Seven?

You find me back in Chattanooga, after a trip to Tampa and a stint in the heartland last week. I'm not particularly keen on traveling, but I’m working on a good project with a great client in Iowa. I hate to keep lobbing excuses at ya’ll for why the posts are short or off-topic, but I’m going to do it anyway. Because of travel and workload I haven’t had time to think of a new and exciting topic. Rather than give you another series of links, however, I will write off the cuff about my past adventures in the business of urban design. 

As for this weekend, I'm only hoping to survive Spencer's birthday party. Seven years old, S-E-V-E-N! How time flies. Each year on the weekend closest to his birthday (which always happens to be Memorial day) we have the family in town for a crawfish boil. The weekend is always great and it is the one I most anticipate every year. Aside from its obvious significance, his birthday is also a marker for other events in my life journey.

For as bright and athletically inclined as he is, he has yet to
grasp the concept of this particular rivalry. He does, however,
know the difference between Hondo and Rondo.

2005 was an eventful year. That year, D.Rushing was with child (my aforementioned son and heir), and I was working for Stroud at the Planning & Design Studio. Life was great. We had a very happy, comfortable (I speak for myself) and uneventful pregnancy. Working for Stroud was a joy and privilege, even if it wasn't always a bed of roses. The life of a silversmith’s apprentice City employee was not an easy one. The work itself was a joy, but dealing with the cast of characters at the city and in the broader community could be…trying.

In the late spring, Stroud got the sack and studio employees were shuffled to other city departments. I was designated for assignment in the public works department where I was to assist citizens navigating the building permit process. While I suppose there is something to be said for the fact that I was not fired outright, I can't imagine a more soul-crushing job for a designer. If my goal was to put in twenty years of civil service and retire with a pension, I might have stayed. As you might have suspected, however, I don't get down like that.

Long about this time, Spencer Sinclair Rushing arrived. In part out of loyalty to the Master, in part because I didn't want to be a cog in the bureaucracy (the pay sucked anyway), and primarily because my first son was born, I resigned from the city. How lucky was I to be able to spend the first three months of Spencer's life at home with him and his mother. After having that experience, I am convinced that fathers should be able to take paternity leave (especially for the family's first child as the couple is learning the ropes). The few dollars of income lost could never buy the experiences I had that summer. In the back of my mind, however, was the question about how I was going to continue to grow professionally and earn a few farthings in the future.

OK, so it wasn't all play- but "work" was fun.

That opportunity came when I joined forces with three of the brightest people around. Stroud, Ann and I were unemployed and our friend Jim was looking for the next step in his consulting business. We joined forces to form of Kennedy, Coulter, Rushing & Watson with the mission of providing planning and design for cities and their moving parts. Over the next six years we did some really nice work on projects like the Knoxville South Waterfront, the Nashville Riverfront, Kingsport Landing, and The Strip in Knoxville. While the project work was fun, educational and paid the bills, the great windfall for me was simply being able to interact with three very high level professionals. Watching and learning as they conducted business, both technically and personally, was like being in school again (in a good way).

Alas, starting a new business is no mean feat. We did well enough and kept our families fed, but starting a private sector planning firm during the Great Recession was always going to be a tough ask. In the end, we each started to gravitate toward our core competencies and last fall when Stroud decided to try out for the PGA tour we had a group hug and called it. We’re still finishing out some contracts, and I have shown dogged determination in keeping Stroud off the golf course and on an airplane. That fantastic chapter of personal and professional development, however, has come to a close with a debt to my friends that I’m not sure I can ever repay.

As was the case exactly seven years ago, I’m in a transitional phase. This time round, however, the summer will be hectic rather than blissful, as there are irons in the fire. In August I’ll take the family on vacation, catch up on some sleep, then take the next step in my career. Don’t worry, I guarantee it will not be as a writer.

Have-A-Tampa

Last week was great.  Idea Channel put it down for the Vine Street corridor in the Urban Design Challenge. The team embraced the challenge by putting the site in a broader context and addressing the issues that they felt were most important. If you want to hear more about their concept, make sure to come out the Community Design Forum on June 7th. As the usual Forum host is a member of the Idea Channel team, I have volunteered to moderate. It should be entertaining and informative, and there will be beer.

