New Geography

Tag: Florida

  • What College Gowns Bring to Towns

    The college town, one of America’s most appealing and unique features, grew out of the Age of Reason, and the concept of a regional, liberal-arts college nurtured by a small town has been intertwined with American history. Today, with enrollment dropping, the small, private college seems to be going the same way as the typewriter, the newspaper and the independent bookstore. While some colleges struggle to survive, the institution of the college town lives in suspended animation, ready to support whatever form its major employer may take. One thing’s for sure: the reinvention of the post-college town is coming.

    Here in Central Florida, the tradition of a liberal-arts college entwined with a small or medium-sized municipality is alive and well, for the moment. But trouble is brewing. While private institutions in Central Florida may not advertise their funding problems, the truth is plain to see. Rapid expansion of athletic programs, sure-fire profit centers for most schools, is underway at Rollins College, Stetson, and University of Tampa, and all are exploring other ways to reach more students, as well.

    Florida’s public universities are not immune to budget problems, either. And their response to the financial crisis says much about the future of college towns everywhere.

    Reinvention of the liberal arts college itself has been a cottage industry for the last several years. Student body diversification into “lifelong learning” (read: the lucrative retiree demographic), extensions, outreach campuses, and summer programs for primary and secondary schools has surged, as colleges try to open new markets. Bloated administrative costs have given rise to urgent fundraising and athletic programs, while an army of poorly paid adjunct professors shoulder an increasing burden of responsibility for the actual work of teaching. But, as Moody’s analyst Susan Fitzgerald has said about small, tuition-dependent colleges, they are in “a death spiral – this continuing downward momentum for some institutions [means] we’ll see more closures than in the past.”

    The Economist magazine has compared colleges to newspapers. If their analogy were to hold true, of the 4,700 colleges and universities in the world, “more than 700 institutions would shut their doors.” Citing the rise of massive, open, online courses or MOOCS, the magazine suggested that the idea of a professor interacting face-to-face with students will become a luxury. Colleges seem destined to end up in the same tiresome boat as the rest of the digital world, where everything, ultimately, becomes a product on Amazon.

    Uncertainty about the future has hastened the liberal arts school’s demise. In the darkest days of the recession we were told there was a STEM crisis: science, technology, engineering and mathematics were the fields that would get you a job. People ditched their liberal arts pursuits for more practical, employable ones, swearing off the indulgent frivolity of a philosophy course for a computer programming class. Panicking parents and students stampeded out of the gothic halls of the English department as fast as they could.

    Here in Florida, to pay for a new state campus in Lakeland, the Governor gutted the operational budget of Florida’s 11 other institutions of higher education. The new campus, located on rural land adjacent to Interstate 4, is far from any sort of population center. It’s a soulless commuter school; any form of a college town to accompany it lies far, far in the future.

    USF Polytechnic is being billed as a “destination campus”. Its showy new structure nearly complete, it lies naked to the Florida scrub and Interstate 4, with a few lonely stucco buildings and portable classrooms marking a kind of desperate, treeless sense of place in the hot Florida sun. No flip-flop-shod students strumming guitars, debating the meaning of Proust or the relevance of Marx will ever be found under its oak trees or in front of its bohemian coffee shops, because there aren’t any. Instead, there’s a harsh, asphalt parking lot and a long, hot trudge to the endpoint, another signal that one’s college years are just like a shopping trip to Wal-mart.

    If the one-in-seven death rate holds true, then one of the seven college towns in Central Florida will not have a future either. Gainesville, DeLand, Winter Park, St. Augustine, Tampa, Lakeland, and St. Petersburg are seven places with streets, residences, and businesses that each have grown up around colleges, public and private, and that enjoy a thriving sidewalk life.

    Ironically, at least two of these colleges were born in another desperate time, the Great Depression. The University of Tampa, across the Hillsborough River from downtown Tampa, started in a failed hotel when the city took it over from owner Henry Plant’s railroad empire. Likewise, Flagler College in St. Augustine began in a resort hotel built by New York railroad magnate Henry Flagler. The small, private, liberal-arts college was a perfect solution. A grand old structure was re-inhabited, and a struggling city was bolstered.

