Letting Ugly Things Grow

I grew up in a neighborhood near a giant park. It has a pool, a carousel, a zoo, sports fields, gardens and so on. But my favorite parts of the park always were (and still are) the totally unmanicured ones: patches of woods with makeshift dirt trails, not marked on any map, snaking through them.

I wandered on my most recent visit through an area that used to be a city dump site for large slabs of concrete and other construction materials. It wasn’t ever fenced or anything, just out of the way and surrounded by woods. Today, most of the debris has been cleared out, the truck entrance appears permanently closed, and the clearing has been overtaken by weeds. So many weeds.

(Source: Author.)

I saw it and thought, “This will look great in 20 more years.” I know because some other wooded sections of the park were heavily cleared about 20 years ago to remove invasive buckthorn. And for a while after that, those sections looked really barren and awkward. Now they look great again.

Here’s the thing about woods: You like the woods? There’s no shortcut to the woods. You can plant a garden. You can plant a row of trees, but you can’t plant a forest in anything like its finished state. It has to go through its awkward phase. You have to allow it to grow.

Ecological succession in a wild environment is similarly a no-shortcuts deal. Think of an area that’s been badly disrupted by, for example, a volcanic eruption. Grasses slowly colonize the slopes that were stripped bare. Then come small shrubs and, in waves of succession, larger, woody plants and finally mature trees, and a whole new host of species that thrive in the now-shady understory. The hardiest pioneer species come first, and they create the conditions for successive waves.

Okay. What the Heck Does This Have To Do With Building Strong Towns and Cities?

There are processes that happen in a healthy city that are analogous to ecological succession. The idea that city planners ought to think more like ecologists is a long-term hobbyhorse of mine. I think we—those of us who are involved in building or shaping our built environment—ought to respect these processes and seek to let them play out. In some cases this also means protecting the process as it takes root. (Think of those deer fences they put up in areas under restoration to prevent premature grazing.)

Our cities are full of areas that have been badly disrupted, in the sense of the economic and social ecosystem. Paved over, abandoned, disinvested, left to decay.

A great example of the first, most incremental step of business activity in a clearly “disrupted” location. (Source: Very Local.)

If we are to think like ecologists, we want to ask, “Who is the first, or next, person, business, or entity that is going to come in and make something of this place? What does that wave of succession look like? And are we allowing that action to occur?”

Or, are we putting up roadblocks that ensure that the next incremental step does not happen? Typically this looks like regulatory or procedural hurdles that render the bar of entry too high for anything—in other words, a place remains barren of new development until someone is willing to step in with the resources to leapfrog that early stage of reinvestment entirely.

(Source: Author.)

Most of our readers, I suspect, highly value the end state of a walkable, diverse, dynamic place with a lot of local character. The trick, then, is to also value the process that gets you there, and some of the less obvious forms of urban dynamism taking place where there isn’t already a mature economy and a lot of wealth.

Johnny Sanphillippo wrote of pop-up flea markets in parking lots, “This place is a work horse. It grows small businesses from scratch without recourse to bank loans or government subsidies. It provides products and experiences that are genuinely needed in the community. And it costs almost nothing to create compared to the usual economic development model meant to induce artificial prosperity through tax holidays and subsidies for mega projects.”

Similarly, the sometimes-ingenious repurposing of strip malls, often by immigrant entrepreneurs, represents a sort of successional urbanism that, while not the end state of what many of us envision as our postcard-perfect strong town, is a vital and viable step on the way to something.

Creative living arrangements that accommodate large or multigenerational households in a residential area not built for them, or that carve out rental units for a little bit of income and added housing where it’s needed: These are steps in urban succession that tend to occur by “stealth” where not overtly permitted by regulation.

Accessory commercial units. Other home-based businesses. Food trucks. Street vendors. The ad-hoc occupation of vacant space for a garden, a plaza, a park, an art exhibition: something to activate it and show people, “We’re here.” These are all, in some way, the urban equivalent of the weeds filling in the field and preparing the soil for something grander and more permanent in the future. Does the place you live allow and facilitate these steps, or put up barriers to them?

Too often, this process stalls out. This can happen because an area is still being buffeted by the same economic forces keeping it poor and dysfunctional, but it can also be in part because the affordable, attainable next step that—and this part is crucial—already-committed locals can take on their own is not available or legal. We should always be thinking, “What is that next step?” Who can do it or can’t, and why?

Or, you can try to shut it all down. I’ve seen this reaction in response to pop-up businesses and the ad-hoc sharing or repurposing of housing in working-class suburbs that were originally built to be bedroom communities for white-collar commuters. Here, the logic of urban succession—let people try small things to meet their needs—clashes with the manicured-garden logic of the suburban experiment: We’ll put everything in its right place through careful planning, and then it will never change. 

When you build a place as a manicured garden—when you plan for control and constancy, when you focus on getting the aesthetics and the vibe of the place just so on day one—that place is never going to be nicer or more enticing than it is on day one. It has nowhere to go but down.

Where we let the weeds come in and do their thing, a forest can one day grow.

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