Ri-verfront Re-dux: Re-envisioning the Re-Imagining

100+ years ago: now that was a river

“It’s just another asset we could potentially bring to the table...”

A few re-marks


This "...re-envisioning the Riverfront Re-Imagine site..." is worth a re-ad. As is the slide deck re-plete with a sketch with which the mayor re- cently re-turned. (Note how the public "just another asset" library is already commodified for leveraging shiny land swaps and foot traffic. It's all good. Just talking the talk.)

So let's see who is interested before we figure out who's qualified before we ask them to propose the re-vised re-do. Consultants at every step stand re-ady to assist, advise, and re-commend. Meanwhile, supplies of foam core are being laid in anticipation of much re-engagement with the re-sidents.

(Wonder what we'll end up thinking we want that's different from the last time(s) we were asked.)

This ain't bad:

"...Even with this amount of housing activity, the supply of affordable housing units has not met demand.  To alleviate the affordable housing shortage, the City has been working diligently with developers to promote housing developments that offer units for a range of income levels. Although the city needs a variety of workforce and affordable options, the biggest push is for the development of 50% AMI and lower."

But dibs instead on the next luxury hotel with a brewery (!) and a so two years ago food thing from the coast (either one). Be re-assured that whatever comes will come awash in art and green and bike racks and a "rapid transit" stop. And parking.

Better be good because we're building for the next century now - and beyond.

"The community vision for Riverfront Re-Imaged is for an innovative, unique and enduring development. The expectation is to create an architectural and culturally significant amenity that will serve this community for 100+ years."

Hope they saved the receipts on the foam core. Looks like we've had our say. (Note to all those who have said that some of us are too old to have an opinion or say in what happens next - most of you aren't young enough for this next new thing. Neither are your kids, but they'll be the ones stuck with answering "What were you thinking?!" crouched around the blasted skyway drumfires as they look up at the twinkling passage of Mayo Clinic in near earth orbit.)

Anyway these are critical:

"CRITICAL ELEMENTS • Transformative one-of-a-kind project • Land & environment are renewed and sustained • Welcoming to all and diverse community appeal • Vibrant public spaces & natural integration • Connected physically & socially • Year round use, with easy riverfront access • Natural integration of neighborhood characteristics • Encompass Rochester’s past as well as future"

And an unobstructed view of the backside of the Government Center

We'll see. Well, maybe not us, but surely someone will.

Oh, almost forgot. Here's my Post-It (TM) note:

• Affordable, accessible housing at 50% AMI and lower.
• A public library.
• A center for health, innovation, and culture.
• A better view.
• A river.

#rochnxt: where should we make a place for the next museum in Rochester?

…[C]ultural institutions in general and museums in particular play a significant role in the future of cities.  They are part of the key infrastructure to keep our cities, where so much of us live, healthy, livable, safe and successful in the 21st Century. 

- Eric Visser, “Museums in the City of the Future”

The next museum in Rochester is about the next Rochester. The Rochester we are creating, in the city we are inventing, for a world we are discovering.

The next museum in Rochester is about learning how to learn, how to create, how we become who we are becoming.

The next museum in Rochester is for our many vocations of making and doing and creating. Invoking an aspiring present. Evoking the global implications of our doing and making and creating. Convocations of doers and makers and creators. Participating. Observing. Learning from the lived experience of living next now.

There are no better emissaries of the next Rochester than Rochester’s children. Any purpose laying claim to what is next that is not a place where children are present does not understand where next is. The next museum in Rochester is a museum where children are embraced by opportunities to be children at play discovering their world and inventing all the ways they might become who they may aspire to be.

There are no better emissaries of the next Rochester than Rochester’s adults. Any purpose laying claim to what is next that is not a place where adults are present does not understand where next is. The next museum in Rochester is a museum where adults are embraced by opportunities to be adults at play discovering their world and inventing all the ways they might become who they may aspire to be.

There are no better emissaries of the next Rochester than Rochester’s seniors. Any purpose laying claim to what is next that is not a place where seniors are present does not understand where next is. The next museum in Rochester is a museum where seniors are embraced by opportunities to be seniors at play discovering their world and inventing all the ways they might become who they may aspire to be.