    Towns that grew up around these places have different, more informal qualities than other towns. In Gainesville, for example, churches, temples, student centers, and other non-profit institutions occupy prominent positions within the urban core. There’s a diversity of old houses with garage apartments, lean-tos, and enclosed porches. Wood apartment buildings have side stairs, outdoor beer kegs, and bicycle racks. They sit under huge, mature trees, clad in subtropical philodendron vines, and are connected by narrow dirt pathways carved independent of sidewalks. A sense of grown-over-time pervades within and around campus, its boundaries softened by sneaker and bicycle traffic, concert posters and poetry reading notices.

    Gainesville, with nearly fifty thousand students, will probably survive, but other, smaller towns may struggle. As conversion to digital learning reduces costs, the college town may disappear. Anonymous reviews, posted online, replace conversations in bookstores. University Avenue may be deleted, just like yesterday’s term paper.

    Our bookshelves are crowded with titles about the urban future, but in all of this furious scribbling it seems no one has noticed that sidewalks have all but emptied out in many of our cities. Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and a few more still march to the pedestrian beat. But a fairly thorough survey of peninsular Florida yields few sidewalks with any kind of street life — and the few that still operate as shared, social space all belong to our college towns.

    Students, with one foot in childhood and one in adulthood, still walk on sidewalks. They shop online, too, but they still patronize businesses for the sake of the social interaction, and still have use for the physicality of the street… for a street life that seems to be endangered.

    College towns, living on today in a shadow of their former bohemian selves, will be reinvented, just as education systems will. But for now, deprived of street life, we breed a different sort of citizen and thinker than an old college town once did. This new digital citizen will construct social space in ways yet to be foreseen.

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

    Photo of downtown Gainesville by the author. This scene is typical of the streets surrounding the campus of the University of Florida.

  • Florida: When Density is Destructive

    Brick streets, mature old oaks, and a sense of history imbue Winter Park, Florida with a sense of place that is the envy of many small cities and towns. The tony Park Avenue brings shoppers and visitors, who soak up its ambience and enjoy the street life of this quaint southern town. On the east side, bounded by blue lakes, lie gentrified historical mansions, while the west side is a neighborhood of smaller, affordable homes with multigenerational Winter Parkers. This community of little single-family homes is now endangered by developers that are gobbling up parcels two and three at a time, increasing the density threefold, and squeezing out residents in a new, “zoning for dollars” economic climate.

    Affluence and affordability have always maintained an uneasy truce, and the balance between them has historically been protected by cities through planning policies and an understanding that the mission of a city is to be workable for all of its residents, not just the wealthiest. Unfortunately, this balance tilts when the density imperative drives land values up, and tips the scales in favor of half-million dollar townhomes. High density has become fashionable in Winter Park these days, as it has in many cities, and there are some benefits to this new style. The costs? Well, those will be counted later.

    Density’s benefits look great on paper: a higher tax base, expensive new housing, walkable urbanity. When implemented well, these can make for positive changes. Advocates preach careful, sensitive ways to develop: don’t smash large and small buildings together; don’t mix uses on a street, and ramp up from low to high density across a gradient of a block or two. Advocates also preach a consensus-building process to avoid neighborhood clashes over growth issues. In places where this has happened, like Coral Gables in Miami, the story has mostly been a good one.

    The west side of Winter Park, with its cottages and modest residences for families, dates back to the 1920s. Within the neighborhood are many small churches to which residents walk on Sundays. Playgrounds, parks, and a community center characterize the West Side’s tree-shaded streets, and its proximity to the downtown area means jobs for many of its residents. For the last ninety years, the city has evolved around this neighborhood, and many families go back several generations. Its diversity includes many African American families, mixing with whites. It carved out a niche in the city.

    Today, the West Side is an older and less affluent neighborhood that happens to be close to a desirable address. The West Siders have already chosen their preferred building pattern and rhythm, infilling their blocks with new homes of similar size and scale, enlarging the tax base. They already live a walkable urban lifestyle, use mass transit, and evolve with slow and organic growth. In short, every urbanist’s dream.

    Like many cities that have a working class enclave that butts up against a newly trendy one, Winter Park has encouraged dense, mixed-use development, while nominally protecting its existing neighborhoods. And this is where the density equation seems to fall apart. The residents who leave the area will no longer participate in the economy of Winter Park. The new residents of half-million-dollar townhomes probably won’t ride the bus, walk to the churches, or otherwise activate the local streets. So a natural piece of the city is lost forever. Urbanism, for all that has been written in favor of this ideology, is diminished for the sake of density.

