Back to School

A few hours ago I got home from my first stint as a reviewer of student urban design proposals. That's right, kids: I went from consumer to teacher without ever having to be a producer. This afternoon I ducked out of work and went to the architecture and planning school at UC Berkeley to have a look, with some real professionals, at 18 class projects for a graduate-level landscape architecture class.

Here's what happened: a few months ago I got a survey asking me how I felt about open space and parks in my neighborhood - West Berkeley, also known as Oceanview - and specifically how I felt about an alley that bisects my block and a couple blocks northward and southward. I Googled the names at the end of the survey (like you do) and figured they were graduate students. But their questions were both provocative and, I thought, kind of wrong-headed. So in the grand tradition of my activist Communist forbears, I wrote a letter back. The gist:

The things people use a neighborhood for and the things they use green space for are not necessarily the same…and green space is not the same thing as open space. In the neighborhood we're talking about, the shops on 4th Street are a good example. You finesse that issue in your survey by including 4th Street in your list of parks. But maybe a neighborhood doesn't need parks - green space - at all. It needs a place for people to gather, socialize, and maybe do some shopping (either recreational or daily needs-type stuff). But that's not a park, precisely. It's a forum.

So, yeah, my usual rant. But then one of the professors sent me an email, and I was busted. She had Googled me right back, found my Planetizen work (especially this), and pegged me for being Adam Rogers the Wired editor (and not Adam Rogers the famous jazz guitarist). So she invited me to the studio review. Of course, I said yes - very flattering to have one's dilettantism validated. Plus, I'd attended a couple studio reviews at the Harvard Design School while I was at MIT on a fellowship a couple years ago, and they're pretty fun.

By and large, I was really impressed. I went in highly skeptical that a six-block-by-12-foot space could be anything more than a dark conduit for homeless people and delivery trucks. Several of the proposals disavowed me of that stupid preconception. Some did it with pure artsy creativity, like the one that used directed, multicolored lighting displays to illuminate the path at night (and, more importantly, light up both ends, giving the alley geographic stability). Some were pure tactics and workmanlike good thinking, like the one that re-paved and built out the intersections between the alley and the cross-streets with lights, planters, and benches, to give the whole street its own identity. My favorite re-graded the alley into a central, one-car-wide streetlet with plantings on both sides, proposing in-fill construction of mixed-use houses and retail along its length - building, in essence, a colonial or medieval street down the middle of my block. Very cool.

A few cheated (even if it was in a way that I approve of). They used the alley as an excuse to dream-redevelop some empty or abandoned space in the neighborhood. Some of the brownfield sites were city-owned, but some weren't, making those proposals too pie-in-the-sky, even if I loved the idea of a nearby abandoned distribution center turning into a park with a café and a basketball court.

It turns out that I am the kind of Berkeley resident that Berkeley residents hate. I am a latecomer, a yuppie (well, not so young anymore, but I do buy expensive cheese, so there you go), a commuter to San Francisco, a person who can't understand why new development is bad (please can I have just one freaking dry cleaner?), and perhaps worst of all, a native of Los Angeles who has also lived in New York. When people in Berkeley decry gentrification and skyrocketing housing valuations, they are talking about me.

But the fact that I, too, live in Oceanview and care about my neighborhood makes the want/need dichotomy I'm always talking about all the more difficult to parse. How are planners - student planners or governmentally-empowered planners - supposed to navigate the eddies and currents of what an involved community says it wants out of, oh, say, an alley, when the members of that community range from people like me to the guy down the block who's lived here for decades…in the decaying house his mother lived in for decades before that?

It turns out that what they do is turn their bow into the wave like the Excelsior in the beginning of Star Trek IV, and get creative. The gap between what residents want and what they need is bridged by smart planners coming up with solutions to problems we didn't know we had. Bad drainage leads to new, permeable pavement and a daylighted creek. A dark, scary alley leads to bollards and custom-designed streetlights.

So like I told the class: now I'm going to be wistful when I walk past my alley, because it'll never get rebuilt along the lines they drew. And now I understand the best thing about sitting in supposed judgment over students: usually, I'm the one who's going to get schooled.