Thinking Before You Market Can Have Beautiful Results

Natalia from Polis has already nerded out on the potential for apps to collect use-pattern data to aid urban planners as illustrated by the recent Nike+ 1000 Runs mapping project. Personally, though, I’m more excited about this as a social ad campaign than as an urban planning tool. It’s a pretty ingenious way of encouraging participation: it taps into Nike’s passionate base and invites their participation, using the individual pieces collected to create something new and pretty cool (and quite lovely) which, in turn, encourages more people to use the product in question. Thoughtful marketing is always fun to see, especially when it’s social (which begs the question: is it even possible to be thoughtful without being social in 2011?)

Oh, and let’s not forget the mega-bonus that it’s rooted in the pedestrian experience of the urban environment, which is always nice to see from suburb- and auto-centric Madison Ave. Round of applause.

This Just In: Far Rockaway Ironically Proves Itself to be Dull and Humorless

Image from the NY Daily News

I try to keep Where fairly upbeat, but this one's got me too annoyed not to write about: apparently Far Rockaway's city councilman, James Sanders, threw such a spectacular snit fit about a McDonald's subway ad that he got the corp. to pull the campaign, which could not have been cheap. About the ad, Sanders whinnied (with stereotype-reinforcingly tone-deaf politician 'humor') that "clowning around at the expense of a community is not funny," and went so far as to demand an apology (which, sadly, he also got).

Here's the kicker: the ad does not actually poke fun at Far Rockaway at all. It features an image of a McDo's iced coffee being held up, cheers-style, by a disembodied hand, and reads "To not falling asleep and ending up in Far Rockaway. (Unless of course you live there)." Even in issuing their apology, the company rep explained what anyone with two brain cells to rub together could plainly see: "Our intention was to add humor to the situation of falling asleep on the subway, missing a local home stop and waking up at the end of the line." Because Far Rockaway? Is waaaay at the end of the line, in case you're not familiar. The punchline here is the hour-long ride back home, not the condition of the neighborhood that the last stop happens to be in.

In fact, the only disrespect I see here toward Far Rockaway is from this Councilman Sanders yahoo, whose own insecurity about his district is pretty blatant. If the person representing my district thought that their job was to run around looking so hard for opportunities to defend the 'nabe from people calling it boring that they'd go so far as to pull slights out of thin air, you can bet your ass I'd be on the phone letting them know that I'd much prefer they be looking for money to fund the subway rather than worrying about the ads inside the trains--much less getting them yanked! "What's your position on the recent fare hike, Councilman? What about reduced service? Oh, no, sorry -- you go ahead and finish your rant about that ad for coffee, first." Give me a freaking break.

The sad thing is, this guy's grandstanding cost all of the city's subway riders a clever ad that dealt with a shared urban experience (the fear of falling asleep and waking up at the end of the line). Even in a city like New York, one often encounters ads that reference the (imagined) national shared experience: back yards, apple pie, and cul-de-sacs. While I'm no great fan of McDonald's, I do appreciate it when major corporations tailor their ads to acknowledge the fact that, yes, we are in fact in a city. If we have to be bombarded with advertisements, at the very least they should reference a shared experience that we actually share.

But fear not, New York: Councilman Sanders will make sure that that doesn't happen.

WEEKEND READING: May 21-27, 2011

Photo credit: saracino

Heading into a much-needed long weekend. Memorial Day means extra reading time!

ITEM ONE: Anyone who's familiar with the unique joy of finding an easter egg in a video game will love this week's leader--check out Repudo, a new app that turns the city into one giant easter egg hunt.

ITEM TWO: Humans are just so darned clever.

ITEM THREE: The Space Liberation Manifesto is a call to arms for anyone who wants to see digital public space protected from the kind of every-flat-surface-gets-a-sign mentality that has turned public space in the physical city into one long commercial break. (via @bruces)

ITEM FOUR: Nicolai reviews Rem's Cronocaos show, which is on the Bowery until next Sunday. Choice quote: "In the realm of preservation, as in so much else, we seem to have become a world terrified of too much direct contact with reality."

ITEM FIVE: Michael Maltzan actually makes Los Angeles sound palatable in an essay excerpted from his new book No More Play over at Design Observer. (The Iwan Baan pics don't hurt.)

ITEM SIX: Caleb Smith, aka the man who walked every street in Manhattan, shares one of the most meaningful (and under the radar) historical sites for him on the island he knows so well.

Weekend Reading is very multi-media this week, I'm just realizing. So enjoy the reading...and watching, and listening! Back next week with more urban-y goodness.

Why Las Vegas is (Probably) Not the Next Detroit

Photo credit: chepenicoli

A recent post at MarketWatch suggests that Las Vegas could be on its way to becoming the next Detroit, a metropolitan mire populated mostly by those who can't afford to leave. Indeed, the two cities share some striking parallels: both are industry towns, Detroit for auto manufacturing, and Vegas for gaming tourism; both cities experienced intense booms, Detroit at the start of the 20th century, and Vegas at the end of it; and both have been hit hard as their boom economies experienced extraordinary challenges, with Detroit facing the decline of domestic manufacturing and Vegas facing the decline of the domestic pocketbook.

