Austin’s Ann Richards Congress Avenue Bridge by Ted Lee Eubanks
If Austin would like to be a community of rooted citizens enjoying the fruits of diversity, a soulful city, then she must first recognize and celebrate diversity in all of its manifestations and across the entire span of its admittedly brief history.
The investigation, recognition, and celebration of heritage are among the most effective tools to be used in framing and contextualizing urban planning. Through this process (narrative-based planning) everyone is given a voice, those alive today as well as those who contributed in the past.
I thought that everyone knew this already.
Yet, recently attended a “new urbanism” luncheon where the speaker spent 45 minutes talking about city planning without mentioning the words history, heritage, preservation, or conservation. She was quick with “equity” and “gentrification,” but completely incapable or unwilling to accept that cities are first and foremost about people, not objects (such as public spaces, buildings, or roads).
Heritage comes to us from the Old French, and means “that which may be inherited.” Within heritage, history is only a part. Culture and nature are equally important. But, as the word implies, all of these component parts connect our present condition to the resources and contributions from the past, our heritage.
What matters in urban planning are people. We do not plan for cities; we plan for people. An urban plan is ideally a way in which we plan the greatest good for the greatest number of people living within a particular construct called a city.
To know people, we need to know something about their heritage. I am less interested in our artificial classes of people (black, white, Latino, Anglo, male, female, rich, poor) than I am in individuals. Yet, individuals do exhibit patterns of behavior, and those patterns are helpful in planning. Why? Because the patterns are repeated.
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun….Ecclesiastes 1:9
My work is in interpreting that which we have inherited (our heritage) so that it can be grasped, shared, and celebrated by the greater population in our city, including urban planners.
Yesterday, Austin’s Mayor Adler challenged those in attendance (predominantly landscape architects, architects, planners, engineers, public servants, nonprofits) to look for ways to democratize Austin, especially in places such as its civic spaces. My response to Mayor Adler is that we should start by democratizing Austin’s history.
Austin’s past is selectively presented. Parts have been erased and expunged from the public arena. My goal is to resurrect these histories, a small step forward in demonstrating that everyone’s contribution to what is now a great city, Austin, mattered in the past and matters now. I am no more interested in the wealthy (white) businessmen who funded our historical buildings downtown than I am in the laborers who actually built them or the tamaleros on Congress Avenue who sold them lunch.
A city without a past is barren and soulless. This is an aimless landscape, inhabited by disconnected, disengaged, hollow-eyed nomads wandering a Kuntslerian nowhere. If we in Austin would like to be a community of rooted citizens enjoying the fruits of diversity, a soulful city, then we must first recognize and celebrate this diversity in all of its manifestations and across the entire span of our admittedly brief history.
How did life come to be left out of Austin’s future?
Hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornados are considered forces of nature. With these, we expect the worst. A force of nature, beyond our control, is to be feared.
Life itself is a force of nature. Life, as a force, is inexorable, relentless. Life, too, is beyond our control. We can destroy life. We cannot create new life where none existed before.
Life expands and evolves to fit every niche and opportunity, given enough time and progeny. The more diverse the niches available (like a tropical rainforest), the richer and more varied the life that occupies them.
Biodiversity refers to the variety of life on Earth at all its levels, from genes to ecosystems. Biodiversity also includes the ecological and evolutionary processes and functionality that sustain it. How well an ecosystem is functioning is a critical concern in the conservation of ecological systems.
Roemer’s spurge (Euphorbia roemeriana), found only within a few counties in the Texas Hill Country by Ted Lee Eubanks
Cities have biodiversity, too, usually a shadow of what existed before. Mirabeau Lamar visited Waterloo (the village that preceded Austin) in 1837, and shot a bison near what is now the corner of Congress and West 7th. The bison are gone from Austin. John James Audubon, visiting Galveston the same year, saw more ivory-billed woodpeckers along Buffalo Bayou than any place he had previously visited. The woodpecker is extinct.
Imagine Austin is Austin’s newest comprehensive plan for the future. One way to plan for the future is to learn from the mistakes of the past. As George Santayana said,
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
The environment is one of the eight priority programs listed in Imagine Austin. The plan states,
Our open spaces and preserves shape city planning, reduce infrastructure costs, and provide us with recreation, clean air and water, local food, cooler temperatures, and biodiversity.
Not much more is said about biodiversity in the plan. In other words, not much more is said about the diversity of life, or about Austin’s natural patrimony.
