a critical impasse of cynicism

It has been an abnormally tedious journey the last few months for someone interested in architecture, design, planning and the various aspects that can be considered simple accoutrements to existing in a city one attempts to care about.

The economic “shakedown” coupled with the already depressed local market has instigated an abnormal despondency towards optimistic planning which has been amplified through already mishandled large scale urban projects. Just going back a couple of years points at milestones made in Cleveland’s development that are contradictory to the general understanding of progress.

The botched County consolidation, which included the Ameritrust Tower weakened an already precipitous public trust towards elected officials (possibly magnified by discrepancies of character in regards to national politics). The project was not transparent enough, nor deemed necessary enough, to justify to the general public the scope and intent intended. I admit, my skepticism for the project holds strong and I still feel that the edifice to personal ego was greatly misplaced (via the proposed location) and squandered an amazing opportunity (to construct a marvel atop the stone base of the existing structure which some had intoned was the original plan).

On the other hand the Euclid Corridor project (which I will probably never call by the purchased “Health Line” name, it just sounds stupid to me) also suffers from a lack of understanding. That the majority of Federal funds went towards long overdue infrastructure improvements and not the actual bus line. This is important to understand for a number of reasons; the first being that the actual cost of the bus line itself was a small portion of the cost of rebuilding the infrastructure spine along Euclid. A cost that will no doubt be recouped when understood as preventative measures to counter possible failures (of power, water, sewer, etc.) and the monies necessary for the emergency repairs. Secondly it granted Cleveland a “premier” street (similar to a Main Street) which creates an inferred value and address of import for businesses to locate to. In fact, quite a few grand projects were planned before the mortgage crisis sunk our current banking system with the planned speculative projects in tow.

Now the cynicism that goes along with misunderstanding has found a “new” target, the planned location for the Medical Mart, a project that again has not been forthcoming enough to gain public support and will therefore squander the opportunity of the backing of the general public. Mention creating jobs downtown and heads nod, talk about bringing thousands of visitors to spend money and corners of lips start to twitch into low smiles, add that the plan includes attempting to beat New York City to market and hands start to wring together in joy but if one hides the details of the bargain (by not repeating it often and enough) people will start to question the ideology of an administration already suspect.

At the last public meeting regarding the Med Mart I saw quite a few familiar faces, those that hold the future of the city dear to heart and honestly want to rebuild the city’s image to one of a bright future, an urban wonder. I also saw some faces that I usually don’t at these meetings such as members of professional institutions who should be leveraging their skill sets towards creating a better project (and by extension better city). I left the meeting during the public comment portion, mostly because the questions that I felt were most necessary to understand to judge the merits of the project were bound to be asked in an incoherent and muddled way. The presentation itself was straight forward and actually gave enough reasons for my curiosity via the site selection to be sated. Whatever going ons I was not privy too were either concealed well enough under the presentation to not make a difference or did not hinder the choice enough to be considered “dealin’s”.

I will inquire (again) as to transparency. Where is all the information regarding the deal? Search for “Cleveland Medical Mart” and you end up with dozens of Plain Dealer reports with sporadic information (and enough public comment to make your head spin). The web sites and blogs that show up (official) do not contain any information and at the time of this writing the County website is down.

The interesting aspect of this condition, however, is that the answers are out there. I have seen online reports, proformas, cost calculations, estimations of income and various strategies for structuring the construction and operating costs and find some confusion as to why these reports are not centralized so as to be easily referenced. Now would be a pertinent (albeit late) time to collect and disseminate the information in order to garner public support. However the onus is not entirely only on the project. Those hoping to counter will do well to import research into their arguments as well. Anecdotal responses do very little to further the argument (except to reveal a misunderstanding of the precedence as well as the conversation at hand) except to attempt to personalize it. The “how does it directly affect me?” argument shouldn’t be the main concern, instead we should question “how does it immediately affect those around me, those I care about, those whom I have and share concern for?”.

As such I ran a very quick comparison between the physical location of convention centers in competing urban centers, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Chicago, Detroit, Toronto (because I love Toronto) and Pittsburgh in an attempt to understand the correlation between the “assumed downtown center” and the convention center (as a case study for proximity and connectivity). Just a series of Google Maps represented that most of the convention centers are located relatively close to the center of “downtown” but not exactly, as they take up quite a bit of room (most of them are tucked to one side against a freeway or some other unbuildable area). What does this study show? Quite a bit if the proper questions are asked. How is the city connected to the convention hall? What amenities are nearby? How does this tie into the city as a whole? What is the correlation of public building to privately owned commercial structures? Then one can ask how many conventions are held each year, for how long, generating how much income? These are the sorts of studies that probably have been done (we would love to see them, to learn from them and point out congruencies and inconsistencies within the fabric of Cleveland). I mention this as an acceptable counter to the anecdotal information, my favorite so far being that a shopping mall in downtown Columbus is closed down for lack of use so how could a Convention Center in Cleveland succeed?

There is a time and place for unbridled cynicism. To be honest it is an easy way out of an argument, one you may not want to engage in simply because you fear what your own thoughts and opinions may reveal about yourself. I know I am guilty of throwing out the blanket statement of how everything in relation to the particular topic sucks. However the level of discourse that is being avoided may be the conversation most necessary to accept in order to exchange ideas and create solutions; which is where we with today’s problems of financial meltdown, environmental and social crisis, waning power supplies, exponential growth in technology (which may ironically be leading to more acceptable isolation).

We simply cannot afford knee jerk cynicism anymore, we require optimistic yet realistic solutions grounded in research, precedence and some expectation of altruism.