I recently read an article in the Columbus Dispatch called "Burns Bottom dispute continues to sizzle." Our Seminar in Community Based Planning attended a community design charette in Columbus, Mississippi in early September. The charette was designed to help the town citizens and leaders incorporate a number of elements, most notably a soccer complex, into a comprehensive plan for the city. Now a county supervisor is advocating for upgrades to the existing city parks to be included in the plan. Political grandstanding or responsible activism?
The article is about a meeting organized by last Thursday by Lowndes County’s District 5 Supervisor Leroy Brooks of African-American elected officials, ministers and community leaders. From the comments section below the article I gather that Leroy Brooks is an outspoken and perhaps polarizing figure in the community. He claims that the city parks have long been neglected and there is nothing in the article to dispute that. He sees some movement happening on the soccer complex and perceives an opportunity to generate support for improving the parks. At a recent joint meeting of the town council, county supervisors and Columbus-Lowndes Recreation Authority officials,he asked that the city parks be a part of the plan and got voted down. At that meeting, the supervisors voted unanimously to commit $3.25 to the Burns Bottom soccer complex and alleviate the city of any financial responsibility, if the city later pays to renovate the Trotter Convention Center. Brooks calls that vote illegal, because the meeting was considered a workshop. Included in Brook’s suggested improvements are a new building, a rubberized outdoor basketball court and a pavilion.
Brooks wants this all included in a comprehensive recreation plan. He says he supports the soccer complex, but that efforts to improve all the parks should be included with the effort to build this new park. He downplayed the racial aspect in his comments, but Rev. Larry Story of Turner Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church was a little more forthright. From the article:
“I think that’s just a way of saying no,” Story said of the decision to put off further consideration of the issue until a later date. “It seems like the board (of supervisors) has historically been locked around racial lines. I think unless the three-vote majority have hearts of compassion, nothing is going to change, except you’ll see an uprising of the African-American community. People seem quick to jump on the African-American community, as far as drugs and crime, but they don’t want to make an investment in the community. It seems like there’s constant division down racial lines.”
I don't know whether Mr. Brooks or any of the other people from the meeting attended the charette. The design team was very professional and seemed to have done their reconnaissance work well; it seems inconceivable that they would not have approached Brooks or the ministers ahead of time and tried to get them involved. Reaching out to minority communities is definitely in the charette handbook. As I recall, there was some discussion of the parks and it was an item on the flip charts.
The town needs a comprehensive plan about how to improve the parks. I don't think it has to be attached to the Burns Bottom project, but it should be addressed somehow.
It is disturbing to see how negative and even rude the comments after the article are. I guess it is a sign of the times, small-minded, short-sighted people emboldened by the rancor of the August town-hall meetings. One responder said “you stupid ass people…don’t blame anybody but yourselves for putting into office those selfish pricks who waste our taxpayers money on their silly projects.” I hope nobody uses language like that in my comments section!
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Esther Short Park
When I was in Vancouver, Washington, I was happy to get the chance to spend some time in this little park across the street from the Vancouver Hilton. A lot of things are going on in this small city block area. A restored Victorian house occupies the southwest corner. The bell tower and splash pool bring the sound and movement of water. The park also includes a pavilion, large grassy areas,and a playground. Condos are on three sides, along with the hotel and the offices of the local newspaper. Walking around I found a lot of shops, offices and restaurants, but no groceries.
Panorama made by stitching together eight photos taken from the second floor balcony of the Vancouver Hilton just after dawn on September 15th.
Stream bed above the splash pool. The park has a nice rhythm of spaces intimate and open, making possible a variety of experiences in a limited area.
Kid playing in the splash pool.
Climbing rocks at the splash pool. Smelled like chlorine.
That's me at the base of the bell tower. Somebody invite me to lunch!
Bell tower with condos on the east side.
Long view of the playground across the greensward.
Signage at the playground.
Diagonal parking on west side, no curb. Cars are held back from the sidewalk by monoliths.
Condos overlooking the park. There is a fitness center at street level. The chrome letters spell out "Farmer's Market," which I think is in the courtyard of the building every Saturday.
