According to Gov. Scott Walker, people do not want to see Wisconsin "become another Milwaukee." He made that assertion about the state's largest city more than once during his gubernatorial campaigns. However, Walker would do well to rethink that view because, according to experts, Milwaukee is among a handful of cutting-edge cities worldwide that are consciously remaking themselves into survivable, humanistic habitats that are not only urban and livable, but -- get ready for a new word -- biophilic.
On Earth, the magazine of the National Resources Defense Council, lays out the details in the current issue's feature story entitled, "Milwaukee Sees the Light". Author Richard Manning describes how, in a 1984 book, noted biologist E. O. Wilson came up with a hypothesis he called biophilia: "Wilson argued that love of nature makes humans more attentive to their surroundings, just as affection allows attachment to and knowledge of a loved one’s face. In evolutionary terms, attentiveness and attachment confer fitness."
The article recounts how Tim Beatley, a landscape architect at the University of Virginia, has developed a list of criteria describing the biophilic city and came up with a worldwide list of examples. Among them: Milwaukee; Portland, Oregon; San Francisco; Phoenix; Singapore; Wellington, New Zealand; Oslo; Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain; and Birmingham, England.
Heady company for a supposed Great Lakes rust-belt city. It's true that Milwaukee, to this day a major industrial center, lost tens of thousands of jobs in the economic upheavals of the 1980s, creating a newly poor segment among its former middle class, especially impacting black residents. But in the past decade the city's population has restabilized and -- although the Great Recession chilled many hard-won gains -- vibrancy has returned to the downtown and even some of its more modest neighborhoods. Milwaukee improbably has even become something of a magnet for young urban professionals, the "creative class" that propels further change.
For all those reasons, Milwaukee is the very kind of place where the application of biophilic principles might do the most good, the most quickly. Given disturbing trends in the planetary ecosystem and plain old economics, new connections arguably needed to be made. Where they have been made, positive change has become evident.
Read on below the fold for the details on why Scott Walker is dead wrong, except perhaps in assuming he can benefit politically through rhetoric that further divides Wisconsin.
One major example shared in the On Earth article is the rapid redevelopment of Milwaukee's formerly polluted, smelly Menomonee River Valley. The valley, which skirts the southern edge of downtown and runs for miles, was once where native Americans harvested wild rice, a "gathering place" where tribes and even early Europeans parlayed. From the mid-1800s into the late-1900s, the valley was ruthlessly exploited, becoming the site of heavy manufacturing, rail yards, coal piles and slaughterhouses, all of which which polluted the soil, the city's three rivers, the Lake Michigan harbor, and the air overhead.
Now, after a decade of hard work, the valley is far along toward being cleaned up, with massive investments including the iconic Harley Davidson Museum (Milwaukee is the motorcycle company's headquarters), the massive Potawotomi tribal casino with its 19-story hotel, athletic fields, the miles-long Hank Aaron State Trail that winds from downtown out past baseball's Miller Park, a global water center devoted to cutting-edge, clean-water business technologies and environmental research, and shiny modern industrial parks, all sharing wooded, riverfront views.
On the periphery of the valley, refurbished warehouses and new construction provide trendy housing for young urban professionals who can often walk or bike to work.
One of the new tenants in the valley is a particularly powerful example of biophilia. The Urban Ecology Center is a non-profit private organization whose facility is open to residents. Its Menomonee Valley center (one of three in the city) presents an earthy, inviting layout that's almost like a modern lodge. The center combines the functions of a nature museum with a children's summer camp and a community center, offering education programs and neighborhood meeting space. The center's several locations in the city are teaching inner-city urban kids to garden and understand the city's surprisingly diverse wild areas in a hands-on way.
Like the Urban Ecology Center, Milwaukee civic leaders and other community organizations increasingly are turning to the biophilia model that places high value on human connections with raw nature. Manning writes that a successful example of this focus is the way Japanese culture has long integrated nature into its art, architecture, and other disciplines.
One set of biophilic experiments, Manning writes, correlated the level of human immune-system response to taking walks in the woods. Businessmen who regularly took such walks showed a significant, continuing increase in "killer" blood cells that fight infection. That result and other data strongly suggest that a healthier life depends on communing with nature. This has special significance in modern and urban areas where artificial environments too often still do the exact opposite, creating stress and squeezing out any sense of wonder. Writes Manning: "Schoolkids who go for a walk in a park before testing score higher than kids who walk a city street. Office workers get sick less often and are more productive if their work spaces have natural lighting and views of the outdoors, or access to it... ."
