Hmmm, Raleigh’s thinking big?
The Raleigh Planning Department, knee-deep into writing a new comprehensive plan, is open to our biggest, baddest, baldest ideas for fashioning a great 21st century city. So they say. Dust ‘em off, shine ‘em up, and bring them to Tir Na Nog on Monday, April 21. More below, from Kris Larsen —
July of 2008 marks the 220th anniversary of the first ‘planning’ meeting held for Raleigh. That meeting, held at Sir Isaac Hunter’s Tavern, established Raleigh as the new state capital of North Carolina. In honor of this occasion, the Department of City Planning will be hosting a spirited, non-traditional planning charrette to discuss the Big Ideas you have for downtown and the City of Raleigh. This email, and the attached PDF, is a call for our community’s dreamers, thinkers, and critics, imagineers, and designers to come together to share your ideas, no matter how crazy or far-fetched, for what our community can be.
You want a river downtown? Tell us.
An arena surrounded by walkable retail? Tell us.
A zip line between the Two Hannover Tower and Wachovia Capital Center? Tell us.
You get the point.
Please feel free to post the attached PDF on your respective websites, as the success of the event will be influenced by the number of dreamers we have in attendance.
The details:
Where? Tir na nOg Irish Pub (218 S. Blount St., Downtown Raleigh)
When? April 21st, 2008 from 6:00 – 9:00 PM
What else do I need to do? RSVP to Kristopher.larson@ci.raleigh.nc.us
Best regards,
Kristopher Larson, MPA
Senior Planner
Raleigh Urban Design Center
Department of City Planning
e kristopher.larson@ci.raleigh.nc.us
p 919.807.5220
m 919.795.6925
f 919.807.8481
April 14th, 2008 10:04
Among the big plans for our city is the plan for a world class park.
In a writing course that I teach, we use an allegory titled “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula Le Guin. Written in the ‘70s, the story tells of a city whose great prosperity depends on the suffering of a child. The child is shackled in a closet, so that the bright, happy city can thrive.
My students variously interpret the story as an analogy for racism, the treatment of the poor or abortion. What is clear is that the helpless are abused for the benefit of the powerful. The image might also be a State which would board the doors of its mental hospitals for the sake of budgetary expediency. Its proud citizens in the name of “materialistic activism” would cheat the handicapped of their last 306 acre refuge to create a municipal park.
We are those who remain in Omelas. The alliance between the State’s Mental Health hierarchy and those who would use Dorothea Dix for Omelas’ bright and happy park is only delayed by the dance of greed. The State wants $100M for the land; Raleigh, urged by the 306ers, offered $10M. If the mentally ill are to be turned out by the State, the value of the Dix Mental Health facility will be needed as a trust by the counties which have now inherited the problem without funding. That property was dedicated to the needy, not to this administration’s caprice nor dedicated to the fluttering flight of Frisbees.
The one element of that appears in all interpretations of the story is that “the one’s who walk away” turn from “materialistic activism” for the sake of humanism.