Refining Raw Material

I have selected six main bodies of work to study and draw my principle material from.  These six sources are all based upon the concept of Environmental Psychology, although not all of them are aimed specifically at the notion of altering or increasing the presence of flora in urban environments or otherwise altering architecture to make it more biophilic.  I have chosen these sources because, based upon their abstracts, they will be the best suited for building an argument to support my working thesis: In order to bring about an environmentally healthier and psychologically happier populace in the future, urban planning and architecture needs to focus on bringing about more natural elements into their designs.  This thesis is bare and unappealing at best, but it is concise enough to address my primary concerns.

My arguments will stem from the belief that applying environmental psychology to our urban planning designs will positively affect the individual moods of people inhabiting those urban environments and will create a gateway to encourage more environmentally-friendly behavior among those people in the future.  As is pointed out in one of the essays, science cannot predict the future, but there seems to be enough evidence here to support my assertions.  Of course, in writing the essay, I shall either succeed or fail in making my point.

Though my essays are all taken from an APA database, I think my arguments will be largely philosophical in nature with the science from these papers used as a justification for my philosophical arguments.  In utilizing philosophical style instead of strictly scientific style I hope to make the subject easier to consume; the trap in using this method is coming off as alarmist.  Particularly in terms of discussing the environment or environmentalism, alarmist rhetoric can doom an argument to dismissal for many people.

In addressing the question of whether other people from urban environments find themselves attracted to the more wild areas of cities, I have discovered an article related to children and environmental psychology.  Whatever the findings, I plan to use this as a way to make the essay more personally relatable.  If the findings do not support my thesis, then they ought to serve as a strong counterpoint to refute.

The Perfect Brainstorm

I think the title of this post is a little misleading, but I like it so I'm not going to change it.  I'll make no secret that I am developing an essay based upon this blog since this blog serves the dual purpose of acting as an assignment for school (part of which is sharing my thought process on creating my essay).  I am long overdue for this activity, but my thought process has been muddled with other worldly duties.

I don't have a strong thesis yet, which is a problem, but a large part of this is that I don't want to suggest a thesis when I'm not sure how I want to state my argument.  I'm personally inclined to suggest something along the lines of the benefits of nature in urban environments.  After making some inquiries and doing some light research into the subject, it looks like this concept is called environmental psychology and it's a fairly new and moderately obscure realm of thinking.

Environmental psychology may increase pro-environmental behavior.  Architecture designed with environmental psychology in mind maybe more appealing to humans for primal evolutionary reasons.  I won't make any positive assertions to these without more assertive research.

Based upon what I've seen in Olympia and in Tacoma, I think there is something worth arguing here.  This weekend will be focused on, among other things, nailing down the nitty-gritty details of what I want from this essay and starting to layout a rough draft.

Level of Acceptance

Downtown Olympia is heavily gentrified in the style of its bohemian residents.  The walls are covered in murals and the people wear various eclectic layers of clothing in their own particular edgy style.  Almost everyone has sunglasses on - it's sunny when Gabriela and I are there, but it was raining not a half hour prior.  The sun was, as it often is in Washington, just teasing the possibility of summer between dreary spouts of rain.  There is no humility in downtown Olympia, just unbridled pride in the artistic expressions of its community.

In the midst of all of this gentrification is a small bastion of nature so minute that, even though I was looking for it, I walked completely past it.  It doesn't help much that the location I was seeking is marked by a small plaque no more than a couple inches in length and a laminated paper sign asking pedestrians to please keep off the grass!

What grass?  I'm looking for Beatty Memorial Park!  Well, we found it - Gabriela and I.  It was right where we were told it would be, on 5th Ave right in front of Buck's Fifth Avenue.  The park is no more than a tuft of grass sticking out of a crack in the sidewalk.  The plaque (which has been returned or replaced after being stolen in 2015) and the laminated paper sign are the only indicators that this tuft of grass is actually recognized by the city of Olympia as an official memorial park.

Please keep off the grass!

Finding this treasure was exciting for me.  I had been led to believe that Beatty Memorial Park was going to be another regimented display of grass presented in a nice clean circle on the sidewalk.  The reality was something that looked like nature doing its thing.  The real story behind it, however, is a little more complicated.  In this case, Nature isn't doing its thing entirely on its own.