But Las Vegas has a key advantage that Detroit does not share: it is dependent on an industry that is rooted in place. You can drive a car (or a factory) right out of Detroit, but Vegas succeeds because of its concentration of spectacle and excess. Vegas has long competed successfully with casinos in other cities. Atlantic City and Reno are one thing, but in the past couple of decades casinos have become popular plug-the-hole-in-the-budget schemes for cities around the US. (Even Detroit has put a lot of its downtown-revival eggs into the casino basket).

This competition has driven Vegas to become a center of innovation for the tourism and hospitality industries: it succeeds not because it is a center of glittering decadence, but because it is the center--the hub that other glitz-burgs model themselves after. The product here is a place-based experience, and that's a lot harder to outsource.

But MarketWatch also notes that Sin City has been well-trumped as the world's largest gaming center by Macau. While this fact is nothing to sneeze at, gambling tourism is not a zero-sum game considering the limits imposed by distance--that old, inconvenient truth that keeps Thomas Friedman up at night. Macau's new-found financial supremacy can be attributed more to the rise of Asian economies than a loss of interest in the Strip. Vegas remains the premier gambling center in North America, and it hardly seems likely that the good people of Omaha and Altoona will start hopping flights to the South China coast en masse any time soon.

A one-horse town will always be economically vulnerable, and the city should continue its efforts to diversify. Las Vegas' reliance on such an unstable industry played an undeniable role in magnifying the impact of the foreclosure crisis there (when your income shrinks, vacations are often the first thing to get cut from the budget). Still, don't bet against a comeback. "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" turns out to be a surprisingly apt summation of how the city's economy functions. It may be tacky and garish, but that's part of the fun; Las Vegas is a city that cannot be separated from its Brand. The place is the product.

StimulusWatch and the Real American Housing Crisis

A couple of weeks ago, Drew posted about StimulusWatch, a site that lists all of the local projects in the United States that have been publicly announced as candidates for federal stimulus funds and lets the public vote on each project's merit. As luck would have it, my job involves researching construction projects, and I've been spending almost a month now combing through SW for several hours a day, looking for potential building projects. From what I've observed, it seems doubtful that the site will have any major impact on how stimulus dollars are spent ("Pork" is probably the most-used word in the very angry, uninformed comment sections no matter what state or city you're viewing). But SW does provide an opportunity for people working on the local level to gauge how their neighbors feel about a wide variety of public projects and services.

In the Energy category, for instance, one can see how effective the green movement has been on public opinion. Whereas a few short years ago Energy projects would undoubtably have been fewer in number and much lower in popularity, the Energy category seems to be one of the most popular, regardless of state or city, with the +/- ratio around half and half -- about the same as the ratio for Streets & Roads! Folks in small towns seem just as likely now to favor energy retrofits to their town hall and the addition of solar panels to school and library rooftops as urban and suburban Americans. People are still skeptical of hybrid vehicles, though, with many requests for money for hybrid or alternative energy-fueled municipal fleets meeting staunch resistance. But overall, the mainstreaming of energy efficiency efforts seems to have been a wide success.

It is seeing this shift that makes me hopeful that we can reverse what is undoubtedly the ugliest trend that I've noticed from coast to coast: the outright rejection of Housing projects. Items with "senior" or "demolition" in the title notwithstanding, Housing projects receive negative vote ratios so consistently that it's as if there was some sort of unspoken rule barring people from voting anything but "No." Even more disturbing than the negative vote ratios are the comments left by mostly anonymous posters at the bottom of each page. Affordable and public housing is called some terrible things, and there is more than anyone's fair share of racism, classism, and willful ignorance. Public housing in America, it is plain to see here, has still not recovered from the havoc wreaked by the slum-clearance-brought tower projects of the 1950s and 60s. Much like with Wall Street, American public housing is experiencing a crisis of confidence.

It would seem that, as much as we need the money to build units for the thousands of people who have lost or are about to lose their homes, it might not be a terrible idea to spend some of HUD's budget on increasing public awareness of the different kinds of housing available nowadays. Stigma attached to terms like "public housing" and "affordable housing" undoubtedly hampers efforts to create sustainable mixed-use communities, a contemporary goal of most major urban housing authorities, by keeping middle- and upper-income residents whose presence facilitates that integration at bay. The focus for housing advocates and agencies is no longer on concentrating poverty, but on economic integration -- and if it's not, it damn well should be. Without changing the conversation, attempts to tackle America's shortage of affordable housing will likely be uneven at best.

For anyone interested in transportation issues (Transit, Airports, Streets & Roads, Amtrak), Community Development, Energy, Housing, Public Safety, Schools, or Water infrastructure, StimulusWatch provides an opportunity to better understand the challenges facing those fields. Whether you're for or against the federal stimulus package, that opportunity shouldn't be missed.


(Photo from Flickr users TheeErin and andyandrew. The original full-sized versions can be viewed by clicking the photos.)

