Memories of growing-up are among the strongest of our lives. What are your growing-up memories? They are probably very vivid. Mine are. I want to briefly mention two very different sets of such memories. The first is about an amazing set of adventures in a modest neighborhood in the south end of Lansing, Michigan, then about the size of Casper today. It was the decade of the 1930's ... days of the "great depression" and our family was clearly was among the many who were just "hanging on". But the things I recall are not about lack of money but about neighborhood kids, their folks, the numerous kitchens I knew inside out, the gravel streets, the "action" in the alleys, the full-size airplane my dad built in the back yard (which inadvertently became the neighborhood's "Public Square" for the year), front porch games such as counting passing cars and keeping the Buicks for my own, Friday walks to the grocery after pay-day (we had no car), the dreaded math teacher down the street who had the best grape arbor in town, the ball field across the street (mowed only occasionally by our fathers), Doris, the milk-wagon horse and Mr. Rumsey, who owned the neighborhood store. It was what I know now as "community", being assembled within me and shaping much of my current attitudes towards people and places. I'll never forget those times.
The second set of memories are very different but equally indelible. Due to the intense housing shortage after WWII it was necessary for my folks to live for a time on a farm. It occurred during the three years of my high school days. During that time I became the sole "hired hand" at a neighboring farm, owned by an elderly Dutch couple, the Boersmas. It was in fact the experience that opened up my love for the land and eventually led to my choice of profession. Arnold and Clara Boersma taught me how a small parcel of land and it's water can be so productive and provide such a satisfying way of life. They taught me about weather, wind and the beauty of rain ... about milking cows and caring for their forage ... about how Babe and Dolly, two work horses were superior at some tasks over the big, steel-cleated Oliver tractor. And maybe most memorable of all, Clara's meals... including probably the best apple pies ever created!
Two sets of memories about community - one in a city setting and one in a rural setting. Both very influential in my choice of a career in land and community design.
As I look back I realize that though I was poor in material things, my growing-up time was rich with things that had everything to do with simple relationships between me and other people and the places in which we lived. What I experienced was probably not unusual for the time. But today it seems to represent the character of a community people are trying so hard to protect if it exists and so intensely trying to create if it is not there. These community-building urgings are not new... they are part of the oldest set of longings a civilized people can have and, if the will is there, it is as available today as it ever was.
Given this nostalgia regarding my growing-up days and as noted in the title of this talk, I want to discuss some of the aspects of the community-building phenomenon... about which each one of us, in one way or another is involved.
I want to talk about it both as a process and as a set of inter-relationships among people, their needs and a chosen physical place.
I want to emphasize that I speak more as a student than an authority. Providing answers to the unique community-building circumstances in Wyoming is beyond my insights and abilities. But I can bring some testimony about some attitudes and practices which can make a difference if preserving and creating effective communities is high on your agenda.
The thrust of the term "community-building' is more about the future than about current circumstances or about the past, because it is about the process of change ... a community always becoming something beyond its beginnings or where it was the day before. The process does not stop and wait for us to figure it out.
It is this inherent look to the future that seems so difficult for us as we build the communities we live in. History tells us we are not very good at predicting the future, that unforeseen events can change everything and that one group's view of the ideal does not square with another group's view of the ideal. So, many ask, how is it possible to plan ahead when there are so many imponderables? Other than the basic infrastructure services, many believe it best to let the future be shaped by the accumulation of those things that satisfy each days emergent needs. Don't lay out such comprehensive plans for the future but let them be more open to choice. It seems more flexible and seems to allow the greatest possible latitude for choosing how one wishes to live. Moreover, as the thinking goes, voluminous land use planning and zoning laws have clearly not been very helpful in avoiding the chronic urban problems common to every growing area in the country ... look around and one can see.
