The first time I drove through Novato I thought that I had let my attention wander and taken a wrong turn. As you enter town from West Marin, Novato Boulevard seems almost as wide as a freeway. It is supposed to be Northern California but it feels more like L.A.

Then you pass the diner on the left and somehow the scene changes.  The road narrows to two lanes.  There is the welcome shade of trees, and a sense that the occupants of the houses might not be subscribers to Better Homes and Gardens.

You are back in small town America, circa 1949 — a stretch of a half-mile or so that progress somehow missed.  Then you cross Diablo Boulevard at the stoplight and it is L.A. again.  Two malls in the next half mile, and oceans of parking that remind you what rules the roost around here.

With auto-centricity on both sides I’ve wondered how long the quirky center could hold. Not very, it now appears.  According to the Marin Independent Journal, the Novato city council has decided to eliminate the two lane stretch.  It will demolish the houses, cut the trees, and widen the road to four lanes; and it will do all this for the “efficiency” of traffic flow.

Don’t people ever learn?  About half a mile to the east is Highway 101, which was built to ensure an efficient flow of traffic north of the Golden Gate Bridge.  Have you driven 101 at rush hour lately?  Widen it and they will come, and make it clogged again.

Perhaps a mile back from the stretch in question is San Marin Drive.  It is four lanes plus parking, with strip mall of course, and a model of efficiency by the standards of the typical traffic engineer.  So much so that speeding has become a chronic problem. Not long ago a motorcyclist crashed into a father and daughter, killed the latter and left the father maimed.  Residents are desperate for ways to slow the traffic down.

That’s what the two-lane stretch on Novato Boulevard does.  It “calms” the traffic in the term of the trade.   The planned widening would “take down the quality of our community and take down beautiful trees,” one resident told the IJ. “I like the idea of slower traffic.  It’s fine by me.”

Novato has been down this road before, so to speak.  For years it permitted strip malls to proliferate around town until its main street – Grant Avenue – dried up.  Then it had to spend millions to spiff up Grant Ave and try to bring people back.  Now it wants to speed up the traffic on Novato Boulevard with the probable result that it will have to slow it down again.

What’s the old saying about making the same mistake over and over and expecting somehow to get a different result?

Jonathan Rowe

A culture reveals itself in what it believes can go wrong.  Economists for example have no concept of bad growth. Growth can be too fast, in which case the economy is “overheating.”  It can be too slow, in which case it is “sluggish.”  Economists of a leftward bent might say that the fruits of growth are distributed unfairly.  The rich get too much and everyone else too little.

But fruits they are assumed to be –  a succulent pie that just needs to be carved in a more equitable way.  That the pie itself might be unhealthful or spoiled is not within the ken of the conventional economic mind.  The possibility cannot exist.  Growth might consist of junk food and violent video games, pills to which people are addicted, and a host of other such things.  Still it is growth and therefore devoutly to be sought, as far as the economist (and the corporation) are concerned.

Something similar happens with invasions of the cultural and social realm.  Unless there is a link to bodily harm, in the form of cancer in particular, then harms are deemed spectral and of marginal importance.  What prompts this thought is news of a $24 million U.N. study on the possible connection between cell phones and cancer.

The study covered 13 countries and was – not surprisingly – inconclusive.  Researchers found a small correlation but not an overwhelming one.  Critics pointed out that the study was based on cell phone usage patterns from a decade or more ago when 30 minutes a day was considered “heavy.”   Also the study ignored the difference between people who used headsets and those who held the phone itself next to their ear.

That’s twenty four million to learn not much.  But my question is this.  Do we really have to determine that something causes cancer before we can say it isn’t good?  Can’t we talk about the noise and annoyance in public places, the way people tune out the life around them – the way parents ignore their own kids while yakking on the cell phone for pete’s sake?