    West Siders protested in City Hall, asking the city not to upzone their neighborhood. While City Hall nodded to its citizens, it had already quietly allowed upzoning to take place, taking advantage of tired homeowners who decided to cash in. Half-million-dollar townhomes, which could be built in other areas, are instead being built here, to take advantage of low land values. Parking garages and midrise apartments now cast shadows on the adjacent small houses. Land values may rise on those parcels with new townhomes and midrise apartments, but immediately next door, the remaining adjacent little one-story cottages become particularly undesirable; the value of those homes becomes depressed. The owners’ only hope is to sell off to a high-density developer. Step by step, high density becomes more and more inevitable as the only solution left.

    The market forces at work in Winter Park have played out elsewhere across the country, with old neighborhoods eroding. This time around, with density all but institutionalized as the only acceptable way to grow, the deck seems to be stacked against entrenched locals. Cities are re-writing their development codes in favor of shiny new mid-rises and high-rises, ignoring existing residents who won’t be missed till they are gone.

    When the market, an amoral institution without sentiment, threatens neighborhoods, it is the job of City Hall to provide a hedge that ensures balance and fair play. But citizens have to shout over the money in order to be heard, so local groups like the Friends of Casa Feliz have stepped in on their side. If “zoning for dollars” can work against this section of the city, groups fear, then no one is safe, and people are reminding City Hall of its duty as a guardian of its residents.

    Density, on its own, is neither a good nor a bad thing. It can make a city more efficient and connected, and proponents tout its reputed health benefits and contribution to a thriving social life. When, in the process of allowing density, a city destroys the very values that it is supposed to promote, then the city ends up cannibalizing its neighborhoods for little benefit other than the one-time gain that the developers will realize from the sale of these newly built products. Income streams are put into mortgage-holders’ pockets, and, bit by bit, one more highly localized economy disintegrates.

    City halls, so obsessed with petty regulations, would do well to recall their basic functions as protectors of their residents. If there were a “back to basics” movement for government, many ordinances written to benefit the few would be shed, and there would be a refocus of attention back to the public good. The current infatuation with density, like many fashionable ideas, may come and go, but if a multigenerational neighborhood goes, it won’t be replaced in our lifetime.

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

    Photo by Betsy Owens of the Friends of Casa Feliz: “Preserved 1920s Cottage on Lyman Street”, Winter Park, Florida.

  • Florida: How Fine Art Became Local

    Fine art resides not only in the cosmopolitan cities. It lived, as we saw in the recent movie “The Monument Men”, in the many villages of Europe. Right now, we are seeing it living on the periphery of Orlando, Florida.

    Home to Stetson University, DeLand is forty minutes north of the regional core of downtown Orlando. It is one of those delightful, off-the-beaten-path towns that tourists love to stumble upon and explore; the largely intact, century-old strip along Woodland Boulevard is vibrant, bohemian, and alive. Florida’s archipelago of cities compete for the hip and the cool, and it is easy to dismiss places like DeLand. Cities and towns in this state have, for the most part, yet to grow the kind of institutions that speak of maturity, sophistication, and worldliness. The draw of DeLand is not sidewalk urban hipsters sipping lattes; instead, it speaks of a new age of curiosity, individuality, and appreciation for experience outside of the roaring din of the city. The newly re-named Museum of Art – DeLand signifies a powerful future for this part of Central Florida.

    Formerly called the Museum of Florida Art, the museum’s new name – no qualifiers, no excuses – befits a mission that brings world-class art to its patrons. “First and foremost, we serve our community,” said George Bolge, the Museum of Art – DeLand’s Chief Executive Officer. Bolge, retired from the Boca Raton Museum of Art, was asked to head up this museum and expand its scope and its reach. “At the same time, we are participating in the broader conversation about what art is, and where it is going. Our voice is being heard loud enough that people in New York are talking about what we are doing.”

    In the first half of 2014, Bolge’s exhibition run includes veteran Florida artist Jill Cannady, whose evolving career has stayed one step ahead of her critics. “This is important for people to see, and she is right here under our noses in DeLand, Florida,” said Bolge. Recent exhibitions like “Forging an Identity: Contemporary Latin American Art” drew patrons to exciting international artists who have helped shape Florida’s cultural and social ideas.

