Preserving Our Places, Preserving Ourselves

“It is my wish that you preserve in its original splendor all that is ancient and that whatever you may add will conform to it in style...” So declared the barbarian Theodoric the Great, newly minted king of Italy around the year 500. He was bemoaning the destruction of Rome and reinstated the ancient office of curator statuarum to protect the carved marbles of the Eternal City from vandals, thieves and lime-makers. Theodoric instituted a short-lived reconstruction program that temporarily staved off Rome's millennium of decline and cultural hibernation. Preservation not only connected the present with the past, but was a means by which the triumphs of his predecessors, in art, science and culture, could make positive contributions to the future. Perhaps the Ostrogothic king was a visionary who sensed that the upheavals of fifth century Rome threatened the very cultural underpinnings that defined its power and progress, and which had ultimately made it worthy of invasion in the first place. We too stand at the edge of such a cultural precipice.

Our own cultural dark age looms not as a result of political turmoil, but as the natural outcome of technology, modern finance and globalization. This trifecta has allowed many of us in the industrialized world to live relatively comfortable lives: food is cheaper than ever before, buildings are assembled at astonishing speed and we can instantly access any morsel of human knowledge while lying on a beach. We define ourselves as 'consumers': of food products, of manufactured goods, of housing, and of media and content. However, this consumer ethos has meant the loss of much cultural knowledge, because our lives are so mediated by the products of a global marketplace, rather than of an immediate, responsive community. Our connections to the physical world increasingly lack the idiosyncrasies of human agency and creativity: their universal gloss is rootless and abstract.


This is perhaps no more evident than in the built environment. Modern real estate development, which is the fortuitous concoction of a rationalized construction process, reliably cheap energy and capital financing, has propagated a creeping sameness in architecture, and by extension, our interaction with the physical world. Our cities are largely built by diffuse, corporate entities rather than by the people that inhabit them, untethering our building culture from the restrictions of a place and its inhabitants. We are left with a built environment that might be described as 'anyplace', or as no place at all.

Perhaps this is why people get upset when an unremarkable older house disappears: its very ordinariness gives meaning to that place by helping to define it. It may be the particular colour of its brick, or its relationship to the street. In neighbourhoods of older housing stock, it is possible, for instance, to trace the evolution of particular architectural characteristics because local builders would influence each other, refining and sharing techniques. This produces a cohesiveness in the streetscape, and the loss of one of its constituents is a blow to the cultural memory unique to that place.

The early Italian preservationist Gustavo Giavannoni used the term “architectural prose” to describe the minor architecture of a city. This is the background urban fabric that defines a place, a record that marks the presence of the myriad anonymous agents that have shaped it. Such prose is harder to find in newer construction, and not solely because of its young age. Rather, the scale of building, whether in the sheer number of units or in the size of structures themselves precludes the human imprint, except in its most abstract sense. Even in smaller projects, the mass-produced materials and (often) catalogue design cannot replicate the sedimentary quality of human agency that has marked urban settlement throughout its history and that inscribes it with cultural meaning.

Canadians are notoriously self-deprecating, a characteristic that makes cultural identification fraught. Icons such as the maple leaf and hockey are important, to be sure, but are rather low-resolution touchstones that speak to a very diverse populace spread over a large country. The finer details of regionalism which are associated with say, Sichuan Province or Tuscany are simply not possible, because we have not had enough time to discover who we are, collectively. It is for this reason that a broader ethic of preservation that includes the ordinary and vernacular is so vital: it provides a cultural foundation that cannot be replicated by the often universal and banal qualities of modern construction. For a diverse population wrestling with identity, the import of architectural preservation can not be understated because the built environment is the stageset for our divergent and common narratives.



Finding value in our built environment isn't just about identifying the monuments to our history. While we understandably take great pride in our iconic or historically significant structures, we must not conflate 'historic' with 'heritage'. The former speaks to association with important events or person, while the latter refers to our collective inheritance – of settlement patterns, technique and vernacular styles, of materials and rootedness in place. This distinction is important in developing an approach to preservation because it recognizes that heritage reaches beyond the historic house museum, and is found in the mundane and the human, in subtleties and intangibles.