The Ads Are In the Air

In case you were wondering, the answer is no; nothing is sacred anymore. At least not to advertisers. A Dutch company called Geotronics recently launched a re-branding campaign by staging a full-blown musical number in the busy concourse of a train station in Utrecht. While there are plenty of ways to read this (the least entertaining of which is not that we'll finally have an answer for people who say musicals are unrealistic because "no one bursts into song and dance routines in real life"), it seems to set a troubling precedent. Long since unsatisfied by innumerable billboards and neon signs, advertisers have been aggressively acquiring pieces of the cityscape (ceilings, stairs, escalators, trees, sidewalks, benches, busses, etc.) over the past few decades. With this latest move, it seems, even the physical space -- the very air around us -- is fair game for splashy advertisements.



Observe above: an image of Charing Cross Station in London. Below, the same image with green filters highlighting existing advertisements:



Here, as in most contemporary public and quasi-public spaces, people are bombarded with ads for food, real estate, toiletries, and events. The advertising has become so ubiquitous, that it seems abnormal to pass through an urban space without ads on every flat surface (think back to the media bonanza in late 2006 when São Paulo banned all outdoor ads). And now, we can't even count on the people we're sitting next to, or the janitor sweeping up litter a few yards away, not to be a part of some grandiose sales pitch just waiting to erupt. The advertisement space in public spaces starts to look a bit more like this:



There's a fundamental problem with being told by your environment that you are merely a consumer. Yes, we are consumers living in a capitalist society, and I don't intend to argue the merit or value of that. But there is something to be said for maintaining the dignity of public space, and keeping some places free of advertisements. If we merely see each other as fellow consumers we are, in an odd way, pitted against each other. I have to buy what you can't buy if I want to feel successful. Ads do nothing to reinforce the fundamental building blocks of any harmonious human settlement: community, interdependence, and civic engagement. Those are the values that public spaces should strive to promote.

But what's the big deal with the Geotronics musical performance ad, you may be asking? If we are already bombarded by ads everywhere we go, what's the difference adding the occasional flash-mob-esque song and dance routine hawking toothpaste or the newest Barbie doll? It might even be fun -- certainly moreso than any billboard. But advertising has a way of growing, cancer-like, taking over new nooks and crannies without us noticing. In some cities, storefronts are now more profitable with windows boarded up to shoulder more posters and billboards.

Jump ahead a decade or two, to when these performance ads have become more commonplace. What happens when civic officials see more value in a park as a place for elaborate performance ads? Just imagine your city's parks, transit stations, and civic plazas as dozens or even hundreds of little Disneylands. And what would a child who grows up riding the Citibank Train to Coca Cola Park instead of just 'the local playground' think of the city once they were grown? The only value a place has once it's been bought is what the company that bought it was willing to pay for it.

(Original photo from Flickr user annabelb. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

The Next Street Art

Say there was a place that had some special meaning to you. It could be the alcove where you had your first kiss, the alley where you were mugged, the square where you participated in an important rally, or the location of an historic uprising. Good or bad, we all infuse places with our memories. This is what makes physical places so powerful, and why peoples' opinions and experiences of the same place can be vastly different. Places are what people make of them. Now, technology could be making it easier for tech-savvy street artists to etch their own experiences and opinions onto physical places, communicating the artists' own sense of a place to others who pass through it.

Barcodes are most commonly used in retail environments, but their size and informational storage capacities make them ripe for adaptation for more inventive uses. In Japan, barcodes are now being applied to gravestones to store and transmit information, when scanned, about the deceased. The idea here is that family members will, through videos, photos, and stories, be able to reconnect with the deceased in a less mournful, more celebratory way. Imagine "a sort of gravestone based, family fueled, wiki of the dead."

This technology could easily be used in public spaces to represent a political viewpoint or a historical event. Imagine walking down a street for the first time and noticing a bright green barcode sticker affixed to the facade of a building. Using a scanner-enabled mobile device, you could access a website loaded with the history of the building site, or a series of short stories about the surrounding blocks, or photos of a lifechanging event that a stranger experienced in the very spot where you are standing. Reading or viewing material like this would give the place a new gravitas, and would change your perception of what might otherwise be a mundane stretch of asphalt and brick.

RFID tags are another method of remote-storing information that, thanks to increased range, provide the opportunity for a bit more mischief. With the technological know-how, a clever street artist could program a chip to send a text message or photo to any wi-fi enabled mobile device passing by. Imagine again: you're walking down a street and you pass a hidden RFID tag; your phone rings. You answer. An audio recording plays, recounting a woman's personal account of a riot that took place across the street a decade earlier. Later, walking through a park, your text alert sounds. You open the message to find a set of coordinates and the time of an upcoming event, perhaps a flash mob or a constructive riot. Or, perhaps, a photo of the view from the very place that you are standing, hyperlinked to a database of stories and photos of places around the city (along the lines of Invincible Cities, linked below).

While they would only be accessible to those with the proper devices to read the information that they stored, RFID tags and barcodes have distinct advantages over more traditional forms of street art like posters, graffiti tags, and murals. For one thing, they are smaller, and less intrusive. While this could be seen as a weakness (especially for barcodes, which require direct interaction), it is also a strength in that RFID tags and barcodes are less likely to prompt their own removal than more readily noticeable artistic interventions. These tiny storage units can also provide more vivid, personalized accounts of events or viewpoints, and have the potential to be more impactful on their viewers.

