Photo by Sarah Goodyear.

The sticker on the stall door in the women’s room at the United Nations had a simple message: “[stop bracketing / START DOING].”

That slogan would have made no sense at all to me just a couple of days earlier, before I sat and watched the preparations for the Earth Summit that will take place in Rio de Janeiro next month. (If you have no clue what the summit is, check out our primer.) The meetings in New York City, which will resume May 29, are called the “second round of ‘informal-informal’ negotiations on the zero draft of the outcome document.” Here’s what it looks like:

You walk into a cavernous room full of diplomats. Projected on a screen at the front of the room is a paragraph from the aforementioned “zero draft,” which will evolve into the working document that will be up for discussion in Rio. Each paragraph is picked over word by word, with delegations from dozens of countries around the world suggesting word changes and deletions, or disagreeing with other nations’ word changes and deletions. A guy at the front of the room types it all in for everyone to see, putting the suggested changes in brackets, like this:

We reaffirm support for the implementation of [national – Canada delete; Russian Federation retain] [and sub-national – US, Russian Federation] [energy – Norway] policies and strategies, [based on individual national circumstances and development aspirations – US delete, Belarus retain] [to combine as / using an – US, Belarus, Norway, Russian Federation] appropriate [the – US Norway delete] energy mix to meet development needs …

You get the idea. That’s not even one sentence out of a document that was running close to 200 pages by the time I showed up to watch the show last week. Later, all of those edits need to get resolved.

You can see why the young activists with the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development Major Group for Children and Youth wanted to put that message out there: Stop bracketing. Start doing.

Every afternoon during the informal-informal negotiations, there are side events at which smaller groups of people talk about things that might actually get done when the brackets have all been erased and the magical consensus document emerges.

I attended one such side talk, about ocean acidification, at the suggestion of the folks at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who were co-presenters of the event along with the government of Monaco, where cutting-edge research into the problem is taking place. The talk was a great reminder of the fact that all around the world, scientists and scholars and philanthropists and, yes, even bureaucrats are fighting to do real work that combats the effects of the enormous quantities of carbon that we are pumping into our atmosphere.

Take Libby Jewett, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) program on ocean acidification, who gave a concise, informative, and chilling presentation about NOAA’s ongoing efforts to monitor and quantify the way that carbon emissions are changing our oceans. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the average acidity of the global ocean has increased by 30 percent, and if carbon emissions continue unchecked, it is expected to increase by 300 percent.

Along with Sarah Cooley, an oceanographer from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Jewett explained how the ocean’s changing pH will have a potentially devastating effect on coral reefs, mollusks, and other forms of marine life that depend on calcification, a process immediately affected by acidification.

When the ocean’s pH has changed in the past, the process took thousands of years, Cooley explained. “Organisms had many, many generations to be selected for these new conditions.” The current situation, she said, could be compared to a human’s blood pH changing in a matter of hours — a potentially fatal event. “This rate of change is unprecedented in geological history,” she said.

Destruction of mollusks and coral could send shockwaves through marine ecosystems, impacting fisheries and the people who depend on them, Cooley and Jewett explained. The impact, according to the data that are currently available, will be worst in the lower-latitude coastal nations — precisely the same places that will be most profoundly affected by rising sea levels and rising sea temperatures brought on by climate change.

Luke Daunivalu, a representative from the island nation of Fiji, spoke about the grave implications for his country. “We are very closely connected to the ocean and the coral reefs,” he said. “Healthy coral reefs and related marine ecosystems are essential to subsistence fishing, tourism, and export.”

The scientists in the room said that they didn’t see any way that acidification could be reversed through geo-engineering. Instead, they advocated for increased research and monitoring. At the local level, Cooley said, decreasing other stressors on the marine environment, such as water pollution and overfishing, might mitigate some of the damage caused by falling pH.

Monaco’s representative to the U.N., Isabelle Pico, thanked the scientists for their presentation. “It’s really refreshing for us diplomats to have you talking about something so concrete. Sometimes we are negotiating about a word and at the end we don’t even know why,” she said, to general laughter.

Then the delegate from Iceland asked what the scientists would hope for from the meeting in Rio. Jewett kept her expectations modest: “Having it confirmed by countries in the document that this is an important issue, and maybe … saying that we are going to put resources and people and time towards working together in this international effort — I don’t know that we can hope or expect more than that,” she said.

