Memphis First

I had the real privilege to help with the Memphis First Robotics competition Quick Build session this past Saturday at the University of Memphis.  Students from Memphis high schools came together to begin building robots as the first part of the competition.

The instruction manual

The hardware

Students from the Memphis Academy of Science and Engineering begin work on their robot frame.

Craigmont High puts the motors on their assembled base.

Teams work on the programming and electronic components

It was wonderfully rich mix of young, middle, old, female, male, black, white, Asian, Latino, student, teacher, parent, mentor, sponsor, friend coming to together to learn, build, do, redo, make, program, share, talk, meet, eat, compete, cooperate, collaborate and create with each other.  Most surprising to me was the growing enthusiasm from the student teams as the day progressed.  By the end of the build at 4 p.m., teams from Hamilton, St. Mary's, Manassas, Craigmont and Memphis Business Academy had their basic robot going, and the rest were very much on the way.

While it was a scheduling coincidence that the build happened on the Martin Luther King birthday weekend, the event still demonstrated a great new Memphis that MLK's legacy is helping build.

The Weal of Memphis

This is the second part of a list I've been trying to put together that to list the pros and cons, ups and downs, bad and good, ill and weal of Memphis.  It is a personal, emotional list and I provide no empirical evidence for anything I write.  Also, it is about Memphis as a whole, as a complete platform for destruction, decay, change and creativity, and not about any one detail.  Memphis is a city of a bazillion great and some horrible details, but I will anoint none as the ill or the weal of Memphis.

Preface:  As it's heavily focused on possibility, much of what I write here may not be on anyone else's list as a good Memphis thing.  But they are the soil, seed and climate for a great Memphis if we want to grow it.


The Weal


Grassroots creativity, of business, art, film, music, food, and so on.  Wherever it comes from, everything in our civic power should be set to grow it.  Every Memphian a Creator.

Guerrilla street sign in Cooper-Young

Modern change. Newcomers, oldcomers, hybrids, their ideas and acts are creatively colliding in ways probably unseen since the founding of Memphis. Geographic sprawl and and the ungainly heft of Big Memphis threaten to swallow the seedlings of change, but dynamic change has a workaround for both in the live web.

Bike lanes on Madison

Room to experiment. An advantage to our existing urbanized sprawl is our ability to use the under- and unused for experiments in urbanism, agriculture, art and hopefully all 3 at once.  Always at risk of being pushed out by speculative hoarding by dull and unimaginative public and private owners, but there's more where that came from.

Small enough to change -- stolen from Corey Booker. Memphians, especially natives like me, tend to think of Memphis as bigger than it is.  It's not so big, however, and we can change its trajectory (whatever that is) so much easier than other cities can.  If we want to.

Low cost of living. A pro that is only in combination with other pros. Therefore a pro.

The food. Whenever I've lived in other places I've missed our food. It was great then and it's only gotten better (to our old school comfort food restaurants we've added the breadth of international and heights of fine). The local food movement promises to make it only better.

The music.  

The water. This includes not only our excellent tap water but the abundance of the stuff that flows past and falls on us.  We are rich in the stuff of life and it's tasty too!

The thunderstorms. The west to east suspense of these cataclysms is for the ages.

A beautiful, rich, fertile, exquisite natural environment.  

Good bones -- stolen from Jeff Speck.  Memphis remains a well laid out grid until it reaches the far edges of Cordova and Hickory Hill.

A Name. Memphis.  I'm a citisan but I believe Memphis is one of the great city names of the world.

A River of inspiration. The Mississippi River.

Texture. The intersection of our built form and a hot, humid and rich natural environment.  It's there in a million details but still remains to be created as the Memphis Look.

African-American foundation and majority.  The struggle for freedom and prosperity, and the creativity, of African-Americans has made Memphis a better city.  It's also a huge reason that the name Memphis resonates

Creativity of our myths.  When we get past the corporate genuflection, the myths and legends are ours to build on.  Build on.

Kid created mural in the Children's Museum of Memphis

The Ill of Memphis

This is the first part of a list I've been trying to put together that to list the pros and cons, ups and downs, bad and good, ill and weal of Memphis.  It is a personal, emotional list and I provide no empirical evidence for anything I write.  Also, it is about Memphis as a whole, as a complete platform for destruction, decay, change and creativity, and not about any one detail.  Memphis is a city of a bazillion great and some horrible details, but I will anoint none as the ill or the weal of Memphis.

Preface:  Modern Memphis started in a hole and now we're filling it slow.  Officially slow.


The Ill

Low density and physical sprawl. Memphis' biggest meta-problem, (compounded by near zero civic awareness of this as a problem -- see below), makes so many other solutions difficult. For instance the economic dynamism of entrepeneurship is so much harder to bootstrap in neighborhoods of few.

Prescott Memorial church demolished for a university surface parking lot.

Official neglect of Memphis as a city of place and form. There's been much work in changing this but it's my belief that the leaders of Memphis still overwhelmingly think the city can succeed in an underpopulated landscape defined by brownfields and parking lots, an atopia strung together by asphalt, long car trips and marketing.

Big Memphis, the powerful keiretsu of corporate, political and cultural leaders, that slowly push the big and the usual, and neglect the small and unusual. Its inability to see the small and different makes it all the more likely that the newborn sprouts of creativity and enterprise will wither not from malice but ignorance.

Leadership that is socially, economically, geographically cutoff from creative grassroots culture. The small, the funky, the casual, the natural, the random don't fit the hygenicized corporate model.

Steep hierarchies. The slow and privileged movement and blocking of information, action and people up and down our steep pyramids zaps Memphis' entrepeneurial dynamism and grassroot energy. Ideas become stale, creation is marginalized, people leave. We dissipate and lose civic energy on the incredibly inefficient ascent.  So unnecessary in a city of Memphis' size.

