Calinfrastructure

I’m not sure if it’s boring or interesting or just weird to post pictures of foreign garbage cans — but I’m always struck at the choices cities make when deciding if their street furniture will behave like street furniture or behave like a billboard. Leaving aside Garbage Can Ontology (surely a grad program at some liberal arts college somewhere), these green things in San Jose just look nice and blend in, helping the city function rather than adding to the clutter. There are also solid cement ones with neat silver tops around too. As far as I’ve been able to gather from CNN, Americans are slightly more averse to paying taxes than we are (so taxes are lower) but they’re slightly more passionate capitalists than we are — yet cans here, as well as in Chicago, are simply cans — supported by those stingy taxes, and not generating any revenue. Maybe Americans are just better at ontology (or math).

San Jose has one of the three existing Japantown’s in the US (the other two are in San Francisco and Los Angeles). They’ve built a few interesting sites in the area, including this neat round bench. It’s located in front of the Japanese Methodist church, which you can hear a [murmur] story about here.

This is a public art memorial for the Japanese interned during WWII — the benches represent the waiting areas where people were kept until being shipped to the camps. It’s neat because they can also be used as functioning benches. They look like wood in this picture, but are solid concrete. On a pole next to it is this replica of the posters that were all over San Jose, telling people they had to leave their homes. We were told that they wanted folks to walk around and look at all the historic markers around Japantown, but since there is an aging population, they wanted places for people to sit and rest. This all is a lovely blend of public art and usefulness. This is the American West, so the streets are wide and the houses are spread apart even in older areas like Japantown, so these bits and pieces do a lot to scale this sprawling city down to a human level.