Michael E. Arth

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Michael E. Arth
Born	April 27, 1953 (1953-04-27) (age 56) Burtonwood, Lancashire, UK
Nationality	United States (born to American parents on a U.S. Air Force Base)
Field	Painting, Drawing, Printmaking, Animation, Film, Photography, Architecture, Landscape Design, Urban Design, Public Policy Analysis, Community Organizing, Candidate for Florida Governor.

Michael E. Arth is an American artist, home/landscape/urban designer, public policy analyst, advocate for the homeless, futurist, and author. On June 4, 2009 he officially announced a run for Florida Governor on his campaign website, which is at http://www.michaelearth.org.^[1]

Contents 1 Art 2 Building and urban design 3 The Garden District 4 Solution to homelessness 5 New Urban Cowboy 6 The Labors of Hercules 7 Futurist and Environmentalist 8 Florida Governor Campaign 9 See also 10 References 11 External links

[edit] Art

Michael E. Arth has worked with a wide range of media; From rock concert posters in the early 1970s, to original prints like etchings, serigraphs, and lithographs, to paintings, and photography. A large format book of his work, Michael E. Arth: Introspective 1972-1982, was published in 1983.^[2] He shifted focus in 1986 to home and urban design. In 2007, in collaboration with filmmaker Blake Wiers, he produced his first feature length documentary.

[edit] Building and urban design

Arth designed, built, and landscaped a small number of private residences in Southern California from 1986 to 2000, most notably "Casa de Lila," a seven-story Spanish style villa integrated into a mountain ridge in the Hollywood Hills.^[3][4][5]

In 1999, Arth founded a more pedestrian and ecology-oriented version of New urbanism called New pedestrianism.^[6] His new approach calls for very compact new towns and neighborhoods where tree-shaded, pedestrian and bike lanes are in front of all residences and businesses, with tree-lined automobile streets at the rear. While the pedestrian lane idea is not entirely original (examples of rear loading garages with front sidewalks that replace streets were built in Venice, California, as early as 1910), his fervent emphasis on this as a panacea makes his work distinctive.

Arth claims that living in what he calls a Pedestrian village, coupled with a compact, mixed-use neighborhood or village center, will ameliorate a wide range of problems related to urban living. Having such a development built near a downtown area or newly-created village center reduces the amount of travel time that would normally be spent in an automobile, thus increasing the physical activity of the homeowner and saving energy. In more densely built new towns or developments, he claims that this new form of housing would greatly reduce the dependency on the automobile and the resulting village-like towns would vastly increase both aesthetics and quality of life. He also promotes the creation of similar pedestrian amenities that can be retrofitted to existing towns. Arth's design and development company, Pedestrian Villages Inc., develops projects that follow the principles of New pedestrianism.^[7]

[edit] The Garden District

In 2000, while working on a book and documentary, The Labors of Hercules: Modern Solutions to 12 Herculean Problems,^[8] Arth found a small slum in DeLand, Florida, where he could try out some of his ideas. Subsequently, he purchased 32 dilapidated homes and businesses, which he restored over a seven-year period. Running out the drug dealers and rebuilding the downtown neighborhood won him the support of the community and a number of awards. He changed the name of "Crack Town" to Downtown DeLand's Historic Garden District. Arth enhanced the existing infrastructure by planting trees and by building pedestrian lanes, gardens, courtyards, and bike facilities in the district.^[9]

In 2004, Arth designed and secured local planning approval of a major mixed-use development in the Garden District that exemplifies the major tenets of New Pedestrianism. "The Palm Garden" was to consist of twenty-eight shops and restaurants and a health facility overlooking a sunken tropical garden complete with swimming pools and waterfalls - all on a car free promenade. Fifty-two residences were proposed above the retail space. Across the street, the "Palm Garden Cottages," was to consist of twelve houses facing a pedestrian lane with a garden and community pool house. The garages are located at the rear on an automobile street with the houses overlooking a tree-lined, car-free pedestrian lane in front, according to NP principles.^[10] These new projects were on hold as of 2007^[update] due to a downturn in the Florida economy. ^[11]

[edit] Solution to homelessness

In 2007 Arth proposed a controversial national solution for homelessness that would involve building nearly carfree Pedestrian Villages in place of what he terms "the current band-aid approach to the problem."^[12] A prototype, Tiger Bay Village, was proposed for near Daytona Beach, FL. He claims that this would be superior for treating the psychological as well as psychiatric needs of both temporarily and permanently homeless adults, and would cost less than the current approach. It would also provide a lower cost alternative to jail, and provide a half-way station for those getting out of prison. It could also provide a community for those in drug treatment and the non-violent mentally ill who are either incarcerated or living on the street. Work opportunities, including construction and maintenance of the villages, as well as the creation of work force agencies would help make the villages financially and socially viable. ^[13][14][15] In 2009 Arth launched an extensive website that explains the village concept in detail.^[16]

