interviews
Water and the American West
by Richard Frank
October 25, 2021
This interview with Richard Frank, professor of environmental practice at the UC Davis School of Law and Director of the California Environmental Law and Policy Center, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Can you tell me a little bit about the story of water and how it's tied to the West, and to California in particular?
Richard | A friend of mine who's a Court of Appeals Justice here in California wrote an opinion on a water law dispute and started it with the quote, "the history of California is written on its waters." And I think that the point is true of the entire American West.
Water policy and legal issues are inextricably tied to the development of the Western United States; water is the limiting factor in so many ways to settlement, to economic development, to prosperity, and to the environment and environmental preservation.
Can you talk about the difference between groundwater and surface water– and the policies that regulate each?
There are really two types of water when it comes to human consumption. There's surface water: that is the water that is transmitted by lakes, rivers, and streams. Then there is groundwater, and a substantial amount of water that Americans and the American West rely on is groundwater. That is water that is stored in groundwater aquifers, which are naturally occurring groundwater basins. Both groundwater and surface water are critical to the American West and its economy and its culture.
Traditionally a couple of things are important to note, first of all, water is finite. Second, water gets allocated in the Western United States generally at the state level. There's a limited federal role. Primarily, policy decisions about who gets how much water for what purpose are made state by state.
I think allocation is really interesting in that it's more state-level than federal. How was water and the allocation of water in California designed? Is it a public-private combination? What goes on in terms of the infrastructure of water?
Another very good question. The answer is it depends. Most of our water infrastructure is public in nature.
Again, in the American West, the regulation of water rights is generally done at the state level, but the federal government, historically, has a major water footprint in the American West because it has been federal dollars and federal design and management that really controlled much of the major water infrastructure in the American West — you know, Hoover Dam, and the complex system of dams and reservoirs on the Colorado River in California, with the Central Valley Project that was built and managed by the federal government with Shasta Dam on the upper Sacramento River as the centerpiece of that project. But we also have a California State Water Project, the key facility being the Oroville Dam and reservoir on the Southern River that is managed by state water managers. If we were starting over, that kind of parallel system would make no particular engineering or operational sense.
But, we are captive to our history.
And then you have these massive systems of aqueducts and canals that move water from one place to another throughout the American West. They are particularly responsible for moving water from surface water storage facilities to population centers. In the last 50 to 75 years, these population centers have really expanded dramatically, so you need massive infrastructure to deliver water from those storage facilities, the dams, and reservoirs, which generally are located in remote areas to the population centers. So it takes a lot of time and energy to transport the water, from where it is captured and stored to where it is needed for human use.
California has faced continuous drought – what measures is the state taking now to manage water?
Just to frame the issue a little bit — we have, as I mentioned, a growing population in the American Southwest at a time when the amount of available water is shrinking due to drought and due to the impacts of climate change. We have growing human demand for residential and commercial purposes and at the same time, we have a shrinking water supply. That is a huge looming crisis.
And it is beginning to play out in real-time. You see that playing out in real-time. For example, several different states and Mexico rely on Colorado River flows based on an allocation system that was created in the 1920s, which is overly optimistic about the amount of available water. From the 1920s until now, that water supply has decreased, and decreased, and decreased. Now you have interstate agreements, and in the case of Mexico, international agreements that allocate the finite Colorado river water supplies based on faulty, now obsolete, information. It is a real problem.
What measures do you take now, knowing this information?
If you look at the US Drought Monitor, it is obvious the problem is not limited to the Colorado River. We are in a mega-drought, so cutbacks are being imposed by federal and state water agencies to encourage agricultural, urban, and commercial water users to cut their water use and, and stretch finite supplies as much as possible through conservation efforts.
In California, we have the State Water Resources Control Board, the state water regulator in California, and they have issued curtailment orders. Meaning, they have told water rights holders, many of whom have had those water rights for over a hundred years, that, for the first time, the water that they feel they are entitled to, is not available. Local water districts are also issuing water conservation mandates; the San Francisco water department is doing that, in Los Angeles, the metropolitan water district, is urging urban users to curtail their efforts.