These points seem reasonable enough, and yet when one looks into our early American towns and villages, from east to west, most were the results of carefully thought-out plans for the future ... they resulted from a vision that must have captured their imagination and their development energy. In fact, as I sense our history, building an up-lifting and durable community life is an art inherent in the American spirit. Our fore-fathers knew how to build communities with an eye to the future. It is evident in countless villages, towns and cities throughout the country, built over time with an artful blend of civic pride and common sense.
Although I do not know Wyoming communities as well as I would like, I have spent time in towns like Powell, Cody, Lander, Laramie, Casper, Buffalo, Sheridan and even little Meeteetse. I have walked through some of their attractive neighborhoods and working downtowns ... great examples of the "art" I speak of. They embody the quality-of-life characteristics that so many other communities in this country are working hard to protect or are in the agonizing process of losing. There is a precedence for visionary, long-term thinking on the community-building front in our country and in this State. In the face of the massive societal changes we are experiencing, visionary thinking about the future seems more needed than ever at a time when we are doubting its usefulness. History confirms that the necessary creativity abides in each one of us when the motivation is there. The issue is most likely the kind of planning ahead we adopt, not whether or not it is needed.
For whatever reasons, we do not seem to seek from our newer communities the Sense-of-Place and Identity our early communities represented so strongly. Maybe, as growth exceeded the boundaries of the originally planned towns, growth issues become too complex and such qualities are simply too elusive to hold.
In any case, we are now in very different times. The way we now prefer to live has not been kind to the community qualities we once knew. As I think about the principle change-agents they include a few basic ones, such as:
The Automobile. We are automobile dependent. The car is our freedom, our office, our entertainment, our security and our pride. We acquire them like pairs of shoes ... one for every different occasion. We want them all inside our homes. We eat in the car and shop from the car. We prefer easy, quickly found and close-by parking... "free" if possible. Therefore, commercial corridors follow automobile corridors, necessarily where there is enough land, usually at the extended edges of the city or town, to accommodate the space consuming moves of our automobiles. This is the basis of the strip development formula which has generally replaced our once-familiar downtowns as the new "center" of community life. Because of the continued refinement of the automobile and our significant support of roadway systems our sense of community is increasingly extensive, not intensive. Interestingly, it's one of the ways in which the entire State of Wyoming can be sensed as a kind of single "neighborhood" with longer "streets" than normal... and it actually seems to work.! It's a tribute to the strength of the community spirit overcoming physical separation of great magnitude. So it may be understandable that many in Wyoming do not yet consider urban sprawl a particular problem.
Growth. When population growth is combined with longer life expectations, increasing mobility and the search for more livable communities there is the inevitable over-crowding of those places that offer great recreation and scenic amenities. We see it in classic proportions along both coasts and in the Rocky Mountain states, inevitably spreading to adjacent areas. It is one aspect of sprawl causing great inefficiencies in our country's urban framework. Governor Geringer, in his guidebook on conserving Wyoming's open lands, states the case this way: "Today the primary human impact on Western land has shifted from resource development to urban development ... Rapid growth has created housing booms in the Rocky Mountain states, diminishing our neighbors' most fertile agricultural land, wildlife habitat and open lands. Strip malls destroy grain fields; housing subdivisions replace meadows... without the scenic views, agricultural land and wildlife habitat that open spaces provide. quality f life in Wyoming will decline.
Mobility. Beyond what the automobile has afforded us in mobility, the cyberspace revolution extends the mobility equation immeasurably. Instant communication to and from anywhere in the world is altering home-work patterns, family relationship patterns, learning patterns and generally causing us to rethink the meaning of "neighborhood", "centrality", "proximity" and even "community". This kind of mobility freedom may or may not diminish our desire to build traditional scale into our new "home towns", but it does imply that our fix on the future is still as uncertain as ever, if not more-so.
These things tear away at our once strongly felt "place-traditions." It is significant to realize that what seems to be the best of traditional community-life is threatened by the so called "good" life we now have chosen. It is a real challenge to attempt to reconcile these conflicting aspirations. Yet, across the country, I sense an increasing willingness to face this challenge with new energy and I sense there is an emerging confidence that seeking traditional community values can be coincident with adapting to changing times.