It might not seem like much, but an international acknowledgment that carbon uptake in our oceans is a real and pressing problem would be a big deal: Of the 400-plus paragraphs in the zero document, negotiators have thus far been able to agree on the wording of just 21.

It may be that the best we can hope for from the Earth Summit is a broad set of goals for building a more sustainable world. The actual doing will fall to individual countries, communities, companies, and nonprofit organizations long after all the bracketing is finished.

Also:

• Learn what “informal informal” means, and more about the Earth Summit process, here.
• Get the basics on ocean acidification from NRDC’s website, here.

Tia Jackson and Kristen Rapp are co-founders of 462 Halsey, a group of community volunteers who are planting a garden in a lot that has been abandoned for decades.

Tia Jackson’s family has lived on the same block of Halsey Street in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood for five generations. Kristen Rapp is a newcomer. Jackson is black. Rapp is white. In a part of town where the gentrification process has been grinding along painfully for years, the two might never have met if not for a sign on a fence on a vacant lot, left there by the members of a group called 596 Acres.

Now Jackson and Rapp have keys that let them into that vacant lot at 462 Halsey. They are shoveling dirt and planting seeds. Together with a dedicated group of neighborhood residents, they are turning an abandoned scrap of urban soil into a garden.

The sign that brought them together was part of a project to identify and map all city-owned vacant lots in Brooklyn, which add up to a mind-blowing — you guessed it — 596 acres in total area. To give you some perspective, Prospect Park, the borough’s largest, is 585 acres. In a city where real estate is an obsession (or a cult?) the idea of so much land sitting vacant is kind of astonishing.

Less than a year old, 596 Acres is the work of a small core of volunteers, including Paula Z. Segal, a lawyer and lead facilitator for the group. Segal first got interested in the city-owned vacant lots because of a site known as Myrtle Village Green, near where she lived at the time. Owned by the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, the lot was needed for a time to provide access to a major water tunnel project. The community was supposed to get it back, with landscaping and other improvements, once the access was no longer necessary. Years later, people are still waiting.

Kristen Rapp and Temi Jackson, age 5, sow seeds in vacant ground.

Researching the site, Segal learned how much data was available on vacant city land that had not yet been locked down by developers — and she got excited about the potential uses for that space. She presented some of her findings at the Festival of Ideas for the New City last year, and that’s where she met Eric Breisford, a programmer who, like her, is involved in a variety of other projects having to do with access to public space, public data, and decent food. The duo quickly got to work on making the data more accessible in both digital and paper formats.

Together they worked to get a map printed that showed the data they had gathered, and an online version as well. They researched a few lots in greater detail, then wheatpasted the printed maps to foam core boards along with explanations of  “what’s going on here,” and posted those at a few lots around Brooklyn. “We did that knowing there was all this mystery around these vacant lots and not knowing what would happen,” Segal says.

One of the lots they flagged was 462 Halsey. And that’s when Rapp and Jackson found each other and, with the help of 596 Acres, started the process that got the lot open after 20 years or more of blight. “I never knew what was going on with that lot,” Jackson says. Now, she’s planting seeds there with her son and her little sister.

Two other lots identified through 596 Acres are also starting new lives as garden space this growing season — the Java Street Garden and A Small Green Patch.

“What drives my involvement in most of the projects I work on is the idea that control over the food you eat is a fundamental right,” says Breisford. He cites research showing that 1.7 acres of urban acreage is capable of producing 90,000 pounds of food worth about a quarter of a million dollars.

Think what 596 acres could produce.

But Segal and Breisford say that the purpose of 596 Acres is not to tell people what they should do with the vacant lots. Food is part of what grows in places like these, but it is by no means the only thing.

The group 596 Acres, shown here at the Halsey Street site, empowers communities to reclaim vacant properties.

“It’s as much community as it is garden,” Rapp says.

“We want to see people being able to regain control over what’s going on in their neighborhoods,” says Segal.

To that end, 596 Acres helps people to navigate bureaucracy, governance structures, and neighborhood dynamics. The group has printed a broadsheet with a flowchart that outlines the complicated processes involved without making it all seems hopelessly intimidating.

