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.

Integration 2.0

Links:
MoveSmart.org

National Geographic's Maps: Tools for Adventure @ the Museum of Science and Industry

If you typed the word "maps" into Google and then visited the first ten sites on the results page, you might get a good idea of what it feels like to walk through the Museum of Science and Industry's exhibit National Geographic's Maps: Tools for Adventure, which is part of the citywide Festival of Maps. That is to say: a nuanced overview of mapping technology, this is not. While the exhibit is kid-friendly, it tries a bit too hard to go after the attention deficit demographic. Thematically, the "tools for adventure" theme is the loose string that sort of ties things somewhat together, almost. In fact, between this, the City of the Future exhibit earlier this year, and the Christmas Around the World disaster that we'll discuss in a minute, I'm beginning to wonder if, perhaps, this legendary museum is just coasting on its historical reputation these days.

But, before a tangent begins, let's get back to NGM. The exhibit is, in plain terms, an awkward hybrid of a video arcade, a preschool classroom, and a museum installation. There are kiosks set up throughout several rooms, as well as a block table (a kid-friendly trick MS&I tried with City of the Future that still feels misplaced) and a large foam-block pyramid puzzle. Add to that a moon rover used for mapping Mars, a fake stargazing setup, and an airplane cockpit with plenty of buttons and levers, and you have an intellectual seizure that can even make the grown-ups a bit dizzy.

If the organization of the content is less than stellar, it should be noted that there are some interesting items on display. A portion of an old scroll map of the Mississippi River makes an early appearance, as does an early map of Disneyland (which is cooler than it sounds). But the overall effect of the topical schizophrenia is that, unfortunately, individual pieces get lost in the muddle. Even for someone used to clicking through a few hundred articles and websites a day, the wide variety of topics covered here was so overwhelming that it got downright boring halfway through. When the brain is presented with too much information, it shuts down. I shudder to think that this is the way the curators at one of the nation's most prestigious museums think that children should be taught (to be fair, the exhibit was organized by the Children's Museum of Indianapolis and the National Geographic Society, but MS&I agreed to host it).

But the real jaw-dropper of the day was not the FoM exhibit, but something tangentially related. Apparently, it is customary for the MS&I to put together a Christmas Around the World exhibit. I haven't been to the museum to see past iterations, but this year the exhibit involves Christmas trees decorated to represent "customs" from countries around the world. This provides the museum with a fabulous opportunity to combat Americans' infamously low geographic knowledge, which it squanders on an embarrassingly simplified version of global cultures.

To wit: Mexico's tree is decorated with dozens of felt-cutout Mexicans complete with sombreros and ponchos, Ireland's is dripping with kitschy shamrocks and jigging leprechauns, and there is a very purple Native American Christmas tree that's decked out in a gazillion of those hexagonal things you make out of yarn in kindergarten. Japan's and China's trees, meanwhile, are both covered in oragami (but the China tree uses fluorescent paper, so it's totally different), and (tellingly) the United States' tree is wrapped in red, white, and blue crepe paper and cardboard cutouts of the 50 states and the US outlying territories. It's as strange as it sounds. In fact, it's worse in person. The entire exhibit has the icky, sticky feeling that comes from seeing or hearing something that you don't quite want to call racist, but can't help admitting is kind of leaning in a generally gross direction. The museum's website claims that the trees are decorated by Chicago's ethnic groups to represent their cultures. And to that I say: whaaaa? If that's the case with most of these, it makes me kind of sad.

So if you are looking to learn about the world and how it was and is shaped and explored, skip the MS&I and check out the Field Museum instead. Or the Newberry Library. Or, you know...Google Maps.

But, just in case you want to see this stuff for yourself...

IF YOU GO
National Geographic's Maps: Tools for Adventure is on display at the Museum of Science and Industry until January 6, 2008. The museum is open Monday – Saturday from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m, and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.; the admission fee is $11 for adults, $9.50 for seniors, and $7 for children under 11. There is no student discount. Christmas Around the World also runs through January 6. While you're in the Hyde Park area, check out The Virtual Tourist in Renaissance Rome: The Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, the University of Chicago's contribution to the Festival of Maps.


