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.

Regional Distributions

Much has been made of suburban change in light of the subprime mortgage crisis. Articles such as What Will Save the Suburbs? and The Next Slum? offer new ways of looking at suburbs, with important implications for cities. A post at Design Observer by Andrew Blauvelt (co-curator of the Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes exhibition currently on view at the Yale School of Architecture) offers an interesting perspective on these issues.

Blauvelt finds that suburbs are taking on qualities commonly associated with cities, and vice versa. For example, suburbs see increasing diversity, congestion, and poverty as cities experience gentrification, detached housing, and chain stores. Blauvelt considers cities and suburbs mutually dependent, both from physical and psychological perspectives. He explains that "[c]ity dwellers and suburbanites need each other to reinforce their own sense of place and identity despite ample evidence that what we once thought were different places and lifestyles are increasingly intertwined and much less distinct."

While ideas about cities and suburbs take many evolving forms, their spatial relationship is fairly constant. At a basic level, suburbs are defined by their location on the outskirts of cities. They could be thought of as a gradient between areas of more and less human density. Modern transportation spreads this gradient, like spray-painting a dot on the wall from a distance. What if the density equation were inverted to resemble a spray-painted ring? Or if we were dispersed like stars across the sky? What cultural and ecological changes might take place in the absence of dense urban centers?

(Photo credit: East Hampton Historical Society)

Archisatire

"I invite you to invest in the ninth wonder of the world."

Hilarious.

via

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.)

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!)

W(e are )here

The following post contains the introduction that this blogger wrote for the W(e are )here show, which opens today at the Intermedia Arts Gallery in Minneapolis. The show is being curated by the founders of Solutions Twin Cities; if you're going to be around the Cities at all between now and May 9th, 2008, do stop by and take a look. For more information, see the link at the bottom of the post.


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

During the Age of Discovery, great explorers crisscrossed the planet in search of uncharted territory. They left a visual legacy in the maps that recorded their journeys, and with each new discovery, mankind's knowledge of Earth grew. One can only imagine how thrilling it must have been to live in a world that was seemingly growing larger by the day. The very concept of "where" -- humanity's understanding of our relationship to the world around us -- was expanding.

Today, the internet revolution has democratized exploration in ways that Columbus and Magellan could never have imagined: everyone has become an explorer. New cartographers are adding their personal explorations to existing maps and creating new records of their own experiences. If that which is observed is inherently altered, it follows that a person's experience of a place directly changes the place itself; places are what people believe them to be. That means that today's maps are about much more than hills, valleys, rivers, and roads. Maps have become tools for examining the emotional, sociological, and philosophical aspects of the human experience.

The concept of "where" is changing once again, expanding to include increasingly minute and varied facets of our world. The ever-ephemeral sense of place is created by human interaction with the physical world. Maps have always charted changing systems, but in the internet age the more intense focus on the hyperlocal has sped up the rate at which cartographers work. Slower-moving features of the planet -- shifting continents, growing cities, and eroding shorelines -- have already been adequately mapped; places are now being recorded as they exist for short periods of time. New maps record what could be termed the "hypercurrent."

Within this gallery, you will find a sampling of how cartography is being redefined by this change in scale. Whether recording a tiny patch of previously unremarkable forest floor down to the tiniest twig and blade of grass, reorganizing the contents of the Bible to visualize cross-references and social relationships, or taking a fresh look at urban growth by examining the construction date of houses currently on the market, today's cartographers are rethinking how the world around us is recorded and represented to assert the fact that we are here. This new breed of explorer is taking the impersonal maps and graphs of yesterday and making them deeply personal.

Welcome to the New Age of Discovery.

Where is expanding. W(e are )here.



Links:
W(e are )here (Intermedia Arts)

Solutions Twin Cities

Blog Like You Give a Damn

Happy Whereday!

Well la-de-da. Exactly one year ago today, Where's first post went up. The site looked a lot different...no logo, basic Blogger format, very...yellow (not sure what I was thinking, there). And here we are, 365 days later, with the 250th post. Plus, since four regular weeks = one full year in blog-years, that makes today Where's 13th anniversary! Hip hip hoo-ray, and all that jazz.