As our interaction with the physical world is increasingly mediated by a globalized culture of products and design, it is vital that we recognize our inheritance in what we decide to keep, and of equal importance, in what we decide to build. We need to reestablish the architectural continuum with our past, with this place and its people, that has been obscured in the past fifty years, while moving forward. Otherwise, as John Steinbeck's displaced Oklahomans asked, “How will we know it's us without our past?”

The Edmond Place Phoenix

A piece of the urban puzzle is being reconstructed in Parkdale, in Toronto's west end. Twelve years after a fatal fire, the apartments at 194 Dowling Ave will be resurrected as a 29-unit supportive housing building. The Parkdale Activity and Recreation Centre (PARC) will administer the apartments, known as Edmond Place, to provide appropriate housing for persons with mental health and addiction challenges.

The city, which exercised its rarely used expropriation powers to acquire the building, will benefit from its retention in the public sphere. The building, which is designated as a heritage property, is not only appropriately scaled to the neighbourhood, but is an excellent example of an Edwardian walk-up apartment. And unlike the long and costly battles that have marked the redevelopment of other heritage properties, Edmond Place's rebirth from the ashes of tragedy is exemplar of the benefits of cooperative development between municipalities and non-profit interest groups.

Although Parkdale has thus far avoided the condo boom of the neighbouring Queen West Triangle, its housing market is as overheated as anywhere in the city, and it seems miraculous that the property sat unrestored and undeveloped as long as it did. The project certainly had no shortage of detractors who felt that Parkdale was amply served by rooming houses and inexpensive rental accommodation, and that new stock was not required. Such projects, it was suggested, reduce neighbourhood safety while tempering property values. However, as the area has become increasingly gentrified, the housing options for current low-income residents, to say nothing of newcomers, is jeopardized: Parkdale's population has declined over the last census period, a trend that may be attributed to multi-family houses that have been reconverted into single-family dwellings.

Those who fret about property values would do well to remember that housing prices have risen sharply in the past decade, in spite of the presence of rooming houses, poorly maintained rental housing and drug dens. Such living arrangements and their residents have long peopled the streets of Parkdale, and the Edmond Place project will make the area safer by providing a secure, affordable and most of all, supportive housing option for at-risk individuals who would otherwise have little hope of being integrated meaningfully into the community.

Edmond Place represents a fine example of local stewardship of a heritage property that preserves the streetscape while providing a much needed service. This city has no shortage of condominium developments that are materially and physically disconnected from the surrounding neighbourhood, the construction of which were preceded by months or years of legal wrangling, local opposition and much bitter resentment. Detractors of the project at 194 Dowling might also ask themselves what compromise the city would be forced to make in the form of extra height and density in exchange for the building's preservation, and what effect this would have on the neighbourhood. Considered in this light, Edmond Place should be chalked up as a win for everyone in Parkdale.

Decadent Wastefulness and Willful Amnesia

In the early hours of May 20, 2007, Walnut Hall's useful life was unceremoniously terminated by a team of firefighters. And while a collapsing rear wall sealed its fate after three decades of shameful dilapidation, this end was all but inevitable to those who had witnessed and wondered upon its long and intentional decline. Its value, econometrically assigned, required that Walnut Hall wither: its former owners, wishing to demolish the building and redevelop the property, let it disintegrate until restoration was all but impossible for its most recent purchaser. This handsome row of townhouses (1856) at Jarvis and Shuter Streets in Toronto stood as a symbol of our willful historical amnesia, the single-mindedness of capital and the impotence of policymakers.

The story is familiar. Although the strengthening of the Ontario Heritage Act in 2005 gave municipalities more tools to preserve cultural heritage resources, these increased powers have in some ways diminished the property owner's motivation to preserve. The problem, of course, is that as more restrictions are placed on what an owner can do to his or her property, the more attractive 'demolition by neglect' becomes.

This certainly seems to be the modus operandi for the Sylvan Apartments in Toronto's Bloor-Dovercourt neighbourhood. The two-storey, L-shaped building at the corner of Havelock St. and Sylvan Ave. has suffered a precipitous decline in the last five years, evidence of a decadent wastefulness of resources that the promise of greater profits all but guarantees. The Sylvan, which is listed on Toronto's inventory of heritage properties, is slated for near complete demolition so that the lot can be redeveloped, with only a portion of the facade remaining as a sop to preservationists and local dissenters.

