Friday Grab Bag: Descartes, bodies, carpets, Cleopatra

It's a Friday, and it's been a little while since I've posted and a long while since I've posted a Friday Grab Bag.  After all we've been through, it's spring finally and beautiful in Massachusetts today.  This leads me to think that some random thoughts on random topics with no discernible thread is what people need.  So, here goes.

Friday philosophy (complete with a dead body). Think about this sentence for a minute: "Police confirmed yesterday that the body found floating in the river belonged to Sally Jones, a sophomore at the local community college who had been missing since last Friday."  While this sentence is made-up, it nevertheless could appear in a newspaper article reporting on an ongoing investigation. What's interesting to me is this -- what can it mean for a corpse to "belong" to someone? It makes no sense.  The body is not in my opinion distinguishable from the "self" and furthermore, even if it is, the "self" referred to in the sentence is dead, and therefore no longer able to own anything.  This is a case of Miss Marple meeting Rene Descartes and the offspring not being too pretty. 


Cleopatra dons a disguise. On a completely other note, I was talking to a 7th grader the other day and she was telling me about her project on Cleopatra (queen of ancient Egypt famed in part because of her relationship with Marc Antony and in part by her dramatic demise by an asp).  Of the facts she related to me about Cleopatra's life was this one that I did not know (retold here by me using her emphases):

Long before Marc Antony, Cleopatra was intrigued by Julius Caesar who was in the process of installing himself as the first emperor of Rome.  Cleopatra wanted to meet Caesar but going to Rome overtly would have been a complicated issue politically, so she opted for another method -- clandestinely.  Of course she would travel by ship, but how could she be on the ship without being spotted?  Her answer was to go to Rome rolled up in a carpet, a carpet that would be delivered to Caesar as a gift, and which when unrolled would produce this woman, the queen of Egypt.

A fabulous story, though it is hard to imagine what the travel accommodations were like.

Note: Wikipedia fills out the story wonderfully and dramatically and gives a much more accurate telling of this story, correcting my bad information, such as -- this happened in Alexandria, Egypt not in Rome, and Cleopatra sought Caesar as a trump card in her power struggle with her brother Ptolemy.  The fact that she had Caesar's child 9 months after the "carpet encounter" is an interesting fact too, as is the source of this tale, Plutarch.

Of course there have been many images made of Cleopatra over the centuries, so pivotal is her story to our imaginations.

Here are two separated by 19 centuries:

Cleopatra.  Egypt, ~30BC

Cleopatra meets Julius Caesar.  French, Jean-Leon Gerome, ~1867.

A city. A shutdown. A suspect. And us.

It beggars the mind to jot down last week's events in Boston and Cambridge and Watertown - Monday's two bombs near the finish line at the Boston Marathon that killed three and wounded many more; the release of the video footage identifying the suspects and possibly precipitating Thursday's very violent night -- the robbing of a 7-11, the killing of MIT police officer Sean Collier, the car chase from Cambridge into Watertown and the shootout in Watertown that killed one of the suspects and sent the other one into hiding; finally, Friday's day-long manhunt for suspect number 2 culminating in his capture while he bled under a tarp in a boat parked in a backyard.  The first of funerals have taken place, and if injury weren't enough, Westboro Baptist Church showed up to add insult.  Teamsters Local 25 set up a human chain to protect the mourners. This week, Cambridge City Hall held a minute of silence and Officer Sean Collier was remembered by the MIT community with Vice President Joe Biden in attendance.

I still cannot grasp the meaning of last week's events though many good efforts have been made to parse them.  As an urbanist, I am interested in what this says about cities, though I must concede that Shakespeare probably got it best when he asked "What is the city but the people?"

Many smaller stories tile the larger people mosaic -- the police officer able to weep only in the solitude following Officer Collier's funeral; the acquaintance's girlfriend who got shrapnel in the chest from the exploding backpack; the friend woken on Thursday night to the sound of a war on the street outside her house in suburban Watertown; these cannot be minimized.

What transpired on Friday, however, is equally baffling. What can it mean when a whole urban area of over 1 million people comes to a self-imposed halt so that law enforcement can pursue one man?  Where have we come to, and should we be happy that we are there?