Indian blanket moth (Schinia volupia), Colorado River, Austin, Texas, by Ted Lee Eubanks
CodeNEXT is the current phase of the Imagine Austin visioning effort. CodeNEXT will rewrite the Land Development Code (LDC). The most recent draft is titled The Next Austin: Manage our growth, keep our character, and details strategies to “preserve, protect and enhance the City’s natural and built environment.” Biodiversity is mentioned only once in this draft, and no strategy is presented to conserve or restore biodiversity.
There are easily one thousand species of terrestrial and aquatic plants and animals in the Shoal Creek watershed. If we add soil bacteria, nematodes, earthworms and the like, the number would jump even higher.
The greatest threat to biodiversity in our watershed is development. The logical remedy is to regulate development. CodeNEXT is going to shape the next LDC, the regulations that control development. On biodiversity, this first draft is silent.
The greatest threat to biodiversity in our watershed is development.
How did life come to be left out of Austin’s future? Curiously, there is little mention of historical preservation in the draft, either. Heritage is only mentioned when it references trees.
Here is one possible explanation. Complex, amorphous issues such as biodiversity and historic preservation are difficult to shoehorn into forms that fit well into regulatory codes. In preservation, cities focus on preserving distinct architectural styles that are simpler to quantify and define. Although the end goal should be to preserve the cultural and social fabric of the community (i.e., people), what is reflected in code is the protection of old buildings (i.e., things).
The same is true for biodiversity. City planners cannot begin to address the conservation needs of the thousands of species within the city’s limits. Therefore, planners and regulators focus on a manageable number of species that are easily recognized for their aesthetic value – trees. For the remaining species, the vast majority of what comprises biodiversity, the codes and regulations are silent. Barring the presence of an endangered species (a federal law), biodiversity other than trees is unprotected.
Imagine Austin does profess a commitment to conserving biodiversity, but only within the context of “our open spaces and preserves.” Yet, CodeNEXT takes this aspiration no further. Shouldn’t goals be established for biodiversity conservation and restoration within all of our open space? Shouldn’t funding be identified for such an effort?
Most cities are becoming more sensitized to protecting and restoring heritage landscapes, not less. The good news, however, is that the flaws in the current draft are acts of omission. My concern is with what’s missing.
My suggestion is that natural and built landscapes be separated, and a completely new strategy be developed for the conservation and restoration of Austin’s biodiversity. In addition, the strategy for built landscapes will need to be rewritten to include historical and cultural preservation.
Given that the current team of experts is responsible for the gaffe, I would suggest inviting a few new team members to help save this draft from an ignominious fate. Without a major rewrite to integrate the conservation and restoration of biodiversity in our region into our building codes, this draft is unacceptable both as a statement of principle as well as policy.
Texas bluebonnet (Lupinus texensis) by Ted Lee Eubanks
Bullock Texas State History Museum by Ted Lee Eubanks
The man for whom history is bunk is almost invariably as obtuse to the future as he is blind to the past…J. Frank Dobie
Austin began with Shoal Creek sitting on the sidelines. Edwin Waller adopted Shoal Creek as the western edge of the new city, and his to-be namesake as the eastern boundary. Congress Avenue became the centerline.
No longer. Austin is upside down, inside out. The city sprawls past these edges into the white-rocked and cedar-treed hinterlands. Shoal Creek neighborhoods like Old Enfield and Pemberton Heights, renewed and revitalized, eject thousands of motorists each morning to wend their ways to downtown employment.
Yet Shoal Creek pumps life in more than one direction. Shoal Creek people connect to the city through the creek, but the life of the city flows north as well. One can peer north from the mouth of Shoal Creek to the central business district, state government, the University of Texas, the Pickle Research Campus, and out to the Domain. Once an extremity, Shoal Creek is now a vital organ.
Shoal Creek is not alone in its transformation. The Colorado River, now Lady Bird Lake, and Waller Creek are evolving as well. Shoal Creek is the only one of the three to retain enough of its original form and character, however, to serve as the standard bearer for the city’s heritage.
Heritage is a squishy word, easy to mold, easy to tape to the refrigerator door. There is an element of heritage in art, in food, in architecture. Eeyore’s birthday is heritage. Wooldridge Square is heritage. Rosewood is heritage. The 1887 West 6th Street Bridge is heritage. The Bullock Texas State History Museum houses some of Austin’s heritage. SXSW is becoming heritage.
