Chicago El Stories

So here's an interesting art project: Chicago El Stories is an installation at the Armitage Brown Line stop in Lincoln Park that pairs photos of seemingly unimportant sites around the city with audio files of peoples' memories and stories about the places. It's an interesting way of showing how the urban environment is littered with personal experiences, and how the city can be so many different things to so many people.

Three Short Urban Navigation Blogedankens

No prizes this time, but I do encourage you to leave comments if these exercises lead to any interesting answers...or more interesting questions. Click the links to see the inspiration for each thought experiment.


Blogedanken #1: Imagine that your city were like Venice; where would the Grand Canal be located? What streets would remain streets, and what ones would be sunken to form the city's canal network? Create a corresponding map. Does this map tell you anything about transportation and infrastructure networks in your city? How could such a map be used to plan transit lines, or a park system?


Blogedanken #2: If someone asked you to write a guide to your city for visitors that didn't want the tourist experience, where would you send them? Determine 5-10 places and/or experiences that you consider essential for the un-tourist in your city. Now create a walking-tour route that connects these spots in a way that creates a meaningful way -- a way that can direct the visitor's interpretation of your city. Compare your route to a map in a typical tourist guide. How do the two differ? What does this tell you about the way that you have experienced the city, yourself? What has your city taught you?


Blogedanken #3: Cities are very much about paths. Numerous networks of people, information, and physical infrastructure create a massive web often referred to as the urban fabric. Almost every city has one or two once-crucial cords in this web that have faded from prominence, or even disappeared completely. Imagine that you are creating a virtual guide, using GPS and voice recordings, to one of these defunct lines in your city. How have the areas around this forgotten path adapted since its decline? If they have not adapted particularly well, speculate as to why that might be. Based on what need the path and its surrounding infrastructure originally served, what currently vibrant paths through your city could become deserted or forgotten in the future? How might this be averted?

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

(Re)Building Intellectual Infrastructure

Richard Florida, Dr. Creative Class himself, spent a good deal of time in a post today on his blog responding to some of the concerns raised in yesterday's Where post on questioning the logic of the CC. I'll admit that I haven't yet read Rise of the Creative Class (yesterday's post was about the phenomenon, not specificlly the book that started it), so reading his thoughts taught me a lot that I didn't know about his argument. As it turns out, I agree with him on more than I had originally thought. From Dr. Florida's post:

"My bottom line is that every human being is creative. And the creativity cannot be forced into the social categories we have imposed on ourselves...The real task is to build pathways to a creative society in which all can contribute and be rewarded [and] in which all engage their creativity at a much fuller level, thereby contributing to economic growth...The key to the future will be to extend the creative force into the service and manufacturing economies - across all segments of the population. The logic of the creative economy is such that the further development of the economy requires the further development of human creative capabilities. We need to shift from a creative economy and a creative class to much fuller and broader creative communities and a creative society."

This plays directly into the follow-up I had planned to last night's post. If cities hope to strengthen the creativity of their citizens in order to secure their economic futures, the officials holding the purse strings need to realize that coffee shops and bike paths aren't going to cut it -- they're the icing, not the cake. As illustrated in the Slate article referrenced yesterday, the creative class will seek out existing creative societies. Cities looking to invest in their creative infrastructure, then, should focus on building up the skills of those who already live there instead of looking to bring new folks in. To paraphrase City Comforts, brilliance innovates, genius follows.

Cities looking to build a creative populace can do so if they are willing to invest in what we'll call their intellectual infrastructure. Civic leaders' first step here would be to create the strongest school system possible -- a major responsibility that many cities illogically refuse to take seriously. That sadly overpoliticized issue aside, cities must find innovative ways to encourage their citizens to develop their own creative skills. It's time that politicians stop looking at citizens as "constituents" (read: votes) and start seeing them as what they are: the city's greatest assets.

In a recent post at atlas(t)'s Galleon Trade Edition, blogger Claire Light waxed nostalgic about the proverbial days of yore: "Once upon a time, before art was professionalized (insofar as people are willing to pay artists, that is to say) folks stayed at home a lot and made art themselves. Every middle class home had a piano, every working class one a fiddle, or a jew's harp. Young ladies drew each other for sport. Young men drooped from the forks of tree branches shouting, 'Beauty!' Jigs were danced, and danced well, on homemade wooden heels, family theatricals taught children the fine art of crying at will, [and] a blank wall was excuse enough for interpretive dance..."

As Dr. Florida (and several readers who commented on yesterday's post) pointed out, creativity is about a lot more than what we traditionally think of as the arts. Creativity and innovation, especially in terms of economics, must be valued in all fields and industries. What the atlas(t) post illustrates particularly well is the way that art used to be intregrated into society; these kinds of activities were much more accessible to the general public. Art-for-fun had no social stigma; it was just something that everyone did. In this way, artistic endeavors served as both social activities and intellectual stimulation. When you gathered around a piano and sang songs with your friends, you got some beneficial social juju and you gave your brain a workout. While you may not have been able to use your piano-playing skills or your ability to sing a high G at work the next day, your musical exploits sent you to the office or the factory with a fresh and slightly-stretched mind.

So what policies or public projects could a city undertake to try to rebuild this kind of intellectual infrastructure that makes creativity a common civic value? One idea comes from a recent airoots post (them again!) about a kind of dwelling in the Dharavi area -- best known as Asia's largest slum -- in Mumbai known as the "tool-house." When is a house a tool-house? "When every wall, nook and corner becomes an extension of the tools of the trade of its inhabitant. When the furnace and the cooking hearth exchange roles and when sleeping competes with warehouse space. A cluster of tool-houses makes for a thriving workshop-neighbourhood and its public spaces emerge as a dynamic by-product of such an auto-organized habitat."