The day certainly showed not only the determination but the capabilities that America and an American city can bring.  Within four days after the bombing, one of the suspects was dead and the other was in custody, wounded. 

This incredible law enforcement capacity exists for a host of reasons - training, cooperation, technology.  But there are other reasons too. The streets on Friday offered not a soul nor a sound other than the wail of sirens of motorcycle police joined from time to time by the rumble of heavy trucks rolling down the center of the street, canvass-topped and painted in the light tan color appropriate for desert warfare.

The streets were empty because the people stayed inside, in response to a "shelter in place" statement by the governor, a statement that was not an order, but a request. 

How does such a request produce such a result?  Social media must be a crucial element.  Only by our interconnectedness - the fact that we are wired to each other and to the web - could Friday's complete shutdown occur.

It brought results.  Still, it produced worries too.  Ought we have been more circumspect? Do we risk group-think building a momentum of its own with unsettling and potentially dangerous outcomes?  Simply believing that we act for the right reasons does not protect us from being wrong, which is only a rephrasing of the aphorism that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". 

The confirmation on Thursday that the body found floating off India Point Park in Providence, Rhode Island this week belonged to 22-year-old Brown University student Sunil Trepathi points out the danger.  Wrongly identified by online sleuths as one of the bombing suspects, Trepathi's name was blasted around the Twitterverse as if he should be sought by the FBI.  The viral nature of the accusation got so bad - while so completely unfounded and incorrect - that the editors of Reddit later apologized to family for what they described as a "witch hunt". The family no doubt appreciated the contrition, but the Genie had left the bottle.  The family issued this statement:

"As we carry indescribable grief, we also feel incredible gratitude.  To each of one  you -- from our hometown and to many distant lands -- we extend our thanks of the words of encouragement, for your thoughts, for your hands, for your prayers, and for the love you have so generously shared.   

"Your compassionate spirits is felt by Sunil and by all of us.  This last month has changed our lives forever, and we hope it will change yours too."

They concluded: "Take care of one another.  Be gentle, be compassionate.  Be open to letting someone in when it is you who is faltering. Lend your hand. We need it.  The world needs it."

In the odd paradox of the human spirit, those who have the most legitimate reason for hardness often evince the opposite and ask others to do the same. 

It is always tempting to assume we have entered some new era, that technology has fundamentally changed us, that "history has ended" -- to quote one of the great whoppers promulgated after the fall of the Soviet Union.  History hasn't ended. Technology has changed many things, but it hasn't fundamentally changed us, and as Americans, we have an obligation to maintain  the most important aspect of our freedom -- the weary, wary sideways glance by which the governed and the governing view each other. 

Surely some revelation is at hand.

For some reason, two lines from William Butler Yeats' poem "The Second Coming" have been rattling around in my head over these past few days:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity. 

To whom these lines apply, I know not, but Yeats said many things well. This is no exception.

You can read the whole poem here.

Innovation Districts: Fad or Future?

Are innovation districts a passing fad, or are here to stay?  This was the motivating question behind a panel discussion I moderated at Harvard's Graduate School of Design on April 3.

Watch the discussion here:
 

The event was organized by an ambitious group of planning students at the school, and in the course of preparing it, we covered many aspects of innovation districts and developed a series of important, interrelated questions about what they mean.  Here's how we phrased it:

Innovation Districts are all the rage, with cities around the world attempting to create them. What makes them work?  What are their local and regional implications?  Can they be planned, or must they occur organically?  Can they be replicated? These are just some of the questions to be discussed by a panel of experts on April 3 at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.

The distinguished panel consisted of:

• Tim Rowe, founder, Cambridge Innovation Center
• David Dixon, principal, Goody Clancy
• Guillaume Pasquier, deputy director, Paris Saclay
• Gavin Kleespies, executive director, Cambridge Historical Society
• Marc Draisen, executive director, Metropolitan Area Planning Council

Click on the link above to watch the discussion.

New Construction: These numbers just in.

In 2012, Cambridge witnessed groundbreakings for over 1.8 million square feet of new construction, almost all of it in Kendall Square.

Meanwhile across the river in Boston, three million square feet of new construction is underway right now in their innovation district, with another 20 million planned.