The building, which provided 16 rental units, is to be replaced by a four-storey structure with 59 units. If density is your sole criterion for development, you would likely declare this a positive addition to the neighbourhood. Of course, the art of city building is more subtle than that. We must question the value of what is lost and measure it against its replacement using other criteria.

The first thing to consider is appropriateness of scale. The Sylvan occupies a large lot, but it relates to an intimate and close pairing of intersections (Dewson Ave. is just to the north). Its two storeys are appropriate to this setting, because the surrounding houses are generally three storeys, with the upper floor contained within a peaked roof. And while the new building, at four storeys, is not an overbearing addition to the street, we must ask ourselves whether it will be an improvement to the public realm? Or more importantly: is it better than what's already there?

What about design? The Sylvan (1910 and 1927), by no means an architectural masterpiece, is a fine example of its type: the walk-up Edwardian apartment building. It is subtly detailed with Doric order columns and a three-sided bay at the corner. The buff brickwork is quietly handsome, with delicately articulated arches spanning windows and doors; this detailing was intended for a truly 'pedestrian' audience. The initial drawings for the new building suggest a motley collection of applied mouldings and styles that fairly shout at the passerby, “I'm classy! I exude Old World charm!” and are reminiscent of the lawyer-foyer applique boxes so lately popular in the outer suburbs. Will this be a positive addition to the street?

As for 'use value', there is a definitely an argument to be made for increasing the number of people that can live on the lot. However, given that the last tenants were evicted in 2005, one can't help but wonder to whom an empty building is any use. It seems incredibly wasteful that a serviceable building, particularly one of architectural interest, that contains within it the cultural legacy of our deceased craftsmen, and that is appropriate to its setting should be left to decrepitate. The eventual profits to be realized from such an enterprise beggar at once the neighbours and the public realm.

These discussions inevitably come around to sustainability: drafty old buildings cannot possibly return the same energy performance of new, hermetically sealed structures, the argument goes. However, it is important to remember that buildings like the Sylvan were designed to be perpetually maintained. Bricks need to be repointed, windows painted and reputtied, weatherstripping reapplied as needed, etc. New building components are marketed as maintenance-free, a sleight of hand appealing to a 'knowledge economy' that has forgotten the importance and usefulness of manual work. Maintenance-free is code language for disposable, a position that is neither sustainable nor ethically sound. Moreover, when we consider the energy embodied in the fabric of the building (that is, the energy already expended to construct it), the sustainability ledger is more difficult to balance: the maintainable surely holds some value when measured against new, high-tech, disposable and energy-intensive building components, no matter how high their R-value.

What is perhaps the most ironic about the sad tale of the Sylvan Apartments is that, unlike many other buildings of a similar vintage, much of its lot is unbuilt upon. Behind the building is a large yard and a sagging row of garages. Surely there is some missed opportunity here, some way to keep another gem from being discharged to the landfill and to keep tenants from being dehoused (yes, 'rental replacement' is a form of dehousing - just ask 're-assigned' tenants of Regent Park): townhouses on mews, for instance or a set-back, three storey addition, no taller than the surrounding houses. No doubt the parking requirements would put a kibosh on such a development, despite being spitting distance to bus and streetcar stops and two subway stations. It is econometrically more prudent to demolish and make sixty-one (!) parking spaces underground. And if you're going to ask for a zoning amendment for the extra density, better make it triple the existing so that the legal and development fees and all that time lost arguing with the neighbours and councillors is worth it.

Let's be clear: I am not opposed to the creative reuse of or additions to heritage buildings. There are clear benefits to new construction that cannot be overlooked, and we should not forget that much of our current heritage stock was built, in fact, on the foundations of razed predecessor buildings. My point is that our criteria for supporting development (in this case, by the Ontario Municipal Board, as the city was opposed to it) must not simply evaluate new construction, but should carefully weigh the merits of what is to be lost.

What becomes of the Sylvan? The development process seems to have stalled. In the meantime, more bricks have disappeared from the parapet every time I pass by. Many windows are broken, and a neighbour informs me that there is a family of raccoons living inside. She also claims that the roof is severely leaking, which may explain the substantial settlement cracks on the Havelock facade. It has good bones, but surely there are limits; any chance of rehabilitating the structure ebbs away daily. The developer is not obligated to maintain the building beyond a minimal public safety baseline, and if the city can only protect a small portion of the facade, what happens now that it is left to crumble? The Heritage Act offers no protection to a 'listed' building, short of stalling a demolition permit. And as the untimely demise of Walnut Hall demonstrated, the vagaries and punishment of nature need no permit.

