nicomachus.net

Our relationship to built space is not something we often explore, and yet these spaces define for us the world of our daily lives. Authors like Wordsworth and Thoreau write about the wonders and mysteries of the world revealed to them simply through careful observation of their environments. The observant way of moving through the world revealed, for the romantic and the transcendentalist, an overlooked simplicity of everyday life.

Being observant in this way has value intrinsically in that it is a way to feel more connected to the place you occupy and a way to recognize the importance of that connection. Often, as in the case of Wordsworth and Thoreau or even contemporaries such as Ron Rash or Edward Hoagland, those who know something about this connection experience it in wilderness — standing on a mountain top after a day’s hike or standing on the edge of a river or lake. The unique foil that wilderness poses to the human-built environment is arguably the basis of most environmental ethics, from Aldo Leopold’s land ethic to Edward Abbey’s monkeywrench defense to Deep Ecology. In each of these versions of environmental ethics, the bottom line human/wilderness relationship is one where we ought to preserve wilderness.

But basing an environmental ethic on juxtaposing wilderness and urban areas leaves those of us who live in cities without any sense of ownership over our environmental responsibilities. “The State of World Population 1999,” a report issued by the United Nations Population Fund, documents the trends of increasing urbanization. One-third of the world’s population lived in urban areas in 1960. By 1999, that percentage had increased to 47 percent. The report predicts 61 percent of the world’s population will be city dwellers by 2030. “The State of World Population 1999” offers this prediction about urbanization:

the ecological and sociological “footprint” of cities has spread over ever-wider areas, creating an urban-rural continuum of communities that share some aspects of each lifestyle. Fewer and fewer places on the planet are unaffected by the dynamics of cities.

Basing environmental ethics on wilderness preservation alone is a luxury we can no longer afford.

There are other models, however, for an urban environmental ethic. It took a while, but the Sierra Club finally gets it. It released a white paper endorsing more density in urban growth. The US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) awards for sustainable architecture reasonably acknowledge the fact that environmentally friendly building design contributes to far fewer resources consumed for every person who lives and works in those structures. To get a sense of what’s required by LEED certification, read the article in this week’s Independent on a proposed building in Chapel Hill that, if built, will be North Carolina’s first LEED Gold standard building. Apart from urban planning, Michael Pollan’s works can be thought of as an attempt to design an environmental ethic that’s based on agriculture instead of on wilderness. His theory of co-evolution (developed in Botany of Desire) and the agro-industrial food policies he calls into question in The Omnivore’s Dilemma both serve as models of how to think responsibly about the environment and be a city dweller.

Durham has its own theorist on urban environmentalism, and his focus, like most enviro-ethics theorists, is on preservation. Only this time, Gary Kueber is trying to preserve buildings. Preservation and sustainable urban design go hand in hand, argues Kueber.

Endangered Durham, Kueber’s medium for developing his preservationist ethic, is a website dedicated to showing what happens to a city when poor planning decisions dominate its development culture. Probably the most striking feature of his project are the before and after photographs. Using historical photography from archives, libraries, universities, and books, he identifies areas of Durham that have changed significantly — and identifiably — over the years. As you can imagine, much of the time this change is not for the good.

The pictures above are from a recent post on 118 Main St and its various facades over the last century: circa the 1920s, the 1960s, and today.

A good example of the kind of relevance his site has is his collection of posts on DOT’s woeful redevelopment plans for Alston Avenue. He’s done a great job articulating just what’s wrong with DOT’s current way of thinking. See http://endangereddurham.blogspot.com/search/label/Alston%20Ave. for more. These posts speak to his concern that sustainable design is about more than just preserving buildings. “An equal part of my intent is that what we build new,” — whether roads or buildings — he says, “is human-scale – respecting the lessons of how we used to build cities for pedestrians and integrating knowledge of our impact on the natural environment.”

His breadth of familiarity with historical documents and evident depth of thought on urban design would lead you to believe he is a life-long urban planner. Not the case, however. Originally trained in Internal Medicine, he practiced primary care in Durham for four years — right up until he decided that his “hobby” of historic preservation was more important to him. “ So I gave up medicine, went back to school to get a Master’s in Public Health, and a Master’s in Urban Planning. I’m finishing up the latter this May,” he says.

Kueber grew up in New Orleans. Like many of us who live in historic cities, he took the beautiful architecture for granted. It was only after college at Duke, medical school back in New Orleans, then moving back to Durham for a second time that he got involved with efforts to save historic properties. He worked with and eventually chaired the Endangered Properties Program with Preservation Durham.

He started the Endangered Durham website when he realized that “Durham had lost so much historic architecture, and the majority of folks who live in Durham weren’t aware of it.” Creating a publicly accessible tool for researching Durham’s landscape and architectural history, he thought, could strengthen preservation efforts. He describes an often-repeated pattern of development thinking “when someone would propose a teardown, there was no context – people would see it as ‘well, that building is pretty far gone’ instead of ‘we’ve lost hundreds and hundreds of buildings – we really need to go above-and-beyond to keep what we still have.’ Along with that, I saw that the same ethos that led to the loss of so much architecture was still around.”

While Endangered Durham’s posts are tagged by property types and streets, Kueber’s concerns also fall into themes — loss of greenspace or demolition by neglect, for example. He confesses that site organization is one of the biggest challenges he faces.

“I would like it to exist in perpetuity as a community resource where people can look up a site and the history of that building/buildings that came before. The tags are a mixed bag, and they include both themes and locations. They could really be overwhelming, because I see the creation of a healthy, vibrant community as the whole, and these landscape pieces as parts of that whole.”

Some areas of town are more threatened than others. “I think East Durham – more than just the traditional east Durham, which centers over on Driver St., but everything east of Roxboro and also the Little Five Points Area by Mangum/Cleveland/Corporation,” currently faces more difficult planning decisions.

He adds,

“To a lesser extent St. Theresa (Southside) and West End. These areas of town have persistent economic disinvestment and difficult to change social forces that mire people in poverty and crime. And to a large extent, those problems are bigger than Durham. But people need help and want change in their neighborhoods, because they need a better life. Unfortunately, old buildings play a pretty small role in the creation or maintenance of those problems, but they become symbolic of decay. I often joke with people that the reason buildings (and trees) get knocked down is because they are the only parts of the neighborhood than can’t run away when the bulldozers come. It’s something tangible for politicians to point to as an accomplishment. Unfortunately, there is no good evidence out there that demolition helps neighborhoods, and some evidence that it exacerbates neighborhood social conditions.”

A rare honor for bloggers is to meet in person the strangers who read and enjoy their sites. But Kueber was in attendance at the grand opening of the Bull City Headquarters, a mixed-use community center that local artists have opened up in Little Five Points. During the organizers’ speeches about the Headquarters’ mission, they indicated that one reason for locating in LFP was based on what they had read about the area on the Endangered Durham website. Kueber says, “that went beyond my best hopes for what the site could do — inspire others to community action in neighborhoods other than their own, to see all of Durham as their city.”