Historically, we’ve created two kinds of places. The urban place, our cities, the places inside the walls, and then everything else outside the walls, the rural places, the agrarian places.
Our towns and cities were the connected places, they were our centers for commerce, and industry, and technology, and innovation. The rural places were grounded places, they were places that produced our food. Yet, they were right next door to each other. Daily, the residents in the cities experienced that rural and grounded experience as well. Our city started in much the same way, Denver, Colorado.
This is an image of the confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River where Denver was first settled. Of course, we grew, and we thrived, and this map, this diagram, shows that same confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte in the upper left hand corner of the map. As you see, the river continues, and you see the smoke stacks as we urbanized and industrialized our city. Those smoke stacks became the icons and signs of our progress and our success. Yet, there was a cost.
As those smoke stacks and industry came to our city, it pushed that rural, grounded place further away. The slaughterhouses, the farms that rimmed our city originally, that produced the food for our city, got kicked out of downtown. Our city was becoming noisier and more polluted, and so, as we fell in love with the automobile, and it gave us access to lure and promise of our suburbs, we looked for a place that might be quieter and maybe harken back to that rural grounded experience. But suburbs produced something that wasn’t either urban or rural. It wasn’t connected or grounded.
Something didn’t quite make sense.
We’ve been struggling with that ever since. Witness our current obsession with urban agriculture, right minded, as it is, backyard beehives and chickens. Let’s talk about an urban example close in on at Denver. Less than 100 years ago, 40,000 cattle a day moved through these stockyards that were located between the South Platte River and Brighton Boulevard, just north of what, in 1962, would become the Highway I-70, 40,000 cattle a day, less than two miles from 17th Street, the Wall Street of the West.
At night, you could hear cattle mooing in the center of our city. This is what that place looks like today. The stockyards are long gone, except for 14 days each January, when the National Western Stock Show inhabits this location, and the cattle come back to those pens, but generally it’s an industrialized area. Even the National Western itself, facing the pressures of an agrarian experience in an urban environment, seriously considered moving outside our city, just in the past few years.
Fortunately, our city leaders, correctly and instinctively, knew we can not let this happen. We need to fight the good fight and have the complex and critical conversations about how we integrate this agrarian rural experience into our urban environment. Out of it has come an amazing and complex innovation, a collaboration, a joint venture between seemingly diverse and desperate parties: the city and county of Denver, the National Western Stock Show, Colorado State University, History Colorado, and the neighborhoods that are close in to this site, Globeville, Elyria and Swansea. They’re coming up with innovations and collaborations, here for not experience, for example, ideas as far flung as international symposiums on global food production for healthy and sustainable foods for the planet. As well as locally inventive projects like classes dealing with how to build your own greenhouse, and how to prepare those foods that you’ve produced in a healthy way.
You see, we’re trying to create a globally connected place that is locally grounded. This is critically important work Complex, but critically important. Because we’re running out of land. Our metroplex from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs spans 130 miles of urban sprawl.
So, what do we do about that? Of course, I’m here to suggest I have a few ideas. We need to create places that are either urban or rural. We need to institute the discipline to make sure that we avoid creating places that aren’t either one of those things. We need to create places in our most dense urban environments that are mixed used, mixed income, mixed generational projects, residential communities that are inextricably linked to the sources of their food production, and equally connected to the open space network in greenways, in parks, in waterways of our city. So that everyday those residents can have both the wonderful experience of being connected to an urban environment, but grounded to that experience of nature.
In order to do that, we need to understand what both of these things are, both the urban and the rural experience. We need to become expert in both of those things. So I would suggest that cowboys and urbanistas, rednecks and baristas have a lot to learn from each other. I have a bit of a different perspective on that because I lived this sort of strange double life. I’m a Denver guy, I moved here in 1982 after graduating from architecture school, and ever since I’ve been designing urban places and buildings in the city.
But in 2006, maybe looking to have it all, to have that urban experience – we were living in a great historic Denver neighborhood – looking to have it all and have that rural grounded experience, our family, my wife and our two children, 10 and 12 at that time, purchased a cattle ranch in Strasburg, Colorado, just 30 miles east of Denver. It’s a little bit crazy, our days are diverse, they’re long, we do all sorts of strange things, I may start my day with a meeting with the mayor in the morning, and end that evening bailing hay. But it’s been an incredible experience, and it’s had a profound impact on our family, and how I will forever look at urban design. The lessons from the urban experience informed the rural, the rural informed the urban. Some of those lessons of the rural experience happened before we even purchased the ranch.
