Blog
Can Data Be Resilient?
Before attending the NOAA Coastal GeoTools Conference in North Charleston, South Carolina (March 30-April 2), I had not spent much time thinking about data resilience. A brilliant scientist now working for ESRI, the leading company in geographic information services, drew my attention to this important question. But first, a note about the delay: Almost a month ago, I passed along a link to an article in the Post &Courier of Charleston, South Carolina, that reported on two presentations at the conference, one of them mine. I promised more material from that conference, but the following week, illness took hold of me for a day or two, and soon after, I was consumed with preparations for a trip to the American Planning Association’s...
Restoring the Chicago Area Landscape
Chicago is not terribly old, as world-class cities go. It was incorporated only in 1837. The area was essentially devoid of European settlers until the 19th century. In the preceding centuries, the resident Indians, including the Potawatomi, had created a landscape dominated by oak ecosystems as a result of actively managing the landscape through the use of prairie fires. On the open lands of the Upper Midwest, there were few meaningful fire breaks, and the fires drifted east over vast grasslands. This North American fire regime changed the land by preventing the establishment of woody species, allowing oaks to dominate because of their thick, fire-resistant barks. The oaks in turn allowed more sunlight through their canopy and provided a...
Update to “Don’t Say Those Words”
In response to my good friend, Allison Hardin, planner and floodplain manager in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, posting on Facebook the article referenced in my last post from the Post & Courier covering my and Matt Hauer's presentations last week at the Coastal GeoTools conference, another long-time friend, James Quigley, who teaches at Stonybrook University on Long Island, has brought to our attention another article about Florida Gov. Rick Scott's unofficial policy that state employees in various agencies not use the words "climate change." This one is from the Miami Herald, further elaborating on a situation first brought to light by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting. Check it out. Jim Schwab
Report from Coastal GeoTools 2015
Since Sunday evening, I have been in North Charleston, South Carolina, attending the 2015 Coastal GeoTools conference, hosted by the Association of State Floodplain Managers with support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. I intend to post more material from this conference as the opportunity arises, but as is often the case, especially where one is both a participant and presenter, time is often tight and inadequate to write the sorts of thoughtful analyses and comments I prefer to make the hallmark of this blog. But look for more in coming days. In the meantime, however, at least with regard to a session on coastal inundation at which I presented Tuesday morning, the local press (Post & Courier) made my job...
Seattle Hosts the Nation’s Planners
It appears the American Planning Association may break all its attendance records at its annual National Planning Conference next month in Seattle. The last previous record of about 7,000 was also set in Seattle in 1999, so there must be something about the city that both supports and attracts urban planners and those interested in the subject. Perhaps it is the whole Pacific Northwest that sets a tone in favor of well-planned communities; Portland, Oregon, for example, has long been regarded as uniquely progressive in this regard. But Seattle and King County, which includes the city, have been no slouches in embracing forward-looking initiatives aimed at achieving sustainable, environmentally friendly communities. Former King County...
Don’t Say Those Words!
Now suppose I go to Florida but decide never to utter the word “mosquitos.” Will that make the little buggers go away? Or suppose I refuse to say “cockroaches.” Does that mean they would never infest my apartment or condo? Finally, let us imagine that, on my trip to Florida, I never say the word “sunburn”? Would that make it possible for me to sit on the beach all day, unprotected, without suffering the consequences? If those propositions sound absurd, then consider the moronic dictum of Florida Gov. Rick Scott, who apparently has decreed that state employees are not to use the words “climate change.” Presto. Problem solved! Climate change ceases to exist, all the science to the contrary be damned (for instance, the most recent National...
