Healing the City
Restoring health to the roots of a city so it can be taken off life support and live again begins with small, local measures. Some work is done at the scale of the neighborhood, other work at the scale of the block, the building cluster, and the individual piece of property. Many of the measures below start in one of the roots, but bring health to other roots, creating a strong web of virtuous cycles. Here’s how it works:
Living Traditions
The operating systems of living cities are living traditions. A tradition is something we do repeatedly because we love to do it, and humans are really good at traditions, keeping some of them alive for centuries or even millennia. A dead tradition is something you do repeatedly because someone else told you to. A living tradition is something you do repeatedly because you know why you’re doing it, and want to keep it up. “We do this because…”
In other words, a living tradition can’t be administered or enforced by someone else; it’s what we do, not what they make us do. Taking a city off life support requires that we all change, not just that someone somewhere else changes the gizmos they’re selling us. The following are some of the changes we’ll want to make with our neighbors on our block or in our neighborhood or on our own lots, once we realize why we should be making them:
Earth
Nature is an immense soil-making machine in all but the hottest or coldest parts of the planet. Making more clean, healthy topsoil isn’t rocket science. Instead, it’s a mostly a matter of stopping the harmful things we’re doing to our topsoil and doing just a few other things to help nature do its job.
Grow Things to Eat
Why should your yard lay fallow while you spend more of your money at the grocery store? The food that is most enjoyable and healthiest for you is usually the food you raise yourself or that is raised nearby. The ultimate goal of changing soil in the city is to make it so healthy that we’ll want to eat the food that’s grown in it.
Who can do this? You can.
What does it cost? The biggest cost is your time spent in the garden. Seeds are inexpensive if you buy them, or free if you save them from last year’s crop. Compost is free or nearly free if you use your own kitchen scraps and garden trimmings.
Who can help? You can. If you don’t have a green thumb and don’t want to grow one, you can support your local neighborhood gardeners by buying their produce.
Cleanse
Not all soil in the city is contaminated, but if your soil is, there are now a number of remediation measures short of hauling the soil away that we can use to remove the contamination.
Who can do this? You can hire someone to do this, but you'll need to check first with the city Health Department or Environmental Services department to see if they require a permit for the work.
What does it cost? That varies, according to what the contaminants are in your soil.
Who can help? Check with your local agricultural extension office.
Compost
The best way to transform poor soil into healthy soil is with compost, which begins with both green clippings such as leaves and grass, and food scraps. Your neighborhood should have a central compost station using green clippings from parks, streets, and other public areas plus food scraps from neighborhood restaurants. If you live in a house cluster like a bungalow court, cottage court, or apartment building, you and your neighbors should compost together. Composting on your own lot is easy. And regardless of the scale, composting green clippings keeps them out of the storm sewers, lakes, streams and rivers where they cause algae growth and aquatic weeds, and composting food scraps keeps them out of landfills, where they not only take up space, but release climate change gases.
Who can do this? You can, on your lot. For cluster-sized or neighborhood-sized composting, you and your neighbors may want to go together and hire a landscape company to do it.
What does it cost? A good pair of compost drums can cost as little as $100 or less. After you buy the drums, there is no cost except for your time.
Who can help? There are a number of composting resource organizations, but you may not need them. Composting is really simple: use roughly half kitchen scraps and half garden clippings. Add to one drum regularly; turn both drums every time you add to the new drum. Once the new drum is full, empty the old drum into your garden and the emptied drum becomes your new drum. That’s pretty much it.
Start a Community Garden
Some people want to raise just a little food; a community garden is ideal for them. In a community garden, everyone is allotted a plot of garden space, and they share a fence to keep four-legged critters out, a tool shed, irrigation water, and sometimes tools. Community gardens can be started on a vacant lot or two, and can be moved elsewhere in the neighborhood later on.
Who can do this? Your neighborhood. You or one of your neighbors who likes to garden will need to organize the garden.
Who can do this? You need to do this with your neighborhood.
