International studies

I started my professional career when I was 18 by acquiring a painting franchise. That year I won several company awards, including New Franchisee of the Year, and set a few company records to growth and productivity. I ran that business for three years while concurrently completing a BComm in Marketing and International Business. In my fourth year I gave up the business to focus on my studies and ended up instructing a second year business course at the University of Ottawa entitled Business Communication Skills.

Upon completion of my degree I moved to Europe where I lived and worked in Italy, then Ukraine, and traveled most of the continent. After one year abroad I moved back to Canada to work as a Franchise Consultant for two years. My territory was larger than France, Spain and England combined and included over 25 branches. I was a road warrior. In my second year doing this I began to look for business opportunities that didn't require my physical presence all over the country. This is when I fell in love with making money online.

I sprung into action learning the online business game. I started a publishing firm and published our first book that year (and it actually made a profit!). And also an online info product business (which unfortunately didn't make any profit). With these two experiences under my belt, and working hard to make them grow I was made an offer I couldn't refuse. Bestselling author (The Millionaire Mindset), and marketing guru, Gerry Robert offered me to come work for him as the VP of Marketing of his company LifeSuccess Publishing.

I worked alongside Gerry, Jean-Guy Francoeur (author, The MESSY Manager), and Bob Proctor (star of the movie The Secret, and bestselling author of You Were Born Rich and several others). Within weeks we launched a campaign that was the most powerful and impactful campaign LifeSuccess Publishing had ever done online.

Soon after that Gerry, Jean-Guy and I started a company called Black Card Marketing Group selling our online marketing and sales proficiencies. Within months we grew our business to over 13 full-time staff with a large positive cashflow. Our business was thriving. As my skill and knowledge grew I spun off to create my own division of Black Card.

Now I am the author of TRIBES: The World's Most Cutting-Edge Marketing Strategy.

I started life as a chemical engineer; got caught up in extractive metallurgy; that led on to nuclear engineering, then microbiology; and so to industrial R&D. While it was mining oriented, I was exposed to a huge range of disciplines. My team made advances in comminution, classification, particle size analysis, sampling of particulates, flotation, bioleaching, slurry pipelining, vertical hoisting of ore hydraulically, portable X-ray fluorescence, the strength of beds of particles, mine ventilation control, rapid radon determination, and shock loading behaviour of particulates.

Then I went into process engineering contracting and built, among others, a major coal terminal; some very large, deep shafts in hard rock and the associated infrastructure; coal washing plants; natural gas compressor stations; offshore platforms; and gas-to-liquid processing plants. I also did some major feasibility studies - a direct coal liquefaction plant; a major gold mine in a very remote location; two copper mines also in remote areas. I used 3-D CAD in design and, with large systems, developed material takeoff and costing systems. I also worked on project construction risk analysis, and used these tools both to save a couple of projects in distress and to bury others before they got too far into trouble.

I slowly moved into consulting, and in recent years have done major work in process plants as diverse as cat crackers and sulphuric acid plants. I have appeared as an expert witness in some major cases - in one case before the International Court of Arbitration.

I also returned to teaching, first as a professor of environmental chamical engineering, then as a researcher into energy and the environment. This has taken on two directions - climate change and poor household energisation. In climate change, I was a coordinating lead author for an IPCC technical report on carbon capture and storage; in household energisation, I have worked with a wide range of fuels to ensure safe, clean energisation of homes too poor to be connected to an electrical grid.

My speciality? I have given up on the idea of ever having one!

Query, Book Proposal& MS of “Legend” By Christina and Barie Fez-Barringten

Query, Book Proposal & Manuscript’s text only (37 pages)
“Legend”
©2006 Christina &Barie Fez-Barringten
(Under title 17 of U.S. code by section 106; 1976 copyright act)

By Christina and Barie Fez-Barringten

This is a picture book of 21 surreal psychic automatism collages made during the late sixties and is the only collection of its kind. They are a “roman” of mythology, which she calls Romantic Mythology.
For the first time they are scheduled to exhibit in fine art galleries and wish a book to be available for the general public, collectors and connoisseurs.
They currently appear on their website: www.bariefez-barringten.com
The website is not commercial and seen by very few.

Memberships
Alliance for the arts
Gulf Coast Writers Association
American Institute of Architects
American Society of Interior Designers
International Interiors Designers Association
Pratt and Yale University Alumni associations
Please see their website for complete background.



Query Letter
Greetings!
These 21 art works have attracted connoisseurs, collectors, as well as artist’s agents, exhibitors and galleries. The works of art are a one-of-kind unique collection of collages which have become an artifact of the sixty’s, surreal psychic automatism, pop art and sixty’s nostalgia. The collages were made from collections of high fashion magazines (Vintage Fashion) acquired by Christina in the sixties while Barie was a student at Yale and his cousin Louis Abolofia and the "love generation" were spawning happenings, fashion and music. The art captures the popular look and excitement of the period without being psychedelic, but is a kind of expression of the times. They were created in Puerto Rico just before they returned to New York City in 1969 where Barie taught at Pratt and was the co-founder of international Earth Day in 1970.
The art work is briefly annotated with a narrative about the period, art movements of the time and highlights of their life.

Christina's Romantic Mythology is derived from the German language where "roman" means “story” , taking artistic license to develop metaphor and reasonable contexts, events and representations based on what ever is known about something; in this case legendary mythological characters. Christina has done with each legend what story tellers and movie makers have done for ages with all mythology; to create a portrait of the mythological characters in the jargon of her own imagination; in this case the vintage fashion world of the vintage and very precious 1966,1967 and 1968 Harpers, Vogue and Mademoiselle magazines. In this sense, her work shows the superior reality of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought.
It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life. She made these collages in 1968 at the very time of their release with the vision she had of them and their mythological antecedents.

Christina and Barie are both members of Gulf Coast Writers Association and the Naples Press Club attending various writers’ conferences where they plan to offer this proposed book. They are also members of various art, design and professional organizations where they will also offer this book for sale. The original art works themselves are currently not for sale and only being offered to purchase as an entire collection while individual giclees may be purchased for individual personal collections. The book will be a popular way to get the works into the hands of many who would otherwise not have access to the whole collection nor individual pieces.
Christian and Barie have all the originals as well as jpg files and for nine they already have TIF and PDF files for your use. They need only make 12 more TIF or PDF for your use. The images shown are JPG files. Legend is to be printed in color with full-page picture of artwork on the left and on the facing page the description; left sheet picture and right sheet description so that the reader may see the full-page color picture while reading the description at the same place. This is a time when the editions of these fashion magazines are greatly valued and collected in their original form; they are themselves vintage collector’s items.

The book will make an excellent gift and a definite addition to a connoisseur’s collection.
As a trustee of the South West Florida Yale Alumni Association, Barie will also offer the book to its members and their families. They will also be able to offer the book when they speaking at various professional and social groups.

While browsing through Barnes and Noble Christina and Barie noticed that there were other art books being offered for sale by such publishers as Rizzoli, Abrams, Clarkson Potter, Tashen, Cedco, Harper Collins, Lococo fine art; Art Fund; Chronicle Book; Distributed Art Publishers Inc.; Empire, Balcony Press; ARS Libri; and Oak and Knoll, to name a few.
Their books had few words and beautifully printed fine art.
“Legend” should be one of these beautiful books.


Please let us know if you wish a copy of the MS in with the 21 images in PDF or JPEG format which can be send it as an attachment.
However, you can view the collages by clicking on “Christina’s Artwork” on www.bariefez-barringten.com

However, the Book Proposal and text of the MS follows below.


Book Proposal (2,643 words) 7 pages

“Legend”
by Christina and Barie Fez-Barringten
©2006 Christina &Barie Fez-Barringten
(Under title 17 of U.S. code by section 106; 1976 copyright act)

1. The Content (What the book is about)

The problem and the book as the solution

Unique selling proposition
AWR is art within reach for the person who cannot afford to spend $500 for a giclee or $5000 for an original but can spend under $50 for the entire collection of 21 fine art collages. In any case, even if the buyer could buy one he can then have all the rest.
Today, there are other such “within reach” markets for furniture, jewelry and fashion making culture, high styling and great art available for everyone. At the beginning of 2008, Christina’s entire collection will be exhibited in one of the nations largest such furniture chains called Design Within Reach. (DWR).

What’s so important and special about this book?
The book is important because it documents a period, kind of art and a unique person in the world of art. Why should a publisher want to publish it? (Aren’t there enough books out there already without adding another to the pile?) There are few affordable books of fine art and none of this period.
Who’s the core audience for the book, and why will they care about it? People who are just beginning to buy furniture, decorate there homes and begin collecting fine art and cultural metaphors will greatly appreciate this book. Especially those with a love of fashion, myths and legends. Already there is a tremendous market for vintage Vogue, Harpers, Mademoiselle, etc.

Premise:
Today, the popularity of myths, legends and fashion is overwhelming as society seeks heroes, a promising future and solutions to the challenges of our world. While the ugly, dissonant and disgusting have a market the beautiful, harmonious and opulent have even a greater market.
While TV, fashion magazines, comic books, internet, blogs, tunes, etc satisfy some of the markets needs art galleries are filled with fantasy and futuristic works of art. What can be better than to have a whole collection of a single vision of fantasy icons, legends and myths icons, which combine both fashion and myth? Not a replacement for the bible or many other sources of great heroes and fictional deities, Legend presents the look of the legends and links them to our own metaphors.
Manuscript
MS Status: The art work is 100% complete and the narrative is 90 %complete awaiting the input of editors and publishers possible emphasis, direction and redirection
Special Features: The special feature of this book is that it combines full color artwork with metaphorical narrative.
Anticipated Length: The book of 21 fine art images with a one page narrative for each will be proceeded by an eight page introduction and preface for a total of about 50 pages.
Anticipated completion: The manuscript is already complete in its draft form and the authors are ready to work with the publisher’s staff to complete any final editions in a matter of days.

2. The Market (Who will buy the book)

Demographic description:
The predominant segment of human population broken down by age or sex or income etc especially with regard to density and capacity for expansion or decline will be predominantly college, newly weds and baby boomers relocating and reestablishing homesteads. Many of their parents and friends will buy these books to give as gifts, wedding, birthday, home warming and shower presents.
Psychographic description is a graphic representation or chart of the personality traits of an individual or group: The psychographic of the buyers will be happy, positive and optimistic shoppers seeking high end icons, metaphors and symbols of their taste. They will be discriminating and selective buyers.
Affinity group is a natural attraction, liking, or feeling of kinship will be interior designers, academic college students, administrators, professors, schoolteachers, researchers, historians, architects, fashion designers, art collectors, connoisseurs, travelers, airlines, and retired professionals.
Competition: This book will compete with other beautiful fine art books of contemporary fine art now stocked in book stores such as Barnes and Noble and available on line by thousands of internet art and art book sales sites.

Promotion:
Christina’s artwork has a built-in audience on our webpage, galleries and participation with buyers and specifiers. Because we are both active members of interior design, architectural, art, writers and university alumni associations we will be able to bring this book to the attention of many including members of the media. In addition, we are both retired and have the ability to participate in book fairs, conferences and direct and indirect marketing venues.
Book stores now carry a goodly number of art picture books selling as gifts to art collectors and connoisseurs. We are actively marketing our art in galleries and our book about our twenty years in Saudi Arabia. We believe that the confluence of our different projects and involvements will greatly benefit the interest and sale of many of these books.

3. The Author (Why Christina and Barie are the best possible authors for this book)

Previous writing: Barie has had a contract to publish by John Wiley and sons, written and published about fifteen monographs in learned and peer reviewed journals in Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, England, Finland and the United States of America. He has also written many corporate reports and manuals for the Gulf Oil Corporation and Arabian American Oil Company.


Current writing on other projects such as:


1 Saudi Arabian Mission Report: contains news paper collage clippings from the English language Saudi Arabian newspapers prior to 9/11 from 1993 to 1999.

2. Holy Spirit in Saudi Arabia about our twenty years in Saudi Arabia

3. Bronx Stardust about the first 21 years of my life growing up in New York City

4. Autobiographical Memoirs including my views on urbanity, metaphors, cities, family, relationships, schools, etc.

5. Little Fishermen is an illustrated Christian Children's book

6. Look of the End Times is a fine art pen and ink scripturally narrated book.

7. Anagrams (word grams) is a book of illustrated DaDa drawings and poems

8. European Pen and Ink drawings is a book of drawings made in 72 European cities in 1963

9. Sheba-Land is a pen and ink sketch book with brief narrations consisting of surreal fantasy drawings

10. Acrylics in Saudi Arabia made for a one lady exhibit in 1986

11. Architecture, the Making of Metaphors is a compendium of formerly published and unpublished monographs

Personal marketing
Place books and brochures:
• Gift shops
• Decorator and Design offices and shops
• Furniture and decorator shops and show rooms
• High Fashion shops
• Art galleries, which show my art
• Book Fairs
• Writers Clubs
• Book signings
• Fashion shows
• Writer’s fairs and conventions
• Lectures on making collages at art schools, schools, and libraries


Why are we the best persons to write this book?

Christina Fez-Barringten is a Pop Art artist and a writer. Her collages, acrylic paintings, and Plexiglas sculptures were part of the exciting visual arts movement that emerged in the mid 1950's in Britain and in the late 1950's in the United States. Pop-Art was one of the major art movements of the 20th century. It was characterized by “mass-cultural” themes and techniques drawn from popular materials and media such as plastics, magazine advertising, TV, pop-music, space-time relativity, and comic books. While Pop Art, like Pop Music, aimed to employ images of popular culture in art and emphasized the everyday elements of any given culture, Christina's work challenged the depressing “elitist” culture of the 1950's with her passion for harmony, grace and balance. She believed that all of these elements could work together. Furthermore, she believed that the “deconstructivism” of DaDa and Surrealism art of the time could be made popular by mixing them with the jargon of the world of fashion and cosmopolitan urbanism that the new generations understood. Christina's work might be called Existentialism today. This brave young woman turned her beliefs into reality. She broke Plexiglas into fragments and reassembled them into vibrant, colorful sculptures. Christina ripped apart fashion magazines of the early 1960's and gently placed them into compositions of personality, boldness, love, deep thought, and excitement.

Shortly before moving to New Haven to begin his studies, Barie was introduced to Christina. Christina lived at the International House, a home for graduate students on Riverside Drive. She studied fine arts at Columbia University Howard Cook, then, the president of the International House, graciously arranged for Christina to have a large art studio in the same building, where she could work and develop her new kind of sculptures.
Her medium was Plexiglas, which had never been used in fine art sculptures.
David Rockefeller commissioned her work to be exhibited at the Chase Manhattan bank. Other exhibitions followed. The Frank Lawrence Gallery at East 57 Street and Park Ave. Showed and represented her abstract sculptures; which, thanks to her medium, and , her artistry, are not like conventional sculptures where volume is inserted into space which surrounds them. Rather, they have become part of space as air, color and light play through it.

Background:
Christina was born in Leipzig, Germany. 1956 she came to New York to study philosophy. But when she discovered the powerful and inspiring movement of modern art in New York City, and, learned to know Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, and, others. She decided to use her artistic talent and, changed her goals to study fine art at both the Art Students League and School of Visual Arts.

Shortly before she intended to return to Germany, Christina was introduced to Paul Lefson by Max Waldman, a theatrical photographer (Well known for his book "Waldman on Theater", and his photos in Life Magazine). Paul and Christina got married in 1958 and lived on East 31 Street in Manhattan. Sadly, Paul Lefson died accidentally while on business in Chicago early in 1963.

To overcome the devastating loss, Christina turned to her art more than ever. She now studied sculpture at Columbia University under Professor Peter Augustini. In that period, Christina learned to know Barie Fez-Barringten.

Barie and Christina married in 1966 in New Haven, while Barie studied at Yale University, under Paul Rudolf, Charles Moore, Vincent Scully and others. 1967 Barie originated the theory of” Architecture the Making of Metaphors". At that time, Barie conducted a lecture series at Yale University with Robert Venturi, John Cage, Paul Weiss, Christopher Tunnard, and others. This event is partially published in "Main Currents of Modern Thought".

After the completion of Barie's studies in February of 1968, the couple moved for a short while, (To escape the cold of winter.) to Puerto Rico. Barie was appointment junior partner of Schimmelpfennig, Ruiz and Gonzales and designed buildings for Ron Rico and El Mundo.

In Puerto Rico Christina developed a series of original and exciting collages. She was inspired by the most elaborate, rich and opulent editions of the 1960's - Harper's Bazaar and Vogue Magazines.
These collages are excellent posters and are now shown for the first time on the internet.

Back in New York, in order for Barie, now, a licensed architect to do his work, and Christina to have space for her sculptures, the couple moved in to a large loft on East 68 Street. Barie taught architecture at Pratt Institute. And, when Barie accepted the challenge of Mayor Lindsey to bring the first ""Earth Day" to New York City, he encouraged his students to build the stage for that event. Paul Newman and people from Sesame Street, Ally McGraw and others furnished the educational entertainment. The following year, John Mc Connell enlisted Barie's assistance to stage his version the Earth Day in Central Park and to get the General Secretary of the United Nations, U Thant, to proclaim Earth Day as an international holiday (March 21).

In addition, Barie founded a New York not-for-profit corporation: "Laboratories for Metaphoric Environments" with one of its goals to provide under privileged children a glimpse of the creative excitement of the building industry from cabinet work, to carpentry and design. There in order to illustrate his teaching he produced a series of words-drawings now in the hands of several collectors.

In 1973, Barie accepted the challenge to develop two vacation resorts in Tennessee, Sugar Tree and English Mountain. And, in addition, he designed homes for a development in Belmopan, Belize, British Honduras.

Also, Barie the artist developed a series of brilliantly envisioned drawings of futuristic metaphors, which he exhibited in conjunction with Christina's Plexiglas sculpture, at the Jonathan Gallery in Jackson, and in Memphis, Tennessee.

Later, he was recruited by the "Gulf Oil Real Estate Development Company" to be its lead project manager for a new computer building and other new structures in Texas. Because of that, the couple had moved to Houston. Also, Barie always interested to inspire young people in his profession, taught part-time at the University of Houston; and, later, fulltime, as associate professor at college station's Texas A&M University. Professor Fez-Barringten student's benefited by his friendship with the astronaut Joe Allen. Together they looked way into the future and designed space stations furniture and other imagined designed necessities.

By 1981, the Fez-Barringten's moved from Texas to Saudi Arabia where Barie trained Saudi Arabian students to work in architecture department of The Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO).

After moving to Riyadh, Barie got busy and designed 21 new towns for the people of Saudi Arabia. He also designed sport stadiums, office buildings and other building types.

In Riyadh Christina developed, out of necessity a new style of pattern-like paintings. For in this Muslim country objects can not be portrayed through art. 1986, Christina gave a major exhibition of her acrylic paintings sponsored by the American Ambassador in Saudi Arabia. In addition, she taught and was the judge of important art events, especially during the five years when Barie was Professor of Architecture at King Faisal University, located in Dammam on the Gulf of Arabia. Professor Barie Fez-Barringten's articles of metaphors, written during that time, are published in learned journals in the USA, Middle East and Europe.

Barie Fez- Barringten is an architect, philosopher, writer, artist, project manager and teacher. He is one of the world's foremost advocates of the artistic concept called the “Architecture, the making of Metaphors”. His work has been recognized around the world, particularly in the US and Saudi Arabia. According to Professor Fez-Barringten, there is a 3-way symbiotic relationship that exists between architecture, music and art, and the audience that experiences that art within the controlled space of that environment. Using the concept of the “metaphor”, a synergy that can be easily observed when all
three properly work together.
In 1999 the Fez Barringtens left Saudi Arabia...............

Praises of Author’s Work
Both of us have served for many years in secular public as professor, managers, architects, designers, teachers, and clerical positions as missionaries, pastor, and ministers with a following of constituents, congregations, and students who now have families and run business, mange companies and lead governments and government agencies. Because we both are good speakers and teachers the American Institute of Architects, American society of Interior designers, and Interior Design Society continue to invite them to serve in positions of leadership. Barie was recently appointed a trustee of the Yale club of Southwest Florida and Christina has been invited to show her collages in local fine art and internet galleries.