The cancer centric bent of advocacy in this country has a number of sources.  For one thing it goes to our national body obsession.  For another, it arises from the requirements of the legal and legislative arenas.  Regulation here must be justified in terms of what is called the “police power;” and harm to person or property is the most direct and unambiguous way of invoking that.  In the courts, such harms provide a basis for lawsuits that seek money damages.

The more general degradation of the cognitive environment is harder to quantify and thus harder to regulate and seek compensation for.   Our processes for determining what a problem is, thus are slanted in the direction of personal bodily harm.  That is important, certainly.  And certainly there are big gaps there, where powerful interests are concerned (workplace hazards for example.)

But the health of our social body is important too, and of the common spaces we inhabit.  When the law takes equal cognizance of that, it will be a sign of progress.

By Toby Barlow

A friend who owns an independent bookstore was recently telling me about a disturbing trend where people go into her store, browse titles, read a few pages, and then go order it from Amazon, all to save whatever you save by shopping on line.

I told her that I actually do the opposite. If I see a book that interests me, I read the customer reviews online, then I call my local store, Leopold’s, and order it. Yes, it’s slower, but I’m usually already in the middle of another book, so I have time. It costs more too but I actually like doing my part to help keep the lights on, maybe helping them enough so they can hire some nerdy kid who likes books.

You might think your town is different than mine. After all, I live in downtown Detroit and your community is doing so much better than that. Listen to those birds chirping! Look at that line at the coffee shop! It’s nothing like downtown Detroit where, as we all know, great economic changes have wrought a massive Godzilla-scale beat down. But if you think that can’t happen to you, lemme tell you, it can.

It has been, what, fifteen years since the internet started changing everything? And thanks to it we now have a lot of convenience (click!) and a lot of social networking (poke!) and a lot of information (forward!) yet instead of making us happier we are living in a woefully insecure society where very few models are actually sustainable.

Just to take one small example, I usually watch 30 Rock on Hulu, which isn’t generally considered to be anything near a viable business model. If I happen to be home, I watch 30 Rock on NBC, which is losing money faster than a spastic drunk at a casino. NBC was just bought by Comcast, the cable giant whose entire mega-profitable empire, I just learned from The Atlantic, is seriously threatened by things like, oh, Hulu.

The only ones who are winning right now are the robots. The almost completely computerized and automated iTunes, Netflix and Amazon are all making serious bank. And I can get 30 Rock episodes from each of them. But I can’t get it at my video store anymore because my video store is closed. Which is kind of my point. I liked those guys. Sure, one of them was a little creepy, but at least he had a job. I mean, where do the creepy guys go when they lose their jobs? What do they do? Do I want to know? (No, I don’t want to know. Let’s just give him a job.)

Every holiday season more and more people do all their shopping online, forcing more local stores out of business and local unemployment goes up and then, lo and behold, next Christmas nobody has as much money. The whole thing is either a reverse engineered ponzi scheme or a losing game of three-card monte or it’s just the end of Reservoir Dogs where they all shoot one another dead.

So can we maybe just slow it down a little? As spring arrives and we embrace the slow food movement and plant our gardens and tend to our bees, I would also like to propose we think about slow shopping too. Walk into a store and browse. It will take more time, but by making it a bit more difficult you’ll actually wind up spending less money, thusly saving more than you would have if you had shopped on-line.

I’m not saying the Internet is evil, far from it, it’s a wonderful, wonderful thing (Hi Arianna!) and if you need a book fast then, sure, by all means, go buy it on-line at bn.com. But if there’s a place near you where you can go support your community, then stop on by there instead. Make the effort. Yes, you might pay more, but a lot of the extra money you’re paying in local taxes goes to filling in your potholes and paying for someone to watch your kids cross the street. Businesses survive on wafer thin margins, one more customer going and shopping at a store can actually make a big difference.

Seriously, you might feel savvy buying those shoes from Zapatos but in the long run you’re really not. The phrase “free shipping” is really just like crack cocaine, it’s cheap, it’s addictive and, in the end, it will cause the same horrible destruction in your community.

