1. Yesterday was National Creamsickle day*, although I missed the opportunity to drag my Oldenburg to the Oak Creek clubhouse to contextualize the event — a couple other opportunities popped up and one can only be so many places at a time — real life took on the fast cheap and out of control texture of Plastic Alto.
2. There is a breakfast klatch that is based in Barron Park that I am an adjunct member of — for instance, I sometimes join them at Joanie’s on Cali Ave for corned beef hash and eggs — and one of the members sent me a link, weeks ago, about a podcast he heard, which is about new urbanism.
3. Sussing out the import of that group of memes led me to an article about San Francisco planning in 1904 and the suggestion by Dan Burnham to build a giant Athens (the Goddess, also known as an Athenaum?) on Twin Peaks.
4. I once suggested we build a giant John Arrillaga monument here, as a way to sort out his ego from what is practical regarding 27 University.
5. I did see the Will Sigua monument in Los Altos Hills yesterday
, an event which further catalyzed the enhanced texture of my day.
Proposed white male with leisure trapping monument for Palo Alto, with one leg at Hoover Pavillion and other leg at El Camino Park
Notes:
1. wiki graph on New Urbanism
New Urbanism has drawn both praise and criticism from all parts of the political spectrum. In an interview in Reason, a right-libertarian magazine, professor Peter Gordon, a professor of Urban Planning from University of Southern California, spoke out in favor of suburbanization and criticized New Urbanism as ignoring consumer preference and the free market claiming that cities have moved towards car-oriented development because that is what people want.[29]
On the other hand, journalist Alex Marshall has decried New Urbanism as essentially a marketing scheme that repackages conventional suburban sprawl behind a façade of nostalgic imagery and empty, aspirational slogans.[30] In a 1996 article in Metropolis Magazine, Marshall denounced New Urbanism as “a grand fraud”.[31] The attack continued in numerous articles, including an opinion column in the Washington Post in September of the same year,[32] and in Marshall’s first book, How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken[33]
Critics have asserted that the effectiveness claimed for the New Urbanist solution of mixed income developments lacks statistical evidence.[34] Independent studies have supported the idea of addressing poverty through mixed-income developments,[35][36] but the argument that New Urbanism produces such diversity has been challenged from findings from one community in Canada.[37]
2. podcast link about Minneapolis new urbanism klatch
3. blogger in Sf with short film about Google bus
4. about Claes Oldenburg’s Good Humor Bar
See also: good humor versus cream sickle
5. maybe I should see if there is a yelp photo of corned beef hash at Joanies, or A Good Morning or Cibos. (I do have that Greg Brown Cibos, from just yesterday, or Wedneday)
6. bottom line: food for thought but maybe greenwash of growth for growth’s sake
*according to this article, the invention of the cream sickle and Burnham’s plans for a monument on Twin Peaks occurred in that same year, 1905
Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss 