Hey Utah!

Last month I visited Utah for the first time while attending a conference in the capital, Salt Lake City. I imagine Salt Lake City as being in middle America, but in fact the flight was only 75 minutes, closer to San Francisco than Seattle.  A light rail line connects you from the airport directly to downtown destinations, for only $2.50, leaving every 10 minutes.

The City is set at the southeast corner of Great Salt Lake, very much like San Jose is set at the southeast end of San Francisco Bay. Neither city is quite on the waterfront, but you're aware of the proximity. The city is sited at the northern, uphill side of a long, low, flat plane - Salt Lake Valley - which sits at the base of the steep Wasatch and Oquirrh mountain ranges on the eastern and western sides, respectively. Salt Lake City is a place that gets very hot and very cold - it's not for the timid.

The city is laid out according to the "Plat of Zion," a peculiar planning pattern that includes 660' x 660' blocks - that's 10 acres each - and very wide streets with 132' rights-of-way. Over 500 settlements were established according to this pattern. There is a modestly sized downtown area, something of the CBD (central business district) found in so many cities west of the Appalachian mountains. This area has the tall buildings, the sporting venues, the 10-story parking garages, the Mormon facilities, the pubs (now open to all), and a few residents. Once you leave the downtown area, the city gets very un-dense very quickly. The surrounding neighborhoods are mostly made with one and two story single family houses.  A coffee shop, restaurant, and flower shop surrounding an intersection forms a local neighborhood center.

Pictures from my weekend in Salt Lake City are here:

http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=2AZsW7hs4ctWL9

The Culture of the City

Salt Lake City is like the Vatican of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, referred to locally as the LDS, known internationally as the Mormons. The Mormon sites feature a distinctive kind or architecture - a bit depression-modern, a bit colonial-fascist, a bit corporate-communist. All in all, difficult to categorize, but you know it when you see it. Founded in 1847 by a group led by Brigham Young, today the city has almost 200,000 residents, about half Mormons. Touring around the city - by foot, by bike, by street car - you immediately notice that most adults are white, but most children are brown. Even the city of Joseph Smith cannot buck national trends towards diversification.

 

My conference was held at the Grand America Hotel, a luxurious 2002 Olympics era hotel, built in a bombastic classical style, evoking a Mitt Romney embrace of wholesome Americana. The conference, the 22nd annual held for the Congress of New Urbanism, was a lively event where I reconnected with old friends, made new ones, and wistfully thought of those skipping the event this year. The topics, like the participants, spanned practice and policy, local and global, humanists and technocrats. There were numerous and lengthy sessions on urban farming, China urbanization, digital technologies for public feedback, safe streets, great American grids, playing, and not-so-big-ness.

 

After the conference, we rode public bikes from the downtown Mormon Sites into the surrounding neighborhoods. We met lots of friendly residents, out on a warm late spring weekend afternoon. They were curious about our green bikes, which had been all over the papers in the lead up to their launch. Despite the active role played by the Mormon church in helping to enact California's Prop 8 prohibiting gay marriage, Salt lake City seemed to be a very gay-friendly place. The weekend I was there, a huge Pride parade was held downtown. It felt like home!