"Although my parents have been wonderful and my husband is an excellent provider, the reality is this: God is my only guarantee. The Knower of all my needs is the sole Meeter of all my needs." - Beth Moore
I'd like to amend Moore's statement by adding to parents, and aunts and brother, and changing husband to boyfriend. She is so, so right. It is a thing only God can do, to balance one in a position of gratitude and adequate vulnerability to open ourselves to love in our human relationships, and yet, never put those loved ones in the position of filling God's role. My parents, aunts, brother, friends and boyfriend cannot ever provide me with all I need to survive. They do not know nor can they meet all of my needs. Not saying that they don't want to, but they simply cannot. They have deep needs, too, which I can never meet. The more I expect my loved ones to resolve my problems for me, and set me free from my sin and hurt, the more I am removing God from His proper place.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Stinginess & the Beauty of Contrast
Did you know you can be stingy if you're only buying things for someone to prove you aren't stingy? This is a perfect example of righteousness without a changed heart. I recently ruined my largesse by erupting in a point of insecurity, "But, I bought you this and this and this!" Old generational lifestyles and habits die HARD. Who knew my dad's miserliness to the point of social death would carry on in me and be a thorn in my own flesh?! Be a challenge in my interpersonal relationships as an adult? On the one hand, it is admirable to save and be mindful of expenses, not to be wasteful or frivolous. But on the other, it is sad to realize my own fixation on the symbolic value of money in relationships. That is a downside to being one who speaks in the gifts love language. Thanks, Dad! Well, the positive to come out of this is not being broke, and also being inclined to think up good, practical gift ideas. To every point of fallenness, God has provided the redeemed side of it, too. Ah, the beauty of contrast.
Prayer: God, save me from my fix-it mentality, as if I can force myself into un-stinginess! Even my best efforts at generosity carry that shadow of that same old stinginess. I can't fake new life; only You can put it there!
Prayer: God, save me from my fix-it mentality, as if I can force myself into un-stinginess! Even my best efforts at generosity carry that shadow of that same old stinginess. I can't fake new life; only You can put it there!
Mixed Use, City Blocks, Old Buildings, and Population Density
Chapter 8
Here, Jane repeats her main thesis: that a city spot will thrive (safety-wise, economically, in vibrancy) if a diversity of people use it at a diversity of times. As such, I was able to skim much of it. The only fresh thing is her vantage point: she is fighting for primary use buildings as essential in remedying the unbalance of users in an area, as this is the root of city decay. Precepts of orthodox planning and one of its approaches to revitalization, the clean-it-up approach, is nothing but an expensive quick fix, in Jane's eyes, because they do not emphasize or prioritize the primary use. Furthermore, often the places city planners choose to clean up are already thriving off of the principles of mixed use.
A second myth Jane dispels is that nice-looking, well-kept residences are the cause of vitality in an area; rather, the truth is that houses start to be taken care of and get face lifts after the district has found its balance of users. Nice houses are a sign that vitality has already taken place. Say a new museum has brought visitors to an area on weekends and in afternoons, whereas it was previously dead then. That primary use building becomes a "chessman," because it converts pawns to queens (167)! (Wow, what a fabulous analogy: creative, memorable, but still belonging in academic text.)
Jane's word use usually gets my imagination flowing, with the exception of her loose use of "economic." She states that mixing people together on a sidewalk or other public area will breed "economic mutual support"(164), but doesn't specify how. I guess I will have to ask T., who wrote an article in the Boom Jackson magazine about converting an old broken-down factory into a mixed-use building (i.e., like an urban version of a mini-mall, putting the suburban version, strip malls, to shame). I guess it feeds economics because peoples' pathways are easily distracted. That is, I meant to just grab lunch with my friend Gladys, but the bookstore across the plaza had a book display that brought me in, which was perfect for a gift I had to buy anyway. Bada-bing, bada-boom. That mixed-use building doubled their profits on me.
Chapter 9
In this chapter, about the need for small blocks, Jane uses picture diagrams for the first time. Up till now, she has been relying on words to describe spatial things. She offers a way to create diversity in public spaces other than primary use buildings: create center use areas by bisecting long city-blocks with extra streets. This gives city walkers alternate routes to choose from, instead of the same monotonous, self-isolating, long streets that only pool at the end where there is a central point of use (i.e., a subway station). Jane cites the Rockefeller Plaza's extra north-south street as a perfect example of this (how cool that would have been to reference in my St. Patrick's Cathedral section of my undergrad thesis!).