For a bit of self-indulgent celebration, I've put together a list of the Top Ten posts (and series) over the past year. Each header links to the original post. The date of publication follows a brief sample quote, and the posts are listed in chronological order. Without further ado...

Open Spaces, Non-Places
"People have idealized 'open' space when what they should really be focusing on is 'quality' space...[And when] the distinction between 'open' and 'quality' public space is ignored, it allows not only for the types of ridiculous arguments used by the 'concerned neighbors' mentioned above, but on a more subversive level it devalues public space in general." (4/10/07)

Community 2.0 and the Built Environment
"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...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." (5/13-18/07; weeklong series)

Speeding Succession
"Why not help along the process of ecological succession? As urban areas around the world begin to reimagine and reconfigure themselves as more localized, sustainable places, people stranded by a fuel crash or a series of eco-disasters could get work replacing suburban communities with trees. For every house torn down and mulched, ten trees could be planted." (5/29/07)

A True Alternative
"Of late, we have been plagued in our building and planning practices by an intense mediocrity, a society-wide indeciciveness. What we want, of course, is the best of both worlds: the convenience, community, and culture of the city, and the peace, privacy, and pastoral scenery of the small rural town. What we've wound up with is suburbia: the best of nothing." (6/21/07)

The Dawn of Digital Urbanism
"'Who will watch the watchers?' This, I think, will be the most fundamental challenge of Cyberspace: in a universally connected world, the unwatched watcher has more power than ever, as they will have unprecedented access to the masses." (6/28/07)
(Also: from the response post a few days later, Everyone is Watching You: "To paraphrase that famous line: when everyone is a watcher, who's watching the watchers? Everyone.")

Resident Experience Master Planning
"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...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.'" (7/13/07)

Eat Your City
"Urban farms could become for the 21st Century what large, elaborate central parks were in the late 19th and early 20th. Frederick Law Olmsted famously described Central Park in Manhattan as the lungs of the city, but with new green technologies these farms could become more than lungs -- they could be the heart and brain of the city as well." (7/25/07)

The Possibilities of the Post-Retail City
"It's interesting to imagine a world in which shopping took a back seat to other social spaces as the dominant street presence...To get an idea of what might fill the void [left by retail], it might be interesting to see how social space is structured in places where gift economies (or at least barter systems) often already exist and retail strips are few and far between, at least in the traditional sense: slums." (8/13/07)

World Urbanism Day
"[Presented here] 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." (11/8/07)

Living in SimCity
"In an existing version of SimCity, a player could cover an empty triangular plot with parks and watch the land value of surrounding blocks rise. Imagine a SimCity that allowed users to completely re-design the Polish Triangle so that any player walking through the area could access this visionary public space and interact with it." (2/13/08)


Have a wonderful weekend. Thanks for a great first year!

Living in SimCity

SimCity, one of the most popular electronic games of all time, played an undeniable role in the return to the popular consciousness over the past few decades of urban planning. While the original game succeeded by breaking cities down into their most basic elements (residential, commercial, industrial, institutional, infrastructural, recreational), subsequent versions have become more complex, and more nuanced. And with the most recent version of the game, SimCity Societies (the first version not developed by creator Will Wright and his team at Maxis), came and went with barely a whimper, the franchise is ideally poised for a thorough revamp.

I recently read two posts at Very Spatial that got me thinking about SimCity and its potential for revival. The first of these posts was about mixed reality gaming, and it discussed a Nintendo DS game that allows players to visit a real island north of Tokyo and participate in a treasure hunt, with the handheld gaming system acting as an interface between the real island and the electronic version of the same place. This technology literally breaks down the walls between the player and the game, blending reality and fantasy. The second Very Spatial post focused on using online mapping technology to record personal histories or memories. The rise of mapping as a customizable, highly social tool should not be ignored by anyone interested in developing a city simulation game. Collaboration and customization are powerful selling points when trying to grab the interest of today's young people.