Mary Lou Beatty was a longtime resident of Olympia, and she volunteered as a bookkeeper at Buck's Fifth Avenue.  Every year for her birthday she'd pour grass seeds into the cracks in the sidewalk in front of the store and declare them to be her memorial park.  When she died, loving family and friends carried through her decision and the city of Olympia made the park official.  A horticulturalist from Evergreen university even brought miniature sheers down to keep the grass properly mowed in the park for quite some time after it opened.

What appeals to me about Beatty Memorial Park, though, is that it looks like Nature struggling to reclaim the city, but it's actually human beings helping Nature struggle to reclaim the city.  It's discreet enough to be an oft-overlooked kitschy attraction in the art district of Olympia.  The discretion of the park is a by-product of its regular grooming.  Although it is scruffy for a tuft of grass, it isn't allowed to grow out of control.  This is another case of humankind caging nature for its amusement - the Beatty Memorial Park is a sort of urban grass zoo.

The park was quite a fascinating discovery, and it makes me wonder what other wonders Olympia is hiding in plain sight.

Nature-ing within the Lines

Shortly after being introduced to areas around Olympia, I was afforded a chance to see sights to the North in Tacoma.  We began our journey by the University of Washington by climbing on the free train and heading to the Tacoma Dome Station to eat at the Freighthouse Square food court.  This was a favored selection of Professor Birkenstein, and I was unfortunately unable to try any of the variety of foods offered by the court due to a limit on my wallet.

The Freighthouse Square food court

The Freighthouse Square is a gentrified freight warehouse for the nearby train tracks that presumably used to run much closer to the large green building that now acts as a shopping venue for Tacoma's trendier locals.  Sporting everything from a comic book shop to a barber shop, the interior of the Freighthouse Square has been changed as little as possible to preserve that down-home eating-your-szechuan-in-a-freight-warehouse feel.  You know, just like back home.  Despite my cynical attitude, it is a nice place and the crowd wasn't too thick at lunchtime on a Monday afternoon.

Upon leaving the Freighthouse Square food court, we headed back across the street to the Tacoma Dome station while discussing our next move.  During this discussion I noticed what turned out to be my only glimpse of wildlife in the midst of Tacoma's dense urban areas.  If other such places exist in Tacoma, they weren't anywhere near our itinerary.  Perhaps eventually it will be worth another look.

Wildflowers in the city

Most striking about this area, lost behind a warehouse in plain view of both the street and immediately adjacent to the Tacoma Dome station, is the vividness of the colors.  Here, like in Olympia's Tumwater Falls park, the flora is bright green and decorated with lovely little flowers.  The flowers themselves are exciting to me because this area is so clearly unplanned as far as gardening is concerned; they are golden yellow and hot pink among the tall green blades of grass.  This slice of nature is truly worth its beauty.  I wouldn't wonder that it goes unappreciated by patrons of the free train every day as they wait patiently for their ride.  Well, with this photograph at least some of its beauty can be admired for posterity's sake if nothing else.

As I had mentioned, the flowers behind the warehouse were to be the only real exertion of nature against the awesome might of Tacoma's regimented city planning.  Our trip took us past the Washington State History Museum (which, like all museums, is closed on Mondays) and across the Chihuly Bridge of Glass.  Now, the Bridge of Glass is a marvelous gallery in its own right.  It displays the work of local glass artist Dale Chihuly, and I got several nice pictures of his work.  But what I noticed was what was below the bridge rather than on it.  In this case, the freeway (which allows pedestrians to cross from the Washington State History Museum to the Glass Museum on the other side of the I-705).

Very prim, very proper, almost austere

Growing up looking at 1980's and 1990's surreal artwork, I was often struck by depictions of mathematical infinities.  These were used to create depictions of virtual worlds or to demonstrate perspective, and they always fascinated me.  The straight lines of the freeway below the bridge create this perspective for me in real life.  And the only green here is carefully placed - it grows only where it's told to grow.  The hedges are in neat little rows and trees are planted in lines where they can serve a dual purpose of giving the impression of being natural as well as blocking sound from the freeway.  A small patch of ivy tries to cross the barrier on the west-bound highway (on the right side of the picture), and that's the most nature has been allowed.  Around the train tracks on the right, the ground is covered in deceased yellow grass.  The few shrubs in the yellow grass are spaced out more or less evenly, giving the impression that they, too, have been planned.  In Tacoma, things have a place, and that's where they belong.  Nature does not reclaim Tacoma, Tacoma reclaims nature.