Yes, Floods Are More Frequent
If you live in the Midwest, you’re over, say, 50 years old, and you’ve had the impression that floods are happening more frequently than they used to, your memory is not playing tricks on you. A pair of researchers at the University of Iowa have studied the daily records collected at stream gauges in 14 states by the U.S. Geological Survey from 1962-2011. Four times as many stations (264, or 34 percent) showed an increase as showed a decrease during that time (66, or nine percent). Iman Mallakpour and Gabriele Villarini published their findings, “The Changing Nature of Flooding across the Central United States,” in the February 9 advance online edition of Nature Climate Change, a scientific journal. Villarini is an assistant professor of...
Solar Power and Resilient Communities
One of the most critical lifelines for survival for many citizens in a community stricken by disaster is the electrical grid. Without power, food spoils in refrigerators. Without power, one cannot recharge a cell phone, which may be a critical means of seeking help. Without power, one may freeze in the dark. Last Thursday, February 26, I participated as a panelist in a webinar hosted by the American Planning Association as part of its involvement in the U.S. Department of Energy’s SunShot Solar Outreach Partnership. With two other speakers, Robert Sanders and Stephan Schmidt, I helped explore solutions to such helplessness through what is becoming known as solar resilience. The idea is simple: through a combination of solar photovoltaic...
The Night Ministry
If, like me, you work in the central business district of a major city, you probably cannot escape it. On the way from the CTA train station to the office, a four-block walk, it seems that I pass the homeless on every street corner. One part of me would like to do something for them. Another part knows from experience that some may be very difficult to help. And a third part says that I don’t have the resources to help them all anyway. It is hard to know what to do, so most of us try to tune it out. But don’t you wonder? How did they all get here? What do they do when the temperature in Chicago plunges to subzero levels? When the winter wind howls and the snow piles up, where do they all go? How long have they been on the streets? Were...
The Challenge of Creating Resilient Communities
Resilience has typically been defined as an ability to bounce back from, and to withstand, shocks and crises. These can include natural disasters but also terrorist strikes, sudden economic downturns, or major industrial accidents. The term was borrowed from the field of ecology, but it has taken root in community planning and has important implications for how and where we build and for the kinds of human capital we develop. It is inherently a complex topic. That complexity raises the question of how entities outside communities can encourage or foster greater resilience within them. Is it all up to local planners and elected officials, or is there a role for state and federal governance and perhaps private philanthropy? If so, what is...
Music of the Plates
Tectonic plates, to be specific. Those who have studied geology, formally or informally (like, reading National Geographic or Discover) know that the earth is riddled with fault lines, many of which fall along the boundaries of tectonic plates in places like the Pacific Rim. Periodically, as pressure builds along these faults, they move in various directions, releasing tremendous power through what might be described as a snapping motion. But what does that sound like? Well, in real life, we know of rumbles and crumbles as buildings fall, but what if you put it all to music? An Australian technology innovator, David Johnson, did just that, taking a century of seismic data, assigning notes and instruments to various parts of the planet,...
Elevator Speeches for Disaster Recovery Needs
Two weeks ago, I introduced a new report produced by the American Planning Association under a contract with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. I had the honor of managing the production of Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery: Next Generation over the four years of research and writing that were involved in its development, along with overseeing several other web-based enhancements that were also part of the project. Now I’d like to introduce readers to one final product that we rolled out just yesterday—a series of downloadable briefing papers on various subtopics of disaster recovery. The report covers the subject of recovery planning in 200 pages of detail, offering considerable depth on the topic. The briefing papers serve a...
March to End Injustice
On this weekend of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, my wife and I spent last night watching the movie Selma before going out to dinner. Produced by Oprah Winfrey, who also plays the part a Selma protester, the movie focuses on Dr. King’s leadership of the March from Selma to Montgomery for black voting rights in Alabama, which resulted in 1965 in the passage by Congress of the Voting Rights Act that effectively ended the devious practices of southern officials in denying voting rights to black citizens. \ It is an uplifting movie, as one would expect, and I highly recommend it. The movie deserves more than the two Oscar nominations it received, but getting justice in Hollywood has always been a curious game of inside politics. It is...
