elpasospeak

This from Jerry Kurtyka:

EL PASO – GAME’S OVER

# 5 – What Do We Do Now?

Things are going to slide, slide in all directions

Won’t be nothing

Nothing you can measure anymore…

• Leonard Cohen, The Future

If Brutus continues to indulge me, I want to discuss some ideas that have been brewing over the last three years as I completed the broad band project (BTOP) for the Library. I said earlier that I would redeem the cheap shot I took at Richard Florida’s expense, because he does have something to say on this matter. To paraphrase Florida, urban planners assume that, to attract talent/jobs, what’s important is to provide infrastructure: sports stadiums, freeways, shopping centers, etc. In fact, creative people prefer authenticity — so making your city just like everyplace else is a sure way to kill its attractiveness.

Sound familiar? Stadiums, trolleys, arenas. Since my arriving here in 1996, El Paso’s main problem to me, at least, has been its insularity, backwardness and apathy, not the lack of a trolley or arena. You know the joke, “You have landed in El Paso, please set your watch to 1974.” Few ever leave and even fewer people travel to return and tell us what the rest of the world is doing and thinking. When they do, we call them “crazies.” Otherwise, it’s the same people talking to the same people.

I really believe that El Paso and many other cities are now at a crossroad. It is clear that global urbanization will continue if for no other reason than cities are an efficient form of social and economic organization. When I wrote earlier about El Paso’s physical and economic growth, that is what I was talking about and it is the focus of our city leaders and the Borderplex types. It is all they can see and so they put all their effort into it. They want to do the things other cities tried 25 years ago.

It is also clear to me that the world is in the midst of a change in consciousness as radical as previous changes in the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution of 200 years ago. These two trends – global urbanization and emerging consciousness – are not necessarily mutually reinforcing, either. There is an unrest afoot on the planet. If you’re not seeing it and feeling it, you are blind.

All over the world now, action communities are forming faster than they can be counted, usually focused on social and economic justice, peace and the environment. Tens of thousands of them! They have no central governance and only informal communication between them and no central dogma. Dogma and “isms” are so 20^th century! They don’t want to kill each other. OCCUPY is one such group in this country, but more frequently these action groups involve indigenous peoples in the 3^rd world and, especially, in South America. It is the consciousness of the planet speaking to us through the planet’s marginalized people. It is worth being a part of it.

Listen to this five minute speech given by Paul Hawken at the Bioneers Conference (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xkz2OjMOg88 ) to hear what I mean. Now, imagine this unrest here in El Paso. Where are its seeds? Who would you ask about it?

First I will tell you who NOT to ask. Do not ask anyone in the Rotary Club, the Garden Club, the country club, Borderplex, or anyone on city council or in any bank or economics or planning department or the chambers. They are too baked into the current growth model and how to get their piece of it.

But you can ask yourself what matters in your city. What do you feel about your city and, also, notice where in your physical body you feel it: stomach, neck, head, heart, ears? When do you feel it? Who in you is feeling it? The teenager? The business person? The teacher? The parent? The taxpayer? The malcontent? What information is this giving to you; telling you about El Paso and your place in it? Are you going to do anything about it?

When I consider El Paso, I feel very angry and I want to do something about it instead of just watching the Usual Suspects feed their faces at the spend-and-tax trough, courtesy of the politicians and bureaucrats they own. I also get upset with the apathy of citizens here that enables this to exist as it does.

So, when I left city employment last year, we took a European tour and exactly one year ago I found myself attending the Urban Systems Collaborative (USC) conference at Imperial College in London (so I could write off the trip ). The USC focuses on the role played by information flows in cities and attempts to define a “science of cities” using constructs such as complex systems and social network theory. I had participated in this eclectic, hang-loose-group for a year and looked forward to finally meeting some of the people with whom I had been corresponding – urbanists; architects; computer scientists; physicists; academics; artists (yes); entrepreneurs; planners. Quite a mix!

Appropriately, the USC conference theme was Quality of Life, but it wasn’t about a bond issue. Rather it was about what makes for a quality life in the city; how it is that our cities can become the places that contain our lives and allow each of us to reach our potential. I will get into more specifics in future posts, if Brutus allows, and I will consider how Maslow’s Hierarchy can help to define an urban consciousness and point the way up and through to different kinds of cities that coexist simultaneously in the same space; with or without trolleys and stadiums.

NEXT – Maslowpolis (A Consciousness of Cities)