You can’t always know how you’re going to affect someone else’s outlook…for that moment, for the day, for…? I really like the thought behind this video.
Smile, even if no one’s looking…you never know who’s going to feel it.
What’s in a smile?
Posted in community, social, spirituality, urban living
Tagged community, connection, gratefulness, gratitude, love, smile
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Iranian Cartoonist Flees ‘Unimaginable’ Conditions, Reflects On Life In Exile
Iranian cartoonist Kianoush Ramezani is among some 150 Iranian intellectuals, media workers, journalists, and bloggers who were forced to leave Iran following the postelection crackdown last year. According to Amnesty International, as many as 5,000 people were arrested in Iran following weeks of antigovernment demonstrations.
Ramezani is the founder of Iran’s first Cartoonist Society and the president of the Cartoonist Society of Gilan. He spoke to RFE/RL correspondent Golnaz Esfandiari about why he fled his homeland and what it means to live in exile.
RFE/RL: Why did you leave Iran?
Kianoush Ramezani: Following last year’s presidential vote, because of the atmosphere that was created and also because my fellow citizens—journalists, political activists, and those who were trying to raise awareness and spread information—came under intense pressure and were repressed, the majority of those working in these areas were forced to leave the country.
SLIDE SHOW: A Selection Of Cartoons by Kianoush Ramezani
A number of them were arrested. Some of them had to leave Iran illegally through Turkey and northern Iraq under [what were] sometimes very difficult conditions. Later, they were granted refugee status in other countries.
A few months after the vote, because I decided not to practice self-censorship, I started to draw political cartoons that reflected the postelection repression, in order to help the Iranian people and their protest movement. Because of the problems I was facing — the arrest of my very close friends was an indirect threat against me — I was forced to leave Iran. Since December, I’ve been in France, where I am seeking political asylum.
RFE/RL: Until recently, you lived in your own country, with your family and friends. You had your job. You were well-known. Now you’ve lost many of the things you could once take for granted. You’re a refugee. You’re living in a country that is not your own. How does it feel?
Ramezani: I was one of those Iranians who believe that they had to stay in their country to be effective and have an impact from inside the country.
Since 2006—because of the pressure I faced over of my work—I could have asked for asylum. It wasn’t my plan [to leave my country], but the postelection conditions were, and are still, so unimaginable .
[In Iran] I basically had two choices. I could have stayed and remained totally silent or wait to be arrested and jailed at any moment. I would have become a person who wouldn’t have been able to be useful to society or the opposition movement. Between being sent to jail, remaining silent, and practicing self-censorship, or going into exile while enjoying freedom of expression and the right to work, I chose the [last] option.
Even though French people and rights organizations here treat Iranians with respect, this still is not my homeland. There are problems. There is always homesickness and nostalgia [and] the thought that I will not be able to see my country and Tehran for a long time. The thought of not being able to be with my family. I wasn’t even able to see them and say goodbye because of the way I was forced to leave the country. These are all pains that one has to experience to understand what it means to be a refugee and why refugee status is usually associated with pain and sadness.
RFE/RL: I looked at some of your drawings and cartoons and didn’t find anything about living in exile or the plight of refugees. Is that something that might be reflected in your future work?
Ramezani: Yes, because of the kind of crisis my country is facing, I’ve been focusing on the crackdown and repression of my people, and I haven’t really focused on my own status as a refugee. But while searching through my work, I found a cartoon, which I sent you. I drew it after researching the life of a Romanian writer, Ion Luca Caragiele, who went into exile and passed away in [Berlin], far from his homeland. His life inspired me. The drawing, even though it is about a Romanian writer, can now represent the life of some Iranian refugees.
RFE/RL: If you had to make a cartoon or a drawing of a refugee or asylum seeker, what would it look like?
Ramezani: It would definitely be a person that has left a part of himself in his homeland. It would be definitely a person with a body or soul that is incomplete that is kept away from his homeland.
Posted in activism, corruption, entertainment, urban living, violence
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Vietnamese gardeners in New Orleans offer much food for thought
by Breaking Through Concrete team
Thang Nguyen has been gardening his canal-side backyard in east New Orleans for 35 years. (Michael Hanson photos)
East New Orleans is lush and crumbling. Sometimes it feels like the built environment—the convenience stores, sugar factories, distant oil refineries, houses, brick apartments, parking-lot pavement—is no different than the vegetation: all bloom and decay, the life cycle spinning in time lapse.
