NO DOWNTOWN BAKERSFIELD PLAN – WHY?

Our leadership in Bakersfield is happily traveling into the future the same way they have been in the past. Bakersfield downtown owners have remembered experiencing it as a place without gathering much help from Council members. There has been no real concerted attempt to make a vestige of any downtown plan for a quarter of a century. Why?

Under the mask of a new “Bakersfield Metropolitan Plan the “Old Boy’s Club “ persists in its complacency. The bureaucrats are supporting a soft shuffle to have the County/City decision-makers work together during two meetings a year! One guesses this is a beginning and worth a 25-year wait. However one still feels the effort is a most tentative and conciliatory involvement, when it comes to observing even the setting of agendas for debate at these meetings!

There is marked evidence that our Bakersfield governments are desirous of becoming “public” developers! Why there are six developers in our public arena. City Manager Tandy’s “Olmscheid and Multi-use Stadium Project”; City Council’s “Water Park”; Economic Development Director Donna Kuntz “In-fill housing”; City Public Works Director Raul Rojas “Kern River Parkway”; Housing Authorities “Seniors Housing” and KCOG’s “High Speed Rail Station”.

Dan Walters writes “California cities have been induced by circumstances -- primarily the loss of much of their property tax base -- to become active partners in commercial development projects, hoping to reap harvests of sales, hotel and property taxes from those deals……….It's not a particularly welcome phenomenon, because it distorts local land-use decision-making and often leads to misuse of redevelopment to seize land and/or grant unwarranted subsidies to private developers.”

Dare we suggest that this syndrome is prevalent in our downtown Bakersfield redevelopment area? Dan Walters continues, “As worrisome as the city-as-developer syndrome may be, it's unlikely to disappear. And as it has developed over the past quarter-century, one aspect is its conflict with state open-meeting laws. It's inherently incompatible for a city council to act as a land developer, particularly in partnership with private interests, when the Ralph M. Brown Act and other "sunshine laws" require the public's business to be conducted in public, with rare exceptions. This conflict can only grow more acute as local governments become more involved in elaborate development schemes.” The law outcome in our California State Legislature on this matter that will be most interesting to watch evolve.

What is disturbing however is to observe how Bakersfield City Ward Boundaries have created a watch your own turf and stay out of mine behavior. Confined to “buddyism” in making decisions for the good development of our city, the ward boundaries confine and prohibit logical citywide development decision-making.

Maybe all Council members should become a team in rather making primary infrastructure decisions with respect to their downtown, their suburbia and their agricultural edges. If the Bakersfield ward boundaries were not gerrymandered about Council member residences, but rather that the ward boundaries ensured all Council members have to vote for the three above mentioned areas in a little more balanced fashion, we might see our academic institutions recording the performance of policy making for each Council member.

When the Council Members wish to be developers of sensible progressive infrastructure in their wards they are not shy of using the power which “eminent domain” provides. It’s when it’s used for redevelopment in partnership with private development deals, without due process, that it becomes dangerous. This is why our Council members shy away from eminent domain use as a development tool in the redevelopment of downtown. Or let’s be more accurate maybe this is why they fear getting involved with downtown development.

It is time that we should not burden a single Councilperson with this onerous downtown development responsibility. An integrated plan for the distinctive districts of Bakersfield’s downtown must be germinated. The fear of all Council decision makers about downtown should be overcome simply with a new urban design. Common space for citizens mobility needs, parking structures, new green space for parks and public places are the first essential steps from which an urban design arises to grow for the good of all. One should not leave future downtown changes to the cyclical nightmares of the “marketplace.” Only fearless integration of urban design actions based on a plan will bring an enlightened downtown future.

It is time for our leaders to consider Golden Empire Transit as an essential partner in our commuting futures. It is important for our Kern Transportation Foundation leaders in the private sector to take hold of guiding a balanced future and application toward all forms of transportation. It should become far more important for our activists to network together to bring solutions to downtowns short and long term future, rather than sniping individually at singlar urban development issues.

Unless decision makers and we citizens collectively face the making of a physical design for our downtown, we will never cause the development of a unique City to evolve. Bakersfield will remain a small “hokey town” incapable of getting to be a city especially when only focused on servicing the automobile.

Bakersfield’s mystical downtown core will be absent as long as the pitiful, inadequate and dysfunctional transportation system does not link well with its sprawling suburbs. Our downtown isn’t lively because of its buildings; it is lively because of its streets and then only during street fairs!

BY Graham Kaye-Eddie – Master Urban Designer.

Makabusi Inc. – Bakersfield – California

Email – makabusi@pacbell.net

Press the flesh, not the keyboard

In a wired world, physical presence counts more than ever

AS A young man in the City of London, recalls Sir Martin Sorrell, boss of WPP, a marketing group, he was struck by the magnificence of the partners' room at Hambro's. The bank's top brass sat in a vast hall above Bishopsgate, surrounded by their aides. “There was a lot of noise,” he says, “but everybody knew what everyone else was doing.”

The newish mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, began his working life as a trader for Salomon Brothers, and has recreated something similar in his office in City Hall. Officials work in cubicles within a giant, open bull-pen, rather than in private offices. Again, the aim is to free the flow of information. The inevitable conclusion: seeing other people in the flesh is a different, and sometimes better, way to make sure that news and views flow freely than anything that electronics can offer.