The Urban Generalist

It's been a while since I last posted, mainly because I was finishing up my second term. I have spent the past year working on my Master's degree in Urban Planning: this means lots of reading, writing, researching and collaborating with an interesting group of people from diverse backgrounds. Jane Jacobs and many others have tirelessly promoted diversity (of residents, income levels, land use, etc) as a fundamental characteristic of the healthy city. I would take this a step further and say that diversity among city-builders is equally important.

The city is a complex and constantly evolving organism. It does not react singularly to change, but as a synthesis of the many autonomous agents sometimes called the citizenry. A city's life involves the interplay of society and politics, the economy, small and large businesses, the ability (or disability) to move about, resource availability (or scarcity) and a whole host of other issues. It is no wonder that mayors rarely achieve their mandate (although we'll save our 'weak mayor' system for another post) with so many interests competing for attention. Urban planners are generalists by necessity, then. A senior planner recently told me that to be effective in the profession is to be a 'man of the world', a somewhat dated expression that nonetheless captures the generalist spirit: open-minded, pluralistic, polymathic. In this way, the planning profession can be seen to occupy the sparsely inhabited end of the generalist-specialist spectrum.

As noted in another post, our modern existence relies on a network of interconnected specialists: the goods we buy, from a stick of gum to an Ipod to a new house, were produced by multiple individuals engaged in specialized tasks. Frederick W. Taylor, observing factory-workers at the turn of the last century, realized that by breaking tasks down into smaller and smaller components, great efficiencies could be realized. This kind of industrial rationalism has had a lasting legacy, and while there is no shortage of detractors, scientific management has unquestionably produced great benefits for many of us in the form of healthcare, leisure time and a seemingly endless array of consumer products. However, specialization has a darker side: by framing problems through a narrow lens, the specialist inevitably produces limited solutions. In city-building, such single-mindedness can be disastrous.

The housing projects of the 1960s spring to mind. Well-intentioned policy-makers mistook the symptoms of poverty for its causes: by razing old rental stock thought of as slums and replacing it with new, 'humane' housing complexes, the poor would have dignified and municipally monitored accommodations. Of course, the legacy of such projects is well-known: their construction was disruptive and effectively fragmented the invisible networks within existing communities; they are often segregated from the city, creating instant ghettos and reinforcing the cycle of poverty; and their cloistered design often interrupts the existing street pattern, reducing walkability and snarling traffic. By narrowly focusing on housing provision as a solution to poverty at the expense of its root-causes, the result was blunt and ineffective.

A similar process is at work in the engineering profession. Duany and Kunstler have written extensively about how modern city-building often revolves around a set of prescribed and accepted engineering standards designed with the narrow purpose of moving traffic as efficiently as possible. Such an approach ignores all the other subtleties of the urban environment such as the relationship of buildings to each other, the pedestrian's experience and use of the street, the mix of building types and uses, street furniture and landscaping, etc., etc. This kind of thinking results in wide, multi-lane roadways, seas of parking and precludes the human scale of building we love about old Europe, but are too intimidated by the authority of the engineering profession to undertake ourselves.


A recent set of projects by first-year engineering students at the University of Toronto exemplifies this approach. The intersection of Dundas St. and Spadina Ave is one of the busiest in the city: the sidewalks are teeming with pedestrians and vendor's stalls, and both roadways must accommodate streetcars, automobiles and bicycles. It also has a higher than average pedestrian collision rate. A team of well-meaning and undoubtedly intelligent students came up with a solution: pedestrian bridges over the roadways. If your sole intention is to 'solve' the problem of pedestrian collisions, this provides an ample solution. However, like minimum road widths and setbacks prescribed by engineers elsewhere, this solution ignores other important aspects of city-building: quality of the public realm, connection of pedestrians to the street/buildings/other pedestrians, importance of views, etc. By creating an armature in the sky, the engineers are saying, "The street is primarily a conduit for automobile traffic. Pedestrians endanger themselves and hinder the flow of traffic, therefore they need to be removed from it in a rational fashion."

