New Geography

Author: Richard Reep

  • The Reinvention of Sanford, Florida

    Sanford, Florida was in the midst of reinventing itself. Then the calamity of Trayvon Martin’s violent death turned this sleepy Florida town into a poster child for everything that’s wrong with the state. Now that the media frenzy has moved on to other troughs, the residents must sweep up the mess. As is often the case, compassion and healing have been operating quietly in the background. Two years after the tragedy, this healing process is being highlighted through a grant by Ashoka University to document the lives and faces of the people of this small, historical town. The Sanford Project was begun by a group of students and artists to capture the unique culture and character of the city, and to turn around perceptions of Sanford.

    Led by Olivia Zuk, a recent graduate of nearby Rollins College, The Sanford Project recently exhibited its results at ‘Say It Loud’, a pop-up gallery space in nearby Orlando. “The media willfully misinterpreted Sanford,” she said, “and we decided that it was critical to overcome the passing controversy and focus on the true nature of this Central Florida town”. During an internship last summer in New York City, total strangers, Europeans as well as Americans, approached her about its lurid reputation. Ms. Zuk’s eyes flashed as she added, “I had had enough. This is my backyard and it needs to be properly defined, and this ugliness put behind us.” When she returned from New York, she received a grant to create a media circus, this time of her own design.

    The Sanford Project quickly attracted eight other students. A startling photographic odyssey captured humanistic portraits of the town’s residents, overcoming its caricature status and reminding viewers of Sanford’s real people. Seeking to go out of their comfort zone, the collaborators accepted invitations into churches homes, businesses and communities, gathering intimate stories and the personal reflections of Sanford’s residents, including memories of the celery-farming days of the 1940s and before.

    While the individual stories and images are remarkable, what is more remarkable is that these students, on their own, chose to reach out to collaborate with Sanford’s residents. And even more remarkable than this gesture is the fact that they were most often greeted with pride and acceptance. “We did not force it,” explained participant Destiny Deming, “but as the project progressed we all felt more at home in a city that several of us aren’t even natives of.”

    Lauren Cooper, another participant, said, “I didn’t get turned down to speak with a single person, or hear any outcry to critique our cause. That silence, ironically, speaks.” The quality of this small town is probably not unique, and belies the illusion that our big cities are our greatest triumph. Olivia Zuk and her students found, instead, a triumph in the humanity that came out of this effort to re-connect with the small town.

    The project’s images, video, and documentary will be coming home to Sanford later this spring. Building solidarity built between the city and the small, peripheral town must be done to rebuild a state of compassion and shared ownership out of the ashes of our greed-driven, cynical culture. The Sanford Project takes the necessary first step, and although the pathway is long, the first step is the hardest.

    Participant Aaron Harriss described The Sanford Project as “suburban white kids from Orlando interested in historic African American communities”. The sardonic, self-deprecating comment belies his generation’s interest in localized connectivity over and above the “official” storyline of a community. Rocked by charges of racism, and guilty by association, Central Floridians were stung by the Trayvon Martin publicity. Few rose to speak, or set the story straight, however, until Olivia Zuk and her Sanford Project team stepped in.

    “Being from the millennial generation, most of us working on the project learned about the segregation of white people and black people pretty early on,” reflected Ms. Zuk after interviewing a Sanford resident. Segregation was a story told like a history lesson, at arm’s length, and for many suburban white kids this might be close enough. But Zuk took with her a multiracial team of Lauren Cooper, Destiny Deming, Christopher Garcia, Leila Gray, Aaron Harriss, Angelica Milan, Victor Rollins and Lauren Silvestri.

    They sat with African-Americans, heard stories of racism, participated in the African-American culture of Sanford, and supported the local Martin Luther King Day parade. They learned more about the city than many of the region’s occupants knew: Sanford’s history, like that of many small towns, conceals some darker episodes, such as the story of Goldsboro, an African-American town that was forcibly incorporated into the larger town of Sanford in 1911. But it has many joyful tales, also, stories of beating the odds. The surrounding celery and orange fields have been eclipsed by the theme parks, but Sanford sustains itself as a town with a desirable quality of life.

    Lingering in the twilight of its agricultural boom, Sanford today is off Central Florida’s beaten path; it’s about a 40 minute ride from downtown Orlando. Its historic downtown and surrounding residential community is beautiful, but its population has struggled to grow.

    A reinvention was long overdue. Then, in stepped the media, reinventing Sanford in the wake of young Martin’s tragic death: small southern town, fill in the rest of the blank. This condemnation, inevitable in today’s city-worshipping culture, seems all too pat. Caught off guard, perhaps, Sanford was unable to push back at a media framework in which you are either a darling or a pariah, but never anything in between.

    The millennial generation’s nonhierarchical view of society, symbolized by The Sanford Project, is a pathway out of the good-or-evil, red-and-blue polarization that we continually encounter. Increasingly, however, these black-and-white cartoons ring hollow and empty, unable to withstand scrutiny.

    Is this cycle unbreakable? The students and artists who have captured Sanford’s character through images and stories have started the hard work to do just that. Millennials, like the generations that preceded them, may someday come to accept this either/or view of the world. For now, however, efforts like the Sanford Project — efforts that are not profit-driven, but rather socially driven — are rebuilding our squandered moral capital.

    Richard Reep is an architect with VOA Associates, Inc., and an artist who has been designing award-winning urban mixed-use and hospitality projects, domestically and internationally, for the last thirty years. He is Adjunct Professor for the Environmental and Growth Studies Department at Rollins College, teaching urban design and sustainable development, and is president of the Orlando Foundation for Architecture. He resides in Winter Park, Florida with his family.

    Photo by Destiny Deming of children outside of their Sanford home.

  • Searching Out The Half-Full Glass

    There is a shiny, brittle skin to the economic recovery that conceals an unhealthy flesh underneath. It is tempting to call this condition a glass half empty. But seeking the healthy and the fit in nontraditional places has become a quest for more and more Americans who are leading us down a pathway that diverges, from the mainstream towards a new future. Out of earshot of the mainstream media and off of Main Street, there is a glass half full.

    The official storyline of the economic recovery began in 2009 almost as soon as the stock market lost half its value, and masses of unemployed people listened to cheery reports that the recession was over, even as unemployment surged to 10%. With waning confidence in our institutions and leaders to guide us, people seemed genuinely at a loss to define a shared future of abundance and beauty. Since then, insidious corrosion has eaten away our traditional sources of optimism. In a sea change, the focus of many people is slowly shifting away from that glossy promotional veneer back towards person-to-person relationships and rebuilding moral capital one transaction at a time.

    For many employees, a fulfilling career is a lost dream, traded instead for salary and benefits. In this phase of the curve it is still an employer’s market, and most employers manipulate the terror over loss of job to their advantage. Working hours are now pretty much 24/7 for many people, taking work home on weekends; answering business emails and phone calls at all hours of the day and night.