Friday, September 18, 2009
The Natural Areas Conference
Natural Areas Association
Conference, September 15-18th 2009
Vancouver, Washington
I have spent the last few days at the Natural Areas Association’s 36th Annual conference in Vancouver, Washington. A great group of people here, smart and down-to-earth (in the best sense). It seems to me that the group is about evenly split between university people and government people. The keynote speakers on the opening day included Pat Pringle, a geology professor from Centralia College, who walked us through the complicated geological history of the state of Washington, Sam Green, the poet laureate of Washington, who shared some very fine verses inspired in part by his experiences living in a cabin on a remote Island off the Washington coast for 26 years, and Robert Pyle, a writer of fifteen books and an enthusiastic advocate of the experiential aspect of nature.
On Wednesday morning I attended three presentations on urban wilderness restoration and management issues in parks in Philadelphia, Cleveland and Northern Oregon. I learned that the contractor in the Philadelphia project had to contend with packs of wild dogs, that Cleveland actually has a lot of green space and that the managers there are having difficulty with an introduced and destructive earthworm (of all things), and that aspects of the Cooper Mountain state park woodland habitat restoration plan could be applied to our own Osborn Prairie management plan. Then I presented my Jackson Prairie, General Land Office Records paper in a session that was well attended. To my relief, there was nobody scheduled to speak after me, so I was able to relax and take my time. I got a good response, especially from two people in particular, one a retired forester with the Washington Department of Natural Resources who had worked with GLO records in the past and the other a researcher at Montana State who is using GLO records to map historic grassland (they didn’t use the word “prairie” in Montana at the time of European settlement).
The site of the conference, the Vancouver Hilton, is a LEED certified facility that borders the southern end of Esther Short Park. The park has a little splash pool with misters, a clock tower with a waterfall, and a playground area in addition to grassy expanses and scattered large redwoods, firs and sweetgums. It is not very big, a small city block in size, and is divided into informal “rooms” or distinct areas, all of which combine nicely into an integrated whole.
The Keynote speaker for the Wednesday luncheon was George Divoky, a biologist who studied seabirds on a remote island off the north shore of Alaska for over thirty years. In that time span he was able to document how global climate change made it possible for a certain bird to nest on the island by making the summers just a little bit longer. This bird fed on arctic cod, which are dependant on krill that live in the ice packs just offshore. Over time, again due to climate change, the ice packs moved north, or dissappeared altogether, and the lack of a critical protein source caused the birds to have much more difficulty raising chicks. Then, with increased warming, polar bears showed up. With no ice, the polar bears couldn’t hunt seals anymore, so they came to Cooper Island and ate all the birds Divoky was studying. So in thirty years the arctic ecosystem as changed enough to see this one species appear and then disappear on Cooper Island. The entire arctic ice pack will disappear at some point in our life time. Since the icepack is home to invertebrates that are the basis of the arctic marine food chain, this can be said to be the largest habitat loss in the world at this time. Scary stuff, and Divoky presented it in a way that avoided doomsday and desperate tones. He pointed out the good news: soon we will be able to grow wheat across Canada. The bad news: we will no longer be able to grow wheat in most of the USA. We need to plan for this.
Thursday was for field trips. I went to the prairies of the South Puget Sound. The cool thing was the Mima Mounds: a very regular pattern of mounds, each one about five feet tall and twenty feet wide, continuing uninterrupted by stream, hill or dale, over an expanse of hundreds of square miles. These mounds support a grassland habitat, which supports a pocket gopher species, numerous flowers (not many of which are blooming now) and lots of different butterflies (we didn’t see any). Thus far nobody has come up with the final word on what caused this formation. Too vast for humans, probably had something to do with patterns in the way the ice melted (suncups) at the end of glaciation and sediment from glacial wash collecting in the cups. We also visited a nursery managed by the Nature Conservancy for the production of seeds for prairie restoration.
On Friday my thesis professor returned to Mississippi, leaving me by my lonesome. I spent the morning in a workshop focused on the Nature Conservancy’s Conservation Action Plan. The CAP is a strategy for implementing restoration. It is much like the “goals and objectives” phase of the design process that we teach in the Landscape Architecture Department here at Mississippi State. One difference with the CAP is that there is a component by which the monitoring of the results, that is, collecting data to determine whether or not the objectives of the plan are actually being achieved, leads to possible revisions of initial stated objectives, so the process is cyclical and self-revising. I spent the afternoon exploring the Esther Short Park more closely and walking around the downtown area of Vancouver. For dinner, I tagged along with the conference organizers on a tour of some of Portland’s breweries. I met some very nice people who are involved in ecological restoration in its many aspects all across the country and who patiently indulged my curiosity about the details of their professional lives. And the food was very good. The next NAA conference is going to be in St. Louis and I am looking forward to it.