[edit] New Urban Cowboy

New Urban Cowboy: Toward a New Pedestrianism, a feature length documentary, was released in April 2008. The film chronicles Arth's rehabilitation of DeLand's Garden District and explains the philosophy behind New Pedestrianism.^[17][18][19]

[edit] The Labors of Hercules

The Labors of Hercules: Modern Solutions to 12 Herculean Problems is a two-volume book being published in 2009 that takes the myth of the Labors of Hercules and compares it to 12 modern problems. Including subchapters, there are about 200 issues covered in the books. The second labor, for example, points out that more than two people are born every time one person dies. This is compared to Hercules' battle with the multi-headed Lernian Hydra because every time one of the monster's heads is cut off, two more heads appear from the stump. The last labor is about the future, which Arth compares to the capture of Cerberus, the triple-headed hound of Hades that could see the past, the present, and the future at the same time.

[edit] Futurist and Environmentalist

Michael Arth's ideas tend to be practical, environmentalist, and future-oriented, which is also reflected in his Florida Governor campaign's slogan, "bringing the future to Florida." Some of his ideas, not listed above, include:

Self-Driving Vehicles: He writes that the use of shared driverless cars, combined with the increased use of virtual reality for work, travel, and pleasure--could reduce the world's 800,000,000 cars to a tiny fraction of that number within a few decades. Arth believes this should be the aim of public policy for various environmental, safety, and economic reasons.^[20]

UNICE: Arth coined the term UNICE (Universal Network of Intelligent Conscious Entities) in the 1990s to describe a conscious intelligence that he theorizes "might be the result of a new form of intelligent life developed from a hive-like interaction of computers, humans, and future forms of the Internet."^[21]

Eco-Policy Design: Arth has developed an "Eco-Policy Design" to eliminate most human-caused emissions by 2029. The plan is based on a range of economic and environmentally sustainable policies.^[22]

[edit] Florida Governor Campaign

Arth is running for Florida Governor. He emphasizes the importance of radical transparency and better representation through voting rights reform. He disdains the private campaign financing system which he says elects fundraisers in the place of good leaders and marginalizes the issues. He wants to do away with the winner-take-all voting scheme and replace it with Instant Runoff Voting and Proportional Representation. He calls the War on Drugs "a war on the poor," and points out that Florida's incarceration is 8 times higher than Canada's. He says that Florida prisons are growing faster than any other state because of deinstitutionalization of the mentally disabled, drug prohibition, and minimum sentencing laws. His campaign site has many issues listed with links to successive levels of explanation.^[23]

On his candidate Facebook^[24] site, and on Twitter,^[25] Arth wrote that a top official in the state Democratic Party had tried to talk him out of running. Arth said that he was told the newspapers and other major media outlets would not write a single word about him because campaigns were about money and not ideas. Arth quoted the official as saying, "If you don't have $3 million you cannot even get started. You will need $1.3 million a week to win it." He wrote that he asked the editors of several newspapers if it was true they would not write a single word about his campaign. The Daytona News-Journal, a major Florida newspaper, answered his question with a front-page news article with four pictures on June 23, 2009. The article was both above and below the fold, plus a second page, and included four photographs.^[26]

Immediately after the article appeared, Arth rose from no listing in the polls to 4% in a Mason-Dixon poll asking Democratic voters who they would vote for in the primary.^[27] A column written the next week by Pamela Hasterok in the same newspaper asked "why couldn't a novice with as many good ideas as Arth become governor?"^[28]The same theme was picked up by the Washington Independent in a story titled, "Michael E. Arth, Dark Horse of the Week," which suggested keeping an eye on Arth.^[29]

[edit] See also

• New pedestrianism
• New urbanism
• Labours of Hercules
• DeLand, FL
• Eschatology
• Florida gubernatorial election, 2010
• New Urban Cowboy: Toward a New Pedestrianism
• List of urban theorists
• Homelessness
• Principles of Intelligent Urbanism
• Birth credit
• driverless car

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Michael E. Arth's website
• Michael E. Arth Florida Governor 2010 website
• Information about UNICE
• Producer of "New Urban Cowboy"
• New Urban Cowboy site
• Online portal to The Labors of Hercules
• About New Pedestrianism
• Villages for the Homeless website