    In the official story of urban triumphalism, a museum executive should take his victory lap in Manhattan or Paris. Bolge, however, chose not to follow the herd. He was beckoned to DeLand by the opportunity to take an arts institution from good to great. The museum has its own building, a tan, prismatic form just north of downtown. Its exterior is a windowless enigma which belies a wonderful, light-filled volume within, one suited for showing world-class art. Its multifunction lower level has an atrium space and gallery, and an upper level gallery and classrooms. It’s a flexible facility that does its job by putting the art first, staying in the background, and being accessible to all.

    Even more interesting is the Museum of Art – DeLand’s downtown satellite, at the corner of Woodland and New York, six blocks south of the main gallery. This space, with a wood-floor and the rough-brick feel of a Chelsea loft gallery, recently exhibited “Small Masterworks” borrowed from the Butler Institute of American Art. Ascending the stairs, one is greeted by a free-flowing series of galleries which take you from a sunlit-filled reception area to a deep, introspective space that cleverly maximizes the art viewing experience. From Benjamin West, an American-born colonial artist, to Warhol, Lichtenstein, Motherwell, and others in the late 20th century, “Small Masterworks” provides sensitive and moving documentation of the evolving American art scene. DeLand, the quintessential American town, seems to be a perfect setting for it.

    This is the new story of Florida which is just now being written. While local art lovers are enriched by such an institution, it is drawing more and more attention from the surrounding metropolitan areas. With this museum, DeLand is now exporting culture to the city, in a reversal of the trend, signifying a maturation of the Florida arts scene.

    The Butler, in Ohio, is another example of this reversal. Nearly a century old with multiple locations today, The Butler is a solid institution with an international reputation. Something interesting is happening. As we have become used to mobility and flexibility, our world is no longer limited to where we live and work. With the internet, we are becoming increasingly connected. This favors DeLand, and places like it, with a new equity of distance – cutting-edge ideas are now a few clicks away. People in far-flung areas are less isolated.

    DeLand has a college vibe — a built-in art appreciation population — and with the rise of retiree enrollment, expect this population to go up. It’s affordable, walkable, and fun, with few of the big-city evils like crime and congestion that can scare away newcomers. No longer a tropical wilderness out of which man once carved a crude existence, Florida may now be settling down and becoming a more civil and aesthetic experience for its citizens. Towns like DeLand offer something that big cities like Orlando and Miami cannot: a high quality, human-scale lifestyle.

    “In DeLand,” Bolge stated, ”I’ve noticed that people have a pretty high opinion of their town… there is a spirited investment into making its art museum into a great institution.” Bolge sees this museum is a conduit to channel the story of Florida art into the broader flow national artistic energy. “We’re going to be showing what the Florida art patron likes, too,” he said, “so later this year, you will have a chance to see what a Floridian does with a world-class collection of artists.” “We are here for the local community,” says Bolge, “but it doesn’t hurt that we have a profile outside the community as well.”

    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 Lisa Habermehl: Downtown satellite location of The Museum of Art – DeLand

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Urban Housing: A Master Plan for the Few

    How we, as a nation, find bounty and beauty in the future depends upon how we react to two trends emerging from the recent difficult period in American urbanism. The first of these trends is the increasing lack of affordability in mainstream urban America, with the costs of maintaining a middle-class lifestyle at a level where distinct have/have-not lines are now drawn. The second is the increasing authoritarianism in mainstream urban America, where decisions about how our cities function are guided by a new array of authority figures that represent the common good. Both trends point to a disempowerment of a vast section of the American population.

    Our loss of housing affordability is an insidious development that will continue to eat away at the urban triumphalism that marked the beginning of this century. Generation Xers, seniors on fixed incomes and the struggling middle class will have much in common during the coming decade, with fewer and fewer housing solutions designed for them. If half of our consumer goods are purchased by the top ten percent, then the rest of us are increasingly irrelevant in terms of goods, and services, as well as in housing,

    Affordability on Main Street was once a concern of Wall Street. It was broadly known as Fordism, from the days when Henry Ford paid decent wages so that his workers could afford his new product, the car. Today, with Main Street on its knees, Fordism is dead and Wall Street turns more and more to itself, and to large, multinational conglomerates for profits. Volume generated by the middle class comes from a few companies like Apple, and, as the class shrinks, psychological distance between the haves and have-nots widens the gap, especially for those with memories of the material wealth they had in earlier days.