Competition will come from other contemporary artists and fine art publishers who will print and distribute books to the major book stores but will not be able to reach the major design and academic professional community as an insider.

All the chapters, Annotated Table of Contents and Chapter by chapter synopsis can be found in the pdf file.

Creative Interaction between Author and Editor involves listening, receiving criticism and work to develop and improve the ms. it is hoped that the state of this ms is early enough in its development to be able to be developed with shared artistic enthusiasm and interest.

Christina and Barie will await your kind word.
Sincerely yours
Christina and Barie Fez-Barringten
1011 La Paloma Blvd.
North Fort Myers, Florida 33903
239 543 2736
www.bariefez-barringten.com
christinasfineart@gmail.com

Below please find the text only of the manuscript.
LEGEND”
©2006 Christina &Barie Fez-Barringten
(Under title 17 of U.S. code by section 106; 1976 copyright act)

A graphic tale of the love generation’s hippie’s sixties started at
Haight Ashbury, San Francisco
Book of Christina’s Automatic Surrealist Collages
Made in Puerto Rico in 1968 from fashion magazines she collected in Manhattan and New Haven from 1966

By Christina and Barie Fez-Barringten
Artwork by Christina with Barie’s narrative

TOC
A. Preface
B. Introduction
C. Artist’s background
1.Appetite
2.Taproots
3.Kiss
4.Opulent:
5.Quixote
6.Mystery:
7.Easter

8.Creation
9.Lord’sSupper
10.Maria
11.Maya
12.Xanadu
13.Sun-He
14.CoCo
15.Narcisse
16.Salome
17.Vampira
18.Turandot
19.Mercedes
20.Luna
21.Gemini


Preface: Book is to be printed in color with full-page picture of artwork on the left and on the facing page the description, left sheet picture and right sheet description so that the reader may see the full-page color picture while reading the description at the same place.

Christina’s pop art collages are now available as fine art inkjet giclée printed reproductions as the entire collection of the originals is being kept as part of the artist’s estate. This is being done to preserve their integrity and value of their importance and value. Each of the fine art giclees are individually signed and dated and be part of any connoisseur’s fine art collection. Each is truly one of kind, unique and remarkable achievements. With the advent of digital photography and the slow demise of mechanical lithography, digital inkjet high-end printing is expanding exponentially. Giclée loosely means spraying or squirting in French. Christina’s collage giclees are characteristics of a true digital art print:

While the techniques of collage were first used at the time of the invention of paper in China around 200 BC the use of collage remained very limited until the 10th century in Japan, when calligraphers began to apply glued paper, using texts on surfaces, when writing their poems. Her work cries out for words and music only to be found by the viewer. In the 19th century, collage methods also were used among hobbyists for memorabilia (i.e. applied to photo albums) and books (i.e. Hans Christian Andersen, Carl Spitzweg).In this way Christina’s home is filled family photo collages. It is her natural way to express her ideas and relationships of people, places and events. The term collage derives from the French "colle" meaning, "glue”. This term was coined by both Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in the beginning of the 20th century when collage became a distinctive part of modern art.

Introduction:

Art of the so-called Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the sixties, Christina’s Psychic Automatism is graphic memoirs made during the sixties. While they seem to be Pop Art, Surreal, Fantasy Metaphors they are really a re-assemblage of deconstructed reality.
Christina’s Giclées Collages combines the beauty and brilliance of this printing technology. While photographic prints are somewhat dull and limited a giclée print let her collages pop with deep blacks, saturation and gradations hard to achieve with other media. Her jet-printed glossy laminate.
“As she broke the Plexiglas into fragments, she too tore the magazine’s pages. As she reassembled the Plexiglas fragments to a form a new reality so she assembled the bits and pieces of magazine sheets to form metaphors of spirit, fashion, urbanism, and a fantasy life and into a visual memoir of the Love Generation”.
The Baby Boomers of today grew up in the midst of the greatest cultural revolution of our time, a revolution, which emerged out the beat generation into the hippie’s creativity in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury and England’s Soho. It was the beginning of the culture of youth where being over thirty was ancient.
Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, sounds, feelings, and impressions of her three creative days between Yale’s school of architecture and Manhattan’s “art scene”. She did this in Puerto Rico while TV programs like:” Laugh In” and the first run of Star Trek was airing in the states. At Yale, they gave a lecture series published as “Architecture the Making of Metaphors” encouraged by dean Charles Moore with John Cage, Paul Weiss, Robert Venturi and others. At the time Timothy Leary was advocating the wonders of LSD while the young were tripping out on Broadway and loving at Woodstock. Society listened to acid rock and painted psychedelic illustrations and paintings. They listened while crowds proclaimed against the Vietnam war to “Make Love and Not War” while the musical Hair reaped in millions at the box office. The streets of New Haven were charged with “blacks” rioting against the “establishment”. Christina dressed in the her own designed and high fashion minis and soaked in the psychedelic sounds of the Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Bee Gees, Beatles and other like the Mamas and the Papas. All the while she collected the many magazines she would later use in her collages. She and her husband made graffiti and gorilla art on buildings, malls and with posters in their apartment and the buildings in Puerto Rico..
Christina’s Pop Art collages are a part of visual artistic movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain. It paralleled in the late 1950s in the United States. The early 50s was the time when Christina had to flee from east to west Germany, leaving her home city of Leipzig, a city once known for its commerce, music and literature. Christina was born educated in Leipzig and its surrounding area. It was the home of Gutenberg, Luther, Bach, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Handel, and Klinger, Goethe’s Faust “Auerbach’s Keller”, only to mention a few. Its neighboring small town is Dessau, the seat of the Bauhaus. Christina grew up in an atmosphere of great music and art. She draws upon that culture and sensitivities of grace and tenacity of that time which is little found in today’s politically correct generation.
Pop- Art is one of the major art movements of the Twentieth Century, characterized by themes and techniques drawn from popular mass culture, such as advertising and comic books. Pop- Art is widely interpreted as either a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism or an expansion upon them. Christina was the first artist to use Plexiglas (acrylic). Her sculptures are amazing examples of three dimensional abstract expressionism and movement in the transparency of space. She studied sculpture under Peter Augustino at Columbia University
While Pop Art, like pop music, aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture, Christina’s work challenged this mundane idea with her passion for harmony, grace and balance. She demonstrated that the two could work together and that “deconstructivism”; DaDa and Surrealism could be made popular into the jargon of the reality of the world of fashion and cosmopolitan urbanism.
Christina’s giclée collages are her response to Abstract Expressionism and marked a return to representational art. She uses images from mass culture and ordinary commerce as a relatively new development. In fact, her work incorporates the shapes and forms of her abstract expressionist foundation where each piece is a whole shape consisting of abstract forms arrayed in a kaleidoscope of shapes and forms in tension and counter tension dynamics and repose.
While Christina loathes any social preoccupation with psychoanalysis, her work is pure imagination drawn from her own pure psychic automatism, by which she proposes to express the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation. She practices what the philosopher Husserl known as the father of phenomenology of subjective experience as the source of all of our knowledge of objective phenomena.
Christina’s Psychic Automatism is a surrealist technique involving spontaneous assemblage without conscious aesthetic or moral self-censorship. Automatism phenomena is perhaps parallel to the non-idiomatic improvisation of free jazz.
Christina’s Collage surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.
Christina’s mass image art combines eclectic mysticism, current high-end fashion metaphors and values of her real and exaggerated impression of the society values around her. With each completed piece we see the combined segments of what man has made out of modern reality. Each piece reifies the potential of the combination of the segments to its aesthetic conclusion. As she breaks and reassembles fragments of Plexiglas to form her sculptures so she cut apart the fashion magazines of the early sixties and reassembled them to compose there own personality. In style, many of her collages are absolutely baroque and busting with dynamic life and exuberance. Her work is in the genre of other pop artist such as English pop artist Sir Peter Thomas Blake and Richard Hamilton; as well as Norwegian artist, Hariton Pushwagner. The tactility and appeal of each of her pieces is irresistible as the origins of each segment. She has made of each much more than the original form and, has immortalized what was once discarded and swept away with time.
Like all the pop artist of her time, Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg, and Liechtenstein, Christina delights in using, reusing, and converting the obvious into the new. This fact remains also true in her acrylic paintings. She is a true maker of metaphors, making the strange familiar and communicating one thing in terms of another. Formally trained also as a fashion illustrator at the New York Art Students League she uses the figures, costumes and textures to recreate styles and fashion looks of the dream world. Each image is bizarre and somewhat extraterrestrial with the art of a Spielberg or Jim Henderson’s Muppets each becomes both the reality of our world and some other.
Christina Fez-Barringten is an international artist. She has exhibited her work in New York City, Connecticut, Tennessee, Florida, Europe and the Middle East.
Living in New York, Christina and her contemporary artists: Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg, Liechtenstein, Peter Augustino and so many others opted to present the obvious in the new, a principle that remains also true in Christina’s dynamic acrylic paintings, and in her first of its kind acrylic sculptures. Rather than selling he originals Christina offers her collages as giclees. The printing technology of the fine art ink jet giclées brings out the beauty and brilliance of her collages. The nature of a giclée print let her collages jump out with deep blacks, saturation and gradations, hard to achieve with other media. Art of the Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the 1960s. It seems Christina’s collages are also an expression of Pop Art, Surrealism, Fashion-Fantasy or Metaphoric-Urbanism. Yet her works are in reality a re-assemblage of deconstructed impressions of the 1960s. Her collages derived from Cut-Outs of magazine sheets, like Harpers Bazaar and Vogue, mirroring the face of that magical period. Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, feelings and impressions of that time. Her work is timeless and like a hidden treasure jet to be fully discovered.
Pop- Art is a major art movement of the Twentieth Century drawn from popular mass culture, such as advertising and comic books. While Pop art, like pop music, aimed to employ images opposed to elitist culture in art, and emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of the culture; Christina’s work challenged this depressing idea with her passion for harmony, grace and balance. She believed the two could work together and that “deconstructivism”; Dada and Surrealism could be combined into the jargon of the world of fashion and cosmopolitan urbanism. Christina’s modern art is very easy to comprehend.
She was far ahead of her time when she used images from mass culture and ordinary commerce in her work. Realism and Minimalism are considered to be the current modern art movements. Her collages are a response to Abstract Expressionism and marked already then a return to representational art. San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, England’s Soho and Woodstock stirred the beat generation and hippy’s to bring about the greatest cultural revolution of our time; of which Christina’s collages are one of the finest examples.


Barie Fez-Barringten was born 1937 in New York. He attended Christopher Columbus High School. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in interior design from Pratt Institute. After Several years of working for such architects as Edward Durrell Stone and Morris Lapidus; and a year of extensive travel throughout Europe he returned to the US to continue his studies. By 1968 he received his masters degree in architecture from Yale University.

Shortly before moving to New Haven to begin his studies, Barie was introduced to Christina Lefson. Christina lived at the International House., a home for graduate students on Riverside Drive. She studied fine
arts at Columbia University Howard Cook, then,
president of the International House, graciously arranged for Christina to have a large art studio in the same building, where she could work and develop her new kind of sculptures.
Her medium was Plexiglas, which had never been used in fine art sculptures.
David Rockefeller commissioned her work to be exhibited at the Chase Manhattan bank. Other exhibitions followed. The Frank Lawrence Gallery at East 57 Street and Park Ave. Showed and represented her abstract sculptures; which, thanks to her medium, and , her artistry, are not like conventional sculptures where volume is inserted into space which surrounds them. Rather, they have become part of space as air, color and light play through it.

Christina was born in Leipzig, Germany. 1956 she came to New York to study philosophy. But when she discovered the powerful and inspiring movement of modern art in New York City, and, learned to know Andy Warhol,
Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Liechtenstein and, others. She decided to use her artistic talent and, changed her goals to study fine art at both the Art Students League and School of Visual Arts.

Shortly before she intended to return to Germany, Christina was introduced to Paul Lefson by Max Waldman, a theatrical photographer (Well known for his book "Waldman on Theater", and his photos in Life Magazine). Paul and Christina got married in 1958 and lived on East 31 Street in Manhattan. Sadly, Paul Lefson died accidentally while on business in Chicago early in 1963.

To overcome the devastating loss, Christina turned to her art more than ever. She now studied sculpture at Columbia University under Professor Peter Augustini. In that period Christina learned to know Barie Fez-Barringten.

Barie and Christina married in 1966 in New Haven, while Barie studied at Yale University, under Paul Rudolf, Charles Moore, Vincent Scully and others. 1967 Barie originated the theory of:” Architecture the Making of Metaphors". At that time Barie conducted a lecture series at Yale University with Robert Venturi, John Cage, Paul Weiss, Christopher Tunnard, and others. This event is partially published in "Main Currents of Modern Thought".

After the completion of Barie's studies in February of 1968, the couple moved for a short while, (To escape the cold of winter.) to Puerto Rico. Barie was appointment junior partner of Schimmelpfennig, Ruiz and Gonzales and designed buildings for Ron Rico and El Mundo.

In Puerto Rico Christina developed a series of original and exciting collages. She was inspired by the most elaborate, rich and opulent editions of the 1960's - Harper's Bazaar and Vogue Magazines.
These collages are excellent posters and are now shown for the first time on the internet.

Back in New York, in order for Barie, now, a licensed architect to do his work, and Christina to have space for her sculptures, the couple moved in to a large loft on East 68 Street. Barie taught architecture at Pratt Institute. And, when Barie accepted the challenge of Mayor Lindsey to bring the first ""Earth Day" to New York City, he encouraged his students to build the stage for that event. Paul Newman and people from Sesame Street, Aly McGraw and others furnished the educational entertainment. The following year John Mc Connell enlisted Barie's assistance to stage the epic Earth Day event in Central Park and to get the General Secretary of the United Nations, U Thant, to proclaim Earth Day as an international holiday (March 21).

In addition, Barie founded a New York not-for-profit corporation: "Laboratories for Metaphoric Environments" with one of its goals to provide under privileged children a glimpse of the creative excitement of the building industry from cabinet work, to carpentry and design. There in order to illustrate his teaching he produced a series of words-drawings now in the hands of several collectors.

In 1973, Barie accepted the challenge to develop two vacation resorts in Tennessee; Sugar Tree and English Mountain. And, in addition, he designed homes for a development in Belmopan, Belize, British Honduras.

Also, Barie the artist developed a series of brilliantly envisioned drawings of futuristic metaphors, which he exhibited in conjunction with Christina's Plexiglas sculpture, at the Jonathan Gallery in Jackson, and in Memphis, Tennessee.

Later, he was recruited by the "Gulf Oil Real Estate Development Company" to be its lead project manager for a new computer building and other new structures in Texas. Because of that, the couple had moved to Houston. Also, Barie always interested to inspire young people in his profession, taught part-time at the University of Houston; and, later, fulltime, as associate professor at college station's Texas A&M University. Professor Fez-Barringten student's benefited by his friendship with the astronaut Joe Allen. Together they looked way into the future and designed space stations furniture and other imagined designed necessities.

By 1981, the Fez-Barringten's moved from Texas to Saudi Arabia where Barie trained Saudi Arabian students to work in architecture department of The Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO).

After moving to Riyadh, Barie got busy and designed 21 new towns for the people of Saudi Arabia. He also designed sport stadiums, office buildings and other building types.

In Riyadh Christina developed, out of necessity a new style of pattern-like paintings. For in this Muslim country objects can not be portrayed through art. 1986, Christina gave a major exhibition of her acrylic paintings sponsored by the American Ambassador in Saudi Arabia. In addition, she taught and was the judge of important art events, especially during the five years when Barie was Professor of Architecture at King Faisal University, located in Dammam on the Gulf of Arabia. Professor Barie Fez-Barringten's articles of metaphors, written during that time, are published in learned journals in the USA, Middle East and Europe. 1999 the Fez Barringtens left Saudi Arabia...............


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1. Appetite

This collage expresses the unsatiated hunger, appetite, longing and dreams of mankind for all the tangibles.
The printing technology of the fine art inkjet giclées brings out the beauty and brilliance of her collages. The nature of a giclée print let her collages jump out with deep blacks, saturation and gradations, hard to achieve with other media. Art of the Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the 1960s. It seems Christina’s collages are also an expression of Pop Art, Surrealism, Fashion-Fantasy or Metaphoric-Fiction. Yet her works are in reality a re-assemblage of deconstructed impressions of the 1960s. Her collages derived from cutouts of magazine sheets, like Harpers Bazaar and Vogue, mirroring the face of that magical period. Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, feelings and impressions of that time. Her work is timeless. And, like a hidden treasure yet to be fully discovered.


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2. Taproots
This collage incorporates the shapes and forms of an abstract expressionist foundation. It is a kaleidoscope of shapes and forms in tension and counter tension, dynamics and repose. This work is pure imagination depicting automatism and repetition by which to express a real function of thought.

Art of the Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the 1960s. It seems Christina’s collages are also an expression of Pop Art, Surrealism, Fashion-Fantasy or Metaphoric-Fiction. Yet her works are in reality a re-assemblage of deconstructed impressions of the 1960s. Her collages derived from cutouts of magazine sheets, like Harpers Bazaar and Vogue, mirroring the face of that magical period. Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, feelings and impressions of that time. Her work is timeless and like a hidden treasure yet to be fully discovered.



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3. Kiss
Lips, heads, and flowers orbit a sky surrounding an eye looking at the yellows, cerulean blues, lavenders and burgundy rainbow. Each are made a family of separated identities in a new structure of this kiss context. The clouds of color carry the content of the figures in an artist’s pallet of complementary hues and tones. All of these images are created in a spontaneous surreal technique called Automatism

Automatism is a surrealist technique involving spontaneous writing, drawing, or the like practiced without conscious aesthetic or moral self-censorship. "Pure psychic automatism" was how André Breton, surrealism's founder, defined surrealism, and while the definition has proved capable of significant expansion, automatism remains of prime importance in the movement. Seeing many of Christina’s works one immediately thinks of Duchamp’s “Nude Descending the staircase”. Duchamp discusses his work saying, `I discarded brushes and explored the mind more than the hands.’
Christina’s work speaks across centuries, cultures and genres. To own her work is to posses a still life of importance and value.


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4. Opulent:
The focal point is a well dressed aristocrat surrounded by white horses, damsels and exotic dogs as a clouds of ochre, persimmon, blues and gold. Art of the so-called Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the sixties. Christina’s Psychic Automatism is graphic memoirs made during the sixties. While they seem to be Pop Art, Surreal, Fantasy Metaphors they are really a re-assemblage of deconstructed reality. Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, sounds, feelings, and impressions of her three creative days between Yale’s school of architecture and Manhattan’s “art scene”. She did this in Puerto Rico while TV programs like:” Laugh In” and the first run of Star Trek was airing in the states. At Yale, they gave a lecture series published as “Architecture the Making of Metaphors” encouraged by Dean Charles Moore with John Cage, Paul Weiss, Robert Venturi and others. At the time, Timothy Leary was advocating the wonders of LSD while the young were tripping out on Broadway and loving at Woodstock. Society listened to acid rock and painted psychedelic illustrations and paintings. They listened while crowds proclaimed against the Vietnam War to “Make Love and Not War” while the musical Hair reaped in millions at the box office.


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5. Quixote

Like the famous legend of Don Quixote de la Mancha, the lady is dressed in warrior black with a great black hat. The images are a quiet story of the pride and proclamation of knight hood of great and single purpose. Collage is the making of metaphors, which make the strange familiar. Quixote is now a person who is victorious and the metaphor is the bits and pieces of constructed icon combined into the new reality of this surreal automatic expression. Like its Height-Ashbury Love generation contemporaries, this work conjures and freely lets psychic and poetic realities become a medulla upon which to feast the eyes and heart. The Baby Boomers of today grew up in the midst of the greatest cultural revolution of our time, a revolution, which emerged out the beat generation into the hippie’s creativity in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury and England’s Soho. It was the beginning of the culture of youth where being over thirty was ancient.


