A participant in a City Repair place-making workshop once said, “What good is freedom of assembly without a place to assemble?” Here volunteers come together to repair an intersection in Portland, Oregon. (Photo courtesy of City Repair)

On after-work dog walks through my West Newton neighborhood, I see dozens of cars but few pedestrians. Less than a handful cross paths with me on the sidewalk, our interactions seldom going beyond the averted gaze, the perfunctory wave or the quick hello. Even in Dolan’s Pond, the closest patch of woods, waterfront and wildlife—a rare green space that I had imagined would be a post-rush-hour mecca for the deskbound—these walks are largely solitary affairs. As I commune with my canines and marvel at cardinals, red-winged blackbirds and other avian visitors to this nature sanctuary, I wonder where the humans are.

I imagine most of them are hidden in the usual places—behind workstations, dashboards or big screen TVs. Vacant sidewalks are typical of bedroom communities like mine, where many adult residents spend their most productive hours elsewhere doing work that in no way intersects with the life of the community. Away on weekdays, not much in evidence on weekends, and rarely seen operating without the aid of a mobile device, few develop strong ties to the land and people in their neighborhood.

In Bowling Alone, Harvard University Professor Robert Putnam estimates that every ten minutes of commuting reduces social connections by ten percent. With most adult residents of my hometown—myself included—at work or in transit most of the time, it’s hard to feel rooted to the community and invested in its future. To change all that, I thought of simple things I could do, from holding a block party to volunteering with local organizations to scheduling a town meetup. But as I searched the web for options, a more holistic, durable solution emerged.

Making the Neighborhood More Neighborly
The idea took shape in 2001, when City Repair in Portland, Oregon, an urban planning consultancy, organized the city’s first annual Village Building Convergence (VBC), now a ten-day event planned by thousands of volunteers that’s like a block party on steroids. By day, neighbors and visitors co-create or renovate small, permanent public spaces at 40 sites around the city where they can gather together, enjoy community-based art, or tend a permaculture garden. By night, they attend a community dinner, workshops, talks and a music festival in exchange for a small fee that supports the daytime artistic and ecologically-oriented “place-making” activities.
 
In one neighborhood, homeowners contributed a corner of their own property as a public gathering space replete with pizza oven, bench and community bulletin board. Another VBC project, which started out as a mural and bench at a well-travelled intersection, morphed into the construction of street-side compost bins and community gardens.
                         
Other cities with ongoing Village Building Convergence events include Asheville, North Carolina; Burlington, Vermont; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Olympia and Port Townsend, Washington; and Sebastopol, California, which held its first VBC in 2014. Projects included street murals, community kale patches, a children's fairy village and a decorative bus stop bench. The Sebastopol VBC also featured SEBtalks, inspired by TED Talks, on “The Heart and Mind of the Community,” and a daily “open village” where people could network, swap used items and get their bikes repaired.
 
These hands-on projects and community gatherings have led to a more connected Sebastopol, says Sebastian Collet, a Sebastopol VBC organizer who once worked as City Repair’s Placemaking Coordinator. “Through casual conversation I met four or five people who all live on my street,” he recalls.
 
Reclaiming the Commons
According to Mark Lakeman, principal and co-founder of City Repair, which has facilitated or inspired independent place-making projects in more than 50 cities in the US, Canada, Australia, India and Brazil, VBC is part of a growing effort to reclaim the commons in cities and towns designed more for automobiles than pedestrians.
 
“We raise awareness of a fundamental issue of placelessness that is endemic to the urban and suburban landscape of the USA,” says Lakeman. “We also motivate and support these communities to creatively engage the situation by planning and designing, funding and permitting, building and maintaining these various kinds of ecologically conceived gathering places. All of the projects promote design literacy, so people come out of the process with new tools and strengths for being creative problem-solvers in their own lives.”
 
The epitome of an urban retreat, Village Building Convergence could be just the antidote for bedroom communities like mine that can be as sleepy by day as they are by night. Whether developed through expansion of existing local programs (such as Newton’s annual day of service that brings neighbors together for building, painting, planting and cleanup projects) or started from scratch, a VBC in my hometown could be a game changer.
 
Over time, those dog walks might grow less solitary, peppered by impromptu conversations that go way beyond the quick hello. It may take a lot longer to get back home, but that’s a price I—and I suspect the dogs—would be willing to pay.

Reprinted from Cognoscenti: Thinking That Matters (WBUR, Boston's NPR News Station):
Thu, Feb 26, 2015 | Mark Dwortzan

Growing up in suburban New Jersey, I used to look forward to winter. Especially those extraordinary days that began with the sonorous, spine-rattling sound of my hometown’s school-cancelling siren. Energized by the prospect of the snow day ahead, I’d join my brothers or friends in the neighborhood to build forts and snowmen in front yards or sled down pristine hillsides. All while marveling at the look and feel of a gray, barren landscape suddenly gone white.