The morning after the Design Challenge, I hopped a plane with The Bearded One to Tampa. We were invited down there by the one and only Blake D (who was a pupil of mine until he turned evil…just kidding). Last century, Blake and I shared a small office at the RPA for the first year of my professional career. He left Chattanooga for his homeland of Florida and Glatting Jackson (which was later bought by AECOM). AECOM is currently undertaking a downtown plan for the City of Tampa, and as a part of the process is hosting a number of Knowledge Exchange Forums. Each of these forums deals with a specific topic, and we were invited to come tell the Chattanooga story at the public realm forum (correction: Stroud was invited to come tell the Chattanooga story, and I was invited to make sure that Stroud kept his presentation to no more than 20 minutes). I must admit that when the trip was planned, I had grand visions of sunshine and a cigar smoke filled night in Ybor City. Alas, it was not to be. It rained the whole time we were there, and we ended up dashing through a downpour to eat somewhere in Channelside. No serious complaints, however, as this was work not vacation.

As expected, Stroud killed at the forum. (I dropped the ball as our 20-minute presentation ended up running 33:09, but no one seemed to mind).  As we were prepping for the presentation, it occurred to me that he and I (and others no doubt) have given this talk numerous times on the road but not frequently at home. I thought it would be a good idea to record his presentation and make it available online. It is uploaded in 3 parts below.  Although we were asked to go into greater detail on a couple of things that are more relevant for Tampa, it is a pretty good overview of the Chattanooga story from a broad urban design perspective. Enjoy.

In sporting news, a hearty congratulations to the 5-6 year old Hixson Thunder for overcoming their “coaching” to win their pre-season tournament, regular season, and post-season tournament.

I'm a proud papa (and a marginal coach). 

Why should I change? He's the one who sucks

First things first – thank you to those who checked in with health advice and concern. I’ve got a plan for diet and exercise and after a year on a waiting list, I’ve got an appointment to see a new doctor. I’ve heard great things about his practice, and I’m very excited about his approach to health (I feel old exhibit #427: I just wrote that I was excited about a seeing a doctor). Obviously, I have not yet seen him, but after hearing from some of my friends who are clients, and reading about the practice, I am totally on board with the philosophy. As I understand it, the approach to health is collaborative between to the doctor and patient, it puts physical concerns into the larger life matrix of social, emotional and spiritual concerns, and approaches treatment from the standpoint of treating cause instead of symptom (which is the opposite of how my prescription-happy former Doc approached things). Last week, I noted that maintaining health and building the city are both hard work. This week I’ll stick with that concept, but illustrate it with a detail.

One of the things I have found in my dozen years in this profession is that there are two ideas that always come out of a public process (and most stakeholder meetings). The first is to close a street and turn it into a pedestrian mall. The second is to build pedestrian overpasses or footbridges. Both of those are almost always a bad idea. Earlier last week, I sat in on a meeting for an upcoming project, and someone tossed up the pedestrian bridge idea. It was not my meeting, and I think we were trying to wrap things up, so I held my tongue. As I left the building I reexamined why footbridges are such a bad idea. There are some straightforward, concrete answers, but it struck me that there is also a very basic concept that no one ever talks about.

Pedestrian bridges are detrimental to urban environments for a number of reasons- each of which is the direct result of the facility functioning as it should. The job of the footbridge is to remove the pedestrian from the street. The sole benefit from this move is that pedestrian and auto conflicts are reduced (and that is a worthy goal, don’t get me wrong). By taking people off the street, however, we have taken people off the street. The street is the heart of the public realm- our shared community space. We want pedestrians on the street- strolling, sitting, shopping, browsing, running, and dining. This is makes business viable, attracts more activity, and fulfills the promise that is the city.