Mix quasi-reality and personalized cartography together and what have you got? Enormous potential. Consider the possibilities: a game could be created that allows people to create an alternate reality version of their neighborhood or their whole city and then upload that alternate reality onto a central server. Using a handheld device, they could then venture out into the city to interact with alternate realities created by other users. Games could cross paths and interact, teams could be built, and stories could intertwine. Social media and a wiki format could allow users to modify games created by other users, and whole alternate mythologies could be built, each one intrinsically tied to the place where it was developed. Gamers could travel to other cities to take part in other games. It's virtual reality without the stupid headgear.

The truly ingenious part of SimCity is that the game is disguised as a simple simulator that allows one to play God by building (and/or destroying) a city. Entire regions become customizable, and whole worlds and cultures imagined. Meanwhile, the game is also teaching players valuable lessons about how and why cities work: houses and factories don't do well next to each other; large buildings create more traffic, but well-planned transit alleviates that pressure; parks and recreational facilities are vital to morale (or "aura" as it was called in SimCity 3000) and public health. These lessons are still important today, but with advanced technology this type of simulator has the ability to teach an entirely new set of lessons.

In truth, the most basic building block of urban civilization -- more basic than residential, commercial, or industrial -- is social interaction. And by looking at cities at this most basic (and, at the same time, complex) level, we see an entirely new set of problems. Gentrification, segregation, resource distribution, community -- all of these issues could be explored through a SimCity game that mixed reality and personal fantasy.

An example: there is a triangular plaza in my neighborhood in Chicago. While it has a fountain and some trees, this scrappy public space has long been a source of frustration for some of my neighbors, who wish that the "Polish Triangle" would be better cared for, and that it could serve as a beautiful public gathering place. In an existing version of SimCity, a player could cover an empty triangular plot with parks and watch the land value of surrounding blocks rise. Imagine a SimCity that allowed users to completely re-design the Polish Triangle so that any player walking through the area could access this visionary public space and interact with it. The lessons learned would not only be more resonant -- they would be more personal, more real, and might actually affect public sentiment and, eventually, political will.

Another recent phenomenon suggests that this kind of gaming technology could be extremely successful if implemented: the Japanese cellphone novel. These novels, written by teens and young adults on their mobiles, have become a major literary movement in Japan, with half of the Top Ten bestseller list from the last year being made up of cellphone novels that were turned into actual print novels. A striking fact about the genre: most cellphone novels eschew details about the setting of the story. “If you limit it to a certain place," an author explained in a recent NY Times article on the subject, "readers won’t be able to feel a sense of familiarity.” Thus, while a core group is creating personalized content -- for free, unless and until their novels are printed -- massive demand is coming from outside of that core. It is a community that anyone can be involved in, and one where you can very easily make the switch between producer and consumer at your leisure.

The same could be done with a hyperlocal, mixed reality version of SimCity. You could import buildings to your neighborhood from around the world. Stick the Eiffel Tower in the middle of Central Park. Walk through Shibuya in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. Ultimately, the most compelling and useful alternate realities would rise to the top, whatever the reason for their popularity. In the future, you might be able to walk up and down your block several times and see it in a completely different way on each lap.

And, if you didn't like any of what you saw, you could change it in an afternoon.

(Photo from the Centre for Education in the Built Environment. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)


Links:
Mixed Reality Gaming In Japan (Very Spatial)

Creating Memories Using Maps (Very Spatial)

Wicker Park's Dirty Doorstep (Chicago Reader)

Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular (NY Times) (via Smart Mobs)

The Future of (Urban) Shopping

"Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare."

That suggestion, originally made by Gorges Perec, is part of a longer quote sourced in a recent post at Pasta & Vinegar by blogger Nicholas Nova. Nova examines Perec's suggestion that we should "question [our] teaspoons," or look critically at things that we consider mundane or take for granted. "Make an inventory of you pockets, of your bag," the quote continues. "Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out."

Nova suggests: "Why is this important, maybe first to highlight how the mundane is intriguing. Beyond the descriptive level, it’s also curious wrt to innovation and design as it allows to ask question and possibly to nurture near future world." A previous Where post speculated on how streetscapes and shopping centers might evolve in a hypothetical, post-retail future. The more pragmatic way to approach this admittedly fantastical scenario would be to question the teaspoons of current retail environments as they exist today and think about how shopping might be a different -- but still essential -- component of urbanism a few decades hence.