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6. Mystery:

As the period, this collage restates the metaphors of a culture, past and future in the form of women in exotic and colorful costumes. Are they gypsies, nobility, or part of a kings harem? Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, sounds, feelings, and impressions of her three creative days between Yale’s school of architecture and Manhattan’s “art scene”.
It is a collage of bobbles, bangles and beads with surreal double images and decorated faces hiding the true identity of the one person they represent. Everywhere there are hints of her identity but she still remains illusive.


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7. Easter

A new beginning in the Grace of God, this collage exhibits the exuberance of victory;
the joy of man and nature of the Lord’s triumph over evil and death.
The printing technology of the fine art inkjet giclées brings out the beauty and brilliance of her collages. The nature of a giclée print let her collages jump out with deep blacks, saturation and gradations, hard to achieve with other media.
Art of the Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the 1960s. It seems Christina’s collages are also an expression of Pop Art, Surrealism, Fashion-Fantasy or Metaphoric-Fiction. Yet her works are in reality a re-assemblage of deconstructed impressions of the 1960s. Her collages derived from cutouts of magazine sheets, like Harpers Bazaar and Vogue, mirroring the face of that magical period. Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, feelings and impressions of that time. Her work is timeless. And like a hidden treasure yet to be fully discovered.


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8. Creation
A new beginning in the Grace of God. This collage exhibits the exuberance of victory.
The joy of man and nature of the Lord’s triumph over evil and death.

The printing technology of the fine art ink jet giclées brings out the beauty and brilliance of her collages. The nature of a giclée print let her collages jump out with deep blacks, saturation and gradations, hard to achieve with other media.
Art of the Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the 1960s. It seems Christina’s collages are also an expression of Pop Art, Surrealism, Fashion-Fantasy or Metaphoric-Fiction. Yet her works are in reality a re-assemblage of deconstructed impressions of the 1960s. Her collages derived from cutouts of magazine sheets, like Harpers Bazaar and Vogue, mirroring the face of that magical period. Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, feelings and impressions of that time. Her work is timeless. And like a hidden treasure yet to be fully discovered.

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9. Lord’s Supper table
The world of the unseen let’s Christina sees Jesus surrounded by worshipers in a swirl of ochre, browns, blues and whites. A winged angel and others in ancient costumes compose a swirl of time and progression of the essence and meaning of communion and fellowship, not religious but a vision of our relationship with the Lord.
While Christina loathes any social preoccupation with psychoanalysis, her work is pure imagination drawn from her own pure psychic automatism, by which she proposes to express the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation. She practices what the philosopher Husserl known as the father of phenomenology of subjective experience as the source of all of our knowledge of objective phenomena. Christina’s Psychic Automatism is a surrealist technique involving spontaneous assemblage without conscious aesthetic or moral self-censorship. Automatism phenomena are perhaps parallel to the non-idiomatic improvisation of free jazz.
Christina’s Collage surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.

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10. Maria
There is no doubt that this modern day icon represents a female form another time and place. With her reverence of the mother of Jesus she surrounds the hallowed face with soft pastel roses, and winged birds, clouds and shy. This new vision of holiness is a priceless collectors item which can only be compared with the medieval icons. This piece does not deny or embolden misinterpretation but simply expresses the purity and peace of faith and hope.
Christina’s mass image art combines eclectic mysticism, current high-end fashion metaphors and values of her real and exaggerated impression of the society values around her. With each completed piece we see the combined segments of what man has made out of modern reality. Each piece reifies the potential of the combination of the segments to its aesthetic conclusion. As she breaks and reassembles fragments of Plexiglas to form her sculptures so she cut apart the fashion magazines of the early sixties and reassembled them to compose there own personality. In style, many of her collages are absolutely baroque and busting with dynamic life and exuberance

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11. Maya
To the Hindus Maya is The power of a god or demon to transform a concept into an element of the sensible world. It is the transitory, manifold appearance of the sensible world, which obscures the undifferentiated spiritual reality from which it originates; the illusory appearance of the sensible world. It is another term for the Mayan culture and this collage places a blond female head on female body surrounded by swirl of white and ochre fabrics.

Like all the pop artist of her time, Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg, Liechtenstein, she delights in using and reusing the obvious in to the new. This fact remains also true in her acrylic paintings. She is a true maker of metaphors, making the strange familiar and communicating one thing in terms of another. Formally trained also as a fashion illustrator at the New York Art Students League she uses the figures, costumes and textures to recreate styles and fashion looks of the dream world. Each image is bizarre and somewhat extraterrestrial with the art of a Spielberg or Jim Henderson’s Muppets each becomes both the reality of our world and some other.

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12. Xanadu
Mongol city founded by Kublai Khan, 1625, Anglicized form of Shang-tu. Sense of "dream place of magnificence and luxury" derives from Coleridge's poem (1816). It is a place of great beauty, luxury, and contentment. A Shangri-La expressed by this exuberant female in swirl of fabrics above and below her upper and lower torso. Her eyes only peek out from behind the swirl and dares us to enjoy the dance, music and excitement of this instant caught by Christina.
While the techniques of collage were first used at the time of the invention of paper in China around 200 BC the use of collage remained very limited until the 10th century in Japan, when calligraphers began to apply glued paper, using texts on surfaces, when writing their poems. Her work cries out for words and music only to be found by the viewer. In the 19th century, collage methods also were used among hobbyists for memorabilia (i.e. applied to photo albums) and books (i.e. Hans Christian Andersen, Carl Spitzweg).In this way Christina’s home is filled family photo collages. It is her natural way to express her ideas and relationships of people, places and events. The term collage derives from the French "colle" meaning, "glue”. This term was coined by both Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in the beginning of the 20th century when collage became a distinctive part of modern art.

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13. Sun-He
The Korean name conjures light and bursts with energy of musical, acting and artistic talent. This collage is a sole figure of a female wearing a bronze billowing skirt below a great yellow and yellow ocher middle and above her bare waste a copper brown silk and leather topping. Some say Zixiao (Sun-he) was formally Emperor Wen (of Eastern Wu) was a son and one-time crown prince of Eastern Wu's founding emperor Sun Quan during the Three Kingdoms period.

Art of the so-called Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the sixties. Christina’s Psychic Automatism is graphic memoirs made during the sixties. While they seem to be Pop Art, Surreal, Fantasy Metaphors they are really a re-assemblage of deconstructed reality.

Christina’s Giclées Collages combines the beauty and brilliance of this printing technology. While photographic prints are somewhat dull and limited a giclée print let her collages pop with deep blacks, saturation and gradations hard to achieve with other media.


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14. CoCo
Like Picasso Christina rearranges the human figure in this surreal pink and rose colored burst of petals with her head set in a lower ovary (ovule). Like its name sake for a tall palm tree bearing coconuts as fruits; widely planted throughout the tropics these blossoms are prolific and bountiful. It will be a treasure to its owner to remind about the possibilities of life and creativity with in each person.

While Pop Art, like pop music, aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture, Christina’s work challenged this mundane idea with her passion for harmony, grace and balance. She demonstrated that the two could work together and that “deconstructivism”; DaDa and Surrealism could be made popular into the jargon of the reality of the world of fashion and cosmopolitan urbanism.


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15. Narcisse
The word is derived from a Greek myth. Narcissus was a handsome Greek youth who rejected the desperate advances of the nymph Echo. As punishment, he was doomed to fall in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. Unable to consummate his love, Narcissus pined away and changed into the flower that bears his name, the narcissus.
Freud believed that some narcissism is an essential part of all of us from birth.
Andrew Morrison claims that, in adults, a reasonable amount of healthy narcissism allows the individual's perception of his needs to be balanced in relation to others.
Some say Narcisse is about sex, religion, power and deceit. Red, gold, purple swirls surround this female seemingly skipping though life.
While Christina loathes any social preoccupation with psychoanalysis, her work is pure imagination drawn from her own pure psychic automatism, by which she proposes to express the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation. She practices what the philosopher Husserl known as the father of phenomenology of subjective experience as the source of all of our knowledge of objective phenomena.

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16. Salome
Persimmon, gold beige and black furs and adorned with pearls and Arabic hangings is the laughing female face. The shapes and forms are only fantasy shaped animal icons creating a new icon of the famed seductress set on a purple background.

“As she broke the Plexiglas into fragments, she too tore the magazine’s pages. As she reassembled the Plexiglas fragments to a form a new reality so she assembled the bits and pieces of magazine sheets to form metaphors of spirit, fashion, urbanism, and a fantasy life and into a visual memoir of the Love Generation”.

Christina’s pop art collages are now available as fine art ink jet giclée printed reproductions as the entire collection of the originals is being kept as part of the artist’s estate. This is being done to preserve their integrity and value of their importance and value. Each of the fine art giclees are individually signed and dated and be part of any connoisseur’s fine art collection. Each is truly one of kind, unique and remarkable achievements. With the advent of digital photography and the slow demise of mechanical lithography, digital ink jet high-end printing is expanding exponentially. Giclée loosely means spraying or squirting in French. Christina’s collage giclees are characteristics of a true digital art print:

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17. Vampira
Vampira portrays that seductive woman who uses her sensuality to exploit men. In red silk fur with rode lame she reclines open armed and backward on a gigantic lipstick red divan.
Vampira’s dark eyes and white skinned arm are all that shows covered by the blood red power of red on a purple background. Christina’s Pop- Art is part of one of the major art movements of the Twentieth Century characterized by themes and techniques drawn from popular mass culture, such as advertising and comic books. Pop- Art is widely interpreted as either a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism or an expansion upon them. Christina was the first artist to use Plexiglas (acrylic). Her sculptures are amazing examples of three dimensional abstract expressionism and movement in the transparency of space. Christina studied sculpture under Peter Augustino at Columbia University
While Pop Art, like pop music, aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture, Christina’s work challenged this mundane idea with her passion for harmony, grace and balance.


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18. Turandot
Discovered in Heidelberg in 1904 by Max Wolf is a minor planet orbiting the sun. Christina’s cousin was an astronomer on the staff of the Max Plank Institute in Heidelberg and as a German appreciates the Turandot of German mythology and Turandot is an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini, to an Italian libretto by Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni, based on the play Turandot by Carlo Gozzi. Turandot is a Persian word and name meaning "the daughter of Turan",
Turan being a region of Central Asia which used to be part of the Persian Empire. In Persian, the fairy tale is known as "Turandokht", with "dokht" being a contraction for "Dokhtar" (meaning "Daughter"). Indeed shows the daughter of Turan in great Russian furs.
The story of Turandot was taken from the Persian collection of stories called The Book of One Thousand and One Nights or Hezar o-yek shab (1722 French translation Les Mille et une Nuits by Francois Petis de la Croix), where the character of "Turandokht" as a cold Chinese princess was found. But this story about a Chinese princess bears much resemblance to Persian poet Nizami's story about a Russian princess being pursued by the Sassanid king Behram. The story of Turandokht is one of the best known from de la Croix's translation. Christina cloaks this African Queen in exotic mink, ermine, and fox in an icon of nobility and stature. This vision was merely a precursor to the twenty years she would later spend in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia where her art was very well received in first of its kind one lady shows in the desert capital city of Riyadh.

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19. Mercedes
While Mercedes is a city in SW Uruguay, on the Río Negro the Infanta Maria de las Mercedes of Spain (1880–1904), Princess of the Asturias, for all 24 years of her life the Heiress Presumptive of the Spanish royal crown, and for a period in 1885–1886, the extant Head of the State of Spain, was born as Doña María de las Mercedes de Borbón y Habsburgo-Lorena, eldest daughter of King Alfonso XII of Spain (Don Alfonso de Borbón de Cádiz y Borbón de España).

Christina engulfs the slender royal in baby blue ostrich feather, silks and vertical high reaching blue timed domed minaret. This vertical axis grisaille is contrast on a stark black background metaphorically linking the royal lady with her dreamy castle and royal structures.
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20 Luna

The black background sets off the blues and lavender shapes and forms which seems to be a female in flight and the moons way of making shadows in the sky. Part of the abstracted spot design is parts of the moon hovering over the lower blue forms in moon’s shadows.
Christina’s mass image art combines eclectic mysticism, current high-end fashion metaphors and values of her real and exaggerated impression of the society values around her. With each completed piece, we see the combined segments of what man has made out of modern reality. Each piece reifies the potential of the combination of the segments to its aesthetic conclusion. As she breaks and reassembles, fragments of Plexiglas to form her sculptures so she cut apart the fashion magazines of the early sixties and reassembled them to compose there own personality. In style, many of her collages are absolutely baroque and busting with dynamic life and exuberance. Her work is in the genre of other pop artist such as English pop artist Sir Peter Thomas Blake and Richard Hamilton; as well as Norwegian artist, Hariton Pushwagner. The tactility and appeal of each of her pieces is irresistible as the origins of each segment.
She has made of each much more than the original form and, have immortalized what was once discarded and swept away with time. They have been become costumes of the legends they represent.

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21. Gemini
Gemini is a harlequin of double personality and image this two female figured icon wrapped in pink, persimmon, ocher, gold, red and black furs and plush fabric.
The face look at you and away from each other reifying Christina’s understanding of the Gemini star sign. Gemini is the third sign of the zodiac in astrology. Also called Twins. They are together and share the colors and luxury of a common context.
Like all the pop artist of her time, Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg, Liechtenstein, she delights in using and reusing the obvious in to the new. This fact remains also true in her acrylic paintings. She is a true maker of metaphors, making the strange familiar and communicating one thing in terms of another. Formally trained also as a fashion illustrator at the New York Art Students League she uses the figures, costumes and textures to recreate styles and fashion looks of the dream world. Each image is bizarre and somewhat extraterrestrial with the art of a Spielberg or Jim Henderson’s Muppets each becomes both the reality of our world and some other.
Christina’s work speaks across centuries, cultures and genres.
To own her work is to posses a still life of importance and value.

To see the image inserts please see Christina’s art on their website.
For more of her work and background see her website: www. bariefez-barringten.com
©2006 Christina &Barie Fez-Barringten
(Under title 17 of U.S. code by section 106; 1976 copyright act)

My Urban Legacy: “Culture of Cosmopolitan Urbanism”
Topics covered:
The art of Urbanizing
Mitigating our Urban Dilemma
Choose and Manage Urban Contexts
Natural vs. Manmade Cities and the Urban State of Mind

Lecture #2
14,976 words on 47 pages October 30, 2007
By Barie Fez-Barringten
www.bariefez-barringten.com

Introduction:
As I promised in my first lecture I will show “what can be done to make cities livable and worthy to be called home”.
“Culture of Cosmopolitan Urbanism” aptly describes our cosmopolitan and urban abilities to agree, disagree, peruse common goals, tolerate stress and congestion, discern between community and privacy and distribute precious resources. It is these attributes and our persistence
that will make cities livable and worthy to be called home”. Today I will present to you the opportunities and efforts to urbanize and what you can look for in monitoring your surroundings.
Amongst others, the League of Women Voters encourages Americans to make democracy work by both informed consent and participation. Urbanization is at the heart of today’s agenda affecting immigration, defense and health care. I have received an urban culture and believe that it is my responsibility to likewise share this culture.
I also believe that if we were to share our culture with others it would positively affect our urban surroundings. The culture of cosmopolitan culture is our legacy.

Because of the way, I became an architect I always considered my voice my profession, and I always professed urbanism, to me urbanism is truly significant, its settlements, built-environment, and achievements. Urbanism was my family’s way of life in the context of my birth, living and work; they were all integrated and so full of opportunity, good will and life. It was every thing I could ever imagine and I could not believe that there was any life outside of urbanity.
As I matured, I realized that there was an undefined and illusive “Culture of Cosmopolitan Urbanism”.

In a nutshell, what I s wrong with our cities?
No dissertation on the “Culture of Cosmopolitan Urbanism” would be relevant without also noting what’s wrong in our urbanized cities and what can be done to make it right.
Although, as you may have already gathered from my first lecture what’s wrong is not always solvable on a day-to-day, project, or municipal level but needs much broader policy changes at the highest levels of government, society and commerce. It is not only a design and planning problem, but a social and political problem as well. Although my former Yale professor and architect, Peter Millard, once pointed out that human nature likes to take one problem and add so many more so that they can be overwhelmed and not do anything, claiming that they are overwhelmed and overcome by multiple burdens. At home, families get stressed by bunching all the angst in one moment while society’s leaders never seem to have either time or the mindset to include urbanism on their agenda. Perhaps there are too many lobbyists distracting them from their mission. On the other hand, they deal with urbanism at another level on a daily basis. Urbanism as civilization itself is a “weighty matter”.

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What are my qualifications to know what to do about urbanism?
While I may be retired from full time teaching, Lee County Government service and private architectural practice, I have not retired from the profession of communicating urbanism.

After all, as a practicing architect and urbanist even my advice to clients and my drawings all communicated urbanism’s conditions, ideals, goals and operations, even writing programs, city plans, site plans, development plans and building performance specifications. For the Gulf Oil Corporation I wrote their policies and procedures for all their construction and real estate development fast track projects. John Wiley and sons ultimately published it. Later, in Saudi Arabia I did the same thing for ARAMCO and several royal family and privately business conglomerates. My job was to see the big picture then sift it down into specific and practical elements.

Many of these works resulted in tremendous expansion of business and successful practices. Not to “toot-my-own-horn”, but I discovered in all of this that I am a great organizer and know that if I can do this so can others.
It is for this reason I have prepared these lectures and believe that “together we can do what alone we cannot”. On the other hand, I am a great believer that one person can make differences, and that one person can change urban contexts. For example, the way that Robert Moses, Rockefeller, Astor, Vanderbilt and so many others built facilities that attracted the people that urbanized cities.

From where have I gleaned this information?
Because, in part we are the product of our cities, we cannot afford to be irresponsible about its shape, ethics, and morals and well functioning. Urbanism has become such a popular subject that there are many books and commercially published articles, which have now become available on the Internet. It is from these articles I have gleaned some of the definitions, information and statistics I site in my explanations. Like many other scholars, I too look to other scholars and the results of their research; and, this field is well researched.

If more people were proud of their cities, they would encourage its betterment.
For many, cities equivocate to an identity and as we cheer for our favorite team, we do so as fans of a particular city name and location. We are rooting for our own identity, metaphor and significance.

Urbanism is manifest in our pride, how we grade our city is a measure of that pride.
The consensus we express in forming our city or what we patronize expresses our culture and identity. I believe that were this spirit d’cor prevalent it would contribute to the improvement of our cities. For example, snowbirds that have their home in another city may not call SWFL their home. You know, home is where your heart is and where your treasure lies.
Is there a city of which you are proud?

Why is the study of urbanism important?
The very idea of the city is heroic, monumental and worth supporting. We do with teams what we think we are doing with our families, government and community, communicating our rightful statues as authorized members of the strong, sovereign and civil society. Understanding urbanism is as essential a study as understanding ancient, classical, traditional and contemporary civilization, which has been the work of so many including scholars and theologians. As I said urbanism as civilization, it is a “weighty matter”.
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Who determines what’s going to be built in South West Florida?
So, although SWFL has a lot of building units the stewardship of these developments is pretty much left to a few permanent residents. And these get precious little involvement from citizens but a very strong voice from real estate developers who are much more motivated.

Why each of us should care about the built-environment?
Urbanity has a life of its own when family and friends let us down the city’s commerce, institutions and facilities shore us up, educate and occupy our life with a career and vocation. The pop song “Downtown” so well describes how “we can forget all our troubles, forget all our cares and go downtown”.

How many times did I find answers in the public library, community educational outreach programs, the street, and jobs because of the proximity of one to another employer or clients, medical help in walk-in clinics and housing by going from door to door in a neighborhood I liked.

