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High and Dry on the Waterfront
This posting is not my typical essay, but simply a link to a free download, for a limited time, of a Zoning Practice article I recently authored for the American Planning Association. “High and Dry on the Waterfront” discusses an issue covered in my October 14 blog entry, “Living Densely on the Urban Waterfront,” about the challenges of rebuilding in dense urban neighborhoods in New York, New Jersey, and other places hit last year by Hurricane Sandy. If you simply click on the home page panel with the article name, that will take you to the download to read the article itself, which you can download as a PDF. Enjoy. Jim Schwab
The Value of Passion
My wife, Jean, won an award a week ago. It’s not your usual award for best pie at the fair, best scout leader, any of that. It carries a certain degree of controversy with it by its very nature, and she is fine with that. The award came from the Chicago Teachers Union, in which she serves as a retiree delegate, and is called the Pioneer Award. It is bestowed at the CTU’s annual LEAD dinner, which this year also attracted Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, and some members of the Illinois legislature, plus U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky. In other words, the event is politically oriented, and the award, bestowed on Jean and one other individual, Gloria Mhoon, is for retiree activists. Jean earned the award,...
Living Densely on the Urban Waterfront
Far too often have I heard people ask the facile question about why other people live in hazardous areas, such as along rivers that flood or coasts that suffer coastal storms. Yes, Americans do have a propensity for building in hazardous areas, and often not building appropriately for such areas, but many of the people asking the question are themselves living in areas subject to some sort of hazard. It’s just that it’s easier to spot the speck in another’s eye than the mote in one’s own, as Jesus once noted. I teach a graduate urban planning class at the University of Iowa, called “Planning for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery.” To make the point that not everything is as simple as it may seem, I ask students early in the semester to...
We Shall Overcome Together
Imagine watching a mean-spirited white farmer shoot your father dead in the cotton fields shortly after taking advantage of your mother in the shed. Then imagine, after several years of serving as a household servant, walking away into a world unknown, with few possessions, and walking past two black men hanging from nooses on a public street in Georgia. And somehow you first find a job serving affluent white people and ignoring their comments, and then finding your way to a fancy hotel in Washington, D.C., on the recommendation of your boss, who turned down the opportunity, and after several years finding that your performance leads you to the White House to serve as a new butler. By now it is 1957, Dwight Eisenhower is president, and...
Venice and the Prism of History
Earlier this summer, I noted that my wife and I had visited Venice, Italy, as the result of an invitation in late May at IUAV, the Architectural University of Venice. I was asked to speak at a conference on how climate change is changing cities and affecting city planning. Because Venice is unique in so many ways, it excited my intellectual curiosity. I pulled together four substantial books from the Chicago Public Library, and I eventually completed reading all of them, though not before we flew to Europe. Stealing time night after night, I indulged my habit—I am an unabashed history buff—until I got the job done. I learned one thing about the history of Venice: There are many ways to write the extensive history of even this one small...
Labor Day Special
This is the first time since creating this blog that I have posted twice in one weekend. I have limited my posts to once a week, for the most part, because of the press of other business. This fall, as has been the case since 2008, that includes teaching a University of Iowa graduate class in the School of Urban and Regional Planning, “Planning for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery,” on top of existing duties, including extensive travel, with the American Planning Association. I have not wanted to establish a pace I could not maintain. But I was struck this morning by a headline column in the Chicago Tribune Business section by Rex W. Huppke, titled, “Don’t demean jobless.” Huppke is generally a very well-balanced, thoughtful writer who...
A Dose of Good Judgment
It is easy enough to be cynical about government, especially about its response in a crisis. Millions of Americans express such cynicism on a regular basis, if not daily. It takes a bit more fortitude to look honestly at some of the daunting challenges government must face in events like Hurricane Sandy and to conclude that some things actually get done well, and to conclude that leadership is sometimes successful. It takes a certain depth of judgment to conclude that some of that successful leadership can emerge from moments of governmental self-criticism, examining in some depth what works well and what does not, then drawing conclusions about what steps would solve the problems uncovered. I have just spent the last two weeks pouring...
Backyard Shakespeare
This third in a trio will complete my short series of blog posts on discovering your own backyard. It is another way of highlighting the marvelous joys that are sometimes well within our grasp, if only we find the time and the opportunity to enjoy them. Shakespeare in the Parks is completing its second summer of visits to area parks all around Chicago, with a well-practiced troupe from the Chicago Shakespeare Theater that this year has been performing The Comedy of Errors in 18 different locations, bringing the treasures of Shakespeare to every single neighborhood in the city. I just watched their performance tonight in Washington Park, on the city’s South Side. The play was an excellent choice for a diverse audience, favoring one of...