They are also continuing to connect people like Jackson and Rapp, in Bed-Stuy, with others who want to unlock the chain-link mysteries of their own neighborhoods, clear the rubble, and get to work making things better.

596 Acres is looking to expand into New York’s other four boroughs. They’re fielding inquiries from places like Detroit, Philadelphia, Vancouver, and even Rio de Janeiro about how to start similar data projects there. They’re looking for funding, and Segal sees a lot of possibilities ahead.

“It’s a way of bringing power to communities that don’t have power,” she says.

Meet your new neighbor. He's got lots of friends. (Photo by Pip R. Lagenta.)

Raccoons are going to take over the earth. Or at least move into your apartment.

OK, they probably aren’t, but that was the impression I got while watching the Nature documentary Raccoon Nation, which I caught one recent night on PBS. (You can watch it here.)

The premise of the show is that urban habitats could actually be making raccoons smarter. Omnivorous, curious, intelligent, and super-adaptable, raccoons are turning out to be really good at overcoming every challenge that people throw at them. Cities are like giant playgrounds for them, filled with puzzles that they can solve with surprising ease — and learn from in the process.

In Brooklyn, N.Y., where I live, one family came downstairs in the morning to find a dead raccoon wedged in their silverware drawer. The resulting picture (yikes) got passed around local blogs for days. It’s a horrible image, but it got a very different reaction than a similar picture of a rat or a snake would have elicited: People felt bad for the raccoon as much as they did for the person who stumbled down for breakfast and encountered its furry corpse.

Because here’s the thing about raccoons: Unlike other animals that people encounter rummaging through their garbage, they’re freaking adorable.

Just borrowing the fax. (Photo by Pip R. Lagenta.)

Their masked mugs are just so wildly cute, as is the way they use their front paws (which are incredibly sensitive, allowing the animal to take in enormous amounts of information about its environment). In the same building where the dead-raccoon-in-a-drawer incident took place, residents couldn’t keep from videotaping and cooing about the antics of other raccoons that were doing their best to bust into the house.

“People have a different kind of relationship with raccoons,” says Stanley Gehrt, associate professor at Ohio State University, one of the raccoon researchers featured in the Nature show. “People kind of identify with them. There’s an increased comfort level. People are actually feeding them and adopting them.”

Which is not such a great idea. In Toronto, which according to Nature is “the raccoon capital of the world,” the animals are causing lots of problems. There are concerns not just about property damage, but also about the spread of diseases such as rabies and raccoon roundworm. One homeowner got so fed up with the raccoon family that was destroying his garden that he attacked them with a shovel — and got arrested for animal cruelty. The episode provoked a small rally, complete with pro- and anti-raccoon camps.

The Nature show included segments on how the furry critters are destroying centuries-old Buddhist temples in Japan, where they were introduced after a ’70s TV show called “Rascal the Raccoon” convinced people that they would make cute pets. Owners dumped them once they grew up and got vicious, and as a result Japan is filled with raccoons that are basically turning some of the country’s most historic buildings into toothpicks by nesting in them.

Look who came to dinner. (Photo by ImageMD.)

People try all sorts of things to get rid of raccoons: rags soaked in ammonia, mothballs, cayenne pepper, coyote piss, strobe lights, ultrasonic noise machines, you name it. And guess what? To quote the honey badger, raccoon don’t care.

Removing food sources, trapping and relocating the raccoons, and sealing up any available hole where they can enter are the best strategies, but they don’t always work. In Japan, they’re just killing them: A biologist interviewed on the Nature program estimates she’s done away with 10,000 of the beasts. She looks like it has made her pretty sad. But still they come.

In Germany, raccoons were imported for hunting and fur, and there’s a thriving population in German cities like Kassel, where there are today about 100 raccoons per square kilometer (0.39 square mile). Characteristically, the Germans have tried to solve the problem through engineering, creating ingenious shields to keep raccoons from climbing up drainpipes and into houses. Except the raccoons seem to figure them out as soon as they’re created.

