Thoughts and Impressions

Sprawl and Northeast Ohio
Case Western Reserve Presentation
Thoughts and Impressions
Sprawl Impressions .pdf

I am willing to openly admit that at first the idea of listening to a professor lecture that most arguments that expose the flaws of sprawl are unfounded and entirely questionable uncomfortable. Not unlike having someone start lecturing me on how their particular deity could offer salvation for my soul there was this inherent uncomfortable-ness. I knew I was to be in enemy territory, unarmed and alone and quite possibly I would not make it out alive.

As I read through some of the responses Robert Bruegmann's book Sprawl: a Compact History, I came to realize that my greatest fears could possibly be realized and no matter how painful, I may be the better off for it. The most common complaint was that Bruegmann was to attack the liberal literati elite, those that envision social urban engineering as a savior for solving our social woes and that sprawl, in itself, was nothing more then an exercise is self protection and economic collection. "There wasn't to be a large argument" I thought to myself "from which I would be exposed to ideas I wouldn't be able to accept".

It wasn't that I was wrong, I just wasn’t correct enough to remain complacent.

It is true, as some have claimed, that Mr. Breugmann took a stance that Cleveland's sprawl issues weren't as awful or as large a hindrance to the central city as one would imagine, however his contentions were backed by reasoning that at best I would consider spurious and at least I would call insulting. Granted Breugmann has a background in art history and not in urban planning, sociology, architecture, philosophy, economics, government or biology/ecology however not once was the mention how sprawl would influence master painting. Not once. This saddened me.

Now the reasoning for the time lapse that has been marked by the publication of this article is entirely due to attempting a way to form my impressions as well as to let the initial disappointment leave my opinion not as biased as it was for that past week. It was hard to decide on where exactly to begin so in my typical fashion I begin where I ought to, at the beginning.

I don’t remember much of what Robert looked like. I sat way in the back. There was a lot of traffic, I left the office later then I would have liked and the main road out in front of the campus building was under construction or complete removal. It would be hard to ascertain for certain. I do remember the following statements happening in quick succession. I apologize for my summation, I couldn’t write quickly enough to quote completely.

1- "I am not for or against sprawl; instead I am here to discuss how the arguments against sprawl are incorrect."
2- "…the main problem with sprawl is that there is a lack of agreed upon definition." – But then goes on to states that issues of sprawl is as old as cities.

These opening statements immediately set the tone as biased. Not even in a way that I could argue it was because I was already biased against the conversation. No, there was an order of logic here that was severely lacking. Let me adjudicate;

…one may not attempt to propose a state without bias by proposing that only one side lack fundamental grounding for their argument. That is inferring support for the opposing side of the argument by not allowing the basis of its perspective to be questioned or judged.

…one may not rely upon a lack of definition and then make a concrete statement that alludes to a completely understood and accepted definition of what sprawl is. How can something start for sure, when one doesn’t exactly understand WHAT it is?

I suppose that as soon as these statements were disseminated I immediately became guarded and perhaps overly defensive. What I am offering here are only my thoughts on comments that piqued enough of my attention and curiosity to be jotted down in my sketchbook. I suppose by now I should state that this is not meant to be a treatise or proper study of a simple presentation that may only appear lopsided due to time constraints or material being presented. Perhaps I took the entire thing out of context. I can't honestly be sure however I do believe that the lecture was video recorded and should be available online at some later date on Case Western Reserve University’s website.

For organizational purposes and try to shorten this I will list ideas that Robert presented and then extrapolate my reactions upon them. Again, I am summarizing his statements and in no way am intentionally altering them so as to strengthen my argument. I am actually too lazy to do that.