Let me be clear: I understand that this is a project by inexperienced students. God only knows that I have produced similarly narrow work in my academic career. My point is that over-specialization will inevitably result in blunt, coarse-grained planning decisions when finer detail is called for. Undoubtedly, we need specialists who are experts in their field. However, urban planners must also possess the qualities of a generalist and the ability to think circumspectively: cities are after all, as social historian Mark Girouard writes, one of humanity's most complex and enduring creations. By its very nature, the urban living arrangement precludes singularity of mind or action.

On Bricks and the Tyranny of Lintels

I live in a fairly old neighbourhood by Toronto standards. There are houses and commercial buildings of varying vintage, but most were built between about 1890 and 1920, and almost all of them are brick.

Brick is an amazing material: it is relatively easy to work with, and its small but consistent size means that there are any number of patterns that can be achieved. Most importantly, its uniformity establishes a metric for the decorative and functional program of the masonry.

Some of the earliest archaeological remains of permanent settlement show extensive use of sun-dried, mud brick. Stronger than wood and longer-lasting, brick proved a popular and versatile material. However, its ordinariness when compared to more expensive dressed stone meant that it was often relegated to structural duties, with finer materials veneering the facades of buildings.

This trend wasn't universal, however. In England and the Netherlands, masons achieved a high level of sophistication in brick construction. Where stuccoes had previously been applied to mimic cut-stone, English and Dutch masons used the humble material to rigourous decorative effect. It has been speculated that the poor soil quality in Holland required the use of brick because it is lighter than stone and would subject the buildings to less subsidence. Indeed, many visitors to Amsterdam have noticed houses propped up with wooden posts to prevent them from toppling.

Whether or not builders were compelled by environmental conditions to use brick, it gained popularity in North America wherever clay could be easily extracted. And untethered from snobbish preferences for stone over brick, it became the material of choice in many eastern cities. It was not just its ubiquity as a natural material that recommended it for building; rather, its decorative and structural properties lent it to a wide variety of applications.

In a recent post, I wrote about the effect of concentration on design. As design and technical problems are solved increasingly by 'products' developed for and distributed in a global marketplace, skills, both mental and physical, are diminished. Take a modern brick building, for instance. Most new houses constructed with brick are built on a wooden skeleton that carries the load of the building. The brickwork is a veneer, and is more akin to tilework, as it has no structural qualities - it only needs to hold up its own weight. Older brick buildings, where the walls were double-wythed (double walls of brick), required not only significant skill in laying out the courses, but also in spanning windows and doors, holding up eaves and bay windows and tying the two wythes together. Modern brick-veneered buildings also need to span windows, but this is achieved largely through the application of a steel lintel.

Steel lintels embody the ethos of concentration, efficiency and an inevitable deskilling of the manual and creative faculties. They are everywhere in modern construction, but if you haven't seen one before it's because you're not supposed to. Steel lintels are simple steel L or I beams that allow bricks to span a window without crushing it, and are popular because they eliminate the guesswork for the mason. Before the widespread use of steel, stone or reinforced concrete lintels were sometimes used, but their unlike their steel cousins, these are highly visible elements and had to be considered as part of the visual program. In Toronto, openings were mostly spanned by a simple segmental arch. The detail is generally subtle though, as the windows themselves are almost always rectangular.

Arches are an ancient construction method that allows empty space or an opening to be spanned by distributing the weight of the walls or ceiling on either side of it rather than straight down. Depending on the how high the building was or how it was to be used, the masons would construct their window arches in varying thicknesses to assure adequate strength. Even the humblest basement window in the darkest alleyway was arched because it had to be. But if you look carefully at these out-of-the-way elements, there is a high quality to their construction because it was required: a sloppy or poorly planned arch could fail, jeopardizing the integrity of the building, to say nothing of the mason!

Most importantly though, the absence of a steel lintel as a solution to the spanning problem meant that, like the walls themselves, window headers were an opportunity for expression. For a simple rectangular window, the mason could choose a jack, cambered or segmental arch. He could alternate the colour of brick for the voussoirs (the bricks that form the arch itself), or have them project slightly from the wall. He might include a ribbon course to extend beyond the windows and articulate the floors, or use chamfered bricks to soften the opening. And because architects were rarely involved, vernacular styles could develop that reflected the particular tastes of their makers.


