Dreaming Big
Re:Mike To Get Ideas for a Better St. Michael’s
P otential rejuvenation of St. Michael’s Drive has danced on the fringes of the Santa Fe planning landscape for years. Now, a network of enthusiasts is hoping a weekend-long festival on St. Mike’s can provide some excitement and a few key pieces to the puzzle.
This weekend’s Re:Mike event is an experiment in looking at the revitalization question from a more grass roots, of-the-people perspective.
It’s different from the more “traditional process where smart people decide what happens and some people support it and others don’t,” Kate Noble, an economic development specialist with city government, said.
“The ideal is to have a really motivated and mobilized community with some consensus as to what can and should happen” on St. Mike’s, Noble said.
For most of its recent history, the 1.25-mile piece of the roadway from Cerrillos Road to St. Francis Drive has had six driving lanes, lots of strip malls and huge swaths of concrete parking lots.
But St. Mike’s boosters have long seen the thoroughfare as a blank canvas of possibility. Among other things, city officials and others have worked on zoning changes, conducted surveys, solicited design ideas and offered visions of an attractive Europeanstyle boulevard.
Interest and involvement has waxed and waned, but “it’s just not going away,” Noble said.
“People continue to be interested in talking about community development in and around St. Michael’s
Drive,” she said. “The voices we keep hearing and the interest and energy in it have kept the project alive.”
Nicholas Mang of The Story of Place Institute, a Santa Fe nonprofit helping organize Re:Mike, said top-down efforts tend to be long range, but bottom-up movements have the potential for immediate action. Both are needed to move the revitalization of St. Mike’s forward.
We wanted “a creative process, so what gets planned and redeveloped there won’t be just coming from outside but from the authentic identity of that place,” Mang said.
The idea is to generate enough people, ideas and excitement to “catalyze a different perception of what’s possible here,” Mang said. If people can actually experience the possibility of a revitalized St. Mike’s, the desire and political will to make something happen will be much stronger, he said.
Re:Mike kicks off at the Saint Michael’s Village West Shopping Center today at 5 p.m. and runs all day Saturday and Sunday afternoon. Offerings include lectures, film screenings, music and other art performances, yoga, a car show, a vinyl record sale and beer plaza.
Among the highlights are a series of demonstrations in the areas of energy, water, ecology, transportation and business development.
A number of “pop-up,” or temporary, businesses and art projects will help showcase the latter. There also will be an energy village, the mapping out of a former arroyo now paved over and a look at how St. Mike’s could be narrowed from six to four lanes.
The push behind Re:Mike is to “show what’s possible,” Mang said. Similar events have taken place in other parts of the country.
“It’s really about weaving together people and ideas connected to this event, and then on the other side, how to help weave those into actual application and implementation,” he said.
Overlay district planned
One goal is to gather information during Re:Mike that will help create a St. Mike’s overlay district — long talked about but never fully realized — with components such as construction incentives, green infrastructure and building heights.
A group of University of New Mexico graduate students will use the community input to help draft recommendations for a form-based code — that’s a buzz-word for regulations intended to encourage certain urban neighborhoods — that would create aesthetic and development regulations. Noble said she and others hope to see Re:Mike produce one or two dozen concrete ideas that city staff and boosters could begin to implement relatively soon, such as a community garden or car charging station, or a new ordinance making it easier for micro-businesses to thrive on the street.
“I would love to see pressure coming from the community for specific actions for the city to do in the overlay district. We want this to happen,” Noble said.
A significant amount of resources, both financial and otherwise, have been poured into making Re:Mike happen, and countless manhours and goods have been donated. Organizers include The Story of Place Institute, design firm Anagr.am, networking group Mix Santa Fe and many others. The city is contributing around $47,000.
“It’s kind of humbling how much the community at large has brought forward to make this event possible and how much creativity and energy we’ve already seen,” Noble said.
“The process is sometimes the point,” she said.
For more information, visit remikeable.com and facebook.com/remikeable and vivasantafe.com.