As I mentioned last week, our society now treats symptoms. We rarely look for the root cause of our problems. This is the case with ped bridges. The fundamental question is this: “What is the problem?” Is our problem motorists behaving in a way that is potentially dangerous, or is it people having the audacity to walk across a street? Put in those terms, the answer is crystal clear. Our problem is not people walking (in fact that is a good thing), our problem is that we developed a transportation system that exists in a vacuum instead of being integrated into the city. Cars are important (I love mine and I drive all the time), mobility is important, access is important- however, these are facilitative actions. The reason we drive is to get from one place to another to engage in some activity. Those activities are the reasons that roads and cars exist to begin with. However, our current system favors the act of moving more than what we do once we’ve arrived. So rather than trying to cure the “ill” of people of walking on a street, why aren’t we address the other side of the equation?

In the great movie Office Space, Michael Bolton (one of the protagonists) decried the fact that his name had been hijacked by a “no talent ass-clown” (the singer Michael Bolton). When asked why he didn’t change his name, he replied “Why should I change, he’s the one who sucks.” So it is with the pedestrian bridge in an urban area. Why should the pedestrian have to get on a bridge, it’s the traffic behavior that is the problem.

*As I was writing this week, Outside the Lines did a segment about Bo Bike’s Bama. This is Bo Jackson’s effort to raise $1 million for the tornado victims by bicycling across my great home state.  Halfway through the piece I was reduced to tears (I am a crier of Vermeilian proportions). I love Bo Jackson (although this has not always been the case), he is a credit to professional athletes and an Alabamian of the highest order. Please consider going to BoBikesBama.Com and making a donation.

The day the pig's feet died

Most of ya’ll know that one of the inspirations for this space is Jim Kunstler’s kick-ass blog. For those of you who don’t know, Jim wrote every planner's favorite book “The Geography of Nowhere” (even though he is not a planner). Over the course of the last several years, the thrust of his writing has shifted from land-use planning to peak oil to the impending implosion of the global financial system (and most global systems for that matter).  Each of those topics has at least a tangential connection to urban design, so I don’t begrudge his shifts. A few weeks ago, however, he wrote a couple of installments on health care and medication. I was bummed because I enjoy reading him, but have zero interest in that particular topic.

I was reminded of those posts last week when I had my own little visit to the doctor’s office. I feel great, I look great, and my blood pressure and heart rate are both “excellent”. However, my cholesterol was through the roof (as I suspected would be the case). Over the last several months I have neglected my workout regimen and bought/ate half of a delicious pig from our friends at Burns Best Farm. The sad fact is that I don’t eat well in the winter.  I’m lukewarm about the prospect of eating fruits and vegetables shipped in from halfway around the globe, and without local produce I tend to gravitate to proteins (meat and cheese) and carbs (bread and pasta). Had my labs been taken during the summer when the fruits and vegetables from the CSA were around, the numbers may have been different. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending my flawed approach, just explaining it. I have not actively worked on keeping my cholesterol down and I have no one to blame but myself.

He was born and raised locally,
we named him Al, and he was delicious.

I’ve been seeing my current doctor for a about a year. To be frank, this person is not my first choice.  However, she is in-network and the doctor I want to see has a waiting list (I’ve been waiting for more than a year). In any event, the doctor explained the cholesterol number then announced that she was putting me on Lipitor. There was no question of lifestyle, no discussion about changing my exercise routine, no mention of trying to get the number down by changing dietary habit. I respect my doctor, and I understand that she has spent a lot of time in school and in practice to develop her philosophy on treatment. However, aged 39, I’m not ready go on a statin and subject myself to headache, difficulty sleeping, flushing of the skin, muscle aches and tenderness, drowsiness/ weakness, dizziness, nausea and/or vomiting, abdominal cramping and/or pain, bloating and/or gas, diarrhea, constipation, and rash without at least making an effort to address the problem through means I can control.  Fuck. That. More importantly, I fully believe that the quality of one's life is more important than its duration.

So long duck liver pate in aspic.