What I'm getting at here is that in solving a technical problem, builders had at their disposal an almost infinite number of possibilities to choose from, so long as minimal technical requirements were met. It is no surprise then, that 'detailing' is often derided as historicism, because our modern construction methodology has concentrated technical solutions into pre-fabricated elements. Any detail is necessarily an applied element, and is not an emergent property of the technic. This is why steel lintels over windows always look bare, certainly, but also quite confounding: because we can't see the lintel, our brain tells us that bricks shouldn't be laid over a window. Modern builders often get around this uneasy feeling by articulating the windows with a conceit of 'soldiered' or upright bricks to allude to an arch. This is a vestigial and empty gesture that always seems incomplete, somehow.

The city is awash with the ghosts of masons past, whose careful work has been destroyed when the windows are replaced with a pre-fab vinyl job and the original opening is bricked up. Invariably the new window is lintelled with steel, mostly because it's cheaper, and because as moderns, details perhaps don't carry the same currency for us they once did. And as the skill to create strong and lasting brick buildings is relegated to the dustbin of history and the elite ranks of heritage restoration masons, we'll have to settle for applique personalities and whatever novelty the product designers come up with.

What's in a name?

A recent conversation with an old friend got me thinking about place identity. He grew up in Brockton, which is a rough-around-the-edges West Toronto neighbourhood with a large Portuguese population. I had been spending some time in the area, taking pictures and exploring its colourful streets of short blocks, small lots and houses built right to the sidewalk.

When I mentioned my recent wanderings to my friend, his response was, "Brockton? What do you mean? I grew up in Parkdale." His house was at the upper end of the historic subdivision of Brockton, on the eponymous Brock Street that forms the north-south axis of the village and a good distance from the proverbial tracks which separate the neighbourhood from Parkdale. His response made me wonder how many residents would identify their neighbourhood by its historic name and how many would tend toward a larger attractor, like Parkdale, or Bloor West.

This is perfectly understandable. Beyond the city's printing of Village of Brockton 1888 on the major street signs, the name is not in common usage. Although Brockton was parceled out from the same land as Parkdale, it was intended to be a residential area for the working class who toiled in neighbourhood factories. As such, it lacks a grand (if faded) thoroughfare like Queen St. and many of the cultural institutions that have strengthened Parkdale's identity. Over the years, of course, Parkdale acquired quite a different reputation from its putative, genteel aspirations, but I'll save that for another post. Suffice it to say, Brockton never really established itself in the city's collective mind, nor perhaps, among its residents.

The irony is that Brockton is physically more identifiable than many other neighbourhoods. Kevin Lynch called this the 'imageability' of a place: how well it was visualized and mentally mapped. In this regard, my street, near Roncesvalles Ave. in west Parkdale, looks a lot like many other Edwardian streets in Toronto. It is very long and contains a mix of modest and more commodious middle-class houses, and in the summer the canopy of maples and oaks forms a leafy corridor. It is a lovely street, but it could be almost anywhere south of Bloor St. between Spadina Ave and High Park. Brockton, on the other hand, has small lots and truncated, crooked little streets. The railway tracks that bound its south end inform the block pattern, creating odd-shaped lots and undefined spaces. Many of the houses were built on speculation, but it often requires a keen eye to discern such developments, as the ensuing years and owners have drastically modified them. The influence of Portuguese ownership is everywhere, with angel-brick, wrought iron, stucco and tiles adding an eclectic palette absent elsewhere in Toronto. Narrow laneways crisscross the neighbourhood, and many contain small dwellings or converted industrial buildings. And because the lots are small, the houses are built close to the property line, giving the built environment a presence and providing a sense of enclosure. The human scale dominates and the resultant urban spaces are at once surprising and intimate.

So what's in a name?

A recent poll to select one for another West Toronto neighbourhood points to the fact that many people indeed take such matters seriously. Realtors have known this for a long time, and the efforts of the South Junctioners or Trianglians, or whatever they ultimately decide to call themselves should not be mistaken as a project of artificiality. On the contrary, like our own names, the moniker we choose for our place of residence is highly associative and deepens our connection to where we live. The neighbourhood might have nothing to do with Sir Isaac Brock, the hero of the War of 1812, but it has everything to do with those little lots and short blocks laid out as the Village of Brockton.