The High View of Chicago
In my last blog post, I extolled some of the virtues of staying put, at least for a vacation, as opposed to roaming the world, a charge to which I plead guilty on a regular basis, though more in connection with work than pleasure. That was a teaser to my real goal of introducing readers to one of the most intriguing projects in Chicago in recent years. The wonderful thing is that my wife and I live just 50 feet from the Bloomingdale Trail. I can even overcome my dislike for the name the larger project surrounding the trail has acquired: The 606. Intended to convey the idea that this is everyone’s project in Chicago by using the first three digits of the city’s many ZIP codes, I find it as unappealing as most things numerical when a real...
Ode to Vacations
There is a great deal to be said for vacations, even when you don’t vacate the premises. In fact, I am smack in the middle of enjoying just such a vacation right now. I am away from the office for two weeks, and I am at home. Not that I have always stayed at home. I have taken vacations with my wife and, when they were younger, with our children in a number of fine places. The mountains in Colorado. A resort in the Dominican Republic. A weeklong tour of California. All were wonderful exercises in concentrating on something other than one’s livelihood, kicking back (or forward), trying out new scenery. But when people asked where I was going this year, I explained that, having completed no fewer than 14 business trips so far this year, I...
Preview on Post-Disaster Recovery Report
This post is not a substitute for my normal blog commentary, but I am catching up. Just a little bit. I am on a vacation from the American Planning Association for two weeks, and will blog this week and next on some more leisurely topics as a result, but right now I want to introduce you to a free streaming media download just released online from APA. As the result of a funding agreement between APA and the Governors’ South Atlantic Alliance, APA was able, during its 2013 National Planning Conference here in Chicago in April, to provide a live webcast of two back-to-back 75-minute panel discussions on planning for post-disaster recovery. The presentations were drawn from our work through the APA Hazards Planning Research Center on...
Calling All Disaster Experts
Think not only of the natural disasters suffered within the U.S. each year, but around the world. Then imagine finding between 400 and 500 of the most experienced experts in the various fields related to research and practice on natural disasters and bringing them together in the same space for three days. These would include emergency managers, urban planners, social and physical scientists, government policy makers, geographers, architects, and engineers, among others. Finally, imagine instigating wide-ranging discussions among all these folks, getting them to talk to each other and explore interdisciplinary solutions to the numerous problems posed to humanity by natural hazards. Imagine the richness and creativity of the conversations...
First Impressions of Venice
Gondolas on the Canal Grande at the Accademia Bridge If you are a veteran of Venice prone to sniff at the observations of a first-time visitor, this commentary may not be for you. I was invited to speak at a May 23 conference on climate change and cities at IUAV (Architectural University of Venice). I spent the next four days touring the city with my wife. I cannot pretend to be an expert, though I spent a modicum of time trying to absorb Italian, via Rosetta Stone, in the weeks preceding the trip. I also dived into a tour guide, plus Garry Wills’s book, Venice: Lion City: The Religion of Empire, and other sources to begin to divine what brought this gorgeously remarkable city into being and what sustains it today. I have learned a...
Reflections on Independence Day
Yesterday we celebrated Independence Day. In Egypt, protesters celebrated the removal from office of an elected president by the military. On the 237th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it is worthwhile to reflect on all the ramifications of that event over the last two and one-third centuries. Those ramifications are not always as obvious as most Americans, including political commentators, may think. The wheels of history often turn slowly, and sometimes they seem to switch directions with lightning speed, but there is an underlying logic that bends that arc toward freedom, born of desires that run deep in the human psyche. This essay is decidedly not a book review, though it is the product of decades of...
When You See the Face of God . . . .
Hurricane season is once again upon us. This blog entry is about six years old. I decided to post it in light of our continuing national encounter with disasters and our difficulties in coming to terms with some of their implications. It is a closing plenary speech I delivered at the Carless Evacuation Conference held at the University of New Orleans in February 2007. I hope readers find it of some value. Presentation at UNO Carless Evacuation Conference I have a small surprise for Professor John Renne today. It’s called No PowerPoint. It’s something we used to do back in the Stone Age before the invention of the PC. I think these days some people regard this as the oratorical equivalent of riding a bicycle with no hands. I chose to do...
