Walking and Community

This post is a continuation of yesterday's post and some thoughts I shared with a small group of neighborhood activists meeting at the First Unitarian Church last night.

As noted yesterday, the authors of “A Pattern Language” argue that “Individuals have no effective voice in any community of more than 5,000 to 10,000 persons.”

Because people need a voice in determining the destiny of their communities, smallness matters. Communities must be about self-governance, i.e. local power. Here again, I have my differences with how our city government is configured. Power, some power, needs to devolve from City Hall to Portland neighborhoods that are true communities.

Such devolution is part of a community effort to become self-sustaining.

Another part of that effort is developing commerce that is locally owned. Ownership of business needs to be part of the community for it to be responsive. Customers and business owners alike should strive to keep our resources within our communities.

And yes we should be able to walk to the stores in 20-minutes.

Communities have institutions: a library, a theater, a post office, bus stops, parks, plazas, cafes, (Third Places) and “nodes” of activity to name a few mentioned in “A Pattern Language.” All should be within easy walking distance of community residents and of each other.

A journalist’s aside: Communities also communicate. In fact, communication defines community just as it defines culture in general. Without communication, there is no community. We need to communicate to be a community, and the quality of that communication determines the quality of the community. The word “civility” is often invoked at this point. (An observation: with some exceptions, the smaller the political arena, the more civil the political discourse.)

So communities need community newspapers, in print or on-line. In recent years, list serves have also aided community communication.

The foremost community institutions are schools, where some of the most important community communication should take place. Schools, like families, are inter-generational time binders. They communicate knowledge, tradition, culture and, most importantly, values — individual and community values.

Schools should be true community schools. And yes, we and our children should be able to walk to them SAFELY in 20 minutes.

Here’s a quibble with the Portland school district. Schools should be — and should be called — community learning centers. They should be open year round to all. We all need to learn, and we can learn from each other. Our current schools don’t teach enough about their surrounding communities. They overlook local history, archeology, commerce and, most woefully, our dreams for the future.

Finally, 20-minute communities should be places with of face-to-face communication. Travel was once equated with communication. You or a messenger hand-carried a message somewhere. (The telegraph ended that). Letters were highly valued. Then we “reached out and touched someone” by telephone. Now we “text” over cell phones or e-mail.

I recently stunned a community friend when I walked 10 minutes to her house and hand-delivered a thank you note to her.

When I walk to the post office or the library a lot more happens than getting there. I feel the topography of place. I slow down. Time and place become one. I am exposed to the warmth and cold. I feel the breeze. I hear the birds. I notice the tint of the leaves, I mark the changes, small changes. A newly painted fence, a strange car in a driveway, a plumber’s truck outside a house, a posted sign about a missing cat. And I encounter people. We greet each other. We sometimes stop and talk.

Dog walkers are often the easiest to talk to. Dogs are social lubricants. I met a Newfoundland walker the other day. It turned out he’s for McCain; I’m for Obama. We bonded because we are both for Newfoundlands.

Neighbors for Newfoundlands.

Neighborhoods are bound by things like Newfoundlands — and sidewalks and school auctions and farmers markets and encounters at the post office.

Our day-to-day community lives are not taken with deficit spending, stock market gyrations and car bombs in Kabul,

On my 20- minute walks (not drives) to the Hillsdale Town Center, I meet more and more friends. And, not surprisingly, the more I walk, the more friends I make and meet. And all of them are neighbors. Friends who live just minutes away, in a 20-minute neighborhood/community.

A final word about time. Think of how we have come to monetarize time. We are paid by the hour. Time is money. We have parking meters that rent time to park. Our months are marked by bills. Our years by taxes — we even have tax years.

The 20-minute neighborhood begins to return time to its proper place. Time is no longer money. Time is living. We are given a life time and the time of our lives. The 20-minute community/neighborhood restores our place in our time — and our time in our place.

Part I: Defining community one step at a time

I’ve been invited to give a brief talk at the First Unitarian Church tonight on “The 20-Minute Neighborhood”

I’ve decided to break my remarks into two parts and parcel them out to you today and tomorrow.

I was intrigued by the term “the 20-minute neighborhood” when I first heard it.

The words grated against other “X-minute somethings.”

The three-minute egg

Four-minute mile

Fifty-minute hour (my wife’s a therapist)

Three-hour job

90-minute parking space

And, finally the 40-minute commute, which, as it turns out, is a kind of antithesis to the 20-minute neighborhood.

So, once the extraneous associations have been pushed aside, what is a 20-minute neighborhood?

It can only be one thing: a place whose center is no more than a 20-minute walk from where you live.

It must mean a 20-minute walk, not drive.

If those 20 minutes were the time to drive to the center, it wouldn’t be to a neighborhood center or even a community center. It might be the center of a small city. If it were a 20-minute bike-ride, it would be a town.

So the implied word in “the 20-minute neighborhood” is “walking.”

Such a compact neighborhood offers the obvious health benefits of walking. They are the kinds of benefits found in 10,000-step programs and the like. A walkable neighborhood also carries the environmental and economic advantages of not requiring us to drive.