Not pictured: ducks

On the far side of the bridge is the Glass Museum.  Like the State History Museum, the Glass Museum was not open that day.  However, there were some things to see outside.  Most notably, this beautiful water feature.  Now, what I like about this picture is how much of Tacoma it captures.  In it, we can see the old and the new, the artistic and the practical.  The conical shape of the Glass Museum rises on the right, where glass artists actually use a massive kiln to create artwork every day that the museum is open.  Just to the left of the cone is an old brick building with its name painted on the side - it's been converted into modern apartments on the waterfront (obscured mostly by the artwork in the foreground is a reflective black wall that has been added onto the old building).  At the left in the background is the beautifully designed but eminently practical suspension bridge that runs across the Thea Foss Waterway.  Beyond that is the Tacoma Dome itself.  All of this in addition to the blown glass artwork in the water feature that makes up the foreground.  (For extra Washington points, it's also overcast!)

The Glass Museum is built on the Foss Waterway Esplanade.  The Esplanade is home to a trendy bar (the Social) as well as a grip of luxury flats.  It also offers access to the marina inside Foss Waterway, in which one might sail a boat into Puget Sound for an afternoon to enjoy the maritime air.  If you're into that kind of thing, which I'm not.  Still, the market must not be great for boats, since a fair number of the boats (not pictured) had signs on them indicating they were up for sale.  There was another interesting part of the regimented gardening style of Tacoma on the Foss Waterway Esplanade, though.  This one caught my attention partly as a curious tourist but mostly as a cynic.

Stay classy, Tacoma

Parts of what I can only assume are boats and ships (I have no experience in this area) have been colorfully painted and placed among plants in a garden path that runs along the length of the esplanade.  Somewhere in the history of this area, someone thought that taking trash from old boats and prettying it up to put on display would enhance the natural beauty of these plants.  I can't say I necessarily agree with the artist, but it does seem wonderfully gentrified, doesn't it?  Nothing can be more pretentious and lazy than simply cementing your garbage to the ground, covering it several layers of thick glossy paint, and claiming it's simply part of your garden.  Well props to you, Tacoma: your hipsterness knows no bounds.

Having seen all we felt we could see on the Esplanade (which offered limited daytime attractions to the unimaginative tourist) our group piled back in our Saint Martin's van and drove off to the Chinese Reconciliation Project Park just down the road a bit.  Now, I have a bit of a beef with this park because despite its good intentions it seems a bit wasted.  First, it's in a very difficult spot to get through during normal daytime traffic.  This means it doesn't see that much traffic.  Second, it's not well-advertised or even terribly visible from the side of the road.  At the risk of derailing this blog's running theme of critiquing nature in the big city, I'd say that it was placed somewhere out of the way where it can be said to have been built with the allowance that the folks that perpetrated the crimes that caused its existence in the first place wouldn't have to see it regularly or think about it in anything other than a detached logistical way.  This upsets me because I feel like, if you're going to have a park that apologizes for the crimes your community committed, it should be somewhere obvious so that newer generations can continue learning from the sins of their fathers.  But I digress...

There was much to see in the park, but it was a park and like the rest of Tacoma it was firmly within the lines.  There was a small section of beach that apparently used to have a pier, and this was the closest that I could get to unrestrained nature in this part of Tacoma.

Puget Sound

I'm not especially familiar with barnacles or sea-life as it pertains to what grows on the pylons below piers, but from the stuff I recall from growing up in California that stuff isn't generally gray.  I'm not sure if that's different in this part of the world or if the gray on the pylons is the by-product of some treatment that is supposed to keep the wood from rotting into the sound.  Stopping at the critique of the gray stuff on the pylons, Puget Sound stretches out beyond the shore in a gorgeous panorama.  Though often constrained by man-made channels and straits, such a large body of water is best suited to its own freedom.  Whatever happened to the pier here is a mystery most likely lost to time.  There are other piers nearby, but over time the sound will reclaim even these six pylons.  Although Tacoma is master of its land, I don't believe it can ever truly master its waters.

We ended our trip on that note, and I must confess to griping at Professor Birkenstein for some time on the trip back to the home base about the poor placement of the Chinese Reconciliation Project Park (as though he was a member of its planning committee).  I was less satisfied with Tacoma than I was with Olympia, as its rigidity felt confining.  I think it even made me feel a little anxious.  I am glad, at least, for one little patch of grass behind a warehouse by a train station.  May its flowers bloom summer after summer.