A Universe of Imagination
Literary daring comes in many forms. Some authors attempt to redraw the boundaries of traditional genre. Others try daring new themes that have previously been verboten in the society of their time, and though some gain lasting fame in this way, others find that, over time, what was once daring becomes banal. The discussion or destruction of sexual taboos, for instance, often goes this route unless the work that pushed those boundaries is noteworthy for some more fundamental achievement. A few, like Ernest Hemingway, change the stylistic preferences of a generation, showing in his case how a few words in a very short sentence can speak volumes. One year ago, a legend of modern American fiction died. I grew up with that legend, still in...
Iowa Faces Its Fluid Future
It was just five years ago that Iowa was awash in flood water. Many people are familiar with the dire scenes from Cedar Rapids, where record floods forced the evacuation of 10 percent of the city’s residents on June 13, 2008, swamping the downtown and causing extensive damages. Plenty of other Iowa communities suffered as well, however. Cedar Falls, 90 miles north of Cedar Rapids along the same Cedar River, struggled to contain flood waters that overwhelmed its north side and almost overtook its downtown. To the southeast, Iowa City watched the Iowa River flood major University of Iowa buildings like Hancher Auditorium and the Iowa Memorial Union and learned, maybe, that the university had invested in too much real estate on the...
Preserving a Tradition
On Tuesday evening, May 14, I had the special pleasure of receiving an award from the Society of Midland Authors. Every year in May, the Society holds a banquet in Chicago at which it bestows its annual book awards in six categories—adult fiction and nonfiction, juvenile fiction and nonfiction, poetry, and biography. The awards have gone to some highly decorated authors and to some who have never received an award before, and to many who never received one again. But always, the awards recognize the best that Midwestern literature had to offer in the prior year. I have served many times over the past 20 years as a judge for those awards, in either adult nonfiction or biography, and I have had the privilege of announcing the award a...
42: Baseball in Transition
Until this past year, I had served for several years in a row as a biography judge for the Society of Midland Authors’ annual book awards. As a result, a few years ago, I read Judith Testa’s Sal Maglie: Baseball's Demon Barber (Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), which won that award. At the time, I commented to a friend that a good sports biography can serve as a window into an era. One learns about how a player grew up, how the sport groomed its stars, and about the ethos of the cities they played for. Some of the background information such books can supply may be harder to convey in movies, but I believe 42 has come as close as any sports movie to detailing the nuances of significant change in an era when baseball changed...
Stars in My Palate
Photos by Alyssum Pohl I had not planned to use this blog to talk about restaurants. Furthest thing from mymind, in fact. Then again, like most open-minded people, I can be persuaded to change my mind, based on the evidence. There is also the fact that cooking has become for me a grown man’s hobby, and I have grown the soul of a gourmet. I know really good food when I taste it. I discovered high-quality dinner at Stars in Charleston, South Carolina, tonight, May 1. Mind you, I am from Chicago, where the culinary bar is set high. But Charleston has its own culinary tradition. I was out with a group of seven people affiliated with the NOAA Digital Coast Partnership the night before one of our semiannual meetings. Stars is set in downtown...
Lessons from Sandy
I don't believe I have ever previously been to New York three times in as many months. The first week of April, however, I had the honor of leading a team of five experts on post-disaster recovery, including myself, in conducting a series of five workshops in as many days for planners, public officials, and allied professionals in New York and New Jersey to assist planning for recovery after Hurricane Sandy. The two earlier trips—one from January 30-February 2, and another March 1-2—covered much smaller swaths of territory. A California colleague, Laurie Johnson, and I collaborated on the first one, meeting with the American Planning Association's New York Metro chapter representatives in the Rockaways, then with Occupy Sandy volunteers...
Home of the Brave
When I was about ten years old, it became clear that I needed glasses. Not immediately clear, but eventually clear. There was a substantial period of floundering that may not have lasted as long as it seems in retrospect, but mere weeks often seem like an eternity for youngsters. My perceptions may also be colored by the fact that I cannot now, and could not then, fathom the motives and perceptions of the adults around me who had to come to the conclusion that I had impaired vision. I know only what I recall. What they were thinking is and was beyond my reach, especially with the distance of more than half a century. What I recall, however, is extremely important. It played a role in shaping who I was then, what I became, and my...
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