    Solutions to the affordability gap in the urban realm are conspicuous by their absence. Desirable addresses, decent houses, and access to amenities are now the province of relatively few, who are serviced by those on the outside, commuting into town from less hip and trendy places. New residential housing, driven by the Wall Street investment community, is geared towards the market-rate. The linkage between mass transit and affordable housing has been deftly snipped apart by the investment community, where the topic of affordable housing generates a yawn.

    Solutions? We might do well to investigate anti-urban trends, where peripheral and rural communities are stable and growing, and look at how these communities cope. Housing solutions like prefabricated units (think trailer parks, America’s answer to the favela) might be studied.

    Non-affordability, as a trend, is strongly linked to a co-evolutionary partner that is driving a wedge between the haves and have-nots: an authority figure which has become a new interlocutor in of the urban conversation, a sort of urban do-gooder to save us from ourselves, pushing more requirements and accepting fewer improvisations. Affordable housing has less to do with the square footage that is in that space, and more to do with the ingredients found within the square footage.

    The gloved hand of quasi-government authority has come to rest upon our cities with an increasingly tight grip, in the name of the green lobby or in the name of the traditional town.

    Cities underwent rapid change in the fifties and sixties due to the car, and subsequently parking garages, commercial strips, suburbs and highway overpasses sprouted. All these developments facilitated growth and expansion. Americans were remarkably unsentimental about their historic urban fabric, and notably experimental about innovative technological solutions to remove obstacles to this growth.

    Today, our confidence is shaken. The rise of authorities to dictate urban form signals that the era of innovation and improvisation is over, and that American cities are entering a new era of more rigid control of what gets built. The authority, in the form of a Master Plan, treats the city as if it were a vast, private land holding, and its citizens as if they were animals in a forest that was about to be developed.

    Master Plans have already been passed in Denver, Philadelphia, and Miami, and are on the boards for other cities in 2013. When a developer Master-Plans his land, he relies upon a Master to create the vision for the land, and this Master – credentialed, experienced, and hopefully talented – sets out the form of the future construction. The Master may have a passing interest in the voices from the land itself – biologists who count endangered species, for example – but the overarching form comes out of his mind, and the developer then implements the plan.

    When the same process is used upon a living, dynamic city, the results vary. Future citizens, bound by the edicts of this Master Plan, may submit to the Master’s vision, or, they may chafe at its restrictions. These Master Plans are formulated with great citizen input and collaboration until the time at which they are set. After that, they are to be obeyed. The plans create a physical model, or form; they are like a glove into which the city must fit its future hand.

    Master Plans attempt to take all possibilities into account, while creating ‘perfect’ rules by which the city can grow. Physical order, it is hoped, will lead to social order, as buildings once again behave like they did before the car. Should the future evolve as the Master predicts, the glove will fit the grown-up hand However, the future is notoriously difficult to predict.

    The new regulatory regime has become fashionable as citizens, sickened by the dirt and ugliness of our cities, seek an authority to keep us from temptation. As such, Master Plans arise from a noble intent not unlike the one held by city planners at the turn of the 20th century: to improve urban hygiene. And they may be correct in thinking that emulating urban form as it was before the car might just bring walkability back into fashion once again.

    The future, however, is ephemeral and dynamic, not static like a Master Plan, and may become frustrating to the Master Planners who have created elaborate blueprints for our nation’s cities. America’s fluid economic situation is giving rise to in-home workplaces, negating the need for traditional office space. It is giving rise to in-home manufacturing, reducing the size and complexity of factories. Warehouses, in today’s era of just-in-time-delivery, are being converted into other uses. And finally, Master Plans all seem to reminisce about Main Streets with lovely, tree-lined rows of shops under apartment (parking would be safely tucked in the back). These shops, renting for top dollar, stand empty today, made even more remote from reality with the advent of online retail.

    In short, Master Plans that rigidly enforce an urban form of yesteryear may become next year’s white elephants. Cities bearing these master plans may find themselves with a regulatory burden that is reducing their desirability as places to live and work. Following these cities specifically, learning of their successes and failures, and analyzing how Master Plans are working will tell us a lot about the future.

    As affordability is reduced and regulation increases, American cities could soon evolve into forms that are quite different from those of our past. And as confidence in the future fades, our cities take increasing comfort in the past, fossilizing our urban form as the Romans once did. For those underneath the affordability curve, improvisation and innovation will still continue, and insight into both of these emerging trends will yield a new sense of direction for the places where we live and work.

    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 alesh houdek: A walled and gated Miami home.