utterly opinionated

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a weekend bicyclist, “might consider keeping his head down and his helmet on” suggests the Huffington Post this morning.  ”A backlash is brewing over his new bicycling policy.”

LaHood blogged that he is ending the era of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.   “The new policy has vaulted LaHood to superstar status in the bicycling world. Bike blogs are bubbling with praise. A post on Ridemonkey.com calls him “cycling’s man of the century.” The Adventure Cycling Association’s Web site calls LaHood “our hero.” says Huffington.

He’s my hero too.

Black is de rigeur in Paris

Black coats, black boots, big black scarves, and even black hair.  Black is as certain as the methodical parade of grey stone buildings on every Parisian street. Paris wears black well.  Tres chic.

At home the exuberance of individuality is as messy as the backdrop of our chaotic buildings and streets.  Black hair is eclipsed by blond, red and even purple strand.  Colorful clothing abounds.  Gaudy sneakers encase happy feet.

The elegance of Paris and its inhabitants pleases me.  The exuberance of my fellow Americans puts a smile on my face.

Remember this story?   Mon dieu!  You don’t have to spend $1010 on a trash can.

I love the pragmatic simplicity of Parisian trash cans.  A short steel post, with a ring at the top, bolted to the sidewalk with a plate.   The bag is held in place by an enormous, sturdy, bungee cord.

Get a local manufacturer to make these and I’ll bet they won’t cost much more than $50 a piece.  In Paris, you don’t have to walk much further than a block or two to find one.   They don’t take up much space, and the bag is simple to replace.

When did we start to believe that trash needed an architectural masterpiece to house it?     Admittedly, this solution was born as a safety measure, after trash cans became a great hiding place for bombs.  I love this solution.  Bombs can’t hide in clear plastic bags.

Bring it on!

Paris is a dense city.  There is not much space here.   Streets are narrow and crammed with cars.

A typical parking space in Pittsburgh measures twenty feet long by eight and a half feet wide.   This smart car fits into a space just nine feet long.  I measured it.   Fill a city with tiny cars and there’ll be twice as many parking spaces.

I’ve been sleeping through the winter.  Paris has woken me up.

24 hours ago I arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport, caught the RER metro into central Paris and settled into my tres petite chambre a coucher.   Tres petite.   Very un-American.  Lured here by a free room and a cheap ticket I thought what better way to emerge from the winter, but five days in Paris?

When I travel to a city I always promise myself that I will hit several museums and the important sights, but I should know myself better.  Once I start walking I am lost in the streets and there is no stopping me.   I cannot help myself.   Time inside seems time wasted.

On this trip I decided to focus on Le Marais, on the right bank of the Seine, and perhaps one of Paris’ most interesting neighborhoods.   My Eyewitness travel guide says this about Le Marais.  “ A place of royal residence for centuries, it was abandoned to the people during the Revolution and descended into an architectural wasteland, before  being rescued in the 1960s”.   Such a description cannot keep me away.  It takes an hour to walk there from my hotel and an hour back, but the journey is part of the adventure and it helps to burn off the endless food temptations along the way.  Tomato and mozarella pressed “sandwichs”,  crepes filled with nutella and wrapped in paper and lots of cafe creme.  Past the Jardin du Luxembourg and a school with children screaming in the playground, past scooter stands, markets, through the streets of the Left Bank, across the Ile de la Cite and then I am almost there.

This morning I set out after eating my petit dejeuner of french bread, croissant and hot coffee.  As I walked I absorbed the simple adaptions to life that Parisians have made in this very dense city.

We can learn from this.

Read on …

We sold our Lake House a couple of years ago.   It had become a burdensome retreat, large and a lot to care for.   Most days we’d sit in the tiniest room just off the kitchen, reading and looking at the gorgeous lake view.

I’ve adapted to life without a weekend retreat.  Still, I daydream about the perfect place to spend a weekend day and list the formula in my mind.  No more than an hour’s drive from our home in downtown Pittsburgh;  one room with a great view;  a fireplace center stage;  by water; on a biking trail;  with grounds that are rough and weedy.

Heaven.