    Today’s workers are jumpy and work far harder, for less than they had made in the before-times.
    Many employers, starved for profit in recent years, finally took what little profit they had in 2013, sharing little or none with the hardworking employees who had helped them to regain their economic footing. Those workers at the top who sweated the worst of it divided meager earnings among themselves, leaving little for the rest of the workforce.

    Mainstream America bravely soldiers on, making 2004 wages, but with 2014 expenses. We are presented with more stuff to buy, more media to consume, and more gadgets to worship. Experiences that were once fundamentally outside of the mainstream economy – one’s college years, for example – are now a big business. There seems to be no refuge from the insistent, shrill attempts to monetize everything. It is easy to feel pessimistic and just a little debased, and to begin feeling dissident urges. Under our noses, however, another America lurks.

    This is an America which hasn’t bought into the “too big to fail” system, and it has at least two demographic bases. The first is the portion of the millennial generation that has seen the damage done to their elders, and is now waiting it out, sneering at “suits” and instead creating its own economy out of localized, small moves. It operates with a healthy disregard for the establishment system. This group is in its first historical phase of creating its own food and shelter, carefully selecting strains of sustenance from local sources and operating a kind of “starting over” effort at the basic need level of the Maslow hierarchy. Food and shelter first, they reason; rebuilding a new system will come later.

    It’s a generation that has suffered from what philosopher Henri Lefebvre called the reproduction of the space of production in their youth. This somewhat laborious phrase cites the space of production – the factory floor – as the model upon which all the rest of our space has been molded. School, said Lefebvre, is molded upon the factory floor, where students are taught to memorize and obediently regurgitate facts to their teacher/boss. Business leaders, anxious to produce workers, insist upon teaching to standardized tests, to reproduce the results they expect upon graduation. Education is replaced with being taught the business culture.

    What Millennials reject is not so much the establishment itself, but rather the manager-worker relationship that has seeped into every corner of daily life, driven by the pressure for higher profits and faster throughput. What looks to boomers as sloth (because we are conditioned to respect this pace of production) is to them a form of dissent.

    It’s too soon to tell whether the millennial generation, like the boomers before it, will eventually succumb to the corporate world. Allied with them, however, are the new, immigrant Americans; people who have come to our shores to seek a new place to live and work. To the rest of the world, America is still the land of the free. People are escaping terrible conditions in cities like Cairo, Rio and Istanbul, and even more frustrating powerlessness in cities all around the world. To these new arrivals, many from non-OECD countries, America still represents opportunity.

    New arrivals are treated with suspicion by a xenophobic, fear mongering media precisely because they are correctly viewed as not-yet properly conditioned. Those immigrants who buy into the promise of wealth may perpetuate a realm that is corporate-dominated, but many others may not. Our genius is our open borders, and as a nation of immigrants America has always renewed itself with their diversity.

    A future of abundance and beauty must begin with small moves: a foundation upon which moral capital can be rebuilt. If integrity and trust can be found in simple transactions between individuals, then progress can indeed be made. It is here that a glass half full can be found, and it is here that the social space of America is being re-made. Dying strip malls are being replaced by farmer’s markets; vacant glass towers are being replaced by warehouse-based laboratory startups and home offices, just to name a few examples. This new generation, and these new immigrants, are proving that America is all right after all, and can rebuild itself without the worst trappings of the 20th century corporate world.

    These are small, unglamorous trends. If they occur without “help” from Wall Street or without government regulation, are they dissent? Then so be it. Good people can bring to society a sense of uncorrupted – dare one say humanistic? – values. Our half-full glass should include a re-creation of space on a new model: space modeled not on production, but rather upon a shared and positive vision of the future.

    Richard Reep is an architect and artist who has been designing award-winning urban mixed-use and hospitality projects, domestically and internationally, for the last thirty years . He is Adjunct Professor for the Environmental and Growth Studies Department at Rollins College, teaching urban design and sustainable development, and is president of the Orlando Foundation for Architecture. He resides in Winter Park, Florida with his family.

    Flickr photo by khersee: Warehouse — waiting to be repurposed?

  • Highway Eye-4, Revisited

    Interstate 4. It is a unique highway which is cursed by many drivers in Central Florida, and many more who come here in search of rest and relaxation. While Californians raise all highways to royal status — Interstate 5, for one, is referred to as “the five”, as if it were some kind of important personage — Floridians just call their central artery I-four. My decision to chronicle I-4 was sparked by a recent experience. Along with my family, I was caught in a traffic jam as we headed east on I-4 outside of Disney World. I have been stuck on this very spot many times. But on this trip, as we sat listening to Janis Joplin, something new happened.

    Along this stretch, one can take an off-ramp that runs parallel to the interstate, linking it to one of Central Florida’s toll roads. It travels for a couple miles in close proximity, and is elevated along a ridge of grass about 10 feet above the surface of I-4.

    A ditch and a grassy embankment separate the off ramp and the interstate. As we watched, a driver in the right lane of I-4 turned off of the interstate, crossed the shoulder, went down into the ditch, and climbed up onto the parallel road, speeding away and out of the traffic jam. At first, one person did it, and then others followed. And then, about 500 feet ahead, we saw another stream of cars doing the exact same thing. And then, ahead of that stream, yet another stream of drivers drove over the embankment. It wasn’t one or two cars, it was dozens and dozens; an en masse sheet flow ripping up the grass. People, fed up with the traffic mess, had taken matters into their own hands. And they were speeding away.

    That is a phenomenon I haven’t seen before: collective abandonment of a pathway, even one that is highly discouraging. But then, maybe it’s nothing new. I-4 has inspired bizarre and unusual behavior for years.

    Back in 2012, I shared some highlights of this unique roadbed. For example, a haunted part lies, perhaps not coincidentally, close to the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp. Just a couple of weeks ago, a section of the underbrush along the highway’s edge was cleared, revealing a hillside cemetery. At the fence line there was newly painted stucco. In this area, I-4 is rumored to have a ghost or two from an early pioneer family that walks along the side of the road. Whether the highway was paved over part of the cemetery or the high-speed rumblings awakened the dead remains to be investigated.

    In the 1980s and 1990s, living in Tampa, I actually kept an I-4 log book in the car. Occasionally an incident was worth writing down, but it ended up mostly as an inventory of objects encountered along the interstate:

    • About 300 feet ahead of me a cardboard box tumbled off the rear bed of a pickup truck. The rolling, disintegrating contents included a boat chair on a 2 foot tall post and a light with wires flying off of it. I drove right over them. The chair made a very loud clunk.

    • In Lakeland, a road crosses over I-4, with a ramp that goes down the embankment and turns abruptly onto I-4, sort of like a driveway. There is no acceleration lane because a railroad bridge abutment is immediately ahead. At this entrance ramp, one late afternoon I was behind a pickup truck without a gate that rolled down the ramp and accelerated quickly to merge into traffic. As it did, a huge, greasy black transmission fell off of the back. The ground shook when it hit, and I heard the thud.

