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Artists’ creative use of vacant shops brings life to desolate high streets
Robert Booth, The Guardian,
To most, the ring of hammer on nail as shop windows are boarded up on Britain’s struggling high streets can only mean unemployment and decline. But for a growing band of optimists, it heralds a golden opportunity.
Artists and curators have begun colonising “slack space” freed up by the recession and are transforming vacant shops into “creative squats”, galleries and studios.
Former branches of shops including Woolworths and Carphone Warehouse, as well as independent stores, have been colonised to house community cafes and performance art events and promote the work of local artists.
(18 February 2009)
Facing the Zoning Monster
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
Over the last 50 years, food and zoning laws have worked to minimize subsistence activities in populated areas. Not only have we lost the culture of subsistence, but we’ve instituted legal requirements that make it almost impossible for many people to engage in simple subsistence activities that cut their energy use, reduce their ecological impact, improve their food security and improve their communities. In some cases, these laws were instituted for fairly good reasons, in many cases, for bad ones that associate such activities with poverty.
In fact, scratch most of the reasons for these things, and you’ll find class issues under their surface in the name of “property values.” There are ostensible reasons for these things, but generally speaking, the derive from old senses of what constituted wealth – and what constituted wealth was essentially having things that don’t do anything of economic value, but show that you can afford. It is important to remember that many things we think are ugly because of their class associations are not inherently ugly – that is, a lush garden is not inherently more ugly than a lawn (quite the contrary), nor are colorful clothes on a line inherently unattractive. What we find beautiful has to do with our culture and our training, otherwise how could anyone have ever found a 800K McMansion beautiful?
Among the basic subsistence activities legislated against by towns, cities and housing developments are:
(12 February 2009)
Growth pattern crippled Phoenix
Catherine Reagor, The Arizona Republic
Phoenix grew into the nation’s fifth-largest city through a reliable pattern: Build affordable homes on the metro area’s edges, welcome waves of new buyers, and then roads, schools and retail centers follow.
Home buyers relied on that pattern. Buy an affordable home on the edge, watch it quickly appreciate, then sell at a good profit and move again to a bigger home in an established area.
Builders and all the other businesses of the real-estate industry relied on that pattern. Develop open land just beyond established neighborhoods, offer affordable houses, and watch the area grow into the Valley’s newest suburb.
… One reason the current housing collapse has been so brutal in Phoenix is how suddenly that pattern broke down. In only a couple of years, the breakdown trapped people in unfinished communities much like a fast-moving landslide buries people in their tracks.
Digging into the rubble of Phoenix’s latest real-estate collapse, the damage is clearest in edge developments, areas where home values have fallen the most and foreclosures are highest.
(15 February 2009)
KunstlerCast #51: Seaside Revisited
Duncan McCrary, The KunstlerCast
James Howard Kunstler is back from a visit to the American South. He reports on two New Urbanist developments outside of Montgomery, Alabama. In many ways Kunstler believes that the new urbanist model of building 400 acre “traditional neighborhoods” out in the green fields of suburbia is over. He explains the relationship between new urbanism, suburbanism and just plain old urbanism. Kunstler’s journey also took him to revisit Seaside, Florida, one of the most famous new urbanist projects produced by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. Many people criticize Seaside for being elite and artificial. But Kunstler says Seaside will probably feel more authentic as it ages naturally.
(12 February 2009)