The Next Generation of Disaster Recovery Guidance
It is always an honor to be able to lead an effort that advances the state of practice with regard to a subject as critical to the nation, and the world, as planning for post-disaster recovery. As readers will have noted from this blog and website, for the last four years or so I was in that position as both the manager of the APA Hazards Planning Center and project manager for Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery: Next Generation, a project that has included the production of an APA Planning Advisory Service Report (No. 576) of the same name. We wish to acknowledge the support of the Federal Emergency Management Agency through an agreement with APA, which made the project possible. I personally wish to thank the members of the project...
Finding Intelligent Middle Ground
If I were a major celebrity like Oprah Winfrey, I could expect immediate and fierce feedback whenever I chose to comment on a controversial issue. I am not, but she is, and on Saturday, January 3, she got such feedback after expressing doubts about the leadership of the demonstrations that have followed the deaths of various unarmed black men at the hands of police in various cities, most notably Ferguson, Missouri, and New York. It is an unavoidable feature of the new Twitter universe in which we now live that almost anything any celebrity says will be dissected and regurgitated thousands or millions of times within 24 hours, not just by the news media but by every interested individual with a social media account of some type. The...
Give It Up, Rahm
As any urban planner, lawyer, or intelligent elected official knows, public safety is a powerful argument in support of measures undertaken by any level of government. This is particularly true of local government, which in the U.S. is responsible for most law enforcement, traffic management, and response to emergencies and disasters. The city of Chicago in recent years has wielded this argument as the primary justification for a program using red light cameras to monitor traffic at various intersections in the absence of direct management by police officers, who cannot be everywhere. The tradeoff is simple: Violators who drive through red lights or make right turns where not allowed are cited and fined, but those violations do not appear...
Holiday Promises
The holiday season is upon us, and despite having a modicum of free time that I have not enjoyed for a while, I confess—I am still struggling to compose as much material for this blog as I would prefer. But I am working on it, on some serious material on a variety of issues, and you will see it all in coming weeks. But before I get to that, I want to express some gratitude. Although any blogger clearly blogs with the hope of finding an audience, I have been stunned in recent weeks as the number of visitors and registered users has soared, the latter number topping 2,200 as of yesterday. At the current rate of growth, I would not be surprised if there are 10,000 of you a year from now. Finding an audience of that size and on that...
Interview with Boulder, Colorado, Mayor
This is one of those short posts that takes you to a different blog, but one for which I have direct responsibilities--the Recovery News blog at the American Planning Association website. We posted last Friday a video interview with Matthew Appelbaum, the mayor of Boulder, Colorado, exploring the lessons the city learned from the floods that afflicted the city in September 2013. Appelbaum discusses the road to recovery, the unique circumstances of the flood, and the fact that "resilience is the watchword." I hope you enjoy listening. Click here. Jim Schwab
America’s Problem
There has been considerable angst in recent weeks about relations between police officers and young black men, and more than a little finger-pointing. While I certainly think this nation needs ongoing discussions about how race relations affect police activity and vice versa, that is not the immediate subject of this blog. Instead, I want to turn to a different aspect of race relations in the United States that I think is undeniable, and yet will be denied by certain segments of the population. It is the ongoing inability of some people to accept the legitimacy of African American leadership even when a majority of Americans have supported it. I spent the first week of December in Washington, D.C., at a series of meetings big and small,...
Beating the Bug Takes Time
This is not the more substantive discussion I had intended to post this weekend. I had planned some explorations of the concept of community resilience, based on recent travels and meetings that allowed me to help explore such topics, and other initiatives in which I am involved would have allowed me to elaborate on the theme in subsequent posts once I started. Fate intervened in the form of a microscopic being that somehow manages to waylay us human beings. As early as last Sunday, without knowing the precise cause, I began to sense that unnerving malaise that often precedes a full assault by some sort of virus or bacteria. But I got through the week until Thanksgiving morning, when a slight chill the night before became a sore throat,...
