Way finding, multimodal, and local gardens

Map of current community gardens in Albuquerque with walking and biking radii and bus routes noted.

The trend for the last 60 years in the US has been for us to rely more and more on the automobile. The car has made it possible for cities to become less dense and spread out to the fringes. This has created large neighborhoods that are not close nit or self-sufficient. People don’t shop at their small local grocery anymore where they can run into their neighbor. Now we all get in our cars and drive. We drive to the huge big box store with faceless workers and customers. And where is that food coming from? Do we care? With our dependence on the dwindling supply of resources we really should care. It’s hard to believe that these major issues could be solved very easily and maybe that’s true but there are things that can be done to help us turn back time in a sense to a time when we weren’t as dependant on imports. What if our need for gasoline was reduced? What if we could give jobs to our local economy? What if traveling around our neighborhoods was easy, cleaner, and less stressful. There are so many ways that the way we choose to travel and the produce we chose to purchase are related. Can community gardens exist in most neighborhoods? How would this effect pollution due to shipping of produce to our grocery stores? How would it affect the local economy? Would the public become more aware of what is seasonally appropriate? Wouldn’t it be amazing if everyone in a city could be within 5 miles of a local production garden? The benefits would be profound. People would get to know their neighbors again, get their hands dirty, and become more connected with their food. I would like to propose a way for the public to locate these gardens and access them through multiple transportation sources. This would be a 3-part objective. Traffic signs would be installed to direct exiting points and turns to the gardens. On street directives would target the cyclists, and tall poles with embedded information would speak to the pedestrian. All of these installments would be within a reasonable traveling distance for the corresponding travel mode. The walking distance would be set at ¼ of a mile, cyclist prompts would be within 5 miles and the traffic signs would reach to 10 miles. These installments have the potential to be used all over the US and around the world. Although the physical manifestation of the way finding material would be universal, the information attached to would be extremely site specific.

Prototypes for garden signage

Signs and stencils

Prototype signage at Nob Hill Grower's Market

Invitation to Infinity

Click image to open video, or goto: http://vimeo.com/69775023

So much of life seems linear. We are taught to think in a spectrum that has start and end points. Something is created and follows a path until that something must end or run out. Consequently, it is simple to measure the rise and fall of multiple topics pertaining to this matter. Just put them on a graph with the X and Y axis and see a very two-dimensional way of existing. When it becomes easy to perceive things as finite, the process of thinking cyclically disintegrates. But we must not lose this.

Because if we lose this, the reassurance that the mystical concept of infinity becomes smaller and harder to understand. In a time like the present, if we lose that belief that everything moves in a three dimensional pattern of harmony, we lose any hope for a sustainable future. Our existence will become finite.

Consider this an invitation. An opportunity to challenge yourself to think outside of the gridlines and beyond the terminable pathway. If this can be achieved, suddenly one starts to understand that the pattern that the sun follows is no different than the growth and decomposition of a tree. Suddenly it becomes clear that humans follow a similar pathway throughout years of history. We grow, we decline, we rise and fall and repeat ourselves. Whether it be on a daily basis or measurable throughout centuries. Charles Eisenstein believes that the only way to break our fallible want to measure things two-dimensionally is to consider this to be a time where we are being born into a new paradigm. “The present convergence of crises––in money, energy, education, health, water, soil, climate, politics, the environment, and more––is a birth crisis, expelling us from the old world into a new.” Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition.

And is this is understood, we can all act as components of change. We can provoke a movement towards creating a better world, like many people have done in the past. By supporting this new way of thinking, more of us will understand we do have a say in how we perceive and conserve the natural world. We do have control in deciding how we are going to relate to it and protect it. This is an invitation to regain that mystical concept of infinity, of seeing things in 3D and doing what seems impossible. And is with this kind of faith in a cause and direction, that we will move towards a world without endpoints, where anything is possible.