bikes

March 12, 2009  by

Miami: Biking to a Public Place Worth Caring About

Riding a bike in Miami is an act of humility.

  • It is to ride on sidewalks poorly-paved, swerving constantly to avoid bus benches placed right on the pavement and dead palm tree branches strewn across your path.
  • It is to tolerate motorists, many in SUVs, who are in a rush and have no experience dealing with bicycle commuters in this city where there are few.
  • It is to sweat (literally) a 35-minute bike ride — risking your limbs and maybe more — just to get to the library, this massive, uninviting concrete building with so much land but little more than a parking lot and playground outside.

I’ve arrived at the West Dade Regional Library, one of the few places in Miami where you can spend time productively and rewardingly without spending money.

Thankfully, there are people in this library and it’s got an admirable collection of books, but this place has the potential to be so much more. A public library, on the inside and on the outside, should be a safe, pleasant community environment where people and families interact, learn and enjoy themselves.

The strange, rusted metal sculpture on the front lawn is a praiseworthy attempt at art, but it’s not enough if we want to make this library a public space worth caring about.

Outside, we could grow community gardens, where families could come together and do rewarding work that benefits the community. We could plant fruit trees, edible plants and flowers. We could employ senior citizens to teach classes to children about gardening and nature.

Inside, we could host citizen-run workshops that teach people useful things. We could remove the 6 machines at the front of the library for quick, automated checkout and replace them with the real people who once sat there, librarians we used to get to know.

This is a massive public space, with so much potential. Miami’s West Dade Regional Library belongs to us. Why don’t we do something about that?

These simple changes could alter the culture of a community, and it’s a grassroots approach to sustainability. If you care about the place where you live, the things at the top take care of themselves.

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August 22, 2008  by

Sustainability in the Netherlands

I recently returned to Miami from a 6-week study abroad stint in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the way we organize our society compared to the Dutch.

Utrecht

I used to think we could remedy the destructive car culture we have in the United States simply by adding more bus routes, bike lanes and metro rails to cities. But I understand now that doing that would only skim the surface of the problem.

Cars are less ubiquitous in Utrecht not because individuals have made a personal commitment to protecting the environment (wouldn’t that be nice?), but because the city design — among other things — discourages driving in favor of other ways of getting around.

Partly because of space constraints — a reality for most European countries —  cities in the Netherlands are organized around compact communities where people live, work, eat and shop all within a 5 or 10-minute walk, or an even shorter bike ride.

Not surprisingly, there’s not much incentive to drive a car that costs a lot to buy, fill up, maintain and insure. As a result, there is

  • more interaction among community members
  • a lower cost of living
  • a public sphere people actually want to be a part of

In his TED talk The tragedy of suburbia, James Howard Kunstler talks about the need in America to define space in order to create “public spaces worth caring about.” Kunstler argues that suburban sprawl in the United States represents a massive misallocation of resources. We need to take some inspiration from Europe and reorganize our communities to the benefit not just of the environment but of citizens as well.

Of course, the solution is not as simple as superimposing the Netherlands model onto every society, because every region has its particular geographical, ecological and cultural concerns — the Netherlands is well-suited to bicycles because of the flat terrain, the cool weather and the frugal Dutch — but there has to be a more concerted effort in America to evaluate the needs of different places and to design a sustainable infrastructure accordingly.

That’s what’s emerging now, in part with the US Green Building Council, an increasingly influential non-profit organization that’s pushing the movement toward “Green Building” in the United States with its LEED standard. Tomorrow in Miami I’ll be attending the USGBC’s Natural Talent Design Competition, which will feature “progressive and innovative approaches to neighborhood design” from Emerging Green Builders. I’m looking forward to learning some new things.

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