Critical Summer Adventures

We just opened our Temporary Embassy to the Riparian City of the Doan Brook Watershed at the Cleveland Convention and Visitors Bureau at Spaces. If you're in the Cleveland area, stop by Spaces and get your passport stamped, and check out the other fascinating ways to experience Cleveland provided by the Cleveland Urban Design Collective, The Think Tank That Has Yet To Be Named, Alison Pebworth, and Cleveland SGS (along with some other fabulous resources provided by the Spaces staff).

We also have lots of copies of the first guide book in our series Stories in Reserve! If you want to tour North America this summer, forget Disney World, the Grand Canyon and New York City! Wouldn't you rather see dentist offices in Tijuana, a military munitions manufacturing site-turned wilderness preserve in Southern Illinois, and a post-mega-event False Creek in Vancouver???

Right to the Riparian City

On May 11, we (the Temporary Travel Office) will open our proposal for a Riparian City in Northeast Ohio, focused on the Doan Brook Watershed. The watershed is the land draining into Doan Brook, a creek that runs through the cities of Cleveland, Shaker Heights, Beachwood and Cleveland Heights. Our proposal is to re-imagine the geo-hydrological territory of the watershed as political landscape inhabited by human and non-human citizens. To bring this imaginary territory to life, we will be offering passports from an embassy temporarily staged at SPACES (as part of their Cleveland Convention and Visitors Bureau) in Cleveland until July 13. We're also soliciting suggested landmarks and points of significance within the watershed via a large scale map and on the web.
We're really interested in the bioregional territory, not as a utopian gesture that promises harmony between humans and the larger ecology, but as a point of entry into the problematics of practicing a political ecology. Our political borders don't become less problematic just because they're delineated by geology.
Some related links:
Doan Brook Watershed Partnership
Mark Whitaker's Toward a Bioregional State blog
Libcom's discussion of stakeholder politics

DIY Museum Culture in Texas

 

The New York Times has a great short piece about odd museums in Texas. Not all of them are in homes and garages, but those sound the most interesting to us. It begins with the Devil's Rope Museum, a tribute to barbed wire, but other local collections include:

classic-rock eight-track tapes from the 1970s (the Eight Track Museum in Dallas), their bugs (the Cockroach Hall of Fame Museum in Plano), their cars (the Central Texas Museum of Automotive History in Smithville), their sports (the Texas Basketball Museum in Carmine) and their toilet seats (Barney Smith’s Toilet Seat Art Museum in San Antonio). The state has numerous established, well-financed museums that are members of the American Association of Museums in Washington — the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas — but there are dozens of others that exist as museums because someone put up a sign saying so.

Image above: Michael Stravato for The New York Times, The Toilet Seat Art Museum of Barney Smith, 90, in his San Antonio home’s garage.

A Crooked Border

Joe Burgess/The New York Times

The New York Times' Frank Jacobs has a great post on the Borderlines blog about the fallacy of the straight border between Canada and the US, noting that the clear-cut demarcation "deviates from the 49th parallel by up to several hundred feet." It proceeds to deliver an abbreviated history of how the border became what it is today, and that rather than one giant straight line, it's a series of smaller straight lines between a series of border monuments. It concludes with a remark on how colonial forces along the 49th parallel (in Russia's Far East and North America) have created these imaginary lines, with very real consequences, at the detriment of indigenous peoples:

Another (ahem) parallel: Both sets of powers divided the territories between each other irrespective of the native peoples present in those areas. In the case of Sakhalin, Japanese/Russian occupation was disastrous for the Ainu, Gilyak and other local tribes.
In the 1870s, Sioux fleeing the might of the United States Army provided the straight part of what is now sometimes known as “the longest undefended border in the world” with its most poetic epithet. Seeing how an invisible force seemed to stop the American cavalry dead in their tracks, they called that imperfectly demarcated boundary the Medicine Line.

Occupy Maps

We just picked up the new book by our friends' at AREA Chicago, Notes for a People's Atlas: People Making Maps of Their Cities, which we strongly encourage anyone reading this to check out. The book contains a collection of maps of Chicago (as well as a handful of other cities and neighborhoods from around the world) made by residents, visitors, activists, artists and others, along with short essays that provide some historical context for informal and artistic map making.  The Notes for a People's Atlas project began 7 years ago, facilitating the mapping from below of the city of Chicago. One thing that emerges from the collection of rather random mappings of the city (from the politically motivated to the idiosyncratic and comedic) is an understanding of how much our spatial understanding of where we live has to do with how we live in it and what we imagine is possible.

The People's Atlas starts by asking people to mark up blank maps, and it becomes extremely clear that what remains blank in the maps produced is as important as what gets filled in. Through the process of mapping what is known, we also map what isn't known. How can we deal with gaps in individual and collective experience if we don't know those gaps even exist? The immediate, micro moments that define our everyday lives (where we eat, go to school, or get unnecessarily harassed by the police as one map narrates), put into the space of a map, can be projected onto the social fabric that is woven from the experiences of those surrounding us, whether we know them or not. The individual maps in People's Atlas give us an incomplete visual index of a city that isn't some kind of static, naturally defined terrain, but rather is a living entity with permeable boundaries. Various entities flow in and out of its walls, not unlike genetic material breaching cellular walls, struggling to make it a habitable place. Notes for a People's Atlas, encourages us to make this a more just process, realizing in maps our connections to others who are also fighting to make the city inhabitable.

Disaster Tourism is for the Birds

Thanks to the Atlas Obscura blog, we came across this story about several species of birds (Tiger Bittern, Black Bittern, Little Egret, Pond Heron, Indian Pitta and Kingfishers) that plunge to their deaths in Jatinga, India. Apparently, it's not the descent that kills the birds, but the people on the ground. Conservationists and wildlife advocates have been working on figuring out what the cause of the birds' behavior is, and stopping the killings (deaths have supposedly dropped by 40%) At any rate, a tourism agency for the state of Assam is attempting to turn the phenomenon into a tourist attraction.
We should probably apologize for the horrible pun in this post's title.

RIP Parking Meters

The NY Times just ran a story on the removal of NYC's remaining coin-based meters. We've written about this change that has been happening to the administration of car parking in cities across the country, a shift from municipal to corporate operations. Often this is done as a form of short term revenue generation (ala Chicago) that ends of being a pretty bad deal for both the city and those trying to park in it. We see the shift to privately managed public services like this as simply one (extremely) mundane element (along with things like E-Z Passes and biometric travel security) of what some call the "control society," where behavior is regulated by pay-to-play mechanisms rather than (or along with) traditional disciplinary measures. A "kinder, gentler" form of enforcement, if you will.
The NYT story ran just a couple of days after the International Park(ing) Day, a day where people transform parking spaces into open spaces of gathering, like a pocket park. We wonder what the shift in parking administration might mean for this kind of temporary reclaiming of space, that pretty much depends on a shared practice of public space and understanding of a public good. As long as metered parking spaces operate as a municipal function, one can at least expect a certain amount of latitude in behavior. Many city planners and bureaucrats are actually advocates for non-automobile uses of space after all. But what happens when that space is managed by interests that actually have no stake in maintaining a public beyond one that is a paying customer, and property lines (and the power they engender) extend further beyond the confines of corporate walls?
If you're really interested in the history of parking meters and their rise in cities, check out this report from a 1958 volume of The Patent, Trademark and Copyright Journal of Research and Education on the Parking Meter Industry (pdf).