A recent post at the David Report describes a design studio and upcoming panel discussion on the Future of Shopping. From that blog, I'll snatch another repurposed quote fragment: "Our culture is experiencing transition at so many different levels that we find ourselves at an unprecedented moment in history where we have begun to realistically re-imagine art, craft and design’s relationship to our culture, and its future...The future of luxury is an open question without obvious answers but it will be the young artists, craftspeople, and designers at Konstfack who will ultimately provide them. What will we be shopping for in the future? Bling Bling? The way things look now, it is more likely to be clean air and pure water."

The suggestion here assumes that the current transitionary period that humanity is experiencing will result in a fairly dire future. The commodification of clean air and pure water (which, to some extent, has already happened) will likely make shopping an even more important part of daily life. Imagine Wal-Mart selling de-particleized oxygen tanks in bulk, for the low low price of $259.99 a pack.

Purchasing essentials is, and will likely always be a tactile experience. It is quite common to buy a book without reading it first, or a CD without listening to it, but we are much more careful about buying things like food and shelter. In grocery stores, fresh produce is left out, unpackaged, to be groped and examined before purchase. Speaking of questioning tea spoons, think about your most recent trip to buy groceries. What was the ratio of things you'd tasted before to things you were trying for the first time when you rolled your cart up to the cashier's station? It's probably a safe bet that most of the food was familiar. And shopping for a new house or condo often takes months, with the buyer wanting to visit and experience firsthand the space that they might be purchasing to make sure that it meets all of their needs. What would the required commodification of air and water mean to urban retail environments?

Now swing the other way; let's end this post with some optimism. What will retail environments look (feel? taste? sound? smell?) like in the future if conditions generally improve for humanity? Retail is the essential element, the primary building block of the current globalized, megapolitan-level urbanism. Our infrastructure -- economic, transportation, and even social -- is largely built around shopping centers and commercial corridors. For better or worse, retail and commerce are often what give our society (and even our lives) meaning. With each successive generation, who you are and what you do are ever more tightly bound. So if our livelihoods and our identities continue to align more closely, it is very possible that urban commercial structures will become more diverse and complex. For retail, specifically, this could mean that shopping will become a much more immersive and meaningful experience, less about materialism for materialism's sake, and more about finding material goods that augment and/or enhance one's lifestyle in a productive way.

We see stores as boxes full of things that we can buy. But a retail environment has so much more potential than that. Rarely nowadays do store environments actually heighten the shopper's understanding of the products on display. If there is an effort to do so, it is almost never done at the middle class, mass market level. So how could retail environments change and adapt as consumers become, for example, increasingly environmentally aware, or as people become more interested in the related DIY movement?

The Reconfigurable House project sheds some light on this: "The project is a critique of ubiquitous computing 'smart homes', which are based on the idea that technology should be invisible to prevent DIY." The Reconfigurable House is an artistic experiment, an environment made up of easily manipulated experiential factors. Walking through the "house," a person can adjust everything from humidity to lighting to noise level. In a retail environment, this kind of technology could be used to expose and test products in an effort to build a consumer's trust. Shopping for a jacket becomes an entirely different experience when fitting rooms allow you to change the weather conditions to see how the garment holds up.

What would such developments mean for cities? It's hard to say. The visual impact of shopping corridors would likely remain the same. But the way that people interacted with stores, and the role that shopping played in daily life, would likely change. This has implied effects on everything from transportation planning to public space. What are some of the mundane aspects of contemporary retail districts that might provide some useful insight upon closer examination?

(Photo from The Style Press. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)


Links:
Question your tea spoons (Pasta & Vinegar)

The Future of Shopping (The David Report)

Reconfigurable House (2007) by Usman Haque and Adam Somlai-Fischer (Rhizome Inclusive)

Review: Suburban Transformations

I'll start this review off with an apology to PA Press, since they sent me a review copy of architect Paul Lukez' new book Suburban Transformations back in early November and I'm just getting around to actually reading and reviewing it more than two months later. There was NaNoWriMo, then there were holidays...it has been a crazy winter. And so, without further ado...

