Let me tell you this: After the last four years, not to say the last month, I am excited to not be excited. Boredom, right now, sounds like the most appealing of states, a privilege rather than a curse.
There is a case to be made for boredom, beyond exhaustion with its opposite. The subject has been explored with some academic rigor of late, the topic achieving a new relevance in this last year of quarantined lockdown. So, for example, you might read James Danckert and John Eastwood’s Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom (Harvard, 2020) on what boredom means for the brain, or if you are more inclined to a social study of the phenomenon, Peter Toohey’s Boredom: A Lively History (Yale, 2012).
I won’t hold it against you if you find the academic discourse on boredom boring, but boredom itself, broadly construed, does have its virtues. In this vein, think of the writing of W. G. Sebald. In his idiosyncratic works — Austerlitz, Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants — single sentences can roll on for pages at a time, one digression folding into another, then only to double-back on themselves. Is Sebald boring? Some think so, and I wouldn’t argue. But it is in his measured, antique form that Sebald achieves a kind of intoxicating sublime.
On screen, a similar sensibility is exemplified in the HBO series How to with John Wilson, in which a nebbish-y documentarian 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 construction scaffolding. A documentary on scaffolding? That sounds boring. And yet, through the essential mundanity of its presentation, it becomes a profound meditation not just on temporary urban design, but our own personal frailty.
Bored is also a useful conceit for thinking about cities. The architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock did not advocate for boring architecture per se, but in a landmark essay he distinguished between what he called the architecture of genius and the architecture of bureaucracy. The architecture of genius was the work of a select few great minds, the leaders of the field, and perhaps best suited to places of great civic import: museums, concert halls, places of government. The architecture of bureaucracy — let’s call it boring — was the infill building of the everyday, produced at scale; the quotidian architecture of housing and commerce.
Some of the best architecture in Dallas is of the bureaucratic variety. The bungalow residential housing of the M streets in Old East Dallas qualifies in this respect; these neighborhoods are “boring,” with their regular streets and conventional houses of similar scale set one next to another. But that is boring in the best sense.
Alas, Dallas has a paucity of boring architecture, especially downtown, this in no small measure due to the wanton demolition of its built history. For more than half a century, Dallas has stripped itself of its bureaucratic building, the result being a city of surface parking lots and developments floating in urban space.
In neighborhoods like Uptown and West Dallas, the city has replaced its bureaucratic building with bad building, and the two are assuredly not the same. Those clunky beige-block apartment complexes, cheaply built and making no accommodation to the pedestrian? There is no redeeming those projects.
We can find a root of the problem in the idea that boring building — or boring anything — is anathema to the “Big Things Happen Here” Dallas ethos. That’s why the powers-that-be at Klyde Warren Park have pitched a glitzy $10 million fountain that will shoot a choreographed water show up into the sky. Why have a simple water feature for kids when you can jet choreographed streams a hundred feet into the air?
I am not excited about that bit of excitement, but I am cautiously optimistic about a new City Hall initiative that is, assuredly, boring. I refer to Connect Dallas the new Strategic Mobility Plan released by the Department of Transportation earlier this month. A city planning document is, practically by definition, boring, and this one is no exception: 106 eye-glazing pages of bureaucratese. It’s got policy frameworks, action plans, performance dashboards, graphs and tables up the wazoo, all presented in a PowerPoint-style format that was out of date in 1996. Snooze!
And that’s not even getting to the content: mobility, which is itself a bit of sleep-inducing urban-planning jargon, but nonetheless critical to how we live, encompassing everything from street design to development policy.
Among the report’s priorities is the adoption of an “action plan” to achieve the Vision Zero goals adopted by the City Council in 2019, that vision being an elimination of pedestrian deaths by 2030. This is an increasingly urgent issue, as pedestrian safety in Dallas is disastrously bad, and according to the report getting worse, not better. Statistics (inherently boring) illustrate this problem: According to the nonprofit Smart Growth America, in 2019 Dallas had a Pedestrian Danger Index of 124.2, more than double the national average of 55.3, and a jump from the city’s 2016 score of 110.4.
It would be safer to walk in Dallas if the state of the city’s sidewalks was not so appalling. According to the report, Dallas has 4,400 miles of sidewalk, of which only 1,200 miles are unobstructed or undamaged, with 2,100 miles missing altogether. That’s right: Nearly half of the city’s sidewalks — the most basic building blocks of mobility, don’t functionally exist.
The report has a strategy for rectifying that state of affairs, focusing on areas of need and making connections to public transit. Frankly, it could do a lot more, but it’s a beginning.
There are many other worthy initiatives outlined here, including 885 new miles of bike trails and infrastructure, and some 200 miles of enhanced bus service, and a remaking of city parking requirements that inhibit growth and privilege cars over people. Those ideas reflect the city’s collective will. Input on the plans goals and strategies was solicited at more than two dozen public events. I’m sure they were uniformly boring, but no less productive for it.
Notable in its absence from that report is any mention of civic beauty. Perhaps that was deemed too exciting, or more likely irrelevant to its technocratic aims. But a report that considers mobility so broadly as to include development and housing strategies (as it does, and smartly), might also acknowledge that the places we travel should be attractive: well designed, sustainable and with plenty of trees, Dallas being a heat island. I can think of no more critical goal for Dallas than making streets that are safe and attractive.
And so I propose a new civic mantra: Let’s make boring things happen here.