Gehrt is not totally sold on the idea that cities make raccoons smarter, saying that much more research needs to be done. What’s clear, he told me, is that people and wild animals are coming into contact more and more frequently. Cities are getting greener, providing habitat. People are more tolerant of wildlife than they used to be, seeing the presence of wild animals as a life-enhancing glimpse of nature rather than as a menace. And for hyper-adaptable animals like the raccoon, the city is a safe haven, with no hunting or trapping and no predators. Figure out which streets are too busy to cross safely (which they seem to be able to do pretty quickly), locate your local garbage can, and you’re living the raccoon high life.

The crux of the issue is that raccoons are a lot like people: clever, opportunistic, adaptable, and fiendishly persistent. Also, street smart as all hell. They like cities almost as much as we do.

For better or worse, we have unwittingly hooked up with raccoons for the long run.

Alain de Botton's proposed atheist temple. (Image by Tom Greenall and Jordan Hodgson.)

Fundamentalism and magical thinking are all the rage these days. Rational scientific thinking is out, especially when it comes to climate change, and atheists are really unpopular.

But what if non-believers grabbed a few ideas from the religious set? Writer Alain de Botton, whose most recent book is called Religion for Atheists, has come up with a plan to build an enormous atheist temple in the city of London. On his website, de Botton asks “Even if religion isn’t true, can’t we enjoy the best bits?”

De Botton doesn’t see an atheist temple as a contradiction in terms. Here’s what he told The Guardian:

Normally a temple is to Jesus, Mary, or Buddha, but you can build a temple to anything that’s positive and good. That could mean a temple to love, friendship, calm, or perspective. Because of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, atheism has become known as a destructive force. But there are lots of people who don’t believe but aren’t aggressive towards religions.

De Botton’s temple would be 151 feet tall, cost about $1.6 million, and incorporate symbolism celebrating the history of life on earth.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the proposal has met with grumpiness from his fellow atheists. Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and other blasphemous texts, thinks it would be a waste:

Atheists don’t need temples. I think there are better things to spend this kind of money on. If you are going to spend money on atheism you could improve secular education and build non-religious schools which teach rational, skeptical, critical thinking.

Maybe de Botton has a point, though. Education hasn’t succeeded in beating back the tide of anti-scientific, willfully ignorant fundamentalist thinking. Maybe some grandiose architecture is just what rational atheists need to compete in the marketplace of ideas, where they’ve increasingly been on the defensive.

While some evangelical Christians in the U.S. have voiced support for environmental protection, religious fundamentalists continue to attack secular, scientific thinking — not only on the teaching of evolution in the schools, but also on environmentalism in general and climate change science in particular.

And politicians scrambling for fundamentalist votes are eager to join in on the science-bashing. All in God’s name, of course.

Texas governor and failed presidential candidate Rick Perry famously called Al Gore a “false prophet” for a “secular carbon cult.” Fundamentalist groups such as the Cornwall Alliance make faith a central part of their climate change denial:

We believe Earth and its ecosystems — created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence — are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history.

And let’s not forget what Newt Gingrich did to climate scientist and Christian Katharine Hayhoe.

So maybe secular, scientific thinkers should start acting more like fundamentalists. After all, our secular institutions are being co-opted by the religious right. This week, the Indiana State Senate approved a bill to teach creationism in public schools, and Ken Cuccinelli continues to use his office as Virginia Attorney General to harass a climate scientist.

De Botton’s temple is undeniably kind of wacky. But wacky seems to be what’s selling these days.

Editor’s note: This article originally stated that the temple would commemorate the “300-million-year history of life on earth.” Thanks to reader Sean Montague for pointing out that life has existed much longer than that. The actual number is closer to 4 billion years.

Troy, Michigan's Tea Party mayor, Janice Daniels, tangled with trains and lost. (Photo: Change.org.)

Is the Tea Party losing its mojo? It sure looks like it. Tea Party favorite Michele Bachmann had to bail early from the presidential race and it’s looking more and more like they’ll have to settle for Mitt — hardly the Tea Party ideal. To make matters worse, they’re having trouble finding good candidates for Congress. And they seem to be taking a beating on the local level as well.

Consider the case of Troy, Mich., an affluent suburb 10 miles outside Detroit, where Tea Partiers last night got spanked in a fight over public transit.

In November, Troy elected Tea Party activist Janice Daniels as mayor, and put two other Tea Partiers on the city council. Daniels ran on a platform of “fiscal transparency, integrity in budgeting, and open communication between the private and the public sector” and “limited, constitutional government.”