My best anecdote about the way people care for there cities is one of the many little old ladies I chatted with in a little Italian city.
She not only gave me directions, but also explained for several hours each landmark and important edifice I would pass on the way. She knew when it was built and who were the architects and the builders. This particular woman could not have had an education past the sixth grade and yet she had a passion and, like a priest imparted that passion with diligence and responsibility. I had a similar experience on an Island in the Persian Gulf with Shiite Moslems about their small urban city’s building, arts and monuments. I have many locally books and my own photos of this place. They intuitively shared their culture of cosmopolitan urbanism.

Are there urban planning tools to focus public attention on blighted areas?
Urban Clusters is a very recent planning concept but one which is ancient and already prevalent in major metropolitan areas all over the world. It was only being recognized to facilitate legislative attention and funding and to permit rezoning, zoning in blighted, and deteriorating urban and suburban cities, cities that may not even be an urban area. For example, the recent North Fort Myers “Community Development Plan” calls for three Town Centers in North Fort Myers.

What is the Florida Government doing to address urbanism?
Twelve years ago, in 1995, Richard A. Pettigrew, under the Honorable Lawton Chiles, was Chairman of the Florida Governor's Commission for a Sustainable South Florida and delivered
“South Florida: A Sustainable Vision For 2020”.
Amongst the five broad principles was to Limit Urban Sprawl - establish urban development boundaries to protect environmental resources and encourage urban redesign and redevelopment supported by good public transportation.


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Concerned to transform urban sprawl into quality development patterns, the report noted that rapid population growth and sprawling development patterns are leading South Florida down a path toward wall-to-wall suburbanization.

How does the government define urban sprawl?
The report continues, that the proliferation of urban sprawl is a development pattern characterized by scattered, decentralized, low-density development that is not functionally related to adjacent land uses-is swallowing up undeveloped areas in the region at an alarming rate. This results in the depletion of natural and other environmental resources and severely threatens the future viability of the Everglades ecosystem.

What problems does the government find that causes urban sprawl?
The growth patterns of South Florida encourage automobile reliance, which exacerbates the lack of coordination between land use decisions and sitting of transportation facilities and other infrastructure. Related consequences include competition for scarce water resources, pollution from storm water runoff, inefficient urban design, and rapid conversion of agricultural lands and other open spaces to urban uses.
The report concludes with the four pillars for improving South Florida's urban form to:
1. Establish urban development boundaries;
2. Ensure travel choices, mobility, and access through public transit,
3. Achieve infill development and redevelopment, and
4. Increase use of good urban design.

So what is the government’s report card about curbing these problems?
We are now nearly at a midpoint of the vision’s goal with about twelve years remaining and most of us, with the exception of the restoration of the Everglades, perceive little progress and a further deterioration of our home in Southwest Florida.
Do any of you have a perception of the state of the urban environment in this area, perhaps your neighborhood or nearby area?

What has been done to solve the urban crisis?
However, some of the commission’s objectives are in the works. It said it would establish urban development boundaries and recommend management and regulatory measures to achieve needed protection and restoration of the ecosystem and sustainable development within those boundaries.
Many of Florida’s Development Services panning districts have implemented their five-year comprehensive development plan and community planning boards.
These help to use urban design principles to foster individual community identity, create a sense of place, promote pedestrian oriented neighborhoods and town centers, encourage the use of public transportation, and increase urban quality of life.

What are the problems that still persist?
Many of the states planners now promote in-fill-development, redevelopment and reward developers that choose to build in the "right" place. However, many of the local and state courts still agree to settle in favor of tenacious development interests. Interests which often put profits ahead of the public good and invest their wealth in professional teams that well understand the typical town-fathers needs and necessities.

All around us there are examples of missed opportunities and run-away growth and development. One such is our traffic intersections as in the city of Cape Coral, I’m sure there is one in your neighborhood, which has three or four major streets intersecting without any architectural design features or landscape. One of the contributing cause is that such traffic planers have not considered other aspects of design and organization, Furthermore there is a blaring absence of a process and professionals in that process to bring the art of metaphors, architecture and design to make this intersection a center of civic pride. There are many cities, which add traffic circles, intersection circular light features as in Houston, and other means to punctuate the intersection.

Are there any non-government initiatives?
It could be the call of its’ chamber of commerce to harness its wealthy city-benefactors to find a business opportunity, as did the Saudi Arabia’s mayor of Jeddah who enticed businessmen to commission sculptors to design works at many intersections of his city.
He learned this lesson from visiting European cities and simply brought a very old fashioned idea into the present.

How can we use free enterprise to benefit our cities?
Most of the time, as a business, developers usually “buy-cheap and sell-dear” like any other commercial business.

To them land development is not a outcome of industry, developing the natural, human and financial wealth for the community, but only to benefit their corporate portfolio and investment interest of it s stock holders and investors.
The beneficiaries are usually not indigenous but an absentee business. Over the years, governments have developed agencies, statutes, codes and ordnances to provide guidelines and limits to protect the people’s assets. However, there are remarkable and outstanding developers of landmark exceptions as the Jeddah’s many sculptures on its city’s “traffic circles”, plazas filled with statues and fountains, Fort Myers’ old post office plaza, its city hall, library plaza, Centennial Park, and even landmark buildings such the Manhattan’s Empire State building, and Gulf Arab States Dubai and Riyadh Towers to only mention a few.

What are the basics to forming a city?
I have found that settlements form cites when the residents collectively need an authoritative corporal body, which can form armies, and municipal agencies, which can employ beurocrats and civil servants to provide services, law and order, build and maintain public facilities and manage land and property ownership.

The difference is that the population drives natural urbanization or its surrogates while synthetic by a third party, which can enable and support natural urbanization.

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What is the difference between population and third party urban structures?
Natural settlements usually are site-specific emanating from a local geographical labor and material resource while an artificial development is initiated for profit as a land and real estate business, colonies as for political occupation, or when kings conquer, hold and expand their kingdom.
Natural growth occurred when in the so-called “Industrial Age”; the growth of modern industry from the late 18th century onward led to massive urbanization and the rise of new great cities, first in Europe and then in other regions, as new opportunities brought huge numbers of migrants from rural communities into urban areas. This was called the Industrial Revolution.
Later, in the United States from 1860 to 1910, the invention of railroads reduced transportation costs, and large manufacturing centers began to emerge, thus allowing migration from rural to city areas.

However, cities during those periods of time were deadly places to live in, due to health problems resulting from contaminated water and air, and communicable diseases. Still the growth was natural where the people came first and land development followed to house and supports the new populations.
American cities absorbed the populations from various global calamities such as from Ireland between 1845 and 1849 when the Great Irish Famine drove many Irish to New York City where now live more Irish than in Ireland.
Were any of you or your family members’ part of that migration?

What are the remarkable examples of urbanization?
In the Great Depression of the 1930s, cities were hard hit by unemployment, especially those with a base in heavy industry. In the U.S. urbanization rate increased forty to eighty percent during 1900-1990. The Cuban revolution of 1959 eventually filled Miami with 2 million Cubans and the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, which killed an estimated 675,000 Americans.

Today, the world's population is slightly over half urban, with millions still streaming annually into the growing cities of Asia, Africa and Latin America. There has also been a shift to suburbs, perhaps to avoid crime and traffic.
Either by election, coercion or manipulation citizens or their representatives may surrender their right to form a city to a proxy. This could be a feudal lord, conqueror, institution, or commercial interests.




Has free enterprise and city building gone out of control?
Cities formed as a business by an adversary primarily concerned about its own profit is an adversary in that it is not a surrogate and vies for its own optimum benefits.
Today sub-urbanization and urbanization has become a major industry and economic sector driving the U.S., state and local economies making land development into an industry owned and operated by major corporations who synthesize and manufacture housing, commercial and industrial properties as an industrial synthetic product.
As a product, it is subject to the same policies and procedures as the manufacture of cars, computers and “widgets”. It is planned, built and sold on an assembly line and as synthetic as a plastic cup or automobile.
As the culture was shocked by the industrial revolution rebelling against machine-made as opposed to man-made products, synthetic-built environments are also taking their toll on the ecology, energy consumption and cultural metaphors.

What are some of the other ways cities are forming and expanding?
Metropolitan Urban Areas (446 words)
An urban area is an area with an increased density of human-created structures in comparison to the areas surrounding it. This term is at one end of the spectrum dividing suburban and rural areas. An urban area is more frequently called a city or town such as Naples, Fort Myers, Cape Coral and Bonita Springs. Urban areas are created and further developed by the process of urbanization.

Unlike an urban area, a metropolitan area includes not only the urban area, but also satellite cities plus intervening rural land that are socio-economically connected to the urban core city, typically by employment ties through commuting, with the urban core city being the primary labor market. Long Island’s bedroom communities to offices in Manhattan are one such example.

In France, an urban area is a “zone” encompassing an area of built-up growth called an "urban unit" and a close definition to the North American “urban area” and its commuter belt, and is similar to our definition of “metropolitan area” or “metroplex”.

In the United States, there are two categories of urban areas. The term "urbanized area" denotes an urban area of 50,000 or more people.
Urban areas under 50,000 people are called urban clusters.
Urbanized areas were first delineated in the United States in the 1950 census, while urban clusters (sometimes called “Town Centers”) were added in the 2000 census. However, we know that an urb is any populated area, which makes our small villages and towns urban as well. So this means that these terms are defining a much more complex and large problem. Urban clusters include those thousands of small-populated villages and towns.

There are Twin cities formed by merging into urban centers, which are born in close geographic proximity, and then grow into each other over time.
The term Twin Cities is used in the United States often to refer to the cities Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, Duluth, Minnesota and Superior, Wisconsin, Dallas–Fort Worth area, Niagara Falls, Ontario and Niagara Falls, New York and Germany’s Ulm and New-Ulm.

Other examples of cities formed by merging are New York City (five boroughs, historically especially between Manhattan and Brooklyn), London which grew from its cores in the City of London and the City of Westminster to encompass many other towns and villages, Budapest which is the amalgamation of Buda and Pest and Hong Kong (Victoria City and Kowloon). In each case these city’s population increased, the quality of its built environment increased but so did urban squallier and in some cases its slums.
Can you name some other metropolitan areas?

What was one of the first modern causes of major urbanization?
If you said the first and second world wars, natural disasters and political turmoil, you would be close.
As the advent of modern art was to our western culture so was the Industrial Revolution. Modern art changed the way we perceive the world while the Industrial Revolution changed the way we think of urbanity.
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The Industrial Revolution took place in the world’s great natural cites and made them greater and more populated. It spurned a revolution in the design and construction of residences in which to house labor and management in tenements, row houses and apartments.
Support facilities such as parks, schools, and hospitals were built rapidly accompanied by all sorts of entertainment and recreational facilities. As the towns were built up around factories, ports and trade railroads were built and its impact on all cities and Railroad terminals were one of the great building types of their time.

What were some of the Industrial Revolutions major milestones?
Iron and steel, and glass, long spans and plenty of light, which was first built in Paris, designed by Paxton for a world’s Fair.

Leipzig’s Hauptbanhauf, Grand Central, Pennsylvania Station, Union station Chattanooga and so many others were glorious public buildings boasting the new prosperity and potential of industrialization.


The industrial revolution, proliferation of oil related industries and the opening of international markets gave the corporate predominance in American culture, which spilled over into property development
The real estate development corporation which built inside natural cities now expanded to build outside of natural cities into the suburbs and to develop Global or World cities as prominent centers of trade, banking, finance, innovations, inventions, products, and markets such as cloths, shoes, suits, dresses, roofing, siding, and even buildings. These were marketed in national journals such as the Sears Catalog and Rotogravure. Whereas "mega city" referred to any city of enormous size, a global city is one of enormous power or influence... Examples of such cities include London, New York City, Paris and Tokyo.

What are some the ways city builders have innovated to handle the increased population?
Urbanism has its own language as when urban architects refer to spines as the dominant linear feature while a ring road is built around a city avoiding the city’s congestion.

The Central Business District, called the CBD, is the urban core while every urban area has traffic ways, sidewalks, ambulatories, open space, cross intersections, nodes, plazas, open space and vest pocket parks on urban blocks to fill the space left by the demolition of a an existing building.
When planning a building the urban architect examines the floor- to -area ratio to let light and air into dense urban areas and provides easements for utilities and common access.
Books and ordinances have been written defining the differences between community and privacy and the hierarchies of increasingly public and private spaces as Yale and Cambridge. Modern planners have invented circular, radiant, Green belt, Matrix and cuneiform (swastika) planning geometries.
Urbanism’s more modern innovations include elevated walkways connecting towers as Ralph Durden designed for Federated Department Stores in Cincinnati and the grand boulevards of many large and small cities, not to mention mass transit innovations such as the trolleys, busses, subways, elevated tracks and rapid rail trains. Developers specializing in dense city high-rise urban buildings continuously innovate, invent better systems of vertical and horizontal people movers and healthier air-conditioning as thousands of people live, and work in dense conditioned space all year long.

In this way, the urban space is a totally synthetic environment, which insists on being tolerant and resilient to a variety of national and ethnic backgrounds, especially people who must adjust out of rural and sub-urban contexts.

What are some of the modern building types?
Some of the urban building types were designed by Le Corbosier’s such as his “Marseille Block” with undeveloped land around the building, not in urban context but on outskirts of downtown Marseille, and Moshe Safte’s “Habitat” in Montreal. This is an example of a synthetic development in a natural urban area. There are resort cities in Germany such as Bad Poi Mont; Baden Baden, which includes infrastructure, surrounded by nature and underground healing baths. Such buildings included residence, schools, recreation, shopping and work places thus circumventing the need for daily use of either mass transit or the automobile.






What affect has the automobile had on urbanity?
Automobile Age
On the other hand, today’s Rome is a nightmare for city planners trying to adopt the city to modern times without destroying or uprooting its precious landmarks.

Traffic is a disaster in cities, which build and grow naturally compounding one bad choice after another and having to work around the givens of yesterdays metaphors, which seem irrelevant and outdated but have value as a record of the culture’s past accomplishments, victories or tragic history.

In all, automobiles are used to accommodate travel from urb to country, urb to sub-urbs, urb to urb and sub-urb to sub-urb.
However, except on heavy traversed paths public transportation and overly wide highways are not feasible unless subsidized by the government or expensive tolls. Recently, while the State of Florida voted to build a mass transit system it later lost the states vote to fund the project.

The manufactures of the automobile and traffic caused by the construction of highways challenged the urban experience. In New York, Robert Moses was deterred by Jane Jacobs not to divide Manhattan into pieces as he had done to the Bronx.
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However, Cities like Manila, Bangkok, Atlanta, and Manhattan still have congestion and time-travel problems. The inexpensive solution is solution is mass transit.
However, most architectural scholars agree that the advent of oil has brought the developed countries an abundant supply of energy to power their electric grids and oversupply every citizen with private vehicles thus making the world dependent on dangerous sources for the supply of oil. Given the original definition of city as being “of the citizen”, you can say that the city the world wants is different from before the invention of the combustion engine and the automobile. The modern concept of the city is the LA model of highways and urban-like destinations. This model has been extended to Texas and extrapolated successfully to cities in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, and Bahrain, miniature versions of these models appear in every area of America, Gulf Arab States and is spreading globally.
While today’s cities have been impacted by banks and business buildings, highway systems, air travel, airports, and mass transit have overwhelmed and swallowed the pedestrian and the freedom once enjoyed by urban dwellers to enter and leave the city while aggressive and creative corporate entrepreneurs employ architects, planners and designers to create and satisfy market expectations, such as William Levitt and Levitt Town and the city father’s of Columbus Ohio, Los Angeles and New Towns such as the Irvine Ranch in California, RESTON and Columbia Maryland by James Rouse. Of course, South West Florida is not immune from the recent investment by major national real estate, financial and banking corporations.
Modern technology brought about by the discovery of abundant oil and electricity has spurned a profusion of automobiles, highways, airplanes, electrification of cities and air-conditioning, not to mention the invention of the elevators, radio, television, and computers to cities.
Cites have been able to be planted and developed away form rail but in proximity to airports such as Reston, Dallas/ Fort Worth, Frankfort, Los Angeles, Seattle, Montreal, Vancouver, and cities in Israel and the mid east as well as many industrial cities in every country and satellite cities in major large metropolitan areas.

What are the local innovative measures to make cities more livable?
Urbanity at a smaller scale in our own area has manifest in Naples, which was originally platted in 1887 as a grid off the Gulf of Mexico and in 1994, Duany was commissioned by the Fifth Ave. chamber to stem the flow of business out of the city. To do this city council formed The Fifth Avenue South Association and The Downtown Naples Association (DNA) has joined forces with The Greater Naples Chamber of Commerce to form one of the strongest, most encompassing visitor centers and local business advocacy organizations in Southwest Florida.
Some of the recent and current urban projects in Naples include the Naples Down Town Redevelopment includes “rezoning downtown”, “2001 Heart of Naples” with a three million dollar bond to build infrastructure and civic design and make parking accessible and plentiful with covered decks, the “Renaissance Village”, “Grand Central Station”, “Renaissance Center”, and the “Four Corners” which is a 100 foot wide pedestrian connector to connect parking to the Renaissance Center.


However, some of the streets merchants recently complain of higher than bearable rents, vacant storefronts and the onslaught of banks and financial organizations to fill the vacancies thereby changing the ambience, romance and street imagery.
Recent Urban Projects in Fort Myers include a redesign of the “River District”, “Eastwood Village”, “Berwyn”, and “Hampton Park” and planned work on blighted areas.

Recent Urban Projects in Lehigh acres include “The Fountains”, a 4700-unit development on 19,000 Acres, and a Mixed Use Homestead Development.

Recent Urban Projects in Fort Myers Beach include the improvement of “Times Square” which includes large commercial and business development. I can also tell you about many administrative, code and ordinances which will eventually lead to the improvement of the health, safety and welfare of the people living in the area.
Are there any urban cluster projects I have forgotten?
Are there any questions so far?

What is a synthetic city and urban enclave?
Synthetic Cities and Urban Enclaves:
(1,504 on 5 pages)
In modern times a synthetic urb is usually formed by a corporate person who synthesis (develops) urban structure(s) by developing property (land or an existing building) which is then populated by strangers, company employees, settlers, migrants, retirees, and merchants, who do not have a hand in the authorship of the place but may be elected to govern and manage the artificial development. Artificial in that it was made without regard to the particular needs of any one-person, but rather an arbitrarily imposed, unnatural, non-specific design that fits all. Because there are no specific potential occupants the development is based on arbitrary, superficial characteristics rather than natural, organic relationships. The program for the design is inherently artificial and imagined and not based on the needs and necessities of owners who commission the design and construction.

How are synthetic cities formed?
It is artificial in that the future occupants were not attracted to migrate to the urb because of jobs, business, or trade that might have resulted from the exploitation and development of any natural resources. New towns, colonies, and company-owned towns plan, build and invited people, anticipating future buyers, markets or tenants. The land is developed to accommodate future population’s potential demand for such developed property. A synthetic development is one where the developer proposes and petitions the community to create the development in the hopes they agree with the developer’s assessment that the development meets or exceeds their future possible needs and city plans.

However, there is an exception when the community initiates and requests the proposal because of its own perceived needs arising from increased population, industrialization, or commercialization it is becomes a natural urban form petitioned by the people. Often a city’s chamber of commerce and municipality may petition private developers and utility companies for hotels, parking garages, public mass transit, power, septic and sewage plants.

These private and publicly held developers artificially synthesize the form and opportunity for the agreements needed to build and operate a city as opposed to when populations settle to exploit natural resources, ports or intersecting trade routes. Corporate developments such those made by Saudi Arabia’s ARAMCO’s Dhahran, Abquiq and Ras Tanura, Brasilia in Brazil, RESTON and Columbia in Maryland are just a few that come to mind.
Cities were not only synthetically formed and natural cities spurned to further growth by the corporate developer but natural cites began to merge and combine into new super municipal corporations. The dynamics of natural cities gave birth to corporate developers when they built synthetic projects in natural cities. For example, when Rockefeller Corp took their idea of corporate building to developing new cities in Latin America and other multi-national corporations built their company towns all over the world. Corporations contribute to the growth of both natural and synthetic corporate developments.