The fact that I’m no longer bullet-proof is starting to sink in. Whereas, at one time it was no big deal to immediately jump into playing sports cold, I now have to warm up, warm down and get sore two days later. In my more athletic days, my dietary decisions were based on what allowed me perform on a day to day basis. Those decisions were not necessarily geared toward long-term health. I now find myself in a spot where I have to work and exert effort in order to be healthy. I suppose I could continue to live the same way, take a pill and deal with the side effects. Those side effects, however, would impact my quality of life far more than fixing the root problem- in this case exercising more and consuming the right things. From here on out, if I want to be healthy I will have to work on it.  In many respects, having a healthy city follows the same rules.

Goodbye Rolled Pig's Head, you will be missed.

Downtown didn’t just happen. The Miller Plaza district, the Riverfront, Coolidge Park, the Riverwalk, the Southside, The Aquarium and its Plaza; these places didn’t just spring up. These places are the result of years of work by hundreds of students, dozens of professionals, multiple public agencies, and thousand of citizens (not to mention the decades of work by previous generations in establishing the city). Unfortunately, our country has been conditioned to think like my doctor. We look for the pill with the full understanding that there are side effects, but with the mindset of dealing with them later (with another pill). We have quit trying to deal with the root issues of problems because it is hard work.

Beer and Cigars, I'm gonna miss....wait, who am I kidding.
Remember what I said about quality of life?

I thought about the parallels between my current problem and an ongoing issue for many cities. My doctor has diagnosed a problem (high cholesterol), and as treatment can choose to treat the symptom (with a pill) or work hard to attack the cause (changes in diet and exercise). A city identifies what they see is a problem (traffic congestion), and as treatment can choose to address the supply side (by adding lanes and facilities) or work hard to address the demand side (organize the city in a way that puts life’s daily tasks in closer proximity to one another). Taking the pill may lower my cholesterol, but it puts me at risk for a host of other maladies. Adding lanes may reduce traffic for an instant (not for long, however, due to induced and diverted traffic), but the side effects of that decision are debilitating. We are already unable to maintain the burden of our massive infrastructure, yet we build more. The more roads we build, the worse our quality of life is- we lose man hours stuck in a car, we lose potentially productive land, and we lose civic identity. Rebuilding our cities and reassessing our transportation philosophies will be hard work. Kunstler suggests that resource shortages will force this work upon us whether we want to undertake it or not. Whether forced or voluntary, hard work is the only thing that will make us healthy in the long term.

The world is my oyster

This week you find me on the North Shore in the Quality Tire waiting room experiencing a solid case of the Mondays. I woke this morning feeling a bit sore (having picked weeds and planted yesterday). I hopped in the shower to find that I was out of shower gel- the only logical thing to do was use Denise’s product. Smelling of some flower or other I rolled downstairs to find the boys…being boys. After shoveling the remainder of their breakfast in their precious little mouths, we made our way into the car and down the street. The thud, thud, thudding was instantly recognizable- flat tire. Quick u-turn, back down the street, transfer the boys to D’s car and off to school. Two blocks into our journey I realized that my lovely wife’s gas tank had negative gas in it. Yes, negative- no gas, running on fumes. A quick detour to the finest Kanku’s we could locate remedied the situation (being the petty man that I am, I put $1.87 worth of gas in the tank. Yes, I know that’s terrible). I dropped the little angels off, made it home, gave D a kiss for the day and returned to the task a hand. The rest of the episode went like this: scraped the shit out of my knuckles during the tire changing process, encountered a lug nut that was seemingly epoxied tight, put the spare on backward, had to redo the entire process, then drove at 20 mph to the North Shore to see my tire folks. A tremendous pain in the ass, to be sure. The bright side, however, is that all of that shit happened and I am now in a comfortable waiting room chair, all before 8:55am- the rest of the day is my oyster. Onward…

Update: upon my return home from the tire store, I realized that I lost a check. Said check had been inadvertently discarded and was found in the garbage in, amongst other things, a few dozen shucked oyster shells. I bullshit you not.

I was all set to write about US-27 and the remarkable occurrences we’ve seen over the week. I’m still in the process of digesting what has happened and trying to figure out what it really means (I think I have a pretty good idea, but time will tell).  I will write about that soon, but in the meantime, I’ll share a bit of my weekend.

