Glacierization: Concepts Pt. 1

That BIG EAR is coming back to life this semester under the auspices of the Jackson Community Design Center based out of the 5th year MSU architecture school.  By the end of this term, the JCDC will be publishing a book of 4-6 conceptual suggestions about the current conditions of State Street.  

Our theories are conceived in the larger frame work of the relationship of I-55 and State Street.  The basic supposition that unites our work is that the interstate is one of the most important variables in the evolution of Jackson and many other similar cities.  This relationship is what we will call the effects of a superpath on a path.

This post is the first in a series of initial concepts.

GLACIERIZATION

gla·cier: a large body of ice moving slowly down a slope or valley or spreading outward on a land surface

Annexation Map of North State Street – annexation of the final territory happens around the time of the completion of the interstate

The speed of growth of State Street slowed to a crawl in the 1970’s as the interstate began to dominate.  Zoning annexation finished up the north end to the edge of Ridgeland , but the area was already marked with the stench of death. 

Development has continued in Ridgeland, just across the interstate—just across the divide between the suburban and urban.  At the divide, a suburban phenomena, Target turns its back to State Street and opens onto the interstate.  Just north of Meadowbrook Drive traffic drops on State Street and increases on I-55.  There are very few reason to come to State Street along this stretch, and, additionally, there are also very few reasons to use this stretch as a path from one destination to another.

Why does glacierization occur and why at the north end of State Street?  We may initially respond that it is simply a result of economic pressures, the interstate drove State Street out of business, but this answer misses the larger question, a question of ideology.  The north end of State Street acts as defensible space—distance that is used to separate the safety of the suburban from the terror of the urban.  This distance is a physical and psychological barrier—a constructed empty space made possible by the technology of the interstate and the state of mind of a fearful demographic.  Is this not the reason so many residents in Ridgeland put up a fight over the height of an office building at The Renaissance?  They moved to Ridgeland to get away from the city.  Tall buildings, vertical growth, is equated with the city, a truly unruly place.  Suburbanism is a politics of fear.

How could urbanism, a doctrine of compactness, over come the distance?  How could Jackson possibly reach out to its suburban neighbors?  The north end of State Street will forever be a glacier, a silent limping body.  In fact, the glacier seems to be spreading as development continues to move north and county line road begins to die.  The only hope is global warming...

Connections Come, Connections Go

Image from MDAC.  An alchemist's connection that lasts 2 weeks.

So long Mississippi State Fair 2008.  Here's to another year of a city disconnected from its main corridor.   

Prior to the construction of the interstate in the late 60's, The fairgrounds resided on the opposite side of the main corridor (State st.) from the city.  Now it resides between the city and the corridor (I-55).

Current Traffic Counts on State St. (red) and I-55 (yellow) from intersections with I-20 (right end) and County Line Rd. (left end)

It is an incision in urban fabric, a desert that cuts a quiet city off from a fast-paced interstate.  What do we do?

What is Jackson's Identity?

How many of you give driving directions like this...take a right at the Shell station, then go down until you see the sign for Home Depot, then you will take a right and you will see a Pizza Hut and a Taco Bell... etc.? If Jackson was stripped of all of these signs and all outdoor consumer propaganda, what would the identifiable land marks be? What is Jackson's Statue of Liberty, Millennium Park, or Bourbon St.?

In an article by David Harris featured in Adbusters magazine, Harris looks at just this sort of situation. Sao Paulo, Brazil the fourth largest metropolis in the world and Brazil's most important city imposed a regulation that all outdoor advertisements be banned and removed. The city's mayor, Gilberto Kassab explains:

“The Clean City Law came from a necessity to combat pollution … pollution of water, sound, air, and the visual. We decided that we should start combating pollution with the most conspicuous sector – visual pollution.”

The article also includes and excerpt from and interview by Bob Garfield on "NPR's On the Media" with reporter Vinicius Glavao from Brazil's largest newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo. In the interview when Galvao is asked about the appearance before the ban he states:

"São Paulo’s a very vertical city. That makes it very frenetic. You couldn’t even realize the architecture of the old buildings, because all the buildings, all the houses were just covered with billboards and logos and propaganda. And there was no criteria. And now it’s amazing. They uncovered a lot of problems the city had that we never realized. For example, there are some favelas, which are the shantytowns. I wrote a big story in my newspaper today that in a lot of parts of the city we never realized there was a big shantytown. People were shocked because they never saw that before, just because there were a lot of billboards covering the area."

The interview later continues with the following dialogue:

BG: I want to ask you about the cultural life of the city, because, like them or not, billboards and logos and bright lights create some of the vibrancy that a city has to offer. Isn’t it weird walking through the streets with all of those images just absent?

VG: No. It’s weird, because you get lost, so you don’t have any references any more. That’s what I realized as a citizen. My reference was a big Panasonic billboard. But now my reference is art deco building that was covered through this Panasonic. So you start getting new references in the city. The city’s got now new language, a new identity.

Photograph of Sao Paulo taken by Tony de Marco

(Click here to see more photos of Sao Paulo)

Photograph of street signs after Hurricane Ike in Galveston, TX. (Click here to see flickr link)

Now, picture this:
If we were to wake up tomorrow and all evidence of outdoor advertisement had vanished, would the existing structures hold their own identity?

Which areas of Jackson would maintain their integrity? What measures would have to take place for those identities to begin to emerge?

Now, lets take this to another level...imagine that the entire population of the United States woke up tomorrow and found the same scenario. I feel like I'm creating the makings for a killer Twilight Zone episode, but work with me for a minute. Which cities do you think would be the most successful at still functioning?

This is an important factor in our research in finding the influence of the Interstate on city development. Most likely, the cities that would be the least detrimental to the human psyche and the personal sense of orientation would be those whose infrastructure developed based on the necessity of walkable neighborhoods and mass transportation. Cities designed around plazas and iconic landmarks. New York, Washington D.C., and Boston just to name a few.


The reasoning is simple: how easy would it be to find your unlabeled destination while driving 60 mph down the freeway?