RFID and barcode street art has the potential to turn the urban environment into a virtual minefield of information. While the potential for abuse by malicious hackers or marketing drones is there, the idea of being able to literally "tag" a place with multimedia information is an exciting one. Perhaps it's already being done. Anyone know of some examples?

(Photo from Flickr user cloverst. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)


Links:
Barcodes on tombs to connect with the dead (The Inquirer)

Invincible Cities (Thanks, Pete!)

WEEKEND READING: March 29-April 4, 2008

First things first: MONU has put out a Call for Submissions for their upcoming issue on "Exotic Urbanism." Sounds freaking brillaint. Now, on to this week's cream o' the crop.

ITEM ONE: New-ish blog Boredom Is Always Counter-Revolutionary with a cutting rant about advertisements, architecture, and envisioning the city of the future.

ITEM TWO: Lee Bey has his own cutting rant this week, this one zeroing in on race, crime, and public housing in Chicago. Spot-on.

ITEM THREE: Switching gears a bit, MNP's post on suburb-eating robots will blow your mind and tickle your funny bone. (Photo credit)

ITEM FOUR: Interchange blogger Scott Page on DIY Urbanism and the upcoming Wicker Park Bucktown workshops in Chicago.

ITEM FIVE: CS Monitor examines Hugo Chavez's plan to build a Venezuelan Brasilia of sorts. Welcome to Caribia, the 21st Century Socialist City.

ITEM SIX: Some eye candy from The Map Room -- a collection of late 19th and early 20th century maps of Latin American cities.

ITEM SEVEN: More humor to cap things off this week. The Onion features an hilarious exposé on the aristocrization of gentrified neighborhoods in American cities (via Super Colossal).

Adios, compadres. See you next week!

WEEKEND READING: March 22-28, 2008

Sorry for the slow week. Regular posting should resume after this weekend. In the meantime, there's always plenty of weekend reading to go around!

ITEM ONE: First off, a bit of self-promotion. I have a new post up at Next American City projecting some possible outcomes of the rise of online virtual worlds and increased advertising in Western culture. The French Quarter as an export? Perhaps...

ITEM TWO: WorldChanging with a stirring piece on the powerful political act of optimisim.

ITEM THREE: Is your city a "Paris" or a "London"? Read this Economist piece comparing the two euro-glam-capitals and ponder that question for a bit. (Via Pittsblog)

ITEM FOUR: PlannersWeb takes an in-depth look at the role of urban planners in a Chavez-led Venezuela.

ITEM FIVE: Core77 reports on the book containing the radical designs generated by participants in eVolo's '06, '07, and '08 Skyscraper Competition. Flashy stuff. (Photo credit)

ITEM SIX: Speaking of radical architecture, Richard Florida posted news of a massive floating city-cum-cruise ship. This definitely falls under "You gotta see it to believe it."

ITEM SEVEN: Over at Interchange, Barbara Faga looks at the somewhat comical tug-of-war in public perception of which is worse: density or sprawl.

Hasta luego; enjoy your weekend.

Urbanffffinds 011

Public and Private Spaces

While they are best known for Park(ing), San Francisco group Rebar recently completed another interesting project called COMMONspace in which they visited POPOS (short for Privately-Owned Public Open Spaces) around San Francisco and staged some bizarre stunts in order to highlight the fact that these places were, despite common perception, open for public use, whatever the public determined that to be (within the law). Their self-described objective was to ask of these public places, "How public?"

From a recent article on the project in The Next American City: "'We partnered up with [performance and activist group Snap Out Of It] and said, 'Let’s just get in there and energize these spaces,' which appeared to us to be underused by the public and constrained by the psychogeography of downtown,' says [Rebar member] Blaine Merker -- in other words, the very fact that these spaces are located in the business district gives the public the idea that access and certain behaviors are prohibited."

Security guards, surveillance cameras, and the business attire of the crowds of office workers in San Francisco's financial district had all created the illusion of exclusivity in these decidedly un-exclusive places. POPOS were the result, after all, of a law that aimed take advantage of new commercial construction by requiring developers to include public areas for the enjoyment of all San Franciscans. But citizens were not enjoying these spaces because the physical environment, while perhaps attractive, was hardly welcoming in the way that a park or plaza might be.

I have to wonder, reading this, what effect corporate advertising has on public spaces. This is largely due to a recent post at Spacing Wire that pointed out the absurdity of Canadian communication megacorp Rogers spraypainting advertisements for Myspace Mobile onto sidewalks in public parks.

"Big businesses like Rogers (and the ad company responsible for implementing the campaign) should act like responsible corporate citizens. Sadly, these companies take advantage of [the City of Toronto's] over-stretched staff. They are fully aware that City will not invest the time or energy to prosecute them. But when teenagers get caught with a spray-paint can in hand, they’re arrested and eventually ordered to take part in community services."

The Spacing team also pointed out that this was the same park where Audi placed advertisements thinly veiled as sculptures earlier this year. Rogers and Audi are certainly not alone when it comes to corporations willing to bend the rules in public places in order to create "authentic" or edgy advertisements for their products. (While I can't comment on their legality, I have seen multiple "graffiti ads" around Chicago for various companies). But what do these infringements say about the role of corporations in the public realm?

