richjensen

Urbanhonking is a website community project launched by three friends in Portland, Oregon. It’s the home of dozens of bloggers and a rambling chat room. Youngish and playful, thick with musicians and independent media producers, these are mostly people trying to have fun and do good in a crazy messed up world. It’s one of the places I’ve been hanging out in the last year. There are talented, energetic people there that kind of slant the way I slant. But they are also about three quarters of a generation younger than I. It’s interesting (to me) to visit there.

Pages from the Urbanhonking Founders

Jona Bechtolt

Mike Merrill

Steve Schroeder

There’s this sweet young man at work. Very smart, shy, and gentle, tall. Today we talked. We had an errand and I drove the van with him in the seat along side. I’m old and curious and so is he. He tells me about mathematics and the astrophysics trivia he trades with his grandfather. Suddenly I got a thought and turned to him and asked, “You aren’t going to join the army are you?” And he said, “Yes.” He wants to join the air force, actually, and break codes somewhere back from the enemy lines, maybe deep inside a mountain bunker. Our conversation went along. He’s a good kid. He said he’d be proud to serve his country.

I said I thought the American government was criminal and there were much better ways to serve his country. We spent the rest of the day in silence.

I imagine something like SimCity: a model of the inputs/outputs and accumulations of an urban region. We’d see the political office holders, the public and private assets, employers, transit flows, etc.

A fancy version would accumulate historical snapshots allowing for review and critique of developments on the ground.

By the way, VbStoPe is a provisional name for my hometown, an urban region that includes cities from Vancouver BC to Eugene OR.

It would be a good thing if the 10 – 15 million urban residents of this region had a humane and rational means of managing their collective affairs. Visualizing what is here, how it all connects, and where it is going are the first steps to an intelligent, open and democratic discussion of what ‘we’ can do for the well-being of the world around us. I want to team up with folks working to describe the trans-urban collectivity (Vancouver-bellingham-Seattle-tacoma-olympia-Portland-eugene) that ranges here across several hundred miles and thousands of out-dated adminstrative and cultural boundaries.

VbStoPe is the urban node I know best, but I’d be very interested to help develop a kind of intelligent world map with the 600 – 800 other nodes of this size scattered on its surface.

My hunch is that this, the urban-region, is a more relevant level of granularity for considering both local and global affairs than either the national or the individual city ‘alone’.

The cities in my home region, here near the Northeastern shores of the Pacific Ocean, were mostly developed as competitive points of resource extraction in the 19th century. That competition still lingers and seems to support an irrational ‘otherness’ attributed by each town to its neighbors. I look forward to a greater integration of the cities here, more conversation among Seattle, Vancouver and Portland and the surrounding towns, and more opportunities to learn from each other how to deal with automobiles, zoning, healthcare, police policies, pollution, etc.

I really don’t like the idea of Cascadia, another popular name for the region here. I don’t think we need or want new nations, anthems, flags or armies in the world. Cascadia, just the sound of it, seems to evoke a fairytale kingdom. VbStoPe, and other acronymic descriptions of the city stuff already on-the-ground here, are more like the generic, functional descriptions that come out of organic chemistry. That seems like a better place to start a project of demystification.

Still, even though they use the tagline “Solutions for Cascadia”, I cheer www.sightline.org as a place to watch an ethical regional intelligence accumulate and grow more articulate here.