How is a synthetic city different from a natural city?
It is synthetic because it is synthesized and not indigenously formed but manufactured using all separate and non-contextual materials, parts and assemblies except the land upon which the product and its sub products are synthesized. The product combines desperate elements into one form from hitherto unrelated and foreign parts as an automobile or any manufactured product. With this in mind in 1973, Forrest Wilson, then dean of the newly formed College of Architecture at Athens, Ohio University invited me to lecture to the entire university on “Industrial Architecture” where I presented my research on the prefabrications for the 1972 Munich Olympics, the German manufactured home industry and corporate planning systems used by newly emerging real estate developers.

What are the advantages of a Synthetic City?
However, synthetic urbanization does for a citizenry what they supposedly they cannot do for themselves, either because of the system of government, economics, and dramatic inordinate population growth Life, for instance in Florida counties, or catastrophic shrinkage (Cites after a war as Leipzig, Germany) and one other where merchants create a city in the sea as Venice and Rotterdam.

What is missing from a synthetic city?
A city so formed is said not to be so-called real or genuine but something else. It has many things but lacks history, evolution, personalization and indigenous character. Its place, operations, author, corporation, investors, and name brand such as Disney’s “Celebration” and Barron Collier Cos. and Domino's Pizza founder Tom Monaghan’s “Ave Maria”.
In metaphoric terms while the synthetic developer may have fabricated metaphors, poems and songs about the artificial place. The place does not make the strange familiar because it does not tap into any historical, familiar or cultural fact. Being a fabrication and without intrinsic history and a real life it can only allude to a past in the mind of the future occupant or recall a distant time and place. It can be thematic and imaginative but it can only be a copy of a real place that developed naturally.

However perfect may be a man-made synthetic city it will be imperfect because it lacks the imperfections, history, and consensus of the natural city, New Towns, such as RESTON, Virginia provide a government and management organization to operate the development, and HUD requires most PUD and other publicly occupies developments to operate under statutes and ordinances, which require homeowner, tenant and condominium associations. However, and over time these synthetic developments soon develop their own history and metaphors, which are then made part of the culture.
However, with all of these regulating mechanisms it is like a robot without a cold, headache or attitude; furthermore, it is predictable and regimented. Like a book, movie or play you’ve seen a hundred times. It is possibly boring and uninteresting.

While many today find Venice wonderful there are many who find it unlike other Italian cities because Venice has become lifeless and lacking normal Italian culture (It is a museum of great architecture and engineering artistry).
Can you think of any such places?


Why are we attracted to synthetic places?
The attraction to Synthetic Places
Future inhabitants are not attracted by an economic opportunity but the life –style and recreation promised at the New York City World’s Fair; “Building the world of Tomorrow” in 1939/1940. Like a car or any other product developed by a composition its consensus comes from market and feasibility studies and ability to penetrate and operate within the market place and convince buyers of the value of the uniformity, reliability and profitability of the product. It has turned most homeowners from a mere citizen into a business man hoping to someday recover profit from the sale of a product, his home, a home whose marketability is based on international cosmopolitan and recognizable values. In some ways, it has some the appeal of a science fiction context designed to present a world without history, family and the abnormalities and trivia of real life pursuits. It is an escape and synaptic solution to arguing about zoning, building permits, budgets, limits of natural resources and limited ability for society to grow and adopt. In one swoop the synthetic urban form solves all threw problems and presents a new tomorrow.

Synthetic cities are cities initially designed and controlled by a central and organized authority with a specific social, business and philosophical goal such as “Broad more”, “Arsenate”, and Green belt circular city, where design and form are dominate determinate.

Synthetic Cities are artificially manufactured and not made by a series of natural circumstances, as Vincent Scully once pointed out American cities are often created and changed “cataclysmically”.
In 2004, Scully said about his role in “Modernism”:
“ I was a confirmed Modernist………………………..I think we were very wrong. We had very cataclysmic and simplistic ideas about city planning, for example.

We really didn't have any respect for the traditional fabric of our cities, which is a miraculous development over centuries of time, much more important architecturally than the development of anything having to do with individual houses. Just the street, the curb, the grass strip, the trees, the sidewalks -- this is a marvelous urbanistic structure. What I learned as time went on was that Modernism was very faulty, in view of what architecture was. That it was a simplistic view of architecture. It was predicated on an arbitrary aesthetic. It was totalitarian in its mode of thinking. Everybody had to do things one way”.

What have Synthetic cities Have I been involved?
I have been involved in the design and construction of a few synthetic urbs such as Housatanic Horizons in Connecticut’s Lake as well as Shopping centers at highway interchanges, subdivision designs, Planned Unit Developments, new towns for the Gulf Oil Corporation such as Reston, Virginia, and for People’s Protective, Sugar Tree and English Mountain in Tennessee and many towns and villages in Saudi Arabia for ARAMCO, Yanbu and Jubail Royal commission and Internal Security Forces. In fact, I supervised the design of eleven such housing projects in eleven different municipalities and one Sports Park in Saudi Arabia.

What are the ways institutions have tackled urbanization and how effective are such institutions and their recommendations?
Movements, Associations, and institutions concerned with urbanism
As I said before synthetic urb is a product of a corporate systematic production process best suited for controlled environment of a factory but when overlaid on a existing inhabited area becomes a matter of building in what is industrially called “simultaneous operations”, manufacturing new while the old continues production.

What are the efforts to argue for the redistribution of federal and State’s budgets in favor of urban renewal?
Rockefeller Commission Report and Metropolitan Areas
In March 27, 1972 and long before the latest corporate global urban industry, about National Population Distribution and Migration Policies the Rockefeller commission report found that the percent of the population living in large places was rising, with much of this shift is due to natural increase. Furthermore, the average densities of urbanized areas are declining, not rising.

The appropriate scale at which to grasp emerging settlement patterns includes the metropolitan area, but goes beyond it to the urban region—a constellation of urban centers dispersing outward.
Basically, the urban region is an adaptation of adjacent urban centers to underlying economic change and to most Americans’ desire for dispersed suburban living. The easy communication among urban places in urban regions permits the smaller metropolitan areas to benefit from the economic advantages of agglomeration, while avoiding some of the penalties of excessive size and density.

How can the source of budgets to be used for urban renewal be increased?
The answer was the metropolitan area I explained earlier.
The Rockefeller commission report noted that the increased complexity and scale made the continued fragmentary approaches to metropolitan planning and development progressively more costly and wasteful. This suggested that the basic responsibilities for planning settlement patterns, new public facilities, and public services should be at the metropolitan level.

To encourage this comprehensive approach and local cooperation, the major portion of federal funds to support planning activities in metropolitan areas should go to the appropriate multi-purpose area-wide planning agency. These agencies, in turn, can support planning efforts for individual jurisdictions within the metropolitan area. A great example of a comprehensive approach is the Urban Development Corporation (UDC) UDC was formulated in New York city to combine the best of government with the private sector to cut through red tape and renew the urban cores. It worked and mid-town Manhattan became a beautiful and safe place to invest and live.

In addition to better and more active planning at the state level, state development agencies may be desirable to implement development plans on a broad geographical basis. To function effectively in such a role, these agencies must have broad powers to acquire land, to override local ordinances, and actually to carry out development plans.
While the need for such organizations is gradually being recognized, only New York State has actually established one.

In its first years of operation, the Urban Development Corporation showed that it could be an effective mechanism, particularly for improving housing opportunities for low- and moderate-income families. It is also committed to actively promoting orderly urban development and is currently involved in the development of several new communities throughout the state.
The early success of the Urban Development Corporation, and its promise for effectively guiding orderly urban development, suggests that it would be a good model for other states.

I recently pointed this out to an American Institute of Architect’s panel discussion on urban design tackling ways breaking down the barriers of special and competing interests. It was apparent that while the panel raised many important points their empirical experience and knowledge was very limited. This problem is likewise shared by many elected and appointed surrogates of the people charged with major responsibility in either natural or synthetic urbanization. Many of who have contributed to sprawl with granting and supporting government subsidies for infrastructure, which have disguised the true cost of sprawl. Examples include subsidies for highway building, fossil fuels, and electricity.

The Rockefeller commission report came forty years after the formation of the Urban Land Institute (ULI), which was formed "to provide leadership in the responsible use of land and in creating and sustaining thriving communities worldwide,” not only nationally, but world wide. ULI advocates progressive development, covering topics such as sustainability, smart growth, compact development, place making, and workforce housing. Industrialists have long been faced with the need to both house and grow labor force communities and to invest in secure real property for long term corporate value.

As the guest of a Saudi real estate development family I attended one of its’ meetings in New Orleans and in 1976,I became active in the National Association of Corporate Real Estate Executives (NACORE) as I dealt with the Gulf Oil’s urban properties. It was during this time that these corporations and organizations were tooling-up to nationalize and globalize urban land development as a business and industry to the extent that when oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere such companies were already prepared to design and build community compounds to house foreign workers.

They became very experienced in building everything where nothing before existed, in other words to synthesize a community. With this latent experience, they could easily plan and develop other development products as a stand-alone profit center. And so the corporate development companies evolved and separated as real estate development corporate businesses and universities offered graduate degrees in the administration property development.
Using the example of these institutions what are some of the principles of the culture of cosmopolitan urbanism at work?

What are the basic principles of culture of cosmopolitan urbanism?
1. Civic Pride and vision
2. Vested interest and ownership
3. Long range investment and planning
4. Improved property and value of context in which to live and do business.
5. Initiative and responsibility to life changing principles

What are some of the social initiatives to facilitate urbanism?
While many would argue against government control, there are others that see government’s duty to control urbanization as a board of directors controls its corporate assets.

Principles of Intelligent Urbanism (PIU) is one of many systems of theories to guide urban planning originated by architect Louis Sert at Harvard and is composed by of a set of ten axioms for the formulation of city plans and urban designs. They are intended to reconcile and integrate diverse urban planning and management concerns.

In my book published by John Wiley and sons, I too defined policies and procedures for the proposals, programming, design and construction of buildings and support facilities.
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Principles of Intelligent Urbanism (PIU) hopefully represents the will of the people in the hands of their elected official s as they set about to be the arbiters between the developers and the people, however, created these. Architects predate so-called “planners” by thousands of years so to deal with overpopulation and extreme demand, systems like PIU has been created.

They are not only followed by corporate developers but also used to win variances for new development order approvals in areas where land prices are below market and a profit can be made.

Replete with metaphors, these PIU axioms include:
1. Environmental sustainability,
2. Heritage conservation,
3. Appropriate technology,
4. Infrastructure efficiency,
5. Place making,
6. Social access,
7. Transit oriented development,
8. Regional integration,
9. Human scale, and,
10. Institutional integrity


American Institute of Architects Blueprint for America
is to engage architects and community leaders in a discussion about the future of their town, city and region. The different strategies for SW Florida include
1. New Town Planning
2. Community Master Planning
3. Downtown redevelopment
4. River district Plan
5. Fort Myers beach Times Square project
6. Rural Land Plan

A.I.A. eight essential elements to make livable communities are
1. A sense of place
2. Mixed-Use Development
3. Density
4. Effective Planning for Regional Transportation
5. Street-Savvy Design
6. Physical Health and Community Design
7. Public Safety, Personal; Security
8. A Sustainable Approach to Neighborhood and Regional Development.

What is one of the more popular political initiatives facilitating urbanization?
Smart Growth:
Not only has smart growth been institutionalized but also it has been legislated by many state governments.
Because of its attractive weather, comparatively lower land cost and fewer commercial or governmental impediments to planning and land development, Florida is one of several “growth states” taking up the expansion of population and drive of the so-called baby boomers to utilize their affluence and mobility.

Smart Growth is an urban planning and transportation theory that concentrates growth in the center of a city to avoid urban sprawl; and advocates compact, transit-oriented, walk able, bicycle-friendly land use, including mixed-use development with a range of housing choices.




Long before former, vice-prescient Al Gore first promulgated smart growth; transportation and community planners began to promote the idea of compact cities and communities in the early 1970s. The cost and difficulty of acquiring land (particularly in historic and/or areas designated as conservancies) to build and widen highways caused some politicians to reconsider basing transportation planning on motor vehicles.

One wonders about the political implications of urbanism between conservative and liberal, redistribution of population and wealth, socialism verses capitalism, political parties and persons vying for power and control.
Encouraging growth, smart or otherwise, builds political continuants deciding whether to facilitate urbanism in natural existing or create new cities on developed land.
Does anyone have any thoughts about the politics of urbanism?
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What other countries have initiated urbanization programs?
Architect Peter Calthorpe promoted and popularized the idea of urban villages that relied on public transportation, bicycling, and walking instead of automobile use. Colin Buchanan and Stephen Plowden helped to lead the debate in the United Kingdom.

However, to offset these advantages the market has recently found that weather, fishing, boating and golf were not enough and the need for the big-city metaphoric cultural institutions and amenities were needed. Hence, a recent market has developed thematic urban clusters featuring theatres, entertainment and recreation normally associated with large urban centers. Urbanization and urban design has become a major professional industry on a global scale. On a mega scale the way Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, Minneapolis, and others emulate other natural cities.

Smart Growth values long-range, regional considerations of sustainability over a short-term focus.

Its goals are to achieve a unique sense of community and place; expand the range of transportation, employment and housing choices; equitably distribute the costs and benefits of development; preserve and enhance natural and cultural resources; and promote public health.

In general, smart growth invests time, attention, and resources in restoring community and vitality to center cities and older suburbs. New smart growth is more town-centered, is transit and pedestrian oriented, and has a greater mix of housing, commercial and retail uses. It also preserves open space and many other environmental amenities.

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What has been the design professions response?
Enter André’s Duany and his wife Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. In 1949, Duany was born in New York City (my fair city), but grew up in Cuba where he lived until 1960.

Duany received his undergraduate degree in architecture and urban planning from Princeton University, and after a year of study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, and as I, received a master's degree in architecture from the Yale School of Architecture.

Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk has been dean of the University of Miami School of Architecture since 1995; Plater-Zyberk began teaching at the University of Miami School of Architecture in 1979 and created a graduate program in Suburb and Town Design in 1988. Duany and Plater-Zyberk (DPZ) founded Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company in 1980 and both are now headquartered in Miami, Florida

DPZ became another initiative to stem sprawl and attract density into established developed areas and a leader in the national movement called the “New Urbanism”.
New Urbanism seeks to end suburban sprawl and urban disinvestments and DPZ have been involved in the Fifth Ave project in Naples, Down Town Fort Myers, West Palm Beach, Stuart, Amelia Park, Sarasota, coconut grove, and Tampa to only name a few.

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What are the principles of Smart Growth and do they coincide with the
“Culture of Cosmopolitan Urbanism” ?
The Principles of Smart Growth are:
• Create Range of Housing Opportunities and Choices
• Create Walk able Neighborhoods
• Encourage Community and Stakeholder Collaboration
• Foster Distinctive, Attractive Communities with a Strong Sense of Place
• Make Development Decisions Predictable, Fair and Cost Effective
• Mix Land Uses
• Preserve Open Space, Farmland, Natural Beauty and Critical Environmental Areas
• Provide a Variety of Transportation Choices
• Strengthen and Direct Development towards Existing Communities and
• Take Advantage of Compact Building Design

As you can see, the “Culture of Cosmopolitan Urbanism” picks up where smart growth ends, Smart growth deals with the physical while the Culture of Cosmopolitan Urbanism” deals with the social.

What are the basic principles of the culture of cosmopolitan urbanism?
1 Civic Pride and vision: yes as smart growth encourages community and stakeholder collaboration
2 Vested interest and ownership
3 Long-range investments and planning
4 Improved property and value of context in which to live and do business.
5 Initiative and responsibility to life changing principles.

However, without one with out the other it is incomplete and may be why there is relatively little public support for smart growth.
Confirming the observations of the Rockefeller report there is the metaphoric issue of property rights and the right to live in low density.
This flies in the face of the non-sprawl and economic solutions of condominiums and cooperatives that share tax and maintenance costs?

In The Politics of "Smart Growth" by C. Kenneth Orski, he says, “Most observers believe that Smart Growth and the campaign for livability will remain largely symbolic gestures.
As one local elected official remarked, "the broad public does not regard scattered development as undesirable.



Vice President Gore's rhetoric notwithstanding, the average American associates quality of life and livability with low rather than high residential density,” a point of view that was long ago promulgated by Frank Lloyd Wright and confirmed by the way the absorption rate of synthetic developments in every state in the union save those in no-growth communities.

About urbanism, what else is on the mind of the consuming public and political constituents?
In his book titled Smart Growth Fraud, Michael S. Coffman of the “American Land Foundation” he says that “for decades urban planners have adhered to the mantra that urban sprawl increases pollution and housing costs, more driving time to work and shopping, stress, and the escalating consumption of scarce farmland and open space. Al Gore’s Smart growth was created to supposedly correct these problems and create more livable and inexpensive homes for all.
Irrefutable evidence, however, shows that urban planning creates the very nightmares it is supposed to eliminate.
In the process, it strips urbanites of one of their most fundamental civil liberties — property rights." Witness inner massive inner city housing projects, which became the home to pimps and drug dealers.

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Are there urban contexts, which have solved some of these problems?
It should be noted that in large, medium and small cities there are multiple housing types and single and two family houses. There is also very large single family owned apartments as coops and condominiums in well-kept, convenient and safe neighborhoods. There are neighborhoods in Columbus, Kansas, Manhattan and so many others with large single-family houses. Large urban cities need not have only one or another building type.

In Lee County, we have Smart Growth and Community planning districts to update the Comprehensive Five Year Plan and the City of Fort Myers has already begun re-planning its downtown using these very principles involving local architects and planners.



What other methods have corporate developers found to persuade counties to grant variances and surrender the use of their undeveloped lands?
Rural Land System=RLS
Another such movement, associations, and institutions concerned with urbanism is Rural Land System=RLS
At a conference of university’s presidents the Ave Maria president told a gathering of guests of the Southwest Florida Chamber of Commerce that Ave Maria was a product of the RLS where a private large corporate developer invited Ave Maria, so as to meet some of the RLS objectives.
Earlier, I learned from Lee County planners that this scheme ultimately preempted some of Lee County’s wetlands and watershed. Like the Babcock Ranch developers and others who studied the current urban requirements, the developers were able to argue and win variances from local officials. The engineering firm of Wilson Miller developed RLS and the Southwest Florida Regional Planning Council approved the project.

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In addition, these projects also include a percentage of so-called “affordable” housing of which Lee County Commissioner John Albion was worried that what will be labeled affordable housing won't be affordable for long. Buyers might purchase a home at an affordable price, but could turn around and sell it for much more, which would make affordable housing almost impossible to find in Ave Maria.
He compared the project with Florida Gulf Coast University.

He said people working the lower-paying jobs at the university no longer could afford to live in the area because they can't afford the homes. He recommended the county and Ave Maria work to create a plan that would keep affordable housing affordable.

Here are some of the numbers: in Ave Maria the cost of a single-family home likely will range from $195,000 to $500,000; multi-family homes, such as condominiums, likely will range from $125,000 to $300,000; and rental properties likely will range from $650 to $1,400 a month and have 200 very low-income units. Ave Maria officials also have said they plan to donate a 28-acre site within 10 miles of the town of Ave Maria to Habitat for Humanity of Collier County.
Habitat will build 150 owner-occupied affordable housing units. Cost of so-called affordable housing is usually over $150,000.
Ave Maria at a glance
• Ave Maria will cover 4,995 acres.
• Ave Maria University is expected to serve 6,000 students. There are now an estimated 300 at the interim campus in the Vineyards in North Naples. The town will include:
• 11,000 residential units
• 690,000 square feet of retail space
• 510,000 square feet of office space
• 35,000 square feet of medical office space
• 148,500 square feet of civic/community and miscellaneous facilities
• 400 hotel rooms
• 1,800 acres of parks, lakes and open space
• An oratory, and
• A private school for grades K-12 and a public high school that will be located off-site.
Have any visited Ave Maria, and what do you think of the project?