Links:
National Geographic's Maps: Tools for Adventure (MS&I)

Christmas Around the World (MS&I)

The Virtual Tourist in Renaissance Rome: The Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae (U of C)

Festival of Maps

World Urbanism Day

In honor of World Urbanism Day (aka Town Planning Day), I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what might become of some of the world's great cities if global warming's worst case scenario came to pass. Scientists estimate that, were all of the ice caps and snow pack on earth to melt, the sea level would be somewhere between 230-260 feet (70-80 m) higher than it is today.

While no one reading this post is likely to see this kind of damage, it's interesting to imagine what today's cities would look like in such a radically different world -- but the scale is so vast that it's hard to fathom. The following is a simple visualization of the landscapes of twelve major coastal cities around the world in three imagined futures: red overlays represent areas that will be submerged after a 50 foot (15.2 m) sea level rise; orange overlays represent areas submerged after a 150 foot (45.7 m) rise; and yellow overlays represent areas submerged after a full 250 foot (76.2 m) rise. The colors represent the fire-like spread of the ocean inland. Take these pictures for what you will; they are what they are.

While many of the cities represented were included for their global importance today, the visual impact of the colored overlays played a big part in determining what cities made the list. The numbers below each square image describe the approximate length of one side in miles/kilometers.



New York City, United States
(74.5/120)



Montreal, Canada
(54.7/88)



Rio De Janeiro, Brazil
(26/42)



Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire
(28.6/46)



London, Great Britain
(16.8/27)



Stockholm, Sweden
(22.4/36)



Istanbul, Turkey
(22.4/36)



Mumbai, India
(53.4/86)



Sydney, Australia
(22.4/36)



Hong Kong, China
(18.6/30)



Pyongyang, North Korea
(20.5/33)



Tokyo, Japan
(83.9/135)



------------------------


The images above were created using Google Maps and a filter from Hey What's That dot com.


Links:
World Urbanism Day (Wikipedia)

Google Maps

HeyWhatsThat.com (EDIT: I found a direct link to the tool that I used.)

Mapping the Self @ the Museum of Contemporary Art

At first glance Mapping the Self, the MCA's contribution to the Festival of Maps lineup, takes some serious liberties in how it defines what a map is. But then, as the introduction to the exhibit plainly states, this exhibit is not about maps. It's about how artists use maps, both to define themselves and the physical, social, and emotional spaces that they inhabit and/or experience. In fact the very meaning of the word "map" is derived from the Latin word mappa, for the cloth that maps were drawn on. A map is an exploration drawn out on a physical surface. With the etymology in mind, the pieces at the MCA's exhibit fit the theme a bit more logically.

Save for a few larger pieces spread throughout the fourth-floor atrium (including a clever recreation of John Baldassari's Framed Heights), the bulk of the work in the exhibit is organized into two rooms; the first deals with artists' use of mapping to define and examine themselves, and the second with the way that they use maps to explore and reimagine the world around them.

A piece by artist Patrick McGee is a notable highlight in the first section as it explodes the traditional concept of the map at the same time that it asserts itself as one. McGee took measurements of his head to come up with a new system of units of measurement; the diameter of his head (the Fit) became the measurement of length, its volume (the immersion) the measurement of capacity, and weight (the burden) the measurement of mass. McGee's piece is both entertaining and thought-provoking, especially in the context of this exhibit. It represents, after all, the physical nature of the artist's head, but it also breaks the head down into very basic calculations and reevaluates the rest of the physical world in relation to the artist. It is a philosophical mapping of the idea of physicality; a delightful mindf*ck, if you will.