And then agriculture. Agricultural users — farmers and ranchers — have had to get water rights in many cases through the federal government, as the federal government is the operator of these water projects. They have contracts with water users, individual farmers, ranchers, or districts, and they are now issuing curtailment orders. They're saying, we know you contracted for X amount of water for this calendar year, but we are telling you because of the drought shortages we don't have that water to supply. Our reservoirs are low at Lake Shasta or at the Oroville Dam.
When you drive from San Francisco to LA on the five, you see a lot of signage from the agricultural farming community about water. There's apparently some frustration about this. What are the other options for them?
About 80% of all human consumed water goes to agriculture. That is by far the biggest component of water use, as opposed to 20% used for urban and commercial, and industrial purposes.
Over the years, ranchers and farmers, and agricultural water districts assumed that the water would always be there — as we all do.
And the farmers and ranchers have, in hindsight, exacerbated the problem by bringing more and more land into production. You see on those drives between San Francisco and Los Angeles, particularly in the San Joaquin Valley, all these orchards are being planted. Orchards are more lucrative crops than row crops — cotton, alfalfa, and rice. But, if you are growing a row crop, you can leave the land fallow in times of drought.
We don't have to plant. If the water stopped there, or if it's too expensive to get, it may make economic sense, but if you have an orchard or a vineyard it's a high value, those are high value crops, you don't have that operational flexibility and they need to be irrigated in wet years and in dry years. Now, you see these orchards, which were only planted a few years ago, are now being uprooted because the farmers realized that they don't have the water necessary to keep those vineyards and orchards alive. For ranchers, the same thing is true with their herds. They don’t have enough water for their livestock.
The water shortage has never been drier than it is right now. Farmers and ranchers are being deprived of water that they traditionally believed was theirs and they're very understandably, very unhappy about it. They see it as a threat to their livelihood and to the livelihood of the folks who work for them. Their anger and frustration are to be expected, but it's nobody's fault.
To say, as some farmers do, that it is mismanagement by state and federal government officials, I think is overly simplistic and misplaced in the face of a mega-drought. Everybody's going to have to sacrifice. Everybody's going to have to be more efficient in how they use water. All sectors are going to need to be more efficient with the water that does exist.
Looking at this percentage breakdown of water use – is it actually important for individual users to change their water habits?
Well, every little bit helps. When you're talking about homeowners, about 70% of urban water use is for outdoor irrigation. So we're talking parks and cemeteries and golf courses and folks' yards. You know, that used to be considered part of that American dream and the California dream — you would have a big lawn in front of your house and behind your house. Truth be told, that has never made much sense in an arid environment. That's where the water savings in urban areas is critical in the way it really involves aesthetics rather than critical human needs, like water for drinking and bathing and sanitation purposes. There is a growing movement away from big lawns, and away from the type of landscaping that you see in the Eastern US — there is no drought in the Eastern United States. As Hurricane Ida and other recent storms have shown, the problem is too much water, or rather than too little in most of the Eastern United States. So it really is a tale of two countries.
We just need to recognize that the American West is an arid region. It has always been an arid region, we can't make the desert bloom with water that doesn't exist. We need to be more efficient in how we allocate those water supplies. And it seems to me in an urban area, the best way to conserve and most effective way is to reduce urban landscaping, which is the major component of urban water use.
You also write about water markets and making them better – for those who don’t know, what is the water market?
Water markets, that is, the voluntary transfer of water between water users, is more robust in some other Western states. Again Arizona and New Mexico come to mind. California somewhat surprisingly is behind the curve. We are in the dark ages compared to other states. Water markets are kind of anecdotal. There is not much of a statewide system. It is done at the local level, through individual transactions without much oversight and without much transparency. And I have concerns about all of those things.
I believe conceptually watermarks are a way to stretch scarce, finite water resources to make water use more efficient. I can, for example, allow farmers or ranchers to sell water to urban uses or commercial usage or factories in times of drought.
Farmers sometimes can make more money by farming water, than they can by farming crops.
There are efficiencies to be gained here.
The problem in my view is really one of transparency. The water markets are not publicly regulated, and some of the people who are engaging in water transactions like it that way, frankly, they want to operate under the radar.
In my opinion, water markets need to be overseen by a public entity rather than private or nonprofit entities. We need oversight and transparency, so that folks like you and myself can follow the markets to see who's selling water to whom, for what purpose, and make sure that those water transfers serve the public interests and not just the private interests.