One of the mysteries of the wired (and wireless) world is that proximity still counts. In spite of September 11th, and the predictions that everyone would travel less and have fewer meetings, people still want to gather to do deals, to drum up new ideas and to court customers. Indeed, in some ways, physical presence counts even more than it used to. Tony Venables, an economist at the London School of Economics, believes that businesses that thrive on face-to-face communications—or what some call F2F—now account for a growing share of economic activity.

Of course, the arrival of the Internet and of cheap long-distance telecommunications means that lots of activities that once required physical presence can now be conducted online. Customers can pay a bill, book a hotel room or place a bet without walking to the bank, travel agent or bookie. The fall in the costs of undertaking such routine transactions has allowed companies to move them out of expensive city centres to cheaper locations.

But other kinds of business seem to need proximity more, not less, these days. Look at the way the venture capitalists who financed the Internet boom huddle together along Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto; or the clustering of media folk along New York's Avenue of the Americas. “If you are doing a multi-million-pound deal, you need to eyeball them,” says Dame Judith Mayhew, chairman of the policy committee of the Corporation of London. “You don't do that down the line.”

Cities are still highly efficient ways to ensure that eyeballers can see each other. Some trades seem to thrive on density. In a paper recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Sukkoo Kim points out that 40% of American employment is packed into 1.5% of its land area. Those cities that specialise in some services—notably finance, insurance, property dealing and wholesale trade—have tended to pack more and more workers on to the same land, he argues, unlike those that specialise in services such as public administration or retailing.

Why might that be true? Michael Storper of the University of California, Los Angeles, has written a paper with Mr Venables on “Buzz: The Economic Force of the City”. They argue that cities are where information and ideas are developed and swapped. But not all information is equal. Some (a bank statement, say, or a booking) is easily codified and electronically swapped; while some (“I have a deal for you”, “why don't we do it this way?”) requires context and trust to be meaningful. It is the second kind of information that requires F2F.

As a result, many activities are bifurcating. Hollywood film-shooting is continuing to move out of town, for instance, while deal-making, which requires trust and lots of parties, stays in town. And this split does not apply merely to the movie world. Much American manufacturing is going to small and mid-sized cities inland. A typical beneficiary is Memphis, where Federal Express has its hub. The deal-making and design tends to remain in the big cities of the two coasts.

For individual companies, the key question is when and how to bring people together. Companies with lots of outlets need to keep branch staff in touch with head-office staff. One company that works hard at this is Wal-Mart. The retailer's founder, Sam Walton, spent much of his time tramping round the company's stores. Nowadays, regional and district managers spend four days a week on the road, listening to what store workers are saying.

Even a company such as Oracle, which tries to do as much as possible electronically, finds that it needs regular face-to-face contact. Jim Flynn, its head of corporate communications, brings his regional staff together once a quarter. “It's the only way to work through complicated co-ordination issues,” he says. Moreover, in a global business with different national thresholds for irony and humour, and with English widely spoken as a second language, the Internet can breed misunderstandings if not backed up with regular meetings.

For companies whose lifeblood is creativity, personal contact matters even more. Silicon Valley was born from long nights spent drinking in the now-defunct Wagon Wheel bar in Mountain View, California, where the early geeks and semiconductor executives thrashed out technical glitches together over beers. Big pharmaceutical companies struggle to build into their bureaucracies the sparky communal brainstorming that creates breakthroughs. According to Louise Redmond, head of organisation effectiveness at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), recent meetings of staff from around the world have revealed gaps in research programmes that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. She says that GSK has increasingly tried to cluster teams working on a particular project on the same physical site.

The need to put the right people together also feeds into office design. At WPP, Sir Martin says, “we're blowing out walls and creating coffee areas.” No longer are accountants and media people assigned to separate floors. Instead, they work side by side in teams to ensure that they keep talking to each other.

As companies try to get more staff to work on the road or from home, they lose the water-cooler conversations that sometimes spark useful ideas. Margaret Exley, chairman of Mercer Delta, a consultancy, argues that some employees, especially in customer services, rarely see their boss's face, even for a performance appraisal. Some sales teams get round this by having regular meetings on the road. One beneficiary of this trend is Starbucks, a coffee chain that is increasingly used as a substitute office. Several stores have even turned spare space into meetings rooms, according to Howard Behar, Starbucks' president for North America.

Companies with scattered staff also often try to bring them together in occasional conferences—and these have become much more intensive, carefully planned affairs. That partly reflects a shortage of corporate cash for jamborees. Ed Griffin, head of Meeting Professionals International, a trade association of meetings planners, says dolefully that finance executives have recently taken over responsibility for meetings budgets from sales and marketing departments. He worries that they may not grasp the extent to which a well-run conference can motivate sales staff. It is, he says, a matter of transmitting emotion, not just facts: “If you do it on a television screen, you lose 50-75% of the ability to create valuable relationships.” If he is right, then companies will need to think even harder in future about how to make those eyeballs count.

Aug 22nd 2002 From The Economist print edition

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Drivers who use electronic passes to pay bridge tolls in the San Francisco Bay area will soon find themselves participating in a government traffic-watch program.

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THE W AL-MART CULTURE

A most readable piece. Highly recommended for all who go through the love-hate cycle when having to drive their SUV to 21st century monster general store!