Speaking as a member who is heavily involved in advocacy, I would like to suggest a way out of the trick bag to which Walter is referring. One key is to change a few critical words we use on those occasions when we are part of the critical policy conversations. We need to stop nodding our heads about funding "roads and bridges" and push for "buildings and transit" instead when talking about the publicly funded infrastructure that frames and facilitates so much of urban development. To do this, we also need to get in the game more in the political aspects of our civic conversations.
As evidenced by an absolutely terrific letter that AIA President Clark Manus recently sent around, our profession is coming around to the idea that we need to be more overtly involved in our nation's - and our communities' - policy making apparatus. As I've told students and young architects before, nearly everything we see every day, at least in urban metro areas, was put there by man. Unless you life in a first growth forest that is pretty much the case.
As such, a principal driver for any differences between examples of a particular urban function trace back to political will. Although there are certainly valid critiques of Robert Moses's methods, his verdant parkways on Long Island are both beautiful and functional. The same cannot be said of the urban interstates that lace across my neck of the woods here in the Chicago area - but both were put here by our governments.
In this case, we as a profession are getting squashed in our earnest desire to shape the ways cities are made in this country and a lot of it has to do with the way public infrastructure gets funded. In an era with precious little bipartisanship at the Federal level, both parties solemnly agree, at regular intervals, that spending (as Republicans call it) or investment (as Democrats call it) in "roads and bridges" is a critical priority.
We as architects have missed the point that we are being passed over in this discussion if that term is the frame for it. While both parties invoke the jobs-creating potential of WPA-style public works, those public works that get funded are typically 90% about asphalt and concrete and only 10% about buildings or urban transit. Architects mainly live in and around cities, generally like cities, and wish to perpetuate them as an optimal pattern for human development. Yet we unwittingly sing along with the road builders' lobby every time when it comes time to talk about funding public infrastructure.
We need to push back, to point out to our elected officials that, for example, every employed architect on a project typically creates work for 30 others. We need to point out that, unlike roads which are mainly about asphalt and heavy equipment from huge road building firms, buildings support more small businesses, more skilled trades, and more types of materials suppliers. For every huge ARRA-funded highway extension/expansion project they could have built ten schools.
Multiplied times our major metro areas and we are consuming ex-urban agricultural land at a frightening pace. According to the USDA, in a 10-year span the amount of farmland converted to development was equal to Indiana. Clearly this is not just about better cities but also about our economic future and even national security.
We need architects in Congress. We need architects in state legislatures. We need more architect mayors. We need more people making policy decisions affecting urban development patterns to know that focusing first and foremost on more "roads and bridges" is really about building roads to nowhere.
I'm an elected official in my architect-friendly community of Oak Park, Illinois. We have a saying in politics, "Either you're at the table, or you're on the menu." While we also certainly have to maintain what's already been built, every time we sing along with the priority "roads and bridges" when the topic is infrastructure funding, or have no representation to say otherwise, we put ourselves back on the menu, and we doom our cities to continue expansion in a manner we call sprawl. We need to change what we say and we need to get in the game in order to say it in a manner that translates into policy.
For more, by the way, Google the Architect's Newspaper and my op-ed about civic involvement.
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Eric Davis, AIA, NCARB, LEED AP
Public Design Architects, LLC
Oak Park, IL
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