Conference, September 15-18th 2009
Vancouver, Washington
I have spent the last few days at the Natural Areas Association’s 36th Annual conference in Vancouver, Washington. A great group of people here, smart and down-to-earth (in the best sense). It seems to me that the group is about evenly split between university people and government people. The keynote speakers on the opening day included Pat Pringle, a geology professor from Centralia College, who walked us through the complicated geological history of the state of Washington, Sam Green, the poet laureate of Washington, who shared some very fine verses inspired in part by his experiences living in a cabin on a remote Island off the Washington coast for 26 years, and Robert Pyle, a writer of fifteen books and an enthusiastic advocate of the experiential aspect of nature.
On Wednesday morning I attended three presentations on urban wilderness restoration and management issues in parks in Philadelphia, Cleveland and Northern Oregon. I learned that the contractor in the Philadelphia project had to contend with packs of wild dogs, that Cleveland actually has a lot of green space and that the managers there are having difficulty with an introduced and destructive earthworm (of all things), and that aspects of the Cooper Mountain state park woodland habitat restoration plan could be applied to our own Osborn Prairie management plan. Then I presented my Jackson Prairie, General Land Office Records paper in a session that was well attended. To my relief, there was nobody scheduled to speak after me, so I was able to relax and take my time. I got a good response, especially from two people in particular, one a retired forester with the Washington Department of Natural Resources who had worked with GLO records in the past and the other a researcher at Montana State who is using GLO records to map historic grassland (they didn’t use the word “prairie” in Montana at the time of European settlement).
The site of the conference, the Vancouver Hilton, is a LEED certified facility that borders the southern end of Esther Short Park. The park has a little splash pool with misters, a clock tower with a waterfall, and a playground area in addition to grassy expanses and scattered large redwoods, firs and sweetgums. It is not very big, a small city block in size, and is divided into informal “rooms” or distinct areas, all of which combine nicely into an integrated whole.
The Keynote speaker for the Wednesday luncheon was George Divoky, a biologist who studied seabirds on a remote island off the north shore of Alaska for over thirty years. In that time span he was able to document how global climate change made it possible for a certain bird to nest on the island by making the summers just a little bit longer. This bird fed on arctic cod, which are dependant on krill that live in the ice packs just offshore. Over time, again due to climate change, the ice packs moved north, or dissappeared altogether, and the lack of a critical protein source caused the birds to have much more difficulty raising chicks. Then, with increased warming, polar bears showed up. With no ice, the polar bears couldn’t hunt seals anymore, so they came to Cooper Island and ate all the birds Divoky was studying. So in thirty years the arctic ecosystem as changed enough to see this one species appear and then disappear on Cooper Island. The entire arctic ice pack will disappear at some point in our life time. Since the icepack is home to invertebrates that are the basis of the arctic marine food chain, this can be said to be the largest habitat loss in the world at this time. Scary stuff, and Divoky presented it in a way that avoided doomsday and desperate tones. He pointed out the good news: soon we will be able to grow wheat across Canada. The bad news: we will no longer be able to grow wheat in most of the USA. We need to plan for this.
Thursday was for field trips. I went to the prairies of the South Puget Sound. The cool thing was the Mima Mounds: a very regular pattern of mounds, each one about five feet tall and twenty feet wide, continuing uninterrupted by stream, hill or dale, over an expanse of hundreds of square miles. These mounds support a grassland habitat, which supports a pocket gopher species, numerous flowers (not many of which are blooming now) and lots of different butterflies (we didn’t see any). Thus far nobody has come up with the final word on what caused this formation. Too vast for humans, probably had something to do with patterns in the way the ice melted (suncups) at the end of glaciation and sediment from glacial wash collecting in the cups. We also visited a nursery managed by the Nature Conservancy for the production of seeds for prairie restoration.