What does it cost? Your neighborhood will need to find vacant lots or other vacant land where you can establish the community garden.
Who can help?
Build a Neighborhood Farmers Market
Not everyone wants to raise their own food, but every neighborhood needs a farmers market where those in the neighborhood who raise more than they can eat can sell it, and where farmers from the surrounding countryside can sell their produce as well. Farmers markets are very simple and can even be built for free if you and your neighbors use salvaged materials like shipping palettes.
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Wind & Fire
Make A Living Where You're Living
One of the two most important things you can do to burn less gas is to live near your work so you can walk or bike instead of driving.
Get Outdoors
The other most important thing you can do is to spend more time outdoors. When you do, you get acclimated to the local environment which means that when you return indoors, you might be able to throw the windows open rather than turning on the air conditioner on all but the most extreme days of the year. There is no equipment so efficient as that which is turned off.
Plant Street Trees
It’s much more comfortable and enticing to get outdoors and walk to work or to the store if you’re walking under a canopy of street trees. The tree canopy not only shades you from the sun, but the trees themselves transpire, which means that they emit moisture into the air, keeping you even cooler. They also clean stale air, replenishing it with oxygen. Trees are also more interesting than just a barren sidewalk, and street trees on your street (especially if one is in front of your house) raise the value of your house.
Re-Roof Light
If your roof is wearing out, be sure to replace it with a light-colored roof. Metal roofing is great in many places, and reflects over 90% of the sun’s heat back up to the sky, saving you hundreds or possibly even thousands of dollars every year in cooling costs. Even if your roof is new, a coat of white paint has a similar effect.
Water
Dig a Neighborhood Rain Pond
Every neighborhood has a low point. That’s usually a good place for a neighborhood park with a rain pond. Currently, stormwater management engineers would build a retention basin there and put a chain link fence around it; don’t let them do it because those things are hideous and fill up with junk washed in during a storm. Let it be a pond that holds water instead, and which people can enjoy. It does the very same jobs the engineers were looking for of slowing runoff and recharging groundwater, but it does those jobs beautifully.
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Plant a Block Rain Garden
Every block has a low point as well; often, it’s somewhere along the street, as builders try to make each lot slope to the street. The swale between the sidewalk and the curb is a great spot for a rain garden, which is planted with thirsty plants that slurp up rainwater quickly and also help recharge groundwater.
Who can do this? I can, or I and the neighbors on my block can.
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Build a Rain Pool
If your site is flat, build it at the low point of the site. A small pump can be used to pump it up to a storage tank where it can gravity-flow to water your garden. If your site is large or if you own a pair of houses and rent one, with a garden in the middle (the smallest type of house cluster) you may need rain troughs to carry the water to the pool. The Spanish have built rain troughs for centuries. Those at the Alhambra are gorgeous but expensive, but you can build them really inexpensively as well.
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Build a Cistern
Rainwater captured from your rooftop is usually cleaner than that captured from the ground, especially if you have a cleaner roofing type like metal. If you store the water in a cistern and filter it in some way, you may even be able to drink it. At the very least, you can use it for flushing toilets.
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Catch Rainwater in a Barrel
If you can’t build a cistern for some reason, you can still catch water in a rain barrel. Rain barrels are normally used for watering gardens, and they’re really simple to use. They come with a faucet at the bottom; just attach a hose and open the faucet when you want to water the garden.
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Get a Water Filter
Plastic bottles and styrofoam cups are a great waste of oil and huge polluters of land and sea. Every home and every workplace should have a water filter so you can use a glass or ceramic drinking vessel and wash it afterwards instead of throwing it away. In the words of author Bill McDonough, “there is no ‘away’.” Everything goes somewhere.
Who can do this? You can.
What does it cost? Filters like this cost as little as $9.95.