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What are some the man-made organizing design elements of the urban city?
The great Boulevards of the World
Of course, Ave Maria will have a huge church and a great boulevard. Cites are composed of specific great boulevards, avenues and plazas. Many developments such as Ave Maria base their plans and designs on famous prototypes.

For example, the Champs-Élysées is the most prestigious and broadest avenue in Paris. Its full name is actually "Avenue des Champs-Élysées". With its cinemas, cafés, and luxury specialty shops, the Champs-Élysées is one of the most famous streets in the world, and with rents as high as $1.25 million a year for 1,000 square feet of space, it remains the 2nd most expensive strip of real estate in the world (the first in Europe) after New York City's Fifth Avenue.] The name refers to the Elysian Fields, the place of the blessed in Greek mythology. I always call it the road to paradise. Its wide sidewalks allow one to stride amidst hoards of people while others may meander or even stop at windows or converse. It is exhilarating and uplifting.

I have often gone and walked alone on its entire length. I recall one July 14, Bastille day riding down the Champs-Élysées in a 1911 open convertible with other young boys shooting off guns and singing. Our ride went around the Arch d’Triumph and terminated into the seine where we emerged to the ramparts while the vehicle sank into the deep.

Fifth Avenue is a major thoroughfare in the center of the borough of Manhattan in New York City. Lined with expensive park-view real estate and historical mansions, it is a symbol of wealthy New York. Between Thirty-fourth and Fifty-ninth streets, it is also one of the premier shopping streets in the world, on par with Oxford Street in London and the Champs-Élysées in Paris.

It is one of the most expensive streets in the world, on a par with Paris, London, and Tokyo lease prices: the "most expensive street in the world" moniker changes depending on currency fluctuations and local economic conditions from year to year.

Oxford Street is a major thoroughfare in London, England in the City of Westminster. With over 300 shops, it is Europe's largest shopping street.
Bahnhofstrasse, Zurich is one of the world's most expensive and exclusive shopping avenues.

The Kurfürstendamm, known locally as the Ku'damm, is one of the most famous avenues in Berlin, Germany. The street takes its name from the former Kurfürsten (Electors) of the Holy Roman Empire. This very broad, long boulevard can be considered the Champs-Élysées of Berlin - full of shops, houses, hotels and restaurants. In particular, most important famous designers have their shops there like Gucci, Bvlgari, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Valentino, Lacoste, Tommy Hilfiger, Cartier, Hermès, Swarovski, as well as several car manufacturers' show rooms.
Boston’s Quincy Market.

Today, "festival markets" are a dime a dozen - every city, it seems, has a collection of old brick buildings turned into chic little stores and endless restaurants.



But the one that blazed the path was Boston's Quincy Market. Back in the mid-1960s, James Rouse, then a city planner, had a revolutionary idea: instead of abandoning downtown to decay, why not build a fun marketplace that would not only attract tourists, but also keep workers downtown after dark.

Munich’s Marienplatz, (Mary's Square in English), is a central plaza in the city center of Munich, Germany since 1158. In the Middle Ages, markets and tournaments were held in this city square. The new city hall’s Glockenspiel was inspired by these tournaments and draws millions of tourists a year.

Bull fight arenas in Spain and particularly in Madrid where I sold bullfight tickets to tourist and in Pamplona where during the festival of San Fermin I ran with the bulls through the streets.
Arenas are great social gathering places where wine is squeezed out of leather sacks and the crowed cheer for their cities urban hero, the toreador that Bisset made famous in Carmen. We saw it performed in Paris long after it premiered at the Opéra Comique 1875. The Opéra-Comique is an opera company and opera house in Paris.
These operas, ballets, and operettas as well their buildings, costumes, orchestras and players all celebrate, exaggerate and explain urban life and the plight of city life. For America, that music is jazz country, rock, and Dixie-land.

Southern Boulevard: Not to be outdone, the neighborhood in which I grew up in the Bronx had an 800 foot double block-long super wide boulevard with three movie theatres, on having a stage show, two Chinese restaurants, one huge ballroom dance hall, two music shops with speakers facing the street playing the latest, every clothing, candy and decorating shop and three five and ten cent stores including Kresgee, Kress and Woolworth’s. I even worked in one shop for many years and at night; our family would ambulate from one side and then the other usually having a “mello-role’ before going walking around the corner to our Simpson Street ground floor tenement apartment. I can name others such Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, Fordham Road and the Grand Concourse in the Bronx.
Can you name and describe a great boulevard in your city?

The study of urbanism must include the great urban monuments including Boulevards, Avenues, Areas, and Plazas of the World including:
• Plaza d’ Concorde in Paris
• Piazza Novanna in Rome
• Columbus circle in Manhattan
• Arch d’ Triumph in Paris
• Washington Square in Manhattan
• St Stephan in Vienna
• Los Ramblas in Barcelona
• Parco Güell by Gaudi in Barcelona
• South Beach in Miami
• Roman forum
• Venice’ San Marco Square and the Campanile
• Red Square
• China’s Tieneman Square
• Times Square in Manhattan
• Broadway
• Fulton fish Market in Lower Manhattan
• Staten Island Ferry
• Statue of Liberty
• Tamiami Trail and thousands of other strip roads in the United States of America
• The Las Vegas Strip
And, American Shopping Malls, including the Galleria in Houston, which was built by Gerald Hines to be an air-conditioned version of the Milan, Italy original. Mr. Hines started out selling air conditioners in Texas.

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What are the natural design features around which cities may be planned?
Cites are famous for there rivers and urban architecture on the river
• San Antonio and it s River Walk
• San Francisco’ Golden Gate bridge and environs
• Seine in Paris
• Florence and Rome and the Arno
• Rhine
• Germany’s Ruhrgebit common to Dortmund, Düsseldorf and Duisenberg
• Venice, its canals, the famous San Marco Square, and the Campanile. (See Barie’s pen and ink)
Great Urban Buildings of the World include
• White House
• Taj Mihal
• Notre Dame
• Buckingham Palace
• St. Peter’s
• Dead Seas Scrolls in Israel
• Kabba in Mecca
• Eiffel Tower
• Empire State Building
• World Trade Center
• City forms radial: 2 Dimensional
In summary, aside from the culture of cosmopolitan urbanism what are some of all the movements, initiatives and legislations?

1. Rockefeller commission 2. Urban Development Corporation
3. Urban Land Institute 4. Principles of Intelligent Urbanism
5 Smart Growth and 6. Rural Land system

Is there one umbrella strategy to which many on both sides of the debate agree and can proceed?
Yes, and its called the New Urbanist!
As I mentioned earlier “Urbanist” are specialist in the study and planning of cities and “New Urbanism” is an urban design movement that burst onto the scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It tries to bring urban values into new construction.

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New Urbanist aim to reform all aspects of real estate development and their work affects regional and local plans. They are involved in new development, urban retrofits, and suburban infill. In all cases, New Urbanist neighborhoods are walk able, and contain a diverse range of housing and jobs.
New Urbanist support regional planning for open space, appropriate architecture and planning, and the balanced development of jobs and housing. In a goal-oriented society these seem to very appropriate and compatible with the culture of cosmopolitan urbanism.
By the way, I got most of the Information about New Urbanism from Internet and the “New Urbanism” and “Duany” web sites.
They believe these strategies are the best way to reduce how long people spend in traffic, to increase the supply of affordable housing, and to rein in urban sprawl.

Many other issues, such as historic restoration, safe streets, and green building are also covered in the Charter of the New Urbanism, the movement's seminal document.

They stand for the restoration of existing urban centers and towns within coherent metropolitan regions, the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs into communities of real neighborhoods and diverse districts, the conservation of natural environments, and the preservation of our built legacy.

They recognize that physical solutions by themselves will not solve social and economic problems, but neither can economic vitality, community stability, and environmental health be sustained without a coherent and supportive physical framework.

They advocate the restructuring of public policy and development practices to support the following principles: neighborhoods should be diverse in use and population; communities should be designed for the pedestrian and transit as well as the car; cities and towns should be shaped by physically defined and universally accessible public spaces and community institutions; urban places should be framed by architecture and landscape design that celebrate local history, climate, ecology, and building practice.


They represent a broad-based citizenry, composed of public and private sector leaders, community activists, and multidisciplinary professionals. They are committed to reestablishing the relationship between the art of building and the making of community, through citizen-based participatory planning and design.

And, they are dedicated to reclaiming their homes, blocks, streets, parks, neighborhoods, districts, towns, cities, regions, and environment.

Robert Steuteville Writes: “In The New Urbanism:
An alternative to modern, automobile-oriented planning and development that after World War II, a new system of development was implemented nationwide, replacing neighborhoods with a rigorous separation of uses that has become known as Conventional Suburban Development (CSD), or sprawl. The majority of US citizens now live in suburban communities built in the last 50 years.

The New Urbanism is a reaction to sprawl. A growing movement of architects, planners, and developers, the New Urbanism is based on principles of planning and architecture that work together to create human-scale, walk able communities. New Urbanist take a wide variety of approaches — some work exclusively on infill projects, others focus on transit-oriented development, still others are attempting to transform the suburbs, and many are working in all of these categories. The New Urbanism includes traditional architects and those with modernist sensibilities.
All, however, believe in the power and ability of traditional neighborhoods to restore functional, sustainable communities.

What are some of the strategies adopted by New Urbanism?
Just as Starbucks raised the quality of coffee in competing restaurants and cafes, mainstream developers are adopting new urban design elements such as garages in the rear of houses, neighborhood greens and mixed-use town centers. Projects that adopt some principles of New Urbanism but remain largely conventional in design are known as hybrids.

The New Urbanism trend goes by other names, including nontraditional design, transit-oriented development, and traditional neighborhood development.
Borrowing from urban design concepts throughout history, the New Urbanism does not merely replicate old communities. They apply the principles but practice suburbanization with developer interests to build on low priced land. It is the reason I have given you some specific urban examples and will continue to do so in lectures. It is in this way that New Urbanism is eclectic and often found guilty of fostering banal design solutions when in fact they are simply building contemporary metaphors.

The very fact that new Urbanist must meet the demands of the marketplace keeps them grounded in reality. Successful New Urbanism performs a difficult balancing act by maintaining the integrity of a walk able, human-scale neighborhood while offering modern residential and commercial “product” to compete with CSD.

New Urbanist who cannot compete with conventional development or find a niche that is poorly served by the real estate industry is doomed to failure. The new Urbanist is a pragmatist overwhelmed by the advent of land developers, super highways and utility networks.

The difficulty of that balancing act is one reason why many developers choose to build hybrids, instead of adopting all of the principles of the New Urbanism. Such a compost as a hybrid has usually enough uniqueness as to provide proponents applying for a development order with so many un-chartered elements as to warrant a variance away from the government’s original city plan.
Like my experience with Gulf Oil, it was the lawyers and the accounts that came up with most of the investment strategies and goals the board ultimately considered and approved.

Some new Urbanist thinks that hybrids pose a serious threat to the movement, because they usually borrow the label and language of the New Urbanism. Other new Urbanist believes that hybrids represent a positive step forward from CSD. Unfortunately, the architecture of space, human scale and quality of life has lost out to legalism, and the power of the law and economic benefits.
The new Urbanist has used computer technology to superimpose urban vocabulary, meaning and realities of infrastructure and hierarchies onto the highways, houses built on lots, vast connectors, and commercial centers. The result continues the lack of urban cities and affordable communities where independent and freethinking arts and intellect can grow and prosper. The New Urbanist is unwittingly promulgating the same choices made by their recent ancestors in the fifties for a controlled and managed life and the context to support that life style,
Vis-à-vis freedom of choice, democracy and quality of life what is your opinion of hybrids?




What are the elements and importance of New Urbanism?
Principles of the New Urbanism are an attempt by non-architects and creative persons to translate the spirit and intellect of the architect into formulas and recipes. They have made into clichés the hard work of the mind and spirit of urban architects and city planners.

They extrapolate and digest to legal terms what has taken place over the centuries in order to provide real estate developers with “smart growth plans politically correct vocabulary and legal stature to win the hearts and souls of the controlled and managed town counsels. Many talented people employed by corporate developers challenge county commissioners and local judges and judicial systems.
It makes being an informed citizen and selecting elected officials even more important. Practicing professionals need the support and confidence of constituents and the beneficiaries of the work of the developers and the government.
On the technical and physical side, like the Romans who created The Five Noble Orders of Architecture, Michelangelo’s treatise on scale, Ramsey Sleeper “Time Saver Standards” and John Wiley and Sons “Architectural Graphic Standards” the heart of the New Urbanism is in the design of neighborhoods, which can be defined by 13 elements, according to town planners Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, two of the founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism.
An authentic neighborhood contains most of these elements:
(Both are the planners of Fifth Ave in Naples and the new Fort Myers downtown areas)
1) the neighborhood has a discernible center. This is often a square or a green and sometimes a busy or memorable street corner. A transit stop would be located at this center.

2) Most of the dwellings are within a five-minute walk of the center, an average of roughly 2,000 feet.

3) There are a variety of dwelling types — usually houses, row houses and apartments — so that younger and older people, singles and families, the poor and the wealthy may find places to live.

4) At the edge of the neighborhood, there are shops and offices of sufficiently varied types to supply the weekly needs of a household.
5) A small ancillary building is permitted within the backyard of each house. It may be used as a rental unit or place to work (e.g., office or craft workshop).

6) An elementary school is close enough so that most children can walk from their home.

7) There are small playgrounds accessible to every dwelling -- not more than a tenth of a mile away.

8) Streets within the neighborhood form a connected network, which disperses traffic by providing a variety of pedestrian and vehicular routes to any destination.

9) The streets are relatively narrow and shaded by rows of trees. This slows traffic, creating an environment suitable for pedestrians and bicycles.

10) Buildings in the neighborhood center are placed close to the street, creating a well-defined outdoor room.

11) Parking lots and garage doors rarely front the street. Parking is relegated to the rear of buildings, usually accessed by alleys.

12) Certain prominent sites at the termination of street vistas or in the neighborhood center are reserved for civic buildings. These provide sites.
668
What are some projects that would agree with the New Urbanist?
To bring this all home let me give you a few examples of typical New Urbanist-type projects
• For example, in June of 1996, Disney unveiled its 5,000-acre town of Celebration, near Orlando, Florida, and it has since eclipsed Seaside as the best-known new Urbanist community. In some respects, the New Urbanism and Disney have been uncomfortable bedfellows. While using designers and principles closely associated with the New Urbanism, Disney has shunned the label, preferring to call Celebration simply a “town”.


• Seaside, Florida, by DPZ was the first new Urbanist town, began development in 1981 on 80 acres of Panhandle coastline.
Seaside appeared on the cover of the Atlantic Monthly in 1988 when only a few streets were completed, and it since became internationally famous for its architecture and the quality of its streets and public spaces. Seaside proved that developments that function like traditional towns could be built in the postmodern era. Lots began selling for $15,000 in the early 1980s and, slightly over a decade later, lots prices had escalated to about $200,000. Today, some lots sell for close to a million dollars and houses sometimes-top $3 million. The town is now a tourist Mecca.

Seaside’s influence has less to do with its economic success than a certain magic and dynamism related to its physical form. Many developers have visited Seaside and gone away determined to build something similar.

• Not officially named as a New Urbanist project is La Défense in Paris business district is one of the largest business districts in the world is the design of the Danish architect Otto van Spreckelsen looks more like a cube-shaped building than a triumphal arch. It is a 110-meter tall white building with the middle part left open. The sides of the cube contain offices. It is possible to take a lift to the top of the Grande Arch; it is as spectacular as a view from the Empire State Building, Eiffel towel or the former World Trade Center. You can see a reduced in scale vast panorama the city below; roof tops, streets and buildings. Like a view from the peaks of the Alps or the Rockies. My very first building designs were of New York City skyscrapers.

Few pre-New Urbanist synthetic cities:
• Brasilia, a capital created ex nihilo (Ex nihilo is a Latin term meaning "out of nothing") in the center of the country in 1956, was a landmark in the history of town planning. The site chosen for Brasilia is located in the Federal District and comprises 2,245 sq. miles (5,814 sq. km) of a sparsely inhabited plateau carved out of the State of Goias, 3,609 feet (1,100 meters) above sea level and 746 miles (1,200 km) from Rio de Janeiro. Brazilian architect and urban planner, Lucio Costa, won the competition for the urban master plan and the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer designed the major government buildings.
On April 21, 1960, Brasilia was officially inaugurated to function as the new capital of Brazil.

• Washington, DC designed whom L'Enfant was born at the Gobelins, Paris; He studied at the Royal Academy in the Louvre before enrolling to fight in the American Revolution. Following the war, L'Enfant established a successful and highly profitable civil engineering firm in New York City.

He achieved some fame as an architect by redesigning Federal Hall. In 1791, L'Enfant was appointed by President George Washington to design a new federal capital city under the supervision of three commissioners that Washington had appointed to oversee the planning and development of the 10 mile square of federal territory that would later become the District of Columbia.

• Garden Cities Of Tomorrow by Ebenezer Howard which is to be built near the center of the 6,000 acres, covers an area of 1,000 acres, or a sixth part of the 6,000 acres, and might be of circular form, 1,240 yards (or nearly three-quarters of a mile) from center to circumference.

• Freetown, a city that was new in the 18th century but that was not, paradoxically, a creation ex nihilo. (Ex nihilo is a Latin term meaning "out of nothing”) The capital of the first African colony in the modern sense of the term, a municipality at the end of the 19th century, and today a "capital of pain," Freetown has since its foundation crystallized all the beauties and contradictions of the Sierra Leonian settlement project.
As long as the concept of the city (whose original models were the Greek polis and the Roman urbs) had been intrinsically linked to the concept of civilization, and the concept of civilization considered synonymous with the West, both the ideas of an "African civilization" and an "African city" were seen as inadmissible. Freetown was the exception.

• New-Every town of The Shape of Things to Come by HG Wells, and many other images and designs by futurists, visionaries, science fiction writers and movie producers.
New Urbanist have planned and developed hundreds of projects in infill locations. Most were driven by the private sector, but many, including HUD projects, used public money.
What are some of the New Urbanist urban clusters?
New Urbanist projects built in historic cities and towns includes:
• Crawford Square in Pittsburgh;
• City Place in West Palm Beach;
• Highlands Garden Village in Denver,
• Park Du Valle in Louisville, and
• Beerline in Milwaukee.
• Times Square in Fort Myers Beach
• Down Town Naples
• Munich Subway and CBD street closing of the Marc Stresses
• Vienna St. Stephen Platz
In the mid-1990s, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) adopted the principles of the New Urbanism in its multibillion-dollar program to rebuild public housing projects nationwide.

My first project for Gulf Oil Corporation was RESTON, Virginia. Its competitor was James Rouse’s Columbia Maryland followed by the Irvine Ranch in California. I later was director of Architecture for Peoples Protective, which developed Sugar Tree and English Mountain in Tennessee; Sugar Tree is now an incorporated with a city form of government. However ambitious were these they are dwarfed by these more recent projects. The Gulf Company I worked for was formed to control the multi-billion dollar portfolio of all of Gulf Oil Corporation’s worldwide real estate assets. In addition to managing the financial and operational aspects of its many properties it also offered its services to all the gulf companies, which is where I provided all sorts of consulting services.

At the time, Gulf Oil owned several large developments including Florida’s Hutchinson Island, off of Port St. Lucie. At the time, it was wilderness a gulf Oil paid three times the appraised value of the property. It was the job of our group to consolidate trade and divest itself of unprofitable assets. Profits in the oil business were measured in hundreds of percent while in real estate business about twenty percent was considered acceptable. The Gulf board looked upon the collective sum of all these assets as a drop in the bucket compared to its profit making oil assets and there fore it set policies that held the development and operation of any of there properties with least priority.

