Tag: el paso

How a Fake Ad Campaign Led to the Real-Life Launch of a Massive Infrastructure Project

Posted on by robbie

Donald Trump’s call for a “big, beautiful wall” along our southern border hasn’t resonated in the West Texas city of El Paso. Already connected to Mexico by the world’s largest border metroplex, local officials want to further link El Paso to its sister city, Ciudad Juarez. Last January, they started laying tracks for a streetcar line that officials hope eventually will shuttle passengers between the two countries, as it had once done for most of the 20th century.
Notably, and rather unusually, the El Paso streetcar initiative gained steam as a public and performance art project. In 2011, black-and-white portraits of a smiling train conductor started popping up around town, sometimes accompanied by the phrase Sube al futuro: Go to the future. A few months later, a wheat-pasted mosaic on an abandoned brick building featured hundreds of locals’ faces; together, the composite formed an ad for a retro streetcar, which resembled the Art Deco-ish trolley that ran 63 miles between El Paso and Juarez until 1974. At that point, conceptual artist Peter Svarzbein, an El Paso native, introduced himself as the creative mind behind the El Paso Transnational Trolley Project.
In the five years since, an even odder confluence of art and life took place. The fictional ad campaign gave a fresh face to the public transit movement, which helped turn it into a multimillion-dollar construction reality (the first 4.8-mile section is set to open in 2018). Meanwhile, Svarzbein ran for office and now sits on the nine-member city council, which provides direction to the agency responsible for the El Paso’s transit projects.
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“Border crossing is what defines us,” Svarzbein says of his city. “It’s in the best interest, for both El Paso and Juarez, to allow these people to cross over. They’re not doing it to take our jobs and our Medicaid, or whatever rhetoric is espoused. We understand our people crossing over symbolize the dreams of what this country has always been about.”
The son of an Argentine-born surgeon and a French-born nurse who moved to El Paso together in 1978, Svarzbein grew up accustomed to a border town’s cross-cultural influence. In high school, he and his friends regularly trekked next door to dine out at restaurants or take advantage of Mexico’s younger drinking age at nightclubs.
But shortly after Svarzbein moved away to attend Franklin & Marshall College, a liberal arts school in Pennsylvania, the tie between the sister cities was snipped. In 2006, the Mexican president Felipe Calderon launched an all-out assault against the country’s powerful drug cartels, an opening salvo that led to turf wars in Juarez and chaos along the border. To respond to the violence, Svarzbein began looking for a way to remind residents of both countries of the connections they shared, despite the brutality.
Researching symbols of unity, he came across pictures of El Paso’s old trolley line. For his master’s thesis at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, he decided to create a series of fake ads for the tram’s revival. Both conceptual and commercial, a historical documentary and a performance piece, the art project blurred genres — not unlike how living on the border can entwine residents’ identities.
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In 2012, Svarzbein’s fictional vision for a revitalized streetcar system started to become reality when he discovered the city planned on selling the old, rusting trolleys to San Francisco. “I said, ‘Oh, hell no,’” Svarzbein recalls. He began lobbying city officials to apportion part of a quality-of-life bond to reviving the streetcar, and he gathered over 1,800 signatures. The outpouring of support eventually won a $97 million grant from the Texas Department of Transportation.
When the first phase opens, the trolley will make 27 stops along a route from the University of Texas El Paso to the city’s downtown. It’s expected to pick up about 1,480 riders daily, topping 540,000 trips a year. The line will use six vintage Presidents’ Conference Committee cars, a tram design that became popular in 1936, around the time FDR was reelected for a third term; each is being refurbished with Wi-Fi and air-conditioning. “For some people, it taps into nostalgia. They remember when they were kids, riding the streetcar with their abuela, when it was easier to go into Mexico,” Svarzbein says.
The public-works project is a nod to the city’s history, but Svarzbein hopes that it will also create new opportunities on both sides of the border. “We have the ability in this region to not just design an idea, but to build it,” he says. “We need to make sure that people and businesses are able to cross the border in an efficient and safe way.”
That, after all, is the promise of an international streetcar, he adds, especially in a time where inflamed political rhetoric paints the US-Mexico border as an area in need of armed patrols, rather than more ports of entry. “What much of the country doesn’t understand — and what we understand all too well being in these twin cities — is that border security is economic security,” Svarzbein argues. “Providing jobs are how you make this area safe. Jobs are how the cartels don’t have as much power. Jobs are how you grow this region.”

An earlier version of this story suggested Svarsbein was the sole instigator of the project, when he was actually one of several people advocating for it, and that the cartel-related violence in Juarez had reached across the border. We regret the errors.

Homepage photo courtesy of Peter Svarzbein/mongovision.com.

