Owning Civilization, With All its Baggage

Bill Stumpf, a designer and author of one of my favorite books, says:

Sometimes I think we’ve become a nation of renters, here for the short term, whether here is a place of residence, a stock portfolio, or a political position. We have lost a sense of proprietorship and the sense of community that tags along behind ownership. If we aren’t the proprietors of our civilization, who is? 

(From The Ice Palace That Melted Away, page 94)

To be a proprietor means to own a thing, like a business, a property. How do we do that with civilization? Being a “proprietor of our civilization” means to own our past and the baggage that comes with it. To own the ideas, the history, the people, the place or thing that represents it. Including, sometimes, sorrow and regret. Including people whose ideas we disagree with.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall changed how we own our history. It helped us acknowledge the darker side of our past with honesty and come to treat it with respect. The wall made it possible to own our imperfect civilization without glorifying it. It also, for the first time, gave people permission to create very personal memorials with letters and flowers and medals. It has such emotional weight and healing powers that replicas of the wall travel across the country. Here is a great podcast about creating the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and about the power of place.

In an effort to own our past, we are trying to do more to own the darkest parts of our history.

·         Richmond, Virginia is looking for ways to honor the history of an old slave market while revitalizing its neighborhood.

·         Museums, most often the keepers of our history and our most powerful symbols, are doing more to acknowledge and correct historical deficiencies. Historic homes more frequently represent enslaved residents as well as white owners.

·         Flags and memorials to the south’s Confederate past were removed in the wake of last summer’s racially-motivated murders in Charleston, and some are going to museums. Here and here are examples of news coverage from the south.

·         Georgetown University is trying to make amends for slaves it owned and sold to balance the budget. Its president has met with descendants of the Georgetown slaves, he’s created an African American Studies program, and is working with stakeholders to consider other options.

·         Princeton students continue to protest in favor of erasing history by changing the name of the university’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy and a building named for Wilson (here and here), a racist by current standards, and creator of the League of Nations.

Why don’t we just throw all this ugly stuff in the dumpster instead of a museum and move on, as the Princeton students wish to do?  Because changing the name doesn’t change the idea. It’s choosing not to own history, to sweep it under the rug, to hide the truth. Taken to extremes, do we then change everything named for Jefferson and Washington, hide the Constitution in a filing cabinet, and teach only pleasant, non-controversial history? (Is there any such thing?) Should places still be named for Stonewall Jackson if his statue is coming down? Slave owners who were founding fathers are ok, but not Confederate generals? Where do we draw the line between appropriate and extreme change? I don’t have the answer.

It's easier to be a proprietor of history with a physical representation – a thing to own, not just an idea. History gives meaning to place. History lives at your childhood home and in the White House. Memory lives in the 9/11 memorial plaza and roadside crosses and stuffed animals at the Pulse nightclub and medals at the Vietnam wall. Places have power. When history or memory is attached to a place, and we preserve that place or a symbol of it, we claim it. That’s why we have statutes and flags and historic buildings, and our high school yearbooks and our Rosebuds. History is personal.

By remembering, we are the proprietors of our civilization. We can preserve our past in a building name or a flag in a museum, and still understand that this is not our present. We don’t have to regard museums and buildings as graveyards reserved for dead white guys and symbols of the past. Take the past and use it to interpret the present, to connect the dots. Like putting a Confederate flag in a museum, use Woodrow Wilson as an opportunity to teach how human thought evolves over time. How we are still trying to understand each other and how we need to not just tolerate difference, but to embrace it and learn from it.

Only when we are keepers of our entire history can we learn from it. The fabric of a place has woven into it a past. And though a place can't hold all the love and all the grief and all the sorrow, Charleston and the Vietnam wall and Georgetown give us a common space to heal. We have a responsibility to acknowledge all our history and represent it with truth and integrity. Ordinary virtues demand it. 

Thanks to Reidar Sandell for conversations and suggestions that helped shape this post. And thank you, as always, for reading.

#ordinaryvirtues #billstumpf

The importance of polka dots in public places

Is it just me or is there a profusion of polka dots in the world lately?

 Detroit artist Tyree Guyton started painting polka dots on abandoned houses years ago.

This link is also about street crossing and features polka dots, and it’s totally worth two minutes of your life. 

I am working on actual blog posts with words... more to come. Meanwhile, enjoy! 

#ordinaryvirtues #polkadots

Ordinary Virtue of the Week: Drinking in Summer

As if it didn't matter

which way was home;

as if he didn't know

he loved the earth so much

he wanted to stay forever.

From The Long Boat by Stanley Kunitz

Hi everyone - summer makes me not want to look at a computer screen but I haven't disappeared altogether. Hope you are all well and drinking in the summer too! I'll be posting again soon.

#ordinaryvirtues

Ordinary Virtue of the Week: Wisdom

Last week I started reading Krista Tippet’s new book, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living. You may know Krista from her NPR program, On Being.

I’m only about 30 pages into the book. It’s organized around, and explores her conception of ordinary virtues.

The connective tissue of these pages is the language of virtue – an old fashioned word, perhaps, but one that I find is magnetic to new generations, who instinctively grasp the need for practical disciplines to translate aspiration into action. Our spiritual traditions have carried virtues across time. They are not the stuff of saints and heroes, but tools for the art of living. They are pieces of intelligence about human behavior that neuroscience is now exploring with new words and images: what we practice, we become. What’s true of playing the piano or throwing a ball also holds for our capacity to move through the world mindlessly and destructively or generously and gracefully. I’ve come to think of virtues and rituals as spiritual technologies for being our best selves in flesh and blood, time and space.

There are superstar virtues that come most readily to mind and can be the work of a day or a lifetime – love, compassion, forgiveness. And there are gentle shifts of mind and habit that make those possible, working patiently through the raw materials of our lives.

She divides the book into “five of these raw materials, basic aspects of the human everyday, which I’ve come to see as breeding grounds for wisdom”: words, flesh (about senses and emotion), love, faith, and hope.

When I decided to call this blog and my web site Ordinary Virtues, I made my own list of ordinary virtues. Several of the words on my list are in the paragraphs above. But my list is focused more, to use jargon from my government world, on outputs: Kindness, love, joy, compassion, moderation. A couple have appeared in the blog as the Ordinary Virtue of the Week. I didn’t go deeper into the input needed to get the output, and it looks like that’s where her book is going – “the shifts of mind and habit that make those possible.”

I’ll likely do another blog once I’m done reading, or maybe feature more text as I go along. If you read the book and have some thoughts, please drop me a note at ordinaryvirtues@gmail.com. The comments section on the blog remains a mystery to me. As always, thanks for reading!

Irreverent Bonus Material:

Used entirely without permission. Thanks Bill Watterson, you rock. 

#ordinaryvirtues #becomingwise

Placemaking and Aging Harley Riders

As a baby boomer with parents in their late 70s, their living situation is a growing concern for me. My folks are still ok driving, they maintain the yard and house, and they are physically active. But we all see a day coming when they will not be as self-sufficient and active as they are now.

As their likely caregiver, their location dictates where I spend a lot of my vacation time in the next few years. Happily for me, that’s Skidaway Island in Savannah, Georgia (pictured above. Thanks Mom and Dad!). The island has 10,000 residents, about as many as Cadillac. There is a good grocery store, library, health club, a restaurant, a couple of churches, and a pharmacy accessible by road as well as a walking/golf cart path, but doctors and other stores are off the island and require a car – there’s no public transportation. I’d like to see them stay in their house if that’s what they want, but clearly they will need some help as they become less mobile.