- From the comment that sprawl had existed for as long as there were cities, even counting Hadrian's villa as an example of sprawl sort of made me wonder then why rural areas weren’t considered more as "sprawl" as they obviously act as support for more urbanized and centralized areas (the provision of raw materials to be manufactured or processed). Sure they can be self sufficient but that wasn't offered as a criterion for not being considered. I suppose that as one examines the change in human social behavior from nomadic to agrarian to current one could ascertain that centralizing communities was in fact at first a reaction to existing disjointed and decentralized communities. It is almost as if we were naturally experiencing a "state of sprawl" and then collectively gathered for protection, maximize production, reproduction, etc and cities are actually the foreign ingredient to the mix. I would almost accept that line of thinking, that there is a natural tendency for people to exhibit what could be considered activities of "sprawl" as a means to harkens back to more basic instinctive fulfillment? Regardless, a palatial retreat pales as an exurb example when utilized as a way to justify the decades (centuries) or residential community decentralized development.
- Exurbia allows for all economic classes and then we were presented with a quick example of collective minority organic development. This really actually was probably the most interesting portion of the presentation and was covered to the depth which I had just passed on to you. Here was the potential of utilizing examples on self-gentrification or community social engineering that was missed and that I feel could lead to some rather interesting investigations into ethnic community growth and self identification as well as community policies and practices. Damn.
- There was this very pretty chart that showed that the automotive saturation point in the US has almost been reached and that European automotive use mirrored American auto use with a slight time delay. I believe it was being used to illustrate that as wealth increased people were moving to an automotive based culture and therefore sprawl was inevitable. The charts were based upon a comparison of auto ownership to "registered drivers". I question that survey sample and what it represents. That is similar to asking people with buses passes if they take the bus. Chances are when you are utilizing a specialized license it is being done so as to take part in the activity for which the license is required. Anecdotally, I am aware of quite a few people who only utilize state ID's since they do not own a car, do not need one and would rather not spend the extra money for the driver's license. I wonder if they were properly counted in the study.
- The comment was made that "Sprawl is rarely for the affluent with taste". I have no comment on that. I was just amazed it was said out loud at Case.
- There was some discussion on the word "sprawl" being coined after World War II ( think around 1955) for being used to describe cities spreading out into the countryside and the introduction of the "Garden City" (England) as a way to keep communities centralized and control the lose of green space. These examples were brought up to show that any way of controlling sprawl would inherently fail and would only increase commute time without adding any sort of the community pleasure of urban life who’s protection was being attempted. This was done without any sort of economic understanding of what the "garden city" was or was attempting to be; instead we were only presented with the creation of disparate bedroom communities completely severed from the urban infrastructure that was being relied upon for jobs and goods. At around this point Portland, Oregon was singled out as an American city which totally failed as controlling sprawl. I believe it was also at this point that the comments that public transit has continuously been losing ridership and do nothing to stitch the urban fabric together. It was also here that I realized that the presentation would consist of gross generalizations with some weak statistical analysis tossed in to support whatever oversimplified point was being alluded to. There is so much research to the contrary of these remarks that I find even contemplating offering a rebuttal tedious. Perhaps later that can be it's own response, for now just utilize Google and search for RTA Ridership, Public Transportation, or glance at census statistics for major urban areas and the surrounding exurbs which would mostly lead one down the path of understanding that decentralizing all services does little but remove a great portion of the tax base of the urban industrialized or commercial center and transplant it to the surrounding areas who may or may not share that funding. Then glance at education statistics, income, health and age gaps as compared to specific areas and I am pretty sure you could imagine what the housing stock, street width, utility infrastructure, etc would be before you visited. Then perhaps you could understand why cities such as Portland, Oregon are attempting to control expansive growth and cap development. The main problem with Portland is that the outlying suburbs don't follow similar rules and instead have developed the same typologies that all sprawl developments exhibit, decentralized commuter bedroom communities that lack any employment infrastructure and cannot support themselves if cut off from the urban core.
- A spurious accusation was made (perhaps just another generalization) that sprawl has a rather miniscule impact upon the local environment other then the possible dislocation of native plant and animal species. This didn't include emission from commuting vehicles nor the embodied energy to build the vehicles in the first place, the fact that most suburban homes are greatly oversized for the American family resulting in a larger use of raw materials, energy to refine the raw materials into construction materials, extensive increase of energy to heat or cool oversized homes which become little more then storage spaces for the collection of extraneous material goods (to fill them) which themselves took raw materials and energy to produce. Or, one could argue that by simply creating larger roof surfaces to capture and re-radiate the sun's energy that heat island effect is a measurable impact to the environment. Or runoff/groundwater pollution and control (think Painesville, Ohio) or decentralizing infrastructure to transmit power, water, roadways further distances then if everything existed in a collected area. There are really too many environmental arguments to make so I will defer some of those to later conversations as well.

The conclusions drawn by Bruegmann from his studies were that sprawl was a bad diagnostic tool for judging how well a city is doing, that it distracts from real urban problems and that shifting industry is to blame for many of the sprawl problems facing American cities (at least the older industrialized ones, such as Detroit and Cleveland).

It was also alluded to that Cleveland hasn’t much to worry about as the suburbs are getting denser with consolidation and infill as the overall population grows (is it?) and that city government should concentrate on maintaining infrastructure in order to capitalize on future opportunity.