There is no place more necessary for the next Rochester than one where the next Rochester is its purpose. Where then and now open horizons to next. Where we come to appreciate and comprehend the arc of the city that frames our living here.

The next museum in Rochester is a museum that places us where we live and places where we live in the world.

The next museum in Rochester anticipates a changing world in a city where changing the world happens.

The next museum in Rochester erupts in the lively and lived experience of communities that comprise a city life whose livelihoods call others to us. The world comes for what we offer: wellness, work, and what comes next.

The next museum in Rochester is a museum that welcomes all for whom the city is a destination, where thousands of destinies come to reside and come to visit.

The next museum in Rochester invites the city and the world to be next to each other.

The next museum in Rochester is thoroughly about Rochester: who we are, where we live, what we do and make and create.

The next museum in Rochester is about coming to Rochester and knowing it thoroughly: who we are, where we live, what we do and make and create.

The next museum in Rochester is about what we can come to be by being here.

__________

Notes on #rochnxt: where should we make a place for next museum in Rochester?

Secular prayer is usually called "word magic" by those who think they can propose contrivances for its elimination. We have always been impressed with the feeling that these contrivances are examples of prayer albeit in disguise. - Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Towards History

I drafted most of the above a bit over a year ago - a visioning exercise of sorts, a secular prayer if you will. Since the summer of 2016 I have been working off and on with the children's museum on its next iteration. What it might be. What it needs to be. And the where and how it can be in Rochester at all. Its current location was ever transitional. A place to see if there is a place for it here and if so to move from to a better place. What ever is next - if there is a next - will be the next museum in Rochester. 

I came across this piece above coincidentally as I was downloading the slide deck for the DMC Discovery Walk presentation at the upcoming city council committee of the whole. (Along with foam core fairs, these presentations are a familiar part of our civic liturgy.) More than coincidence, there was an element of serendipity. 

Though I do not speak on behalf of the children's museum planning process, that process already acknowledged this sub-district of the medical development district as among its "five candidates for possible future homes." Is there a better place for a proposed center for "innovation, health, and well being and cultural exchange"? 

Though writing of his home, Jasper Visser could have been writing here of ours and of Rochester's next museum:

Like many cities in the world, the one I call home – Amsterdam – is experiencing growing pains: The balance or lack thereof between tourists and citizens, the growing gap between the rich and poor, the collision between the city’s transnational outlook and my country’s growing nationalism… Cities all over the world explore how to thrive in the 21st century without falling apart. Museums find that as they transform from government institutions into civic institutions, they take on new roles and responsibilities and they are expected to play an active part in the future of the cities they are based in, and the communities they are part of.

Save for contrivances to the contrary, the best purpose for the next museum in Rochester is discovered where it can serve that purpose best.

DMC: everywhere but here or here or god forbid there!

But there is cause to believe in banishing the term, far from banishing its functions one merely conceals them. - Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives

There's an emerging school of DMC commentary that might be described as "strict constructionist." Its proponents endeavor to insulate DMC from criticism and controversy by trying to enforce narrow semantic limits upon the proper use of the emblematic acronym and all that it implies - which, according to this school, isn't really all that much. Though sometimes there is cause to wonder if these proponents have recently reviewed the DMC legislation passed in 2013 or the DMC master plan approved in 2015, it does seem apparent they probably have not reviewed the DMC marketing efforts of 2017.

It's not to far from "In the middle of EVERYWHERE" to in the middle of everything. And my the stories they tell. If there is ground breaking research being pursued at Mayo Clinic - that's DMC. If it exists or is planned within the medical development district - that's DMC. If it exists or happens in Rochester - that's DMC. If it's innovation, investment, medicine, growth, community, recreation, health, culture, or education - that's DMC.

Whatever it is, wherever it is, if it is in or about Rochester, spins positive, and can wear a happy face - that's DMC.

As marketing campaigns go, this is a nice one. Upbeat stories full of promise and truthiness. Sincere people radiant with optimism and competence. Good production values. Better than "Let's Build This!" to be sure. All in all, it is much more credible than the "DMC - Everywhere, but Here or Here or God Forbid There" strategy being applied elsewhere by the strict constructionists.

