"What's remarkable about the urban planning of Burning Man is how this social experiment illuminates what is essential about what we need to live together. Giant groups demand intelligent design and culture thrives in smaller tribes. Form must bend to function, but function is elevated by beauty. Most enlightening is what is learned as a result of the continual remaking of this temporary city, allowing Black Rock City's urban planners to experiment with creating the perfect city." SFGate Review
What happens when a band of naked, fire-worshipping anarchists attract a massive following? Well, they become a city -- a city with infrastructure, departments, city services, subdivided blocks and, yes, even that apogee of municipal control: zoning.
Such was the paradoxical theme of a recent talk by Tony Perez, city superintendent of Black Rock City, the incidental metropolis that springs up each year during the last week of summer on the high-desert playa of Nevada. Burning Man, the 20-year-old festival of art, eccentricity and communal spirit, was once known as a place where anything could happen -- and probably would -- and, in many ways, it still is. It is a clothing-optional community where drugs, if not legal, are not exactly uncommon. And, with the exception of the sale of two indispensable commodities -- ice and coffee -- legal-tender commerce is expressly forbidden.
But as Burning Man has become more successful and has attracted increasing numbers of temporary citizens -- from 8,000 in 1995, when the festival first took place on Nevada's Black Rock plateau, to 31,000 last year and as many as 40,000 expected this summer -- the founders have had to evolve their once-disorderly encampment into a plotted urban landscape with neighborhoods, roads and -- gasp! -- even real estate regulation. Now, the nonprofit organization that sponsors the event has 20 full-time employees, a Department of Public Works, a DMV (Department of Mutant Vehicles), a tech department, a media department, an infirmary and an airport.
Is it real life? Not exactly. But the urban planning of Black Rock City offers a rare look at the lifeblood of all urban civilizations. What is it that makes a city work? What is essential, and what is it possible to do without?
Black Rock City may be a utopian venture, but it's not without its practical needs. And, in its evolution, it's had to learn from the nuts and bolts of ordinary cities.
"We had to learn to be a society," said Perez of the process of earning the trust of local law-enforcement agencies and government entities. "We've gone through adolescence, and we had to grow up."
Like that of developments in many cities, the urban planning of Black Rock City came as a response to tragedy. "In 1996, we lost control of the crowds -- we had loss of life due to traffic accidents," explained Perez to a crowd of urban-planning aficionados and Burning Man fans at a recent lunchtime forum at San Francisco Urban Planning and Research, a nonprofit think tank.
Traffic accidents revealed the need for more carefully designed space with more municipal controls -- including a city grid. Roads, it turned out, are not an autocratic convention designed to kill the spirit of the people, but a necessary element for harmonious cohabitation.
To cut down on noise, traffic and dust, the city prohibits people from driving the vehicles they arrived in once they have set up camp. "It's against the spirit of Burning Man to be insulated in your car with the AC on," Perez said. Instead, he added, denizens bring along bizarre bikes, motorized armchairs, golf carts and other mutant vehicles to help them get around. The result is a truly lively and friendly street life. "It's the most bike-friendly city in America," Perez declared.
As the festival has become known as the best weeklong party on Planet Earth, however, Black Rock City has faced the age-old community question: How do you attract the right sort of people?
"We wanted to discourage the yahoos who thought, 'Let's go up there for the girls,'" said Perez. In 1998, the planners erected fencing for the first time. By 1999, a 7 1/2-mile barrier forming a pentagon around the community enclosed about 4 1/2 square miles of open space. Inside this line, the city has grown every year, now spanning about 1 1/2 miles in diameter.
Burning Man is accessible only to ticket holders through a single gate, and vehicles are routinely searched for stowaway freeloaders. (In 1997, tickets cost $100, but now they range from $165 to $250.) Despite its anarchic roots, Black Rock City now shares many of the features of other gated communities -- barriers that can turn people away, plus official greeters, as well as regulations governing neighborly conflicts. Whether it's due to old-fashioned exclusivity or the Burning Man communal spirit, however, the micro-society seems to be working. Instead of trading money for goods, citizens give gifts. And, for a clothing-optional community, there has been a remarkable lack of sexual predation -- according to Perez, there has never been a rape at Burning Man.
How does a tribe of cosmic dreamers sit down and design a city? As one might imagine, the process drew from disparate sources and methods -- ancient and modern, idealistic and pragmatic. The design began simply as a circle around the Burning Man, a giant humanoid sculpture incinerated on the final night of the festival. In 1998, Perez made the first city plan based on a horseshoe, which he called a failure, because it was too difficult to create. The next year, the organizers settled on the shape of a clock, with blocks spanning from 2 o'clock to 10 o'clock. Every 15 degrees is equivalent to half an hour, giving participants a way to instantly determine their whereabouts.
Since then, the city has grown by simply adding layers to the concentric circles. In the first one, at 6 o'clock, Center Camp offers public art projects and an acre of shade under a parachute tent, where a café sells ice and coffee.