Whether they are spraypainted on random surfaces or screwed onto fake art, logos undoubtedly have some effect on the psychogeography of a place that is supposed to be the unfettered domain of the common citizen. In the same way that cameras and guards create a "you are being monitored" feel in POPOS, logos and advertisements that encroach on public places seem to say "you are still on our turf." When private corporations take over public spaces and undermine the legal entities that care for those spaces, they claim the public for the private. These seemingly harmless infringements say some disturbing things between the lines.

I'm not trying to sound paranoid, and I am aware that this is a small problem at present. But it is certainly something worth keeping an eye on. After all, when private entities claim psychological domain over public spaces, we start down a slippery slope.


Links:
Challenging the Commons (The Next American City)

Rogers thinks the sidewalk is my space (Spacing Wire) (Photo credit)

Empty Cities

Speaking of Singapore (as I was earlier today), the August/September 2007 issue of Polar Inertia features a series of photographs of momentarily abandoned commercial spaces taken throughout the island metropolis by Heman Chong. As the photographer explains: "The idea for this series is to document shops in shopping malls in Singapore at moments when they are completely empty. The eerie emptyness presented in the photos is a spectulative essay on the fantasy of walking through shopping malls and not encountering anyone. This photographs are taken without any prior consent from the owners or any kind of setup or planning. Considering the density of the city (4.5 million citizens on a really small island full of shopaholics), its practically an impossible feat at times."

The photos in "The Abandoned Singapore," as the set is titled, really do a wonderful job of capturing a very eerie, almost post-apocalyptic feel. After three or four pics, you start to feel uneasy...somewhere around ten or twelve, a shiver runs down your spine. By the time you reach the supermarket image above, you'll want to look out your window just to make sure that there are still people walking around; that you haven't woken up on a deserted planet.

That feeling reminded me of a post at Interactive Architecture dot Org that I read earlier today about digital architecture and "information pollution" (you would think there'd be a convenient portmanteau there...I've tried, though, and nothing quite rings true). The post made mention of the now near-legendary law passed at the beginning of this year in São Paulo which banned all advertising -- or what the mayor called "visual pollution" (much less interesting term, that) -- from the city's notoriously cluttered streetscape. IAdotO explained how "the city of approximately eleven million people, South America’s largest, awoke to find a ban on public advertising. Every billboard, every neon sign, every bus kiosk ad and even the Goodyear blimp were suddenly illegal."

I am thoroughly bemused with the way this event has been described in the media (where I'm guessing IAdotO picked up the language), as that is at least the fourth or fifth time I've seen the word "awoke" used in referrence to the day the law went into effect. Paulistanos were apparently came home after a night out celebrating the new year and were lulled to sleep by the buzzing of a thousand tubes of neon and argon, their rooms glowing dimly from the ambient light of a million backlit fiberglass logos filtering through the thin curtains...only to awake the next morning to find that the sinage had simply disappeared. Ad Rapture!! Millions of golden arches and blue half-torn movie tickets and silver apples snatched up into the clouds in a blast of white light, never to be seen again (or at least not until they land in a tech dump in Guiyu). É impossível!

My brain is wandering now, because it's late...but isn't that a fantastic image? I really do love it.

We end tonight with a more tangible image from another set from Polar Inertia; the zine has a compillation of photo collections from the LA/SoCal area, including a set from March of 2006 called "Oblivion." Photographer David Maisel depicts Los Angeles in unnerving inverted black and white. It gives the city a sort of desolate, alien appearance...and it's gorgeous. Maybe this is how LA was supposed to be viewed all along...



Links:
Polar Inertia
- The Abandoned Singapore
- Oblivion

MediaArchitecture - Media Urbanism (IAdotO) (Oh, do read this one! I sort of did it a disservice by pulling one tiny, irrelevant detail from a very solid post, so I am counterbalancing that by insisting that you follow this link).

WEEKEND READING: August 18-24, 2007

It seems like things are really hit-or-miss on the online urbanism media circuit. Some weeks are golden, and others about as interesting as watching paint dry. Luckily, this week was definitely the former.

ITEM ONE: Airoots has a great story on a pretty unconventional "artist village" development in Mumbai. (Photo at right)

ITEM TWO: Some great observations from The Economist on the past and present of one of the world's most fascinating cities, Beijing.

ITEM THREE: Want a unique way to tell your neighborhood's story? Life Without Buildings has found a fun example of how to do so...

ITEM FOUR: Want some geopolitics and developing world perspective with your architecture and urbanism? Check out Candyland, a blog from a former resident of Mexico City now living in Barcelona.

ITEM FIVE: Over at Plasticbag, one of the most interesting posts I've read on place branding.

ITEM SIX: Bill Fulton of the CPDR has no patience for Joel Kotkin. (Right on!)

ITEM SEVEN: New -- and pretty jarring -- info on the relationship between homeownership and economic success via CEOs for Cities.

ITEM EIGHT: Spacing Wire's post about psychadelic radio programs, urban soundtracks, and aimless Sunday strolls. (Conversation starter: What's the soundtrack to your city?)

So in a week overflowing with good stuff, this blogger would strongly recommend all of the above. But if you just have time to read one, make it either Item One or Item Five. And have a great weekend!

