Sorry, Dallas, but boring works here

Let me tell you this: After the last four years, not to say the last month, I’m excited not to be excited. Boredom sounds like the most attractive of all states at the moment, more of a privilege than a curse.

There is an argument for boredom, beyond exhaustion with its opposite. The subject has been studied with some academic rigor lately, with the subject taking on new relevance in this final year of quarantine lockdown. For example, you can read James Danckert and John Eastwood’s Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom (Harvard, 2020) about what boredom means to the brain, or if you’re more inclined to a social study of the phenomenon, Peter Toohey’s Boredom: A Living Story (Yale, 2012).

I won’t hold it against you if you find the academic discourse on boredom boring, but boredom itself has its virtues in the broadest sense. With this in mind, think of the letter from WG Sebald. In his idiosyncratic works – Austerlitz, Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants – individual sentences can go on page by page, one excursion merges into another, then only to repeat itself. Is Sebald boring? Some think so and I wouldn’t argue. But it is precisely in his moderate, antique form that Sebald achieves a kind of intoxicating sublime.

A similar on-screen sensitivity shows up in the HBO series How to with John Wilson, in which a nebbish-y documentary filmmaker explores New York City with a handheld camera on missions of personal discovery. The strongest episode is a meandering investigation into the history and purpose of scaffolding. A documentation about scaffolding? That sounds boring. And yet the essential everyday nature of its presentation turns it into a deep meditation not only on temporary urban design, but also on our own personal weaknesses.

Boredom is also a useful imagination for thinking about cities. The architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock did not advocate boring architecture per se, but instead distinguished in a groundbreaking essay between the architecture of genius and the architecture of bureaucracy. The ingenious architecture was the work of a select few great minds, the leaders of the field, and perhaps best suited for places of great civic importance: museums, concert halls, government offices. The architecture of the bureaucracy – let’s call it boring – was the true-to-scale infill building of everyday life; the everyday architecture of homes and businesses.

Some of the best architecture in Dallas is bureaucratic. The M-Street Bungalow Home in Old East Dallas qualifies in that regard; These neighborhoods are “boring” with their regular streets and conventional houses of similar size standing side by side. But that’s boring in the best sense of the word.

Unfortunately, Dallas has a shortage of boring architecture, especially in the downtown area, not least due to the wanton demolition of its architectural history. For more than half a century, Dallas has shed its bureaucratic edifice and is a city of above-ground parking lots and developments floating in urban space.

In neighborhoods like Uptown and West Dallas, the city has replaced its bureaucratic buildings with bad ones, and the two are certainly not the same. Those chunky beige blocks of flats, cheaply built and no shelter for the pedestrians? There is no redemption of these projects.

We can find a root of the problem in the idea that boring building – or boring everything – is an abomination to the Dallas “Big Things Happen Here” ethos. That’s why those in power at Klyde Warren Park put up a glittering $ 10 million fountain that will shoot a choreographed water show into the sky. Why have a simple water game for kids when you can shoot choreographed streams 30 meters into the air?

I’m not excited about this excitement, but I’m cautiously optimistic about a new town hall initiative that is certainly boring. I’m referring to Connect Dallas, the new strategic mobility plan released by the Department of Transportation earlier this month. An urban planning document is practically boring by definition, and this one is no exception: 106 eye-opening pages of red tape. It includes policy frames, action plans, performance dashboards, graphs and tables, all presented in a PowerPoint-style format that was obsolete in 1996. Slumber!

And that’s not even the content: Mobility, which is a bit of drowsy urban planning jargon, but still vital, from road design to development policy.

One of the priorities of the report is the adoption of an “Action Plan” to meet the City Council’s 2019 Vision Zero goals, which is to eliminate pedestrian deaths by 2030. This is an increasingly pressing issue as pedestrian safety in Dallas is catastrophically poor and is getting worse, not better, according to the report. Statistics (inherently boring) illustrate this problem: According to nonprofit Smart Growth America, Dallas had a pedestrian hazard index of 124.2 in 2019, more than double the national average of 55.3 and a jump from the city’s value of 2016 from 110.4.

It would be safer to walk around Dallas if the condition of the city’s sidewalks weren’t so appalling. According to the report, Dallas has 4,400 miles of sidewalk, only 1,200 miles of which are unobstructed or undamaged and 2,100 miles are missing in total. That’s right: almost half of the city’s sidewalks – the most basic building blocks of mobility – are inoperable.

The report provides a strategy to correct this situation by focusing on the areas of need and establishing links to local public transport. In all fairness, it could do a lot more, but it’s a start.

There are many other worthy initiatives outlined here, including 885 new miles of bike lanes and infrastructure, roughly 200 miles of improved bus service, and a redesign of city parking requirements that are stifling growth and preferring cars to people. These ideas reflect the collective will of the city. More than two dozen public events solicited input on the goals and strategies of the plan. I’m sure they were boring throughout, but no less productive for that.

It is noteworthy that there is no mention of bourgeois beauty in this report. Perhaps that was seen as too exciting, or rather irrelevant, to his technocratic goals. But a report that looks at mobility so broadly that it incorporates development and housing strategies (like it does and smart) might also recognize that the places we travel should be attractive: well designed, sustainable, and tree-lined , Dallas is a heat island. I can’t think of a more important destination for Dallas than creating safe and attractive roads.

And so I propose a new bourgeois mantra: Let’s let boring things happen here.

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