What did that mean in practice? First, Daniels changed the oath of office when she took it, leaving out the part about how she was supposed to enforce the city charter. Then she got into a nationally publicized flap when homophobic comments on her Facebook page predating her mayoralty were brought into the public eye. (She wrote that she was giving up her “I Love NY” totebag after the state allowed “queers” to get married. Take that, you rainbow-flag-wavers in the Empire State!)

Just a couple of weeks after the Facebook post came to light, Daniels again made national headlines by leading the Troy city council in rejecting $8.5 million in federal funds to construct a rail-based commuter transit center. Daniels and the new Tea Partiers on the city council voted against approving a key contract for the center, which had been in the works for a decade, despite objections from the business community and Republican Gov. Rick Snyder. Their official explanation seemed to be that our nation is too far in debt to be throwing money around, and that it would be irresponsible to take the cash (although they gave no indication that they’d say no to federal money for roads).

Here’s what Daniels said to the New York Times:

There’s nothing free about government money … It’s never free, and it’s crippling our way of life.

But a funny thing happened on the way to this particular Tea Party celebration. Project supporters scrambled to present a scaled-back version that would require about $6.3 million in federal money, winning strong support from the Troy Chamber of Commerce. At a meeting last night, one council member reversed his vote on the contract, clearing the way for the project to proceed.

Many in Troy wondered about the claim that fiscal responsibility, and not ideology, was behind the initial rejection of the project. The rejected money, after all, wouldn’t have gone to pay off the national debt; other municipalities indicated they’d be thrilled to take what Troy turned away.

And during the mid-December hearing about the matter, it came to light that opponents of the project might have been motivated by fears that the trains would bring inner city crime to their peaceful burg, which has been named safest city in the state for 10 of the last 14 years.

David Wisz, an ally of Mayor Daniels who spoke at the Dec. 19 meeting, had this to say in his testimony: “It’s a magnet for crime … ‘Heroin express,’ that’s what the police call the transit center.” On his Facebook page (what is it with Michigan Tea Partiers and oversharing on Facebook?) he also wrote that “another mugger mover is not needed.”

As for being up-front with her constituents, Daniels has compounded her anti-gay Facebook gaffe by refusing to release the tape of a meeting she had with the local high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance.

They say she implied that homosexuality is a mental illness. She says she meant no such thing. We’ll have to wait for the FOIA requests to play out to see what her words really were. The transparency she values in fiscal matters apparently doesn’t extend to all her official actions.

Andrew Basile, CEO of a local law firm, takes all of this very seriously. In a letter to the Troy Chamber of Commerce, he wrote, “It’s bad for business for Troy to have a mayor who harbors (much less publicly voices) anti-gay perspectives. She might as well have taken out a full-page ad in the Detroit News admonishing corporations not to locate in Troy.”

Basile has argued that Troy’s miles of auto-dominated sprawl makes it hard to attract world-class talent. When I spoke to him about the transit center rejection before it was reversed, he was more frustrated than ever. He laughed at the notion that the rail lines could be viewed as “a heroin express,” saying they are commuter lines analogous to the Long Island Railroad or Chicago’s Metra.

As for accepting federal dollars for the project, here’s what Basile said in his letter to the Chamber of Commerce:

I’m a conservative Republican. I agree that federal spending should be cut. If Ms. Daniels were in Congress voting to reduce national transportation spending, I would probably applaud her. At least I would understand her. But when a person accepts leadership of a town, she is morally obligated to defend the interests of that town above all else. Her job therefore is to take every last dollar that the federal government is willing to give Troy, especially for projects of significant merit that enjoy the support of many if not most of the local residents and businesses.

At the meeting where the vote was reversed, Mayor Daniels was noticeably quiet. The outcome of the vote was clear from the opening minutes of the meeting. After the deal was done, a cluster of right-wing gadflies lined up to express their disgust during the public comment period. But it was too late.

In Troy, mainstream Republicans are reckoning on the ground with what Tea Party governance looks like in action. And at least in the case of their transit center, they have been willing to push back.

That was New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg speaking at the United Nations yesterday. Bloomberg delivered the remarks in his usual flat tone to a vast room filled with blank-faced diplomats, bureaucrats, and international do-gooders. But there was real urgency in the message he was delivering: It’s time to give cities a substantive role in international climate-change negotiations — because national and international governments have been bickering and dithering while disaster is bearing down on them.