Between Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne, a lagoon inlet of the Gulf of Mexico, and about 10 miles east, Chef Menteur Highway runs for almost 40 miles across the Rigolets (rig-o-lees), a wild and undeveloped tract of pine forests and swamp. Strip malls cling like painter’s tape to the side of the highway, and between the asphalt and behind it, the wetland jungle seems to breathe its hot, wet air onto everything.
On Chef Menteur clings Village de l’Est, a neighborhood of vinyl-sided or light-colored brick ranch houses in a perfectly mid-century suburban layout with sidewalks, a few main avenues, and a couple shopping centers. A low mound on the north side of town, covered in tangled weeds and shrubs, marks the levee that holds in the Pontchartrain overflow.
Six thousand Vietnamese people live in this American village. The Vietnamese moved here with the Catholic Church in 1975 following the Vietnam War. Many were fishermen, and the nearby Gulf offered a work environment similar to their homeland. They also went to work in factories, hotels, and restaurants throughout New Orleans. Everyone, especially the elderly, knew how to grow things—that’s what they did back home. In their little square suburban backyards, they grew vegetables and fruits from seeds brought over from Vietnam. Some even crossed the levee and planted in that no-man’s-land. The wet fields, Delta soils, and thick, heavy air accommodated the same plants they grew in Vietnam.
Katrina hit Village de l’Est hard. A commitment to return to their homes following the flood and a rock-solid work ethic helped speed recovery, but it was the talent for growing their own food in community spaces and backyards that really guaranteed it.
My Tran works with the Mary Queen of Vietnam Church, the strongest entity in the community (90% Catholic, 10% Buddhist). Most of the elderly generation attend mass every morning from 6:30 to 7:30 a.m. My’s parents arrived here with the rest of the influx in ’75. They farm a plot in the community space along a black-water canal. In their conical straw hats, with banana leaves silhouetted against the hazy blue sky, water lilies choking the still canal, and a hundred shades of green surrounding them, the scene could be frozen on a Vietnam postcard. But the stories of hard work and scrappiness sound like the American Dream.
It’s just what they do. There’s soil and there’s sun and there’s water. Why wouldn’t you grow food there?
Years ago Nu and Thang Nguyen fed their family of nine children and still had enough left over to sell at the local market and to restaurants.“When we were younger, my parents grew veggies for home and for sale at market. They made over 50% of their income from the market sales,” says My. “They came here with no education, no language. Dad was a plumber and Mom cut grass for minimum wage. They tended the garden at nights and on weekends. My grandfather did the original farming—he passed it on to my parents.” All nine of the Tran kids went to college.
Since the ’70s, the food economy here has been largely a local one. Backyards produce enough for the family’s own consumption and more: they sell the excess the local Pho restaurants and food markets. Without stringent regulations or organic certifications, the Saturday open-air farmers market still welcomes all comers. It looks and acts like a Vietnamese marketplace.
The Minh Canh grocery store off Alcee Fortier Street too could be transplanted straight from Vietnam. I can’t recognize most of the items. Fresh produce—mainly greens—sit in boxes scattered about. There’s a buzz in here, the type of movement and noise that seems both chaotic and comfortable.
A small garden plot behind an east New Orleans house feeds this woman and her family.
On our final afternoon, we meet with Father Luke Nguyen. He’s an assistant to Father Nguyen (who is traveling in Vietnam), the charismatic leader of the church and community who’s credited with many of the progressive ideas coming from this community. Father Luke is an energetic man in his own right. He takes time out from his priestly duties to show us gardens and introduce us to residents. In each home we visit, we are offered cold water and sodas and invited to sit in the large, open, spotlessly clean living room with shiny, white-tiled floors and portraits of family members on the walls.
I ask Father Luke if the gardening will survive this generation of elderly. Are flat-screen TVs and fast food—the dark side of the American Dream—going to bulldoze the native knowledge and amputate the green thumbs? He doesn’t see it that way. It’s not just this elderly generation that wants to farm and enjoys being outside gardening and raising food. It’s just the elders. Period. There will always be elders. Other retirees in our culture pass the time playing bridge, tennis, golf, or volunteering at parks, etc. In the Vietnamese community, the elderly and retired stay busy growing food.
This turns all my notions of continuity and sustainability on their head. In Village de l’Est, they encourage the young’uns to be professionals, to work and raise their families. When they’ve retired, then they can dig in, connect with their heritage, and grow food.
Maybe this is a model we can learn from.