The intent by many communities today is to recapture some measure of traditional community qualities... stronger sense of place, more vital downtowns, walking proximities to schools, shopping and jobs, calmer traffic - all without sacrificing, of course, the advantages of contemporary life.
Recent innovative efforts show that not only can it be done, it can meet market-place affordability. But it will take efforts different than the normal development routine. By this I mean it will take a more determined seeking of the traditional community qualities we once knew, more inclusive problem-solving procedures and more integrative ways of shaping community patterns. A brief further word on each:
More Determined -- Nothing proceeds very far without the will to make it happen. Therefore people need to feel a unity about the importance of the problem and an unshakeable corporate Will to achieve the vision. In this case, if it is felt that a certain quality-of-place is of high priority, then there are ways to identify those qualitative ingredients and build them into the development or preservation strategy. Without that will, everything else will be up-hill.
More Inclusive -- Too many times a community is given a development proposal that is all worked out and ready to go, or so it is perceived. Not knowing where the ideas have come from, there is anguish and opposition, even to ideas of great benefit. People need to be involved, not to persuade but to discover the most workable outcomes. I have found through the years that by involving the future users of a development/preservation idea early in the game, there inevitably emerges a plan unique to that particular group of people. When people help create a plan their motivations to achieve it are unusually high.
More Integrative -- Too often one development need, such as a roadway improvement, is developed in isolation from another need, such as recreation corridor, which if developed in tandem could achieve a better outcome for both at a lesser cost to each. These opportunities tend not to occur due to the lack of a clear community development vision and a related implementation strategy.
For instance, one of the more familiar features of any community is the open space set aside for recreation and preservation, usually placed in a patch-work pattern as opportunity and circumstance allow. Experience is showing that if all open-space-generating uses are seen as an integrated system (including roadways, power transmission lines, landfills, mining operations, etc), community growth can be fitted much more creatively to the land, without cost premiums, and with greater flexibility for the details of future development. Open space can thereby have a community-building role. It can form a "backbone" or "framework" within which unpredictable future development can form. People generally do not think of open space as having such a positive role like this in determining urban form..
There are an increasing number of examples emerging in the market place today where communities are being built on this "Open Space Framework" premise, such as the new communities of Prairie Crossing, Illinois and Hidden Springs, Idaho. (Maps and photos of these communities were shown during Dr. Johnson's presentation).
The preservation of "open space" is a familiar issue with many kinds of debates on how much, what kind, where and how costly. But when it can be seen in the context of "sewing and stitching" our communities together, new insight occurs and the debate tends to shift from whether or not it is worthwhile to how it can be done. That's when the community-building spirit within us can be most creative.
In Summary - I have spoken about this country's great tradition in building strong communities in ways which we still feel the positive effects from even in the midst of so much societal change. President Phil Dubois in his installation remarks last Oct 4th, in another context, spoke as well about traditional values in the context of rapidly changing circumstances. He said in part, "We must celebrate our most valued traditions. But we must not let tradition for its own sake, bind us or blind us. 'The way we were' is not the way we are, and the way we are is not the way we must be... " I feel similarly about the state of our community-building skills. But as we are willing to move away from tradition for its own sake so must we also be thoughtful about sustaining traditions that remain relevant. We must be determined to seek those traditional community characteristics central to keeping our identity and pride-of-place as we build new places to live. And we must also be creative about testing newly found insights on nontraditional ways to work together and non-traditional ways to protect, conserve and use open space.
I am personally encouraged by the significant efforts throughout the country in every kind of community to work in a more deliberate and cooperative way, to seek better information and further our understandings about each other. From all that I can tell, there is no better effort on this front than has been happening here in Wyoming. In this context, I have increased confidence that we will learn to build more livable communities while protecting even more effectively the open spaces that sustain them.
© Copyright 1997, by William J. Johnson
All Rights Reserved