    • Malfunction Junction is the intersection of I-4 and I-275 in Tampa. I was travelling south on I-275 heading underneath I-4, driving my parents’ 1972 Ford Torino station wagon. This is a tank of a car, all steel with a 302 V-8 engine. I still have dreams about it. I was going perhaps 50 early on a Sunday morning into downtown. Ahead of me by about 6 car lengths was a rusty pickup truck stacked with bales of hay. As the highway ducks under the I-4 bridge, it curves right and it slopes. The pickup was just under the bridge when a bale of hay fell off of it. With no possible reaction time, I plowed right into the hay. The nose of a Torino actually comes to a point, which sliced into the bale of hay, and blew it apart as I drove through, leaving behind a huge, golden-tan cloud. It didn’t leave a scratch on the car — only a single hay straw was stuck in the windshield wiper. What stands out about this incident, even today, was that the hay gave no resistance whatsoever: when the car hit it did not shudder or make any noise at all. It was like driving through smoke. Such was the power of the Torino.

    These incidents now seem almost archaic; circus sideshows from a bygone era. They are great Florida folk tales, stories of bubbas for after dinner entertainment. The events are faraway both in time and in spirit from the darker forces that haunt our population on the road today.

    Those who are here on vacation, trying to relax and enjoy some family time, are tormented by a solid, stopped-up traffic-choked road full of millions of others who have come here to do the exact same thing. People reached a threshold of pain and crossed it, taking matters into their own hands and seeking stress relief during a vacation that was planned as stress relief in the first place. I-4 has become a metaphor for our times.

    2009 and 2010 were years that really beat people up. By 2011 and 2012, many had adjusted their expectations and gotten really cynical about the future. Last year, things changed again. For some, the world has gotten worse. For those who were so swiftly unemployed and have become re-employed, the new working conditions are different. They work much harder, for less than before. They face uncertainty every single day, a holdover from the white-knuckled years. The stress wears on the inner compass, and the temptation to cut corners gets greater and greater.

    When brazen self-interest spreads like wildfire, a sort of highway mob rule, if you will, I think that we as a society may be on the edge of something new and wild, as if the guardrails of rationality have weakened.

    This little incident on Interstate 4 may be isolated, or it might be a symptom of a sea change. People who have been patient and docile have taken a beating over the last several years. We have put up with mental and emotional abuse as we’ve tried to make the world better for our children. In doing so, we’ve — mostly — stayed grimly entrenched in the collective good; the shared social values and the rule of law over men.

    But when one or two people break off and steer their own course, how quickly many others follow. These are dangerous times, and our inner moral compasses are more important than ever before. We didn’t preserve our collective sanity through all of the wicked and sorrowful events of the recent past, only to lose it all now. In the coming year, we must hold on for a little longer, and rebuild moral capital for future generations.

    Richard Reep is an architect and artist who has been designing award-winning urban mixed-use and hospitality projects, domestically and internationally, for the last thirty years . He is Adjunct Professor for the Environmental and Growth Studies Department at Rollins College, teaching urban design and sustainable development. His writing has focused on art and architectural criticism, and on localism and its importance in establishing sense of place. He resides in Winter Park, Florida with his family.

    Flickr photo by Dean Shareski: Traffic on I-4, Orlando.

  • The Private Business of Public Art

    Like many cities coming out of the downturn, Orlando is jonesing for a recovery. To promote a sense of new prosperity, City Hall leaders recently added eight works of art to its downtown core, amidst much fanfare. Before we start whistling “Happy Days Are Here Again,” however, we would do well to examine the circumstances of this renewed interest in public art. Its surprising return was trumpeted as a new way to enrich the city and benefit its residents; many, including this author, applauded the effort. This has certainly happened. But has the result been a barrier, as much as a connection, to its citizenry?

    Public art, always controversial, became a battleground in the sixties and seventies, with cries of “waste of taxpayer money” heard in cities across the land. Artists, always exploring new frontiers, were victims of decency committees and moralizing mayors when their visions strayed much beyond a famous figure astride a horse. Public art placed politicians in yet one more hot seat they didn’t especially need. Yet these programs brought us great beauty, as well. Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate in Chicago’s Millennium Park, and Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC, for example, have proved to be enduring. In the right hands, art creates wondrous public space. Battlegrounds, yes; but many battles are worth fighting.

    Private sponsorship, too, has had a place in the city: corporations, and sometimes even individuals, have commissioned works for their prominent institutions. While the state usually plays it safe with taxpayer money, the private commission was a place where an artist could dare. Good cities have a combination of both. Here in Orlando, the combination was alive and well, until spending on art ceased sometime early in the downturn.

    Public investment in art is suddenly in vogue, and while City Hall takes the kudos for the $1.5 million that has been spent in Orlando, a careful reading of the script shows that no taxpayer money was actually used. Private donors commissioned the art; City Hall merely placed it, mostly on public property. The public/ private partnership seems to have resulted in a collaboration, and a sense of unity between the corporate world, high net worth individuals, and the state, with the public getting the spillover effect of some new art to view.

    All seems to be great, suddenly, in our newfound prosperous era. The state and its richest citizens so often are adversaries who struggle over tax policy, and find little common ground over something as uneconomical as art. But out of nowhere, a collegial atmosphere has sprung forth, with participants rallying around ethereal values such as aesthetics and an inspiring sidewalk. Private interests and public officials are now holding hands round their new treasures, exhorting the public to share in this festival of new art. We seem to be awash in original works of great creative import, thanks to our visionary politicians and our benevolent corporate chieftains.

    And now, a closer look. Of the eight pieces chosen by a jury that reviewed many entries, nearly all are modifications of public art pieces installed elsewhere. Kentucky-based artist Meg White’s “Muse of Discovery” is very similar to her “Awaking Muse” in Schaumburg, Illinois, for example, and others follow suit. There is nothing wrong with this, and the works are all quite good. Yet taken together, the multiple pieces speak of safety and security. Sure-fire crowd pleasers similar to those that already adorn malls and parks in other cities were chosen here. Orlando, where the current t-shirt slogan sadly seems to be Orlando Doesn’t Suck, did not merit much originality , judging by the artworks chosen by a volunteer jury.

    Public art programs were born in an era when public works brought us bland, uninspiring buildings and infrastructure, and the intent was to force cities to inject some originality and creativity into government projects. Today, the municipal art budget has been turned over to private donors, and City Hall has successfully escaped its obligation to pay its percent – a parsimonious proportion to begin with – and zeroed out its budget for creativity and originality. Other people’s art and other people’s money are cleverly passed off as an enhancement to the city’s public realm, with politicians taking credit for this coup.

    Orlando’s current public art situation is emblematic of our new era of the blurred lines between public and private interests. Pre-recession, a few individuals and a few corporations placed art of their own choosing in the public realm as an expression of taste. Today, they are reticent to do so, except through a complicated nonprofit agency. Are our high net worth individuals and our corporate citizens so afraid of their capitalist peers that they can no longer put public art on their own property at their own discretion, without being accused of soft-hearted sentimentality and a lack of interest in profit?