Turnips and Beets and Cabbage (oh my!)

What is a gardening post doing in a planning blog? Planners should, by definition, be excellent gardeners. The scientific approach to planning means careful consideration of placement, varieties and resource management, while those of us who are designers as well should be able to make beautiful, humane spaces. That's the theory, anyway. In reality, life gets in the way, too much or too little rain/sun/time to weed yields a poor crop and we are forced to come to terms with the fact that, just as humans are independent agents and difficult to plan for, so are the vagaries of nature and busy schedules. All that aside, the garden is a perfect tonic for the toxins of modern living. We are so accustomed to treating the seasons as a nuisance (too hot, cold, rainy, etc) that it is tempting to forget that our lives are intimately tied to seasonal processes. A trip to the produce section of the supermarket will amply illustrate our increasing detachment from seasonality in that most elemental of human requirements: our food. Availability of every vegetable and fruit imaginable at all times may fool us into thinking that we have conquered the seasons. However, the convergence of peaking oil supplies and climate change will require us to think in local terms for just about every aspect of our lives, especially food, and we owe it to ourselves to become reaquainted with and take some ownership of our sustenance.

I must admit that the distraction of the Winter Games made it very difficult to think about the spring chores, but there's nothing like a few days of sunshine and the daily reports of Grapefruit League baseball to put one's mind back on track. I dug out the seed trays last weekend and got the early vegetables started.

While we're fortunate to have a reasonably sunny balcony, the yard is about three-quarters shaded by June. This means that root vegetables that profit from early-season weak sun and shade in the hottest months do pretty well, including beets and turnips. The crop was pretty miniscule last year, but I aim to double it with careful feeding. With any luck, the pickles will last until the new year. Lettuce has been pretty successful too, and by letting a few plants go to seed, I pretty much always have a spring crop. On a friend's advice, I'm trying cabbage this year, with a plan to lay down some sauerkraut in the fall, to add to my growing roster of preserves. It's a bit bewildering to me when others ask why I would spend the time to preserve vegetables when I could more easily buy them. I might ask why a person chooses to spend their time skiing or painting-by-numbers or watching television for that matter. As any first year art student can tell you: it's the process that counts. When you add in the satisfaction and insurance of being self-sufficient, the time spent is a bargain.

On Concentration

I've been thinking a lot about concentration lately. I don't mean that in the sense of focusing one's attention to a particular enterprise, but rather in how we benefit from the accumulation of intellectual goods. It is perhaps the single-most important ability of humans that we can remember and regurgitate things we have learned. For this reason, the first human to discover that fire could be made with a flint and tinder was able to pass this information on to others. This process, which has repeated itself countless times through history, and which has been greatly abetted by writing, numeric systems, the librarian's art and humanity's relentless inquisitiveness, has brought us the wonders of the age in the form of space travel, nanotechnology and the screen from which you are reading this.

An analogy can be found in nature. The oil we depend on for so much of our livelihood is a form of highly concentrated energy that accumulated from thousands of years of plants absorbing sunlight, storing the energy in the form of sugars, and then dying. The concentration of countless tons of the stuff, formed under enormous heat and pressure in geological processes resulted in the incredibly versatile liquid we put in our gas tanks today.

We can observe this process in a less geological time-frame. Some animal proteins, which all of us form in our bodies, must be converted from plant proteins. While a selective diet can help vegetarians get all 20 essential proteins, many of us choose to eat meat. When we eat a steak or a chicken breast, we are in fact consuming a concentrated form of that animal's diet. Their bodies have already converted plant proteins into animal proteins and have concentrated it in their flesh. This is why a protein-rich diet will almost always include meat: it simply offers the most bang for the buck.

This of course brings us to another facet of concentration: the process of diminishing returns. Figures vary, but the ratio of units of grain required to produce a unit of animal protein can range from about 7:1 for steer, 3.5:1 for pork and 2:1 for chicken. When we factor in the energy requirements of raising livestock, the ratios of energy per kilogram get into the double-digits.

However, I'll save the concept of the diminishing returns of food production and energy for another post. What I'm getting at here is that we rely on concentrations of energy to run our cars, of protein to fill our bellies and of knowledge to do just about anything else. What are the implications of this? I'd like to unpack the idea of concentrated knowledge for a moment and make an important distinction.