Diversity grows flexibly, and so perhaps for this very reason, short city blocks must be simply committed to in faith in the city planning stage; they may seem wasteful, especially to the orthodox planner, but their payoff is the end of safety and vitality that is achieved wherever diversity is nurtured.
How surprising it is to me, with my own small background in urban studies, that open space is actually pathogenic to city life. Central Park, I suppose, is an exception. I'd be interested to hear Jane's view on why it is successful.
Reading about city blocks, superblocks, sidewalk use...it all makes me incredibly nostalgic for New York. My time there is no vague, watercolor-washed memory, but is rather as crisp as the apple cider and donuts that farmers brought into the city ever Sunday and Thursday. Ah! New York! If only I had enjoyed and appreciated you more while I had you. I think I did enjoy you to the max, but I also think two years was too brief. I wonder, wonder how Atlanta will stack up, or contrast. Now I have a language and a logic to employ as I actively indwell it.
Chapter 10
Ah! the chapter that gives aged buildings the glory they deserve! I am partial to older city buildings because my church and my physics and foreign language (heck, all my) classes were in old, old buildings. Unlike the way buildings age in smaller towns, city aging has a very magnetic quality to it. Maybe it's just that mildew isn't such a foe in NYC as it is here in Jackson. Mildew will quickly remove any magnetic quality!
Perhaps to prevent compromising Jane's once-again brilliant thinking, I will stick with one excerpt that says it all:
"Newness, and its superficial gloss of well-being, is a very perishable commodity" (193) <---speaks to the fact that building tons of commercial stores at once is a recipe for misuse and disuse of area. Business owners who rent cannot keep up with high renting costs of new buildings. The city-making recipe of newness cuts out those often-ordinary enterprises that cannot make it there, economically (such as "unformalized feeders of the arts - studios, galleries," music supply stores, book stores). Think about it: "large swatches" of new construction lack DIVERSITY. They are inefficient. That being said, new buildings are also needed to avoid stagnation of use and users. What Jane cautions against is the conversion of large swatches of land and buildings. Variety needs to be left intact, for the mingling of old and new, she argues, is the incubator of diversity, new primary use buildings, and truly new city life- not in the form of cheap big-box plastered walls, but in the form of "ingenious adaptations" as store-owners adjust the old uses of old buildings to new ones.
Chapter 11
I just realized the ironic lack of diversity in my writing here. I am, with my writing and summaries, doing the very thing Jane hates: routinizing. Using large swatches of predictable text, or rather, forcing you, my reader (are you out there?) down long, monotonous city-streets with no alternate routes. Maybe I can use this project of mine (reading then writing a response, so I read better and remember this book more) as an opportunity to do what I need to do as a writer: write more concisely. Conciseness can persuade, spark, educate and attract a reader far better than deep detail can. It's a quality of writing I most want to master. After all, some sociologists (such as Georg Simmel) made it into the history books simply because of their ability to publish short volumes on social phenomena. That attracted a far larger audience!
I will give myself a 100-word limit:
Jane argues that the presupposed "correlations between high densities [of people] and trouble ... is simply incorrect," but that dense city populations are rather an asset. To offset the standardization that occurs if a population is too dense or overcrowded, the solution is to cover as much ground as possible with residences. Jane tampers remedy this with a reminder of the previous three diversity-generators: widespread dwellings must also be mixed in with non-residential buildings (mixed use around a primary building), and short streets are needed to avoid endless rows of housing.
With all this in mind, the reader wonders as to how suburbs, with their un-dense, un-overcrowded, far-from hitting the "in-between density" spot, flourish. I've understood for the first time how monotony in stores (building use) can generate a population equally monotonous. Jane is making me all the more skeptical of the suburbs as a healthy living arrangement or option.
That was more than 100 words, and it was an explication (reader's interpretation of text). Maybe next time I will try to use the 4-sentence precis (author-centered summary) formula. That's sure to stretch me lingually!
Here, Jane repeats her main thesis: that a city spot will thrive (safety-wise, economically, in vibrancy) if a diversity of people use it at a diversity of times. As such, I was able to skim much of it. The only fresh thing is her vantage point: she is fighting for primary use buildings as essential in remedying the unbalance of users in an area, as this is the root of city decay. Precepts of orthodox planning and one of its approaches to revitalization, the clean-it-up approach, is nothing but an expensive quick fix, in Jane's eyes, because they do not emphasize or prioritize the primary use. Furthermore, often the places city planners choose to clean up are already thriving off of the principles of mixed use.