There have been a number of stories in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Salt Lake City Tribune about efforts in some parts to privatize water transfer. Hedge fund managers are buying and selling water, as a means of profiting. And it strikes me that when you're talking about an essential public resource — and in California, it is embedded in the law that public water is an inherently public resource, that water is owned by the public and it can be used for private purposes, but it is an inherently public resource — the idea of commoditizing water through the private, opaque markets is very troublesome to me. I think it represents a very dangerous trend and one that needs to be corrected and avoided.
Why is California so behind?
There's no good reason for it. It's largely inexplicable that since the state was created on September 9th, 1860, we've been fighting over water. In the 19th century, it was miners versus farmers ranchers. In the 20th century, with the growth of urban communities, the evolution of California into one of the most populous states with 40 million Californians, it has been a struggle between urban and agricultural uses of water.
In the second half of the 20th century, there was a recognition that some component of water had to be left in streams to protect ecosystems, landscape, and wildlife, including the threatened and endangered wildlife. That suggestion has made agricultural users in California angry. You will see those signs that allude to the idea that food and farming are more important than environmental values. I don't happen to believe that's true. I believe both are critically important to our society. But the advocates for the environment have a proverbial seat at the water table. So that's another demand for water allocation that exists.
Do you maintain optimism?
Yes. I think it's human nature to look on the bright side. I try to do that through research scholarships and teaching. There are models for how we can do this better in the United States. Israel and Saudi Arabia and Singapore are far more efficient with their water policies and efforts. Australia went through a severe megadrought. They came out of it a few years ago, but they used that opportunity to dramatically reform their water allocation systems. That's an additional model. I think most people would agree in hindsight that their previous system was antiquated, and not able to meet the challenges of climate change and the growing water shortage in some parts of the world.
Here in the United States, we can learn from those efforts. There are also some ways to expand the water supply. Desalination for one. Again, Singapore and Saudi Arabia have led the world in terms of removing the salt content from ocean water and increasing water supply that way. In Carlsbad, California, north of San Diego, we have the biggest desalination plant in the United States right now, and that is currently satisfying a significant component of the San Diego metropolitan areas’ water needs. It's more expensive than other water supplies, but the technology is getting more refined, so the cost of desalinated water is coming down at a time when other water supplies, due to shortages and the workings of the free market are going up.
At some point, they're going to meet or get closer. Unlike some of my environmental colleagues, I think desalination is an important part of the equation.
In a proposal that came up in the recall election, one of the candidates was talking about how we just need to build a canal from the Mississippi River to California to take care of all our problems. That ignores political problems associated with that effort, as well as the massive infrastructure costs that would be required to build and maintain a major aqueduct for 2000 miles from the Mississippi to California. That's just not going to happen. Some of those pie in the sky thoughts of how we expand the water supply, I think, are unrealistic.
interviews
A Walk Through Boston with Brent Ryan and Garnette Cadogan
by Brent Ryan and Garnette Cadogan
May 2, 2018
Brent Ryan is Head of the City Design and Development Group and Associate Professor of Urban Design and Public Policy in MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Garnette Cadogan is an essayist and journalist and was the 2017-2018 MLK Visiting Scholar at MIT.
Above watch an excerpt from our walk through Boston, or read the full transcript, with maps and photos, below.
Brent: So we're going to walk along the southwest corridor, then we're going to take a left onto one of the South End streets. There, we'll see one of the little, kind of English imitation of London-style parks. We’ll end up in a social housing development, Villa Victoria.
Garnette: Oh, I love that development.
Brent: We'll end up in a place called Blackstone Square that's more in the sort of Grand Park Tradition of the 19th century. Let's go.
Garnette: Remind me of tent city and its history.
Brent: So the actual tent city happened here on this site in the late 1960s.There is a relationship between tent city and the construction of the southwest corridor park into the freeway rebellion. I think they were associated with each other. I think Tunney Lee was involved in both. The agreement to eventually construct social housing on the site,to construct the orange line underneath, and to construct this park on top.
