Joel Garreau: All Publications, Events and Press

How Is America Going To End? | Slate

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 13:34:00 -0400

Joel Garreau, a longtime Washington Post writer and editor who regularly works with GBN, explains that the scenario matrix is a framework for thinking ...

Obama's Vision Deficit | Reason Online

Cecille Isidro — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 06:01:00 -0400

Forget that, as urban historian Joel Garreau has long documented, our country has been decentralizing its living and working patterns for decades now, migrating from virtually all urban centers (except maybe for booming Washington, DC) to relatively ...

Future Tense: Radical Revolution

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:57:00 -0400

In 1913, the U.S. Government prosecuted Lee De Forest for telling investors that his company, RCA, would soon be able to transmit the human voice across the Atlantic. This claim was so preposterous, prosecutors asserted, that he was obviously swindling potential investors. He was ultimately released, but not before being lectured by the judge to stop making any more fraudulent claims.

Last Impressions

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:00:00 -0400

Among the last things to go in the Depression was -- lipstick.

"It was not particularly expensive, but it was a prized possession," says Jeremy E. Adamson, director for collections and services at the Library of Congress. "You feel bad anyway, but you make yourself look a little bit better. It says, 'I care about myself.' Those little things are terribly important."

Smithsonian Click-n-Drags Itself Forward

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 14:36:00 -0500

The Smithsonian has decided this whole online contraption may not be a fad after all.

Over the weekend it invited 31 luminaries of the digital age to talk with what the institution hopes are its most energetic thought leaders. The subject: dragging the world's greatest museum complex into the current century.

No small task.

A Disintegrating U.S.? Critics Come Unglued

Cecille Isidro — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 13:10:00 -0500

For seriously predicting that the United States will break into six parts in June or July of 2010, Igor Panarin has suddenly become a Russian state-media celebrity. Hardly a day goes by without another interview or two for the KGB-trained, Kremlin-backed senior analyst. The clamor in Russia for his ideas is growing, he says.

In The Paper | Guardian Weekly

Communications — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 08:24:00 -0500

There’s some nice writing this week from The Washington Post’s Joel Garreau, who finds that a visit to North Dakota’s nuclear missile silos helps to put the ...

In Unsettled Times, Revisiting Our Mutually Assured Past

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 14:42:00 -0500

In a time of uncertainty, upheaval and catastrophic risk, there's nothing like a missile silo.

You may have no idea what your 401(k) will be worth, or your house, or whether your kids will be able to go to college. Eighty feet below the plains of North Dakota, however, these concerns magically evaporate.

Take a slow, loud elevator cage down into the depths of Oscar Zero, as it is called -- the launch control center for what used to be a bevy of Minuteman III nuclear missiles aimed at the late, great Soviet Union -- and return with us now to those days of the Cold War when, unlike today, even when things were bleak, they were at least clear.

"In the movie 'WarGames,' we were the first to go," Delore Zimmerman, a Grand Forks economic development specialist, recalls cheerfully.

When you're surrounded by 150 Minuteman III silos, with 400-plus warheads, spread out geometrically across eight very large counties from the Canadian border to Interstate 94, you have an extremely clear idea of what the end of the world looks like. Kind of consoling, actually, in its lack of ambiguity.

Today is harder.

Today is more like the situation described by Thomas Homer-Dixon -- "systems that are kind of stressed to the max already, where policymakers are trying to keep ten balls in the air simultaneously and keep all the various constituencies satisfied as best they can. And then there's some exogenous shock on an already highly stressed system that produces a kind of overload situation." Homer-Dixon is author of "The Upside Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization."

Oh, sure, the Cold War end-of-the-world scenarios had plenty of stress overload, especially in how they would start. What if the Israelis were to start losing a Middle East war, for example, or what if the North Koreans disappeared up their own corkscrew logic?

But the Cold War scenarios were by several orders of magnitude the most excruciatingly studied futures that never came to pass.

Visit the Fulda Gap in Germany, for example, about an hour east of Frankfurt. That was the location of the all-time No. 1 pawn-to-king-four scenario of the start of the end.

In that scenario, the endless tanks of endless Soviet divisions would come racing through this valley -- which looks not unlike the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia -- headed for Western Europe. The American 11th Armored "Blackhorse" Cavalry was there on hair-trigger alert to complicate their lives as thoroughly as they could.

If you visited this outfit in the early '90s -- after The Wall had fallen but before it had thoroughly entered people's brains that the Cold War threat was really gone -- you got an earful about their fast tanks, with sophisticated guns. "One shot, one kill" without stopping was the whole idea, they'd tell you.