They may also find that their social opportunities diminish with their transportation options. Mom’s book club and bridge group are on the island but not walkable. Dad’s social circle is his golf group, which plays off the island. A criticism of the “aging in place” model – put some grab bars in the bathtub and you’re good to stay – is that, sure, you can stay in your house, but unless you can still drive, you can’t actually leave your house. In some residential situations, people who age in place may become more isolated than if they were in an institution. New York Times columnist Jane Brody wrote this column a few weeks ago about aging in place - from the perspective of a woman in her 70s. It's worth a read if you're interested in the topic. 

The World Health Organization has identified eight factors that contribute to age-friendly communities: community services and health care; transportation; housing; social participation opportunities; outdoor spaces; respect and social inclusion; opportunities for civic participation and work; and communications and information. The AARP has livability fact sheets for community planners that cite bicycling as a transportation option, dense, walkable neighborhoods, trees, and traffic calm as assets to make “great places for people of all ages.” Hmmmm, sound familiar? These have a lot in common with that list of placemaking characteristics I included in a previous post (see below). If we’re going to do placemaking, it should be for EVERYONE. Not just hipsters, not just artists, not just bloggers.

12 Steps to a Great Public Space

1. Protection from traffic
2. Protection from crime
3. Protection from the elements
4. A place to walk
5. A place to stop and stand
6. A place to sit
7. Things to see
8. Opportunities for conversations
9. Opportunities for play
10. Human-scale
11. Opportunities to enjoy good weather
12. Aesthetic quality

To which I would add:
Opportunities for active engagement and participation
Opportunities for quiet and reflection
Places to get food and drinks

Ideally, elders wouldn’t be segregated unless they wanted to be. A well-designed and executed community wouldn’t need special housing or amenities for the elderly and/or disabled, because health care, transportation, opportunities for civic participation, and outdoor spaces would be there for the hipsters, artists and bloggers already. Communities that are walkable with nearby services allow people who don’t drive to maintain all or most of their activities as they age. Walking creates all kinds of benefits – health, social, local economy, and environmental. Amenities for pedestrians usually translate pretty well to people on wheels – wheelchairs and walkers as well as bicycles and strollers.

This ad is from 1962. Lawn bowling! Archery! Shuffleboard!

There is a range of housing options targeted to aging people. And the concept of placemaking, no surprise, is influencing developments for older adults.

Age-restricted communities were hatched in the 1960s – gigantic suburban-type developments for people over 50 with onsite activities like golf and shuffleboard (Sun City, in the ad above, was one of the first). Contemporary aging boomers are more interested in bike trails than shuffleboard, and many of us will be working until we drop, so more age-limited communities are being built near cities where residents can keep working, ride the trails, and have diverse opportunities for social and civic engagement, rather than be isolated in the middle of the desert.

Elders who don’t necessarily want to be segregated, but may be by circumstance, are influencing nursing home development too. Nursing homes are not really “places” in the sense that we use the term, but this article describes an alternative to traditional / institutional nursing homes that incorporates placemaking concepts. The Green House model described is based on 10-person units where private rooms are built around a living room where residents can socialize. Each unit has a kitchen, and residents and staff work together to plan meals and activities. Green Houses’ smaller scale facilitates interaction between residents which include mixed populations (not all elderly people)… all placemaking concepts that make these less institutional facilities and more desirable living communities. Other nursing homes are facilitating social interaction between elders and youth, from preschoolers to college students.

And then there are theme retirement communities. Born to be wild? Harley riders, feel confident there is a place for you and your people even as you age. Some college campuses, including University of Michigan, have affiliated retirement communities with classes available to residents.

Born to be wild in a retirement community for Harley owners. Are those golf clubs on the back of Fonda's bike??

As with anything else, it’s all about having options. My parents like their suburban setting and I’m happy to visit them there. If we can figure out their transportation off the island, aging in place may be a great option for them. My grandmother relocated from Royal Oak to an age-restricted independent living apartment in Florida to be near her five cousins, transitioning over time to assisted living. My favorite neighbor (who’s 86) wants to move into town where he can walk to meet his buddies for breakfast and to the bank to flirt with the tellers.

The AARP says that one in three Americans is over 50 years old, making us demanding boomers a pretty substantial force for retirement housing choices and associated amenities that meet our needs and innermost desires. Oh the places we’ll go!

Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You're off to Great Places!
You're off and away!
― Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Places You'll Go!

Bonus material!

The Times published several articles a while back describing issues that affect elders even in walkable, densely-developed cities: where can older people congregate within a walkable distance for them, socialize, but not be isolated with only other older people? Here is the first article in the series about police evicting loitering 80-year-olds from a Flushing, NY McDonald’s, followed by responses to it, then this editorial.  This last article describes McDonald’s as a Naturally Occurring Retirement Community – the places that people gather because of convenience and amenities.

And the last word on the subject of aging boomers…

As always, thanks for reading. I welcome your comments, ideas, suggestions, and innermost desires for your own retirement situation, either through the comments section here, by email at ordinaryvirtues@gmail.com, or at www.linkedin.com/susanwenzlick.

#ordinaryvirtues

Return of Boaty McBoatface

OK, I know I said no more on collaboration for a while, but I left you all hanging on the Boaty McBoatface thing. The UK National Environment Resource Council  is building a fancy new polar research ship and held a national naming contest, in which the winner by 124,000 votes was the RSS Boaty McBoatface. Not what NERC expected. They are now backpedaling and have announced they will review the entries but are unlikely to use the winning name. My last post was about different ways NERC could have collaborated for a better outcome, but I didn’t go into what that would look like. NERC is almost certainly saying, So, Ms. Smartypants Blogger, what would YOU have done for that project?

Dear NERC:

If you were really committed to engaging the public in your shipbuilding project and sharing your research and education with a broader audience, you could have used the Best. Collaboration. Ever. method to do it in a much more effective way. (Yes, Best. Collaboration. Ever. is my corn-fed, hopelessly Midwestern name for that approach. If its Portland originators had named it, I’m sure their name would be ironic.)

The Best. Collaboration. Ever. used three levels of collaboration to make a museum exhibit on contemporary Chinese design relevant to a broad audience in Portland, Oregon. Collaborators participated as Creators, Commentators, and Consumers.

For NERC’s Best. Collaboration. Ever., instead of a national naming contest which netted you the overwhelmingly popular name of RRS Boaty McBoatface, you could have held a contest for UK schools only. The winning school’s teachers and students become the Creators. They choose the name for the ship, and the teachers are the bad cops who don’t let Boaty McBoatface get out the door. The winning school gets live monthly video streams during the shipbuilding and the research vessel’s first year or two out at sea. The teachers send you ideas for the video streams that coincide with their lesson plans and their kids get to ask NERC questions during the stream. One of the NERC staff visits the school annually to touch base. You create a scholarship for kids from the winning school to go to science camp.

Then, you make your streams available on a NERC YouTube channel for every other school in the world to watch, and though the students and teachers couldn’t ask questions live, they could submit questions to your web site. You use these questions for a Q/A on the web site, or a blog targeted to teachers. You invite teachers to share their classroom experiences and unique ways they use your educational materials on your website. These are your commentators.