And then I found the Red Guest Houses.   Designed by Totan Kuzembaev for a resort near Moscow, they have helped to transform once filthy waste land.  I will  build one.  It will hover above the old steel and weeds, right next to the river, bright red against the grey ground.  Apart, yet part of the landscape.  My Red Guest House will be something new and creative set into the solid roots of the region.

Soon.

Our bus stop shelters are as dreary as January in Pittsburgh.  While they may be utilitarian they are quite pedestrian and uninspired.   The essential bus stop sign hasn’t even been integrated into the shelter.   It stands all alone, attached to a nearby post or pole, an afterthought.  What a shameful solution for a bus system that has more riders than most other cities in the US.

Santa Monica, on the other hand, is celebrating its bus system   Last year their Big Blue Bus Agency awarded Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects and Bruce Mau Design the Big Blue Bus Architectural and Branding Package.   These two internationally recognized firms were charged with the job of exploring how public transportation has the potential to cultivate, enrich and connect the community.

Their joyful solution, “The Blue Spots” takes the dreary out of bus stops.  Eventually, these flexible blue shelters will be implemented at 360 stops.

Ours or theirs?   You pick.

Every city needs its angels, and Los Angeles has plenty of them.

It has been several weeks since I returned from Los Angeles.   My trip there as a panelist for an American Institute of Architects SDAT was a rich, if exhausting, experience.  Three intense days there bred a familiarity I will never shake off.  I know downtown Los Angeles now.

Whenever I make one of these trips I expect to discover a city that is somehow better off than Pittsburgh.  I expect to find a city that somehow has its act together. Los Angeles, after all, is the second largest city in the United States covering almost 500 square miles.  In 2008, it was named the world’s eighth most powerful city by Forbes.com. Full of significant architecture, with a rapidly growing residential population it is easy to imagine that downtown Los Angeles should be the envy of every other city.

And yet, like most other American cities, it is rotten at its core.   It is the hole in the donut.  It has some serious problems to overcome.

Politics keep its nine districts distinctly divided, reinforcing the already existing and striking differences between them in both architecture and population. A civic center with great building stock, historic Broadway with a vibrant ethnic community, Skid Row with a sad and unwanted population and a manufacturing district, unheard of in most downtowns, essentially all ignore each other.   Its streets are wide, fast and disruptive, a convict population continues to be discharged at alarming rates into the city center, and the economy has stalled the growing residential population and is endangering the vitality of historic Broadway.

Like every other city one needs to look beyond these physical issues to really understand it.   Here, just like in Pittsburgh, I met a group of passionate and hopeful people all working tirelessly towards improving their downtown.   They are not elected officials.  They will not be paid for their work.   This is their neighborhood and they have claimed it.  They are the city’s angels.

Who knows better than them what the problems are?   Who knows better than them what the potential is? If I were Mayor of Los Angeles I would let them rise up, craft their vision and give them the resources to fulfill it.

I came home happily, eager to see Pittsburgh’s beautiful downtown again.   Our problems seem small now compared to Los Angeles.  Yet one is the same.  Our angels, plentiful and passionate, are all too often ignored.

Just back from Australia, with my internal time clock still off kilter, I’ve turned around and headed back to Los Angeles for an intense, but fun, three day project.  The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has invited me to participate as a panelist in an SDAT in Downtown Los Angeles.  What an honor.

The SDAT program is a national community assistance program sponsored by the AIA that focuses on the principles of sustainability.  SDATs bring teams of volunteer professionals together to work with community decision-makers and stakeholders to help them develop a vision and framework for a sustainable future.

For me, this is more fun than a vacation.  I get to spend 3 days in a city I don’t know well and discover every corner of it.  And then I get to think about how to make it better.

Our panel is peppered with smart and interesting people.    An architect and preservation specialist from New York, a neighborhood and governance expert from Seattle, a downtown manager from Oklahoma City, Washington State’s bike/pedestrian/transportation planner, a streetscape and open space designer from Seattle and me, urban guru from Pittsburgh.

For three intense days we will immerse ourselves in the good and bad of downtown LA.  One day will be spent outside, touring, seeing and absorbing.  Another day will be spent meeting with downtown stakeholders -  advocacy organizations, government departments, politicians, neighborhood groups, the transportation sector and plenty more.  A veritable sea of faces.