Food
Start a Single-Crew Restaurant
Single-crew workplaces are game-changers for many types of neighborhood businesses, but the first ones they benefit are those that serve or sell food. A single-crew restaurant has one cook and one server, and they only require 200-300 square feet, so they’re incredibly inexpensive to set up. Some of the coolest restaurants and sandwich shops on earth are single-crew workplaces. And a single-crew restaurant is the beginning of the end of a food desert. This is the kitchen of Mike & Patty’s, the best sandwich shop in Boston. Mike serves and Patty cooks. They only have eight seats, and a line that’s always out the door.
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Open a Single-Crew Grocery
A single-crew grocery is run by one grocer. It can be less than 500 square feet, so the grocer only stocks basic commodities. No, you can’t choose from 30 types of hot sauce, as there’s likely only Tabasco, but it makes all the difference between being able to walk to the grocery and being forced to get in the car and drive. And when you can walk, it’s easy to buy a meal or two at a time instead of stocking up for a week, so your food is always fresher. This family-owned 16 x 30 foot grocery in South Carolina kepts its neighborhood from being a food desert since 1920.
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Establish a Single-Crew Coffee Shop
A single-crew coffee shop is run by one barista. It can be tiny; a hundred square feet might be more than you need if you have some seating outdoors under a canopy or awning.
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Set Up a Single-Crew Third Place
A “third place” gets its name from the idea that it’s the third most likely place for you to spend your time, with the first being home and second being work. Like the tag-line of Cheers, it “the place where everybody knows your name.” It can be a bar, where the crew is one bartender, or a coffee shop with one barista, or maybe double as a coffee shop by day and a bar by evening. Or it can also be a sandwich shop with one cook and one server, like the restaurant. But whatever kind of food or drink is served, it needs to have indoor seating and wifi so people can come and stay awhile, and maybe work while they’re there. Still, you can do a good third place in less than 400 square feet. This one is 14 feet wide and 24 feet deep; they serve coffee in the morning and rum drinks and light meals in the evening, and were turning a profit before anyone moved into the neighborhood because it became known as such a cool place to people living all around the new neighborhood.
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Reserve a Food Truck Lane
Be sure to mark off a parallel parking lane on the inside of the neighborhood square. Many streets built in the past seventy years are so wide that you can have two travel lanes and two parking lanes without widening the street. When you’re expecting a lot of neighbors to show up for a neighborhood get-together of some sort, it’ll probably overwhelm the neighborhood eating and drinking establishments, so mark off that lane around the square a few hours early and bring in the food trucks so everyone has something to eat.
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Consider Neighborhood Bee Hives
Honeybees have been dying off all over the world for several years; nobody knows why. If they all die, fruits and vegetables can’t grow because they won’t get pollinated. One out of every three bites you take is a direct result of a plant that gets pollinated by bees, and most of those bites are of some of the healthier foods we eat, so life on earth would be very different without them. Few people would consider being bee-keepers, but maybe there’s at least one in each neighborhood?
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People
Build a Neighborhood Square
Every neighborhood needs a place to gather, otherwise how can we get together and decide things, celebrate things, or help each other out? A neighborhood square can be really small like the one shown here; a vacant lot or two will do. If they’re already vacant, they’re likely not worth so much that the neighbors can’t pool their resources and buy them. Houses surrounding the square can then be converted into neighborhood services and shops like the single-crew workplaces above.
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Improve Walk Appeal
Walkable places are good, but places with Walk Appeal are better. Do we want a meal that is merely edible? No, we want something delicious. Do we want a show that is merely watchable? No, we want one that’s really interesting. So why would we want places that are merely walkable? High Walk Appeal around a neighborhood business can transform it from being on the brink of failure to thriving. High Walk Appeal protects the environment as noted in Get Outdoors. And high Walk Appeal protects us because the more we walk, the healthier and happier we are, and the longer we live.
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Walk to Work
Studies have shown that walking to work instead of commuting an hour a day does as much good for how you feel as falling in love. In the 20th century when most people worked in factories or for other large employers, this was impossible for most. But the bulk of work is done by much smaller businesses today, and it has never been easier to start your own business. Unfortunately, most neighborhoods have few if any places to work because of conventional single-use city zoning. Work with your city to get a form-based code like the SmartCode that encourages small neighborhood businesses.