36
Unlike many corporations, whose major business is real estate such as Dell Web, Hines, Trammel Crow, Hometown America, Sexton, Marriott, Horne and hundreds of others would propose projects for us to consider investing.

What is the New Urbanist’ Mission Statement?
I hope we can see our own potential culture of cosmopolitan urbanism in their principles and mission statement. Perhaps they can be our own.
As I said in my opening remarks the study of urbanism and civilization is inextricably tied together. As a metaphor, we are what we build and if we are civilized, we will build a way to live and work to make our habitations more livable. As we uncover ancient cities we learn how they were able to translate their version of living civilly in an n urban form. Can we today look at ourselves and be proud of our civilization of time of life?

The New Urbanist Mission Statement says that “ The Congress for the New Urbanism views disinvestments in central cities, the spread of placeless sprawl, increasing separation by race and income, environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands and wilderness, and the erosion of society's built heritage as one interrelated community-building challenge.
203
We stand for the restoration of existing urban centers and towns within coherent metropolitan regions, the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs into communities of real neighborhoods and diverse districts, the conservation of natural environments, and the preservation of our built legacy.

We recognize that physical solutions by themselves will not solve social and economic problems, but neither can economic vitality, community stability, and environmental health be sustained without a coherent and supportive physical framework.






We advocate the restructuring of public policy and development practices to support the following principles: neighborhoods should be diverse in use and population; communities should be designed for the pedestrian and transit as well as the car; cities and towns should be shaped by physically defined and universally accessible public spaces and community institutions; urban places should be framed by architecture and landscape design that celebrate local history, climate, ecology, and building practice.

We represent a broad-based citizenry, composed of public and private sector leaders, community activists, and multidisciplinary professionals. We are committed to reestablishing the relationship between the art of building and the making of community, through citizen-based participatory planning and design.

We dedicate ourselves to reclaiming our homes, blocks, streets, parks, neighborhoods, districts, towns, cities, regions, and environment.

Today, I described how the “Culture of Cosmopolitan Urbanism” describes our cosmopolitan and urban abilities to agree, disagree, peruse common goals, tolerate stress and congestion, discern between community and privacy and distribute precious resources.
As I promised I showed “what can be done to make cities livable and worthy to be called home”. There are other urban topics I can present which you may select from the handout.

Finally,
Are you ready to be a new urbanist and culture others as you have been cultured by urbanism?
275 words
I encourage you to get a vision for your home, block, neighborhood, community, county and city so that you may choose and manage your urban contexts.

Decide whether you choose between a corporate synthetic or natural context. Which one is right for you?

Also, visit cities, enjoy the one in which you live and know the similarities and differences between one and another city.

I hope you will appreciate cities and enjoy them for their own special and peculiar characteristics, its complexities, vulgarities and immense opportunities.

See the differences and distinctive and what they may have in common. Enjoy the big city for
Practice feeling the spaces between buildings and identifying the unique rooftops.

Get lost, reinvent yourself and become something you imagined you could be.

A big city can be very uncomfortable with inconveniences but it is usually on the cutting edge of new beginnings. Learn how to walk and perceive the faces and dress of people on the street.

Your old friends will call you crass and unconventional but once you grasp the fragrance and tempo of the big city, it will never leave you. You will be willing to sacrifice many of life’s pleasures for the stress, tempo, and sharpness that allow predators and creators to be all they are.

You will discover that no one man nor collection of men can create a big city but only a will on the part of a collective, complex, diverse and often adversarial separate teams.

It is not the architects, new Urbanist, and city planners dream come true but the diverse and contradictory reality of man’s creation.
It is mankind at its most optimum.

One and a Half Hour (one hour) has elapsed.
Now there may be time for questions and comments.
As I promised at the end of this lecture, I would leave time for any one that would like to share something about urbanism.
As I said in my first lecture since I am most at home, creating and solving problems I hope that some of you might have come here with an urban dilemma or comment you wish to discuss. I hope this lecture helped you frame some question that we can now discuss

- Freelance Writer & Translator, 1984 - 2004. Provided columns on business, economic, and other news and events pertaining to the Middle East and the Arab World to various publications in the USA and in the Middle East in both English and Arabic. Topics of columns cover international relations, Arab and Muslim community issues, business and entertainment.

- Editorial Producer & Content Manager, Planetarabia.com, Santa Clara, CA Feb. 2000 - October 2000. Managing and leading a team of editors, technical and creative writers. Proofreading, editing, and reviewing final drafts of marketing tools, and coordinating promotional campaigns. Worked closely with web designers to develop applications for content, audio and video streaming, and content syndication. Developed strategies to found and launch major ethnic multi-lingual Planetarabia.com portals in English, Arabic and French. Created and maintained content development tools. Recruited and guided freelance content providers. Oversaw in-house content production, in addition to coordinating content- related projects with technical, design, marketing, and other team leads.

- Arabic Radio Talk Show Co- host, Chicago, 2001-2003.Covering issues
concerning the Arab & Muslim American community with community leaders and
arranging round table discussions and panels.

- Translator/ Instructor, Media Center, Riyadh University, Saudi Arabia,
1986 -1989. Responsible for training media studies’ students on reporting, editing
news material, translation, dubbing, subtitling and the production of documentaries.

- Translator/Editor, TV and Radio Service, Cairo, Egypt, 1985. Preparing and producing cultural, and entertainment programs in both English and Arabic for
a diversified audience overseas. Researched and wrote original materials in the broadcast language, translated and adapted a variety of news from English into the broadcast language. Materials included news, editorials, interviews, news analyses, and feature pieces covering a wide range of issues and subjects, tailoring materials to the interests and needs of the audience, and assuring that the broadcast was factual, objective and balanced.

Most of my recent works, I repost them in www.descovrir.blogspot.com (my personal blog which now has 109 posts)

www.lyndaccorpuz.wordpress.com (my topical blog which I started December 26, 2008)

FROM MONEYSENSE MAGAZINE (as posted in http://moneysense.com.ph/wordpress/):

How to have a jolly, holiday spending (posted October 22, 2008)

http://moneysense.com.ph/wordpress/2008/10/how-to-have-a-jolly-holiday-spending/

Jesus Tambunting: Banker of SMEs (Posted September 5, 2008)

http://moneysense.com.ph/wordpress/2008/09/jesus-tambunting-banker-of-smes/

Finding your greener pasture (Posted August 23, 2008) http://moneysense.com.ph/wordpress/2008/08/finding-your-greener-pasture/

Out and about with Amanda (Posted December 29, 2006)

http://moneysense.com.ph/wordpress/2006/12/out-and-about-with-amanda/

Condo (buying and) living (Posted December 4, 2006)

http://moneysense.com.ph/wordpress/2006/12/condo-buying-and-living/

Make your holidays really happy (Posted November 23, 2006)

http://moneysense.com.ph/wordpress/2006/11/make-your-holidays-really-happy/

MLM vs. pyramiding scam: Know the difference (posted November 20, 2006)

http://moneysense.com.ph/wordpress/2006/11/mlm-vs-pyramiding-scams-know-the-difference/

Asking for a raise and getting it (Posted November 17, 2006)

http://moneysense.com.ph/wordpress/2006/11/asking-for-a-raise-and-getting-it/

Turn your financial goals to New Year’s Resolutions (Posted November 17, 2006)

http://moneysense.com.ph/wordpress/2006/11/turn-your-financial-goals-to-new-year%E2%80%99s-resolutions/

FROM MONEYSENSE MAGAZINE (as per content sharing with http://business.inquirer.net/money/personalfinance/):

10 Money questions couples should ask (Posted March 5, 2009)

http://business.inquirer.net/money/personalfinance/view/20090305-192421/10-money-questions-couples-should-ask

Have a sensible holiday spending season (Posted December 19, 2008)

http://business.inquirer.net/money/personalfinance/view/20081219-178875/Have-a-sensible-holiday-spending-season

Finding your greener pasture (Posted October 2, 2008)

http://business.inquirer.net/money/personalfinance/view/20081002-164135/Finding-your-greener-pasture

How to improve security at home (Posted September 11, 2008)

http://business.inquirer.net/money/personalfinance/view/20080911-159951/How-to-improve-security-at-home

Think ‘convenience’ with travel insurance (Posted July 10, 2008) http://business.inquirer.net/money/personalfinance/view/20080710-147577/Think-convenience-with-travel-insurance

5 tips on finding the best wedding ring for your money (Posted April 28, 2008)

http://business.inquirer.net/money/personalfinance/view/20080428-133129/5-tips-on-finding-the-best-wedding-ring-for-your-money

Cooperatives: alternatives for those who need cash (Posted January 28, 2008)

http://business.inquirer.net/money/personalfinance/view/20080128-115238/Cooperatives-alternatives-for-those-who-need-cash

5 franchising myths (Posted January 14, 2008) http://business.inquirer.net/money/personalfinance/view_article.php?article_id=112192

Giving 101 (Posted November 19, 2007)

http://business.inquirer.net/money/personalfinance/view_article.php?article_id=101767

How to survive graduate studies (Posted November 12, 2007) http://business.inquirer.net/money/personalfinance/view_article.php?article_id=100356

Breaking the glass ceiling (Posted October 29, 2007) http://business.inquirer.net/money/personalfinance/view_article.php?article_id=97437

‘Radical’ money advice from top lady entrepreneur (Posted October 8, 2007)

http://business.inquirer.net/money/personalfinance/view_article.php?article_id=93162

Making money in fashion (Posted September 10, 2007)

http://business.inquirer.net/money/personalfinance/view_article.php?article_id=87733

Learn how to build a tech-based biz from this marketing guy (Posted September 3, 2007)

http://business.inquirer.net/money/personalfinance/view_article.php?article_id=86288

Ready to jump into freelancing? (Posted August 27, 2007)

http://business.inquirer.net/money/personalfinance/view_article.php?article_id=84899

FROM MONEYSENSE MAGAZINE (as per content sharing with http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/business/moneysense):

MY MONEY STORY: Onésimus Barong Tagalog (Posted March 16, 2009)

http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/business/moneysense/03/16/09/my-money-story-on%C3%A9simus-barong-tagalog

MY MONEY STORY: Save, spend, and invest, the Chinese-Ilocano way (Posted March 8, 2009)

http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/business/moneysense/03/08/09/save-spend-and-invest-chinese-ilocano-way

MY MONEY STORY: Amway top distributor (Posted January 24, 2009)

http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/business/moneysense/01/24/09/my-money-story-amway-top-distributor

MY MONEY STORY: Binalot fast food (Posted January 17, 2009)

http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/business/moneysense/01/17/09/my-money-story-binalot-fast-food

How to ask for a raise without quitting your job (Posted July 28, 2008)

http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/node/14980

FROM ENTERPRISE MAGAZINE:

Economic sharpshooter (Posted September 5, 2006)
http://202.91.163.124/Default.aspx?_s=8&_ss=P&P=3&PN=2050&L=S&II=113&ID=S,113,B3,B3-3

Architect of faith (Posted September 5, 2006)
http://202.91.163.124/Default.aspx?_s=8&_ss=P&P=3&PN=2052&L=S&II=345&ID=S,345,B3,B3-1

Raising the bar on hospitality education (Posted June 6, 2006)
http://202.91.163.124/Default.aspx?_s=8&_ss=P&P=3&PN=772&L=S&II=236&ID=S,236,B3,B3-4

The son also rises (Posted May 30, 2006)
http://202.91.163.124/Default.aspx?_s=8&_ss=P&P=3&PN=717&L=S&II=113&ID=S,113,B3,B3-3

Branding is everything (Posted May 18, 2006)
http://202.91.163.124/Default.aspx?_s=8&_ss=P&P=3&PN=660&L=S&II=345&ID=S,345,B3,B3-1

The moderator of Philippine business (Posted April 25, 2006)
http://202.91.163.124/Default.aspx?_s=8&_ss=P&P=3&PN=528&L=S&II=345&ID=S,345,B3,B3-1

Recreating old Manila’s grand parties (Posted March 20, 2006)

http://202.91.163.124/Default.aspx?_s=8&_ss=P&P=3&PN=290&L=S&II=345&ID=S,345,B3,B3-1

Celebrity doctors on call (Posted February 28, 2006)
http://202.91.163.124/Default.aspx?_s=8&_ss=P&P=3&PN=134&L=S&II=113&ID=S,113,B3,B3-3
Packaging beauty (Posted February 27, 2006)
http://202.91.163.124/Default.aspx?_s=8&_ss=P&P=3&PN=117&L=S&II=113&ID=S,113,B3,B3-3

FROM THE MANILA TIMES NATIONAL NEWSPAPER:

Part 1 – Grand plan to change face of Cultural Center complex (Posted May 16, 2005)
http://www.manilatimes.net/others/special/2005/may/16/20050516spe1.html

Part 2 – ‘Commercialized’ CCP embraces the poor (Posted May 17, 2005)
http://www.manilatimes.net/others/special/2005/may/17/20050517spe1.html

Multisplendored architecture of faith (Posted November 8, 2004)

http://www.yehey.com/travel/articles.aspx?id=82415

In the hub of Philippine history (Posted October 28, 2004)

http://www.yehey.com/travel/articles.aspx?id=83031

From dreamers to achievers (Posted May 1, 2004)

http://209.85.175.132/search?q=cache:VKnnLDyOijsJ:www.truthforce.info/%3Fq%3Dnode/view/64+lynda+c.+corpuz&hl=tl&ct=clnk&cd=10&gl=ph&client=firefox-a

The Probe Team ends 16-year run (Posted November 11, 2003)

http://209.85.175.132/search?q=cache:a2F3hoTs3vYJ:www.pinoyexchange.com/forums/showthread.php%3Ft%3D138504%26pp%3D40%26page%3D118+lynda+c.+corpuz&hl=tl&ct=clnk&cd=87&gl=ph&client=firefox-a

A work of yesterday, reborn for today and tomorrow (Date posted unknown)

http://www.yehey.com/lifestyle/culture.aspx?artid=7346

FROM COMPUTERWORLD PHILIPPINES:

GMA: Technology will aid outsourcing (Posted June 16, 2006)

http://www.computerworld.com.ph/?_s=4&_ss=P&P=3&PN=824&L=H&II=405&ID=H,405,BYB, 1

FROM BREAKTHROUGHS (NEWSLETTER OF THE BUSINESS PROCESSING ASSOCIATION OF THE PHILIPPINES)

e-Services: Phil BPO to Boom Despite Crisis

http://www.bpap.org/bpap/publications/Breakthroughs%20March%202009_for%20website.pdf

Phils. Bullish on Extending Cyber Corridor to Next Wave Cities

http://www.bpap.org/bpap/publications/Breakthroughs%20March%202009_for%20website.pdf

It’s Not Just Child’s Play

http://www.bpap.org/bpap/publications/BREAKTHROUGHS%202.2%20for%20website.pdf

His Second Wind: Oscar Sañez, Chief Executive Officer, BPA/P

http://www.bpap.org/bpap/publications/Breakthroughs%20issue%201.pdf

FROM THE CONTACT CENTER ASSOCIATION OF THE PHILIPPINES:

Deepak Agarwal: Young and Bullish (Posted November 29, 2008)

http://www.ccap.ph/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=106:deepak-agarwal&catid=76:hot-topic

FROM PUNONGBAYAN AND ARAULLO (PHILIPPINES‘ TOP PROFESSIONAL SERVICES FIRM AND MEMBER FIRM OF GRANT THORNTON INTERNATIONAL, LTD.):

Scoring success and never getting bored with numbers

http://www.punongbayan-araullo.com/pnawebsite/pnahome.nsf/section_docs/NP164E_31-7-08

Reversing the brain drain: P&A lures top accountants working abroad to come home

http://www.punongbayan-araullo.com/pnawebsite/pnahome.nsf/section_docs/HR545X_27-8-08

Changing of the guard
http://www.punongbayan-araullo.com/pnawebsite/pnahome.nsf/section_docs/UK872F_16-11-06

Everyone knows the intimate relationship between good intentions and the road to hell.

From the comfort of their plush offices and five to six figure salaries, self-appointed NGO's often denounce child labor as their employees rush from one five star hotel to another, $3000 subnotebooks and PDA's in hand. The hairsplitting distinction made by the ILO between "child work" and "child labor" conveniently targets impoverished countries while letting its budget contributors - the developed ones - off-the-hook.

Reports regarding child labor surface periodically. Children crawling in mines, faces ashen, body deformed. The agile fingers of famished infants weaving soccer balls for their more privileged counterparts in the USA. Tiny figures huddled in sweatshops, toiling in unspeakable conditions. It is all heart-rending and it gave rise to a veritable not-so-cottage industry of activists, commentators, legal eagles, scholars, and opportunistically sympathetic politicians.

Ask the denizens of Thailand, sub-Saharan Africa, Brazil, or Morocco and they will tell you how they regard this altruistic hyperactivity - with suspicion and resentment. Underneath the compelling arguments lurks an agenda of trade protectionism, they wholeheartedly believe. Stringent - and expensive - labor and environmental provisions in international treaties may well be a ploy to fend off imports based on cheap labor and the competition they wreak on well-ensconced domestic industries and their political stooges.

This is especially galling since the sanctimonious West has amassed its wealth on the broken backs of slaves and kids. The 1900 census in the USA found that 18 percent of all children - almost two million in all - were gainfully employed. The Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional laws banning child labor as late as 1916. This decision was overturned only in 1941.

The GAO published a report last week in which it criticized the Labor Department for paying insufficient attention to working conditions in manufacturing and mining in the USA, where many children are still employed. The Bureau of Labor Statistics pegs the number of working children between the ages of 15-17 in the USA at 3.7 million. One in 16 of these worked in factories and construction. More than 600 teens died of work-related accidents in the last ten years.

Child labor - let alone child prostitution, child soldiers, and child slavery - are phenomena best avoided. But they cannot and should not be tackled in isolation. Nor should underage labor be subjected to blanket castigation. Working in the gold mines or fisheries of the Philippines is hardly comparable to waiting on tables in a Nigerian or, for that matter, American restaurant.

There are gradations and hues of child labor. That children should not be exposed to hazardous conditions, long working hours, used as means of payment, physically punished, or serve as sex slaves is commonly agreed. That they should not help their parents plant and harvest may be more debatable.

As Miriam Wasserman observes in "Eliminating Child Labor", published in the Federal Bank of Boston's "Regional Review", second quarter of 2000, it depends on "family income, education policy, production technologies, and cultural norms." About a quarter of children under-14 throughout the world are regular workers. This statistic masks vast disparities between regions like Africa (42 percent) and Latin America (17 percent).

In many impoverished locales, child labor is all that stands between the family unit and all-pervasive, life threatening, destitution. Child labor declines markedly as income per capita grows. To deprive these bread-earners of the opportunity to lift themselves and their families incrementally above malnutrition, disease, and famine - is an apex of immoral hypocrisy.

Quoted by "The Economist", a representative of the much decried Ecuador Banana Growers Association and Ecuador's Labor Minister, summed up the dilemma neatly: "Just because they are under age doesn't mean we should reject them, they have a right to survive. You can't just say they can't work, you have to provide alternatives."

Regrettably, the debate is so laden with emotions and self-serving arguments that the facts are often overlooked.

The outcry against soccer balls stitched by children in Pakistan led to the relocation of workshops ran by Nike and Reebok. Thousands lost their jobs, including countless women and 7000 of their progeny. The average family income - anyhow meager - fell by 20 percent. Economists Drusilla Brown, Alan Deardorif, and Robert Stern observe wryly:

"While Baden Sports can quite credibly claim that their soccer balls are not sewn by children, the relocation of their production facility undoubtedly did nothing for their former child workers and their families."

Such examples abound. Manufacturers - fearing legal reprisals and "reputation risks" (naming-and-shaming by overzealous NGO's) - engage in preemptive sacking. German garment workshops fired 50,000 children in Bangladesh in 1993 in anticipation of the American never-legislated Child Labor Deterrence Act.