If you really want to know what is going to happen if you keep sending your money to support those distant acres of automated warehouses, come visit Detroit and take a look around. You’ll see parts of town that look exactly like that burned out futuristic landscape from The Terminator. You know, that’s the movie where the robots won.

Toby Barlow is a writer who lives in downtown Detroit. His critically acclaimed novel Sharp Teeth is currently available from Random House in the U.K., HarperCollins in the U.S., and in a few other countries whose languages he doesn’t understand. His book is available at your local bookstore.

Originally published on Huffington Post

POSTED March 22, 2010

Published on OntheCommons May 2010

http://onthecommons.org/content.php?id=2700

www.onthecommons.org

Jonathan Rowe

Does it matter who owns our local businesses?  According to the economics texts the answer is “No.”  The only question is “consumer value” – which is to say, how much we get for our money.  We are one-dimensional creatures; our psyches are essentially those of wall eyed bass with better math skills.

So, ownership is not relevant.  It’s essentially none of our business.  So long as Wal-Mart offers the cheapest prices, we should welcome it to town.  Ditto Barnes and Noble, Safeway, Starbucks, and Dominos Pizza.  They provide the most stuff for the least price, so what’s our beef?

Part of the answer comes from my old neighborhood in New York.  Not long ago, when you crossed West 23^rd Street walking south on 8^th Avenue, you entered a real neighborhood called Chelsea.  (Actually Chelsea spilled north over 23^rd to the Fashion Institute and the Penn South Towers, but the core was in the other direction.)

It was a realm of mom and pop shops and restaurants, the kind of place where you knew the owners after a few visits. New York used to consist largely of urban villages such as this, that existed paradoxically within the mega-city. I do not remember a single chain, except perhaps the McBurnie YMCA on 23^rd, and a couple of supermarkets that were local chains.

That was in the early Nineties.  A couple of weeks ago I was in New York, and took a walk from Penn Station down through the old neighborhood.  As I approached 23^rd Street I encountered a CVS drug store/melangerie, and then a Gap clothing store.

The Gap?  In Chelsea?  I thought of the actors, stage hands, and assorted others who lived in my old co-op building, thanks to New York laws that enable tenants to buy into buildings undergoing co-op conversion at low “insider” prices. They included Richard, my professor neighbor and a devoted dumpster diver.   Their interest in a Gap store would not have been great.

Across 23^rd it was more of the same.  On the west side of 8^th Avenue there is now a Vitamin Shoppe, Starbucks, T-Mobile shop, Jamba Juice, ATT shop, and Mailboxes Inc., in that order.  It could have been Vintage Oaks mall in Novato, or Serramonte Plaza in Daly City, or any of the other commercial venues that define the placeless corporate landscape here in the Bay Area and in much of the rest of the country.

The neighborhood was gone in any but a geographical sense.  A couple of blocks over, on Sixth Avenue, there’s now a Barnes and Noble.  There’s even a Toys ‘R Us in Times Square, and a K-Mart in the vicinity of Penn Station.  (These big box stores cause the sense of place to blur.)  New York City itself is starting to disappear.

To which our economist friends say, “So what?  Big boxes wouldn’t be there if people didn’t shop at them.  Are you some kind of an elitist who doesn’t care about bargains?”

What such people don’t grasp is that commerce isn’t just about stuff.  It serves a social function as well.  Those mom and pop stores were places where people could know and be known.  This was especially important for older people, and others for whom shopping might constitute the only social contact in long empty days.

There was a Greek coffee shop on 8^th Avenue called The Regal – one of those places with red naugahyde booths and encyclopedic menus that used to be everywhere in the city.  It was unremarkable except for the owner, a kindly Greek lady who would sit on a stool at the end of the counter by the cash register, and greet people as they came in.

This included a number of forlorn souls who lived at a community care facility in the neighborhood.  They would wander in and out during the slow morning hours, and the waitress would chat them up and make sure their coffee cups were filled.  As the lunch crowd came they drifted away to who knows where.

