Begin Again with Trees

If you were alive in the Paris of Louis XIV, the impression of these new boulevards and avenues would be of a tremendous formalizing of nature, rather than of urbanization. The chief device, the parallel rows of trees was a fairly easy way to achieve stunning monumental effects and perspectives with little actual material and labor. These abstract diagrammatic schemes signified little beside the kings' ability to make a rural landscape orderly --something he clearly relished. However, when they finally were developed with buildings decades later, the boulevards and avenues of Louis XIV would become templates for the best of the Second Empire's new street typologies, and they remain models for excellent street sections into our time.

The City in Mind,

James Howard Kunstler
(emphasis mine)

Making ordered rows of great Memphis native trees could be the first, relatively easy step toward retrobeautifying our problematic ugly avenues and boulevards. Even -- especially -- in commercial districts.

Jane Jacobs in Practice

As I continue my slow read of Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities, I have a question:

are there any cities who have explicitly implemented Jacobs' strategies in their planning practice?

I don't think Memphis has had much of her analysis, much less her practice.

Searching for an answer to the question above, I came upon the essay "Localism" by James Howard Kunstler, urbanist and social critic. It starts at farmers markets, ends with a vision of a post-Peak Oil urbanism, design and culture, and along the way gives us this:

Localism, in this sense, is very much related to the current craze for styling one’s endeavors as “green.” Tom Friedman cheerleads for “green” globalism in his New York Times column while Time Magazine runs “Greencast” programs on its website, and all kinds of specialists design green cars, green light bulbs, green toilets, green campuses, and green corporate headquarters (all the better for hawking those Cheez Doodles). Much of this activity can be described, to borrow a locution from public relations, as blowing green smoke up our own collective ass. Such, alas, is the sorry state of our culture nowadays that just pretending to mean well, for most people and institutions, is good enough.

I had originally come upon Kunstler via a link to his Eyesore of the Month, small essays on recent world-class starchitect atrocities. Here's my favorite.