Last week I had the great fortune of camping in the hills above Oakland. My friends joked that I was camping out at our former design chair's house, but the reality is much stranger and more pedestrian at once.
The park at Anthony Chabot Lake provides on the one hand perspective on what it means to live in the city today, while also allowing us to reflect on the cities and civilizations nature makes for itself.
Far above the fray one can still hear the BART, the occasional siren, all those key ambient noise elements of the Oakland Experience. But one also encounters wild turkeys, brave raccoons, and the whoosh trees and bushes make in the mild winds on the lake trail.
Perhaps it's an ongoing fascination with process or equating industry with progress, but I find the sight of unfinished architecture much more exciting sometimes than the finished product. Once the building is done, we can all step back with our pens and blogs and chatter away or walk around the thing and get the glossy real estate story. But during building, there is still potential energy, invention, making-do and make believe.
Nature keeps building and transforming after trees have fallen and fires have come and gone. You can see this in rainforests and even in Chabot: new growth popping out of dead matter, taking over but not erasing. This is what makes the areas around Biff's and Valdez interesting from an urbanist perspective: you can see every day traces of the past and growths of the future, constantly becoming, transforming, mutating and engaging.
Let the City be the City and Nature be Nature: one not necessarily an escape from the other but commenting on it, reflecting it, acting as mirror image and influencing our path toward the future.