Living in an Integrated World
Little more than a week ago (October 28-29), I was participating in a conference in Broomfield, Colorado, north of Denver, sponsored by the Association of State Floodplain Managers, a national organization of 16,000 members dedicated to better floodplain management in the U.S. The conference was the Sixth Triennial Flood Mitigation and Floodproofing Workshop. Along with Julie Baxter, a former staff member of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Region VIII office in Denver, who recently left to join the new consulting firm, Risk Prepared, as a planner, I presented a mini-workshop on “Mitigation Planning Integration with Comprehensive Planning.” The first thing I am aware of is the need to explain what that actually means. It sounds...
One Thing Leads to Another
I have been to my fair share of presentations on disaster-related issues. When I hear a particularly good presentation, I know it is good because I have a lot of others to which I can compare it. Sometimes local planners, emergency managers, and engineers, among others, can bring a certain parochial flavor to their presentations. I think this is usually the result of not having either the experience or the inclination to think beyond the set of problems and challenges immediately before them. But there are also those who have thought bigger thoughts, figured out larger patterns, and validated them through observation and experience. Last week, at a conference in Broomfield, Colorado, north of Denver, I heard one such presentation that I...
In the Name of God
This is the sin against the Holy Ghost: - To speak of bloody power as right divine, And call on God to guard each vile chief's house, And for such chiefs, turn men to wolves and swine:- To go forth killing in White Mercy's name, Making the trenches stink with spattered brains, Tearing the nerves and arteries apart, Sowing with flesh the unreaped golden plains. In any Church's name, to sack fair towns, And turn each home into a screaming sty, To make the little children fugitive, And have their mothers for a quick death cry,- This is the sin against the Holy Ghost: This is the sin no purging can atone:- To send forth rapine in the name of Christ:- To set the face, and make the heart a stone. Vachel Lindsay Illinois poet Vachel...
Food at the Riverside: Review
Restaurants can and often do feature curious logos, and one would expect no less from any independent restaurant in Boulder, Colorado, but an image of an upward-pointing fork with a upside-down goat sitting on top? Well, let’s just accept that. I didn’t see any goat on the menu anyway, just . . . . goat cheese, unless I am missing something, which I doubt, although buffalo does make an appearance. This is the new West, after all. And I can always appreciate an entrepreneurial sense of humor. I am a strong believer that a healthy sense of humor extends our life span, and I certainly hope to extend mine with a positive attitude and a disposition toward laughter as good medicine. In a state where the sign inside “Food at the Riverside,”...
Resilience in the Rockies
Back on July 28, I told the story in “The Fatal Attraction” of a gourmet restaurant in Gold Hill, Colorado, that somehow produced great food with the help of a fantastically dedicated staff in a small town nestled in the mountains. I also noted that the surrounding communities had suffered both wildfires in the past and torrential floods in September 2013, from which they are still recovering. I recounted a few details of some presentations by the mayors of both Boulder and Lyons, and their city manager and town administrator, during the annual Natural Hazards Workshop in nearby Broomfield, Colorado. I had the opportunity just last week to spend three days in Boulder at the Third International Conference on Urban Disaster Reduction...
Creative Economic Development for College Towns
College towns can be as different from each other as they are collectively from most other communities. Some literally dominate the economic landscape of their communities. Others are comfortably lodged in a setting that involves a larger community or even a state capital. They have different histories, different strengths, and different outlooks. What they tend to have in common is a high average level of education and a large number of young people and faculty brimming with new ideas. But they don’t always tap that imagination effectively, sometimes at all, and not all are good at bridging the famous gap between town and gown. So how do they chart an economic future for themselves? On Saturday, September 20, I was in Iowa City listening...