They did indeed create a certain number of social housing units that created this pleasant amenity, but now it’s starting to show its age. It’s a bit dated. k. , they spurred the rebirth of the South End, and of course the South End has become some of the highest priced real estate in the city.
Garnette: It's incredible what makes it work: the relationship of brick with what some are now calling an “urban forest”.
Brent: At the southwest corridor, actually it's like a High Line before there was a High Line. It's an infrastructural project: a linear park. This means it's designed for linear passage, so it needs enough walking surface and, potentially, cycling surface to allow passage. And at the same time, it's setting you apart from the rest of the city. It actually physically resembles much more the Promenade Plantée in Paris than it does the High Line, because the High Line is so constrained.
Garnette: And the High Line in many ways treats us like a canvas, but a distant canvas that can walk and stare at from distance.
Brent: Yeah, but the High Line also was completely unable to control the development around it, so the High Line is now surrounded by what I call the ‘architectural zoo’. Here, you can see that they really disciplined the architects. I mean, all of these projects went through tremendous historic commission review, and as a result there's a kind of docility to the architecture that I find to be, not particularly stimulating. But I think as a place, it's very high quality.
Garnette: And the scale makes it feel very humane.
Brent: Extremely humane.
Garnette:
Brent: Absolutely. Here you see qualities of this park that you don't find in the High Line at all, like community gardens. Oh, this is actually a dog park. It probably used to be a playground. I think beyond it is a playground. So there's a mix of community facilities. It's a lot less monumental than the High Line, that's for sure. And it was definitely designed as a neighborhood space. Including a lot of space for cars, right? So you need to have space for cars to get into these parking places.
Garnette: It feels so much more like a landscape, you can zip in and out and intersect with neighborhoods, and the neighborhood in a way you can't in the High Line, you're still removed from it.
Brent: And you're absolutely unable to perceive the presence of the infrastructure underneath. So I think that that's something psychologically they really wanted to do, is get rid of the infrastructure. You don't see it, you don't see the grills, of course there has to be ventilation and everything. It’s all carefully hidden.
Garnette: Here's the thing I can never get over, in terms of my love for it: the stoop.
Brent: The Boston stoop.
Garnette: Yes, was that a Dutch invention, the stoop? From 'stoep', 's-t-o-e-p'? Separating the stoop ...
Brent: Yeah, I think New York has more of a historical origin from stoops than Boston. I'm not sure why Boston has them, and you notice that Boston's are not always a consistent height. Typologically, the housing of the South End in Back Bay is much less consistent. You also have the Bay windows, which are typical of Boston's 19th century.
Garnette: But it feels like a way of meeting a city rather than separating one from the city. A stoop initially was a way of giving you privacy, of setting you apart. But then it became transformed as a way of meeting the public, a way of ...
Brent: Of setting you above high water.
Garnette:
Brent: And I suspect in this location, the neighbors will meet each other in the park as much as they will in their houses. Now the population of the South End is much lower than it was back in the time when it was poor. Now, the population is wealthier. But the streets are very, very high quality, so we'll walk along.
Garnette: When you say high quality, what do you mean by high quality street? Because when I use that term, I think of high quality in terms of encounters that one has.
Brent: That's true. I would say that formally they're high quality. The houses are extremely consistent, they're well-maintained, they're attractive 19th century homes. The street is isolated from traffic, so it's a quiet by-way. The street's well-planted.
It's very similar to the kind of urbanity that you might find in Park Slope or Fort Greene in New York City. Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia is also pretty similar.
Garnette: What I find remarkable here is how in Boston, you can have a yard but not far away is a subway. I remember Cassim Shepard saying, “you get to have a front yard and a subway system in Boston.” You're hard-pressed to find other cities in which you can make that observation. To have that level of public transportation ...
Brent: That's a very good point.
Garnette: While at the same time, have that domesticity.
Brent:
He said the South End is illusory for another reason, because it's built of brick. But most of Boston is a city of wood, as you know.
Garnette: Yes.
Brent: Somerville is wood, Cambridge is wood. Rocksbury is wood, Dorchester is wood. Most of Boston is a city of wood. Sam Bass Warner said Bostonians maintain wood construction and they maintain separate houses. But Bostonian houses might be separated by two or three feet. So the South End, charming as it is, is actually not that representative of Bostonian urbanism. It's much more similar to Philadelphia and New York.