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Make a Maker Space
Job training centers are good; maker spaces are much better. In a job training center, you show up and an instructor teaches you a new skill. In a maker space, we all show up and help each other learn how to make things. We all know something about making things, but all of us are smarter together than any of us. A maker space is easy to make; all you need is an old building with water, electricity, and a roof that doesn’t leak. What do we make? That’s up to us, and it’ll be very different things in different places.
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Teach Young People Useful Stuff
Your neighborhood maker space should be one of the first places to open on the neighborhood square; the next should be a place that teaches young people useful skills. Think of it as your “craftsmanship center." A maker space is perfect for people who are a bit more mature, maybe in their mid-20s or older, but a craftsmanship center is ideal for people just out of high school, or maybe who didn’t make it to graduation and who need a bit more structure. The skills they learn there should be useful in the neighborhood. If most of your houses are wood-frame, then woodworking skills are important. If most of your houses are masonry, then you should be training at least some of your craft apprentices to be masons. If there are several restaurants nearby, you may want to teach cooking skills. Have the young people apply to your program; these jobs aren’t subsidies, but rather opportunities to learn crafts that will make the kids a good income. You may need to get funding in the beginning to get your craftsmanship center going, but once it’s fully established, it should be self-funding from the useful work your students are doing.
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Give a Gift to the Street
A Gift to the Street can be something that refreshes people (like a street fountain or sidewalk cafe), shelters people (like an awning, gallery, or arcade), delights people (like a beautiful frontage garden), directs people (like a steeple or tall building that gives people a goal to walk to), entertains people (like an interesting storefront), informs people (like a clock or sundial), helps people remember (like a memorial), or that simply gives them a place to rest (like a bench). If every building gave a gift to the street, that street would be a much more entertaining place to walk. And some gifts are so simple you can do them on a weekend; a gift to the street is a really neighborly thing to do.
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Allow Corner Businesses
American neighborhoods all over once had tiny businesses on almost every corner so you could walk to the corner for a jug of milk, a loaf of bread, a popsicle or soft drink, or a spool of thread. Unfortunately, they were banned beginning in the 1920s with the advent of single-use zoning. Changing to a SmartCode will solve that problem. And the corner store doesn’t replace the house that’s sitting on the lot; it’s merely built in front of it, right up to the sidewalk. The shop-keeper still lives in the house, right behind the shop.
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Open a Single-Crew Beauty Shop & Barber Shop
A single-crew beauty shop has one beautician. A single-crew barber shop has one barber. These businesses have been an important part of bonding American neighborhoods together since early in our country’s history, in part because it’s one of the few places where neighbors gather together and simply visit as they wait for their style or haircut.
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Invite More Neighbors
Many neighborhoods, and especially post-WWII subdivisions, don’t have enough neighbors to support neighborhood businesses. The businesses you can walk to will stand a much better chance of doing well if you have at least 5 homes per acre. At 10 homes per acre, they’re likely to thrive. Where can we put these additional homes? The American construction industry has built mostly houses that are over 2,000 square feet for decades, at a time that the average American household has been shrinking to today’s average of around two people, with many single-person households. These households would be better served with homes that are substantially smaller and therefore less costly to rent or buy, and to heat or cool. Smaller homes can be added to existing neighborhood in a number of attractive and interesting ways that would be impossible for larger homes.
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Build SmartDwellings
Project: SmartDwelling began in the aftermath of the 2008 Meltdown to redesign the American home to satisfy the same resident in half the space by building smaller and smarter. SmartDwellings cost about 60% of the full-size house because they’re more expensive per square foot (because they’re built better), but they cost only 40% of the full-size house to heat and cool because they’re more efficient. The more SmartDwellings you use in an existing neighborhood, the easier it is to fit them in when you invite more neighbors, as noted above.
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