Resident Experience Master Planning

Scattered across the new master plan of Baltimore are blue dots that represent what are described as "nodal points," areas marked for significant development over the coming years as an influx of DC-area residents heads north to Charm City. One of these dots, located on the city's east side, represents the National Bohemian Brewery, now a massive mixed-use development helping to revitalize its surroundings. Perched atop the tallest brick warehouse is the classic-cute smiling face of Natty Boh, the brewery's mascot.

The disembodied head of Mr. Boh, though, is not an original piece of sinage. The Natty Boh sign was added by the developer who revamped the brewery in a dual effort to raise the development's profile and in deference to the history of the site. The resultant sign has become a landmark for the entire area -- which brings us back to the concept of originality. In architecture and urbanism, originality refers to different things. With architecture, originality is synonymous with innovation. In urbanism, it alligns more closely with historical value. So if we look at Natty Boh from an urbanist perspective, it is clever but not original. This is an important distinction to make, because the Natty Boh sign is an interesting (if simplistic) example of the potential for large-scale urban themeing.

In her June column for Metropolis, Karrie Jacobs decries the impending destruction of Coney Island by what she so brilliantly describes as "the tyrrany of concept." In the course of her lament, Jacobs quotes this from the webite of the firm designing the new Coney Park: "Thinkwell goes beyond traditional land-use planning and focuses on what we call Content Master Planning™ and Guest Experience Master Planning™...These approaches look at not only the physical layout of a project, but also take into consideration and pay particular attention to how that experience unfolds for a guest from the moment they pass through the project threshold until they complete their experience.”

Malls, hotels, theme parks -- high-concept themed design became a standard feature for these types of places ages ago. And while the Coney Island redevelopment would be relatively innocuous (it consists of a small theme park and several condo towers on nearby Stillwell Avenue), the idea that an urban neighborhood can be Guest Experience Master Planned™ creates the potential for a whole new kind of urban planning. In fact, Resident Experience Master Planning (I should ™ that) could revolutionize the way that cities are built. Using nodal points like Mr. Boh, cities could create self-contained neighborhoods that direct how life unfolds for a resident from the moment they move into the area until they...um...complete their experience, whatever that might mean.

Of course, this sounds like a lot of loopy mumbo-jumbo today. As one of the commentors on Jacobs' article points out, "The power to shape experience is what Thinkwell sells to its clients, yet neither philosophers nor cognitive scientists have deduced how an experience unfolds or how it’s 'completed.' Most researchers now doubt if an experience has a beginning and end — which means there are a lot of externalities, including prior experiences, that can thwart a planned experience." But new advances in crowd simulation technology are making Resident Experience Master Planning more and more possible and, with the economic potential of such a development so high, indeed more probable.

Pruned recently came up with some pretty fascinating potential uses for a new high-performance crowd simulator from Paul Torrens of Arizona State University. For instance, such technology could be used to "design a mall which can compel customers to shop to the point of bankruptcy, to walk obliviously for miles and miles and miles, endlessly to the point of physical exhaustion and even death." Or, perhaps, "figure out how one could, through spatial manipulation, inflame a crowd, even a very small one, to set in motion a series of events that culminates into a full scale Revolution or just your average everyday Southeast Asian coup d'état -- regime change through landscape architecture." If urban planning could figure out exactly how to get people to do specific things or behave in specific ways, it would give new and rather intense meaning to the term "master planning".

The Natty Boh sign in Baltimore is an example of the current extent of urban themeing. The best that developers can do right now is to drum up as much nostalgia as possible. The sign atop the old National Bohemian brewery is an eye-catching logo for the development and gives it some skyline presence, but these are essentially side effects. The true purpose of this sign is to, in effect, re-brand the entire neighborhood. American society has always been defined by work ethic, and Mr. Boh reminds the creative class-type workers moving to East Baltimore to work in the city's nearby "biotech districts" of the ever-elusive Simpler Time, when B-more was a blue-collar center of industry. Mr. Boh is to East Baltimore what Disney World's Cinderella Castle is to Euro-ancestral America.

So take the central idea behind this more primitive form of urban themeing -- sell real estate through nostalgia -- and add the supreme control granted by Resident Experience Master Planning, and voila! Revolution! Quasi-historical touches like the Natty Boh sign convince people to buy apartments, even to move great distances. So imagine the potential for landmarks or layouts or sophisticated systems of these things that could eliminate traffic by dispersing commute start-times, or promote concentration and convince potential residents to embrace density. On the flip side, imagine a city where small nodal neighborhoods each operate completely independently of each other to limit contact with others and thereby remove "externalities" from the experience equation. These neighborhoods could be planned to move residents swiftly from one pre-determined location (home) to another (work) to another (store), creating an endless, muss-and-fuss-free cash-flow for The Powers That Be. Think mass surveillance pre-planned and coded into the physical environment; after all, when behavior is planned, one does not need cameras to know where people are.

Mr. Boh better keep his eye on those pesky planners...

(Photo from Flickr user rebelpilot.)