Thus comes a new wave of biophilic design -- making individual living and work space more naturally satisfying, the way Wisconsin architect Frank Lloyd Wright configured the S.C. Johnson corporate workroom in nearby Racine to look like it was at the bottom of an ethereal lily pond. Biophilia is now growing to encompass entire cities. Such biophilic communities including Milwaukee think in terms of going well beyond the mere idea of "green" buildings and fundamental sustainability. They value and encourage integrated connections, stretching across the entire urban environment to link human society with the well-being that arises from respect for -- and access to -- nature.
Let's put it this way: Does your city have a "marsupial bridge"? Milwaukee does.
Arguably, American rural communities for hundreds of years interacted in very biophilic ways with nature. Ironically, in the past several decades, smaller towns and cities have tended to become more like the nation's prototype urban areas, with their own super-factories, deteriorating main streets and sprawling malls, surrounded by concrete, freeways and declining green space. Scott Walker's campaign claim about Milwaukee ignored those trends.
Given the city's push toward biophilic principles, the shoe in fact is now on the other foot. Milwaukeeans increasingly wouldn't want their city to look like certain other regions of Wisconsin, where the rise of giant factory farms and the loss of precious wetlands are quite anti-humanistic, and hardly in keeping with Wisconsin's great natural heritage. In the city, foot and bike paths, nature preserves and wetlands are now nurtured, not plowed under. And they're increasingly integrated with conventional urban infrastructure. Parks, art gardens and other delights more and more aren't cordoned off, but are woven into the city's human fabric. Rather than sit on an conventional street bench, you might plunk down on a plank in a dense walnut grove, just a few feet from a busy downtown sidewalk but light years away in look and feel.
So even though Scott Walker defeated Tom Barrett twice in gubernatorial elections, it's the mayor, not the governor, who's seen the future and is pursuing it with humanistic passion -- and in the process winning support from Milwaukee residents, indeed, way more support proportionally than in any election Walker ever won. "Wisconsin may be a national poster child for dysfunctional politics and red-blue tensions," writes Manning, "yet Barrett, a Democrat, is serving his third term, winning reelection twice with more than 70 percent of the vote." He continues:
In 2004, just as Barrett was taking office, the city rounded up some pump-priming—$16 million in tax increment financing and $14 million in grants—then knocked down the sullied bricks and mortar. Ten years later, the first thing a visitor notices, even in winter, is a freakish anomaly: cured seed heads of big bluestem, little bluestem, and Indian grass—the charismatic megaflora of tallgrass prairie—poking through the snow. But restoring native plants to a brownfield was not just an ecologically correct choice; it was a matter of hard-headed practicality. These prairie species are deep-rooted and suited to survive the catastrophic storms and floods that are occurring in the upper Midwest with appalling frequency. Sixty acres of the valley, about half of the city’s redevelopment project, have been set aside to catch runoff and filter it with the deep roots of a working wetland, before slowly leaching it to the river.
Meantime, abandoned houses were demolished and the lots became community gardens. Asphalted schoolyards were ripped up and replaced with prairie grass,
outdoor classrooms, and gardens, all layered over soils engineered to soak up
rain. New green infrastructure along city streets catches and channels water.
Matthew Howard, the city’s sustainability director (does your town have one?), told Manning that thanks to an integrated, natural approach that didn't just depend on massive infrastructure to treat effluent and stormwater, Milwaukee "went from 50 to 60 combined sewer overflows in the mid-1990s to one last year.” Hey, Lake Erie cities plagued by algae blooms: Here's a model you might want to look into.
So, should the rest of Wisconsin really continue to resist becoming more like Milwaukee? In some ways, perhaps. But in what counts the most, up-staters who hold traditional disdain for their flagship city should celebrate Milwaukee's push into the future, transforming itself into a healthful, sustaining, even joyful place to live and work, one square block and one handful of native grass seeds at a time.
You wouldn't know it listening to Walker and his followers, but, despite the usual urban challenges, Wisconsin's largest city is a world-class laboratory of hope, an investment both in the human spirit and democracy. Thinking any other way about Milwaukee's transformation would be decidedly erroneous, old school and backward. And that's precisely the problem with the prevailing politics in Wisconsin today.
Given everything the human race is now up against, the Milwaukee megalopolis has a lot more in common with tiny Goerke's Corners than the residents of either place have fully divined. Luckily, Milwaukee has found a promising new path that's leading to surprising, hopeful change. If we could only get some of our state's most powerful politicians to embrace that.