A second myth Jane dispels is that nice-looking, well-kept residences are the cause of vitality in an area; rather, the truth is that houses start to be taken care of and get face lifts after the district has found its balance of users. Nice houses are a sign that vitality has already taken place. Say a new museum has brought visitors to an area on weekends and in afternoons, whereas it was previously dead then. That primary use building becomes a "chessman," because it converts pawns to queens (167)! (Wow, what a fabulous analogy: creative, memorable, but still belonging in academic text.)
Jane's word use usually gets my imagination flowing, with the exception of her loose use of "economic." She states that mixing people together on a sidewalk or other public area will breed "economic mutual support"(164), but doesn't specify how. I guess I will have to ask T., who wrote an article in the Boom Jackson magazine about converting an old broken-down factory into a mixed-use building (i.e., like an urban version of a mini-mall, putting the suburban version, strip malls, to shame). I guess it feeds economics because peoples' pathways are easily distracted. That is, I meant to just grab lunch with my friend Gladys, but the bookstore across the plaza had a book display that brought me in, which was perfect for a gift I had to buy anyway. Bada-bing, bada-boom. That mixed-use building doubled their profits on me.
Chapter 9
In this chapter, about the need for small blocks, Jane uses picture diagrams for the first time. Up till now, she has been relying on words to describe spatial things. She offers a way to create diversity in public spaces other than primary use buildings: create center use areas by bisecting long city-blocks with extra streets. This gives city walkers alternate routes to choose from, instead of the same monotonous, self-isolating, long streets that only pool at the end where there is a central point of use (i.e., a subway station). Jane cites the Rockefeller Plaza's extra north-south street as a perfect example of this (how cool that would have been to reference in my St. Patrick's Cathedral section of my undergrad thesis!).
Diversity grows flexibly, and so perhaps for this very reason, short city blocks must be simply committed to in faith in the city planning stage; they may seem wasteful, especially to the orthodox planner, but their payoff is the end of safety and vitality that is achieved wherever diversity is nurtured.
How surprising it is to me, with my own small background in urban studies, that open space is actually pathogenic to city life. Central Park, I suppose, is an exception. I'd be interested to hear Jane's view on why it is successful.
Reading about city blocks, superblocks, sidewalk use...it all makes me incredibly nostalgic for New York. My time there is no vague, watercolor-washed memory, but is rather as crisp as the apple cider and donuts that farmers brought into the city ever Sunday and Thursday. Ah! New York! If only I had enjoyed and appreciated you more while I had you. I think I did enjoy you to the max, but I also think two years was too brief. I wonder, wonder how Atlanta will stack up, or contrast. Now I have a language and a logic to employ as I actively indwell it.
Chapter 10
Ah! the chapter that gives aged buildings the glory they deserve! I am partial to older city buildings because my church and my physics and foreign language (heck, all my) classes were in old, old buildings. Unlike the way buildings age in smaller towns, city aging has a very magnetic quality to it. Maybe it's just that mildew isn't such a foe in NYC as it is here in Jackson. Mildew will quickly remove any magnetic quality!
Perhaps to prevent compromising Jane's once-again brilliant thinking, I will stick with one excerpt that says it all:
"Newness, and its superficial gloss of well-being, is a very perishable commodity" (193) <---speaks to the fact that building tons of commercial stores at once is a recipe for misuse and disuse of area. Business owners who rent cannot keep up with high renting costs of new buildings. The city-making recipe of newness cuts out those often-ordinary enterprises that cannot make it there, economically (such as "unformalized feeders of the arts - studios, galleries," music supply stores, book stores). Think about it: "large swatches" of new construction lack DIVERSITY. They are inefficient. That being said, new buildings are also needed to avoid stagnation of use and users. What Jane cautions against is the conversion of large swatches of land and buildings. Variety needs to be left intact, for the mingling of old and new, she argues, is the incubator of diversity, new primary use buildings, and truly new city life- not in the form of cheap big-box plastered walls, but in the form of "ingenious adaptations" as store-owners adjust the old uses of old buildings to new ones.