My problem with those conclusions is that I honestly believe sprawl is a problem that does affect the urban core. Is displaces tax revenue that should be used for capital improvements and contributes to a declined urban educational system which results in families fleeing to the schools of the suburbs. I also don’t entirely accept that shifting industry can be only to blame; otherwise one could wonder how any city manages to maintain or even increase an urban population. If everything is constantly changing and no city could adapt then there wouldn’t be any cities (or at the very least they would be moving around all the time). I have no idea what city governments should do to rebuild the city. I suppose there is always "rebranding" or "redefining" but I don't believe that much can be accomplished until government streamlines it processes and clarifies its functions making it easier for businesses to operate and for citizens to utilize.

I also feel that many facets of community living were glossed over such as general aesthetics, social behaviors/patterns/needs, neighborhood/community development and economic development and requirements, all of which are important concerns regarding the degradation of urban cores and the migration of population to decentralized and unconnected neighborhoods.

I would like to thank Case Western Reserve University and Mr. Robert Breugmann for the lecture and forum from which this important and current topic was presented and while I find it hard to respect many of the conclusions that Mr. Breugmann alluded to I am excited by the possibility that perhaps he has gotten more people thinking about how any sort of gross overgeneralization, either for or against "sprawl" does little to advance solutions or offer possibility for specific change to counter the economic and social conflicts that exurban/suburban living have presented us.

Resources cited by Bruegmann:
Demographia
Wendall Cox

Friday, October 05, 2007

Kamm's Corners Farmers Market - Last Day of the Season!



Sunday, October 21st, 2007
Kamm's Corners Farmers Market's Last day of the season!

The season grand finale will be on October 21st and feature a number of special activities. John Kolar from Thyme The Restaurant (and part of the K & K Portage Market family) will be the guest celebrity chef and do a cooking demonstration at 11:00 a.m. Local market favorite Brand New Hat will entertain the crowd with their musical talents, and the West Park/Fairview YMCA will do a group cycling demonstration. Horse–drawn wagon rides will also be offered by YesterYear Horse & Carriage. Fun for all ages and only $1!

Resources:
Kamms Corners Farmers Market

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Ohio Solar Tour

Ohio Solar Tour
Friday - Sunday, October 5-7, 2007
Northeast Ohio Solar Tour Guide

Featuring tours of solar installations and home designed with passive and active solar systems in mind in Cleveland, East-of-Cleveland, Wayne County, Oberlin, Akron, Youngstown and Mansfield.

Take a Clean Energy Journey Across Ohio!
Every October, GEO organizes the Ohio Solar Tour in cooperation with
the American Solar Energy Society's (ASES) National Solar Tour and
fellow ASES chapters across the U.S.

Encompassing sustainable features beyond solar energy, the statewide
event features self-guided, guided or open house tours in all corners of
the state and highlights a growing list of over 200 sites with solar, wind, biomass, green design and energy-saving technologies and more. GEO produces an Ohio Renewable Energy Resource Magazine featuring case studies on renewable energy applications, a primer on the Ohio Solar Tour, and a directory of professionals & incentives to make clean energy work
for you. Local tour guidebooks will be published by September 2007 on all tours organized by GEO.


Resources:
2007 Ohio Renewable Energy Resource Guide
Green Energy Ohio

MAMA LIA Artwalk - Lakewood, Ohio

MAMA LIA Artwalk

Friday, October 5th, 2007
MAMA (Madison Avenue Merchants Association) and LIA (Lakewood is Art) are hosting the first Art Walk along Madison Avenue in Lakewood, Oh.
6pm - 10pm

Newly designated as another one of Cleveland's 'art districts' (I will not get mired in discussion that not EVERYTHING has to be classified as a 'district' or 'zone' or whatever, they can just be places that people like to go to, no matter what sort of 'masterplan' snake-oil is being sold) Lakewood, Ohio is celebrating it's arts and culture with the tried and true method of art walk exposure. I am actually pretty excited to wander around my homestead and seeing what the neighborhood has to offer as I look to relocate and re-atttempt a gallery/studio space.

There is no shortage of places to go or things to see! Below is just a sample...

1. Waddell Architects
17526 Madison Avenue
Oils by Savanah Farris, jewelry by Autumn
Shaffron and music at 8pm.

2. Chartruese
17300 Madison Avenue
Join founder Charity Ewanko, and designers Michelle
Zelasko and Jesse Ewanko at their swanky design
studio for a Show of their own designs.