Bloomberg, who is chair of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, was speaking as part of a panel put together by the Ford Foundation in advance of the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. The conference will be held in Rio de Janeiro in June of 2012, marking the 20th anniversary of the U.N.’s first Earth Summit, which also took place in Rio. 

That was supposed to be the beginning of a grand international collaboration to enact meaningful environmental policies. The follow-up at the highest levels of government has been less than decisive (Kyoto Protocol, anyone?). 

Meanwhile, the world has been urbanizing more and more rapidly. Today, more than 50 percent of the world’s population lives in cities. The number of people living in poor and densely populated places has grown from 600 million to a billion people since the first Earth Summit. 

“How can we ensure that our cities evolve as just cities, shaped by fairness, sustainability, and shared prosperity?” asked the Ford Foundation’s president, Luis Ubiñas. “Rio+20 has to have that conversation — sustainability in the context of justice.”

“Making promises for future leaders to fulfill won’t do at this summit,” said Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, another of yesterday’s panelists. “This must be a summit at which every leader makes concrete commitments about what they are going to do now and in the near term.”

She made the case that meaningful change doesn’t necessarily result from treaties or protocols; it can come from the efforts of action-oriented players at lower levels of government. 

“Cities are where most people come face to face with the worst environmental problems, from air pollution to extreme weather brought on by climate change,” said Beinecke. They are also places where real change is happening, she pointed out. “Citywide solutions, like better transit, clean drinking supplies, wastewater treatment, and improved energy efficiency can bring a cleaner environment to millions. All around the world, mayors are putting these solutions in place. As they do so, cities are becoming the incubators of clean development.”

Bloomberg, touting his own achievements in tree-planting, new energy standards, and cleaner transportation, argued that mayors deserve a broader role in the global debate. “Cities should be given seats at the table when international sustainability policies are mapped,” said Bloomberg. “In every corner of the globe, cities are at the forefront of climate change action.” But too often, he said, “cities lack the power, resources, or the expertise to go along the alternative path, the path of sustainability.”

And there are real-world consequences, he emphasized, if cities continue to be disempowered by their national governments. “The harsh reality is, today’s unprecedented urban population explosion is putting the cities of the world, and therefore the future of the world, in a race against time.”

After the panelists had finished their presentations, the assembled functionaries shuffled back out into the halls of the U.N. on their way to the next panel, or maybe to lunch. You had to wonder if they had gotten the message.

Protesters gathered this afternoon at 6th Avenue and Canal Street.Photo: Sarah Goodyear

The strange legalities surrounding Zuccotti Park have been a critical factor in the development of the political statement that goes by the name “Occupy Wall Street.” The space itself enables, and to a certain extent defines, the action. Even as the movement has spread nationally, the New York encampment remains an important part of the movement’s identity.

But starting at 1 a.m. this morning, the protesters were removed, their tents and belongings loaded into garbage trucks and hauled away. Now comes the news that a judge has ruled that the protesters may return, but they cannot bring tents or generators. Technically, they will be allowed to stay 24-7, but the encampment is apparently over.

Without the permanent presence at Zuccotti Park, what will happen to Occupy Wall Street?

I spent much of the day following people who had been displaced from Zuccotti, riding my bike through the increasingly chaotic and traffic-choked streets of Lower Manhattan, where police vehicles of all sizes were a constant presence.

Photo: Sarah GoodyearI started at Foley Square, a usually dead space surrounded by imposing courthouses about a half mile northeast of Zuccotti. There, a bleary-looking handful of folks huddled in sleeping bags or sat together in small groups talking. They all looked stunned.

Someone holding an information sign told me that a crowd was gathering at the corner of Canal Street and 6th Avenue in preparation for a march, about a mile and a half to the north. When I arrived there, a group of protesters had just been arrested after briefly occupying a vacant lot belonging to Trinity Church. After a quick General Assembly, most of the remaining protesters decided to head back to Zuccotti.

At about 4 p.m., we found the park empty, surrounded by metal barriers and police, many in riot gear. The crowd outside the gates grew and grew, blocking the sidewalk that surrounds the park, while the police looked out at them. The mood was mostly calm. The cops seemed bored as much as anything. Both sides waited to hear whether the judge would force the city to let the protesters back in for good.