This deserves an exclamation point! These are very large numbers in very small geographic areas.  If ever there were statistics that screamed "Cities are the 'it' thing in 2013", these would be them.

We're a long way from 1975.

Remember to chew before swallowing.

After Mitt Romney's crash and burn in the 2012 elections, the radio waves were alive with anger, gloating, recriminations and analysis over the outcome.  Sensible people on the right (which means only not on the extreme fringe) pointed out that this is the fifth time in the last six presidential election cycles that the Republicans have lost the popular vote.  Of course that's true.  Starting in 1992, in every election but one, Americans have chosen the Democrat over the alternative: Clinton, Clinton, GORE, <Bush>, Obama, Obama.

Still, the wisest observation I heard about GOP's problems boiled down to this: "George W. Bush is an undigested political fact in the Republican Party."  

Also true. Without facing the long trail of destruction that Bush 43 and the neo-cons left in their path (dare we call it their "trail of tears"), the Right's hope of building a winning national coalition will be held back a generation at least.  My advice: Start chewing.

Kendall Square, a brief historical sketch.

[Note: The panel discussion on innovation districts held in April at Harvard's GSD is viewable by clicking here.]

Kendall Square is the story of the life and death and rebirth of an urban landscape in the heart of one of the Northeast's most important regions, the Boston metropolitan area.  Kendall Square is also the story of the transformation of the American economy from industrial powerhouse immediately following World War II to today's post-industrial knowledge economy.

It is odd to look at a 1947 aerial photograph of eastern Cambridge and realize to what degree industry was an integral part of the urban fabric.  What today would be referred to as "noxious uses" -- industrial machine shops, gas storage tanks and the like -- were very much woven into everyday life in cities across the country, even in university enclaves like Cambridge.  While these uses were often put on waterfronts because in a pre-environmental era flushing waste into water bodies was seen as an acceptable solution to an otherwise challenging problem, these types of facilities were never far from the homes of the customers they might be serving or from the labor they might be employing.  The side-by-sideness of it -- industry so near residential -- is very foreign to American sensibilities in most urban centers these days, but it was taken as fact by urban dwellers of all income-strata.

1947 view of Kendall Square with old industrial uses.  Residential commences just outside of photo.

By the 1960s, times were changing.  The long-term viability of the city's industrial base eroded while John Kennedy's 1962 promise to send a man to the moon by the end of the decade produced land-use consequences in Cambridge.  This was the era of governmental reach and big visions.  NASA was in growth mode and chose to site its Electronics Research Center in the city, in part because its administrator James Webb had long-standing ties to MIT.

NASA Electronics Research Center under construction in Cambridge, circa 1966

Meanwhile, the promise of urban renewal animated many decisions in municipalities across the country.  These two forces combined to radically alter the landscape of the eastern section of Cambridge.  The Cambridge Redevelopment Authority worked with all deliberate speed in conjunction with the federal government and local officials to assemble land and clear it.  The CRA didn't stop at the boundaries of the NASA property.  Everything out to Binney Street was stripped of buildings.

Kendall Square as it appeared in late 1970, with all the land cleared by Cambridge Redevelopment Authority

NASA unexpectedly departed Cambridge in 1970, the only NASA center ever to close.  While there is some speculation that Richard Nixon's antipathy to the Kennedys had something to do with the decision to shutter the facility, it nevertheless left Cambridge with an unpleasant question: once you've created a moonscape, how do you repopulate it with buildings and people?

The answer they came up with: do a plan, then find a developer who will build.  In a decade-long effort culminating in the 1979 agreement between the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority and Boston Properties, the CRA spelled out a grand vision for the land, and the developer promised to deliver.

This is the plan that Boston Properties has followed since the initial agreement in 1979.

And deliver they did.  Over the following decade, Boston Properties constructed close to 2 million square feet of new buildings on lots that had been used for parking.

A 1975 photo looking west on Main Street. On the right are the parking lots that will be filled in.

A 2013 Google Earth view of Main Street, with the parking lots on the right completely filled in.

There is widespread agreement that this urban fabric falls short of current tastes, but back then a building was a very welcomed thing.  Cambridge is trying to retrofit this area now, but today's concerns are worlds away from the challenges of 1975.