October 25, 2002 Feature
Story
Livable
Cities: An Oxymoron?
Utah State Series Addresses Urban Planning
 Stephen
Goldsmith is a man with a mission.
He began his career as a starving artist and evolved into a
visionary, award-winning urban planner. But his artistic sensibility
wasn’t left behind. In a slide show of before and after
projects throughout Salt Lake City, it appears that everything
he touches becomes beautiful.
California Tire and Rubber
Co. before a rehabilitation project
Goldsmith’s presentation at the Utah State University
Natural Resources and Environmental Policy Program this week
detailed his journey from sculptor to Salt Lake City planning
director.
 That
journey started with a simple, almost desperate quest to find
affordable housing. What he found was a 1910 dilapidated warehouse
on Salt Lake City’s west side. The basement was filled
with hazardous waste. A terrible stink assaulted the nostrils.
Living in the area was actually illegal, according to zoning
laws.
The same building at project completion
But Goldsmith saw potential.
He and his colleagues contacted landscape architects at Utah
State University, who advised them to reclaim toxic soil by
removing poisons and planting gardens. They hired homeless people
and pitched in to create a green walkway around the building.
Salt Lake saw its first artist lofts, and he and others set
up studios.
But their home was still surrounded by blight. After being
turned down by every bank he approached, Goldsmith asked Salt
Lake City for funds to reclaim a second warehouse. He was persistent,
and official reluctance eventually wore down. He and his colleagues
received a grant.
One hundred and fifty bemused people attended the “Wall
Breaking,” a careful brick-bashing session which let streams
of sunlight into the high-ceilinged warehouse and opened up
a view of the Wasatch Mountains. In an effort to recycle resources,
a crane plucked an unwanted skylight off another building and
installed it atop the newly rehabilitated building.
Three hundred people were soon on a waiting list to move in,
and the project garnered national attention.
That area, once an abandoned, industrial wasteland, is now
known as The Gateway District. The small, initial investment
was only seed money, as it turned out. Salt Lake recently saw
$750 million invested in the neighborhood.
“Once people see the conversion of old neighborhoods,
once they experience it, they realize the potential and policies
change,” said Goldsmith.
On the west side of Salt Lake City, one man’s vision,
or desperation, illuminated the possibilities.
Goldsmith and a team of professionals have gone on to create
parks and public sculptures using salvaged building materials.
They uncovered streams buried under years of concrete and reclaimed
dying neighborhoods.
Part mystic, part planner, Goldsmith wants residents to recognize
that the waters pouring out of the seven canyons around the
metropolis are “sacred waterways that give life to that
valley.”
For Goldsmith, urban planning is about more than placing a
structure on a piece of real estate. It’s about social
justice and community ownership. It’s about recognizing
the aesthetic potential, taking into account the history and
feel of a place, recognizing how light and wind touch the buildings,
knowing which native plants will thrive in hard-scrabble areas
and seeing the relationships between people, place and the structures
we live and do business in.
“Everything is connected,” he told the crowd at
Utah State. “Our modern cities often create a displacement
of our goals, our desires and our spirits.”
Goldsmith believes that over-reliance on the automobile is
responsible for the development of cities that have lost their
soul.
“The automobile,” he said, “created a tectonic
shift which buried America’s potential. When car, oil
and tire companies bought up mass transit systems across the
country in the 1940s and dismantled them, they dismantled an
aesthetic and a social structure as well.
“Nothing exists in a vacuum. We buy our car. We fill
it up with gas. The ecological footprint of how we get a gallon
of gas out of the ground and how we manufacture it is enormous.
Even the particles wearing off car tires go into the air, into
our water and into our lungs.”
“Seniors now live in second-ring suburbs tied to cars,”
Goldsmith continued. “As they age, they lose their ability
to drive. Then they become isolated, they lose their independence,
they get depressed. Meanwhile, kids rely on parents to cart
them everywhere, parents become stressed at their over-taxed
lives, commutes grow more congested and people become more stressed.
“The automobile continues to drive development patterns
and public policy, and to create health problems, environmental
problems and social isolation.”
Goldsmith’s life mission has been to help create communities
which are more compact, more aesthetic and more livable. And
he doesn’t always like the word “sustainability.”
“Who wants to be in a marriage based on sustainability?”
he asked.
He feels that our cities should do more than provide a practical
way of coping. They should nurture. They should offer beauty
and a sense of place.
The vivacious Goldsmith is an eternal optimist, hopeful that
an emerging consciousness will help citizens reclaim neighborhoods,
cities and public policy.
“That consciousness,” Goldsmith said, “is
based both on a realization of our opportunities and on a growing
fear of what we are doing to the planet.”
Goldsmith has won awards, titles and recognition. But he prefers
simply to be introduced as a “homemaker.” Showing
a slide of the earth from space, he concluded, “This is
my home.”
Established in 1992, the Natural Resource and Environmental
Policy Program at Utah State University administers graduate
certificate programs in Natural Resource and Environmental Policy,
and in the National Environmental Policy Act.
“The program also coordinates a policy-related seminar
series,” said Director Joanna Endter-Wada.
“The series seeks to stimulate the search for innovative,
workable solutions to challenges involved in developing environmental
policies and to facilitate public involvement in decision-making,”
she said.
Upcoming seminars will feature Congressman James Hansen, chair
of the House Resources Committee; Dick Carter, environmental
advocate and founder of the high Uintas Preservation Council;
Steve Boch, staff attorney with the Southern Utah Wilderness
Alliance (SUWA); Stephen Trimble, naturalist, writer and photographer;
Lee Austin and Howard Berkes, with National Public Radio; and
Dianne R. Nielson, executive director of Utah's Department of
Environmental Quality.
The series is sponsored by the College of Natural Resources;
the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences; and the
S.J. and Jesse E. Quinney Foundation.
For more information contact Judith Kurtzman at (435) 797-0922.
Writer: Nadene Steinhoff (435) 797-1429; nadene.steinhoff@usu.edu
Contact: Joanna Endter-Wada; endter@cnr.usu.edu
or Judith Kurtzman (435) 797-0922; judyk@cnr.usu.edu
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