Damek.

OK, that “New Urban Design” entry I did earlier today was a disaster. But rather than try to edit it, here I’ll just try to summarize what I meant to say.

I want more nature in everyday life. I’m a green in my heart, but I want my tech. I’m not of the “back to nature” variety. I’m an electric green, a viridian green. I want my tech, but I want it designed with ecology & habitat in mind. I want efficiency and intelligence, and also spirit and passion. Playful pragmatism meeting envronmental science. City planning and building design is just another form of tech, like the wheel and the abacus. Much of city planning is still stuck in the dark ages, or at best, not far out of the 19th century. Sprawl is the problem of the 20th century, but we still have even older problems to deal with. For me, traditional park planning in cities is technology on the level of the abacus. We can do better than that. The whole city should be a park, but not in a back-to-the-trees luddite kind of way. Not literally.

In that context, I find this exciting, even if it has been going on for decades. And I find this and this encouraging.

It may be time to shift thinking on black holes, for decades believed to be sucking maws in space from which even light cannot escape. Noted physicist Stephen Hawking, who has long argued just that, now says he was wrong: black holes may ultimately allow something to get free.

Dammit, I’ve just about had it with wishy-washy scientists! We need tough scientists who hold their ground and don’t let the black holes win!

(Caution, long entry ahead – if you don’t have time, stop and come back when you do! )

Last weekend Alex and I took a nice long walk around the 6.1-mile “Big Loop” of Central Park. Now, I’ve been to CP quite a few times since moving to NYC, but not walked around the whole thing. Mostly I’ve just gone here or there for a brief stroll or bit of pretend exercise. This was a serious walk, which felt wonderful, but more importantly made me see CP in a little bit of a new light.

See, I think New York is ugly. There are some great things about it, but for me it’s just too much human boxes and pavement, and too little nature, too little life, too little “other.” I’m no fan of suburban sprawl, but at least in your average suburb you probably have a yard with some grass. So I’ve always thought NYC would be better with more small parks spread throughout, and not just one big park in the center. I mean, OK, you got this one gigantic park rectangle in the middle (CP itself), you got the almost as impressive North Manhattan Parks and Riverside Park; and sure, you get your smaller multi-block parks like Battery Park and Tompkins Square Park slotted randomly in a few places, and then there are a bunch of other said in reply to a question about “conscientious consumerism,” “No, no, you’re not getting it yet — you’ve got to go deeper than that. If you have to be “conscientious” about it, that means that the system is malfunctioning. Being ‘conscientious’ is just another term for letting morons with crap products steal your valuable attention. You are co-dependent with bad design when you’re ‘conscientious.’ Piece-of-junk twentieth century technologies like coal-fired power plants shouldn’t even exist.”

I agree. Faceless, souless design like the endless gray city blocks of NYC shouldn’t even exist, in my opinion. We should love where we live. Granted, some people love NYC just the way it is. I still think they’d love it even more if it were designed better.

Do I have anything specific in mind? Not as such; I’m not an architect or city planner. But I find the growing New Urbanism movement in city design fascinating and encouraging. That last link is especially cool – Metropolis Magazine has this section of their site devoted to issues of design ethics & sustainability.

But even better, I wanted to link to arcology and Arcosanti. From the first link: “An Arcology is based on Paolo Soleri’s concept of the development of compact 3-D alternatives to existing urban sprawls, combining more efficient use of land and resources.” That’s what I mean when I refer to better engineering: a more conscious, efficient, yet beautiful effort. I just find exciting the very idea that out there, somewhere, are people stalwartly working on experimental building and design for everyday living. I mean, dammit, when I was growing up I had a subscription to World Magazine and I remember fondly the articles about people who built houses made from clay and old soda cans, or advanced polymer bubbles, or whatever. Where is the fun, the experimenting, the beauty and efficiency, the desire for living with the earth instead of just on her? It’s over there.

Well, I’m sure we’ll get there somehow, and I know there are always the practical matters of money and time and space to hold us back. What it comes down to is – I will always be willing to spend a little more for better quality, especially in building and city design, hoping that I will thereby be giving something better and more lasting to future generations. This is not to judge past generations who didn’t have the same level of science and social equality to even begin to see these options. We know we can do better now, though, and we should try. And I like Central Park.