On Friday my thesis professor returned to Mississippi, leaving me by my lonesome. I spent the morning in a workshop focused on the Nature Conservancy’s Conservation Action Plan. The CAP is a strategy for implementing restoration. It is much like the “goals and objectives” phase of the design process that we teach in the Landscape Architecture Department here at Mississippi State. One difference with the CAP is that there is a component by which the monitoring of the results, that is, collecting data to determine whether or not the objectives of the plan are actually being achieved, leads to possible revisions of initial stated objectives, so the process is cyclical and self-revising. I spent the afternoon exploring the Esther Short Park more closely and walking around the downtown area of Vancouver. For dinner, I tagged along with the conference organizers on a tour of some of Portland’s breweries. I met some very nice people who are involved in ecological restoration in its many aspects all across the country and who patiently indulged my curiosity about the details of their professional lives. And the food was very good. The next NAA conference is going to be in St. Louis and I am looking forward to it.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Branding
Interesting front page of the Starkville Daily News today. The Greater Starkville Development Partnership unveiled the winner of the town logo design contest. The winning design is by Greg Jeffries, a Starkville native. From what I can tell in the photograph the design consists of four panels, three depicting campus buildings (Chapel of Memories, Humphry Colusiem, That building with the two towers behind the Student Health Center) and a Church, possibly the Presbyterian one close to downtown. Anyway, the interesting thing is, just below that article is one about the new banners. Another group, of which GSDP is a part, is raising money to purchase banners to hang along highway 12. The banners read "Welcome to Starkville Home of Mississippi State University Go Dogs" The banners look nothing like the winning logo design. Granted, the logo design is not finished, there is some tweaking to do. But maybe they should have held off on the fund raising for the banners until they had a final idea for the design. They are rushing the effort because of football. The banner they are proposing has no graphics on it at all, only text. They look a little, well, stark, if you ask me.
Monday, September 7, 2009
Interactive map of California Wildfire
The Chicago Tribune has a cool interactive map of the California Wildfires up here. Clicking on the stars in the map takes you to newspaper articles relevant to those locations. Media coverage of the fire has an impact on public perception of fire in the landscape. It sounds like now they are going to try to blame it all on some "arsonist." I know it is stupid to start a fire in a forest during an extreme drought, and if anyone did so and can be caught he or she should be punished. But the reason for the fire really has a lot to do with the physical conditions of the land cover.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Something's fishy in Wellington |West Palm Beach News, South Florida Breaking News, Forecast, Video from WPTV
Something's fishy in Wellington |West Palm Beach News, South Florida Breaking News, Forecast, Video from WPTV
Posted using ShareThis
I am posting this in response to the video on Taze's blog. Code enforcement officials are using "catfish" (actually pelcostomus) to clean abandoned swimming pools on foreclosed properties. I have a couple of questions. Why is code enforcement burdened with the expense of maintaining swimming pools on abandoned properties? If the property owners can't maintain the pool, condemn the property and give it to the poor! Also, these are not native catfish, they come from Central and South America. Nobody seems to be addressing the environmental impact of putting them "back" in local lakes. The code enforcement official says you can just "put them back in the lake that they came from." This is disingenuous. I'm no ichthyologist, but I believe there is a difference between a native catfish and a plecostomus.
Posted using ShareThis
I am posting this in response to the video on Taze's blog. Code enforcement officials are using "catfish" (actually pelcostomus) to clean abandoned swimming pools on foreclosed properties. I have a couple of questions. Why is code enforcement burdened with the expense of maintaining swimming pools on abandoned properties? If the property owners can't maintain the pool, condemn the property and give it to the poor! Also, these are not native catfish, they come from Central and South America. Nobody seems to be addressing the environmental impact of putting them "back" in local lakes. The code enforcement official says you can just "put them back in the lake that they came from." This is disingenuous. I'm no ichthyologist, but I believe there is a difference between a native catfish and a plecostomus.
"You can't defy the laws of physics or building codes," Mr. Phillips said, "but beyond that, the possibilities are endless."
Interesting slide show about a fellow in Texas named Dan Phillips who builds low-income housing out of salvaged materials. His company, Phoenix Commotion, emphasizes innovative craftsmanship and aesthetically pleasing results. He involves the tenants or clients in the process of building the houses, and some of the projects, such as the Osage-Orange countertops and railings and the broken-tile grouted bathroom floor, require perhaps more time than many people are willing to commit to the process but the results are visually stunning works of art. Reminds me somewhat of the late Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio in Auburn, Alabama.
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