The second room contains pieces that look more like...well, maps, or at least more like what you might expect maps to look like. There are exceptions to this rule, but even a glance around this gallery will reassure anyone thrown off by the first section. Chicago plays a major role here as the physical place being examined and/or reimagined in many of the pieces on display, adding to the sense of familiarity. Works by Stephanie Nadeau and John Cage are highlights, but again, one piece sort of steals this half of the show. That piece, Paula Henderson's Extended Remix, takes Chicago's 77 community areas, color codes them by their majority racial demographic, and then puts them into alphabetical order. The boundaries stay the same, but the names and colors shuffle around, creating a vivid and rather jarring reinterpretation of this notoriously segregated city's racial landscape. It is a very different Chicago seen in this map; paired with Nareau's photographic piece Redlined, it makes a potent statement about the history of racial politics in the Windy City.

Overall, complaints about this exhibit are of the petty variety. Single plaques often hold the descriptions for multiple pieces, which can be confusing. Some of the work on display seemed to lack label or explanation altogether. The thematic nature of the two rooms gives the exhibit structure, though it can be a bit loose at times; as a result, some pieces feel a bit superfluous. But as a whole, the exhibit does what it sets out to do by providing a solid exploration of the way contemporary artists are using maps in very different (and very challenging) ways to explore what it means to be human, and what it means to be part of our society.

While Mapping the Self takes up a relatively small amount of floor space, don't expect to make it through this one on your lunch break. While that would be do-able in theory, in reality you can't really get much from this exhibit unless you plan on taking your time. With most of the art on display, you'll find your efforts well-rewarded.

IF YOU GO
Mapping the Self is on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art until March 2nd, 2008. The museum is open 10:00am-8:00pm on Thursdays, and 10:00am-5:00pm Wednesdays-Sundays; it is closed on Mondays. The entry fee for the MCA is $10 for adults, $6 for students and seniors (both suggested). Tuesdays are free admission.


Links:
Mapping the Self (Museum of Contemporary Art

Guerilla Geography

"We all have a different view of the world. Each of us have our own and diverse ways of using our unique senses to interpret the risks, emotions, possibilities, futures and experiences that places have to offer. How we see where we are is dependent on the experiences that we have had, how we have experimented and explored our environment - and so if the guerilla geographer (psycho-geographer) shapes an experience for a person, that person might forever change their view of themselves, their influences and their world."



Links:
Guerilla Geography Blog (found via Very Spatial)

WEEKEND READING: JUNE 23-29, 2007

It's that time again, folks. The weekend is here at last, and it looks like it might actually be a nice one in Chicago. If you're supposed to get crappy weekend weather, these links might actually be useful!

ITEM ONE: Mayor Daley wants Chicago to host the Olympics in 2016, but there are a few hurdles left to clear. Unfortunately for him, many of them happen to be the Windy City's citizens. (Via No Land Grab.)

ITEM TWO: The first Jane Jacobs awards are given to two urban innovators in New York.

ITEM THREE: The best book this year about San Francisco? SFGate thinks it's "The Suburbanization of New York".

ITEM FOUR: Wired features an article that serves as a great follow-up to yesterday's post on the Dawn of Digital Urbanism. (Via The Map Room.)

ITEM FIVE: This is even better -- an imagined glimpse of geo-blogging DC, Berlin, Dubai, Mumbai, and Torino in 2017. (Photo credit to Wired.)


Adios, compadres. Have a great weekend.

Urban Dreamscapes

I've been contemplating the idea of dreamscapes a lot lately and wondering how they relate to the existing urban environment. There isn't really an established idea, culturally speaking, of what a dreamscape is, so the topic is fairly malleable. The official definition explains the dreamscape as "a dreamlike, often surrealistic scene," though I think that refers more to paintings and other artwork. I'm more interested in how the same ideas used by the fine arts crowd manifest themselves in the designed urban environment.

Urban design and architecture are perhaps the most relevant artforms, in terms of daily life. This is by no means a knock against the fine arts, but it is an inarguable truth that buildings and city plans are works of art that we encounter and interact with almost constantly. The downside of this is that, through their relevance, buildings and neighborhoods become incredibly mundane, far moreso than a painting or drawing ever could. So to find a dreamlike or surrealistic scene in your immedeate surroundings is next to impossible, because even intentional dreamscapes become so common as to be taken for granted.