When knowledge is passed on between two people, or culturally, there is a certain presence to that knowledge: it is possessed equally, and yet it cannot be divided. This can be observed in how we learn to throw a spiral or that Friday follows Thursday. Once you know how to do something, you take ownership of it, and may share it with others. Once you learn the name of your siblings, you also 'own' this knowledge and can also share it freely. These are skills and facts. Here is a further distinction: facts just are, while skills are a mix of facts and practice.

I will not delve too deeply into epistemology because it is outside my particular pursuit at this time. Skills, however, hold a deep fascination for me. For it is in skills that knowledge, practice and the elusive vernacular are concentrated. Yet unlike animal proteins or petrochemicals, which are akin more to 'facts' in their makeup, skills are more flexible, subtle and ultimately more human.

Much has been written about the deskilling of the modern, western human. What we lack in skill, we have made up for in specialization. By focusing on a single task within a large, globally scaled organism, we earn monetary rewards which allow us to purchase products; these products, in turn, replace skills. Now, before I am accused of being a soft-handed academic, I should fully disclose that I spent eight years as a traditionally trained cabinetmaker. My skill-set left me woefully unprepared for the reality of the modern cabinetmaking profession: while I struggled to build frame-and-panel casework with handmade doors and hand-applied finishes, the client wanted everything cheaper, faster, and was willing to sacrifice quality to get it. My salvation: premade products that made the job easier, if less flexible. Doors were cheaper if you bought the standard sizes, and would come pre-finished. It was more profitable to farm out the installation to someone else, even if it meant sacrificing control. While any tradesperson can sympathize with this, we make similar compromises every day.

Processed meals instead of home-cooked ones. Replacing clothes instead of repairing them, or making our own, for that matter. Cars with engines that are unfathomable and unrepairable by anyone but the specialist. And 'design' that has become modular, or at the very least, an act of cutting and pasting ready-made products together. By relying on the concentrated knowledge in the form of products, (combustion engines, metallurgy, food processing, etc. etc) we are sacrificing our ownership of that fact or those skills. The concentrated intellectual input of three thousand years of mathematics may have resulted in my computer being able to surf the net, but I had no part in building its chipset or assembling its motherboard. Moreover, the people who did those things were divorced from the knowledge it took to design them. The knowledge is proprietary, the means of production and the act of production are severed (to riff on Marx), and one's only claim to any real ownership of it is strictly monetary.

Like the energy of thousands of years of sunlight contained in a single drop of oil, we certainly benefit from the intellectual concentration found in all the products we can buy. It would be foolish to suggest otherwise. Neither am I a historical sentimentalist, pining for a return to the horse and buggy. My point is that this concentration of skills into consumer goods, despite the purported range of choice it gives us, actually diminishes our choices. The sameness in suburban development, teenage fashions or the operating system for your computer all illustrate this phenomenon. John Steinbeck commented on the decline of the colloquial in 1960s America, a product of the ubiquitous television and radio. What we are witnessing today is a decline in vernacular design. By solving technical or style problems with products, with concentrations of embodied knowledge, we not only reduce design as an enterprise, but we ultimately diminish what it means to be human.

The Best Laid Plans

I am a planner. At least that's the plan... I am finishing up the first of two years in graduate studies to learn the (not so) gentle art of urban planning. The very term conjures up for many people all the wretched excess of the welfare state: massive housing projects and slum clearances; or maybe the endless splatter of low-rise anonymia, isolation and segregation. Indeed, we spend much of our time dissecting the follies of history and self-diagnosing as a profession. We attempt, vainly perhaps, to answer why we don't build great cities anymore, and why we knowingly ingest poison time and again, even as we rail against it. It's not all doom and gloom, of course. The profession is on the cutting edge of sustainable design and progressive thinking, and it seems to attract people who want more than a fat paycheck in a career. In fact, there has probably not been a more exciting or critical time to be engaged in the art of city-building since Hausmann razed Paris. For it is in the cities, and how we manage them, that the bigger challenges of climate change, resource scarcity and social equity must be met.

This blog is not about planning. It is about understanding how we interact with the physical world and how it interacts with us. To do this, we must scratch below the surface. We need to look, to see, and to recognize the difference. Most of all, we must never, ever stop learning.