Random Thoughts on the People’s Climate March
Reportedly, about 400,000 people attended the People’s Climate March in New York City last weekend. I was not one of them, but that is not because I don’t support their objectives. I had planned to be in Iowa City, and will discuss that visit in an upcoming blog to follow this one, and I learned long ago that I cannot be everywhere that I think it might even be important to be. As I jokingly tell those who wish I could attend some event that I have declined, “I have utterly failed to clone myself.” I am, however, glad that others were there, including those scientists, particularly climate scientists, who felt a need to speak out on this issue. I won’t even try to duplicate all the news already reported through numerous outlets like...
“We are all Steven Sotloff”
In view of American journalist Steven Sotloff’s fate—beheading at the hands of the Islamic State rebels who now control much of Syria—this is a rather dramatic statement. It came from Bruce Shapiro, executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at the Columbia University Journalism School in New York. He was speaking over lunch at a workshop, “Disasters and Extreme Weather,” at the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists, at the Hilton Riverside in New Orleans. His speech lay between my lunch and the panel on which I myself spoke, the first of the afternoon, which was intended to provide a toolkit of ideas for freelance and other writers covering disasters. The point was, in part, that Steven...
Digital Coast: A Model for Progress
In an era of congressional gridlock, with so little productive activity coming out of Washington that many people have begun to wonder if federal government is good for anything, the best models often work quietly in the shadows—and they may not even work primarily out of Washington. They work around the country, in the hinterlands, and along the coasts. They may even have odd names like Digital Coast, suggesting the marriage of digital technology with environmental and coastal planning needs. This is the story, in my own idiosyncratic fashion, of one such model. Just last week, I spent three days in Milwaukee at a meeting of the Digital Coast Partnership, which is affiliated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration...
Drone Coverage in Napa
Readers may well be waiting for me to post something substantial soon, and I plan to compose a significant article this Labor Day weekend. It's been very hectic for me the last two weeks, and I am currently in Washington on a round of ten meetings in two days, pursuing business new and old. But while all that is happening, Mike Johnson from our IT department at the American Planning Association latched onto something very interesting, I think, and added it to our Recovery News blog. Amid all the debate about the proper and allowable uses of drones, Evan Kilkus in California has found one use that gives us handy new insights into the nature of damage from the recent earthquake in Napa, California. Use the link above to see his drone-filmed...
Trees for Metropolitan Chicago
Would you imagine that the trees in the metropolitan Chicago region provide compensatory value of $51.2 billion? This is the calculation produced through i-Tree, a free software program provided by the U.S. Forest Service to estimate tree canopy and the ecological services it produces for our communities. This is not a seat-of-the-pants calculation. There is a great deal of science behind it, as I have learned over the last two decades in interactions with the Forest Service and the larger professional community devoted to advancing the subject of urban forestry. There is a substantial technical literature these days about the benefits of the urban forest in terms of air pollution filtration, reduction of stormwater runoff, reducing soil...
Utah Landslide: Commentary via Google Hangout
I'll keep this short because it's really all about listening to a half-hour video from Google Hangout produced by the Salt Lake Tribune yesterday, if you care to watch and listen. There was a landslide in North Salt Lake, Utah, earlier this week, so the newspaper wanted to assemble some experts to talk about it and how planning might have helped. I was one of three people interviewed. If you wish to watch, click here. Jim Schwab
Bucket List from Down Under
It was one of those summer days this past Monday when I had been working hard to compose an online presentation and needed to come up for air. At a suitable point, I took a break and left my 12th-floor office in our downtown building on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, headed for the elevator, and went downstairs to the plaza in front of our building. It was a sunny day but not too hot, with a slight, pleasant breeze, and one can sit among the flowers at various small metal tables anchored in the cement, on seats that are equally anchored to the tables. It was time to smell the roses. I looked for an empty table; it’s easier to find peace and quiet and less intrusive on someone else’s peace and quiet, though it means that five-sixths of...
