“But the boulevards do more than establish an organizational pattern. They constitute, I believe, the irreducible armature of the city’s public space, and as such are charged with a social and political significance that we can hardly ignore. […] The ‘public life’ is difficult to define, but it suggests the spontaneous dramatization of who we are as a people.”
-Doug Suisman, Los Angeles Boulevard
Our roads are our public spaces. What do we tell each other there? Whom do we exclude?
Not all visionary plans are good plans.
In 1970, two guys with connections to UNL convinced themselves that the Missouri River Megalopolis needed an enormous international airport. They put the development potential for the Lincoln-Omaha-Sioux-Falls-Kansas-City region on par with coastal California and New England.
To speed contiguous urban connection between Lincoln and Omaha, the pair latched onto an idea floated by the US Army Corps of Engineers to dam the Platte River to create a huge lake out of Ashland. A new city would form around the lake. Lincoln and Omaha would be linked by sprawling new development.
The plan was published on thick glossy paper in a 78-page book and included many detailed drawings and other supporting documentation. Here is the layout for the runway.
Plenty of room for any plane to takeoff or land. I love how the Boeing 747 requirements are based on advanced data. (That iconic plane entered service the same year as the airport plan was published.)
The large lake and park would also provide excellent sound buffering for our supersonic planes.
These guys.
These bleak photos by Gregor Sailer, while exhibiting a certain calm, also serve as a reminder of how creepy human-made places are without anyone around.
It’s easy to get carried away when thinking about how a city ought to be built and focus only on the streets, the buildings, or the sewers. We talk about building setbacks, transportation technologies, zoning…
The infrastructure does matter since it, at least in some ways, defines what people are able to do. But, it shouldn’t be the focus of all our conversations.
Cities are about people.
In 1981, Christopher Alexander (of A Pattern Language fame) and Howard Davis unveiled a plan to help attract investment to and empower the residents and businesses of North Omaha. In essence, the plan called for the formalization of neighborhood associations and the creation of an overarching organization to help foster cross neighborhood collaboration. It would be like a more robust version of the neighborhood alliances system we have today. (See the North Omaha Neighborhood Alliance. Also, the newly formed ONE Omaha is starting to do interesting work in this area).
The associations would receive annual funding from the City to use as they saw fit. The idea is trust people to make the best choice for themselves, which is a little different than the annual Mayor’s Grant that is now only available for public safety projects. The associations would also serve an advisory role to the Planning Board and review local building permits. City-owned vacant land would be given to the umbrella association for development, and local craftspeople would be trained to renovate and construct buildings.
The document is typewritten and filled with all sorts of squiggly hand-drawn figures.
Sure, the plan comes from outside the neighborhood (I have no idea who commissioned it), but the focus on empowerment and distribution of authority is refreshing. It doesn’t just get at what sorts of development might go into the area. Instead, the plan focuses on reimagining our form of city government to find a better way meet all our needs.
Of course, there are also problems with this approach. It provides a vehicle for greater NIBMY-ism and risks creating a fragmented urban form, but it also offers a path toward greater and more genuine civic participation. At least it is an attempt at something better.
The authors’ poignant comments on race in the document’s preface are worth a read:
Full text here.
“If there is to be a ‘new urbanism’ it will not be based on the twin fantasies of order and omnipotence; it will be the staging of uncertainty; it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent objects but with the irrigation of territories with potential; it will no longer aim for stable configurations but for the creation of enabling fields that accommodate processes that refuse to be crystallized into definitive form; it will no longer be about meticulous definition, the imposition of limits, but about expanding notions, denying boundaries, not about separating and identifying entities, but about discovering unnameable hybrids; it will no longer be obsessed with the city but with the manipulation of infrastructure for endless intensifications and diversifications, shortcuts and redistributions – the reinvention of psychological space.”
– Rem Koolhaas, Bruce Mau, and Hans Werlemann, S,M,L,XL
Remember when there was an organization in town that tried to change the way we see our city by presenting a fully-fleshed out idea for a project? I miss Emerging Terrain. The people behind that organization were onto something when they dove into their Belt Line project. The idea was simple, yet revolutionary: take an abandoned freight rail corridor cutting through the middle of Omaha and Bellevue and create a linear park and transportation corridor to spur economic development. What sort of transportation? How about a light rail line paired with a trail? Sound crazy? Atlanta is doing it.
As if the vision wasn’t cool enough, Emerging Terrain went the extra length to create a feasibility study looking at demographics, costs, the state of existing development, and the potential for future development, all presented with clear graphics.
If built in its entirety, Omaha’s Belt Line would run from the Metro Community College Campus in North Omaha, through UNMC and the VA Hospital, past the Metro Community College in South Omaha, and all the way down to the front gates of Offutt. Of course, it could also swing over to Carter Lake.
One of the things that made Emerging Terrain’s project so interesting was its focus on process. The project included a novel public outreach campaign through a series of open studios and walking and bicycle tours of the northern portion of the route. It considered public space, transportation, land use, equity, and landscape as an interconnected whole to offer a project that could actually transform our city’s vision of itself. It also considered the political requirements for development.
This is the type of project – and more importantly, the type of thinking – that I’d like to see more of in Omaha. Even if the Belt Line never gets built (though it should), it served as a perfect example of good process. I encourage you to check out the full proposal here.
I stumbled across these tremendous images by Marcus Lyon some time ago. They really seem to capture the what many of us feel when confronted with the banal urban development that continues to crop up all around us: expansive plains of parking, ever-widening roads, and pretend neighborhoods only inhabited from 9am to 9pm.
These images evoke the feeling of having given up. We make our city a monotonous slab of concrete to avoid having to interact with one another. It’s all about getting places quickly, without a thought of what to do once we are there.
This post is a dreary start for a blog, but it is merely the beginning. What is our city? What is working? What can we improve? What is the Omaha that represents its best self?
Recognize this last image?
“Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.”
— Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
The Death and Life of Omaha 