One afternoon I got a clue. I was walking past the MacDonald’s a few blocks up 8^th Avenue and saw one of the people who had been in the Regal that morning. He was gaunt, with a disoriented and haunted quality.  Kids were tormenting him; the manager was shooing him away.  That is the difference between a neighborhood and a corporate marketing arena – between a real person and a lawyers’ version of one.  (That a majority of the justices on the U.S. Supreme Court can’t tell the difference does not speak well of them.)

Safety is another issue.  As Jane Jacobs pointed out in her seminal Death and Life of Great American Cities, a street with many small shops has many watchful eyes looking out the doors and windows.  This is especially so if the shops are run by individual owners who take a personal interest in the surroundings.  The pedestrian traffic alone – the constant in and out – provides potential witnesses and thus protection against crime.

Compare that to a block with a K-Mart or Barnes and Noble.  There will be a long stretch with no entry ways, and no watchful eyes from inside.  Such blocks are especially creepy at night.

In a nation with a surfeit of stuff but mounting social deficits, there is an element of insanity in designing and assessing the economy solely in terms of material output.  Dr. Thomas Lyson of Cornell University has compared counties with small, locally owned businesses and social institutions against those in which outside corporations dominate.

As recounted by Stacey Mitchell in her book Big Box Swindle, Lyson found that “[T]he big-business counties had greater income inequality, lower housing standards, more low-birth-weight babies (an indicator of overall health); more worker disability, lower educational outcomes,  and higher crime rates.  The small-business counties not only scored better on all of these social welfare measures, but their residents belonged to more civic organizations and voted more often.”

Those bargains come at a pretty high price.  And this isn’t even counting the informal social dimension that the Regal Coffee Shop in Chelsea used to embody.  (I didn’t mention that the Regal too has disappeared, replaced by a trendy-chic wannabee of the kind that has become a Manhattan cliché.)

Even the bargains aren’t really what they seem.  Wal-Mart for example is infamous for loss leaders, and for pressuring suppliers to produce lower-quality items that it then can sell at lower-seeming prices.  But that’s an issue for another day.  For now, let’s just be aware that there are reasons to keep an economy local, to the extent possible; and one of the main ones is to keep the social dimension of commerce intact.

If Agway owned Toby’s Feedbarn, and if the Bovine Bakery was a Starbucks, and if Point Reyes Books was a Barnes and Noble, does anyone think they would be as committed to the community as those businesses – with their local owners – are now?

As the resident of one community in Michigan that said “No” to Wal-Mart put it to Mitchell, “They don’t sell small town quality of life on any Wal-Mart shelf, and once they take it from you, you can’t buy it back from them at any price.”

Manhattan Dispatch:  Too Spiffy?

Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village is one of the great common spaces in the U.S., and probably in the world.  On any given day, when the weather is half decent, you will find chess players in the southwest corner, the air thick with concentration; while parents and nannies watch their children in a shaded, ample play area in the opposite one.

In between are musicians, magicians, readers, nappers, New York University students intent over their books; and young people who paint their bodies silver or gold and stay stock still for long periods of time.  Actors study their parts.  Might-be lovers study one another.  Dog owners socialize and watch their pooches in the dog run.

In the early morning earnest runners and power walkers somehow finesse the narrow sidewalk on the periphery.  During the day skateboarders perform amazing feats in a large empty fountain.  It is not unknown that young men slung out on benches with a casual alertness sell items in which a federal agent would have an interest.

Within a space that is neither large nor small – less than ten acres — a distillation of this raucous city somehow settles in with grace  It is less a matter of tolerance than of learned obliviousness.  Do your thing – just don’t bother me.  The New Yorker’s creed. And it works.  A few minutes here can restore one’s faith — not in the future, perhaps, which seems a mess, but rather in a present that can be surprising in its congeniality.

Put enough such presents together, and we might be onto something.