This project is cool and features cute kids, so the media will naturally be all over this. Media coverage lasts for the long term, not just during a naming contest. There must be space on their equivalent of PBS kids’ programming, or the Today Show, where short spots about the project’s progress can be broadcast. Viewers can also check out your web site and YouTube channel where your classroom videos are available. They can see and learn without participating in the project. These are your consumers.

Instead of superficial engagement that lasts as long as the media cycle then forgets the RRS Whatever, you get broad, long-term engagement and educational benefits that go way beyond Boaty McBoatface.

Yes, this is a much more substantial commitment of staff and money and time. But it fulfills your goals much more effectively than a naming contest.

Sincerely,

Susan the Smartypants 

#ordinaryvirtues

#NameOurShipSomethingNiceOrDon'tNameItAtAll

If you’ve read my last two or three blog posts, you’ll have caught on to my love for collaboration. Let the world be part of your planning process, whether it’s for a downtown improvement, museum exhibit, or music series. In the last post I talked about Creators, Commentators and Consumers – three levels of participation by community members. This week, I’m throwing out some collaborative processes. However, as I mentioned in the last post, it’s important to strike a balance between control and welcoming public input. Bottom line: be clear about the goals of your collaboration. Then think of the craziest possible outcome, and plan for that.

You may have seen the story about the British Natural Environment Resource Council’s (NERC) online #NameOurShip poll to solicit names for its new $300 million royal research vessel.  Fortunately, no one promised that the public favorite would be the selected name, because the public favorite, with more than 124,000 votes (more than three times the second favorite), is… Wait for it… RRS Boaty McBoatface. The Guardian said the name sounded like it was created by “a five-year-old who has drunk three cartons of Capri-Sun.” The NERC has announced that it will review all the nominations, but that Boaty McBoatface is not likely to be selected, in spite of the overwhelming public support.

The NERC’s goal for this collaboration was not completely clear in its press release. There’s some squishy language about making the British public part of the shipbuilding project. They wanted people to feel some ownership and get excited about the boat’s science mission. Was the public naming poll the best way to reach that goal?  

The NERC used a totally open process. No control, no filters, and the outcome speaks for itself.

There is another way to solicit public input, albeit with a lot more controls. A Collaboration Lite method applied to the NERC project would have been to take some number of names selected by NERC and put those out for the public vote. In this #NameOurShip poll, the names selected by NERC would have fit within a theme of uplifting and environmentally-appropriate names for such a serious vessel. And they would have been deadly boring, and the poll would have gotten 17 responses and no news coverage. Who wants to participate in a project where the outcome has been essentially pre-selected? Collaboration Lite gives extremely limited authority to participants, and doesn’t inspire much ownership.

Then there are ways to get input from a smaller subset of the population. A stakeholders process uses hand-selected experts in an advisory group to set a direction. For example, the NERC could have chosen a panel of representatives from environmental organizations and universities to select the new boat name. Dollars to donuts, NERC would not have chosen collaborators who were likely to nominate the RRS Boaty McBoatface even after three Capri Suns. This approach to collaboration is not about building broad community relationships, though it may strengthen relationships with stakeholders. It’s not about releasing authority; it’s about surrounding yourself with people who are likely to reinforce what you’ve already decided, or maybe come up with a few creative ideas that aren’t too far outside the status quo, and unlikely to (ahem) rock the boat.

This is not to say the stakeholders method is necessarily a bad thing. For solutions to a technical or policy problem, input from the stakeholders is valuable. The checkout lady at the grocery store may have an opinion about air traffic control, but that doesn’t mean she’s qualified to be at the table making policy about it.

The Best. Collaboration. Ever., which I wrote about in the last post, balanced exhibit control by the Portland Art Museum and its hand-selected collaborators, with a release of control for additional programming to pretty much anyone who wanted to spend the time and effort to create, comment, or consume. The Portland Art Museum used a stakeholders process to create content and programming for its China Design Now exhibit. It also encouraged community organizations, educators, and businesses to create complementary programming, but it didn’t dictate content, only theme. The museum engaged bloggers and local print and social media to provide different perspectives, but again didn’t control the content. The museum decided what it needed to control, and what it was willing to let go of.

Another method involves releasing significant control to collaborators, to the point of letting them run the show while the organizers are essentially facilitators. Another museum world example is the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle, where members of the city’s Asian communities can propose and organize exhibits with guidance from, but not under the control of, the museum. Exhibits are primarily driven by the community’s interests. This is not completely unheard of in a community context; Cadillac’s sound garden is the result of an idea hatched, planned, and implemented by a local musician with the support of, but limited control by, the city of Cadillac. Garden clubs beautify public spaces without being controlled by city leadership.

Did NERC successfully accomplish its goal of getting the public engaged with its shipbuilding project? Does the outcome and NERC’s reaction to it suggest that it didn’t anticipate the public would embrace a dorky name? Was this a major miscalculation of the potential media fallout from a name NERC clearly considers inappropriate? They had to know they’d get some crazy names, and that potentially one like Boaty McBoatface or Lady Gaga could be the favorite, and that it would generate a ton more press than a dull name like the RRS Margaret Thatcher. Maybe they actually hoped for the press coverage a dorky name would generate, and are happy as clams to have the notoriety.

The problem is, the notoriety doesn’t build public engagement with the project, only with the name. When you open up the suggestion box, but you don’t like the outcome and you say, well, we’re still going to choose a name we like regardless of the public poll results, the participants haven’t been given any meaningful level of authority.  The whole process is nothing more than a token feel-good, low-budget PR project. You could even say it doesn’t hold water. (sorry)

The takeaway with all these methods of collaborating is that when you invite the public in, you never know what you’re gonna get. If you don’t give the participants any commitment that their input will make a difference, it becomes clear that they have no real authority, and they’ll lose interest. So while NERC got a lot of international press, in the end, the public’s interest in the boat project may well disappear when the press loses interest in Boaty McBoatface. And NERC comes out smelling like fish guts when it doesn’t take ownership of a process it created because it doesn’t like the results.

So enough for now about collaboration. If you're not a subscriber, you can receive blog posts by email by scrolling to the bottom of any page on www.ordinaryvirtues.com. As always, thanks for reading, and please send me your comments at ordinaryvirtues[at]gmail.com, or try the comment function here. 

#ordinaryvirtues

Best. Collaboration. Ever.

Is it weird or just quirky that I have a favorite collaboration?

In a recent post I wrote about inclusion in placemaking, but ended with a dense stream of rules without any good examples. So I thought this week I’d share my favorite example of inclusive collaboration.

In 2009, the Portland (Oregon) Art Museum held an exhibit called China Design Now.  The museum wanted to create an opportunity for conversations between the museum and community, and engage a different, broader audience to exhibit China Design Now (a canned exhibit) with a Portland spin. 

The museum retained its traditional role as curator, but invited Portland’s design community, youth, Chinese-American population, entrepreneurs, artists, and local arts groups to collaborate. The museum released significant control to community participants, who were invited to create their own events and exhibits related to China Design Now. Museum officials described the exhibition as the center of a wheel whose spokes were events that included fashion shows, music, dance, film, and lectures and exhibits of architecture, alternative art and design, technology, and youth culture – all focused on contemporary China.  Restaurants, the University of Oregon, art galleries, hotels, the public library, restaurants, retailers, and even a comic book shop (which created an exhibit of underground Chinese comics) participated.  Social media were used by the museum and by collaborators to facilitate conversations outside the museum walls.

