To Be Everywhere is to Be Nowhere

Photo collage by Uoregon14 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The following piece will appear as the AIA-Southwestern Oregon Committee on Local Affairs' contribution to the 2017 Design Annual (Register-Guard insert), to be published next month. The theme of this year’s edition is “Technology.”

Few shifts in the cultural landscape have so profoundly impacted our shared conception of the public realm as the advent of the Internet, smart phones, and social media. The smart phone has changed every aspect of our social interactions, with profound implications for the future of communities everywhere. Just as the automobile prompted the decline and replacement of much of the productive urban fabric of our cities (think urban renewal, freeways, parking lots, and exclusionary zoning), the Internet and, more specifically, social media now jeopardize the reversal of that decline.

The irony of social media has been an attendant rise in loneliness, depression, and a sense of detachment among its heaviest users. For the compulsively addicted, virtual spaces become more attractive than real ones, virtual exchanges more appealing than in-the-flesh interaction; entire worlds are just a keystroke or finger-swipe away. The 2,000-year-old words of the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca—who speaking in his time of the price paid by obsessive travelers—now aptly describe this contemporary condition: “To be everywhere is to be nowhere.”

Nowhere is not where anyone should want to be. Nowhere is not a place. Being nowhere means lacking the prospect of progress or success.

The risk posed to cities by a collective preoccupation with virtual communities is the possibility we may eventually forget what it takes to make real places: successful civic, public spaces that are accessible, comfortable, sociable, and truly used. We made this mistake during the Age of Automobiles and paid the heavy price; we cannot afford to make a similar mistake again. If we do, we’ll surely struggle to retain our community identity and sense of place, much of which may have only been regained and/or established in the past few years.

So, what is a realistic future for our cities, Eugene in particular? In the face of stresses that would topple dominant urban planning paradigms, how do we avoid being both everywhere and nowhere at once?

The answer is to redouble our efforts to maximize the public realm as a shared interest because it is our public spaces that most effectively differentiate here from everywhere and nowhere. This means recognizing what makes Eugene’s cultural, physical, and historical context unique. It means countering the banality of many of Eugene’s public spaces. It means stressing the importance of physical structure and identity—the vividness of unique elements and conversely a grasp of the whole—by celebrating design excellence. It means building upon the recent revitalization downtown, which is a more vibrant place today than it has been in many years.

As the region’s historic center for business, governmental, and cultural activities, the success of downtown Eugene is critical to our community’s sense of identity. We commend the City of Eugene for its promising efforts to improve the Park Blocks using the “lighter, quicker, cheaper” strategy to enliven public spaces promulgated by its consultant, Project for Public Spaces. If and when City Hall occupies the location of the “Butterfly” parking lot, the Park Blocks will assume an even more important civic role than they do now. We consider the public-private partnership that brings a high-speed fiber network to 120 downtown Eugene buildings equally promising. This project capitalizes on Eugene’s emergence as the “Silicon Shire,” one of Fast Company magazine’s “Next Top 10 Cities for Tech Jobs.” We’re encouraged to see developers regarding downtown as desirable ground for housing projects attractive to urban professionals and retirees. And we’re pleased downtown at last has its new Whole Foods outlet.

Downtown is starting to work, which is good news for the entire city. We’ve made great progress but much more remains to be done. Many people still consider downtown a dangerous place filled with undesirable people. Too many restaurants still close early each day. Evening activities remain disproportionately focused on the club/bar scene rather than encompassing a more diverse range of options. In the face of Internet shopping, retail businesses aren’t likely to return and once again dominate downtown. There are still far too many inactive storefronts, including those that ring the Park Blocks. Downtown Eugene needs to evolve in response.

Growing the resident population will help. When people live in the city's core, they become caring stakeholders who take ownership of its future. Supplying free public wi-fi throughout would draw people downtown, empowering those who otherwise lack affordable Internet access. Blending shopping with authentic experiences in unique, brick & mortar settings will set specialty retailers apart from their online competitors.

To sustain real progress will require learning how to adapt to the changes that threaten to overwhelm us. Social media may be here with us to stay, but this does not mean they can or should supplant the complex ecosystem that is an actual city. We contend the presence of real public spaces is important to the existence of any civil society and democracy. So too is differentiating those spaces so they are as unique, context-specific, attractive, and meaningful as possible. Investing intellectual and monetary capital in the public realm—such as in downtown Eugene where we as a community exercise our social and civic functions—is crucial. Ideally, the public realm will always remain free to use, accessible, and welcoming to all types of people from all walks of life.

As architects, we firmly believe a sense of place can foster civic engagement. We believe in the power of design as an antidote to the social disengagement abetted by today’s smart phones and computers. We’re not Luddites, but we do prefer living in and working for the betterment of our real world, as opposed to a virtual one. We believe in being present and engaged so that we can design genuine solutions for difficult problems. For the sake of today’s iGeneration and those who will follow them, we’re committed to ensuring Eugene will never become everywhere or nowhere anytime soon.

Austin Bailey, Scott Clarke, Eric Gunderson, Stan Honn, Randy Nishimura, and Travis Sheridan