I was asked to participate in a Sunday morning panel for the Mid-south Sculpture Alliance. Yes, my thoughts exactly, things must be pretty spare in the sculpture world if they’re asking me to be on a panel. But seriously, it was a very good session. The session was called Contemporary Focus: Creating the Future. My fellow panelists were two architects: Tom Bartoo (a local), and a young man from Baltimore whose name escapes me (nice guy, full beard).  We were asked, in essence, to weigh in on with our thoughts on the future of public art and its role in city building.

 Our session started started the session with screening of this video. The moderator of the session was really fired up about it, and I can see how she was inspired. What those folks are doing is fine, it’s really cool stuff. Taking the lead of the video, our conversation inevitably turned to the concept of integrating “art” and infrastructure.  I use quotes because it is my belief that when we ask art to do something, it’s not really art anymore, it has become design.

I am a fervent believer in design.  I think that everything we build, especially as it relates to the public realm, should not only serve a purpose, but do so in a way that contributes to the visual quality of place. For instance, when I was at the design studio, a great deal of time and effort was spent designing things such as pedestrian lighting and water towers. The raison d’être of infrastructure elements is to “do something”, in those cases providing illumination and storing water. If these elements are designed well, they accomplish their primary mission in a way that also contributes to the visual quality of their environment. We took the concept a step further to create elements that not only served their purpose and looked good, but did so in a way that was unique to Chattanooga. Sure, it might be simpler to buy these things off the rack like every other city does, but the marginal cost of design and fractional increase in price were more than offset by the quality of the final product. This is a good thing, and a concept that the city embraced for some time. Designing infrastructure in a way that is visually pleasing and that reinforces our uniqueness is great- but it is not art, it is good design.

Art is another concept altogether. By incorporating public art into our city, and incorporating it into our infrastructure projects we are making a statement about what we as a community value. The point that I argued during the panel discussion was that art need not have to “do something” to have value. In fact, in its truest sense, art needs no justification at all to exist. The only justification has to come from the community. At one point, the city agreed to put 1% of the cost of their projects into connected public art projects (I don’t know if this is still the case or not). I think that’s a good step toward the creation of a public realm that expresses the value of the community and is something that creates a benefit for all citizens. Art for its own sake is the hallmark of communities that embrace quality of life as a valid public enterprise. These are the communities that will win the competition for the creative class, tourism, and outside investment.

Of course, there is a vocal segment of the population that detests any public expenditure on anything public art. On some level, that concern is understandable. Economics are important. Quality of life, however, is important as well. I want to live in a city that is more than an assembly of low-bid, generic elements cobbled together as fiscal-year budgets allow. It is a question of investment and future return. Should we eat our kernels of seed corn because it’s in hand, or should we plant it in order to harvest several ears in the future?

Lessons Learned (lookin' out my front door)

Well kids, C.Rushing has been (in the parlance of our time) all up in the sauce these days. A number of remarkable things are afoot. I have nothing to share, however, for fear of the jinx. Suffice it to say that this should be a kick ass summer. Don't worry, I'll keep you posted, you won't miss a thing. The problem I am faced with is that the topics I want to write about aren't yet ripe, and a fresh new topic has not presented itself. For that reason, I have resolved to look outside and write about the first thing I see…

In the Spring of 2009, a local green building advocacy group sponsored a competition for the design and construction of a pavilion for Jefferson Heights Park. The park just happens to be 10 yards away from my house, so clearly this competition got my attention. As I have noted before, our neighborhood has experienced a rebirth with dozens of new homes and hundreds of new residents over the past decade or so. At the heart of our neighborhood is a 2-acre park. The current park is the former site of the Davenport Elementary School that was razed the year before my birth. The design competition was to be the final piece of a larger park renovation that included a new playground, seating areas, walking trails, and community gardens. (From a critical standpoint, the park design is indolent. It is an assemblage of elements rather than an integrated whole. It also lacks any reference or acknowledgement of the surrounding context. From a practical standpoint, 99% of park patrons are happy to have a new playground with green grass and could give a flip about consonance and dissonance in public space design. I am the 1%, but I digress.)