This is a very charming feature of a lot of streets in the South End, where the developers, in order to promote sales of the home on the block, would widen it slightly and put a little park in the middle.There are about ten or twelve of these in the South End. Sometimes they're a little bit wider, so you can actually enter into the park. Sometimes they're narrow, so that they're like viewing guards. This is directly derived from the Bloomsbury district of London, where they built a lot of these.
Garnette: Ah, yes.
Brent:
I don't know why I find this feature charming, but it gives the space and the street a special quality that I like.
Garnette: The middle of NYC feels like a reprieve from the city. It feels like a plaza, of sorts. Here, it's different because of the docility of the neighborhood. But in New York, it's a way to feel like you're at once deeply immersed in the city and removed from it.
Brent: That's right.
Garnette: So you sit on Upper West Side, for instance, on a bench and you have cars and horns and the entire metropolis is whizzing by you, but there's illusion that you're there in a park.
Brent: Well, Kevin Lynch said the most appealing quality of a city was when you can have one door with activity and vibrancy of the city, and at the back door you had peace and quiet. I think that the prosperous, lucky people who live in the South End get that, because you can live on a street like this, which exudes tranquility, and you can walk five minutes and you're in Copley Square.
Garnette: Yeah.
Brent: Thus, the South End became extremely desirable.
So here we see a break. When you see a building like this, you realize that whatever was here was probably demolished in the 1960s or early 1970s. This was a first generation of social housing construction in the South End, and for the time this was a very sensitive development. Now of course, we look at it and we say, it's insensitive. It's very minimal housing, but
I think it even has some shops on the ground floor. So you can imagine them in 1967 saying, 'We're listening to the community activists, we're doing it, look! Isn't this okay?'. And this is what we got.
Now we're on one of the main radial roads of the South End, Columbus Avenue. To me, these streets are not as successful. What do you think Garnette? Why do you think the street's not very successful?
Garnette: The times I've been through, it lacks an energy. It lacks a vibrancy. It lacks the kind of encounters you think that draws one into a neighborhood and gives a neighborhood a kind of glue and sensibility that makes you feel at one, at home in a neighborhood, but also connected to the larger city.
Brent: It has surprisingly little commercial development on it. Actually shockingly little, for the number of people that live around here. I contrast it with Brooklyn where, if you're in Park Slope or Forte Green and you come out onto DeKalb Avenue or onto Fulton Street, or Seventh Avenue, the streets are lined with shops the whole way. When you come out here you say, “this is it?” In fact, if you've ever tried to entertain yourself on the South End, these places are oversubscribed, they're expensive, and they're packed. They're not very interesting, and there's not very many of them.
Garnette: And it has the whiff of trespass. One of the indexes I use for a neighborhood, does it have the whiff of trespass? Do I feel like I'm trespassing when I'm there?
Brent: Trespassing here? Yeah.
Garnette: Yes.
Garnette: Yeah. It's one of the great ironies that what made it attractive in the first place was scale, and scale seems to be part of what makes it off-putting now.
Brent: It's become a kind of a handicap, I think. I think also the fact that the whole place is a historic district -- it hasn't operated in its favor in that sense, because actually what you need to do is convert a lot of these into shops. This is a natural location for cafe's and active uses, and it doesn't manage to have any.
Garnette: I think of the comparative places in New York that I love, part of the attraction is the corners. The way in which the corners because centers of activities, become as a locus of activity. The corners here feel bare, de- populated.
Brent: They're barren.
Garnette: Do you remember 'My Cousin Vinnie', that movie where Danny DeVito plays a lawyer who is in a small town in America to fight for his cousin, who is accused of a crime in which he is innocent? He can't sleep because it's too quiet, he gets put into prison one night and everybody is being rowdy and Vinnie goes, 'Yes! I can sleep.'
Yes, it reminds me of the beat in this neighborhood, it feels too quiet.
Brent: It's understimulating. Yes.