But the cavalry guys knew they were basically very formidable speed bumps. They also knew where every Lassie collie of every one of their kids would go on the first day of the end of the world. It was that planned.

While the fast and technologically superior 11th Cavalry tanks were supposedly killing Soviet tanks at a 7 to 1 ratio, so the theory went, the 747s from the States were disgorging troops, who would run to their prepositioned main battle tanks to really bring it on. When the 747s turned around to get more American troops, so the scenario went, they would not return empty. They would be full not only of American military kids, briefers told reporters, but also their pets, in cages stockpiled for exactly this scenario. Yes. They had figured it out to that level of minutiae.

The 11th Cavalry dads, meanwhile, knew exactly where they would stop their tanks to get warm pastries and hot coffee on the way to Armageddon. They knew which German bakeries would sell them stuff out their window at 4 a.m. because they'd responded to surprise practice alerts a zillion times.

Oddly enough, that level of guaranteed certainty produced one of the least likely futures in history. It is the one we have today, in which we have survived as a species and even thrived sufficiently to create credit default swaps that possibly will do what the Soviet nuclear targeters failed to do: bring us to our knees.

After a while, you think about this at the bottom of Oscar Zero.

Its portion of the actual missile fields that made North Dakota one of the world's great nuclear powers has been gone for a decade, destroyed as part of an agreement between the United States and Russia. Oscar Zero, however, has been preserved in the hope that the State Historical Society will one day be able to reopen it as a museum. Such an attraction is seen as an economic development opportunity, bringing in tourists. Oscar Zero is not yet open to the public, but if you've got friends in the economic development community, it's possible to find someone with a key who will show you around.

That would be John Clark, a Cooperstown native who maintains the place just as it was on July 17, 1997, the day the nuclear warriors stood down. When Clark was in the Air Force, he served as a "nuclear weapons specialist." He would test the cone-shaped warheads electronically to make sure they would work. You ask him if that was spooky. More in hindsight than at the time, he says.

The command post deep underground is in a concrete pod perhaps 30 feet high and 50 feet long. You enter it through a tunnel sealed by a three-foot-thick blast door. The floor on which you stand, gazing at the desks full of ancient electronics, is suspended from the top of the pod by giant shock absorbers about 2 feet across and 20 feet long. The chair on which you sit to look at the "status alert" display board -- which includes lights labeled "Enabled," "Lch in process" and "Missile away" -- is similar to an airline pilot's captain's chair. It has a four-point seat belt that comes over your shoulders. Oscar Zero is majorly prepared for the ground to move beneath your feet.

How are your retirement funds doing? you ask Clark, 58, your tour guide who still works maintenance at the local hospital.

"If there's anything I could go back to school for, it would be economics," he says, without the slightest hesitation. "I don't understand it, I guess." He shakes his head so rapidly it's like a shiver.

On the road back to town, the crop-laden harvest fields look like iridescent bathroom tiles of jade and turquoise, chocolate and sand, stretching out to the horizon on luxuriously licorice soil so flat that they say you can't lose a dog for three days.

Oscar Zero is thought-provoking, and silence-inducing.

Sure, okay, so nobody today is saying we're looking into any abyss as deep as that of the Cold War. Although you hear people in Europe talking about this being the end of an era for capitalism, possibly producing changes as substantial as occurred in Russia after the fall of communism.

It does, however, turn out that the unthinkable that you've thoroughly thought about for decades is not what bites you in the butt.

It's your unexamined faiths that get you. The faiths in markets. In leaders, in investment advisers, in pensions, in funds, in companies.

They are nowhere near as solid as that pod 80 feet below the surface of the North Dakota plains.

Don't Trash Big Boxes, Repackage Them!

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 16:22:00 -0500

The Washington Post assembled a team of artists, architects, engineers and developers to think creatively about what to do with spaces once occupied by big box stores -- our most common, underrated and increasingly available major buildings. Below are some of their ideas.

Build A Town in a Parking Lot

As a developer, what Leinberger hates about parking lots is that they just sit there not making him any money. Fortunately, that can be fixed. The vast acreage of big-box parking lots seems almost providentially proportioned to be turned into walkable city blocks, he says. What you have to do is lay these blocks out with parking garages at their core, and encrust those with an outer layer of shops and apartments on all sides. That makes one block. Put together a whole bunch of these blocks, with the shops and apartments facing each other across the newly defined streets, and you've got a chunk of city. As it happens, prefabricated parking deck trusses span about 60 feet. So let's say you make your parking deck a loaf 60 feet wide and 120 feet deep. If you face it on all sides with shops that are 50 feet deep, well, voilà -- you've got yourself a walkable city block, with just enough space left over for sidewalks, bike lanes and streets. Then you build apartments or offices over the shops. Didn't you always want to live a croissant's throw away from a Target? We thought so. The great challenge is that big-box stores always have excellent automobile accessibility. So there's that enormous highway out there at the edge of your former parking lot. You want to make that into a boulevard -- a Champs-Elysees.