At 5 p.m., word came down that the judge had sided with the city. As I write, protesters are streaming back into the park, but they will not be allowed to camp.

Watching the occupiers try to find their place today made me think of a huge flock of starlings startled from a tree, swirling around, coming together in small numbers before regrouping and resettling right back where they had begun.

Afternoon chaos at Zuccotti. Photo: Sarah GoodyearIt won’t be easy to separate the OWS crowd from Zuccotti Park (or Liberty Park, as some people are calling it). Last night, as the police surrounded the park in preparation for clearing it, protesters began to chant: “Whose Park?” was the call. “Our Park!” came the response. Today, I heard many people refer to it as their home.

This somewhat bland and corporate space has taken on an emotional charge and significance for hundreds, if not thousands, of people. That is not going to dissipate immediately.

Becoming synonymous with an anti-establishment social movement is certainly not the outcome that Brookfield Properties, the owner of the space, envisioned when it brokered the deal that gave the company the right to build a bigger office tower in exchange for the park. It’s doubtless not the kind of tribute the company intended to pay to its U.S. chairman, John Zuccotti (who, according to Wikipedia, has served at various times on both the National Republican Congressional Committee and Joe Biden’s presidential campaign).

But that’s the way cities work. They don’t belong to any one group, and they can never be fully controlled. They are a medium in which change happens, some of it bad, but much of it good. They are places where unexpected beauty and meaning can spring up between the cracks of the urban structure.

For several weeks now, organizers have been looking for ways to move the movement past occupation into different kinds of action. Crackdowns on encampments around the country might speed that process. The first real test will come on Thursday, when protests marking the two-month anniversary of the occupation are planned.

The movement has always intended to reach beyond the boundaries of Zuccotti Park. As powerful and useful as that place has been, if the force behind OWS is as powerful as its organizers believe, it will soon spring up somewhere else.

Photo: Paul Stein

There are as many answers as there are people who love (or hate) cities. They are engines for economic growth, if you ask economist Ed Glaeser. They are breeding grounds for human innovation, if you ask physicist Geoffrey West. If you’re a dictator or a despot — or a Wall Street fat cat — you might worry about their tendency to harbor radicalism and social unrest.

Fundamentally, cities exist to serve and facilitate the fulfillment of human needs — physiological, social, and intellectual — and when those needs are unmet, they are often the first places to react. They are the places where human change is accelerated. And that’s why they are the center of the Occupy Wall Street movement. As Matt Yglesias wrote on the Atlantic Cities site a couple of weeks ago, “Nobody wants to occupy the strip mall or the office park or the park and ride lot.”

Nope. People — of all ages, but many of them young — want to occupy cities. Fed up with a broken system that delivers little of what it promises, they are using urban public space as an open-source laboratory for social change. And as much as established media and pundits insisted at first that they had nothing to gain with their open-ended effort, they kept going. Because the way things are these days, they actually don’t have anything to lose.

Active engagement with the city as a medium for social change isn’t confined to Occupy Wall Street. Back in October, I attended an event called the Tactical Urbanism Salon, where a group of active urbanist thinkers and doers, mostly in their 20s and 30s, gathered to talk about ways to make cities better using targeted interventions that are often low-cost and easy to implement quickly. (I’ve written about the Tactical Urbanism concept here before; full disclosure: one of the group’s founders, Aurash Khawarzad, is now a friend and coworker of mine). These actions and interventions include improvised street seating, pop-up parks, window farms, and the like. Sometimes they’re done in partnership with government, but the impetus and creative energy is coming from the bottom up.

In the Tactical Urbanism approach, knowledge is shared. Failure is expected and seen as a creative force, rather than as something to be feared. Input from others is welcome. Want to brainstorm about vertical farming? Share ideas about bus-top gardens? You’re welcome to contribute. In a significant departure from the attitude of previous generations of entrepreneurs and activists, there’s not a lot of proprietary grasping going on. It’s a creative commons approach to the physical commons.