Surrounded by the blueprints from various incarnations of Black Rock City, Perez spoke of the origin of the community's physical shape. "It was based on ancient ruins," he said. "Every year, we begin the process of building the city. Standing in a ceremonial circle, we drive a cement stake into the middle of the city." Then, more than 100 volunteers go about making a metropolis from scratch. Perez uses a turn-of-the-century railroad transit (a sort of rotating telescope with crosshairs) to determine the placement of the blocks fanning out from the center. ("Anything electronic fries in the sun out there," he explained.) Lines of volunteers drag 200-foot-long chains to determine the parameters of the blocks, and, finally, Perez creates the "roads" the low-tech way: by leaving tire tracks as he drives his truck along predetermined routes.
According to Perez, the city takes a month to set up and another four weeks to get rid of, and, he said, "that's the hard part." About 60 participants pick the camps clean of all garbage and refuse and ash, though, because Burning Man tends to attract what Perez characterized as a "pretty enlightened" bunch, the citizenry is remarkably good about following one of the city's cardinal rules: Take your trash with you. "It reinstills your hope in human nature," he said of walking through site after site with not so much as a love bead left behind.
What makes people act so respectably? Old-fashioned peer pressure, evidently. "Your neighbor's doing it, so you do it," he said. "It works like that."
This summer, according to the astronomy theme for Burning Man 2004, Black Rock City will have 10 circles with streets named for planets and other celestial bodies. Other additions to the design have been relatively minimal: For years, planners experimented with smaller plazas, but these locales initially failed to attract outsiders and seemed to foster feelings of ownership. "It was, like, 'This is our plaza,'" Perez explained. Since then, he and his crew have created two smaller additional plazas, which open onto the esplanade, for happenings and art displays. They've also an extended two lines of palm trees that cross through the Burning Man circle.
Though the design has remained relatively similar over the years, the city's steady population growth has naturally created complexity. "In the outer edges, it's more suburban," said Perez. "People take up more space -- some people even have lawns and golf courses. In the inner city, it's more dense. People are arguing over inches."
Neighborhoods have naturally sprung up as well, with people banding together around certain cultural interests or identities. "We've got our gay ghetto," said Perez. "We've got our Tenderloin." Recognizing that people naturally create villages within the city, the organizers have even begun something they call gentle zoning.
Harley Dubois, a member of the Burning Man organization's board who runs many of the departments related to the cultural creation of the temporary society (the gate, the greeters, the information services and the camp-placement agency), said that now she sometimes encourages certain groups to camp near one another. She informs families about an area known as Kidsville and situates all camps that look as if they might have sexually explicit themes together and away from the family-friendly zone. In addition, one village known as Hushville, which has determined not to use generators or loud music, has gradually grown into a larger sector of the city, as Dubois has had attempted to find like-minded groups to situate near the Hushvillites.
Nearly one-third of the city -- consisting of the choicest sites within the central concentric circle -- is reserved for theme camps -- public interactive areas that offer events, art, shelter or sustenance. In a gift economy in which even crude barter is discouraged, these areas create something like a commercial district.
"A theme camp is akin to a business or storefront," said Dubois, who sifts through hundreds of applications from people vying for the central blocks of the city. Although she doesn't judge ideas on aesthetics, she said she does require the applicants to "jump through certain hoops" by furnishing her with a bird's-eye design of the camp complete with dimensions, a written clean-up plan and proof that the inhabitants can safely undertake their idea. "Sometimes that three-story dance floor sounds great, but it's not clear how it will hold up under 80-mile winds," she added.
The organizers have also had to deal with a strange fact about human beings' relationship to land: Even when it involves camping in the desert, experiencing temperatures that can reach 120 degrees and winds that may approach 80 miles per hour, the temptations of real estate persist.
"I really discourage people feeling ownership over the real estate," she said. "If people always get the same places, it will create turf wars."
Despite her efforts, certain parts of the city, such as the esplanade that borders on Center Camp, naturally take on a certain allure.
"It's like our oceanfront property," she explained. Because the esplanade forms the city center, Dubois takes pains to place theme camps there that are most likely to benefit the greatest number of people. She requires that these camps be visually stimulating and interactive 24 hours a day, and she keeps the area family friendly, avoiding placing sexually explicit camps in the most central spots.
For all Black Rock City's fame as a place for free expression, it's remarkable how many elements of the community come from far more regulated social bodies. In her role as camp-placement queen, Dubois functions a little like a benign monarch, determining the social design from the top down. And the gate provides many of the controls of a gated community, shielding it from the true anarchy of the huddled masses. Weird outfits, too, are all very well and good, but there's nothing like a good dose of peer pressure when it's time to clean your campsite.
What's remarkable about the urban planning of Burning Man is how this social experiment illuminates what is essential about what we need to live together. Do we need money? Maybe not as much as we think we do. But do we need roads -- oh, yes. In any case, nothing can be left to the whims of freedom. Safety requires control, giant groups demand intelligent design and culture thrives in smaller tribes. Form must bend to function, but function is elevated by beauty. And perhaps most enlightening is what is learned as a result of the continual remaking of this temporary city, allowing Black Rock City's urban planners to experiment with creating the perfect city.
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