Posted in community, energy use, food, land use, urban living, waste reduction
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Suburban malls headed toward a new life?
from Chicago Tribune: Blair Kamin
With a central dome that resembled a flying saucer, the three-legged mall that opened in northwest suburban Mount Prospect in 1962 (left) looked like it had whirred down from outer space and landed in an old farm field at the corner of Elmhurst and Rand roads.
“Randhurst,” it was called in honor of its two main bordering streets, and it was a thing of wonder, the Chicago area’s first enclosed shopping center. Shoppers flocked to the air-conditioned spaces beneath its futuristic dome.
But the future proved short-lived. Just forty years later, with shuttered anchor stores and shrinking traffic, the once-proud retail pioneer seemed well on its way to becoming a “dead mall.” Its useful life, however, was not over.
Today, in an act of radical design surgery, Randhurst is being remade into an open-air, mixed-use development that will have many features of a traditional downtown, including shops, movie theaters, offices and a hotel. The dome and core of the mall have been demolished, and next year a developer plans to open an old-fashioned Main Street lined with Prairie Style-influenced buildings in their place. There will even be angled parking spaces that promise to let you drive right up to a shop, though chances are you’ll really be parking in a vast field of asphalt much farther away.
The revamped mall already has been given a quaint variation of its original name: Randhurst Village.
The catchphrase for this promising — and provocative — type of remake is “retrofitting suburbia.” From Cape Cod to California, its advocates aim not simply to remake dead malls, strip centers and big boxes, but to alter suburbia itself, making it more dense, more walkable, and sustainable — in short, more urban.
That is a tall order, and the credit crunch brought on by the recession has dramatically cut back on the funding available for such transformations. But the downturn appears to have paved the way for future retrofits, especially as towns search for ways to erase the blight of shuttered stores and recoup sales tax dollars they lost when once-thriving malls went slack.
“For the next five to 10 years, the future is going to be creatively retrofitting existing structures,” said James Conroy, director of Chicago-area development for Casto Lifestyle Properties, the Florida developer spearheading the $190 million remake of the mall.
Not surprisingly, given the history of malls killing off mom-and-pop stores and even-bigger malls stealing business from early shopping centers, the movement has stoked fears. In Mount Prospect, some merchants fret privately that the faux downtown at Randhurst will siphon off business from the town’s real downtown, which sits about a mile to the south along Metra’s Northwest line and is studded with new public buildings and residential midrises.
Others, like 17-year Mount Prospect resident Kevin Griebenow, welcome the change, though he fears the mall’s new stores — long boxes that will be split into individual storefronts and sheathed with varied shades of brick — will create architectural blandness.
“My biggest concern is that it all comes off flat and monotonous,” said Griebenow, a dam inspector who doubles as a Chicago Architecture Foundation docent.
But he went on to explain why he is excited by the prospect of the mall’s new Main Street. “Our downtown is just dissected and sliced and diced” by the Metra line, Illinois Highway 83 and Northwest Highway, Griebenow said. “There’s really no nucleus — no place to stroll.”
Ironically, providing such a gathering place was the aim of Randhurst’s original architect, Victor Gruen, an Austrian-born, Los Angeles-based designer often referred to as the father of the enclosed shopping mall. Amid the burgeoning postwar sprawl of modest ranch houses and Cape Cods, Gruen reasoned that indoor malls could offer all the features of a traditional downtown, but in a way that better accommodated automobiles and let visitors shop in 72-degree comfort no matter what the weather.
His sleek, space-age mall, which made its debut in August 1962 with ribbon-cuttings and other hoopla, perfectly reflected this mix of consumerism and community-building. Windows beneath its dome drew natural light into the mall’s heart, where customers dined at the Tree Top restaurant, which appeared to float above the main level. Kiosks in the walkways between stores lent the mall the feel of European pushcarts. Randhurst also offered lockers where shoppers could store their belongings, freeing them to carry purchases.
But like other pioneering malls around the country, Randhurst became a victim of the very phenomenon it had launched. When the much larger Woodfield Mall (left) opened in nearby Schaumburg in 1971, it stood at the intersection of major highways and easily surpassed Randhurst to become the dominant regional mall. In the 1990s, desperate to retain customers, Randhurst added big-box stores like a Home Depot to its fringes. Eventually, two of Randhurst’s original three anchor stores were torn down.
By 2007, as the mall’s fortunes continued to deteriorate and open-air malls like Old Orchard in Skokie drew more business by adding cutting-edge retailers, Mount Prospect officials warmed to the vision laid out by the Casto firm. The town even pledged to contribute $25 million to the redevelopment, provided the mall produces an anticipated uptick in tax revenues. Randhurst now accounts for about 35 percent of the town’s sales tax revenues, and village officials hope that share will rise to at least 40 percent following the redevelopment, said William Cooney Jr., Mount Prospect’s director of community development.