Links:
Mr. Boh's Neighborhood (City Paper)

End of the Line (Metropolis)

Modeling Urban Panic (Pruned)

(Still) Made Here: Eco and Ethics

More and more of the world's consumers are moving to cities in what is now being called -- by everyone including your grandma -- the "Urban Age," concentrating buying power at an unprecedented scale. As this process takes place, one of the great challenges that central cities face is how to market themselves. Die-hard urbanites and suburbanites aside, what can make the difference between city and suburb for many consumers looking to rent or buy a home in hyper-mobile metropolitan regions is the perceived "authenticity" of a neighborhood. This term means different things to different people, but in this case it usually refers to a high level of historic building stock, independent business, quality public space -- factors that create that ephemeral phenomenon we call "a sense of place."

Over at Trendwatching.com, the new buzz phrase for June is "(Still) Made Here." This most recent report (from one of the coolest sites on the web) describes "the comeback of all things local, all things with a sense of place, and how they're surfacing in a world dominated by globalization." The editors of Trendwatching (TW) break this economic phenomemon down into three parts; this week, I'll take a look at how each of these applies to city neighborhoods and the cultivation of authenticity.

The first of (Still) Made Here's subtrends is Eco and Ethics. The report cautions entrepreneurs to "expect consumers' desire to find out about the origins of a product to become a given." While TW's examples deal mainly with small-scale products -- especially food and clothing -- the concept can be used to market places as well. Life-story labels are the most visible manifestation of this movement, as they provide consumers with the backstory of how and where a product was produced, and how it got to the point of sale. In neighborhoods, then, the question becomes: how do we tell the story of a place in a highly visible and easily accessible way?

Many cities have already begun the process of branding their neighborhoods. Streetlight banners (like the one pictured above) have practically become a requirement for revitalization efforts. Some neighborhoods even have slick websites put together by merchants' groups or neighborhood associations. Neighborhoods in cities all over the world have succeeded in building reputations as attractive, livable places; but, when renewal and growth are based purely on economics, neighborhoods are highly succeptible to fads and changes in public opinion. Life-story lableling for places, then, is one way to increase brand longevity. This type of marketing maneuver could be achieved in a number of ways, from websites to community bulletin boards and everywhere in between. The most important part of the process, though, is to organize and present the neighborhood's history in a way that distinguishes the place as authentic and unique.

I have read, in the past, about suburban "town centers" (that even ickier name for lifestyle center malls) that fabricate entire backstories to create a sense of history (or, depending on your perspective, to justify historicist architecture.) Urban neighborhoods have a leg up on these places in that history is often a major factor in determining the authenticity of a place, and many cities are already bursting with it. This leads us to the concept of what TW calls "taking back production." Cities are incredibly vital, living things. They are constantly changing, so the marketing of a specific neighborhood must be a careful balancing act, promoting the history of a place while allowing the community that inhabits it to continue evolving in a way that encourages that urban dynamism. The only people that can properly brand and market a neighborhood, then, are the people who live there.

Neighborhood promotion has the potential to become a major asset-building operation as a way of bringing new people and investment to a place. More importantly, it has the ability to greatly increase community cohesion and cooperation at the same time (which, in an upward cycle, could also become part of the draw of the neighborhood.) Not only would the process of organizing a neighborhood history require neighbors to get together to share stories and skills, it would also get people thinking about the place that they live in different ways. It would put the public realm into very sharp perspective and, hopefully, draw communities together with the common goal of making their neighborhoods healthier, happier, more livable places to...well...live.

So how can all of this be achieved, in a practical sense? Even if a neighborhood's history and community are eloquently and concisely presented on a website, how does this translate to the physical landscape? Markers for local landmarks? Posters on lightpoles? Sidewalk chalking? These all seem like tired ideas, I know. What are some more innovative ways that a neighborhood could get the word out? I know this blog's readership is still small, but speak up! What are your ideas?

(Photo from Flickr user ashleyniblock.)


Links:
(Still) Made Here (Trendwatching.com)

Part II: Story and Status

Part III: Support

Conscious Urbanism: Slowing Down Our Cities

I grew up in Suburbia, and my mother once asked me, "Why on earth would you want to move to the city? It's so busy and noisy and crowded." To which I responded: "I love it when you answer your own questions."

Still, there are times when the urban environment can get a little overwhelming. While I love it dearly, I'll be the first to admit that the nature of a dense environment can be -- and is -- exploited on many levels. Take, for example, advertising. The high concentration of people in high-density city neighborhoods provides advertisers with a sizable market for visual ads. High-traffic transit lines and highways provide the same kind of mass viewership. Think, for a minute, about how many billboards you pass on your walk, ride, or drive to work each morning. Try actually counting them tomorrow.

This visual noise has been attracting a lot of attention lately, it seems. Beijing's mayor, for example, is speaking out against proliferating ads for high-end luxury goods in the growing Chinese capital. Meanwhile, on the literal opposite side of the globe, Sao Paolo made headlines by enacting an ordinance that forced the removal of all of the city's outdoor advertising. The massive billboards that once formed the city's urban landscape -- even served as its landmarks -- have fallen like scales from the city's eyes, to paraphrase one NPR commentator's description. Now, apparently, the city has been exposed to some of its more unsavory elements; the 'boards dispensed with, impoverished favelas have been exposed along high-traffic routes. (And you'll have to forgive me this indulgence, but knowing the very vertical nature of Sao Paolo, I keep picturing stacked slums sandwiched between office towers. It's a bit fantastical, and neither here nor there, but I wanted to share nonetheless.) According to one reporter from the city, it's like walking through an entirely new city.

