"The Search for Common Ground"
University of Minnesota College of Design Commencement speech.
There is a small group of people I think about every Monday afternoon when I drive from downtown to the University to teach Mayor 101, (the class I offered through the Humphrey School and College of Design).
They aren’t members of my family, or friends, or co-workers or students. In fact I never met them. But their faces and stories surge into my brain every time I take that drive---because my route to the U is over the 35W bridge.
I have never once crossed that bridge without thinking about the day seven years ago when the old bridge collapsed---
---and I never think about that day without thinking about the stories of 13 people who died and the many others whose lives were changed that day.
I came to know their stories so well through the funerals and family gatherings my wife and I went to in those horrible days after the collapse.
A mom who called home as she left work so her family could start the dinner she would never eat.
The dad, father, and amateur baseball player whose well-worn glove was in the backseat when his car plunged into the water.
The proud Greek American woman leaving work to teach folk dance.
An immigrant mom and her child.
Those kids on the school bus who miraculously survived.
The driver of the Tasty Bread Truck, a single man with no children, who the kids said had just waved to them before the collapse. His last act was to swerve his truck to the right. That helped the kids on the bus from going into the water.
disconnect these names and stories from this place.
I like to think that somehow, somewhere, they have come together,
---maybe to find ways to bring peace to the people they left behind.
Living through that tragedy has also done something else to me. It has made me obsess about people in the same place whose lives never intersect.
or standing with strangers in an elevator,
or walking through a crowd in a park or a store—
---I look around at strangers in the same place.
I imagine their lives, intersecting only by proximity—
sometimes standing shoulder to shoulder but destined to never meet.
Standing on a crowded street corner, I look around:
Could those two lonely people on either side of me be a perfect couple.
Could the sad look in that woman’s eye be because she just lost a son, and could the bored young man over there be an incredible comfort to her right now?
Could that doctor and entrepreneur, unknown to each other today, be the team that finally cures cancer.
Then the traffic light changes and we walk off, strangers on the same turf—
How did we get to this point where so many of us pass through life with space in common and no common ground? Is it any wonder
are political discourse is so polarized,
our races and cultures so segregated,
our world so filled with people in conflict because they can’t understand those who are different from them.
This is the world into which you take the gift of an education at the University of Minnesota, the gift of a school of design where you have been challenged to understand---
the complex collision of object, and place,
and their impact on people.
Intentionally or not, those of you graduating today will be walking into a world that needs every bit of what you have just learned.
incomes have never been more stratified,
where communities like ours have never been more diverse,
where rigid ideology has never been so isolating,
the design challenge of our time is to find how so many people
---with so much ground in common
---can define the new common ground.
Our greatest challenge is to find a way for an increasingly polarized society to find a physical common ground.
Where sharing the space means sharing ideas.
Where we go from places we pass through--
---to ones where we belong.
---where we belong together in a way we couldn’t be alone.
Where one plus one equals three.
True common ground is rare, but not impossible to find:
I think of the Jemall-el Fann in Marrakesh, which for centuries has been common ground for Berber tribesmen from the Atlas mountains and pilgrims from the Middle East, Asia and Europe. Even today it is common ground for some of the world’s richest and poorest people, and a whole lot of people in between.
I think of the blocks of Xian, China where the Silk Road ended. Like an ocean-front tide-pool filled and refilled with each new wave, these few magical blocks feel
not like any one place along the Silk Road
but a mesmerizing combination of all of the traders from all those places who have come there before.
In our own city, we can think about a hot day around Lake Calhoun where
one group talking about this morning’s yoga class and
another talk in an exotic foreign language you don’t recognize
both feel at home on Thomas Beach.
This would probably be the aspirational part where I talk about spreading out into every part of the globe to create the new common ground.
Well don’t expect THAT from the long time Mayor and lifelong Minnesotan.
My message is: Take a trip somewhere cool but do your work right here in Minneapolis-St.Paul. We need you!
The opportunity and the need is just too great.
Like the once-gangly teenager who begins to grow into their adult self---in other words people like a lot of you--- Minneapolis is just filling out.
We have built an extraordinary collection of things---
---The Guthire, Walker, Central Library, Weisman, scores of new buildings on the University, light rail lines.
Now connect them with places we share—and that bring out something common in each of us.
Reweave our frayed urban fabric and help us take our rightful place as the Great American City of Our Time.
I will be taking on these challenges in my fall class of Mayor 101 and I ask you, too, to throw yourself---as design professionals and citizens--- full speed into the opportunities to bring us together right here in front of us:
How do we reopen Nicollet Ave and bring together the diversity of Eat Street with the vitality of Uptown and Lyn Lake?
How do we bridge the divide between the incredible diversity of a Saturday morning at the central farmer’s market, and the surging growth of young professionals the North Loop?
How do we realize the potential of The Yard---that green space between the new Vikings stadium and downtown---in a common ground for office workers, Viking’s tailgaters and Somali kids from the West Bank?
Can the new light rail line bring together not only Minneapolis and St. Paul, but include the communities of Frogtown into a new world of opportunity.
Can the new Nicollet Mall not only reinvent the great American main street--
---but also be a place where an African American boy from north Minneapolis knows he belongs here every bit as much as the workers in those gleaming office towers.
The opportunities are almost endless, and having had the great privilege to teach many of you, I know you are up to the challenge.
As I finish, look around this room.
some of your closest friends,
you will see people you wanted to know more about and
people you never want to see again.
You can and will go many different ways.
But at this special moment in time—
---when your skills have never been sharper,
---your intellect never more curious,
imagine if this group of graduates committed itself to a common purpose---
---To a commitment to the greatest contribution a designer can make to a democracy: Common ground.
Imagine a great city where the greatest thing that can be said is the simplest:
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