The museum found that collaboration happened on three levels.  Some collaborators were hand-chosen by the museum to engage people through blogs, cultural events outside the museum, complementary off-site exhibitions, and so on; these were the creators.  Commentators, the second level, responded or contributed to blogs and conversations on the museum web site, and participated in other ways, such as through the museum’s educational programs.  Consumers, the third group, attended events outside the museum’s exhibition, but were less participatory than the first two groups. 

Multiple venues were provided to anyone who wished to participate.  A range of opportunities to interact with the exhibit were available – lectures as well as social media, exhibits in art galleries and comic book shops – so most people could feel comfortable participating at some level.

The exhibit was a great success. The museum and collaborators helped facilitate conversations, some through traditional lectures and educational programs, and some through social media. The content also created connections between people by providing a variety of ways to interact with the exhibit, other participants, and with Chinese culture. 

So how does a very museum-specific collaboration translate to other community projects?

Soliciting participation through three levels of engagement is a great way to retain some control over the process, but invite others in. It also allows people to participate in ways that aren’t limited by their child care needs, work schedules, comfort with speaking out in meetings, and so on.

If this was a downtown development project, the creators would be the most directly affected stakeholders – businesses, non-commercial stakeholders like the library or school, interested groups like the arts council or the council on aging, and adjacent residents. They would have the most input, the most say over the final version of the plans, and some active responsibility for the project – not just coming to meetings.

The commentators would be able to participate at a public meeting or event, through social media, or through other feedback mechanisms. They should have the opportunity to comment in pictures as well as text – for example, the facilitator could ask commentators to post a picture of a favorite city plaza on the project’s Facebook page.

The consumers could see the plans and comments on line, in a downtown storefront window, or in the newspaper. I think it’s important to share the comments, or at least a representative selection of them, as well as the plans. The commentators need to be acknowledged as part of the process, and the consumers may be inspired to share their own thoughts too. This is where the conversation starts to happen.

A community can relatively easily provide multiple venues for participation. But there’s some outreach needed too – commentators and consumers aren’t hand-picked like creators, and they need to be encouraged to participate. Think about placemaking for anyone, or for everyone. Have a member of the creator team talk to the civics class at the high school as well as the Rotary; have a display at Walmart and at the church. Create a project Facebook page and ask people to share it to get broader visibility.

And think about less-obvious partners. Here in Cadillac our folk music organization, Gopherwood, holds performances downtown. So while Gopherwood isn’t a business owner, it is part of downtown’s culture. The organizers and people who attend performances have an interest in a downtown project that could complement the concerts, or affect parking. One of our food pantries is about a block from the center of downtown. Have a presentation there during lunch.

I work with a lot of small towns that don’t have the capacity to do all this collaborating and communicating, even for a big important project. That’s where the creators come in, doing more than attending planning meetings. Wouldn’t facilitating the Facebook page be a great project for an enthusiastic group of high school or college media students? The music organization would be happy to say a couple of words about the project when introducing the concert, or share information with their email list and Facebook friends. The community doesn’t maintain total control, but the message gets out to a much broader audience of potential commentators and consumers through trusted partners.

The part I like best about the Portland Art Museum’s approach to collaboration is there’s a comfortable spot for everyone. The organizers maintain a level of control, those closest to the project have the most input, but there are multiple ways for others to have a voice or just be informed. It takes releasing some control, but at little cost for a lot of potential gain.

As always, thanks for reading. The photos are all from the China Design Now exhibit and stolen from places on the web. If you're not a subscriber and would like to get posts by email, please scroll to the bottom of any page to sign up. 

#bestcollaborationever #placemaking #collaboration #ordinaryvirtues

Yes If, or No Because?

A few years ago I went on a field trip to an Atlanta suburb that was reinventing itself as a vibrant small town. I heard the planning and economic development director talk about how to re-create a downtown. One of the keys, she said, was to convince her city government colleagues to change their default response from “no, because” to “yes, if.” No, you can’t build residential downtown because zoning prohibits it. No, you can’t make the sidewalk wide enough for an outdoor café because blah blah blah. Instead, her approach was to think about what the city needed to get in exchange for a yes. Yes, you can make the sidewalk wide enough if you agree to pay for a bump out in the street to slow traffic. Yes, you can build residential there if you create public parking spaces for the ones you’re displacing.

Imagine all the cool stuff we could do by changing our approach from “no, because” to “yes, if.”

As always, thanks for reading. If you aren't subscribed and would like to get blog posts by email, please go to www.ordinaryvirtues.com and scroll to the bottom of any page to sign up.

#ordinaryvirtues

Placemaking: for anyone, or everyone?

One of the buzzwords you hear a lot in arts and cultural circles is inclusion. Audiences for arts and culture have historically been overwhelmingly white, middle and upper income, and they are aging. Museums, symphonies, operas, and ballets recognize that they need to diversify their programming and attract new audiences – become more inclusive – to keep their doors open. Traditional programming is becoming obsolete. For example, my son, a flute and bagpipe player, wouldn’t get near a symphony concert until the Grand Rapids Symphony performed music from a Lord of the Rings movie – something much more relevant to him than Beethoven.

Placemaking has an inclusion problem too. Lots of placemaking plans are made collaboratively, but often with the usual community leaders invited by a gatekeeper. Inviting diverse participants to plan for non-traditional users isn’t always on the agenda. It needs to be.

Why is diversity important in placemaking? The author of this article about placemaking compares it to trickle-down economics. Placemaking efforts to attract and retain educated professionals theoretically also benefit those lower down the economic ladder. The author asserts that advocates for placemaking (or urbanist policy, as he calls it) are just creating what they themselves want in their community – that placemaking is a self-serving benefit created by and for the elite. The people lower down the ladder don’t really benefit (much like trickle-down economics). Placemaking becomes relevant to only a few.

I talked a few years ago with an old-school museum director about inclusion. I asked if he worked with community members when planning exhibits or programming for the museum – something that is no longer unusual. Nah, the director said, I know what the community needs. I don’t have to ask them. This particular museum doesn’t have a board of directors to give the museum director input. The museum’s agenda was set solely by a white guy in his 60s. Not surprisingly, diversity was not its strong suit. Interestingly, in the same conversation, he told me that the museum’s biggest problem was relevance. Go figure.

Well-meaning (or arrogant) community leaders can create events and places that are free, accessible, appealing to young people… but that may not attract people who are low income, disabled, non-white, or young. Research about whether free admission attracts new patrons to museums says it isn’t about cost. It’s about relevance, access, logistics, and marketing to underserved audiences. It’s about being intimidated by the content or event, rather than feeling comfortable and welcome.

In a blog post, Kevin Buist addresses diversity at ArtPrize, Michigan’s large art competition. The post is about an award to incent artists of color to participate, which raised some issues, but these paragraphs were the most interesting to me. They address the difference between making a cultural event like ArtPrize open to all, versus welcoming to all.

“Last year during ArtPrize I had a conversation that really stuck with me with artist Mel Chin, who was a juror for the Juried Grand Prize at the time. We got to talking about audiences and ArtPrize’s open and democratic approach to attracting them. He made a distinction that at first seemed minor, but I’ve since realized how crucial it is. He asked if we wanted ArtPrize to be for ‘anyone’ or for ‘everyone.’ An event for anyone is open and free of charge, there is no invite list, it’s not designed only for a special club, it’s for anyone who shows up. This is a pretty good way of describing ArtPrize’s approach from early on, and it has allowed for a huge and enthusiastic audience. 