Chapter 11
I just realized the ironic lack of diversity in my writing here. I am, with my writing and summaries, doing the very thing Jane hates: routinizing. Using large swatches of predictable text, or rather, forcing you, my reader (are you out there?) down long, monotonous city-streets with no alternate routes. Maybe I can use this project of mine (reading then writing a response, so I read better and remember this book more) as an opportunity to do what I need to do as a writer: write more concisely. Conciseness can persuade, spark, educate and attract a reader far better than deep detail can. It's a quality of writing I most want to master. After all, some sociologists (such as Georg Simmel) made it into the history books simply because of their ability to publish short volumes on social phenomena. That attracted a far larger audience!
I will give myself a 100-word limit:
Jane argues that the presupposed "correlations between high densities [of people] and trouble ... is simply incorrect," but that dense city populations are rather an asset. To offset the standardization that occurs if a population is too dense or overcrowded, the solution is to cover as much ground as possible with residences. Jane tampers remedy this with a reminder of the previous three diversity-generators: widespread dwellings must also be mixed in with non-residential buildings (mixed use around a primary building), and short streets are needed to avoid endless rows of housing.
With all this in mind, the reader wonders as to how suburbs, with their un-dense, un-overcrowded, far-from hitting the "in-between density" spot, flourish. I've understood for the first time how monotony in stores (building use) can generate a population equally monotonous. Jane is making me all the more skeptical of the suburbs as a healthy living arrangement or option.
That was more than 100 words, and it was an explication (reader's interpretation of text). Maybe next time I will try to use the 4-sentence precis (author-centered summary) formula. That's sure to stretch me lingually!
Friday, August 5, 2011
Diversity: Natural after all?
Chapter 7: the generators of diversity
I am not sure I'm quickly sold on Jane's intro: "Diversity is natural to big cities" (143). Only six pages later she points out how the Bronx itself is the perfect example that just because a population is large and urban, doesn't guarantee its diversity; rather, this borough of NYC proves to be much more homogeneous in its loyal residents, resulting in a lack of economic choice and "urban vitality" (one of Jane's several vague phrases that she gets away with just cause she's so cool--maybe that's the difference between academic and theoretical sociology...not that the latter is any less academic, but the prose is so relaxed it just seems too fun to be legitimately academic). I'd like to add that diversity seems like the very last thing to be natural. I remember how the college I attended my freshman year, DU, tried (unsuccessfully) to "enforce" diversity by holding fishbowl discussions, where the facilitators aimed at raising consciousness about race and getting more voices flowing on the topic. Well, let's just say that that goal was a programmatic impossibility with a campus that seemed to have about 95% white students. So in that case, diversity was fought for and yearned for, but alas, couldn't be magically evoked.
I think Jane's point in this short chapter is to argue that diversity and choice in a city setting aren't accidental things, nor do they promote chaos. Rather, diversity must be cultivated, and it will sustain the city's vitality. She supplies for conditions for generating the big D: 1- the outdoors must support people with different schedules and uses. 2-blocks ought to be short as much as possible. 3-building quality and condition must be mingled. 4- people should never occupy one space too densely, for any reason. It turns out diversity won't be easy to come by by her standards, as all four must be present and work in combination to bring out a city's potentialities.
I am not sure I'm quickly sold on Jane's intro: "Diversity is natural to big cities" (143). Only six pages later she points out how the Bronx itself is the perfect example that just because a population is large and urban, doesn't guarantee its diversity; rather, this borough of NYC proves to be much more homogeneous in its loyal residents, resulting in a lack of economic choice and "urban vitality" (one of Jane's several vague phrases that she gets away with just cause she's so cool--maybe that's the difference between academic and theoretical sociology...not that the latter is any less academic, but the prose is so relaxed it just seems too fun to be legitimately academic). I'd like to add that diversity seems like the very last thing to be natural. I remember how the college I attended my freshman year, DU, tried (unsuccessfully) to "enforce" diversity by holding fishbowl discussions, where the facilitators aimed at raising consciousness about race and getting more voices flowing on the topic. Well, let's just say that that goal was a programmatic impossibility with a campus that seemed to have about 95% white students. So in that case, diversity was fought for and yearned for, but alas, couldn't be magically evoked.