Crossing One Thousand
When I first started this blog, one of the nagging questions in my mind was, “Is anybody reading this?” It is a natural enough question for almost anyone. For someone who has published books and reports and hundreds of articles in various periodicals, all with readerships in the thousands to tens of thousands, it is also a question of how best to invest one’s time. The nice thing about a blog, however, is that you can choose your own subject matter. At first, I was inclined to focus more on book reviews, but the pressures of time quickly pushed that notion into the background. I do it, but I do not always have time to do it, and I realized I had a good deal more to offer, given my lengthy background in urban planning. I made a simple...
The Fatal Attraction
At first, it looks like something straight out of the Old West, and perhaps it is. The Gold Hill Inn is now 52 years old, which plants its origins in the 1960s, but the building was originally the dining hall for the adjacent but now closed Bluebird Lodge, built in 1873. The Gold Hill Inn, actually a restaurant, was built in 1926. In either case, Colorado was a decidedly different place back then. The historic district that remains carries forward the heritage of the old frontier. What is remarkable is finding a restaurant of such gourmet and fine dining predilections, for the Gold Hill Inn is no typical small town diner. It boasts some of the finest menus in Colorado, but I will return to all that later. What I want to discuss first is...
Trees in the Disaster Recovery Equation
For the last two or three years, if not longer, I have been engaged in an ongoing discussion with people from the U.S. Forest Service and the International Society of Arboriculture (ISA) about the role of trees in post-disaster recovery. Phillip Rodbell, an urban and community forestry program manager with the Forest Service’s Northeast office in Philadelphia, has been particularly diligent in pursuing the question of how we can better protect trees in urban areas from storms and other major disasters as well as how to reduce the loss of trees in the process of removing debris after disasters. Too often, in the absence of qualified arborists or other forestry professionals, the existing incentives for debris removal cause more, rather...
Interview with HUD’s Scott Davis
I won’t go into great detail, just enough to entice you to click the link below to watch the interview I conducted with Scott Davis, formerly director of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Recovery regarding Sandy recovery operations and programs and the role of planning in creating more resilient communities. The video, taped during the American Planning Association’s National Planning Conference in Atlanta, is on APA’s Recovery News blog, which features multimedia discussions and features on issues of planning for disaster recovery. To watch the video, click here. Jim Schwab
The Bridge to Success
Bridges come in many forms. There are 37 viaducts along the Bloomingdale Trail, the centerpiece of The 606 Project. It’s a northwest side Chicago project whose progress I have featured on this blog more than once in the past. Those viaducts are physical bridges that link the trail (and formerly the railroad) across underpasses that facilitate traffic below. More than a century ago, the city and the railroad agreed that elevating the spur line would alleviate traffic conflicts on the streets below. Today the work on the trail also features more metaphorical bridges: those between people. Making the planning process and its implementation run more smoothly as the trail is constructed involves the judicious use of public-private...
Learn from Taxi Drivers
“How old do you think I am?” the cab driver asked. It was an odd question, but the conversation with my driver from Reagan National Airport to my hotel on 10th St. NW in Washington, D.C., had already caught me by surprise with his first comment before we had ever exited the airport. He asked where I was from, and I said Chicago. “I haven’t seen you for a while,” he said. I was thinking that I had never seen him before at all. Why did he say this? I expressed a little surprise. “Dr. Morse?” he asked. I soon learned that I apparently looked a lot like Dr. Morse, but I informed him that I was neither a doctor but an urban planner. Dr. Morse is apparently a frequent visitor to Washington, was also from Chicago, and must more than once have...
NO JOB FOR WALLFLOWERS
I have a team of friends and acquaintances whom I have put to work for the moment. All are experts on one or more aspects of floodplain management and disaster recovery. They all volunteered for the job because they care about those subjects deeply. I also regard them as a bit of a personal cheering squad, although their real job is to look at what I am proposing to write and give it the evil eye. I have asked them to review my draft outline for a book for which I am currently developing a proposal for a publisher. The topic is the big Midwest floods of 1993 and 2008. Already, they are responding by questioning my choice of an opening chapter, suggesting points I missed, and offering other advice. All that advice probably contains some...