“Making ArtPrize an event for everyone, and not just anyone, is a little different. An event for everyone requires us to pay attention to who in the community feels welcome at an event for anyone and who doesn’t. Even when something is designed for anyone, some can still be excluded. The barriers aren’t intentional—they’re not velvet ropes and invite lists—but they’re still real. It’s a careful process of looking for ways to remove those barriers to build a welcoming event for everyone.”

(I couldn’t get a working link for this one, but if you want to read the whole post, go to www.artprize.org. The post is titled “Welcoming an Independent Award Celebrating Diversity,” and was posted on August 26, 2014.)

Placemaking isn’t only for the wealthy and educated, or doesn’t have to be. It isn’t just Whole Foods and the Fabulous Bistro Gastropub. Public space, public art, walkability, and recreational opportunities aren’t gated with a sign that says “your bank balance must be this high to enter.” That being said, there is an element of truth to the trickle-down, anyone or everyone criticism. Lots of placemaking, particularly the arts, implies exclusivity.

And, no matter how good the intention to include a variety of people, there is still power on one side that is not necessarily on the other. Someone still sets the agenda – and limits the diversity of opinions – by deciding who to invite, or using a structure that inhibits participation. A public meeting limits participation by how the meeting is advertised, time the meeting is held, and some factors that can’t be controlled by the meeting organizer. Self-selection by people who don’t feel they would have a voice, or who find such meetings intimidating, or who have work or child care issues. Everybody can’t be at the table, but they can contribute via a web site or other less direct means. When our mission is to have something for everybody, not just anybody, we need to figure out ways to hear from people using all the tools available for communication.

When all the usual suspects attend, and they’ve all read from the same playbook, do they make the leap to, for example, not just walkability but universal access? Who’s advocating making places that exceed Americans with Disability Act requirements to be more welcoming to people in wheelchairs – like heating sidewalks so they can be navigated in winter months?

Once you have an inclusive plan, how do you market a place to people you haven’t traditionally connected with – like telling a high school kid whose parent isn’t on the Grand Rapids Symphony’s mailing list about a Lord of the Rings concert? Once you find them, how do you help people get over feeling excluded or uncomfortable based on their previous experiences, or no experience at all? For someone who has never been to a symphony concert, would interest in Lord of the Rings music overcome apprehension about what to expect, or fitting in? Sometimes, being invited and welcomed isn’t enough to get over other hurdles.

The point of collaboration isn’t collaboration, it’s getting better results. Including other voices isn’t threatening, it’s an opportunity to make a community or project more effective. Ask non-traditional community members to participate. Listen when they talk. The high school kid, the council on aging, Goodwill, whoever represents non-white, non-middle class, non-able-bodied, non-30-to-55-year-olds. Take them seriously; without authority, there is no real collaboration. Focus on the mission. Have clear goals, but not predetermined outcomes. Work to get past individual agendas to make the core group a team. Decide who the target audience is or might include. Figure out what the needs are and whether they can be addressed. Let go of ownership and share authority. Facilitate connections. Evaluate and re-evaluate outcomes. Communicate through a range of media, not just newspaper announcements and government web sites. Don’t be the museum director who can’t figure out why his museum isn’t relevant.

As always, thanks for reading. If you’re not a subscriber and would like to be, you can sign up to receive blog posts by email by scrolling to the bottom of any page at www.ordinaryvirtues.com.

This post’s photos are from a British artist named Roy, and you can read about him and see more of his work at www.royspeople.com.

With Free Speech for All, Even the Haters

A resident on the busy highway I take to work every day put a large Confederate flag in his front window after Charleston’s murders last summer. It’s still there. The better to let people know he’s an ignorant, racist, traitor, I guess. And I am ashamed that someone in my town is so proud of those dark places in his heart that he will make sure his fellow citizens and visitors here know about it. 

There was also a story in the news recently about two women who walked up to Governor Snyder in a restaurant and started yelling at him about Flint's water debacle. One screamer was quoted as saying that she couldn't understand why people didn't applaud. Ummm, because that's not how civilized people behave?

And there is The Donald. His flippant, vulgar and hate-filled speech apparently represents many more Americans than anyone outside the reality TV industry was willing to acknowledge. His politics aside, he is emblematic of what passes for discourse now – not Mitt’s leather-lined country club library where racism, misogyny, and contempt for most Americans could be discreetly shared with other members of the choir without Trump's insults and volume.

We live in a big, fat, crazy democracy and I wouldn’t trade their free speech, but I sure don’t have to respect it. And we should not reward their dark places and incivility with applause, or votes.

The flag painting, devoid of its color but not its essential character, was painted by Jasper Johns and is from metmuseum.org. If you vote in Michigan's primary on Tuesday, please lead with love. As always, thanks for reading.

#ordinaryvirtues

The hipness of long, skinny parks

Some of the hippest places lately seem to be very long, skinny parks.  The High Line, in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City, is a former elevated railroad turned into a 1.45-mile elevated walkway.  The High Line doesn’t get you from point to point any quicker than the sidewalk.  But it provides a different view of the city, and has landscaping and art along the way.  The traffic noise is not quite so omnipresent.  There are places to sit and people-watch.  There are food carts, so if you want ice cream (as we so often do), you don’t even have to get off the High Line. What if New York said, we’ve just paved a mile of nice wide sidewalk, put in some landscaping and some art, but there’s no place to shop, you can’t bring your dog, and the food comes from a cooler on wheels. Would it get any attention at all, much less 5 million visitors a year, as the High Line has? The High Line’s hip factor makes it a destination all on its own.

The High Line, New York. Another cell phone image for which I apologize.

Linear parks is the real name for long, skinny parks, and people love them.  There’s a reason every town with a river, from Detroit to Crystal Falls, has or wants a riverwalk, also a linear park.  The White Pine Trail, a rail trail from Grand Rapids to Cadillac, is another linear park. (Interesting factoid: at 92 miles long by 100ish feet wide, the area of the White Pine Trail is about 1.75 square miles. Huh.) Battle Creek has a 25-mile linear park that links its city parks, the Kalamazoo River, neighborhoods, and Kellogg Community College.  Here in Cadillac, our most popular destination is probably the long, skinny park along the shoreline of Lake Cadillac. And lucky me, my office is right next to it.

Cadillac, Michigan's long skinny park. Photo courtesy of www.pointnorthphotography.com.

So why is this placemaking? Because linear parks have features that make them unique: 

1.             A variety of things to do. Urban linear parks will frequently have public art that you wouldn’t see just walking down a sidewalk in town. There are places to sit or play or hear music or bike, walk, or run.  And I know I want my next birthday party in a teepee, in a long skinny park on the Seine.  

2.             Public space.  A linear park likely has places to people-watch, meet friends, flirt, picnic, soak up the sun, or talk. 

3.             Greenspace instead of concrete. Natural beauty, water, or interesting plants and trees (the High Line offers a number of programs focused on their landscaping). Spare me another cold, paved public space created for cars, not people.

4.             Local history.  Linear parks frequently have a historical connection that regular parks don’t – they may be built on old rail lines, canals, rivers, or lakefronts with historical interest. Cadillac’s linear park has historical markers along the shoreline to show and describe what used to be on the lakefront.

5.             Walkability and mosey-ability. A linear park’s focus is completely not-cars.  It’s about people. I can do a power walk along Cadillac’s lakeshore and not have to stop for cars, or mosey until I find a good bench where I can eat lunch.