Today look at it. You could say, it's a beautiful cemetery. It does have a suburban quality of 'Keeping up with the Joneses', right? Everybody's got a kind of image to maintain, so each house is cleaner and better prepared than the next. It's so ironic because it's the exact opposite problem that all the planners were worried about in the 60s when they said, 'Oh my god, the city's out of control. We need to upgrade neighborhoods.' Now we have luxury two-unit brownstone. The South End today is like a manuscript that records all of these different eras of urban interactions and urban durations. It will be made evident in the Villa Victoria, where we'll see a very different kind of scale. It’s lot more active.
I brought [my wife] here once or twice and she said, 'Oh, it's pretty but I'm kind of bored'.
Garnette: Of course. Compare this to Barcelona streets, in which, even the narrowest ones, there's a circuit of activity and interaction and encounter.
Brent:
If it was, I think the retail would be a lot more interesting. I mean, I find it ironic that I live in Coolidge Corner and I can go out onto Beaker Street, but I have a far better range of detail in a suburb. And by the way it's a lot cheaper, and it's a lot more useful for my daily needs. There's grocery stores. Where's the grocery store today? I can't find it.
Now we're on Tremont Street which is really the second radial road of the South End. We're moving east toward the area that we were in before, which is the old South Bay. The ‘social quality’, they would say, drops as we move further because these neighborhoods were poor, and they were closer to industrial neighborhoods. The housing, as a result, wasn't built to such a high standard when they were constructed, and the housing gentrified to the same extent.
We're about to walk into Villa Victoria, which is a Puerto Rican community development corporation (CDC) project from the 1970s, but it took until the 1980s to be developed. A very large stretch of the interior of this block was cleared and rebuilt as affordable housing. What's interesting about it is the housing, to some extent, reflects a hybrid between Bostonian urbanism, a kind of suburb Bostonian suburbanism, and what you might think of as a Latino attitude towards space. But I'll be interested in hearing your thoughts.
Garnette: I love the color that we are entering into. Literally and metaphorically.
Brent: Exactly. So you start to see the stucco panels - I think the color was extremely deliberate, and it's varied.
Garnette: And think, even aural quality of this neighborhood. I'm hearing music as we step in.
Brent: It's the first time!
Garnette: It's as if it's saying, 'Welcome!'.
Brent: Now we start to see also a breakdown in the kinds of spaces that the city has.
In the South End, you see it's a quite rigid boundary of the stern brick houses, the stoops which probably originally this frame between public and private, and then the public realm. Here, you have streets like this, I don't even know what I would call this. Is it a walkway? It's a kind of passage that you would find maybe in many cities elsewhere in the world, that allows for different range of encounters. Let's keep going.
Garnette: There's something also in which, even that space at the end of the stoop between there -- it's a liminal space, yes, but it also allows an encounter -- rather than ending right on the street where it is.
Brent: There's that space, there's this space, there's this space. Then there's this space. So all of a sudden,
Garnette: There's indeterminacy to it, which allows a lot more improvisation.
Brent: Exactly. And yet you also achieve the sense of restfulness and separation from the busy through traffic, right? Villa Victoria says, by getting away from buses and trucks and police cars, you don't have to retreat into a purely private realm, you just have a different kind of public realm.
Garnette: Yes. I mean this for example, as simple as this is, suggests that everyone coming to pick up their mail here and the possibilities of encounter.
Brent: Exactly.
Garnette: Apartment 11 and apartment 4 bumping into each other and having a conversation.
Brent: Homes built above and below each other, coming into a common exit. Reinterpretations of open spaces that don't necessarily read as purely Bostonian open spaces, but nor are they cartoonishly Latino public spaces. It's a kind of a plaza, but one that's dedicated clearly to play and non-monumental.
Garnette: Yes.
Brent: This is another interesting kind of space in here. By the way, I discovered this development through the book Housing and Modernity' by Peter Rowe, where he profiled three housing developments in the world, and this was one of them. I thought, 'You're kidding me.' I never thought that Boston had something worthy of that level of investigation. I think one was in Portugal, one was in Britain, and one was here. What do you think about this space?
Garnette: One thing that draws me more than anything else are the trees. Do you remember Auden's reflection, that a city or a culture is as good as its trees? I look around and I see all the trees and the kind of relationship between city and nature.