Is Hazard Mitigation a Priority?
A few months ago, I was asked to speak at the 2014 annual Science Policy Conference of the American Geophysical Union, a scientific organization that has developed a growing interest in natural hazards. I agreed, and am one of four speakers on a panel that will present a session on "Disaster Preparedness: Mitigating Risk" at 1:00 p.m. on June 17; the conference is in the Walter Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. As part of the advance promotion, each speaker was asked to contribute a blog post for AGU. Mine has just gone live; if you'd like to read it, click here. Jim Schwab
The High Cost of Indifference
As a young man from a blue-collar family, I partially worked my way through college during the summers at a chemical company near Cleveland that employed my father as a truck mechanic. If there is one thing I learned at the time, it was the value of safety and industrial hygiene. The first summer I was there, we college students were rotated through various departments to fill in for men on vacation. One produced cuprous chloride, where I learned that not keeping a gas mask on would quickly make you dead. Others produced chemicals that produced itches and rashes if you were not careful, and in one I fractured my left ankle when an antimony kiln tipped over. I could go on, but the point is simple: Safety matters. That theme, however, does...
Resilient Communities: Learning Opportunities
Opportunities exist both May 20 in Chicago, and June 18-19 in Boston, to learn more about creating resilient communities that can survive and thrive in the face of disaster. The first involves a roundtable, “Smart Systems, Resilient Regions," hosted by the Metropolitan Planning Council from noon to 1:30 p.m. The second is a two-day Planners Training Service workshop hosted by the American Planning Association. In both cases, I will be one of the presenters, along with some other experienced experts in the field. For more information on either one, click here. Jim Schwab
Pencils of Promise
“If your dreams don’t scare you, they’re not big enough.” That was the concluding line from Adam Braun, the founder of Pencils of Promise, at a luncheon today at Chicago’s Palmer House Hilton for the Heller School of Business at Roosevelt University. I don’t have any affiliation with Roosevelt, so why was I there? My wife and I were invited by our attorney, Michaeline Gordon of the Dolgin Law Group, which sponsored a table to which Michaeline had invited a number of us, including someone she wanted us to meet for insurance purposes. And surely, such networking is always important. But the important thing about the event was the presentation by Braun. Frankly, I had never heard of this 29-year-old man before being invited, and had no real...
Save the Last Dog for Me
One of the glories of living in a city like Chicago is the broad range of culinary talent that exists here. While it is not illogical to assume that the most famous chefs own restaurants that can quickly empty your wallet unless you are part of the one percent, the notion that the average person cannot afford to sample the best is not always true. There is an almost incredible variety of ethnic cuisines available in different parts of Chicago, for instance, with a range of prices. A decent, reasonable Thai restaurant, Chang Mai (Sticky Rice), for example, opened just two blocks away from us on Western Avenue just this spring. But in October we will lose one of the most iconic and original establishments Chicago has seen in a while. I...
Moving Forward on the Trail
Spring has sprung in Chicago, and along with it, construction progress on the Bloomingdale Trail. I can hear the hammers pounding as I write, installing guard rails at the edges of the trail. Other equipment is tearing out old rail debris and erecting access ramps. Last summer I reported on the plans for the trail, which would become the second elevated rail trail in the nation, but also the longest. Work began in spots, but now it is obvious all the way up and down the 2.7-mile stretch that sits 16 feet above street level. Work crews have been repairing the concrete walls, replacing bridges, fixing viaducts, and preparing the landscape for improvements. In mid-April, they removed an old bridge over Western Avenue, the busiest north-south...
Hawaii Log (Part 3)
In the past two installments about Hawaii, I focused on our first two days there, one for me on Kaua’i, the second with my wife and grandson in Honolulu. This third installment will round out the story. First, the catamaran trip: Since all work and no fun in Hawaii makes even the most diligent planner a dull boy, I wasted no time following suit when my colleague Carolyn Harshman indicated that she intended to spend Sunday afternoon sailing with Maitai Catamaran, her favorite voyaging firm in the islands. She had already spent some time out on the west end of the island at a beach in far better shape than Waikiki where, as she noted, the reef is “pretty beat up” because of overuse and the impact of tourism. Still, this was not a snorkeling...
Hawaii Log (Part 2)
Beyond the Friday day trip to Kaua’i, which I summarily described in Part 1 of this Hawaii log, there is not much point in detailing the work I was doing on this trip. For one thing, it is premature. We were simply working on a training course that is still in development and previewed some of it at a day-long workshop at Pacific Risk Management Ohana (PRiMO) conference at the Hawaii Convention Center. The rest will become apparent when it reaches completion and NDPTC is prepared to unveil it. In the meantime, we are figuring out what works and why. Suffice it to say our trio of consultants spent Saturday morning shaping our presentations, and I spent my Sunday morning refining mine. Meanwhile, my wife and grandson were entertaining...
Hawaii Log (Part 1)
Early in 2008, after I learned that I would be offered a three-week visiting fellowship by the Centre for Advanced Engineering in New Zealand (CAENZ), colleagues and friends had a tendency to ask why that country was so interested in my expertise in planning for natural hazards. I was bemused by the question every time. “Have you watched Lord of the Rings?” I would ask. Because the movie trilogy was so popular, the answer was “yes” about 95 percent of the time. I would then follow by asking, “You realize those movies were filmed in New Zealand?” Most of the time, people were well aware of this. “Think about that landscape in the movies,” I would advise. “The logic will come to you.” Those mountains, the volcanic craters, the rugged...
Let Your Mind Wander
I am going to abandon any pretense to scholarship in this particular commentary. Scholarship would defeat the purpose, which is creativity, not that the two never go together, but there are times when we need to rely on intuition first, and figure out the rationale later. That happens a lot with writing, and it explains why some of the world’s best writers and artists are naturals who also happen to be willing to work very hard at their craft. But they know when to let their minds wander. I read somewhere—this is where the scholarship is abandoned, because I have read this several times and never bothered to note where—that the human mind can actually be more productive and creative when daydreaming than when concentrating on a problem....
Always Feed the Meter
Those who live in big cities know how unforgiving the parking meters are. Leave your car unattended longer than the time on the meter allows, forget to put that extra money in before time runs out, and here comes a parking ticket, with a hefty fine--$25, $50, or more, depending on the city and the location. In Chicago, we no longer even have the perverse satisfaction of knowing that the money at least helps fill the public coffers and pay for some potential service, perhaps covering police or firefighter wages that might do others some good. Thanks to a quick hustle and a compliant city council, Mayor Richard M. Daley in the waning days of his 22-year tenure managed to lease the parking meters for 75 years to a private company, and then...
Get Your Drought Planning Training Here
I recently had the honor of serving as the guest presenter in a webinar series hosted by the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska. The February 12 presentation highlighted a research report, Planning and Drought, which we produced at the American Planning Association under an agreement with the Center. As the presentation, and the introduction to it on APA's Recovery News blog, pretty much speak for themselves, let me here merely link you to it if the problem of preparing communities adequately for the sort of drought recently facing California is of any interest: http://blogs.planning.org/postdisaster/2014/02/19/planning-and-drought-an-integrated-approach-free-webinar/. Jim Schwab
Close Enough to Get Your Attention
This was a day that got me thinking about how we react to disasters. I’ve certainly had the opportunity to work on other people’s disasters, not so much in the direct sense of being involved daily for months on end, but at least in supplying training on recovery, advice on plans, and the other types of bits and pieces of aid that a researcher or consultant is often able to provide. And I’ve studied other people’s disasters in great detail in order to distill the selective wisdom that finds its way into reports and articles and presentations that share the knowledge thus accrued. But there is always some sense of distance, even when one knows personally some people who live and work in the communities affected, or who were directly...
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...
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