The Truth about Arts & Culture
ByYesterday, I addressed the meeting of the Phoenix East Rotary - a small, but great-spirited group of people.
The meeting began with a recitation:
Rotary’s ”4-Way Test of the things we think, say or do”
- Is it the truth?
- Is it fair to all concerned?
- Will it build goodwill and better friendships?
- Will it be beneficial to all concerned?
The group shared with me that they attend Broadway tours that visit ASU Gammage – and take part in community productions at Scottsdale Desert Stages Theatre. Many loved last year’s Chihuly installation at the Desert Botanical Garden – and one had enjoyed a recent Nearly Naked Theatre production. Like I said – GREAT group of people!
After about 10 minutes of discussing all the fun things they’d recently attended, I asked: “Why does arts & culture matter in our community.” The common answers to this question (here & everywhere) mention ”economic vitality”, “cultural tourism”, “enjoyment” and, less frequently, “community pride.”
Then a man, an architect, raised his hand and said, (I’m paraphrasing here) that the arts are the cure to the deplorable way homes & communities have been designed here in the Valley of the Sun for decades – with walls between yards and drive-in garages that preclude even the most basic of neighborly relations. Cultural participation, he stated clearly & simply, gets us out of our homes and behaving like a real community.
Not just well said, a solid testament to the #1 question of Rotary’s 4-Way Test.
Bravo!!
As I’m sure the member of your audience was thinking, it isn’t always about those sometimes pompous Pritzker prize-winning buildings we are talking about. Its the simple artifacts of our human habitats that have been steadily eviscerated by builders and developers in their headlong pursuit of profits at all costs. Of course, they’ve been amply aided and abetted by city authorities who set out zoning and planning ordinances that create the stultifying straight-jacket of regulations that we are expected to live within and that cause much of what we see around us today.
One of my clients is based in Barcelona. For obvious historical reasons that city is different to anything here in the valley. But they have to deal with precisely the same issues we do as far as economic diversity, attractiveness of place and infrastructures to support automobile, train and air transit. However, in Barcelona, they haven’t created a regulatory environment that is solely oriented toward accommodating the automobile or making life easy for developers to chew up more and more land. Consequently their buildings – existing as they do in a similar climate to ours – don’t have to be located hundreds of feet away from each other to meet setback and nose-in parking regulations. In Barcelona the buildings can actually shade each other thereby providing for a far more humane and walkable urban habitat than anything we have here. The result? People actually want to go to Barcelona to hang out there. They’d go there whether or not there were any galleries, gated “communities”, golf clubs or resorts. The place itself – and the culture it engenders – is enough of a magnet to get people to show up by the millions each year.
We hear lots of talk about economic revitalization – very pertinent and relevant topics for nation and our region. But in these debates we hear few calls for radically changing the physical makeup of our human habitats – the very places where we carry out our lives, bring up our children, seek comfort and solace after a long week at work and so on. Its almost as if the places we call home are some kind of stylistic afterthought to making money or educating our children. We have become so anesthetized to the mile upon mile of strip-mall ugliness that assaults our senses every day, that we tend to think that our physical surroundings – the way they are planned, designed and built – has little to do with our culture, economic stability and wealth creation.
As Winston Churchill once remarked “First we make our buildings…..and thereafter our buildings make us”. He had a point worth noting.