Social consciousness is an integral part of this new urban activism. One of the speakers at the Tactical Urbanism event, which was held in Long Island City’s Flux Factory, was Chiara Camponeschi, founder of an online urbanist resource called The Enabling City. Camponeschi documents grassroots urban innovations from tool-lending libraries to food redistribution programs to the salvage of neglected spaces.

Camponeschi asked this: “If cities aren’t ‘enabling,’ then what are they, and who are they helping?”

It’s an idealistic question. Some might even call it naive. But it seems entirely appropriate in light of OWS.

There was, not surprisingly, a lot of talk about the Occupy movement that day, including a work session on the town planning process at the Zuccotti Park site. And although there was definitely a diversity of opinion — some were skeptical, many others embraced the movement wholeheartedly — there was an overall feeling that the movement is speaking a generational truth.

The people around me in that room were hard-working, energetic, innovative, mostly young people who were proceeding with their plans and ideas for making cities better with little or no expectation that they were going to get help from governments, corporations, or any other established entities. Instead, they look to the city itself — its people, its infrastructure (crumbling or not), its capacity to foster human interaction.

These are people enabled by the city to do the work they care about — and in their case, the work is to nurture, heal, and grow the very city that makes it all possible.

Right now, all around the country, people are taking “nothing” — the streets of their cities, their own frustrated expectations, the kindness of strangers — and building something. It’s not a flawless effort. There are real questions about the impact on the surrounding neighborhoods, about the exclusion of certain classes of people, about the ability of all speakers to be heard. But after so many years of apathy and disengagement from the left, it’s kind of wonderful to watch.

My kind of town.Photo: Sarah Goodyear

Today is my last day as cities editor at Grist. I am no good at goodbyes, so I’m going to make this short and sweet.

For the last year, I have had the excellent fortune to have this awesome job. It’s been a rare and wonderful opportunity to explore all different aspects of urban life. I’ve written about beautiful things, like green roofs and the global upsurge in bike commuting. I’ve written about horror stories, like the case of Raquel Nelson, the mother convicted of vehicular homicide for crossing the street with her son. I’ve had the great pleasure of working with contributors like Elly Blue, whose Bikenomics series explored how we might be able to ride our way out of the recession on two wheels. I’ve had the chance to think about the new model cities that are being built from scratch across the globe. I’ve tried to break down some of the preconceptions about the divide between cities and suburbs. And I’ve tried to expose some of the absurdity inherent in the American addiction to sprawl development.

Why do I care so much about what happens in cities? Well, for starters, because so many people live in them — 80 percent of Americans and more than 50 percent of people around the world.

We need better, more livable cities to serve these people well. We need to stop sprawl so that we don’t pave over the green places we have left. Quality urban development is essential for the future.

That isn’t my only motivation, though. Part of it is just about love.

At heart, I am a city girl. I love the human energy and innovation that you find in the world’s best cities. I love the possibilities that can arise when people of all cultural backgrounds come together in one place. I know it’s not for everyone, but it’s for me.

And that’s why I’m making a move. I’m leaving to join the Project for Public Spaces, where I’ll work with planners who are helping to make cities better places. Follow me on Twitter if you want to know more about what I’ll be up to in the weeks and months to come.

And I will still be contributing occasionally to Grist — writing about cities, and why they are necessary, and why they are wonderful.

Let’s not say goodbye, after all. Let’s just say see you later.

Learning the rules of the road at Legoland.Photo: Sarah Goodyear

When I was a kid, the first amusement park I ever went to was Disneyland. One of my favorite attractions was Autopia — the race-track style driving course where you “steer” a car along a track that looks suspiciously like an interstate highway. (Sponsored by Chevron!)

Well, last weekend I went to Legoland California with my 9-year-old son, and I discovered just how differently the Danes (they’re the ones who invented Lego) see driving. The driving attraction at Legoland is an urban streetscape in which the kids are actually in control of the course they set — and in which they are also responsible for stopping at traffic lights and stop signs.

The “Volvo Driving School,” as it’s called, also has a vibrant streetscape, including pedestrians, vendors, and a transit stop — all things that are kind of hard to come by in the park’s immediate vicinity, which is typical sprawl development (albeit with a surprising number of sidewalks).

I’m just guessing, but I have a feeling the Legoland Driving School wasn’t designed by Americans.

Hey, why not take transit instead?Photo: Sarah Goodyear