Mouth of Shoal Creek by Ted Lee Eubanks
Heritage is more than history, though. Heritage is patrimony. Heritage is legacy. Heritage is birthright. Heritage is that which previous generations left behind, consciously or unconsciously, that gives meaning to the places we live, as well as to how we live.
America is a new country, and Austin is a new city. Institutions and traditions that are well established in many of America’s older cities are either absent or in their nascence here. For example, the tradition of investing in the city through philanthropy is a new-born in Austin.
Consider Chicago, another one of America’s post-colonial metropolises. Our two cities are similar in age. Chicago was founded in 1833, and Austin in 1839. Our trajectories quickly diverged. Austin grew to 34,876 inhabitants by 1920. In the same period of time Chicago exploded to nearly 3 million (2,701,705). According to the Texas State Historical Association, “in 1905 Austin had few sanitary sewers, virtually no public parks or playgrounds, and only one paved street.” Only four years later (1909), Chicago would adopt the Burnham Plan, setting the stage for “new and widened streets, parks, new railroad and harbor facilities, and civic buildings.”
While Chicago raced forward at breakneck speed, Austin idled. While cities such as Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia were investing in great buildings and great spaces (Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, one of the nation’s first urban renewal projects, began in 1907), Austin remained hard-scrabbled. The election to finally settle the establishment of Austin as the state capital did not take place until 1872, 30 years after the founding of the city for that expressed purpose. The new University of Texas did not hold its first classes until 1883, and the Texas state government did not occupy the new capitol building until 1888.
Austin’s “great leap forward,” ironically, is the Great Depression. Austin is the city built by the New Deal. Initiatives such as the CCC, PWA, and WPA funded many of Austin’s icons. Zilker Park, Deep Eddy, the Lamar Bridge over Lady Bird Lake, the dams on the Colorado River, including Tom Miller, Lamar Boulevard, many of the bridges over Waller and Shoal creeks, House Park, the UT Tower and Hogg Auditorium, Emma Long Metropolitan Park; all were federal relief and stimulus projects brought to Texas by strong local officials such as Mayor Tom Miller and powerful Texas congressional leaders such as John Nance Garner, Lyndon Johnson, and James P. “Buck” Buchanan. These projects did not come from a generous philanthropic community. Much of this infrastructure came from the beneficent federal government.
Even in 1964, the year the nation elected sometimes Austinite Lyndon Johnson president by landslide, Austin’s population had only grown to a little over 200,000. By 1964, Austin had a growth rate of 1.5% and a population 1% of Chicago’s.
Within 50 years, however, the pattern had dramatically changed. The Armadillo World Headquarters had set the stage for Dell Computers. By 2013, Austin topped 875,000, and Chicago hemorrhaged population (in fact, Chicago is smaller today than in 1920). One of the great cities of the twentieth century, Chicago, is moving aside for Austin, a city from the twenty-first.
West 3rd RR Trestle by Ted Lee Eubanks
Chicago shaped its future and its legacy in 1909 with the Burnham Plan. The Burnham Plan carried Chicago for a century. Austin has yet to choose. We have no vision, no plan, and whatever legacy we are leaving is being written for us by outside consultants. A city of emigrants is a city without its own past, its own heritage. We have chosen to import one instead.
I suspect that one of the visions being imported is from Chicago. Some of those leaving Chicago come here. They bring their tastes and cultures with them. With every arrival Austin changes ever so slightly from what it has been to what it may be. Some who come are here to earn the most and to invest the least. Yet there are others for whom Austin is now home, not only a destination but a destiny as well.
Yet consider the possibilities. Austin isn’t hamstrung with preconceptions of what a city should or should not be. Austin can draw upon its native traditions, as well as those of the people who have chosen to emigrate here. This amalgamation may well combine into an entirely novel heritage that guides (and profits) future generations of Austinites. Austin is poised to become one of the great twenty-first century American cities. much like twentieth century Chicago and nineteenth century Philadelphia.
At these crucial moments great cities find the will to trap opportunity and harness it for the betterment of all. Shoal Creek offers the opportunity for us to show how this should be done. These opportunities demand grand plans to accompany grand aspirations. Grand plans dance between the impositions of the past and the insensitivities of the future. At this moment, Austin has no grand plans, no path to walk. Yet the opportunity for greatness remains, waiting on an inspired few to stir men’s blood.
Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood…Daniel Burnham