This we know, but how does walking foster and define community?

It turns out that walking and community go hand in hand, if you will.

Notice that I have begun talking not about neighborhood but about community. It’s an important distinction.

In Portland, we use the word “neighborhood” when we often mean community. Or we establish livable neighborhoods as a goal without acknowledging the need for sustainable communities, which comprise neighborhoods.

What we may really want are 20-minute communities and 2-minute to 5-minute neighborhoods.

What is the difference between a community and a neighborhood?

One answer is found in the time 20 minutes. A person who lives a 30-minute or 40-minute walk from me (on the other side of the "neighborhood's" center) isn’t my neighbor, but is my fellow citizen, or resident, of a community.

So I question the concept of the 20-minute neighborhood, because a 20-minute walk is at odds with the scale of a neighborhood.

Those of us who think about building 20-minute communities in cities need to start with a definition of what a community is.

“A Pattern Language,” a bible of sorts for urban planners, cites a model used by Plato, Confucius and Jefferson. “Individuals have no effective voice in any community of more than 5,000 to 10,000 persons,” say the authors of “A Pattern Language.”

I happen to live in Hillsdale, a community of 8,000. And, yes, the City dis-empowers Hillsdale and calls it a “neighborhood.”

Hillsdale has several community amenities, all of them mentioned, by the way, in “A Pattern Language.” A neighborhood usually has a smattering of such amenities, but not all of them.

For starters, Hillsdale has a commercial center, at the physical dead center of our community. Metro, our regional government, calls this commercial core of Hillsdale “a Town Center.”

The idea of a "center” is implied by the 20-minute community. The center is the walker’s destination. Metro’s strategy is to have higher density populations living in town centers. Metro is also encouraging those living a 20-minute walk away to work, shop, play, and even study in Town Centers. Town Centers are also transit centers within walking distance, and many commute from there. Hillsdale’s center has nine bus lines, which was a major reason it was designated a Town Center.

Just as walking is essential to our lives (After all, it is the first thing we do when we get out of bed), walking is essential to community....

Tomorrow: Walking and Community.

“Deep Economy” meets “A Pattern Language” at the corner grocery

Bill McKibben’s book “Deep Economy” stresses the urgency of building small communities, nurturing local economies and living simply. The driving force is global warming and the planet’s limited resources.

Reading his book, I’m struck again by how much, and how quickly, we in Hillsdale need to change.

(By the way, “Deep Economy” is the choice this month for our Hillsdale Book Club. We discuss it this Thursday, June 7, at 7 p.m. at the Multnomah Arts Center. You are welcome to join us, whether you have read the book or not.)

As I see it, the first needed change is to connect with our neighbors, taking back time that is now “screen time” spent with mediated, fictitious people and places.

To bring about such a change requires those of us trying to build communities to make community life and involvement manageable, attractive and, yes, more important than screen fantasy.

In Hillsdale, we have a prototype for what I’m talking about in the Farmers’ Market. A sheltered civic plaza (with solar panel shelter) would build on the community center concept.

We also made great progress when, in the mid-'90s, we reconfigured neighborhood boundaries, creating a Hillsdale neighborhood with a Town Center at its a center. Another step forward came with the resolution of boundary overlaps with the Southwest Hills Residential League last year.

But Hillsdale, with 6,000 people, is too big to be a true neighborhood. In recent years, considerable research has shown that much smaller numbers are needed for a community to be cohesive and effective.

One source for this observation is the remarkable book “A Pattern Language.”

The book’s authors (Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, with Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel) recommend that neighborhoods should not be “more than 300 yards across, with no more than 400 or 500 inhabitants.” They go on to say that cities should “give the neighborhoods some degree of autonomy as far as taxes and land controls are concerned.”

Actually, cities should give autonomy to what we now call Town Center neighborhoods—Hillsdale being one of them. They should be rightly called "Town Center communities" consisting of smaller neighborhoods.

I’ll return to the Town Center Community concept at a future time.

For now, let’s focus on one aspect of those small neighborhoods. They are really defined by how far we can comfortably walk with a small push-cart full of groceries. We would buy those groceries from a great American institution that was killed off by the automobile and the supermarket: namely, the locally-owned corner grocery store.

More than small businesses, corner groceries were meeting places where neighbors would linger and get caught up on local news. They were, and once again would be, seven-day-a-week, small, indoor, neighborhood farmers markets. The owners, far from being some giant corporations in Delaware or New York, would be the family living upstairs.

A community like Hillsdale would have 10 to 12 neighborhoods, and 10 to 12 corner grocery/local gathering places.

And yes, not surprisingly, the authors of “A Pattern Language” had something to say about corner groceries. McKibben doesn’t mention them per se, but you can feel their presence in much of what he writes.

Of course to revive corner groceries means major revisions to Portland's zoning codes. And that means dealing with City Hall, not an institution prone to empowering neighborhoods, let alone a new civic entity called “a Town Center Community.”

But perhaps the Herculean challenges of these times will shake up the city's planners and powers that be.

We’ll see.