I think Jane's point in this short chapter is to argue that diversity and choice in a city setting aren't accidental things, nor do they promote chaos. Rather, diversity must be cultivated, and it will sustain the city's vitality. She supplies for conditions for generating the big D: 1- the outdoors must support people with different schedules and uses. 2-blocks ought to be short as much as possible. 3-building quality and condition must be mingled. 4- people should never occupy one space too densely, for any reason. It turns out diversity won't be easy to come by by her standards, as all four must be present and work in combination to bring out a city's potentialities.
Neighborhoods: Sentimentality or Necessity?
Today I dive into chapter 6.
I agree with Jane, “neighborhood” has picked up a saccharine connotation. It is a sentimental thing. I remember one of my Columbia
One thing really struck me while reading Jane’s insights on what makes neighborhoods succeed or fail: how very similar neighborhoods operate to human male-female relationships. Before you dismiss me as crazy, consider these excerpts: “A successful city neighborhood is a place that keeps sufficiently abreast of its problems so it is not destroyed by them. An unsuccessful neighborhood is a place that is overwhelmed by its defects and problems and is progressively more helpless before them.” “Cities, like anything else, succeed only by making the most of their assets.” “In bad neighborhoods, schools are brought to ruination, physically and socially; while successful neighborhoods improve their schools by fighting for them.”
Now, of course, that last phrase – by fighting for them – reminds me immediately of T. asking me in all seriousness back when we first started dating, “Have you ever fought for someone?” He surmised that I never had. Perhaps he is right. So, like someone who really loves someone else, a good neighborhood fights for its stability and perseverance. This again speaks to the reality and applicability of our good chemistry concept, entropy, to urban studies.
Let me carry the analogy further. Jane states that a city neighborhood cannot prosper if it is inwardly-turned, aims for a town-like coziness, or wants to be in any way self-contained. No – only a neighborhood with mobility and fluidity of use – only a relationship with the openness and freedom created by trust – can make it in a city.
Jane goes on to make a three-legged typology of useful city neighborhood types, varying in size. She emphasizes that city streets need to be in a network with larger city districts (“hop-and-skip” people accomplish this, for they know unlikely people, and thus act as gluing agents to tie neighborhoods into networks). Also Jane emphasizes that district neighborhoods are a necessity, as they stream resources and empowerment to the small city-street neighborhood. Obviously, for Jane, “neighborhood” can take both abstract and literal forms. I can jive with this kind of thinking! Typologies are a clear way to break down huge concepts, when writing and explaining a social phenomenon (what could be more cumbersome?).
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Jane Jacobs on City Parks
OK, here's the goal: one chapter from urban sociologist/anthropologist Jane Jacob's "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" per day, for the next...17 days. Today I read chapter 5, "The Uses of Neighborhood Parks." I said it in an earlier post, but I will say it here again: what amazes me about Jacobs is that she can talk about sidewalks for about 50 pages, and still not exhaust the topic, or bore the reader to death. Now that, my friends, is a sign of genius. She has to be one of the best observers I've ever known. ("Known" used in a very presumptuous way; obviously I never met or "knew" this woman, who died at 90 years of age 5 years ago.)
So here's what Jacobs (can I call her Jane, since this isn't a term paper?) made me think about, with regard to city parks:
1. She's right. City parks usually become nothing more than dispirited vacuums, rather than anchors of social stability. The assumption among city planners is that parks will embue a neighborhood with positive effects, when rather, they actually more often than not become both producers of and hosts of negative urban effects (i.e., housing hoards of indigent men and perverts who just catcall all day long--this I remember distinctly happening during me and T's trip to downtown Denver's park this past March). This is a reminder of a lesson learned in chemistry in 11th grade, which applies here: the concept of entropy. Things tend towards disorder and chaos, unless massive amounts of energy are invested to push against disorder and decay. In the same way, for a park to become an economic asset or have "staying power" over the decades in a city block, requires lots of work on the city dwellers' part. Well, actually, the city planners need to be more careful, too: if the location of the park doesn't have a natural diversity of users and their schedules (that is, if the park isn't surrounded my mixed-used buildings), it is bound for disaster.
2. Hmm. Jane noticed that a tenament stoop invited more diverse, lively and safe company than a nearby park did. She noted that the people all convened there, by choice, being of all ages and balanced in gender, not due to any amenity a park would offer (i.e., open space, playground), but because they all found it to be an agreeable place to share leisure, and enjoy each other and the passing city (p. 94). What is the magic thing that makes some certain place an agreed-upon hang out place? Convenience and high traffic on everday errand paths? That is, requiring no extra effort to go there?
