The borough of Delfshaven in Rotterdam was moved to action when vacant buildings were transformed into bright blight.

. . . and almost instantly, what was once an overlooked and easily ignorable area became one of the most seen places in the city.

This solution is similar to Detriot's Heidleberg Project.

What if we tried painting urban blight with bright in Cleveland? The city would look like a box of Crayolas from the vantage of Google's satellite map. Maybe tourists would come from all over to see the spectacle. Maybe Sherwin Williams could donate the paint and sponsor the guided audio tour of Slavic Village and East Cleveland. I imagine houses, apartments, warehouses and office buildings empty on the inside, but bright on the outside. Meanwhile Cleveland's homeless shelters will be bursting at their dull, dingy, unpainted seams.

HOWEVER . . .

A paint job wouldn't stop scrappers from taking copper and aluminum, rooftops from leaking, pipes from freezing, animals from nesting, squatters from squattting . . . Seems to me there should be a better solution than letting buildings and housing stock rot until they must be demolished (adding to the lost value of the home, the cost of demolition). My inner- re-user and reducer squirms that the solution for vacancy and abandonment is the bull dozer, but I am not sure that vigilante art installations and monochromatic paint-jobs are the solution. I do think that they serve to draw attention to the problem. However, I think Cleveland's problem is becoming too large to ignore.

Sad news: Killing the Buddha is dead.

My Meta-Meditation List

• Crazy neighbor and his crazy pit bull
• Quigley Road Vehicle Impound employees
• Middle-aged sidewalk vendor who whistles at me in Lincoln Park every time I walk by no matter what, and even followed me in his white, late model station wagon and whistled at me from his car a number of times
  
• The RTA transit cop who “wouldn’t give a nickel for Ohio City”
• The Lakewood Division of Taxation that needs constant proof that I no longer live in Lakewood, forcing me to retain utility records from 2003 in my files
  

Disparate Thoughts

Reading:

I spent an afternoon at the Algebra Teahouse on Friday. I had forgotten about its unhurried feel, the fava beans on the menu and the quality of the coffee. I sat by the wood-burning stove and read Small is Beautiful . . .

Our scientists incessantly tell us with the utmost assurance that everything around us has evolved by small mutations sieved out through natural selection. . . Every complexity, we are told, is the result of evolution. Yet our development planners seem to think they can do better than the Almighty, that they can create the most complex things at one throw by a process called planning . . .

An unemployed man is a desperate man and he is practically forced into migration. This is another justification for the assertion that the provision of work opportunities is the primary need and should be the primary objective of economic planning. Without it, the drift of people into the large cities (Here Schumacher is talking about the shift from rural to urban in developing countries. In Cleveland it would be the drift of people to the suburbs or the Sunbelt) cannot be mitigated, let alone halted.

The amount of real leisure a society enjoys tends to be in inverse proportion to the amount of labour-saving machinery it employs.

The prestige carried by people in modern industrial societies varies in inverse proportion to their closeness to production.

Other Quotes:

Voltaire: “Anything too stupid to be said is sung”

Lustfelt: “Anything too stupid to be said is twittered”

Strategic Essentialism & MTB:

I attended the Meet the Bloggers conversation with Ward 13 Councilman & 10^th District Congressional Candidate, Joe Cimperman. I’d like to take a moment to apply the over-used, yet useful theory of Strategic Essentialism to the situation.

In the conversations that occurred both during MTB and after the microphone was turned off, many of the bloggers focused on the one or two topics on which they disagreed with Cimperman. I felt that most neglected to appreciate commonalities. Not seeing the forest for the trees, they failed to recognize the value of an ally that is not “of the system”, but knows how to operate “within the system”.

Moving On:

I am moving soon (only about a mile away) and am feeling the tension between my desire to be light, free and portable and my wish to be connected to my past. My paternal grandmother, Mentoria recently passed away and my maternal grandmother, Jeanne recently had a stroke that has left her non-verbal. I regret not asking them more question about their lives.

My family history stems from both the African-American, rural, deep-south and white Appalachia. I have experienced neither place beyond short visits.

I am resisting the urge to scour basements and attics for creased photos and diaries. What would I really do with those artifacts?

I remind myself that possessions are impermanent. Trying to trust that I have the useful and necessary past stored away in heart and mind and that more is not always better.

My mouse stumbled across this social networking site, Rustbelt Bloggers. I joined it namely because of the name, but I like the idea of a site that links the region.