    And are politicians so battle-scarred that they no longer wish to suggest that the taxpayer deserves to have his or her money spent on art? The original motive to elevate the public realm and visibly set a level of taste and sophistication is no longer sufficient for state-sponsored art. Neither does this new private sponsorship seem to rely much on site-specific commissions, preferring to adapt art that has been focus-group tested elsewhere, like any good consumer product.

    Studies that correlate a rich public realm with cities that are chosen for corporate relocations seem to justify the move into art by Orlando, a city desperate for more jobs. So, in the end, it is about money after all. In Florida, home to Art Basel Miami, we may be experiencing an arms race of sorts, as cities compete for the hip and the cool on an absurd stage to win over the creative class. This should be no surprise to anyone who is involved in the arts, a group that has become increasingly cynical about diminished funding from public and private donors alike. Artists, of course, lose out; as craftsmen who labor for the sake of attracting more jobs to the region, they have less and less impact on the city’s public face.

    The result is a public/private partnership that is carefully orchestrated to eliminate controversy, squelch accusations of taxpayer waste, and to provide a safe and secure support group for those rare capitalists who are still soft-hearted enough to care about arts funding. These motives insulate the city from its people, damping down all but a sure-fire applause reaction. In this twilight of public art, the face of the city is painted in a perfunctory way to please everyone yet no one, leaving a hollow and unsatisfying result. Of the new pieces selected by a committee, only Jacob Harmeling of Orlando created an original work, “The Cedar of Lebanon”. Artists who come anywhere from Zurich to Oregon have installed other magnificent pieces, and even if they reference other art, these beautiful works can be considered in a new context. Central Florida, home to the great pool of creative talent, including many who service world-class theme parks, will appreciate the gesture regardless of the mechanics behind it.

    This new era, like other times, will ultimately be judged by the quality of the stuff that it leaves behind. Timeless art that says something specific and intense will ultimately contribute to Orlando’s place in the future of the city as a global entity. Let’s hope the new artwork is respected and honored, that it takes on its own sense of place, and that it revives a conversation about what our cities mean to us.

    Richard Reep is an architect and artist who lives in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and he has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.

    Photo by Richard Reep: “Cedar of Lebanon” by Jacob Harmeling

  • Orlando, Florida: East End Market & the New Localism

    Getting meat and potatoes from the farm to the table depends upon a smooth, even flow. The smaller farmers’ markets are mostly absent in the city these days, with a few vestigial exceptions: Reading Market in Philadelphia, Pike Place in Seattle, and Greenmarket in Manhattan, to name a few. Now, East End Market on Corrine Drive in Orlando has taken its place alongside these venerable exchanges. Owner John Rife hopes this new access to locally grown food will meet the rising demand for an alternative to the large corporate stores and the markets that dot the city’s parking lots and green parks on the weekends.

    “We are blessed with many alternatives already,” Rife said to me in a recent interview, “with several large-scale supermarket choices nearby. East End Market fits into a niche that is not served by these chains, and offers a vibrant food culture to the community.” Rife gutted and re-opened an old, two-story private school building in the suburbs, bringing in multiple vendors offering meat, produce, seafood, bread, cheese and a variety of other food that is ready-to-eat, in addition to ready-to-cook offerings. And between the building and the street, Rife converted a large, suburban-sized front yard into a raised-bed planter community garden.

    The new East End Market will be open 6 days a week, staying closed on Mondays so as not to compete with a nearby Monday evening market that has already gained a loyal following. Rife is delicately fitting into an ongoing local neighborhood scene, something rare in today’s cutthroat retail world.

    The accent is on quality, not quantity, and for some Orlandoans, it smacks of elitism. “A food court for yuppie hipsters,” sniffed one blogger. In an uncertain economy and a struggling job market, the focus on quality seems counterintuitive. Couple this with the backlash against those urban hipsters too smug for their own good, and there could be trouble down the road.

    Orlando’s rural and agricultural areas are surprisingly far from the center of the city; one must travel at least a half hour from East End to see the first farm fields come into view in nearby Chuluota or Oveido. Central Florida’s farmers have little to do with this city, so the notion of a “transect,” where food production crosses progressively denser zones to feed hungry urbanites, is largely a myth. In the commercial food stores, Orlandoans find strawberries from California, Mexican mangos, and seafood from South Africa. Urbanites sacrifice freshness and seasonality for the benefit of a broad range and large quantity, and are reassured by the popular press that this is a favorable tradeoff.

    Instead, Rife and his vendors seek to re-establish links with local farmers and ranchers, in a move that is more populist than elitist. Saturday markets make a gesture towards this, but do not suit many hyperactive schedules. The notion of East End is simply to bring food into the city from local regional producers. It is not intended, said Rife, to displace the other stores.

    Rife is doing something more subtle, as well. His vendors are local entrepreneurs. Many of them built their own booths, or hired local craftsmen to do it. Entrepreneurs that have a small foothold in the marketplace are likely to innovate and stay flexible, adapting to the changing needs of consumers. They have a vested interest in making their ideas work, and while they may sacrifice income in the short term, they’re seeking a long-term return. The energy and motivation are thus slightly different than what one typically finds in a commercial supermarket. East End is a visible experiment in the rising trend towards social businesses, where the capitalist driving force is coupled with social improvement.

    It’s sometimes said that the sidewalks of a city are about the people. Rife is placing people on the sidewalks that are not the hourly, minimum-wage clerks that our cities are used to. A real estate developer and manager, as well as an entrepreneur, Rife has noted that he could have “set up East End, leased it to big chains, sat back, and let the rents roll in.” The employees would have had no stakes in the outcome, no ties to the neighborhood, and no motivation to make an active sidewalk scene out of the marketplace. Instead, East End is a very management-intensive operation, where employees often have a stake in the business. This changes the game of the city. People here are involved.

    In the community around East End Market, many of the faces are already tied into the neighborhood somehow: friends, relatives, colleagues and co-workers. There aren’t any name brands between the customer and the sidewalk. In the rising millennial generation name brand loyalty is fading, anyway. Many people prefer to swap real time information on Facebook and tweet about their dining and shopping experiences, rather than to rely on a billboard or television ad. For those comforted by big brands, East End probably won’t be a sell, but for those exhausted by the relentless presentation of logos in every new commercial construction, whether urban or rural, the hand-crafted quality of this effort is a welcome relief.

    East End Market isn’t creating much wealth for people outside of Central Florida, for the rent is not going to a third-party investor, all too rare in a state where outside forces have typically acted for their own benefit first, using Florida as a vehicle for profit. Beachfront and theme park real estate has created great wealth, but in Florida it has largely resulted in a service class without much upward mobility. This food market, and the producers who supply it, are regional, and represent a shift in the economy towards local job creation.

    Rife could have chosen anywhere to do East End, but chose this specific building because, like any savvy real estate developer, he was looking for traffic counts, ample parking, and a demographic that would range from moderate income to upper-income households. “And,” he adds, “the building was already there. It was cheap, had good bones, and was straightforward to convert.”

