Innovation and the Built Environment
Chris Arnade wrote a photo-essay-style book a few years ago called Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America. I highly, highly recommend it. Since doing this book, he’s started a Substack chronicling his walks around various world cities.
Arnade’s walk around Orlando, for example, nails the vibe he is exploring there. I lived for a long time between “convention center land” and “tourist land,” and his walk skirts right by my old house. This is the big takeaway:
In many ways [Orlando] is the first step towards the hated and roundly mocked future our politicians seem to want for us. One where plebes live in pods watching content, while hooked up to a bug slurry IV. But instead of bug slurry, it is Buffalo Wild Wings, which you have to drive to first before it can be injected into you.
Everyone involved — city planners, the politicians, Disney, developers — have done their best to make Orlando a place devoid of organic community. They have done their best to build a city that squeezes out the human soul.
Even with that pretty harsh take, he does find some good things:
Despite that, there is a soul here. You find it inside places like Taco Express, where on a Tuesday night a family is throwing their daughter a quinceanera celebration.
The Taco Express (which he mentions multiple times) is literally about 2 miles away from where I lived. That’s nothing in Orlando. His overall impression is harsh, but it’s pretty accurate.
How do things get like this? Consider the unveiling of LA’s Sombritas, which are supposed to provide shade and light at minor bus stops around the city, and which have been in the news the past week.
Check out where the shade is actually falling in that picture. Arnade wrote about these too:
At best it provides shade for one person, maybe, and as many people pointed out, imagine the fights over who gets to use the sometimes single sliver of shade.
As for the light, I’m not sure how this is better, or any different, than your standard street lamp?
Then there was the issue of cost, and the whole wrapping it in the issue of gender equity. The latter was because it was found from a poll that women riders want more shade and more safety, which given that women are people isn’t surprising. All bus riders, no matter their gender, race, religion, and age want more shade and safety.
As for the cost, it was claimed that each La Sombrita is $10,000, although the research that went into designing it is said to have cost well over $300,000. The research included junkets to foreign cities to see what works including Quito, Ecuador, a city I’ve spent a fair amount of time in walking and bussing. I can tell you, Quito doesn’t have these sad things.
I am not the first person to make this point, but this is how *tons* of “innovations” come into being. Ridiculously expensive backstory that ends up in a product that doesn’t do what it’s intended to, and may in fact be worse than doing nothing. Examples in schools abound. I’m sure, reader, you can think of others.
Arnade goes on about them:
…something like La Sombrita could only happen in a high-regulation/low-trust society like the US. In every other variation (low regulation/high trust, high regulation/high trust, low regulation/low trust) you get either larger public works without fear of vandalism or misuse (a proper bus shelter), or like in Quito (a lower regulation society) you get natural ad hoc bottom-up solutions.
The high-regulation part of the US is usually couched in the language of safety, but it’s really about not allowing organic growth, which is messy….
The good news for hybrid schools is that even though they’re in the US, an overall high-regulation/low-trust society, hybrids are not really quite operating in a high regulation environment, yet. They often sort of build their own space in which to operate.
Arnade offers Turkey as a low-regulation/high-trust society. I don’t know if that’s true or not; maybe others can assess how correct that opinion is. But low-regulation/high trust (among member families) is an ok description of hybrid schools’ functional policy environments.
This risk aversion/avoidance of “messy” “organic growth” affects the physical, built environment of schools. In my local public school system, every school seems to be using the same building blueprints, no matter where they’re built. I’ve been in many of the high schools there, and I can navigate them all because the entryways and office arrangements are just about the same. I’m sure that saves money. But that’s not exactly the way hybrid schools are built; hybrids are much more messy/organic. And that’s just the buildings. Now: think about how “innovative” things *really* are in other areas among conventional schools, public or private. They’re *very* careful for the most part. High-regulation/low-trust. This is why I think hybrid schools have a shot at being a lasting and permanent part of the American school landscape. They operate with low-regulation, but come together in smaller high-trust subcommunities. They develop organically, even messily over time, and either persist or close down as individual schools. But particular schools find their places in various communities, and just keep rolling because they are built organically from the community’s desires and capacity; they’re not parachuted in after $300,000 in research design. And they’re not copied and pasted from other locations.
The Buildings
I really think the built environment of schools deserves more attention than it tends to get. It matters, and not in a if-only-we-had-more money kind of way. Even with basically no money, in an entity the size of most hybrid schools, it’s possible to keep a space clean, to decorate it tastefully, to play tasteful music, etc. Even doing that little bit matters.
The Catholic Diocese of Tulsa recently started a hybrid high school, and has just purchased more nearby land to expand it. I can only surmise but with my limited experience there it seems the architecture and potential greenspace probably were factors. The school’s built environment matters to them:
I absolutely understand there are constraints. Money really is one. Time is another. To the extent hybrid schools are meant to be long-lived institutions, serving a community for longer than the school career of one super mom, or one dedicated entrepreneur, I am only suggesting we all consider the built environment of schools more. We should be building (very small!) cathedrals, even if they’re located in some rented church basement or office building, not consigning ourselves to trailers.
The National Hybrid Schools Project is in the middle of data collection for a survey of hybrid school facilities around the country. I’ve worked with a hybrid school that went from renting space from a 5-day school, to using an unused public school building, to now having their own facilities (and then expanding them due to COVID demand). I know anecdotally about various kinds of buildings these schools use, but it will be interesting to see what the overall picture looks like. Facilities will, eventually, be another front on which hybrid schools and microschools will have to fight, as they become more popular. They already have. It will be one more place that these schools will have to defend themselves as organic/bottom-up/low-regulation-and-high-trust entities, operating in a high-regulation/low-trust environment. And that will be an important front if we want to, as Arnade does, keep our kids out of the pods and eating bugs, because that simplicity/conformity/control is the constant inertia political actors tend toward. I really mean most of this as a reflection on physical buildings but of course it’s applicable to all kinds of school innovations. We started and we’ll end with Arnade, calling for everybody to just calm down and let the people do their things:
A growing and absurd centralized regulatory mindset, that sees human flourishing as dirty and unsafe, that seems determined to wring out the last drops of any soul, coupled with a (rational or not) mistrust of the residents to treat new things with respect is resulting in our cities being frozen in time.
Places that when they do grow, do it one useless La Sombrita at a time.