Quoted by Wasserstein, former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, notes:

"Stopping child labor without doing anything else could leave children worse off. If they are working out of necessity, as most are, stopping them could force them into prostitution or other employment with greater personal dangers. The most important thing is that they be in school and receive the education to help them leave poverty."

Contrary to hype, three quarters of all children work in agriculture and with their families. Less than 1 percent work in mining and another 2 percent in construction. Most of the rest work in retail outlets and services, including "personal services" - a euphemism for prostitution. UNICEF and the ILO are in the throes of establishing school networks for child laborers and providing their parents with alternative employment.

But this is a drop in the sea of neglect. Poor countries rarely proffer education on a regular basis to more than two thirds of their eligible school-age children. This is especially true in rural areas where child labor is a widespread blight. Education - especially for women - is considered an unaffordable luxury by many hard-pressed parents. In many cultures, work is still considered to be indispensable in shaping the child's morality and strength of character and in teaching him or her a trade.

"The Economist" elaborates:

"In Africa children are generally treated as mini-adults; from an early age every child will have tasks to perform in the home, such as sweeping or fetching water. It is also common to see children working in shops or on the streets. Poor families will often send a child to a richer relation as a housemaid or houseboy, in the hope that he will get an education."

A solution recently gaining steam is to provide families in poor countries with access to loans secured by the future earnings of their educated offspring. The idea - first proposed by Jean-Marie Baland of the University of Namur and James A. Robinson of the University of California at Berkeley - has now permeated the mainstream.

Even the World Bank has contributed a few studies, notably, in June, "Child Labor: The Role of Income Variability and Access to Credit Across Countries" authored by Rajeev Dehejia of the NBER and Roberta Gatti of the Bank's Development Research Group.

Abusive child labor is abhorrent and should be banned and eradicated. All other forms should be phased out gradually. Developing countries already produce millions of unemployable graduates a year - 100,000 in Morocco alone. Unemployment is rife and reaches, in certain countries - such as Macedonia - more than one third of the workforce. Children at work may be harshly treated by their supervisors but at least they are kept off the far more menacing streets. Some kids even end up with a skill and are rendered employable.

The state has a monopoly on behaviour usually deemed criminal. It murders, kidnaps, and locks up people. Sovereignty has come to be identified with the unbridled - and exclusive - exercise of violence. The emergence of modern international law has narrowed the field of permissible conduct. A sovereign can no longer commit genocide or ethnic cleansing with impunity, for instance.

Many acts - such as the waging of aggressive war, the mistreatment of minorities, the suppression of the freedom of association - hitherto sovereign privilege, have thankfully been criminalized. Many politicians, hitherto immune to international prosecution, are no longer so. Consider Yugoslavia's Milosevic and Chile's Pinochet.

But, the irony is that a similar trend of criminalization - within national legal systems - allows governments to oppress their citizenry to an extent previously unknown. Hitherto civil torts, permissible acts, and common behaviour patterns are routinely criminalized by legislators and regulators. Precious few are decriminalized.

Consider, for instance, the criminalization in the Economic Espionage Act (1996) of the misappropriation of trade secrets and the criminalization of the violation of copyrights in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (2000) – both in the USA. These used to be civil torts. They still are in many countries. Drug use, common behaviour in England only 50 years ago – is now criminal. The list goes on.

Criminal laws pertaining to property have malignantly proliferated and pervaded every economic and private interaction. The result is a bewildering multitude of laws, regulations statutes, and acts.

The average Babylonian could have memorizes and assimilated the Hammurabic code 37 centuries ago - it was short, simple, and intuitively just.

English criminal law - partly applicable in many of its former colonies, such as India, Pakistan, Canada, and Australia - is a mishmash of overlapping and contradictory statutes - some of these hundreds of years old - and court decisions, collectively known as "case law".

Despite the publishing of a Model Penal Code in 1962 by the American Law Institute, the criminal provisions of various states within the USA often conflict. The typical American can't hope to get acquainted with even a negligible fraction of his country's fiendishly complex and hopelessly brobdignagian criminal code. Such inevitable ignorance breeds criminal behaviour - sometimes inadvertently - and transforms many upright citizens into delinquents.

In the land of the free - the USA - close to 2 million adults are behind bars and another 4.5 million are on probation, most of them on drug charges. The costs of criminalization - both financial and social - are mind boggling. According to "The Economist", America's prison system cost it $54 billion a year - disregarding the price tag of law enforcement, the judiciary, lost product, and rehabilitation.

What constitutes a crime? A clear and consistent definition has yet to transpire.

There are five types of criminal behaviour: crimes against oneself, or "victimless crimes" (such as suicide, abortion, and the consumption of drugs), crimes against others (such as murder or mugging), crimes among consenting adults (such as incest, and in certain countries, homosexuality and euthanasia), crimes against collectives (such as treason, genocide, or ethnic cleansing), and crimes against the international community and world order (such as executing prisoners of war). The last two categories often overlap.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica provides this definition of a crime: "The intentional commission of an act usually deemed socially harmful or dangerous and specifically defined, prohibited, and punishable under the criminal law."

But who decides what is socially harmful? What about acts committed unintentionally (known as "strict liability offences" in the parlance)? How can we establish intention - "mens rea", or the "guilty mind" - beyond a reasonable doubt?

A much tighter definition would be: "The commission of an act punishable under the criminal law." A crime is what the law - state law, kinship law, religious law, or any other widely accepted law - says is a crime. Legal systems and texts often conflict.

Murderous blood feuds are legitimate according to the 15th century "Qanoon", still applicable in large parts of Albania. Killing one's infant daughters and old relatives is socially condoned - though illegal - in India, China, Alaska, and parts of Africa. Genocide may have been legally sanctioned in Germany and Rwanda - but is strictly forbidden under international law.

Laws being the outcomes of compromises and power plays, there is only a tenuous connection between justice and morality. Some "crimes" are categorical imperatives. Helping the Jews in Nazi Germany was a criminal act - yet a highly moral one.

The ethical nature of some crimes depends on circumstances, timing, and cultural context. Murder is a vile deed - but assassinating Saddam Hussein may be morally commendable. Killing an embryo is a crime in some countries - but not so killing a fetus. A "status offence" is not a criminal act if committed by an adult. Mutilating the body of a live baby is heinous - but this is the essence of Jewish circumcision. In some societies, criminal guilt is collective. All Americans are held blameworthy by the Arab street for the choices and actions of their leaders. All Jews are accomplices in the "crimes" of the "Zionists".

In all societies, crime is a growth industry. Millions of professionals - judges, police officers, criminologists, psychologists, journalists, publishers, prosecutors, lawyers, social workers, probation officers, wardens, sociologists, non-governmental-organizations, weapons manufacturers, laboratory technicians, graphologists, and private detectives - derive their livelihood, parasitically, from crime. They often perpetuate models of punishment and retribution that lead to recidivism rather than to to the reintegration of criminals in society and their rehabilitation.

Organized in vocal interest groups and lobbies, they harp on the insecurities and phobias of the alienated urbanites. They consume ever growing budgets and rejoice with every new behaviour criminalized by exasperated lawmakers. In the majority of countries, the justice system is a dismal failure and law enforcement agencies are part of the problem, not its solution.

The sad truth is that many types of crime are considered by people to be normative and common behaviours and, thus, go unreported. Victim surveys and self-report studies conducted by criminologists reveal that most crimes go unreported. The protracted fad of criminalization has rendered criminal many perfectly acceptable and recurring behaviours and acts. Homosexuality, abortion, gambling, prostitution, pornography, and suicide have all been criminal offences at one time or another.

But the quintessential example of over-criminalization is drug abuse.

There is scant medical evidence that soft drugs such as cannabis or MDMA ("Ecstasy") - and even cocaine - have an irreversible effect on brain chemistry or functioning. Last month an almighty row erupted in Britain when Jon Cole, an addiction researcher at Liverpool University, claimed, to quote "The Economist" quoting the "Psychologist", that:

"Experimental evidence suggesting a link between Ecstasy use and problems such as nerve damage and brain impairment is flawed ... using this ill-substantiated cause-and-effect to tell the 'chemical generation' that they are brain damaged when they are not creates public health problems of its own."

Moreover, it is commonly accepted that alcohol abuse and nicotine abuse can be at least as harmful as the abuse of marijuana, for instance. Yet, though somewhat curbed, alcohol consumption and cigarette smoking are legal. In contrast, users of cocaine - only a century ago recommended by doctors as tranquilizer - face life in jail in many countries, death in others. Almost everywhere pot smokers are confronted with prison terms.

The "war on drugs" - one of the most expensive and protracted in history - has failed abysmally. Drugs are more abundant and cheaper than ever. The social costs have been staggering: the emergence of violent crime where none existed before, the destabilization of drug-producing countries, the collusion of drug traffickers with terrorists, and the death of millions - law enforcement agents, criminals, and users.

Few doubt that legalizing most drugs would have a beneficial effect. Crime empires would crumble overnight, users would be assured of the quality of the products they consume, and the addicted few would not be incarcerated or stigmatized - but rather treated and rehabilitated.

That soft, largely harmless, drugs continue to be illicit is the outcome of compounded political and economic pressures by lobby and interest groups of manufacturers of legal drugs, law enforcement agencies, the judicial system, and the aforementioned long list of those who benefit from the status quo.

Only a popular movement can lead to the decriminalization of the more innocuous drugs. But such a crusade should be part of a larger campaign to reverse the overall tide of criminalization. Many "crimes" should revert to their erstwhile status as civil torts. Others should be wiped off the statute books altogether. Hundreds of thousands should be pardoned and allowed to reintegrate in society, unencumbered by a past of transgressions against an inane and inflationary penal code.

This, admittedly, will reduce the leverage the state has today against its citizens and its ability to intrude on their lives, preferences, privacy, and leisure. Bureaucrats and politicians may find this abhorrent. Freedom loving people should rejoice.

APPENDIX - Should Drugs be Legalized?
The decriminalization of drugs is a tangled issue involving many separate moral/ethical and practical strands which can, probably, be summarized thus:

(a) Whose body is it anyway? Where do I start and the government begins? What gives the state the right to intervene in decisions pertaining only to my self and contravene them?

PRACTICAL:

The government exercises similar "rights" in other cases (abortion, military conscription, sex)

(b) Is the government the optimal moral agent, the best or the right arbiter, as far as drug abuse is concerned?

PRACTICAL:

For instance, governments collaborate with the illicit drug trade when it fits their realpolitik purposes.

(c) Is substance abuse a personal or a social choice? Can one limit the implications, repercussions and outcomes of one's choices in general and of the choice to abuse drugs, in particular? If the drug abuser in effect makes decisions for others, too - does it justify the intervention of the state? Is the state the agent of society, is it the only agent of society and is it the right agent of society in the case of drug abuse?

(d) What is the difference (in rigorous philosophical principle) between legal and illegal substances? Is it something in the nature of the substances? In the usage and what follows? In the structure of society? Is it a moral fashion?

PRACTICAL:

Does scientific research support or refute common myths and ethos regarding drugs and their abuse?

Is scientific research influenced by the current anti-drugs crusade and hype? Are certain facts suppressed and certain subjects left unexplored?

(e) Should drugs be decriminalized for certain purposes (e.g., marijuana and glaucoma)? If so, where should the line be drawn and by whom?

PRACTICAL:

Recreational drugs sometimes alleviate depression. Should this use be permitted?

Note: The Rule of Law vs. Obedience to the Law

We often misconstrue the concept of the "rule of Law" and take it to mean automatic "obedience to laws". But the two are antithetical.

Laws have to earn observance and obeisance. To do so, they have to meet a series of rigorous criteria: they have to be unambiguous, fair, just, pragmatic, and equitable; they have to be applied uniformly and universally to one and all, regardless of sex, age, class, sexual preference, race, ethnicity, skin color, or opinion; they must not entrench the interests of one group or structure over others; they must not be leveraged to yield benefits to some at the expense of others; and, finally, they must accord with universal moral and ethical tenets.

Most dictatorships and tyrannies are "legal", in the strict sense of the word. The spirit of the Law and how it is implemented in reality are far more important that its letter. There are moral and, under international law, legal obligations to oppose and resist certain laws and to frustrate their execution.

Web and Journalistic Activities

Author of extensive Web sites in:

– Psychology ("Malignant Self Love") - An Open Directory Cool Site for 8 years.

– Philosophy ("Philosophical Musings"),

– Economics and Geopolitics ("World in Conflict and Transition").

Owner of the Narcissistic Abuse Study Lists and the Abusive Relationships Newsletter (more than 6,000 members).

Owner of the Economies in Conflict and Transition Study List , the Toxic Relationships Study List, and the Links and Factoid Study List.

Editor of mental health disorders and Central and Eastern Europe categories in various Web directories (Open Directory, Search Europe, Mentalhelp.net).

Editor of the Personality Disorders, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, the Verbal and Emotional Abuse, and the Spousal (Domestic) Abuse and Violence topics on Suite 101 and Bellaonline.

Columnist and commentator in "The New Presence", United Press International (UPI), InternetContent, eBookWeb, PopMatters, Global Politician, The Analyst Network, Conservative Voice, The American Chronicle Media Group, eBookNet.org, and "Central Europe Review".

Publications and Awards

"Managing Investment Portfolios in States of Uncertainty", Limon Publishers, Tel-Aviv, 1988

"The Gambling Industry", Limon Publishers, Tel-Aviv, 1990

"Requesting My Loved One – Short Stories", Yedioth Aharonot, Tel-Aviv, 1997

"The Suffering of Being Kafka" (electronic book of Hebrew and English Short Fiction), Prague, 1998-2004

"The Macedonian Economy at a Crossroads – On the Way to a Healthier Economy" (dialogues with Nikola Gruevski), Skopje, 1998

"The Exporters' Pocketbook", Ministry of Trade, Republic of Macedonia, Skopje, 1999

"Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited", Narcissus Publications, Prague, 1999-2007 (Read excerpts - click here)

The Narcissism Series (e-books regarding relationships with abusive narcissists), Prague, 1999-2007

Personality Disorders Revisited (e-book about personality disorders), Prague, 2007

"After the Rain – How the West Lost the East", Narcissus Publications in association with Central Europe Review/CEENMI, Prague and Skopje, 2000

Winner of numerous awards, among them Israel's Council of Culture and Art Prize for Maiden Prose (1997), The Rotary Club Award for Social Studies (1976), and the Bilateral Relations Studies Award of the American Embassy in Israel (1978).

Hundreds of professional articles in all fields of finance and economics, and numerous articles dealing with geopolitical and political economic issues published in both print and Web periodicals in many countries.

Many appearances in the electronic media on subjects in philosophy and the sciences, and concerning economic matters.

Exhibitions
World Wide Review of Jacqueline Amos/ By Jurate Macnoriute, Brooklyn Counsel of the Arts, Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, United Freedom Foundation, Olympic Visions in Harlem, John F. Kennedy Performing Arts, Humanitarian Services Award, Harlem State Building, International Directory of Artist, American artist for famous Artist, Schaumburg Library of Black Studies, Ethiopia Coptic Church Museum, Whose Who In America (Cambridge) Whose Who In America (Emerald) American Artist Association, International Word Wide Jacqueline has been featured with Bcat TV. Jacqueline has performed 18 one-woman shows in Art. African Cafe, Medgar Evers College, Rotunda, 7 episodes The Biography of Artist Jacqueline Amos, Jacob Jarvis, 26 Federal Plaza, City College Grassroots Connection, Biography of Jacqueline Amos, Jacqueline has also been featured with Grassroots' connections, TV, Roundtable Radio. Jacqueline was also featured on Medgar Evers College Radio(Biography, Roundtable Radio, Supreme Court Building, One Million Women March, City Bank, Long Island University, Public Schools, Harlem Gallery, John F.Kennedy Performing Arts, and many more
Jacqueline is a graduate of Medgar Evers College, Degree in Education, and minored in Arts Education, Cambridge Who's Who In America, Jacqueline Amos a publish Author, documented with the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Schaumburg Library Of Black Studies, Ethiopia Coptic Church Museum, American Artist Association, International Word Wide Registry, Harlem Gallery, Harlem State Culture Building, John F. Kennedy Performing Arts, Medgar Evers College Historical Art Archives, Brooklyn Counsel Of The Arts, Emerald Who’s Who’ Executives and Professionals, World Wide Artist, Humanitarian Award, Philippians and American People, Proclamation Noumi Arts (Borough President, Howard Golden Proclamation from, (David A. Patterson, New York State Senate, 29th District, Bedford Styvesant Art and Culture, Black Hero’s, Medgar Evers College Alumni

Black Mans Diary, (Author Jacqueline Amos) This book seeks not only to help you understand men; Through the ultimate achievements of man documented in the blue print of survival, but also to understand the diversity of human associations, nevertheless it has been limited to self, the knowledge to know, but never the wisdom to apply. Ego’s of empowerment. A central theme of the book includes strategies in how and what man feels, that has been a calamity and the misconceptions in how men think, the oppressor of self esteem, but what society wants you to believe that man has know control over his perceptions of what it takes to be a man.

Jacqueline’s first book of poems, In My Father’s house, Publisher, Publish America, And then followed Self Publishing, and followed A Message To A Black Son,( 2005) and was followed by Indoctrination Of A New World Order Black men (2004), and ” All Black Men Who Ware Shades Ain’t Blind”, (2005). The , "Aint I A Woman"Talking,Tree”(2005) “Black Waters Tell Them My Name”(2005) and followed ” I Am A Black Women, I Am Old Enough To Dye” (2005) A Message To A Black Daughter Honor Shall Not Be Removed, (2004), Black Mans Diary, (2006) What You Know About A Ghetto Child, (2005) These are a few of many; Her most famous poem " Mama All The Slaves Done Died”; was part of “ The Education of Jacqueline Amos” Songs of Experience, God Light Is Green, The Moses Reform, and then followed so on, so on.

Stanley's Uncle, Knolan Benfield, introduced him to photography and specifically to photojournalism. He discovered how to turn his hobby of watching people into a career. So while in college Stanley worked for: the school newspaper, The East Carolinian; the school yearbook, The Buccaneer; and the public relations office. After four years at ECU, Stanley earned his Bachelor of Science in Social Work.

After graduating from ECU Stanley went to work at The Hickory Daily Record in Hickory, North Carolina as a photojournalist. Through the help of Chief Photographer Robert Reed and Knolan Benfield, Stanley was able to refine his skills with the camera and capture those moments he had been seeing all his life.

Knolan had worked with Don Rutledge at the Southern Baptist North American Mission Board in Atlanta, Georgia. Don was Knolan's mentor. Before working for the church, Don was a staff photographer for Black Star, one of the top photo agencies in the world. During the Civil Rights Movement Don photographed writer John Howard Griffen during his transformation into a black man living in the South. This later became the book Black Like Me. Don was an ordained Baptist minister who exchanged the pulpit for a camera. He preached with the camera. His illustrations were no longer with words in the pulpit, but with photographs on the printed page.

One night while processing film in the darkroom at the paper, Stanley got a call from Don. Don was then the senior photographer at the Southern Baptist International Mission Board in Richmond, Virginia. Don asked if Stanley would be interested in an entry level position as a photographer. Excited about working with someone he had admired for years, Stanley took the job and moved to Virginia. He worked with Don on The Commission magazine and was part of the team which won awards for third place for best use of photos in the magazine division of the POY by NPPA.

Stanley listened to Don and learned as much as he could from this outstanding photojournalist. After working with Don Rutledge, Warren Johnson and Joanna Pinneo for five years, Stanley went off to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. His study of people led him to the core of people, their hearts and spirits. His studies at the seminary were for a Masters of Arts in Communications. However, he also was able to study theology and education. These courses stretched his mind and compassion even more for people.

Stanley graduated with his M.A. In Communications on May 17, 1993 and immediately drove to Atlanta, Georgia to start working with Georgia Institute of Technology as a photographer. He worked at Georgia Tech until April 2002. Now he does freelance work for many different clients including Georgia Tech.