During this winter’s spate of major snowstorms, however, I’ve chafed at the first mention of an upcoming blizzard or other “plowable event.” Now snow days mean long hours clearing the white stuff off the driveway, cars, sidewalks, steps and rooftops. Not just once in a while, but once a week or more. Child’s play for an avid outdoorsman, but a bit daunting for a 50-something commuter who spends most business days sitting on his duff behind workstation and windshield.

While recovering in a recliner after one shoveling marathon, it struck me that I and millions of other suburban dwellers in Greater Boston — along with legions of plow operators — had toiled for hours in the service of the motorized vehicles upon which most of us had come to depend for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Indeed, without this collective sacrifice to the automotive gods, most of my neighbors would be hard pressed to get to work, the grocery store, the doctor’s office and other life-support systems not easily reachable by public transit, bicycle or foot.

Thoreau once wrote, “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” If he were alive today, he might have extended the line to apply to asphalt roads as well. Whether our transportation of choice is the train, automobile or bicycle, we are inconvenienced if not immobilized every time a critical mass of snow is dumped on the thousands of miles of high-maintenance roads that form the skeleton of Greater Boston and other metro areas.

So how can we begin to reverse the curse of road-dependency in suburbia, and the snow removal headaches that go with it? How might we bring more of the goods and services we need to survive and thrive within walking distance so we won’t always have to clear our driveways to reach them?

Curbing our addiction to life on the road may seem like a radical proposition, but citizens of Massachusetts are already taking steps that could help move us in that direction. These include:

Mix it up. Smart growth policies in a number of Massachusetts cities and towns promote the development of walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods that integrate open space, housing, business offices, shops, municipal buildings and other venues. For instance, in 1988 a strip mall in Mashpee in Cape Cod was converted into Mashpee Commons, a mixed-use, mixed-income, town center where residents attend to many of their needs on foot. Caveat: these policies can take years to implement.

Live off the land. Likeminded neighbors can reconfigure their block into an ecovillage — a walkable, environmentally-friendly, intentional community where residents strive to produce and access as much of life’s essentials as they can on the premises. Since its founding in 1978 in Shutesbury, Sirius community, the northeast’s longest-standing ecovillage, has made great strides in bringing the production of food, energy and housing back home. However, some residents commute to jobs outside the property, so there’s still a need to dig out.

Go virtual. In mid-February, Eric Convey, web editor of the Boston Business Journal, made a compelling case for an off-road activity that puts the workplace literally at our fingertips: telecommuting. But while telecommuting has returned some workers to the home front in recent years, their ranks are extremely thin. According to Global Workplace Analytics, a mere 2.6 percent of American employees consider the home their primary place of work. Could the winter of 2015 be the spark of a telecommuting revolution? 

Apply heat. If all else fails, we can always resort to the good old American techno-fix: retrofit roadways with radiant heating that melts snowflakes on contact. The Veron Company in Marlborough offers energy-efficient, low-maintenance radiant heating systems for driveways, walkways, roofs, gutters and downspouts. Innovative, yes; cheap, no. According to Angie’s List, installation costs for a 20-by-50-foot driveway can run more than $15,000.
While clearing the first big snows, I considered other, simpler ways to dodge the driveway dig. Should I move closer to public transit? Become an instant bicycle enthusiast? Hire a snow removal service? But by the fourth storm, it occurred to me that the least stressful way forward might be to simply adapt to the new normal of frequent major plowable events.

For now, I choose to adapt. In fact, I already have. Having cleared 100 inches of snow since the start of the winter, I figure my snow-hardened body is primed to handle whatever comes its way. The next time it snows enough for a school-canceling text to appear on my cell phone, I plan on welcoming the onslaught.

A three-foot blizzard? No biggie. Freezing rain on top of that? Bring it on! Before you know it, I’ll be so good at this that I’ll even have energy left over to join my 10-year-old building snowmen, sleighing down hills and marveling at the sheer beauty of it all.

 Reprinted from Cognoscenti: Thinking That Matters (WBUR, Boston's NPR News Station):
 Thu, Jul 31, 2014 | by Mark Dwortzan

Whenever I buy grapes imported from Chile, fill my gas tank with fuel sourced in the Persian Gulf, or select underwear made in Thailand at a department store headquartered in Minneapolis, I can’t help but wonder how much longer we can all go on like this. That our survival hinges on the economic vitality of countless far-flung suppliers  of food, energy, clothing and other essentials gives me pause. So does our reliance on cheap oil, natural gas and coal to deliver that stuff to our doorsteps and keep us warm, cool or plugged-in once it gets there. Not to mention the equilibrium of our planet’s climate, now threatened by the relentless combustion of all those fossil fuels. One of my greatest fears is that, someday, our remote-controlled, global commodity delivery system will collapse, and we’ll all have to scramble to meet our basic needs.

It turns out that I’m not alone. United by concerns about Peak Oil, a warming planet and global economic instability, some 27 groups throughout New England — part of 151 groups in the U. S. and 477 worldwide that have formed since 2006 — are taking collective action to transform their communities into walkable, locally-resilient “Transition Towns.” Such efforts empower residents to produce and consume more of life’s essentials where they live, all while minimizing their reliance on fossil fuels. By shifting their hometowns from a global to a local economy through urban farming, community-owned solar power stations, local currencies and other grassroots enterprises, these groups are advancing an alternative, post-carbon world that’s more ecologically sustainable, economically robust and socially cohesive than the one we currently inhabit.