6.             Sustainability.  The High Line reused an elevated train track, and they left some of the track in place for historical and visual interest (see the photo above). Rail trails reuse rail beds. Battle Creek’s trail links recreation, education, and neighborhoods so residents don’t need a car for every trip. Trees and other green stuff help mitigate runoff, flooding, and absorb pollutants.  (On a fairly random side note, check out these photos of some of the world’s great trees.)

The lakefront pathway and access to the White Pine Trail are incredible assets in my adopted hometown of Cadillac. Bless those who had the foresight to buy up a mile of shoreline along Lake Cadillac for our long skinny park. If you have a long skinny park, do you love it? Leave a comment (there IS a way, some were left last week... just skip the whole "sign in to your account" thing. It works on my computer... sorry I can't give you more than that!) or send me an email at ordinaryvirtues(at)gmail.com.

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A favorite poem about snow and place

Even though we didn’t get our first real snow here in northern Michigan until after New Year’s, I am feeling ready for spring. We always get one last big spring snowstorm, usually in late March or early April, but maybe tonight’s expected snowmageddon is it.

I love this poem, and it helps me remember to think of that last snowstorm as a blessing, one of those opportunities for joy (and one last time snowshoeing), rather than a curse.

Snow, Aldo

by Kate DiCamillo

Once, I was in New York,
in Central Park, and I saw
an old man in a black overcoat walking
a black dog. This was springtime
and the trees were still
bare and the sky was
gray and low and it began, suddenly,
to snow:
big fat flakes
that twirled and landed on the
black of the man's overcoat and
the black dog's fur. The dog
lifted his face and stared
up at the sky. The man looked
up, too. "Snow, Aldo," he said to the dog,
"snow." And he laughed.
The dog looked
at him and wagged his tail.

If I was in charge of making
snow globes, this is what I would put inside:
the old man in the black overcoat,
the black dog,
two friends with their faces turned up to the sky
as if they were receiving a blessing,
as if they were being blessed together
by something
as simple as snow
in March. 

Although the photo is missing man and dog, its title is Friends, which makes it a good fit. Thanks as always to www.pointnorthphotography.com for permission to use it.

As always, thanks for reading. You can subscribe to receive blog posts by email by scrolling to the bottom of any page on the web site.

Ordinary Virtue of the Week: Love

Because what’s more important than love?

The English language is limited in so many ways. Everyone’s heard that the Inuit have nine million different words for snow. Less well known is that the Greek language has several words for love. (Depending on the source, it could be as many as eight – though that list includes some Latin as well as Greek – or as few as three). Why would you use the same word to describe your feelings for a quite fabulous classic Beetle and for your most beloved person? Clearly an emotion or act with so many nuances needs more than one word. These are the most common.

Eros, the most familiar and most seasonally-appropriate, is of course romantic love, passion, desire. (Between people and other people, not people and classic Beetles. But doesn’t its profile look very valentine-shaped?)

Philia is love between friends (brotherly love, like Philadelphia) but also loyalty to our family, friends, and institutions (our jobs, for example, or communities of which we are members).

Storge is a parent’s love for a child, or love between family members. (Note to fellow word nerds: that's a soft g, so it's pronounced store-jay.)

Xenia is hospitality. Kindness to strangers and guests.

This is Robert Indiana's Love Sculpture, I think in NYC though there are copies all over.

Agape is the most interesting to me. The Greeks considered agape the highest form of love, a love that is selfless and unconditional. It now typically refers to God’s or god-like love for humanity. Contemporary versions of the Bible translate agape as “love.” Every Christian wedding ever has included Corinthians 13:13, “So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (Translation from here.)

But in the King James Version of the Bible, Corinthians 13:13 doesn’t say love. To settle arguments between Catholics, Protestants, and Puritans over whose version was best, King James recruited scholars to translate directly from the original texts that make up the Bible. They referred to Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, and English versions to ensure a translation that was as true as possible to the intent of the originals. Some Latin texts used “caritas,” or charity, for agape, and in context and according to the meaning of charity at the time, it worked (though prior English translations had used “love” for agape in Corinthians). King James, ever the traditionalist (and peacemaker), sticks with caritas. “And now abideth faith, hope and charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”

And in a contemporary secular world, in a blog about community, written by a blogger who is all about relevance, this is relevant because why?

In An Experiment in Love, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. writes “Agape means understanding, redeeming goodwill for all men… It is the love of God operating in the human heart. … Agape is not a weak, passive love. It is love in action. Agape is love seeking to preserve and create community. It is insistence on community even when one seeks to break it. Agape is a willingness to go to any length to restore community. It doesn’t stop at the first mile, but it goes to the second mile to restore community. It is a willingness to forgive, not seven times, but seventy times seven to restore community. … If I respond to hate with a reciprocal hate I do nothing but intensify the cleavage in broken community. I can only close the gap in broken community by meeting hate with love.”

So agape is an ordinary virtue, not just a godly one. An ethical choice we make to treat others with an attitude of charity and empathy. An active extension of goodwill to create and preserve a civilized community. To use a contemporary phrase, it is leading with love.

From ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, MI... but I can't remember the source.

And I couldn't bear to leave out this additional quote from Dr. King: “Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can only be done by projecting the ethic of love to the center of our lives.”

I’ve fixed the commenting difficulties on the web site, so if you’d like to comment, you no longer have to divulge your bank account number and sing Stairway to Heaven backwards while standing on your head. If you aren’t a subscriber and would like to receive posts by email, please sign up by scrolling to the bottom of any page at www.ordinaryvirtues.com. As always, thanks for reading!  2/11/16 Postscript: Apparently I have NOT fixed the commenting difficulties... I will check into this soon! Thanks for sticking with me. You can email me at ordinaryvirtues(at)gmail.com too... but then we don't get a fun public conversation.

Measuring the Impact of Gay, Latte-Drinking, Bike-Riding Artists

When I was in college, I had a required statistics-for-liberal-arts-majors class in which one of the textbooks was a little paperback called How to Lie with Statistics, about spinning information or questions to support the conclusion we want. (Yeah, I’m shocked too.) This followed a philosophy class where the prof taught us to “question everything.” These two classes continue to influence my cranky, skeptical self as I move into my senior years. After seeing at least four iterations of placemaking in my working life (New Urbanism, Sense of Place, Cool Cities, and now placemaking), Cranky Susan wonders whether we can identify any real, measurable outcomes from 20+ years of this stuff… and whether that’s actually the point. So today, some thoughts on outcomes.

Almost every project I’ve worked on as a grant writer and grant administrator wants numbers. Same for any publicly-funded program. We are supposed to be able to show outcomes for the dollars we invest. How much contaminated soil was removed? How many jobs were created? How many people were served? Government needs to be accountable, grantors want to know projects were effective, and those are things we can count. What’s harder is to show that the result of a project actually had a broader impact on the community. Is the community better off because this brownfield site is now a bank? Does it improve the quality of life for the residents? It’s even harder for placemaking projects. How can you determine whether 50 (or 500) people per day who walk by a public sculpture were attracted to the area because it has public art, or that they even noticed it, or were moved by the experience of interacting with public art? Or were they just on their way to the dentist? If this kind of data collection and analysis was required for every arts grant, no one would ever apply for another one. 

