greenskills.net Blog

How could these topics possibly be related?

I learned how government procedures can be a victim of intrigue when I was blocked early in my budding architectural and planning career from getting my projects approved. Zoning hearings used to be routine procedures, in which a board offered minor regulatory adjustments and then rubber-stamped plans that would help a city or town increase the assessed valuation of the property within its boundaries and enable it to collect more taxes.

Then at some unspecified date in the early seventies, someone turned the lights off in the hearing chamber, saying they would consume too much fossil fuel, the projects would eat up too much virgin forest and farmland and the cars going to and from the project would create too much dangerous traffic, noise and air pollution. Suddenly they were well funded and brought legions of experts to zoning meetings—botanists, ecologists, entomologists, zoologists, air pollution scientists, and our forces countered with geotechnical engineers, fluvial geomorphologists, potamologists and hydrologists. What had been a friendly world broke out in holy war. It was after the third such confrontation that I began to think that maybe there’s something to it—other than futile blustering by ignorant idiots who opposed any kind of change to their customary surroundings, people who did not share our team’s grand vision for improving it. For one thing, a few defeats handed to me at the bar of local approval soon brought home the fact that their efforts were not futile: we were stopped dead in our tracks.

The second realization dawned when I detected skullduggery behind one of our larger defeats: someone had set the young, wild-eyed environmental advocates against the developers, but not for the reasons of environmental purity that they claimed. We had planned our projects to be a demonstration of good land use: with high densities to shorten walking distances, make residential property accessible to stores and shops, keep homes near jobs, make a future mass transit stop accessible, preserve green space within the development. But who had done this? We soon learned that these kids had become the unwitting tools of larger forces—those that didn’t want apartments (and the riff-raff they attracted) in the suburbs, those that opposed competing businesses and those that just wanted everything to remain green, despite the fact that the land was not in a natural state—it had been farmed for generations—and to have their way, no matter what opportunities for economic growth and improved land use the community might lose out on in the process.

A third issue—and this may have been our Achilles heel—was that, despite our good intentions for better land use, our developer had selected a flood plain location, and this choice was due to the fact that the land was cheaper—for good reason: it was the least desirable and suitable for urban development. And over the years the true cost of making and keeping it suitable became apparent: it needed levees, pumping stations, drainage channels storage ponds, and a host of special engineering measures to create and maintain the basic conditions that exist at the outset on high ground. While the ability to protect from floods for long periods has been shown to be possible in entire countries, like the Netherlands, it has been less successful in New Orleans. Often the die is cast for urban development long before rational planning can be achieved, and then it is too late. While the premise of building on low land can be shown to be a fallacy, it is a romantic and seductive idea, one which many will defend. Hence the battle is joined.

It is this conflict between an immovable object (the city and its inexorable demands for growth) and the irresistible force (the river, Nature and the environment) that has fueled many costly urban battles, with dead and wounded on all sides. It’s the stuff of conflict, and it has inspired many life histories and stories worth the telling. That’s what got me going in writing my new novel, Crimes against Nature, and how it came to be that an architect who loves to tell these stories and to write the histories of real people was inspired to create a murder mystery, set in St. Louis, during a flood of record rivaling the Great Flood of ’93.

More next time.

Till then, regards,

Peter