Recently the strict constructionists have decried those who would link DMC to broader city and regional concerns - saying DMC was never meant to be this or that or some other thing. Oddest of all, they even attempt to distance DMC from Mayo Clinic - as if the later has nothing at all to do with the former. Their argument: the public money goes to the city of Rochester not to Mayo Clinic. OK, but upon what is this half a billion public dollars to be spent? Public infrastructure "to support the medical business entity's development plans, as identified in the DMCC development plan." And what does "medical business entity" mean? From the 2013 DMC legislation this:

"Medical business entity" means a medical business entity with its principal place of business in the city that, as of the effective date of this section, together with all business entities of which it is the sole member or sole shareholder, collectively employs more than 30,000 persons in the state.

In other words: Mayo Clinic. It's almost embarrassing to have to point this out.

As to the broader regional impacts that are quickly disavowed when they bring disruption, disappointment, or disfavor - from the 2015 DMC development plan, among its "guiding principles," this:

Sustain Rochester and Southeast MN as a Destination Medical Center and Economic Engine for the State 

Rochester and its largest employer, Mayo Clinic, are critical components of the regional and State economy. Rochester, particularly its downtown core, needs to maintain an economic concentration, expand its business base and enhance the diversity of its economy. The DMC Development Plan promotes strategies that are focused on a broad range of opportunities, giving special consideration to strategies that support and leverage Mayo Clinic’s growth to enhance and expand the economy of Rochester and Southeast Minnesota. These strategies will promote the growth of new businesses, investment, entrepreneurship, and targeted businesses locally and within the region.

This sort of claim is "everywhere" throughout the 2015 development plan. The whole rationale for state, county, and city public funding is based upon state, county, and city impacts. To embrace these impacts when they are positive, but deny them when they are not, undermines the economic rationale of the whole project, interferes with the necessary policy deliberations required to sustain it, and, in the end, is politically untenable.

But this is what the strict constructionists now endeavor to do: if it's good, it's DMC; if it's not, hey the city gets the money talk to them! And Mayo Clinic - what do they have to do with it?

If "DMC has made Mayo Clinic a political pinata," it is only because Mayo Clinic stuffed DMC with candy and hung it in the middle of state capitol rotunda.

"DMC" on the Wheel of Fortune

Detail from the painting "The Sacrificial Lamb" by Josefa de Ayala, ca. 1670-1684. (Wikipedia)

Rhetorically, a scapegoat functions as a synecdoche in that it substitutes a whole for a part. Consistent with the employment of a scapegoat as a synecdochic representative, an effect can be made to stand in stead of a cause, or vice versa. - Beth Eddy, The Rites of Identity: The Religious Naturalism and Cultural Criticism of Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison

One needn't worry too much about the cost projections for either the Chateau Theatre or the Heart of the City. Not likely either will unfold as planned - if planning is even the right word anymore for what has been going on.

We'll get through to the other side of the Great Downtown Placemaking Scare of the Twenty-Teens soon enough. It will have cost us several millions in foam core fairs to be sure, but nothing near the tens of millions on display. Discovery Square is much more likely to rise as expected. It's familiar territory that follows a trend of siting corporate parks back into the city core. This one rendered even more trendy with an overlay of the rhetoric of social physics. None of this takes away anything from the honest to God remarkable work that might very well happen there.

"DMC" is the Wheel of Fortune answer to "Three letters that stand for 'growth' in Rochester, MN." Perhaps that's "scapegoating" if it's used as a shorthand for the growth someone doesn't like it, change someone resists, or inequity someone abhors. But, it may turn out that it's only the scapegoating that is keeping DMC at all relevant. We wouldn't have much to say about it otherwise, finally understanding it has so very little in the end to say about us.

Odd that the defense of DMC is now reduced to: "It's not about you." Odd, but true. The issue is growth, the challenges are the economic and social challenges of growth. DMC is about a "medical business entity," as it was referred to in the legislation, that remains the main driver of that growth. Beyond that, whatever else DMC is is either real estate or bad pr.

All the rest - all that is not DMC properly so called - is a city being a city with all the problems a growing city has.There's hardly much comfort to be had in that, but it should at least direct one's attention more productively in the proper direction.