5 Cities That Are Making Eco-Friendly Living a Reality

Posted on by robbie

Darker winters and blazing heatwaves, higher floods and months without rain. It’s undeniable that our climate is changing. But some American cities are lagging behind; only 59 percent have a mitigation plan, the lowest rate for any global region.
There are are bright spots, however, as some municipalities are adapting with the weather’s fluctuations — and their early efforts are showing results. Last year, for the the first time on record, the global economy grew without an accompanying rise in carbon dioxide emissions. Cleaner energy sources and conservation are proving more effective than even most experts predicted.
Here are several American projects leading the way into a new century of climate consciousness.
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New York City
The largest metropolitan region — the Tri-state Area, which consists of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut and is home to nearly 20.1 million Americans — found itself taken off-guard by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The devastating, 13.88-foot storm surge flooded the city, shuttering the subways and leaving the New York Stock Exchange, along with most of Lower Manhattan, dark for several days. One hundred and six people died along the East Coast, and thousands were displaced from their homes. Spurred into action, the Big Apple took immediate measures to stave off destruction from another nor’easter. A few days after, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, “Our climate is changing. And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it may be — given the devastation it is wreaking — should be enough to compel all elected leaders to take immediate action.”
Following suit from Southern cities like Galveston, Texas, and Miami, which have built storm barriers and restored wetlands, The City That Never Sleeps proposed a $20 billion, 430-page plan to protect its coastline. A central aspect involves beautifying neighborhoods with miles of parkland wrapping around the island, placing some buffer between city and sea. Offshore, oyster beds could break the storm surges, an innovation Kate Orff, a Columbia University architecture professor, calls “oyster-tecture” or “living breakwaters.” She was awarded a $60 million grant by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to plant millions of pearl-producers off Staten Island. The artificial reef is bringing biodiversity back to New York’s harbor and using the water as an advantage before the next storm strikes.
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Chicago
From the 1871 inferno that burned 3.3 square miles to the 1979 airline flight that crashed seconds after takeoff from O’Hare International Airport, Chicago has been no stranger to its own tragic disasters. But the Second City is taking proactive measures to prevent the next climate change crisis. As part of the Chicago Climate Action Plan started by Mayor Richard M. Daley in 2008, the city is preparing for hotter heat waves and wetter downpours. Researchers have studied ways to combat the “urban heat island” effect, a phenomenon that can increase temperatures by as much as 10 degrees during already scorching summers. In response, the city council passed ordinances requiring more trees in and around empty parking lots as well as reflective covers on most roofs. And at City Hall, landscapers planted nearly 20,000 plants in a rooftop garden.
When it comes to preventing floods, Chicago is once again at the forefront. Almost all public alleyways (and in some districts, concrete sidewalks) have been replaced with pervious pavement, concrete mixed with fine sand that enables water to flow straight through. Under heavy traffic, this paving deteriorates faster than normal, but it also reduces stormwater runoff into the city sewer system by 80 percent, preventing flooding and pesky potholes. Rain or shine, the Windy City’s ready.
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El Paso, Texas
The pipes in this Southern city were running dry after years of drought, so researchers turned to another source: already-used water. Faced with an arid climate in the mountains along the border, El Paso launched the nation’s largest potable-reuse program. Derided by some critics as “toilet to tap,” the technology can seem icky, but most city residents were more worried about running out of water. “In an area where it doesn’t rain you have to explore every viable option, and that’s a viable option,” one resident said at a recent public meeting. While there are some worries about chemicals being poured down the drain, most experts say it’s completely safe since the water’s sent through a body of water, like a lake or aquifer, and then purified an additional time before being mixed in with the regular drinking water supply. The $82 million technology will be fully functional in 2018.
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Los Angeles
This sprawling metropolis is far from the City of Lights, but it’s trying to emulate its European counterparts. Notorious for smog and light pollution dimming out the night sky across Southern California flatland, L.A. has established itself as the definitive leader in smart street lighting, drastically cutting its carbon emissions. In concert with the Clinton Climate Initiative, the city has replaced 157,000 lampposts, more than two-thirds of the total stock. The lights, which used to emit an orange glow from high-pressure sodium vapor, will now be powered by brighter, white light-emitting diodes, or LEDs.
The city has cut energy costs from lighting by 63.1 percent and is saving $8.3 million annually, according to recent figures. To put it another way, by changing out all the bulbs burning through the night, L.A. cut down 94.3 gigawatt-hours — the equivalent power of four dozen Hoover Dams. “It’s a shining example of how green technology can be both environmentally responsible and cost-effective,” says Ed Ebrahimian, the director of the Street Lighting Bureau. Even better? It’s making streets brighter and safer at night: overnight incidents like vehicle theft, theft and vandalism declined by nine percent.
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Honolulu, Hawaii
Not only are its residents enjoying the constant sunshine, they’re also harnessing it for their electricity. The most populous city in the Hawaiian chain, Honolulu also claims the country’s highest per capita rate of homes outfitted with photovoltaic panels, with solar power being generated on at least 10 percent of rooftops.
Because much of Honolulu’s power currently comes from burning pricey diesel fuel, the savings from launching one’s own power source attracted many customers, so many in fact that the local utility fought to cap the energy customers could sell back to the grid. Lawmakers ensured solar power would continue to thrive by removing any caps. Last month, in a 74 to 2 vote, they approved a long-term plan that will have Hawaii running entirely on renewable energy by 2045.”Our state is spending $3 [billion] to $5 billion annually on importing dirty, fossil fuels, which is not good for the environment, our future sustainability, or our pocket books,” says Sen. Mike Gabbard, the bill’s sponsor. “Our islands are blessed with abundant, renewable energy. We should be using these resources for the benefit of our people.”