The fight against excessive urban ad-age is taking place Stateside as well. Los Angeles' famously commercialized cityscape is littered with illegal ads that were recently legalized due to some shady political maneuverings. Meanwhile many of New York's rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods are seeing their historic charm "draped like a giant burrito in enormous vinyl signs" in the words of Kevin Fry, the president of Scenic America.

This brings us to the issue of visual noise, a highly potent but often overlooked piece of the overstimulation experienced in cities. Many of us take the sinage around us for granted; in a hypercommercial society, it's hard not to. But the effect of all of this sinage is a decreased capacity for independent thought. We are constantly bombarded by images of things that we should want, near-subliminal messages (thanks to the aforementioned taking-for-granted) that hold us in a state of distraction. The mayor of Beijing's argument illustrates the deeper problem associated with this phenomenon: increased advertising, especially for high-end goods and services, increases tensions between social classes, the haves and the have-nots.

Vinicius Galvao, the aforementioned Paulistano reporter, describes the current situation in his city thusly: "It's amazing, because people on the streets are strongly supporting that. The owner of the buildings, even if they have to renovate a building, they're strongly supporting that. It's a massive campaign to improve the city. The advertisers, they complain, but they’re agreeing with the ban." And while it's impossible to say for sure without being there, his description makes it sound like the urban pulse of the city has been calmed somewhat. Perhaps, even, slowed.

Part of the fear of density in people comes from a fear of intensity. Cities are busy, noisy, crowded places. And while some people will always thrive on that, modern cities are large enough to provide a wide variety of different environments. Density, however, is an extremely important part of creating sustainable, high-quality urban environments. Thus, it is inspiring to see support growing for "humane density." Neither Too Slow Nor Too Smart, a paper by Richard Bender and John Parman, calls for a sensible, regional approach to population density. Another quote for you: "[We need to] fall in love again with a region that, for many of us, captured our hearts when we first set eyes on it, tasted its delicious food, savored its wine, walked its captivating streets. We know what it is and what it can be. Something this beautiful demands our indulgence, our generosity, and our commitment. We know how to treat it well, and yet we have so often failed to do so. Time to change."

While these words were written about the SF Bay Area, they can easily be applied (perhaps with a few alterations) to most major cities in the world. People choose to move to cities for many reasons, but they generally have the same reason for staying (given the option to leave): they fall in love with the place. And while there will always be a high concentration of activity in urban centers, cities extend far beyond their cores. Residential neighborhoods could benefit greatly from a general calming; be it through the removal of visual clutter, or just more careful planning. There is no reason that density cannot be calm and enjoyable; we just have to slow it down.

(Photo from Flickr user H111.)


Links:
Beijing mayor blasts billboards promoting luxury (Breitbart.com)

Clearing the Air (NPR)

Billboards vs. A 'Greener' America (Washington Post Writers Group)

City of Panic (Occupied London)

Neither Too Slow Nor Too Smart

WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO LIVE ANYWHERE ELSE??????

I was going to take the night off, because I'm in that phase at the new job where I'm taking in so much new information each day that I kind of just want to be a vegetable when I get home...but then I saw a truly awful video promo for a new set of condo towers back in my hometown, Milwaukee. It's gross, y'all. You'll be reeling from the clichés by the end, but it's kind of fascinating to see which elements of a location are used to lend status to some fairly bland architecture...I'm particularly interested in how green and pastoral they try to make these twin hulks seem. I was also amused by the way that downtown cultural venues (located more than a mile and a half away) are advertised so fervently when it is within a five minute walk of two of the most vibrant areas in the city (Brady Street and North Ave.)

If it seems like I'm being picky about the distance, you have to take into consideration that a mile and a half actually still means something in Milwaukee, where the metro is really only about thirty miles end to end. Sure, the exurbs stretch further out, but the developed part of the region is very compact. There has always been an economy of space here that had a lot to do with shaping my views on the spatial requirements of individuals and on places in general. Milwaukee was, for quite a while, one of the most densely populated cities in the country...so to see this regionalist attitude that justifies bland design through perceived proximity to downtown is kind of...weird.

Nevermind my ramblings...go and enjoy the video.


Links:
Park Lafayette (The video link is in the center of the page.)

Another Post About Semantics

While we're on the subject, I need to let off some steam. Some vocabulary-related steam. (Seriously? Is that even a real thing?)

There is a word that literally forces my eyes to cross and little puffs of steam to shoot out of my reddened ears. That word, my friends, is "steps." I'm not talking about the synonym of "stairs." I'm talking about the euphemism for "within walking distance." Truly, this has got to be the most singularly heinous term that marketing people have ever come up with. I read it all the time, in every ad for every new building I come across. "Steps from the lakefront." "Steps from the museums." "Steps from shopping."

STEPS FROM SHOPPING.

Oy. That phrase right there, in particular, is just plain skanky. It's just...so...icky. I can't even tell you why. Just say it out loud a few times. Is that not terrible? Ugh.