The word “improvement” makes one a little edgy in connection with this happy space.  “Leave it alone” sounds a lot better; and the Project for Public Places, to its great credit, reached this conclusion a few years ago.  Nevertheless, a general spiffing up is under way.  Portions of the park are being closed in sequence, while the improvers go about their work.

Walkways are being resurfaced, benches replaced, the landscaping made more genteel.  Some of this seems harmless.  The old benches sometimes did make you wonder about when they were last cleaned.  Greenery is always welcome in this city of concrete.  Maintenance and order do send signals to users that encourage civility and respect.

I don’t want to prejudge.  Still, the place is starting to feel just a bit prim, like Gramercy, the gated private park on the East Side.  The greenery in the new planter boxes I saw is of the type that a downtown improvement district might install.

The old Washington Square Park was like a comfortable living room – worn in a way that put you at ease.  Too much improvement and people will feel the way they do in a home of their financial betters – worried always that they will scratch the furniture or spill something on the rug.

It is hard to sip coffee and work on a manuscript in a place like that.  I hope this is just an excess of protective instinct.  One should never underestimate the ability of New Yorkers to foil the spiffer-uppers and reclaim turf with wear and grime.  Still, it helps to remember that a commons is about life and not décor.  Part of the alchemy of creating common space is to get the balance right.

The Practicality of the Local

The offices of the Rockefeller Family Fund are across from the leafy grounds of the Riverside Church, and the Hudson River beyond.  It doesn’t feel like Manhattan in this part of the Upper West Side.  The offices have the discrete, purposeful hum of old wealth responsibly employed.  The furnishings are modest.  But still, there is a sense that things financial are taken care of; and for this day at least,  there will be no worries about rent and the rest.

I was there for a conclave on new indicators of national well-being.   (The current default measure, the Gross Domestic Product or GDP, is perversely out of date; and never was intended for this purpose to begin with.)  It was a crowd of heavy hitters, led by Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel winner in economics, who served recently on the commission that advised French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of France, on new indicators for his country.

I sat listening to these smart people debate what should be measured, and how.  Can you really put a dollar value on the air and sky, for example?  (I wish there had been more discussion of whether that’s a good idea; and what it says about this culture that we feel a need to.)

Is it possible to measure happiness?  How do you make comparisons across cultures when the concept itself is so culturally bound?  My father-in-law is a Third World rice farmer who says happiness is “when you have rice under the house.”  I have a feeling that wouldn’t cut it in L.A.

I was getting a little dizzy.  The discussion was earnest, enlightened and very learned.  But it was not grounded in any particular reality other than the conventions of the disciplines represented at the table, and a generalized political penumbra. It was a little like large schools: when you deal with a mass, the particularity gets lost.

My mind went back to the workshop the previous Saturday at the Freitas Center of the Sacred Heart Church in Olema.  It was led by Milenko Matanovic, the founder of the Pomegranate Center in Issaquah, Washington, who has worked with communities all over the world to design and build common spaces. The topic was how to develop the design of a village green/zocalo in Point Reyes Station.  (Milenko had made a presentation at the Dance Palace the night before.)

There were about twenty people, including a few from Stinson Beach, Bolinas and the Valley, who came to share their experience in creating village greens in their communities.  After some general discussion, we focused on the activities that we hoped could occur in the new (and still hoped-for) space.  Form follows function.  Decide what the space is for, and you are on your way towards a design.

People didn’t need much prodding.  The ideas poured out, from chess and meditation to music and dance – and of course conversation and unplanned encounters. We ended with a list of about 25, and this was just a warm-up exercise to get a feel for how to get the process going.  Convenient access for people who are not entirely mobile, figured large throughout.

There is something about the concrete that arouses the imagination, while abstraction tends to deaden it.  In the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the narrator, who is teaching writing at a college in Montana, unlocks a stymied student by asking her to describe one brick of the county courthouse in town.  The specificity set loose a torrent that more general topics had blocked.