And on Friday, from early morning until our evening presentation to the public, we’ll prepare our report here and hope that our efforts will have been worthwhile.

Sleepless in LA, but loving it.

Endless miles of freeway have always irritated me.  They plow through neighborhoods, dissecting blocks and turn well worn paths and local connections into dead ends.  Instead of sustaining cities they perpetuate sprawl.

Someone in Melbourne must be thinking the same thoughts.

While riding a 20 mile loop through Melbourne’s close-in neighborhoods, I found myself riding UNDER a freeway.  This creative solution, while not a pretty ride, re-connects the neighborhoods on either side of this freeway and gives back what it took away.  I rode for miles with the sounds of fast-moving traffic above, on a smooth concrete deck, hung by steel straps from the substantial freeway structure above.

Brilliant.

Often, when I’m traveling that horrendous thirty hours from Pittsburgh to Australia, I day dream about laksa.  This Malaysian soup is worth the trip and I eat it whenever I can.

Ingredients

Richard Florida ranks it as a  city “where the kids are heading”.  Melbourne, the second most populous city in Australia, with 4,000,000 residents, has also been ranked one of the top three most livable cities in the world by the Economist Group’s Intelligence unit, since 2002.

The most Important criteria for ranking cities on this list are safety, education, hygiene, recreation, political-economic stability and public transportation.  I’m not sure I’d choose to live in a city based on these rankings.  My criteria might look a little different, and certainly, right at the top, would be cuisine.

More than any other metric, the fact that 34.8% of Melbourne’s population was born overseas has the biggest impact on this city.  This is the reason I’d choose it as a place to live.  This percentage far exceeds the national average, already high at 23.1%.  It’s easy to guess this.  The by-product of this percentage is the large number of ethnic restaurants, clustered in every neighborhood and flavoring every street corner.

Flavoring my trips home.

Visits with family members are interspersed here with visits to restaurants and food markets.  Lebanese, malaysian,  vietnamese, turkish and greek food, each meal better than the last.  Fresh food readily available in abundance from every corner of the world.  A melting pot of food and people that is hard to imagine. With the diversity of people comes a diversity of talent.  Once you have lived it, it is difficult to live without.

This week I fly back to my adopted home, Pittsburgh.  Only 5% of our population was born overseas.  We are missing out, big time.

While I write this at four in the afternoon, in Pittsburgh the day I have just enjoyed has not yet dawned.

A week ago I made my way half way across the world.  First, bright-eyed,  from Pittsburgh through Minneapolis St. Paul to Los Angeles.   Then, bleary-eyed from LA to Melbourne in Australia.  Every time I make this journey I am determined to spend the horrendously long travel time well and at first I do.  I read, I write and I work.   By the end of the first fifteen hours, when I board the plane from LA to Melbourne, my resolve crumbles and the remaining hours are spent dozing while watching bad movies.

When I arrive I fight my way through the fog of jet lag (ferocious since the time difference is sixteen hours) to reconnect with my parents, my sisters and my nephew.  Family visits crammed into two weeks always leave me feeling dissatisfied.  They are both too short and too long.  I vow I won’t eat too much so I don’t have to wrestle the pounds back off when I get home.  But the food is a reminder of the home I grew up in. For two weeks I am tempted by the tastes that I cannot take home with me.  Milk bars, laksa, licorice, ginger beer, turkish bread and tropical fruit are all stronger than me.

Although I am Australian by birth, by now I have spent half my life in America and I am caught forever in between.  My strange half Australian half American accent  marks me.  Interesting in my adopted town.  A defector in my country of birth.  Quizzical looks wherever I go.

A few years ago I set about finding a way to fit in on these visits to Melbourne.   The trail that runs beside my sister’s house loops its way through and around the city.  This has become the starting point for my visits.  Two days after I arrive, my head still slightly foggy, I pull out her ancient bike and cautiously ride down the trail that was once unfamiliar but now belongs to me.  Here I fit right in. On a bike my strange accent is barely noticeable.

Here, on the trail, I am surrounded by people of every ethnicity.  This is where the people of the city congregate, on its trails and in its parks.  This is where differences fade away.  Just like in Pittsburgh.