3. Jane notes that some parks, no sane mother would send her children into. This reminds me of the park where mom would frequently send me to ride my bike when I was 8 or 9, across the street from her apartment in a decidedly urban area in metro Denver. What was it about that park that made it OK in a mother's eyes? There were hints of vandalism, and a bit more open space than was probably helpful there (I remember Andrew commenting on bums spending the night there), but also, I do think it got a fair amount of use and play. I also wonder how that park is doing nowadays; did it prove to have staying power? Also, thanks, mom, for letting me go there and explore on my own. That I count as a very fond childhod memory.
4. I love how Jane mixes urban studies with thinking on class. She notes that blue-collar mothers occupy parks with their kids earlier in the afternoon than white-collar mothers, b/c blue collar husbands get home earlier for supper and this the wives have to go and get cracking on the cooking. She also postulates that the class of neighborhood or class of park frequenters doesn't matter for the success of the park; rich and poor alike like their parks (and perhaps for the same reasons). I want to think things through and piece puzzle pieces together to the same degree as Jane does!
5. Why do city parks have closing times posted?
6. This is for you, Thomas and Cathy: "Superficial architectural variety may look like diversity, but only a genuine content of economic and social diversity, resulting in people with different schedules, has meaning to the park and the power to confer the boon of life upon it" (p. 101). Does that make your craft seem powerless, being entirely dependent on its surroundings? Or, from a more optimistic approach, is the task of architecture to harness the powers of the city toward good?
7. Jane names 4 elements of design that abet generalized patronage/usage by city dwellers: intricacy, centering, sun and enclosure. Basically, the first allows for users to never get tired of a complex layout; the second allows for creative uses of a central public space (oh! this was SO the case in NYC's Riverside Park, which hosted a long free concert series every summer on its largest pier...78th street? I totally can't remember). The 3rd and 4th elements are obvious. People and plants like sun; people also like and thrive within felt boundaries (ever hear about that study someone did that found that kids set on a playground with a fence around it utilized a lot more ground than kids set on a playground with no fence around it?).
8. Shout-out to my dog, Columbia. She got mentioned in this chapter as a university that put two-and-two together and used its drama department to put on musical shows and plays in the long-shunned, crime-, bum-, forty-bottle- and streaker-ridden Morningside Park. These activities became "demand goods," and caused the park (which is like a no-man's land separating prestine Upper-West Side from more colorfuul Harlem below) to evolve into a peace-maker between university and neighborhood, rather than as hostile "Turf." I wonder if Yale has fared so well in its New Haven surroundings?
So here's what Jacobs (can I call her Jane, since this isn't a term paper?) made me think about, with regard to city parks:
1. She's right. City parks usually become nothing more than dispirited vacuums, rather than anchors of social stability. The assumption among city planners is that parks will embue a neighborhood with positive effects, when rather, they actually more often than not become both producers of and hosts of negative urban effects (i.e., housing hoards of indigent men and perverts who just catcall all day long--this I remember distinctly happening during me and T's trip to downtown Denver's park this past March). This is a reminder of a lesson learned in chemistry in 11th grade, which applies here: the concept of entropy. Things tend towards disorder and chaos, unless massive amounts of energy are invested to push against disorder and decay. In the same way, for a park to become an economic asset or have "staying power" over the decades in a city block, requires lots of work on the city dwellers' part. Well, actually, the city planners need to be more careful, too: if the location of the park doesn't have a natural diversity of users and their schedules (that is, if the park isn't surrounded my mixed-used buildings), it is bound for disaster.
2. Hmm. Jane noticed that a tenament stoop invited more diverse, lively and safe company than a nearby park did. She noted that the people all convened there, by choice, being of all ages and balanced in gender, not due to any amenity a park would offer (i.e., open space, playground), but because they all found it to be an agreeable place to share leisure, and enjoy each other and the passing city (p. 94). What is the magic thing that makes some certain place an agreed-upon hang out place? Convenience and high traffic on everday errand paths? That is, requiring no extra effort to go there?
3. Jane notes that some parks, no sane mother would send her children into. This reminds me of the park where mom would frequently send me to ride my bike when I was 8 or 9, across the street from her apartment in a decidedly urban area in metro Denver. What was it about that park that made it OK in a mother's eyes? There were hints of vandalism, and a bit more open space than was probably helpful there (I remember Andrew commenting on bums spending the night there), but also, I do think it got a fair amount of use and play. I also wonder how that park is doing nowadays; did it prove to have staying power? Also, thanks, mom, for letting me go there and explore on my own. That I count as a very fond childhod memory.