    Rife and others like him are creating a recovery with their own vehicles. East End Market takes an existing niche, a once-a-week farmer’s market, and develops around it to fill the other six days. The incremental costs are that of converting a building, but the incremental benefits are potentially great, as neighbors find it easy to stop in, entrepreneurs hone business skills, and profits stay in town for a change.

    East End Market builds upon an existing destination, rather than creating one from scratch. The farmers’ market is an old idea, and here it is used as a vehicle to rejoin the links between producer and consumer that have been stressed by globalism. This kind of microscale, grassroots capitalism is not limited to tomatoes and cheese. It’s one way to counter the erosion of middle-class jobs, and the rise of class divisions. It’s a bet on the new localism.

    Photo by the author: East End Market

    Richard Reep is an architect and artist who lives in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and he has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.

  • Why Trayvon Martin Defines Sanford, Florida

    For other rural cities in America, Sanford, Florida, home of the George Zimmerman trial, is useful as a cautionary tale: Define yourself now, before an incident like the shooting of Trayvon Martin defines you.

    All of Florida is once again in an uncomfortable position, this time with the Zimmerman verdict. The state has by now earned a solid last-place position in its contribution to America’s culture. Its poor history was topped by its performance in the 2000 presidential election, but it includes lurid crimes going back well over a century. Most Florida residents quickly change the subject when the conversation gets around to asking what state you’re from, but Floridians must confront the fact – at least at home in the mirror, if not publicly – that we have a lot of hard work to do. Florida’s social ills, including racism, run deep. Its public-relations image as a tropical paradise of sandy beaches belies the real Florida lurking within, and its urban geography reflects a state that has still deep schisms that are not going away between residents.

    When Henry Sanford built a railroad town in 1877, calling his place “the gateway to South Florida,” it quickly succeeded as a population magnet, swelling to a size far larger than sleepy Orlando by the turn of the century. Bustling with railroads, citrus, and celery, Sanford was a testbed for Spanish oranges, later sold as the “Valencia” variety. Like many Florida cities, it was home to both a black and a white population, and in 1891 the railroad workers to the west incorporated a new town called Goldsboro. One of the first African American towns in Florida, Goldsboro lasted twenty years until white Sanford petitioned to absorb it. Even a century ago, African-American urban success was a challenge to the status quo that was too much to stand.

    Sanford lies on the northernmost edge of Seminole County, north of Orlando, a place named after a tribe whose history is another whole litany of sorrows. Today, it’s a place of lakes, wetlands, and green rolling hills, with neighborhoods and commercial strips sandwiched in between — a sort of exurban enclave of Orlando, slightly more affluent than the average Florida household. A historic town, Sanford is a symbolic landmark more than a true city center, and suffers from being a bit too far from Orlando to be considered a realistic commute.

    This unfavorable geography helped preserve the town’s distinctive historic architecture, as the forces of growth found more accessible real estate to develop elsewhere around it. Mostly new-ish, mostly white-ish subdivisions and commercial strips carve up the land along north/south corridors: US 441, Interstate 4, and US 17-92. Rural Florida has mostly been banished out of Seminole County by this miasma of growth that rings the north side of metropolitan Orlando.

    Sanford preserved its downtown core and much of the surrounding neighborhood as National Historic Districts, keeping a strong sense of place but inhibiting modernization. Downtown, like a stage set waiting for players, hopes in vain for some kind of re-identification. Art galleries, restaurants and antique shops suggest a tourist destination, not a thriving, productive community. Second floor windows loom over Main Street with mostly empty eyes. The waterfront, a few blocks away, is absurdly disconnected from the downtown core. An obligatory six-story stucco condo — naturally almost empty — sits at the point where the city meets Lake Monroe, Sanford’s tribute to the great banking crisis of 2008.

    Sanford’s struggle to survive has led to a grim sense of despair among many who gambled on development and continue to wait for the gentrification payoff. With the railroad and agriculture economy mostly gone, its quaint and highly affordable neighborhoods have yet to attract throngs seeking the good life.

    So, in 2012, the city began a public campaign to reinvent itself. But the Trayvon Martin/ George Zimmerman case did this instead, tying Sanford to a troubling lack of progress in civil rights and race relations. It has laid bare the most difficult social problem in America, and pointed a fair share of blame squarely at Florida.

    What happened in this case may be analyzed for some time to come, but it is not just a Sanford phenomenon. Florida’s geography seems to beget slightly deeper divisions than most other places do.
    A have and have-not condition is almost certainly ingrained into the state’s subconscious culture. With over a thousand miles of coastline, half of which is beaches, Florida’s main contribution to the country’s economy is that of waterfront real estate; second homes for the wealthy and retirement communities. The interior is chock full of golf courses and theme parks that reinforce a sense of affluent leisure. This divides, not unites, into servant and served.

    For the service workers in Florida, the living conditions are vastly different, with little or no upward mobility. A lack of connectivity between citizens, as well as low taxes, exacerbate problems in the state’s education system. Growth has created a big bottom, as well as a big top, with little investment in between.

    Oceanfront condos and houses make good profits for lenders, and the state has gone from a glut to a bubble again. What this boom-bust economy may be doing, however, is helping to redefine Florida as a sort of third-world economy, uncomfortably latched to the underbelly of America. Anyone traveling to leisure destinations in the Caribbean, Asia, or much of South America may recall venturing off the hotel property, only to be immediately struck by a different living standard. Such a difference is striking overseas. Here in the Sunshine State, it’s more subtle: a little less emphasis on schools, a little less melting-pot culture, a little more politically regressive… nothing one might notice while here on vacation. But it has been eating away at society’s veneer over time, and the Zimmerman trial has cast a harsh light on the realities in much of Florida.

    With its emphasis on tourism and growth, Florida will remain a geography of privilege. For the unprivileged, it is a state of danger that is getting worse all the time. Gun law makes this land of sunshine and warm weather a cold, harsh place if you are not on the golf course, tanning on the sand, or in your beachfront condo.

    And for those who want to make this place better? We have a lot of very hard work ahead if we are going to rebuild a state of compassion and shared ownership out of the ashes of our contemporary culture.

    Richard Reep is an architect and artist who lives in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and he has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.

    Photo by Christine Wood

  • A Cri de Coeur for Localism

    The current era of 21st century urban revolutions began in early 2011, with scores of cities during the Arab Spring. The uprisings have now taken on a newer, darker hue, with Sao Paolo’s protest over bus fares that has already spread to other cities in Brazil. A few uprisings have resulted in the deposing of hated Middle Eastern dictators, and many leaders have reached uneasy truces with their citizens, but observers sense that this conflict is far from over. Some see these as isolated incidents. It seems more like a global web of urban unrest searching for a voice.