One interesting thing about the competition process was that it followed the Chattanooga model of cooperation and collaboration. Several departments of City and County, and a local green building advocacy group partnered to fund and facilitate the project. I am grateful to each of those entities for their effort and the investment they made in our neighborhood. I was also excited about the prospect of people working together, just like the old days. The competition provided for an $80,000 construction budget, and set forth a number of prerequisites such as a stage, a plaza, and some “green” building elements including composting toilets. The competition sponsor served as the client during construction, they then gifted the building over to the City after construction was complete. Construction started in October of ’09 and was complete in February of ’10.

From the standpoint of getting something built, the project was a success. While there is much to be said for that, every time I look at the pavilion I see wasted opportunity. It is true that many hands make light work, and partnerships allow a broad range of expertise, experience and resource to be brought to bear. The potential pitfall of partnership, however, is that each entity has a range of needs, desires and expectations that have to be accommodated. The partnerships that Chattanooga became famous for were successful because work was done on the front end to ensure that the process and product would meet the needs of each partner. In the pavilion project, it appears that some of that front end work was not thoroughly conducted. This fault manifest itself in a series of mandates in the construction process that were never discussed during design. While this happened on more than one occasion, I will revert to potty-talk for the prime example.

The competition organizers required that composting toilets be included in all designs. Of course, composting toilets require bathrooms in which to be located, and due to the size and nature of this facility the City required that there be two such rooms of there were to be any. The consequence of that requirement was that roughly 45% of the total project budget was driven by the requirement for composting toilets. That wouldn’t necessarily be an awful thing if we saw some benefit from the investment (i.e. people making use of the facility, compost being used in the community gardens, or an example for education). Composting toilets require almost daily maintenance, and no provision was made within the partnership to perform that maintenance. After the pavilion was opened, the City locked the bathrooms and I wager that nary a single person ever copped a squat on those kick-ass Envirolet FlushSmart VF350s. Some time later, the City returned, removed the composting units, and installed standard toilets. Note that the difference between composting and standard toilets is not the issue. The issue is that if the partners did a better job on the front end, the thousands of dollars that were wasted on unused composting toilets could have been put to more productive use in the rest of the project.

Turns out, this shit was not needed (pun intended).

In hindsight, it is clear that some early meetings between the parties commissioning the construction of the building and the parties responsible for its maintenance would have resulted in a more efficient program, more focused design responses, and less waste. (Of course, as handsome as he is, the designer is not faultless either- he could have done a better job of trying to bridge the communication chasm on the front end.) Despite my whinging about lost opportunities, I am truly grateful to all of the people who dedicated their time, effort and resources to make my neighborhood a better place.

To be fair: From a practical standpoint the pavilion is an adequate piece of work that the neighborhood will (hopefully) enjoy for years to come.  From a critical standpoint the pavilion is another example of "good enough" beating out "excellent" as a standard, and I never hang out there. 

My kingdom for a parking space...

A'ight kids, here's the deal. I warned you last week that due to the Noel Gallagher concert and an Easter trip to The Gump that I would not post today. However, I have been gifted an hour to make an observation.

It is now 6:30 pm on Monday. I was due to meet my wife, boys, in-laws, brother-in-law, and his wife and children at the Boathouse for dinner (I know, it's not my favorite either, but it's local and that's not the point anyway). I was running a bit late and arrived to a place where there was no parking. I'm talking NO parking. All of the parking spots in the Boathouse/VFW/Riverwalk lots (both sides of Riverfront Parkway) were taken. By diners? No. By people taking advantage of the weather and our fantastic Riverwalk.

I'm sure there is something for me to bitch about in regard to not being able to get in to eat with my family. However, I will celebrate the fact that our community values our shared public space. That capital expenditure has more than justified itself. Now, if we could just eliminate the massive number of cars from that equation.....

Oh, the concert was great. If me and my homies ever start a band, this will be an album cover...

Yes, I brought the faux-hawk out of retirement