3. Endress & Endress
17219 Madison Avenue

4. Pop Shop gallery
17020 Madison Avenue
3rd Annual Sugar Coated Show—Group Art Showing
with Reception.

5. Mullen’s of Lettrfrack
17014 Madison Avenue
Drink Specials with wristband from the Pop Shop.

6. Sprokets
17000 Madison Avenue
Photos by David Lay & Holly Whisman.

7. Pet’s General Store
16821 Madison Avenue
Custom creations by Dianne Stucky of Off the Wall
Pen and Ink Creations.

8. Office Space (next to Pet’s General Store)
16817 Madison Avenue
Artist Carol Langley.

9. Cuttin’ Loose Salon
16621 Madison Ave.

10. Joseph Davis Antiques
16426 Madison Avenue
Cowan Pottery exhibit and sale—free walk in
evaluations.

11. Vance Music Studios
16420 Madison Avenue
Live Music all evening!

12. Division of Aging-Lawther Center
16024 Madison Avenue
The Lawther Center presents artists from Gingham
Goose Gift Shop, West Shore Art League, Lakewood
Photographic Society and the Lakewood Art League.
Art will be available for purchase.

13. Goddess Blessed
15729 Madison Avenue
Open until 7pm—Stop in to pursue handcrafted
jewelry and art!

14. Custom Picture Framing
15723 Madison Avenue
Artist Mark Jenks will show his acrylic paintings of
abstract landscapes and mixed media.

15. Fuzion Martial Arts Center
15721 Madison Avenue
Owner, Brandon Robinson will host Students’ artwork
from Harding Middle School.

16. Class Act Resale Shoppe
15649 Madison Avenue
As the name would imply, owner Sharon Neura,
offers the very best in unique finds for the savvy and
thrifty shopper from Art to Clothing to Jewelry, etc...

17. Silhouette Dance, Too
15641 Madison Avenue
Proprietor, Donna Rakerd will be hosting a series of
dance workshops throughout the evening. All of the
dance styles will presented with a FREE lesson for
our visitors whenever they arrive. Also, come and
enjoy art from Students of Harding Middle School.

18. The Hockey Shop
15609 Madison Avenue
Music begins at 8pm.

19. Elements Hair Studio
15607 Madison Avenue
Art Show of works by Studio owner.

20. Salon Bravissimo
15516 Madison Avenue
Music at 7pm. Also, several jewelry artisans will be
selling their works of arts.

21. The Shop on Madison
15506 Madison Avenue
Original paintings and prints, art pottery, art glass and
home décor-colorful to elegant.

22. Blue Ribbon Screen Graphics
15504 Madison Avenue
Photography of classic rock stars. CDs, of local artists
including Michael Stanley and Alex Bevan. And a
Holiday favorite, Mr. Jingeling memorabilia.

23. Wobblefoot, Ltd.
1662 Mars Ave.
Meet and greet local and national artists. Live music.

24. Carabel Beauty Salon
15309 Madison Avenue
Free Nail Art and Face Painting all evening for the
Kids and kits that you can pick up for Halloween!

25. The Mission Boutique
14625 Madison Avenue
Present Art Walk map / flyer and receive 10% off.

26. Lakewood Fire Department
14601 Madison Avenue
From 6pm-8pm Fire Trucks will be on display for the
kids of all ages. While there, take a moment to visit
the Firefighter’s Memorial. A wood sculpture by artist
Nobert Koehn.

• Play it Again Sam
14311 Madison Avenue
Though the store will not be open this evening,
window-shopping is still an option, as a “mystery”
artist will show his work.

27. Sacred Arts Studio
13351 Madison Avenue
Barefoot Boogie from 6-10pm.

28. bela dubby
13321 Madison Avenue
Owners Jill and John Crino will host bands Marie
Curbo, Spanish Prisoners, and Brian Straw along
with art, coffee and beer. Music begins at 9pm.

29. Lakewood Public Library
13229 Madison Avenue
A piece of architecture history, the Branch opened
in 1921. The present structure was built in 1929
by Architects Walker and Weeks who also designed
the Federal Reserve Bank, Severance Hall and
Cleveland Public Library.

30. Mahall’s Bowling Alley
13200 Madison Avenue
Hungry to experience a piece of Americana? Try
bowling and a fish fry then turn your sites to this
wonderful little piece of vintage architecture.

31. Connie’s Collectibles
12603 Madison Avenue
Hosting local artists, vintage furniture, jewelry, pottery
and glassware.

32. Coffee Pot Restaurant
12415 Madison Avenue
Refreshments and live music all evening.

33. Omega Cuts
11833 Franklin Blvd
Christina Ermidis will open her Salon to the
exotic dance styles of Troupe Shabaana.