To attempt the transformation of a contemporary Western (or Westernized) city into a tool-house city would be both disingenuous and impossible. What we can learn from these places is a social principle, not a building practice. Tool-house cities are innovative by necessity, but they illustrate "the relationship between production, livelihood and spaces." This relationship is vital to creative cities, where production -- not consumption -- is the primary economic mode of the citizen (think "prosumer").

Cities, then, should invest in projects and policies that reinforce the production-livelihood-space relationship and encourage citizens to apply the skills that they learn on the job to the world around them in new ways. Citizens should also be encouraged by civic leaders to build off-the-job skills as well, as these can also be applied to urban problems and will likely be more potent and flexible when combined with work-related knowledge.

But what, physically, might this kind of thing look like? Perhaps cities could organize and/or facilitate neighborhood skill-shares or tool-sharing programs, sponsor a job-shadow program for adults, or subsidize classes that could teach arts and trade-related job skills (how about a graffiti club that teaches teens masonry skills so that they can learn to build walls to paint on -- and how to clean them off) There are ten times as many solutions as there are problems. Any ideas?

(Photo from Flickr users pbo31 and Soumik.)


Links:
Creative Class Debates (Creative Class Group)

Manalo Juan (atlas(t) Galleon Trade Edition)

Urban Fictions: The Toolhouse (airoots)

(Still) Made Here: Story and Status

While yesterday's post examined the (Still) Made Here trend from the Eco and Ethics angle, today's looks at another subtrend that Trendwatcher.com's editors call Story and Status. In their words: "An obvious example of the link between locality and story/status is the perception of location-specific quality."


Location-specific quality is hardly a new concept in urbanism. However, it is most commonly used to attract tourists. Think about the French Quarter with its penchant for decadence, or Temple Bar's hybrid cultural/drinking scene, or Ginza with its blinking, frenzied energy. The previous references are to New Orleans, Dublin, and Tokyo, respectively, though the fact that you most likely didn't need clarification there speaks to the success of these places in positioning themselves as authentic and unique. But places like these can sell their story with minimal effort; they are veritable monoliths. Perhaps they just got lucky, but that's neither here nor there. What other neighborhoods must figure out is, "how can what is already here or has been here in the past help this place to become better in the future?"

In TW's report, the first part of Story and Status is titled "Inspiring global production trends: quality made here." The case studies include high (percieved) quality goods made by companies such as Ermenegildo Zegna and Rolex. These companies operate smaller factories or workshops, overcoming the challenge of higher production costs for skilled labor and materials by charging much higher prices than the competition for their product because they have earned a reputation for quality. So if we set up an analogy where neighborhoods are the factories and workshops, and a distinct "sense of place" is the product (I admit this is a cynical way to view communities, but bear with me), then the high production costs are the ills associated with aging architecture and infrastructure.

City neighborhoods are already status symbols in most places. If you live in Los Angeles, for example, you can identify yourself as being from The Valley, Hollywood, or Watts and get completely different reactions. By associating ourselves with a certain place, we are associating ourselves with the cultural story that has been created about that place, and that cultural story is the quality that will allow a place to overcome its challenges. To increase investment in a community, neighborhoods can focus on the most exceptional aspects of their local culture (which can be just about anything) in order to craft a favorable cultural story. And in a society where "individuality is the new religion" (credit TW) it seems that marketing a neighborhood's most unconventional aspects would be the best way to go about promoting it.

Here, though, we come to the problem of gentrification and one of its most infamous side-effects: culture drain. When neighborhoods become popular for their distinct local culture, the fear is always that scads of yuppies, hipsters, and other fad-crazed demographic groups will invade, price out current residents, install a Starbucks and a Gap, and erase the culture that made the neighborhood popular in the first place. It's Chinatown as "CHINATOWN™". Also: it's gross. Also also: it has happened far too many times already.

The second part of Story and Status is "Purchasing ingredients for a story." And this, I'm afraid, is where I'm at a loss for compairisons. City neighborhoods cannot go out and purchase a unique history (though they can work toward creating one in the future by fostering progressive and creative communities. Keep Austin Weird would be one famous example of this sort of long-term planning.) Instead, cities must do what is commonly referred to as Asset-based Planning, taking, as suggested above, existing assets and positioning them as engines for neighborhood revitalization.

The "Purchasing ingredients" section does provide this interesting quote: "[We've] seen a rising interest in the truly different, the obscure, the undiscovered and the authentic. These new status symbols thrive on not being well known or easily spotted. They don't tell a story themselves, but require their owners to recount the story." So unconventional neighborhood features, then, can be used to either puff up a place's civic reputation or can be kept vague and slightly mysterious in order to give residents a sort of edge. (This would certainly explain all of that whining New Yorkers do about how they miss the good old days, when getting mugged was part of the daily routine.) Or whole neighborhoods could, themselves, be the quietly tucked-away spots that provide residents with secret satisfaction (though I'm not sure how you'd pull that off.) Either way, this concept seems to provide a way for neighborhoods to sidestep the culture drain process while still improving their local communities. As for how that would all play out, well...

Again, I ask: any ideas?

(Photo from Flickr user Anole.)


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

Keep Austin Weird

Evaluating neighborhoods in terms of assets of all kinds (Rebuilding Place...)

Part I: Eco and Ethics

Part III: Support