
Temporary cities based entirely on change and ideas, like Burning Man's Black Rock City, are only possible due to the rigidity of standard cities and the isolation residents feel.
What a bummer for Santa Fe Mayor David Coss. He bumps his
speech so that it doesn’t conflict with Barack Obama’s convention acceptance address, only to then run head-long into Sarah “Barracuda” Palin’s bizarre ascendency as dual object of lust/piety among jingoist, provincial conservatives.
Palin’s Wednesday, Sept. 3 speech drew a slightly larger audience and a smidge more bizarre furor than Coss’ did. Yet, while Coss is unlikely to debut as a
anytime soon—and seems an unlikely candidate for bagging wolves from a helicopter with a high-powered rifle—the two politicos share a common story of caring about their communities, becoming city councilors and then mayors.
Coss delivered a significant speech on the condition and situation of the city. It was not, perhaps, a “grand slam” as conservative pundits called Palin’s folksy conservo-porn tirade, but given Coss’ less-than-dynamic delivery, the State of the City address was a solid base hit. Despite some pressing and largely ignored (at least in the speech) city problems, Coss held fast to a rosy outlook. It’s an outlook with real credibility of which Coss legitimately is part.
Trying to imagine recent mayors such as Larry Delgado, Debbie Jaramillo and Sam Pick delivering a comprehensive vision for such issues as affordable housing, environment and river restoration, massive development and construction, public safety, land use, youth opportunities, tourism and quality of life is enough to make me spit orange juice all over the keyboard. Certainly some valuable efforts have been initiated in past administrations (like the Railyard development and park), but it’s not a coincidence that the confluence of elements now infusing Santa Fe with civic and economic energy are doing so during Coss’ regime.
Implied but left unsaid by the mayor, however, is the degree to which the city is resting on a cusp. In the new book,
(Black Dog Publishing, $65), Herbert Wright broadens the 1960s radical, but colonialist, architectural concept of the mobile “instant city” into a history of urban planning and a survey of cities that experience “dramatic change in the wake of their construction or evolution.” Most old-timers are happy to regale crowds with the shocking transformation of Santa Fe since the 1960s (or since the 1940s or the turn of the century) and such claims are accurate from certain perspectives; as much as Santa Fe prides itself on sameness and continuity, it has been a stew of almost constant change. But if evolution is a series of small, ratchetted adjustments, punctuated by big, wrenching swings, as contemporary philosopher Robert Pirsig has argued, Santa Fe appears to be at the edge of a chasm with the rope dangling in front of it.
This month the Railyard—ostensibly the new center of the city—and the convention center—ostensibly the new economic center of the city—both open to the public. The question is: Will these transformative efforts become the status quo, or will the city use these facilities to capitalize on its singular identity?
The book traces cities from the ancient Sumerian settlement of Uruk and the 34 million-strong “Tokyo-Yokohama conurbation” to the virtual realm of
and the super-funded, conceptual cities growing in the United Arab Emirates. In doing so,
Instant Cities
demonstrates cities are, beyond systems of shelter and centers for the exchange of goods, also the primary nexus of ideas, even in the information age.
Thus it is something of a crippling omission for
Instant Cities
to ignore Black Rock City, the instant, week-long city that springs up around the
event in Nevada’s Black Rock desert. With a 2008 population of nearly 50,000 and a full public works department coordinating logistics, traffic, street lights, waste management, law enforcement, medical care, media institutions, etc., it also is a city in which both the sale of goods and the use of corporate branding is outlawed. It is, therefore, a city based almost purely on the exchange of ideas, unlike many cities its size in which ideas have dwindled and goods are the only parlance.
What is disheartening about spending a week in Black Rock City, as I recently did, is that its frenetic level of idea-exchange and community-participation appears to be in direct correlation to the lack of opportunity for such experience in regular towns across America. People respond to the community and electricity of Burning Man to the extent that accessible community and routine wonder fail to manifest in their own hometowns. In other words, it is only possible for Black Rock City to exist because of the more-or-less Victorian restraint of most contemporary cities and the perception that governance and even activism are domains of the elite.
In Santa Fe, often derided for having its head in the clouds, we truly have a wealth of ideas (artistic, scientific and cultural) and a civic leadership newly motivated to promote the exchange of those ideas in equity to goods and services. The mayor’s tally of what is physically and programmatically happening in Santa Fe is genuinely impressive, but it will be the ideas generated in response that define the character of the city for the crucial coming decades.