A Zinger For Zarco > ReGenerating A Lost Legacy In Our Rich Cultural Heritage

Up early as usual before sunrise to find this surprise image of "Proceso de Los Abuelos" created by native-born Zarco Guerrero whose family-roots here in the territory of Arizona go back for centuries before the arrival of The Pioneers in the mid-19th Century. . .It's a reminder that we have more than one predominant culture here in Mesa where the lost legacy of our rich cultural heritage is brought back-to-life every now and then by The Cultural Coalition and other groups with sounds-and-sights in public performances.  
Pop-Up event > a live-performance of "Street Theater"
Our current urban fabric is incomplete.


Downtown Mesa is the only part of the metro area that has its shit together.
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These following words are taken from https://medium.com/@The_AZ_Urbanist

"I’ll say it point-blank:

Picket-fence and grass lawn suburban sprawl favored by anti-urbanists is a Midwest middle-class fantasy, and should never have been spread across West of the Rocky Mountains. This desert that was never intended to support the kind of water usage, or the demographic homogeneity required to maintain such colonial wet dreams.

While Portland-obsessed urbanists and their imaginations for the future of Phoenix are admittedly terrible, most Phoenix anti-urbanists don’t even see Brown people as human, and think that God “will give us water if we pray hard enough”. Most conservatives in the burbs crave a metro area with no public housing, and no buildings taller than two stories. Their vision is broken and we must look beyond it. Reinforcing the multicultural identity of a Phoenix with density, good streets, and more things to do is critical. We are sitting in a hostile urban environment that will only worsen if action is not taken. Bland, distasteful office parks, meandering suburban streets, strip malls, and apartment complexes that face parking lots dominate the landscape. . .

HOLD ON THERE'S MORE:

Mesa Arts Center Courtyard, a prime example of Arizona architecture

Blogger Note: That's an Aerosol Exalted mural titled "Desert Rose" . . . readers of this blog can find the story in the art by using the SEARCH BOX on this site. The subject is a friend of the artist, a pregnant immigrant arriving here for asylum.

On top of that, Phoenix lacks a lot of defining places for all kinds of people to come together and share experiences. Our urban village model is a wreck, with most of the supposed “cores” are nothing more than glorified strip malls and maybe a post office. It’s embarrassing. The few great spaces here in Phoenix have a tendency to be evicted after a while(Phoenix Renews community garden, Carnegie Library), which makes things worse. This lack of a citywide identity or community pride has eroded our civic responsibility, and empathy for one another. Creating good, central public spaces is a core tenet of urbanism, and sorely needed in the Valley. Some ideas I will be talking about in depth later include livening up Central Station (not Union Station), bringing back Phoenix Renews in a central location, and capitalizing on building public courtyards and pools as our version of floor-area-bonuses.

Perhaps most importantly of all, we have to urbanize because we deserve a better built environment to spend our youth, raise our families, and grow old in.

Next time: The Tools We Have To Fix It.