Here is a very long but interesting article on the lack of quantifiable outcomes associated with arts grants, particularly for placemaking. The irreverent author notes that many local officials believe “all we need is to get us some gays and artists and a bike path or two, and our problems will be solved!” (To which I would add a coffee shop and a brew pub.) He compares some efforts toward placemaking to South Park’s Underpants Gnomes: “The project team had a clear idea of what it was putting in to the process and what it hoped to get out of it, but a much vaguer sense of how it was going to get from Phase 1 to Phase 3.” (Phase 2 conversation is another blog post or 20.)

As the author says, “A project could be entirely successful on its own terms but fail to move the needle in a meaningful way in its city or neighborhood. Or it could be caught up in a wave of transformation sweeping the entire community, and wrongly attribute that wave to its own efforts. There’s simply no way for us to tell. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we can’t accomplish the goal of ‘advancing understanding of how creative placemaking strategies can strengthen communities’ without digging more deeply into the causal relationships.”

So if you can’t reliably count the impact of gay, latte-drinking, bike-riding artists… then what? Do we continue to fund arts programs and trees along Main Street if we can’t measure results? Quality of life, attractive communities, a clean environment… do we accept the success of the project on its own terms rather than trying to guess at broader positive impact (or referring to How to Lie With Statistics)?

I say yes. As the saying goes, not everything that counts can be counted. One of government’s jobs is public good. Nonprofits too. Art and bike trails and trees downtown may not be universally viewed as “public goods,” especially when compared to, say, ending homelessness. But sometimes we need to say that a project is worthwhile because it is. We need to care about more than what we are able to count. Sometimes public good can’t be measured in dollars or jobs or parts per million.

As always, thanks for reading! 

#ordinaryvirutes

Of Poetry and Batman

"Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing."  James Tate

 Prose:

dreamstime.com

Poetry:

reminoel.com

I had several kind comments on last week’s quiet places post. Thank you so much! If you’d like to let me know your thoughts on other posts, here’s how:

-          You can email me at ordinaryvirtues(at)gmail.com. This keeps your comments private.

-          You can go to the web site, www.ordinaryvirtues.com, click Blog on the top menu, go to the bottom of the blog post, and click on “comment” or “like”.  

-          You can see the post on my LinkedIn page and leave a comment there. But due to LinkedIn's limits on photos, some posts (like this one) don't go on LinkedIn.

And I promise to stop naming posts “Of…” or at least name fewer of them that way.

Finally, thanks as always for reading! If you are not a subscriber and would like to receive posts by email, please go to www.ordinaryvirtues.com and scroll to the bottom of any page to sign up.

#ordinaryvirtues

Of Quiet Places and Ice Cream

Everyone deserves Sanctuary a place to go where you are
safe
Art offers Sanctuary to everyone willing
to open their hearts as well as their eyes

 From “Art Sanctuary,” by Nikki Giovanni

Can a sanctuary be placemaking? Placemaking is more associated with fun, social opportunities. For some of us, there are limits to how much fun and social we really want. As a claustrophobic, card-carrying introvert, I am most comfortable in places that are quiet and uncluttered. Artprize? Too much. Loud crowded restaurant? No thanks. Placemaking may more typically be thought of as connecting with others, but it can also be about connecting with ourselves.

 These are common guiding principles for making good places (source). I think the list is too passive (it needs “opportunities for active engagement or participation" for example, and “ice cream” wouldn’t hurt either), but it’s a place to start.

 1. Protection from traffic

2. Protection from crime

3. Protection from the elements

4. A place to walk

5. A place to stop and stand

6. A place to sit

7. Things to see

8. Opportunities for conversations

9. Opportunities for play

10. Human-scale

11. Opportunities to enjoy good weather

12. Aesthetic quality

Spaces with these qualities don’t exclude our inner selves. In fact, only one of the 12 would require another person. But you see very little in placemaking literature about solo or quiet activities. We need places that allow us to quiet our minds, to connect with ourselves, to think.

photo courstesy of pointnorthphotography.com

We are all familiar with the idea of nature’s spiritual and restorative possibilities (remember your Emerson and Thoreau?), but that’s not a good fit for everyone. A contemplative place could also look like this:

Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper

 or this.

This is the back side of Notre Dame, one of my favorite quiet spots in Paris - smack in the middle of the city. My photo.

Or whatever you consider a restful place – an art museum, a yoga class, a library, a place of worship.

This is not to say that we can’t feed our inner selves with a group, or in conversation. A community of people with shared interests, such as a book club, or a compatible faith or spiritual community, can nurture a quiet mind. My town used to have a weekly taize gathering. Taize is very meditative, repetitive a capella singing or chanting. A cross between a mantra and a Gregorian chant. I loved it, even though I can’t sing for beans. Singing taize requires you to quiet your mind and focus on the chant. Taize is the closest I’ve ever been to successful meditation.

Taize or a book club is an opportunity for active engagement, but is it placemaking? Sure. Placemaking isn’t just about physical assets. The place where your book club is held is less important than the opportunity to join a book club. Most of us would not move to a community with a great trail system but lousy schools, or an awesome brew pub but no grocery store. The schools and the grocery store may not be "places" as defined above, but they contribute to quality of life. They make the community livable.

If placemaking is about quality of life, it needs to include our inner lives, not just our social lives. A physical place for rest, reflection, remembrance, contemplation, and if we're lucky, opportunities to engage in activities that important to us, whether that's a solo kayaking opportunity or singing badly with a group. As the poem above says, a place to open our hearts as well as our eyes. So I’m willing to make the leap and say that “opportunities for quiet and reflection” should be #13 on our list above. Right before "opportunities for active engagement and participation," and "opportunities for ice cream."

As always, thank you for reading and please add a comment if you are inclined. You can subscribe to receive blog posts by email at the bottom of any page on www.ordinaryvirtues.com. Thanks to Lynne Scheible for planting the seed for this post.

#ordinaryvirtues

I'm full of cracks, I leak all over

My son was home from college over the holidays. Because he is very focused on his schoolwork (that’s what he tells me, anyway), he has not read any of my blog posts. Even so, he was trying to help me with blog post ideas. He is, like me, a policy geek. But his interest is international relations, emerging democracies, and national security. Mine is community and the social contract. So when he suggested I write about Aung San Suu Kyi’s plans to elevate herself above the president, I thought… yeah, not happening. Aside from my complete ignorance on the topic, I didn’t think it fit with my theme: ordinary virtues make civilized communities.

Except that it does.

Philosophers since the ancient Greeks have pondered why we agree to live under government’s authority. The theory is, we create constitutions and laws, citizens tacitly consent to obey the laws, the laws protect the citizens - we enter a social contract. It's a win-win. We agree to stop at stop signs, and we are protected from being in a demolition derby on the way to work. While contemporary issues such as feminism and racial equality have forced us to look at the nature of the social contract differently than Socrates or Rousseau did, it is still generally about being governed.

I’ve always held a broad interpretation of the social contract. That any kind of relationship, not just the governed and the government, is bound together by a social contract. I was going to write about how it’s just ordinary virtues on a grand scale. 

We create other frameworks – religion, the Golden Rule, manners, other social and moral constructions – that allow us to cohabit with each other. They govern relationships between family members, friends, colleagues, and strangers. I would call those frameworks ordinary virtues. 

Why practice ordinary virtues? We don’t get legal protection, as we would by obeying the law under the social contract, but when we choose ordinary virtues, society functions more or less predictably and people at least tolerate each other. You stop for a stop sign, you don’t get hit. Treat people with respect, and typically there is a positive outcome. It’s not that different from the social contract. But I don’t think that’s all.