    Much of today’s social unrest was predicted by French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, writing in the mid-1970s about social space in the city, and how it has been constructed to favor capitalism. The separation of work and home, for example, is a relatively modern spatial arrangement favoring wealth, and for no better example of this, one can see the hike in Sao Paolo bus fares acting as the straw that broke the camel’s back for the Brazilian poor. Lefebvre’s evaluation of the currents of the late twentieth century can now be updated, and it points to a looming social crisis.

    Western states– Chinese, Syrian, or what-have-you – have the tools to utterly crush any alternatives to their power. The state is universally promoted as the “stable center” without which, we are assured, we would descend into chaos. It enables both a spatial flatness and instantaneous communication, collapsing space and time.

    The working class, instead of rising up in Marxist-style class struggle, has continually been pacified by consumerism. Anyone interviewing a modern Chinese young adult would, if they got a candid response, hear the anger of this generation over the Tiananmen Square generation’s sell-out; economic freedom was offered by the state, and the people, starved for so long, chose it, rather than political freedom. Today, they pay the price. Placating the lower classes has become expensive, and the state has become overextended in doing so, but cannot stop at the risk of seeding a genuine revolt.

    As housing, transportation, food and living costs rise to newly unaffordable levels, a larger and larger segment of the population is left behind. An example of this is the phenomenon of food trucks, which has swept many cities in a few short years, creating a niche that is neither vending cart nor restaurant, but something new in between. Government regulation was swift in coming, notable not for its concern about health, but its concern about the economic protection of vested interests . In olden days, food vendors could just duke it out for the customer. Today, the government, anxious to keep the finely tuned economic hierarchy of the city in balance, rushes in to create order and regulate the problem away.

    Struggles in Egypt, Syria, and now Brazil have nothing to do with traditional Marxist concerns about the rise of the industrial worker. With impoverished credibility, evidenced by the multiple failures of the socialist state, leftists have little to offer when considering the urban landscape that lies before us in cities like Aleppo, Damascus, Tunis, Cairo, and many others.

    While the right cries “Marxist” at anyone protesting the greed and corruption of the global economic system, this smear is neither accurate nor serious. Old labels are used for lack of anything better, but the confrontations on the streets have neither a red flag nor a red book. Instead, the new mob – refusing to be pacified by the usual pop culture escapism – is searching for a new voice that is neither communist nor capitalist.

    The American Occupy movement faded before it could contribute anything meaningful to the last election, but perhaps by consensus it decided that the election was already lost, regardless of which party won. Disbanded, the protest against the “one percent” was an inarticulate voice not ready for prime time. What is the opposite of globalism?

    It is a new localism that will arise, refuting the power of the state and finding a yet- unnamed ethic that rejects our flattened, instantaneous space-time for something hilly and slower.
    In the coming months and years these urban voices will continue to protest the state’s authoritarianism, as well as the high price of the global economic system. Eventually, these voices will likely converge into a newer socio-economic philosophy, yet to be defined. Lefebvre died in 1991 without ever seeing the protests at global trade talks at the turn of the millennium, but he would have approved of the dialectic. He would also have predicted that they would be crushed by the state, as happened. He would see today’s world as ripe for confrontation.

    Flickr photo by Phillip Pessar, Frita Man Food Truck at Walgreens, Miami, Florida. “Food trucks in the Walgreens parking lot have become a regular thing.”

    Richard Reep is an architect and artist who lives in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and he has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.

  • Florida’s Pinellas County: Growth Gone Wild

    In the seventeen years since my last visit, Florida’s Pinellas County hasn’t much changed. It’s still a low-grade carpet of commercial junk space from coast to coast, and the edges – where the value really lies – aren’t very different than they were in the 1990s. There’s more, but not better. A county that has consistently avoided growth regulation, Pinellas could have been a model for cooperative public/private real estate development, unimpeded by pesky government regulations. Instead, it is a living example of the atrocious results when leaders focus on quantity, not quality.

    Situated midway down Florida’s west coast, Pinellas County has become a kind of garbage can for America; a place where trash culture and trash capitalism trickles down, finally pooling in this subtropical peninsula. The people of Pinellas, like many other Americans, aren’t dancing in the festival of urban triumphalism. Instead, they’re largely left out of the hip, cool class of places celebrated by the rich. Pinellas’ population largely serves as service workers for wealthier coastal tourists and local financial operations, struggling on low income and unsteady work. The residents seem to have passively accepted the traffic-choked commercial strips, poorly planned subdivisions, and low-performing schools without asking for more. And this is a shame.

    The peninsula’s tragedy is that man replaced nature with something considerably worse. Since its discovery in 1528 by Panfilo de Narvaez, man has graced this natural environment with enough paving, concrete blocks, chemicals and steel to completely cover it up, but none of this handiwork is particularly good, or even well thought out, as most all the county’s residents will grumble when asked.

    Raising their living standards isn’t about adding urban lofts and coffeehouses; instead, the average resident would like safer neighborhoods and roads, and better jobs and schools. These are the important struggles on the suburban frontier, and Pinellas is emblematic of much of America’s population today, left out of the luxury star system to which so many of our urban centers aspire. The hotels and condos erected on the coastline have added quantity, but not any overall quality to the waterfront. The peninsula’s interior remains a patchwork of squabbling municipalities, unable to unite. America’s parade of brand names dominates the Pinellas County experience, with few independent businesses and few distinct, legible places.

    Pinellas County produces nothing whatsoever. It offers some moderately valuable beachfront real estate. It has no natural resources and no endemic industry, and thus it remains about 280 square miles of cannibalistic economy that contributes little to the overall net productivity of Tampa Bay, Florida, or America.

    At the peninsula’s tip, St. Petersburg — “God’s Waiting Room” — sits like a grinning old grandmother, Florida’s original retiree community. This ephemeral location offers a quality of life, and a place to just be. Unlike most of the peninsula, St. Petersburg has art museums, shuffleboard stadiums, and a gorgeous waterfront park. Around Tampa Bay, its superb set of commons is widely acknowledged. All of this was OK for a few generations, as we gratefully acknowledged and respected those who endured the Depression and fought the war. But this Sybaris of the South may no longer be able to feed off of itself.

    As a retirement community, St. Pete led the pack with an economy that fabricated its identity out of balmy sea breezes, and it has slowly diversified its demographic to include families and young couples; it’s also created a sports-oriented industry out of its baseball team, the Rays. Yet age, class and race divisions still underlie this city, and its economy seems tenuous, with little to go on but distinguished good looks.

    Is it time to call Pinellas County a failed experiment in laissez-faire government? A lost cause that would be best returned to nature? Nothing man has done has made it better, and the sooner this is recognized, the sooner Pinellas residents can begin the process of resculpting the county into something worthwhile.

    Blaming government for over-regulating us into mediocrity is certainly in vogue, but that is decidedly not the problem. Here, the built environment fails to deliver an uplifting quality of life, and this failure must be laid at the feet of the private interests, not the public guardians.