Brent: I like these trees, they're also less monumental than the typical Boston street trees. They're more like fruit trees. In Galicia, I say, as soon as you build a house, you remove every tree and then you plant three fruit trees. Because the Spanish love fruit trees, they love ornamental, they don't want a recollection of nature, they want strictly ornamental and productive landscapes.
Garnette: I also like because of the diversity of trees. Look at all the housing development, that all have the same tree, all have three or four species. Here there is a multiplicity. There is a gratuitousness about the housing and the trees that are interspersed.
Brent: Here's a quality in America we've regarded as suburban, but that's only because we've lost it to some extent from the urban, which is leaving your bicycle and baby stroller out in front of your house. In fact, in Spain and France that happens all the time. Right, people leave everything. In Brooklyn, we have a public park and people leave strollers in it. People leave bicycles in it, and children's toys in it, and they're gonna come back the next day to get them. Right?
Garnette: Well the New Yorkers are thinking, even when you have a chain inside your house, somebody's trying to come and get it.
Brent: If someone wants it, they're going to get it. So it must be that people know that nobody wants it.
Garnette: Or could it be a kind of eyes on the street? The ways in which the neighborhood looks out for itself.
Brent: No doubt about it.
In the housing now being rehabilitated, he sees both a reference to the traditional row-house of old, but also an abstraction that conveys an optimism about the future. I think it's a debatable argument, but I love this dyad of being and becoming.
Garnette: What attracts me here more than being and becoming, is belonging: the way coming is a sense of belonging; the ways in which places are semi-private; the way in which there are so many pockets and room for public interaction and public encounter; the ways in which public space feels like an open space, feels like a pluralistic space, feels like an inviting space. We're walking and people are nodding to us and eye contact becomes an invitation to wave, it doesn't have the whiff of trespass the way we had before.
Brent: That's right. That's right.
Let's go up into this plaza, because this plaza is another kind of space which I think we're thinking about.
Garnette: But you find what happens also, the way in which a neighborhood imposes a kind of behavior on those who move through it, that the South End suggests privacy.
Brent: Yes.
Garnette: Privacy and isolation. So it feels taboo to pass someone and say, hi, how are you doing? We are interrupting not only their space or peace of mind, but you are also interrupting the sensibility of the neighborhood.
Brent: You're breaking into their home.
Garnette: Whereas a neighborhood here seems to suggest, if you make eye contact, you say hi.
Brent: It's more urban. I mean, I like this space a lot, in part because it has a somewhat bleaker, modernist quality to it. It's more abstract. I think these are the first buildings constructed, and they became more domestic afterward, but they also add a completely different scale element to Villa Victoria. I think these are necessary pieces of the project, because this building is a visual centerpiece, it's a kind of anchor marking it.
Garnette: Yes.
Brent:
Garnette: I also like the use of the building, the new development and resident services, and center…
Brent: Oh yeah, exactly. This is a civic center. It's a civic center for the community.
Garnette: It invites a civic, the possibilities of rich civic culture. Also, possibilities of encounter.
Brent: I think it's one of the nicer spaces in Boston, actually. I think, even though the finishing of the plaza's not amazing, the kind of mix of activities around is actually pretty unique. Boston doesn't often see its open spaces as plazas, it sees them as secluded, either commons for recreational activity, if you think of Olmsted, the whole Olmsted project was a suburban project in Boston.
Garnette: It is.
Brent: This is an urban project.
Garnette: What, more than anything, draws you to this space? When you think of Boston and what you love about cities, and what makes a city a city, what draws you here more than anything else?
Brent: To this space?
Garnette: To this space.
Brent: It's not very Bostonian.
Copley Square actually achieves that to some extent, that's why it's one of the better Boston open spaces.
Garnette: I love this space also because something as seen in Copley, which is at a public library in front, it says 'Free for all', and this suggests that. Free for all.
Brent: Absolutely.
Garnette: Because when I think of cities, I think of a place in which you arrive. There is a sense of arrival that should suffuse a city that works.
Brent: I think that this space is fortunate that it has a busy street along it, so you've got passage along the way. Look, you even have a post office, so you've got some conventional markers of civic activity.
Garnette: I love it.
Brent: It's a nice space. It was nice to see you.
Garnette: Yes, let's go walking again soon.
Brent: Absolutely.
Garnette: This space and many more.