Windows? Windows? Big boxes don't need no stinking windows. If humans want to live in this building, however, they do. So the first thing is to core out the center of the big box, so you have a garden open to the sky for people to look into, suggests Roger K. Lewis, the emeritus professor of architecture at the University of Maryland who writes The Post's Shaping the City column.

The exterior walls are not hard to punch windows into -- structurally, they're just steel uprights sometimes reinforced with diagonal struts. Then you punch skylights in over the interior walkways, and the apartments almost start laying themselves out. You add a balcony here, a second floor there, a sleeping loft over yonder, and you're looking at the niftiest affordable housing ever. Unless you make them too nice. Then the yuppies are going to want to move in, and there goes the neighborhood.

The Garden of Gaithersburg

Decide for yourself what this says about the zeitgeist, but everybody wanted to make these things into gardens. You want a growth industry? This takes the "eat local" movement to a whole new level.

Organic gardeners routinely lay down weed-suppressing black plastic into which they poke holes to plant their seeds. Asphalt is just like that, only a little thicker, observes Darrel Rippeteau, principal of Rippeteau Architects. So in the process of creating a truck garden (below), the parking lot becomes an orchard. Under the parking lot you find an elaborate network of drainage pipes -- if you think big-box owners want to see women in high heels slipping on ice, you are out of your mind. In its new incarnation, the system collects rainwater for irrigation. In fact, the water can be piped into the fire-suppression sprinkler system in the big box, which now serves as a monster mister. (You could also go hydroponic.) Much of the roof, of course, has become glass or translucent plastic. Those gigunda halogens make great grow lights. The concrete slab floor works as a heat sump. Major-league climate control comes with the package. Much of the produce is packed up in the back and shipped to farmers' markets. But you can also pick your own.

Once it sinks in how big that roof is, one's thoughts quickly turn to solar voltaic, as demonstrated by Phil Esocoff, principal of the architecture firm Esocoff and Associates, who also adds a recharging area for electric cars and a veneer of apartments for people who really want to get near their groceries. He also specifies that everything be easily disassembled and moved as the economics of the box location changes. Once you get into how high those ceilings are, Harold Linton's mind turned to letting the grow space of the big box become the Virginia Arbor Conservatory. Yes, trees. Linton is chair of George Mason University's Department of Art and Visual Technology. Or how about a vineyard? Rusty Meadows, an engineer by training who is director of the Washington office of Perkins + Will, an outfit that specializes in commercial buildings, loves the idea of the Clos de Germantown.

Variation on a Garden

This additional garden transformation is the work of Esocoff & Associates. The vast roof supports solar voltaics, which enables not only a greenhouse, but a recharging area for electric cars, and a veneer of apartments for people who really want to get near their groceries. Everything is designed to be easily disassembled and moved as the economics of the box location changes.

The SoHo of the Suburbs

Give this assignment to artists and they start thinking about buildings comparable to circus tents that are sitting in former rail yards and pretty soon they wind up with ideas for artists living and working and exhibiting that are possibly unlike any other on Earth. Peter Winant and Tom Ashcraft are both sculptors and associate chairs of the Department of Art and Visual Technology at George Mason. Thinking about how "the circus tent opens and folds and closes," they got the idea to open up both ends of the big box, and start rolling in railroad freight cars and trailer-size freight containers. They're cheap, fairly maneuverable and stackable, like a kid's blocks.

If you pile two or more, the upper ones can be for living and eating and entertaining, and the lower ones given over to studios where the art is made. The big center sliding doors of the freight cars can open up to galleries in which the public interacts with the work of the artists.

The ways you stack these things in turn define courtyards and stages and display spaces where people can sit and converse and make music and have small-scale performances. The inside space would transition to the outdoor space, which could be filled with basketball courts, tennis courts, gardens and green space.

All of this would be the product of artists' hands, work and money. Nothing would cost any single artist much more than $30,000 or $40,000, Winant estimates.

But wait a minute, you say. If you open up the ends of the big box to the weather, even if you have a roof, won't that place get awfully cold in the winter? "They'll have wood stoves," says Winant. "They're artists, right? They'll get pallets, break them up and burn them." After all, what is art without suffering?