This is related, I think, to Jefferson’s doubts about democracy in a large nation.  Distance and abstraction are no more hospitable to self-government than they are to the imagination. Locality, by contrast, engages us at the level of experience.  It tends towards the practical rather than the ideological.  What to do in a village green is not a question that parses out along left or right wing lines, except possibly at the fringes, such as whether to permit political posters or crèche displays.

We need better indicators of well-being, for sure.  Feedback guides policy and action.  At present, the national feedback loop is dominated by a metric – the GDP – that counts bad things as good just because they occasion the expenditure of money. Cancer, divorce, car crashes, violent video games and a host of other ills make the GDP go up.  Stable marriages, good health, walking instead of driving, sharing instead of buying, all make it go down.

For the complete run-down, see the links on this page.  By the weird standard of the GDP, the practice of community, such as the Over-The-Hill-Gang and West Marin Share, don’t count at all, because no money changes hands.  Worse, they come out as regress because they take the place of the expenditure of money.

With feedback like that, it is little wonder that policy in this country is a mess.  If you had a car in which the windshield was painted black and the gas gauge went up as you drained the tank, you’d end up in a mess too.  So yes, we need better indicators that portray the world as we experience it and not as professional economists choose to see it for the convenience of their simplistic models.

But such measures won’t do much without local practice that gives reality to the better path towards which they point. After the heady discussion at the Rockefeller Family Fund, I’m looking forward to getting my feet back on the earth, so to speak.

And the Pipevine along the fence is making its spectacularly-shaped blooms.

Pipevine blossoming on the fence at Livery Stable Native Garden - photo by EBarnet

And other blooming native forbs we foster here.

Blossoming forb at the Livery Stable Native Garden - photo by EBarnet

Milenko Matanovic, Community Place Maker/Artist of the Pomegranate Center

Milenko Matanovic was an artist in the former Yugoslavia who tried to bring creativity and life to public places.  When he came to the U.S., he saw that the places themselves were missing, and has devoted his life to recreating them.  He founded the Pomegranate Center (“think seeds”) in Issaquah, Washington; and for the last twenty five years he has worked with communities all over the world in creating common gathering places where art plays a central role.

Milenko will speak at the Dance Palace this coming Friday, March 26^th, at 7:00 PM.

(Admission is free.  Donations will be gratefully accepted.)

Here is how he described the path that led to his commons-building work, in an interview with Grist magazine:

I was an avante-garde artist in my native Slovenia (formerly a Republic of Yugoslavia), where I worked with Group OHO creating conceptual artwork in town squares, riverbeds, forests and fields.   I’ve always been interested in pushing art into life (rather than into galleries and museums).   I dropped out of the modern art network because it looked, at the time, like a dead end as far as impacting daily life.

In 1985 I wrote a small booklet called “Meandering Rivers and Square Tomatoes” – a meditation on the ecological nature of creativity as an interactive, responsive, jazz-like process that has the power to connect humans with nature, with each other, and with a preferred future …

In my booklet, I proposed a different practice of creativity, a river-like process that always yields to the terrain of context, resulting in connectedness instead of simply cleverness.

So, in 1986  I incorporated Pomegranate Center as a nonprofit organization to apply concepts of “connective creativity” to contemporary communities and try to figure out how to better link artistic, environmental, and social issues.

A link to this article is at the Pomegranate web site:

http://www.pomegranate.org/resources/

Milenko spoke with Jonathan Rowe on KWMR-FM in December 2009.  Listen to this interview with Milenko Matanovic by Jonathan Rowe on his program American Offline, broadcast on KWMR radio, Point Reyes Station, 

MilenkoMatanovicInterviewPart1 and MilenkoMatanovicInterviewPart2.

Please join us at 7pm on Friday, March 26, 2010 at the Dance Palace Community Center in Point Reyes Station for a talk and slide presentation with artist and community place maker, Milenko Matanovic of Pomegranate Center.

The event is free, plenty of parking, wheelchair accessible.