Hugh McLeod, Gaping Void

Creaky hierarchies, or the slow turnover of leadership.  Big names in Memphis in the 1980s are still the Big names in 2010s -- Smith, Hyde, Herenton, Ford, Wharton.  Even poor dead Elvis still lords it over Memphis.

Our heavy-rotation legends.  We're just another consumer of our biggest legends.  Creatively sterile and boring.

Cult of personality approach to problem-solving makes solutions unsustainable. Rather than looking for the replicable how-tos and lessons of successes and failures, Memphis lionizes or demonizes the person who did it.  The person will leave, die or just fade away, but systems (good or bad) they build can endure.

Social density and the the zero-sum mentaility.  The creatively destructive "I win, you lose, I'm in, you're out, you're up, I'm down" mindset is easy into lapse into in our dense thickets of off-line, non-serendipitous relationships.  Plus bad stories and ideas get stuck in the thickets.

Fear of failure and forgotten beginnings.  Forget the heroic stories of the cherry-picked best, and anything else that demoralizes the start.  Begin.  Every Memphian a Creator.

Lack and/or exclusion of capital. Without its flow, the ill-heeled, smart and ambitious will leave Memphis, if they ever arrive.

A history of violence. Memphis' levels of violence have been high throughout its life. In fact, it's possible that we're moving past that history with recent drops that have set 40 year lows for violent crime. But this reputation precedes us and it shapes both the global and more importantly local vision of Memphis as a dangerous place. It may take many years or decades of lower levels to move past it.

Poverty. The chicken and egg of many of Memphis' greatest ills (like racism, sprawl, etc.)

Racism. Beyond the fear and spite that splits Memphis from its suburbs, race remains a excellent tool for unimaginative politicians of all stripes to game for their own personal ambitions while neglecting real problem-solving.

The Children's Page, 1925

I found this drawing on The Children's Page of the August 2, 1925 Commercial Appeal. If this is the Eudora Welty, she would have been 16 at the time.

A weird coming together of the native talent and inbred evil of the South.

I'd been looking for a Commercial Appeal editorial putdown of H.L. Mencken (remembered by Richard Wright), which was probably a response to a Mencken putdown of William Jennings Bryan which was probably a response to a Bryan putdown of Charles Darwin. I'm still looking for the editorial.

World Reusers

I love the World Redeemers church on Lamar between Park and South Parkway. They have redeemed a defunct mid-sixties auto dealership with a new use, and with touches and flexibility that make it a model of hackitecture, mixing imagination, architectural reuse, personal taste and economic necessity together into a simple and visually evangelizing complex.

They haven't added any new buildings to the complex, with the exterior show lot still intact. However, they surrounded everything (including a much less visible side street boundary) with a wrought iron fence painted in the church's theme colors, purple and gold.

Up against the sidewalk, the fence gives definition to the complex and the street, as well as security; The wrought iron fence, which I'm fairly certain is a new touch, gives a a traditionally ecclesiastical presence to a car lot form.

But it's the reuse of the showroom and signage where WRC really shines. First they changed the string of roadside signs along Lamar from huckstering messages of "Used Cars" and "We Finance" to

and

They also left the Service Entrance sign on the side of the showroom/sanctuary.

At first I thought they left it there due to its height -- too hard to take down. However, they painted around it and above it and so I figure they could have removed it if they wanted. I believe it was it was left there intentionally, as that's part of the sanctuary. It continues the transformation of the commercial huckstering into religious evangelism.

The sanctuary is the original lot's main showroom (I actually looked at a car there when I was a teenager).

The show windows are gone, bricked in and embedded with gothic-arched stained glass. The form of this building is very much the same however.

Without a doubt, the most creative reimagining is of the 3 tailfin beams supporting the west wall and roof of the sanctuary.

To the 3 they added a 4th, a mirror of the original vertical beam, and completed the Cross.

And then they framed it in neon, again in the same color theme, for souls passing by in the dark.

This complex is hackitecture at its best -- reused, imaginative, visual, eccentric.

A city like Memphis that is poor in resources but rich in imagination is the perfect studio for works like this church.

Memphis could be, should be, the world capital of hackitecture.

Thank You Thurgood!

40 years ago today, the Supreme Court handed down its landmark ruling on Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe.

The ruling spared Overton Park and saved Memphis.

What I wrote 5 years ago.

Wolfside: Landscape Urbanism and Shelby Farms

A very interesting and unnoted fact about the Shelby Farms Park Master Plan: James Corner, the architect chosen to make it real, is a key theorist of the growing and increasingly controversial Landscape Urbanism movement.

I know next to nothing about Landscape Urbanism (because I haven't read their key work which includes Corner's essay "Terra Fluxus") except that they and those other ascendant urbanists, the New Urbanists, don't like each other's ideas and have set themselves up in Enemy Urbanist camps. The LUers want "to prioritize the natural ecology of a site over the built environment" in explicit opposition to the NUer's emphasis on the city's built form. The other charges that LUrbanists have surrendered to suburban sprawl and NUrbanists have gone nostalgic about city living.

(Meanwhile back here in Memphis, the differences are nothing compared to the condemned-abandoned-megamall-parking lot that separates both from Memphis' default camp, the AntUrbanists. The AntUrbanists destroy both our natural and built environment with equal apathy.)

At this point, Landscape Urbanism has few finished projects. In my strong opinion, the successful metamorphosis of the massive, formless and sprawl-adjacent Shelby Farms Park would emphatically demonstrate that Landscape Urbanism is worthy of greatness.

Shelby Farms should be the Seaside of Landscape Urbanism.