One such initiative, the Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition (JP NET), the only one of its kind in Boston, has been in operation for three years. Among other things, JP NET volunteers have turned a formerly vacant, crime-ridden lot into Egleston Community Orchard, a garden space where apple trees, raspberries, chard and other crops are grown sustainability. The Egleston Farmers’ Market, another JP NET-backed project, has brought hundreds of people of different racial, ethnic and economic backgrounds together to buy local produce, listen to live music, and meet their neighbors.

The majority of Transition Towns, in fact, have expanded or repurposed green space for local food production. In Healdsburg, Calif., volunteers have converted residential lawns into vegetable gardens — replacing sod with raised beds of everything from squash to kale. Other groups have generated their own renewable energy via rooftop and community photovoltaic and wind turbine systems. A Transition initiative in the South London district of Brixton spearheaded the city’s first community-owned solar power station atop a public housing complex, netting enough electricity last year to power 10 homes. Such efforts are reducing not only residents’ carbon footprints, but also the amount of toxins that end up in their air, water and soil.

On the economic front, some Transition Towns have introduced alternative currencies that drive consumers to local businesses. In 2012, JP NET distributed the Boston Bean, an alternative five-dollar bill honored by various JP merchants during the winter holiday season. Transition San Francisco introduced Bay Bucks in 2013. According to economist Michael Shuman, every dollar spent locally produces up to four times the economic benefit — in terms of jobs, income and tax revenue — than a dollar spent at a chain store.

“Time Banking,” another common form of local currency circulating in Transition Towns, enables participating residents to earn a “Time Dollar” for every hour of services they provide. Members of Transition Sarasota’s Common Wealth Time Bank exchange Time Dollars for services like childcare and home repairs.

Transition initiatives are not only shoring up financial capital, but social capital, as well. Groups from Liverpool to Palo Alto have hosted “Transition Cafes,” informal gatherings to discuss such topics as renewable energy, transportation and climate change. Others have incorporated community-building into more hands-on activities. Australia’s Transition Newcastle organized a “Transition Streets Challenge to encourage neighbors to work together to use less water and energy and generate less waste.

A newly found inter-connectedness may be one of the greatest benefits of going local and weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels. In his book “Deep Economy,” Bill McKibben writes of farmers’ markets, “The market begins to build a different reality, one that uses less oil and is therefore less vulnerable to the end of cheap energy. But, more important, the new reality responds to all the parts of who we are, including the parts that crave connection.”

One lawn-to-garden conversion at a time, one local currency transaction at a time, one farmers’ market conversation at a time, Transition Town residents are laying the foundations for a more resilient, post-carbon world. Collectively, they give me hope that, even if the global economy doesn’t hold up in the long run, we’ll be just fine.

I want to go local not only due to growing concerns about fossil fuels, climate change, and economic instability, but also because the best times of my life have been in walkable communities with substantial green space, social engagement, meaningful work opportunities, and/or an enduring sense of place. Communities like

·        East Brunswick, New Jersey, where I spent my formative years walking unsupervised to Lawrence Brook Elementary School, playing for hours in a sand pile in my backyard, showing up at friends’ houses without having to arrange a playdate, and knowing nearly everyone on the block; and South Orange, New Jersey, a traditional green village where many of the shop owners knew me by name, and where kids often attended the same schools as their parents before them.

·        Ithaca, New York, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, leafy college towns with scenic parks and waterways, local farms, vibrant main streets dotted by bookstores and cafes, and diverse cultural amenities. Designed to be pedestrian and bike-friendly and bolstered by strong local economies, college towns like these have a lot to teach us about post-carbon living. 

·        San Francisco’s Cole Valley neighborhood, where I lived in a garden apartment and walked to work near Golden Gate Park. On a typical workday I would run into friends or coworkers on my way home—on the sidewalk, in the Real Food Company grocery store, at the Tassajara Bakery, and at other local businesses.

·        The ancient, 3200-foot-high city of Safed in Northern Israel, where I participated in a work-study program in which I helped build stone walls of a children’s park and painted rooms for immigrant families. Not once getting behind the wheel for three months, I enjoyed a daily routine of green mountain views, unplanned interactions and leisurely meals with program participants and neighbors, study of a millennia-spanning religious tradition, and work aimed at improving the quality of life in the community for generations to come.  

I want to go local because I love immersing myself in walkable communities like these where people have easy access to nature, neighborhood, and the work of their heart, and/or the larger history of which they are a part. And I want more of the world to experience the joys of living in such places.

I believe the most promising way to make that happen is to transform our cities and towns into post-carbon, locally resilient communities. The more we produce and consume locally, the more we come to know and treasure the land and people around us, and the more we experience work as a way to serve the land and people we love—for now and for future generations. Oh, the places we can co-create!