Hydroponic Truck Farm Market

Architect Darrel Rippeteau suggests a garden center that provides seasonal vegetables and fruits to local markets.

The big box stores' roofing panels could be swapped out for translucent skylights. Consumers could walk through the space to browse the offerings as at any standard farmers market, or make drive-through purchases with the aid of a small road through the middle of the space.

Fruits and vegetables could be grown hydroponically and continuously all year, allowing for good horticultural practices. The space's existing sprinkler system would become a mechanism for daily watering.

La Vigne de la Grande BoÎte

Imagine a big box in which the roof as well as the parking lots are covered with wine grapes.

That's what Rusty Meadows and Tammy Tim, of the Washington office of Perkins + Will, did.

The interior of the big box has plenty of space for a retail outlet as well as areas for bottling, case storage, processing and shipping. It also features a wine-making school and a cafe

Virginia Arbor Conservatory

An expansive selection of plants native to Virginia grow inside and outside this tree-hugger's paradise. The facility's roof has been rolled back to form skylit portals for various groupings of trees and plants. The space would serve as both a commercial outlet for shoppers and an educational institute for individuals and communities seeking to learn more about landscape concepts and environmental applications to residential and commercial design plans.

Big Box & Beyond

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 15:25:00 -0500

For the purposes of this morning's discussion, the amazing thing about the Spam Museum -- as in the meat product -- is not that it exists. It's that it was created out of an abandoned Kmart. "The renovation of the Kmart building into what you see here today has the drama of a great epic," says Julie Craven, publicity representative for Spam in Austin, Minn. "We are going to be in this building for a long, long time. . . . We love it here."

The Money Has Come From Somewhere

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 10:42:00 -0500

Let us consider for a moment those people being blamed for destroying the economy because they heedlessly bought houses that "they knew they couldn't afford."

I for one have nothing but sympathy for this all-too-human behavior. For more than 30 years, I have noted the absolute lack of connection between mathematics and money. For lo these many decades, I've never understood how I manage to make my mortgage payments. Or my tax payments, for that matter. In my experience, these things never add up.

Not that I haven't worshipped at the shrine to arithmetic. When my wife and I first started sharing a checkbook, budgets were big issues. I thought that mathematics was the most exact of sciences, yielding cold, hard, demonstrable results. There was no squish in numbers, I believed. You could either afford things or you couldn't. Pay check in, rent check out. There was no gray. It was so obvious that it would drive me nuts when she would blithely say, "Well, the money will just have to come from somewhere."

Turns out she acquired this elastic theory of money with her mother's milk. Whenever she and her siblings told their mother that they wanted something, mom would always say, "We can't afford it." Then, a few weeks later, the object of desire would magically appear. When the kids asked her to explain, sure enough she would say, "Well, the money will just have to come from somewhere."

The amazing thing is: It did. This was a family that sent seven kids to college on a writer's salary. To this day, nobody in that entire family can explain how that happened. Nonetheless, they are proof that the money came from somewhere.

The funny thing is, the longer I've paid bills, the more the evidence has piled up that my wife's theory is right -- that money is far too human an invention to be neatly described by the laws of mathematics. When we bought our first house for $80,000, I was able to demonstrate beyond a doubt that there was no way we could make the payments on my salary. When we bought our current house for $200,000, I knew beyond question that we were doomed.

Nonetheless, the money has come from somewhere.

Mortgage payments aren't the only area of finance that never obey the laws of mathematics. Tax returns enter into this nebulous realm all the time. Visions of prison dance through my head every time I dutifully sign the Form 1040 that my tax person has prepared for me. I haven't understood my tax return for decades.

Of course, the mysterious lack of correlation between mathematics and money works in the opposite direction, too. How many times have people told me that I should just sit tight with my 401(k) and that over time, the market would magically make it grow by 7 percent per year? Savings accounts are for chumps, right? No matter how often I told her that she was nuts, my mother kept her retirement money in a credit union until the day she died.

Of course, she had lived through the Depression.

Hmmmm.

Don't get me wrong. I've never completely abandoned my belief in a vengeful mathematical god who will someday smite the profligate. Maybe that's what's happening now.

But this is to address those righteous commentators who say that perdition is too good for those poor souls who signed away their birthrights along with their mortgages during the credit bubble.

If they think those are the only people who have been deluded by the elastic relationship between money and arithmetic, they'd better lay in some more rope and kindling. There's going to be an enormous share of the population that they're going to have to tie to the stake before this is over. That would be all those people who believed -- for the excellent reason that all the evidence of their lives demonstrated that this is the way the adult world works -- that the money would come from somewhere.