“The village looked at the mall as a huge asset that was underperforming,” Cooney said.
It is significant that this drama is playing out in a mature, inner-ring suburb about 20 miles northwest of Chicago’s Loop. As recession-battered subdivisions remain half-finished on the exurban fringe, they offer fewer customers to patronize new stores. That makes properties in inner-ring suburbs, where thousands of potential customers already live, more attractive. Mount Prospect’s population is roughly 56,000.
“We don’t need another person to move to Mount Prospect to make this work,” said Conroy, the development director at Randhurst.
The bigger backdrop for the drama is the overbuilding that has devastated the retail industry (at left, an empty furniture store in Chicago’s far western suburbs in 2009).
The Chicago region is “phenomenally over-stored,” said Stan Nitzberg, a principal at Mid-America Real Estate Corp. in Oakbrook Terrace. It’s the same story nationally. The vacancy rate for U.S. shopping centers, from strip malls to super-regional malls, stood at more than 11 percent in the first quarter of this year — the highest it’s been since 1983, when data were first collected, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers, a New York City-based trade group.
But the upheaval could open the door to change. When Chicago-based General Growth Properties recently identified 13 malls it is likely to forfeit to lenders when it emerges from bankruptcy later this year, the announcement raised the prospect that opportunistic buyers could snap up the distressed properties and remake them along the lines of traditional Main Streets. There, stores face outward to the street rather than inward to a mall atrium, and businesses, stores and residences are interspersed.
“The recession has accelerated trends that already were in place,” said Ellen Dunham-Jones, professor of architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology and co-author with the City College of New York’s June Williamson of the Bible of the retrofitting movement — the 2009 book “Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs.”
As sketched by the Beame Architectural Partnership of Coral Gables, Fla., and 505 Design of Boulder, Colo., the Randhurst Village plans (above) offer a peek into what sort of future these trends might yield: An urban-suburban hybrid that combines elements of so-called lifestyle centers, which cluster upscale stores in pedestrian-friendly settings, and so-called power centers, which feature big-box stores fronted by acres of parking lots.
Big-boxes like the Home Depot will remain on the mall’s fringe, while the Main Street at the mall’s core will offer inviting outdoor spaces like a landscaped “Carson Court” outside the white box of Randhurst’s remaining Carson Pirie Scott & Co. anchor store (left). Cleverly, with an eye toward selling, these spaces have been designed to encourage customers to linger rather than just rush in and out of one store, then back to their cars.
“I suspect that they’ll have street fairs there, seasonal events, maybe outdoor concerts,” said David Galler, project manager for the architects. “Though it’s not under one roof anymore, places like this become the equivalent of the village green.”
Perhaps, but some weaknesses already are apparent. Early plans from the developer called for 200 apartments to be built above the Main Street shops, which would have given restaurants and theaters a captive market and provided Randhurst Village with a round-the-clock vitality. But the apartments were eliminated because it was determined that they would be too costly to build and therefore too pricey to rent.
The mall’s large parking lots will remain, even though they will be dolled up with more landscaping. And while there are plans for bike racks and the project is aiming for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, certification from the U.S. Green Building Council, most customers, even those who live nearby, are likely to drive to Randhurst Village, undercutting the possibility that the mall will cut down on driving and thus promote sustainability.
In addition, recently retrofitted buildings on Randhurst’s fringe continue to turn their backs to adjoining neighborhoods, suggesting that the mall will fail to apply the street-friendly design of its Main Street to the areas around it.
Nevertheless, there is reason to think that the mall’s imperfect version of urbanism will cultivate a desire for more of the real thing — and that Randhurst Village’s faux downtown may be able to peacefully coexist with the real one a mile away.
“Will one hurt the other? I’m not sure it really has to,” said Tom Nelson, president of the Mount Prospect Downtown Merchants’ Association and head of his own computer services store. If shoppers like the mix of stores and the Randhurst Village revamp proves an economic success, more sophisticated retrofits — and a more urbane version of suburbia — seem sure to follow.
Anything that can turn around those big, empty, sterile spaces and convert them into more people, foot-traffick-friendly spaces, including more natural elements, and integrating them into their surrounding environment is good. I always used to get headaches when I went to any mall. Still do.
What do you think? Leave your comments below.
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