I remember well, we had negotiated the price for the ranch, and most of these negotiations happened over the phone or in person with the rancher Charles Robins who was retiring from ranching. We’d come to a price, but it was a few weeks after, and we had yet to pay for the deal. There was nothing signed. I called Charles one day and I said, “Charles, I’ve been involved in a lot of real estate deals, but never had I had one where we didn’t ink the deal. When do you think we can put together a contract?” I could tell you he was a little offended, and he asked me, he said, “When we agreed on this price, didn’t I shake your hand?” And I said, “Yes, Sir.” And he said, “When I shook your hand, wasn’t I looking you square in the eye?” I knew where this was going, “Yes, Sir.” Long pause, and he said, “Is there anything else we need to talk about?” I said, “No, Sir.” We didn’t need a contract. That is the integrity of that agrarian community. His word is his bond, it is alive and well.
The rural economy – and the rural culture as well – is the ultimate innovator in the sharing economy. Sharecropping is what makes the world go round on the Eastern plains. I have a tractor, you have a bailor, you have a field, I want to farm it, that’s how we operate, that’s how things get done, and they’re deals that sustain. We count on each other. The same is true with sustainability.
The rural community is the originator of adaptive reuse, everything gets used and used, and reused and reused, over and over again. Those piles of junk that I used to think, made me in my anal-retentive, orderly self want to clean up that stuff along the side of the fence, I’ve learned are the world’s best free parts stores. That’s what they use them for. My urban experience has informed the rural experience, of course, as well. My experience and expertise with sustainability is why we’re a grass fed cattle operation, rather than a grain fed cattle operation.
It’s why we are extremely hypersensitive to how we use every drop of water at the ranch when we farm. Our access to technology, and information, and resources has made it possible beyond Charles’ years of mentoring and training, it made it possible for us to actually figure out what the heck we’re doing as we’ve gone from 0 to 100 in eight years of learning from nothing about farming and ranching. I’d like to talk now a little bit about an example that is in a rural context. I talked a few minutes ago about the stockyards in the urban context. This is a shot of Denver International Airport and the tens of thousands of acres that exist as developable land around DIA. Mayor Hancock has talked about his vision for airport city and Aerotropolis. And we’ve made this enormous investment in the form of the commuter rail line from Denver Union Station to DIA Development is coming. Absolutely.
They’re coming, they’re interested now, and it will happen. So we need to figure out what kind of development we want to see at DIA. If you look at this diagram, you’ll see the string of pearls heading up towards DIA, at Denver International Airport. Those are the transit stations we’re building. I would suggest that those need to be the center of the density around DIA.
That our very first parking space that we build around one of these transit stations should be in parking structure and should be part of a mixed use, mixed income, mixed generational; the same kind of urban intensity I spoke about before at that transit station. That we must treat every square foot of wheat land, and crop land, and native grass land around Denver International Airport as if it – and it is – just as valuable as every square foot of real estate along 17th Street. It is critically important.
Further, when we look at our residential development on the Eastern plains, that we create residential developments that bring that same sophistication, that same mix of uses to the rural environment, to our Eastern plains, and that we cluster and densify those urban units, similar to what we would do in the city, and create the same adjacency to the rural experience, that grounded experience, creating both the urban connected and rural grounded experience in those wheat fields on those native grass lands. It’s critically important.
Agritopia is a project in Phoenix; agriburbiacom, you should check it out. There’s a number of projects around the country that are just starting to scratch the surface and talk about development supported agriculture. You’ve heard of CSAs, these are DSAs I believe it’s the future.
What’s important about this is that we must create places that are both urban and rural, and that they must all be connected and grounded. The only way to do this is to become expert in the essence of both of those places. We must understand what makes them tick. So I invite you to create a relationship with the people and places that produce your food. Get to know your farmer, for real.
I ask you to attend your neighborhood planning meeting, understand the decisions that are being made about the future of your place, and how it will feel. Declare it. We can create cities of the future with heart and soul and at the same time, create the antidote to urban sprawl. Thank you very much.