My new friend Pete and I have been talking about ordinary virtues. We agree that there is, as he said, “simplicity and beauty in that kind of ‘religion,’” the practice of ordinary virtues. Nietzsche wrote:

“Among the small but endlessly abundant and therefore very effective things… is goodwill. I mean those expressions of a friendly disposition in interactions, that smile of the eye, those handclasps, the ease which usually envelops nearly all human interactions. … It is the continual manifestation of our humanity, its rays of light, so to speak, in which everything grows. … Good nature, friendliness, and courtesy of heart… have made much greater contributions to culture than those much more famous expressions of this drive, called pity, charity, and self-sacrifice.” (From Human All Too Human.)

That works for me. Small but significant. The manifestation of our humanity in small acts of goodwill.

Pete and I also agree that while we try to practice what I call ordinary virtues and he calls the Golden Rule, we both sometimes fail. Terence, an ancient Roman playwright said, “I’m full of cracks, I leak all over.” We follow the social contract and ordinary virtues, but sometimes we fail. Sometimes I run the stop sign, sometimes I’m snarky, sometimes I don’t forgive easily. And then I try to do better.

Back to Myanmar and Aung San Suu Kyi. Although she’s the leader of the elected majority party, the constitution bars her from becoming president. It was written by her opposition – a military junta that ensured compliance with the law not by offering protection, but with threats and violence. It seems like she is violating both the social contract as we understand it, and ordinary virtues. Yes, the constitution is arbitrary and illegitimate. While she has a legitimate claim to the leadership position, why not wait until her party is in power and write a less arbitrary constitution? Deciding to place yourself above the president just seems like a bad precedent in an emerging democracy. And since she has a lock on power, why not respect the system, show grace with an orderly transition, and change the constitution legitimately? To paraphrase Montaigne, I’m clueless. Unlike Montaigne, I really am. But maybe now my kid will read my blog.

What kind of picture goes with the social contract? Beats me. I chose one with simplicity and beauty, to go with Pete's eloquent words. Photo of Lake Michigan courtesy of www.pointnorthphotography.com. As always, thanks for reading. You can subscribe to blog posts at the bottom of any page at www.ordinaryvirtues.com. 

Places With Potentially Unwelcome Intrusions

Arts and culture is one of the Sacred Pillars of Placemaking (along with walkability and coffee shops). The arts make our communities more desirable places to live or visit. From street art to opera, communities are trying to be more relevant by making the arts available (accessible is another discussion). Public art is a brick in this Sacred Pillar.

But as always there is the ancient debate over what constitutes art, with the contemporary twist of where it belongs. Over the summer, there was a debate in the New York Times over “whether public art is a welcome cultural amenity or an unwelcome intrusion in our parks and plazas.” And so today we ponder: does art belong in public places?

Public art can start a conversation (or a debate), make a boring spot more interesting and appealing, add color and character, contribute to a neighborhood’s identity, and enhance the experience of being in a park or other public space. It can complement a city’s identity – think ArtPrize, the big jellybean at Millennium Park in Chicago, Philadelphia’s LOVE sculpture.

Public art may be on private property, but visible to the public, or it may be at public spaces like parks, downtowns, or city offices. When art is on private property (at an office building, for example), people don’t seem to get too cranky. It’s when public funds and parks are used for art, or when someone is inconvenienced by it, or when it doesn’t meet their definition of “art” that their britches get in a bunch.

Years ago, there was a wonderful installation called The Gates in Central Park (photos below) by Christo and Jeanne Claude (first name only artists). A documentary was made about the project because it took from 1979 to 2005 to secure approval from the city for the temporary installation. And look how cool it is!

The Gates, Central Park, New York

The Gates, Central Park, New York City

There is a distinction between temporary public art (like The Gates and some of the other examples in the Links section below) and permanent installations. Temporary art is here and gone. Because it’s not going to be around forever, it’s more of an event, a destination. It shouldn’t take 26 years to get a permit for an art project that’s only up for a few weeks.

I am particularly a fan of temporary public art, for many reasons. Why not change it up? Temporary works can be more daring (permanent public pieces are frequently so safe or even cloying they could be on the wall of a Holiday Inn). Community members see a wider variety of art. Permanent pieces become invisible and irrelevant after a time (or worse; lots of Confederate war memorials are coming down since the shootings in Charleston in June).  When a permanent work becomes dated, it’s a lot harder to make it go away than one you only have for a month or two. They are less maintenance.

Earlier I referenced the New York Times debate over “whether public art is a welcome cultural amenity or an unwelcome intrusion in our parks and plazas.” Obviously, my answer is welcome cultural amenity. If you read the Times piece, you’ll find a couple of commenters who are grumpy because their access to Central Park was limited during installation of The Gates, or one who thinks we should stick to memorials, fountains, and statutes (which are not public art because…??). This is one reason I like temporary works. You don’t like it, wait a month and it’ll be gone.

Some public art is crap, but I’d rather have crap that makes people look and think – make a judgment – than nothing at all. Museums are frequently built to intimidate people, or the art itself is intimidating, or people don’t think they’ll get it. The more art we can put into a comfortable setting, and the more fun it is, the less intimidating art is over time. Something like The Gates or Toledo’s red ball (below) is fun, interactive, and attracts people to a location. Not many people worry that they don’t “get” the big red ball. There will always be dissent. And because we live in a democracy, we all get to have an opinion, say it loud and proud, and either take action or move on.

Links

Toledo hosted a giant red ball this past summer. The ball moved all around the city over a couple of weeks as part of a summer-long Playtime exhibit at the Toledo Museum of Art. People – especially adults – were invited to interact with playful and whimsical art.  Placemaking? Heck yeah. If you want to attract people to a place and make them smile, put a giant red ball there.

Red Ball, Toledo

The installation below – the house with roots hanging from a crane – is a riff on the construction site. Intended to abate the eyesore that comes with construction, the roots suggest that the house was “violently yanked from the land” for the construction project.

Although I gave opera a shout out in the first paragraph, when I speak of public art in this email, I’m referring primarily to visual art. Music is certainly a form of public art / culture. One of my very favorite public arts initiatives was Random Acts of Culture, funded by the Knight Foundation, and other examples of flash mob arts. This one is my favorite. There are lots more on YouTube.

Taxi drivers in Mumbai are decorating their cabs with some fabulous art.

This two-minute video about an Indianapolis art center ties arts (including visual and music), neighborhood revitalization, economic development, and placemaking together.

Street art is getting more recognition as a legitimate art form. While insiders are giving it art world credibility, street art remains outside curators’ control.  The artists control the process from creation to exhibit. It’s not made for longevity – it is temporary by design. Viewers have to decide whether they like it without the blessing of an art bureaucracy. The art is seen in context. All of which I like. Here is an article about one community that embraces its street art, and has made it part of the city’s identity.

As always, you can sign up at www.ordinaryvirtues.com to receive posts by email (signup is at the bottom of each page). Thanks for reading, and a happy and peaceful new year!

Ordinary Virtue of the Week: The Examined Life

"If others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself. We are all steeped in it, one as much as another; but those who are aware of it are a little better off -- though I don't know."  Michel de Montaigne, who claimed not to know much about anything but I love him anyway.

On the other hand, though Plato said "The unexamined life is not worth living," another deep thinker added "but the over-examined life is nothing to write home about either."

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