Take, for example, Lincoln Park in Chicago. The Windy City is notoriously flat. Yet along the lakefront north of downtown, where the landscape should be at its most elevation-challenged, you will find gently rolling hills covered in grass, trees and, of course, statuary. This geological aberration is by design, planned out by landscape architect Ossian Simonds in the 1860s. Simonds followed Prairie Style design maxims that led him to carve out a whimsical dreamscape in a no-nonsense city that valued right angles and evenly-distributed commercial districts. Chicago is still one of the most utilitarian cities you'll find in on Earth (in terms of layout), but over time the curvaceous landscape of Lincoln Park has become an accepted fact of the urban environment that fails to surprise as, assumedly, it once did.

Cities are rife with these forgotten urban dreamscapes; places that used to thrill and excite now serve as pleasant surroundings for pedestrians and joggers. The ironic thing about dreamscapes is that, while those that are created become unremarkable, some of the most unremarkable places by design can be infused with intense meaning and mythical importance in an urban environment teeming with people. I read this week about a project in Singapore that aims to "build a collective memory of the magical spaces in [that city]." They describe a magical space as "a place that holds memories and emotional treasures. It could be ANY place, ANY where." This concept takes the idea of a dreamscape and tweaks it a bit. A magical space is a place that is dreamlike or surreal because of a personal experience, not a careful design. This is the sort of idea that reinforces the "cities are places for people" way of thinking; approaching the city as a place filled with tiny, almost imperceptible magical spaces transforms even the most annonymous of neighborhoods into dreamscapes filled with emotional artifacts and spiritual alcoves.

A post by the L-Arch geeks over at Pruned provides an important piece of my frame of reference, here. After accidentally typing "Utak" into their Google Maps search for Utah, Pruned discovered a landscape in a practically uninhabited area of Russia dotted with long strings of mysterious horseshoe-shaped mounds. Their reaction? "Lest someone tell us that they are simply defensive fortifications or ordinance storage bunkers or outdated meteorological instruments or the beta test site of Bush-Putin's Transcaucasian missile shield or Michael Heizer's Complex Four or ancient auroral observatories -- don't! Better to speculate than to be told the truth, right?"

In the end, this seems to sum up, better than anything I can think of, why exploring urban environments is so exciting. When we walk around new neighborhoods or in new cities, we are promised nothing but the unexpected. Even if a place seems familiar, it is completely new. Even if we find nothing odd or abnormal or even terribly interesting, everything corner we turn has the potential to shock and awe us. And if we are lucky enough to find some strange, magical place -- if we do manage to stumble upon a real, honest-to-goodness dreamscape -- isn't it better to speculate than to be told the truth?

(Photo from Flickr user evanembee.)


Links:
The Magical Spaces Project (Five Foot Way)

Uta(h)(k) (Pruned)

States of Mind

"I'm in a weird place right now."

We've all probably said that, or heard someone else say it, in our lifetimes. It's an odd phrase, when you think about it; to be, physically, in a strange location is one thing. But we know better than to take this phrase literally -- it refers, of course, to a state of mind.

I've always thought it interesting how geography works its way into our daily language. To say one is in a "weird place" in order to convey some kind of life-altering instability says a lot, I think, about how subtly place invades our consciousness. We are much more aware of where we are than we usually acknowledge.

And think, for a minute, about an actual State of Mind. A physical place that represents your consciousness. In reality, physical places are nothing more than fragments of that imagined place -- or, rather, the billions of imagined places in which each one of us lives. Assuming that we have the ultimate freedom to make all of our choices for ourselves, we live in the States of our Minds. We create our own rules, social structures, traditions, languages. Each one of us forms, throughout the course of life, our own culture. We build our personal geography.

