SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS
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Houston, 2017 The 2017 hurricane season already had proven brutal. As Harvey and Irma rolled across the Gulf Coast that autumn, reports of urban devastation piled up. In part, the constant attention to smashed cities is an expected consequence of people and, perhaps more important, TV stations concentrating in urban centers. Moreover, cities, as the largest and arguably most complex product of human enterprise, are those places most likely to lose a concentrated battle with Mother Nature. As cities are made by humans, they necessarily are imperfect. Such faultiness calls for modesty in thinking about how we go about rebuilding once hurricane season has passed. Could Houston, Miami, Jacksonville and Tampa have been better planned and built? Of course. As cities are complex, humans invariably struggle to bring the totality of urban reality into a single vision. We tend to isolate those aspects of urban life which give us pause, approaching the urban condition with singular solutions and agendas intended to “fix” a particular urban challenge. This piecemeal approach tends to distract us from the larger objective of nurturing cities as holistic places of promise. As we rebuild our great coastal cities, we should never lose sight of a task larger than securing communities against the ravages
of nature — although such a goal is necessary for any further success. Instead, we should always think of cities as places that nurture human creativity. This has never been more the case than in such cities as Houston and Miami. According to former Houston mayoral candidate Bill King, 1990s Houston Mayor Bob Lanier used to say, “Houston is one place where nobody cares who your daddy is.” Houston’s genius has been found in its ability to welcome the unwelcome and encourage unbridled creativity. The same can be said about much of South Florida as well. Americans should appreciate such places because our most “American” metropolis, Chicago, was just such an ungainly city of the future a century ago. City leaders managed in the course of one or two lifetimes to leverage the Native American portage across the Americas’ lowest continental divide to create one of the globe’s industrial, transportation and financial powerhouses. No shortage of folks showed up to partake in this success, and the city’s population exploded from 500,000 to 3.5 million over the half century beginning in 1870. Chicago certainly became an emporium for all of the evils and accomplishments