    For the government consistently turned its back when private companies wanted to build more and more and more. In a sad, multigenerational litany of subverted growth management rules, unregulated development approvals, and corporate relocations, one town off of another in a quest for the least-costly, least-regulated place to put a low-wage, back-office workplace. Firms got exactly what they wanted in Pinellas. We must now all live with the result.

    One possibility is for Pinellas County to start buying up the substandard, stucco-smeared construction that litters the landscape, grind it up, and sell it for fill. City-building requires copious amounts of gravel and sand, both in abundance in Pinellas County’s vertical material, much of it unmaintained, underused, or abandoned. The land that is uncovered beneath all this hardscape might then be ritually cleansed, and, as in some parts of Detroit, returned to a more naturalized state.

    Where seawalls haven’t destroyed coastlines, Pinellas’ soft edges are blurred. Estuaries vary by inches in elevation, and the whole of the land is a complex, marshy mosaic. Like a miniature Florida, freshwater sheets flow over some parts. Salt water from the warm Gulf of Mexico undoubtedly has shaken hands with briny Old Tampa Bay more than once during hurricanes and floods. The indistinct boundaries — not quite solid ground, not quite wetland, not quite navigable water — has begotten a human-made environment that is not quite city, not quite country, and not quite suburb.

    The lost potential makes one shudder: the beauty of beaches tragically wasted by cheap condos and crappy hotels; the miserably hot and humid interior beaten into submission by a million buzzing air conditioners, separated by tiny, seared lawns and cracked pavement. Ordinarily, the hum of a city — street traffic, planes taking off, and other forces marking its rhythm — inspires a sort of thrill, a localized dance beat. In Pinellas, the beat is an annoying headache. The coastal communities aren’t quaint or attractive. In comparison, even the junky mess of Venice, California qualifies as a higher-order vernacular made of cheap cloth. Here, the architectural character has lower aspirations, a charmless sea of mobile homes, apartments, and small houses.

    The people elected leaders who rallied for a higher quality of life, only to give in too easily to quantity. Once that trend began, there was no turning back, and the result is an urban form that looks like everybody threw in the towel and just quit. As the next generation begins to take hold, some big questions can be considered for its future.

    Pinellas County could try to stand up on its own two feet, and actually produce something of value. Geriatric medicine might be a good start. Such coordinated effort, however, has eluded Pinellas in the past, and it is not likely in the future. A tech hub might attract a new industry, but there is not much to lure people here, especially when competitors can offer beaches and sun without the high crime rate and poor schools. Tampa has long used Pinellas County as a dumping-ground to house its low-wage service sector, and like much of metropolitan Florida, it suffers as a peripheral zone around the higher-income financial center. Its multiple small towns remain weak and tribal, benefitting Tampa the most.

    But, suggestions aside, it’s high time for the tribes to get together and create their own future. This could take the form of some kind of super-council to re-establish their rights. Other places, such as Minneapolis-St. Paul, formed a multi-town metropolitan council to break the stalemate between feuding municipal entities, and take control of growth. The Metro Council has been credited by writers such as Anthony Orum for redefining the Twin cities during an era when Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Detroit failed miserably at reinventing themselves.

    Such a council would need extraordinary power to succeed. In Minnesota, the Governor nominates council members to provide authority over the small towns and county politics. Whether this would work in Florida is questionable, but some kind of direct, participatory democracy must be considered if the county’s destiny is to be something other than a garbage can.

    Could any of this happen? Ultimately, compassion is in order. Until Pinellas begins rejecting growth in favor of quality development, all we can do is treat it like a terminally ill patient: make it comfortable, give it the low-quality growth that it wants, and let it slide. Perhaps Pinellas County can become a better place, but it is more likely that it will evolve into a kind of Dark Ages suburban favela…and share the fate of so much of America’s sad, confused landscape.

    Richard Reep is an architect and artist who lives in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and he has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.

    Flickr photo by JM Barxtux: In Northern St Petersburg.

  • Building Authenticity: Finding Gems in Florida’s Stucco Mansions

    This jaded land, Florida, is the world-weary capital of architectural irony, with more tongue-in-cheek showpieces than even Las Vegas. But hidden within the MedRev McMansions, the stucco-smeared stage sets, and the high cynicism of our highway junkspace, there lies hidden a handful of true works of quiet beauty. Leave it to Paul Goldberger, Pulitzer prize-winning architecture critic and best-selling author of Why Architecture Matters, to point it out to us godless heathens. In an interview, he tells me that he’s excited to tour these nuggets we’re hoarding. Who knew?

    “While Frank Lloyd Wright and other ‘star-chitects’ hogged center stage,” Goldberger says, “many more created earnest, sincere buildings that fulfilled their obligation to the street. These unsung heroes of American architecture matter. I think that James Gamble Rogers II was one of these in Winter Park. I hope so, anyway, because I’m coming down from New York to see them for the first time ever.” Sincere architecture: an endangered species in the world today, but in over-themed Orlando, practically nonexistent.

    Last year, a popular vote placed Cinderella’s Castle in Florida’s top 100 most influential pieces of architecture. For God’s sake. At the same time Goldberger, the consummate modernist connoisseur, revealed his admiration for Yale University’s Gothic architecture, which he told me “belongs to a different age … it shows innocence risen to a heroic grandeur.” Speaking of its crusty stone structures as “deeply ethical,” Goldberger praised the buildings for their sincerity. Today this architectural authenticity has all but vanished among the fake Mediterranean, fake Colonial and fake just-about-everything, so it stands out when you see it.

    Yale’s original campus was designed by James Gamble Rogers. He happened to have a nephew, James Gamble Rogers II, who was an architect in Winter Park and designed some of the most viscerally marvelous houses I’ve seen. 160 Glenridge Way, for example, is a shaggy, organic, simply gorgeous shingle-style cottage. Casa Feliz, one of his best, is modeled after an Andalusian farmhouse, standing today at the north end of swanky Park Avenue. Its humble brick and barrel tile have a prehistoric quality, as if a woolly mammoth had wandered into a cocktail party, snorkeling martinis. Its studied casualness is sophisticated and resonates with your deepest emotions, if you aren’t yet numb from Orlando’s overwrought garish glitz.

    Goldberger seeks something real, the unadorned truth, in his voyage here next week. He says that he’s come to Orlando many times and enjoys “the theater of the theme parks,” and confesses he has yet to set foot in Winter Park. It may be the ultimate irony that Central Florida’s lure for the most important architecture critic of our time is a few humble, unadorned houses tucked into side streets, largely overlooked by the rest of us.

    This piece first appeared at Orlando Weekly.

    Richard Reep is an architect and artist who lives in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and he has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.

  • How We Should Navigate the Florida Archipelago

    Leafy, timeless rural routes and monotonous, flat highways have characterized Florida’s network of state roads since the early 20th century. Vacationers in the Sunshine State either stick to the interstates – often a hot, frustrating parking lot – or consign themselves to the stop-and-go, confusing local roads. Future Corridors, the state’s vision of a future, integrated road network, is set to finish its conceptual phase this year, and promises to radically revamp the state’s road system. Since this vision will quickly harden, it deserves a close look by a broad portion of the state’s population to see if it truly addresses the state’s needs or, like so many Florida initiatives (the state’s notorious voting system comes to mind), becomes an ignominious reminder of provincial politics at its worst.