If we live in the States of our Minds, what does this mean for the world around us? Our emotions, our values, our thoughts, our dreams -- how do all of these things translate into physical reality? Does a fence protect us or cage us in? Do streets speed us along or divide us from our neighbors? If we choose to live in the city, do we do so to become more connected, or to get lost in the crowd? Do we live in a lively place? A dangerous place? A mysterious place?

A weird place?

Community 2.0 and the Built Environment: An Introduction

Ours is a hyperlinked reality. As technology-enabled connectivity increases, we marvel at how our world seems to be shrinking before our very eyes. For decades now, if not longer, people have spoken of this phenomenon with a mixture of apprehension and bemusement. The apprehension comes from the fact that geography, one of the fundamental building blocks of our reality, is seemingly being relegated to a sort of background status -- an attractive desktop image for life, if you will. The bemusement is likewise rooted in the concrete nature of the physical environment: it never ceases to amaze us each time communicating with people on the other side of the world gets a bit easier because we understand physical distance on a very personal level. Thus the idea that we can communicate instantly with someone in China while sitting in a library in Boise, Idaho, by simply clicking some underlined text is...well...amusing, no matter how tech-savvy we happen to be.

Much as the automobile and its promise of increased physical mobility captured the public's imagination at the turn of the last century and rallied the masses around infrastructural and legislative capacity-building to enhance the automotive experience, the internet has transfixed the global community at the turn of this century by flashing us a future of greatly increased psychological mobility. China, now, is not nearly as far away -- nor as mysterious -- as it once was. Neither is Uraguay, or Romania for that matter. Physical and political boundaries are beginning to fade; the modern world is ours for the taking in a way that is much more immediate than it was twenty years ago.

As a result, it can sometimes seem like humanity is hurtling forward, with new technology (or at least new uses for existing tech) is developed and introduced to the public on an almost daily basis. And just as each technological revolution has had to prove its mettle over time, so has the internet; at first, there was a great deal of fear surrounding the dot com revolution, with people fearing that the world of online communities -- chat rooms, message boards, webcams -- would keep people locked away in their homes, glued to computer screens. Physical communities, we feared, would become a thing of the past. But now, it seems, we have reached the critical point at which people trust the web -- trust it enough to really take control of it.

The "Web 2.0" movement has become a pretty monumental phenomenon in a fairly short period of time. And it comes as no surprise, at least to me, that the interactive nature of collaborative media sites like Flickr, digg, Technorati, Myspace, and the like is not erasing, but re-shaping the way that we build communities. Special interest groups have evolved into social action coalitions. The Blogosphere (a phenomenon of which I am personally quite fond) has passed through its awkward, melodramatic LiveJournal stage and, aided greatly by user-generated media sites like YouTube, become a genuine media powerhouse credited with fundamentally altering political processes around the world. And social networking sites, while still in their own narcissistic adolescence, are slowly starting to show themselves to be, quite possibly, the most promising prospect on the e-horizon through sites like Idealist.org.

So how does this massive shift in the way that we experience life translate to the built environment? "Community 2.0," the communal side of Web 2.0 technology, is growing stronger as you read this, simply by virtue of the fact that you're reading it. Still, it is a young movement, and it is just now starting to show signs of how it will affect the physical landscapes of our cities and towns.

Over the coming week, I'll be using Where to look at what I consider to be the most intriguing and promising aspects of the web-enabled communities of the future. I'll be writing about the way that the internet is changing the way that we use and think about public space; the way that Community 2.0 sites are cutting through crap known as "infotainment" to shed light on some real problems -- and solutions; and the ways in which real estate and the very future of traditional urbanity will be affected by an increasingly mobile public. The series will culminate on Friday with an interview with Phil Tadros, an untraditional Chicago businessman who is applying the people-oriented, localized focus that made his "third place"-style coffee shops into community institutions to the social networking movement in a way that could change how we look at the relationship between electronic communities and our physical neighborhoods.

(Photo from the Internet Mapping Project.)

Series Posts: The New Agora; Communeconomics; Neighborhood Futurism; The Phil Tadros Interview