4. I love how Jane mixes urban studies with thinking on class. She notes that blue-collar mothers occupy parks with their kids earlier in the afternoon than white-collar mothers, b/c blue collar husbands get home earlier for supper and this the wives have to go and get cracking on the cooking. She also postulates that the class of neighborhood or class of park frequenters doesn't matter for the success of the park; rich and poor alike like their parks (and perhaps for the same reasons). I want to think things through and piece puzzle pieces together to the same degree as Jane does!
5. Why do city parks have closing times posted?
6. This is for you, Thomas and Cathy: "Superficial architectural variety may look like diversity, but only a genuine content of economic and social diversity, resulting in people with different schedules, has meaning to the park and the power to confer the boon of life upon it" (p. 101). Does that make your craft seem powerless, being entirely dependent on its surroundings? Or, from a more optimistic approach, is the task of architecture to harness the powers of the city toward good?
7. Jane names 4 elements of design that abet generalized patronage/usage by city dwellers: intricacy, centering, sun and enclosure. Basically, the first allows for users to never get tired of a complex layout; the second allows for creative uses of a central public space (oh! this was SO the case in NYC's Riverside Park, which hosted a long free concert series every summer on its largest pier...78th street? I totally can't remember). The 3rd and 4th elements are obvious. People and plants like sun; people also like and thrive within felt boundaries (ever hear about that study someone did that found that kids set on a playground with a fence around it utilized a lot more ground than kids set on a playground with no fence around it?).
8. Shout-out to my dog, Columbia. She got mentioned in this chapter as a university that put two-and-two together and used its drama department to put on musical shows and plays in the long-shunned, crime-, bum-, forty-bottle- and streaker-ridden Morningside Park. These activities became "demand goods," and caused the park (which is like a no-man's land separating prestine Upper-West Side from more colorfuul Harlem below) to evolve into a peace-maker between university and neighborhood, rather than as hostile "Turf." I wonder if Yale has fared so well in its New Haven surroundings?
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Cosmic Poise
I stole this phrase from Tim Keller. I don't usually listen to him, but lately I have because he speaks generously on the topic of singleness vs. marriage, which is something I enjoy thinking about. He brings up very fresh points and insights on scriptures that I'd never thought of or considered before. He's a great practical preacher of the Word - my favorite kind. Keller used the phrase "cosmic poise" to refer to that quality of unshakability God gives us, when we realize we can have courage and not be afraid under any circumstance our lives bring us. As I begin a new phase of life on new ground, literally new ground in a new city with a new vocation, may my spiritual footings and attitudinal posture remain in Christ. He's my one steady, the one constant in my life who sustains me. Really, pressing into Him will be the answer for any transition I undergo until the day I part with this life.
I think it's curious how I both simultaneously cling to things of this world - the physical blessings of this present earthly life -- and also long to be departed from its worries and seemingly endless burdens, disappointments, fears, etc. It's like CS Lewis said: if I find in myself a longing which nothing here can satisfy, all I can conclude is that this place (earth) is not my home.
So far in my life, I've negotiated as a nomad. I definitely get by on the generosities of others. It's a painful thing to realize, that I'm no self-made woman. I knew that before, but I don't think I ever dared to understand the depth of that truth, previously. When it comes to spending money, I'm ridiculously cheap. Good thing I can still have poise in Christ, after coming face-to-face with some of my ugliest traits. He gives me the ability to correct bad postures, after making me aware of them.
I think it's curious how I both simultaneously cling to things of this world - the physical blessings of this present earthly life -- and also long to be departed from its worries and seemingly endless burdens, disappointments, fears, etc. It's like CS Lewis said: if I find in myself a longing which nothing here can satisfy, all I can conclude is that this place (earth) is not my home.
So far in my life, I've negotiated as a nomad. I definitely get by on the generosities of others. It's a painful thing to realize, that I'm no self-made woman. I knew that before, but I don't think I ever dared to understand the depth of that truth, previously. When it comes to spending money, I'm ridiculously cheap. Good thing I can still have poise in Christ, after coming face-to-face with some of my ugliest traits. He gives me the ability to correct bad postures, after making me aware of them.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)