    Begun in 2006, Future Corridors contains some progressive, sophisticated thinking. Taking existing corridors and redesigning them to segregate shorter trips, trucks, and transit makes sense and should have happened a long time ago. Such managed use lanes are already popular in California, Texas, and elsewhere. The study also looks at enhancing rail systems for both freight and passenger service.

    Florida is already a maze of country roads, rail lines, commercial strips, turnpikes, and interstate highways, with little remote wilderness left. So enhancing, multiplexing, and otherwise modernizing the existing corridors is practical and efficient, and will conserve the state’s inner beauty.

    Smoothing out the lumpy traffic flow will also improve the state’s economy. Florida consumes more than twice the goods that it exports in terms of freight, and its tourist-business throughput is more than that of many nations. Its boom/bust economic oscillations, however, mean that road-building comes in fits and spurts, and is not necessarily tied to real-time needs. To get from Gainesville to Jacksonville, for example, you still have to journey upon twisty, peculiar roads built in the 1930s.

    Florida’s home-grown turnpike, built in the 1970s to funnel tourism, is impossibly congested in some areas today. As population has swelled, it has changed into a local alternative to traffic-choked arteries for short trips and commutes, as well.

    Future Corridors isn’t just about highways, however. Besides its beaches, Florida’s signature characteristic seems to be the ubiquitous, homogenous, low-grade commercial strips that have overtaken our once-quirky roadside culture. Along these main drags, the American narrative can be read in all of its glory: they are the great equalizers, where all institutions are reduced to blue or red logos 300 yards before the turn lane. Decried as the aesthetic horror that they certainly are, these highway markets remain, nonetheless, emblems of the American dream. Anyone with a car can access everything; emporiums are born, flourish, and die. They are transformed quickly and without sentimentality into newer offerings. These strips have transformed much of the state’s coastline into a continuous, multi-stranded conduit of consumption for the masses. The Future Corridors proposal calls for more rural highways in Florida and opens up more land for this kind of development.

    Florida’s future, regardless of its new road plan, inevitably will include more of these strips, not fewer; more traffic and highways, not less. Nevertheless, the state’s environmentalists and urban intelligentsia are already forming positions against much of the vision. As the first regions — Tampa-Orlando and Tampa-Jacksonville — are rolled out, 2013 will prove to be a dynamic year of controversy. As state government battles environmental and urbanist boosters, it seems like a California-like trajectory is already set, with some critical concerns sadly cast aside.

    Florida currently suffers from “hourglass” transportation planning. On the bottom of the curve, short, regional toll highways and roads are built to enhance local connectivity, but connect only feebly to the rest of the state. On the top, the federal interstate highway system dumps huge quantities of people into the state from the Midwest, the east coast, and the South. In the middle a statewide, home-grown transportation system built to handle this volume has been notably missing.

    Competing regions have little incentive to link up with each other. Tampa and St. Petersburg, for example, continue to squabble for small economic advantages, instead of looking at the bigger picture. Meanwhile, the nation’s Department Of Transportation is only mildly interested in state connectivity issues. The gaping hole in statewide transportation planning has never been adequately filled, as any tourist sitting on I-75 in the springtime can attest.

    Future Corridors is the latest incarnation of Florida’s long, mostly inept growth management strategy. The Department of Community Affairs, a state-level regulatory bureaucracy, replaced the previous laissez-faire ethos. It survived until 2011. The regulators represented an impediment in a state that is developed largely by outside economic interests, so they were done away with. With a new bubble growing, these interests salivate over future developable land that will be made available by road-building activity. Thus, growth management continues in a sort of feudalistic twilight, where political connectedness replaces the public process with the tacit support of the citizens.

    Politicians come and go, so the new process may not continue past the next election. In the meantime, public advocates for the state’s future would do well to advance their own vision of the future, which should include several key ideas.

    For starters, the state would benefit from a twenty-first century transportation network that is digitally connected. Planning a trip in Florida is a bit like planning a sailing trip without a weather report. Traffic jams, road construction, and other obstacles seem to crop up without warning, causing trip or meeting delays or even postponements. Delivering real-time digital information to travelers might be out of the cost and logistical range of individual regions, but the state could feasibly invest in a system that updates a driver’s handheld device to help reroute traffic flow and forecast problems ahead.

    And no argument about wilderness preservation or road construction carries any weight until the state’s notorious safety issues have been addressed. Whether it is traffic accidents, pedestrian fatalities, or gruesome bicycle clashes, Florida’s roads consistently make the list of the most dangerous roads in the nation. Buried deep in DOT PowerPoints are meek statements about safety, but little has been done. While Florida beckons the world to its door for vacation, its reputation is marred far worse by poor roads than it is by junky, bland, retail, and it must be fixed.

    More strategically, however, a road system should reflect the new notion that Florida’s urban clusters constitute a single large megapolis, unified in demography, economics, and culture: the so-called “Florida Archipelago”. Geography is responsible for the weblike settlement pattern, and this geography should be enhanced by a safe and effective transportation system, rather than be treated as an obstacle to be ignored or plowed over with ruthless technology. Corridors should be planned to take advantage of this spread-out nature. Intensifying urban activity where it makes sense, and intelligently intertwining agriculture and wilderness into the planning process, could create a vibrant, robust tropical megapolis.

    Finally, the state’s transportation system should help reconcile the growing affordability gap in housing, which is glaring in Florida. A thin line of very high-priced vacation homes hug the coastline, subsidized by people living in less risky locations. This arrangement exacerbates the affordability gap in housing. Meanwhile, rural road networks are often disconnected and poorly maintained. Public transit is ineffective and perennially used as a political plaything, rather than a serious attempt to reduce car dependence for those who would most benefit from it – the low income and the elderly.

    Paving over Florida’s interior will close rural areas that remain within the cost of living of the state’s retirees, and it points to a future that will increasingly resemble overpriced, highly regulated California. And with more and more dependence upon toll roads, the state’s transportation system will, if it continues on this trajectory, further separate the haves and the have-nots.

    Urban feudalism is the top-down, urban-centric, affluent-class authoritarianism that seems to be overtaking the future of Florida and of America. Historically the state has been able to escape this fate, partly because it has a diversified lower middle class, along with service and construction workers. In the past, the rich came to the state mostly when on vacation. This era appears to be waning, however.

    Florida’s working-class population will be squeezed tighter if policies create rising costs that move people further from their jobs. As Florida’s new growth strategy, Future Corridors, moves from concept into planning stages, the broadest conversation among citizens and the planners will do the most good in the long run.

    Richard Reep is an architect and artist who lives in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and he has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.

    Photo by Adam Fagen: Roadside Gator in Monroe County, Florida, along the park road to Flamingo, Everglades National Park.