There is a lot of discussion these days, at least in architecture and planning circles, about what will happen to today's sprawling suburbs as people wake up to the fact that the current suburban model is unsustainable. There have been calls for a complete return to cities, though I think most everyone knows that this would be extremely difficult if not outright impossible. Cities have physical limits, and density becomes unhealthy after a certain point. Compare Paris to the infamous Kowloon Walled City for an exemplary contrast.

Still, it is widely assumed that the suburbs of tomorrow will look quite different from the beige, cul-de-sac draped landscapes that currently surround central cities throughout much of the developed world. While the speculation about the external changes that will force suburbs to shape-shift is frequent and varied, ideas (not to mention actual visualizations) of what these nouveau suburbs might look like are surprisingly few and far between. Suburban Transformations fills a unique gap in that regard, and the pragmatic novelty of author Paul Lukez's descriptions and images of prospective suburban densification and evolution is what makes them so very impressive.

Stylistically, Suburban Transformations is something of a hybrid; it is too colorful to be called an academic text, and yet a bit too dry to be read purely for entertainment. Still, the mix works well, with the text augmented generously with drawings and photos. The bulk of the book is spent discussing the methods Lukez envisions for changing the shape of traditional auto-centric suburbs as painlessly as possible; his process -- deemed the "Adaptive Design Process" -- is appropriately simple. It offers ways to examine and reshape suburban spaces characterized (ironically?) by their lack of character. If suburbs are to be criticized for their generic appearances, Lukez' process should conversely be commended for its ability to take these incredibly generic places and not only make sense of them, but also to make valid suggestions about how to take supposedly hollow, meaningless places and re-think the context to provide opportunities for site-specific design.

The bulk of the book focuses on a single hypothetical case study of the area around a mall in the Boston suburb of Burlington. Here, the author puts his theories into action, using everything from the topography to the noise levels to the freeway interchange -- yes, the freeway interchange -- to give texture and meaning to the site. The book suggests that Burlington's history as an important transportation route -- established first by Route 128 in the early 1900s and reinforced by the freeway in the 60s, can and should be used as a contextual element to guide the design process for transforming the site. The massive roadway is thoroughly and thoughtfully integrated into all of the adaptive designs that are envisioned during the second half of the book. In the end, the freeway itself becomes more closely related to the site; at the same time that it gives the site meaning, the reconfiguration of that site transfers increased significance to the road itself.

Further exploration of the Adaptive Design Process is helpful to understanding its versatility. As a result, Lukez also takes time at the end of the book for three shorter case studies of Amsterdam, Dedham (another Boston suburb), and Shenzhen. Illustrations are plenty and the ideas presented exciting. In fact, this is perhaps the book's greatest strength: its ability to turn a seemingly dire problem (the proliferation of soulless suburbs) into a golden opportunity. Suburban Transformations envisions the dramatic altering of the suburban landscape. And whether or not the process described in the book is ever widely used, the true value of this book is how effective it is in dramatically altering the reader's perspective.


Links:
Suburban Transformation (Powells.com)

Paul Lukez Architecture

The Dream Remains the Same

A recent post over at TNAC's blog, The Street, suggests that it may be time to change the American Dream. But what is the American Dream, exactly? It's a well-worn turn of phrase (were it a turn in the road, the guardrail might be out from being hit so many times), and while people usually use "American Dream" as slang for "house in 'burbs, lawn, two cars, spouse, 2.5 kids, dog," I would argue very strongly against this interpretation. The American Dream is not about houses or property or ownership -- heck, it's not even about money; it's about "new hopes, new dreams, and a better way of life for the future."

That quote was taken from an animated short produced by the Walt Disney Company in the 1950s. The subject was, surprise surprise, the future of superhighways. The Disney folks imagined a tomorrowland where automobiles provided the ultimate in high-tech freedom and mobility, populations were dispersed over "vast metropolitan regions" and the family unit was supported and enhanced by the great amounts of leisure time left over from avoiding the hassles of urban existence. On top of that, a global system of superhighways was to connect all nations and peoples and increase cross-cultural communication and collaboration. Oh, how glorious it looks on that little YouTube screen.

The present, as we are well aware, looks slightly different. Private vehicles do provide freedom and mobility, in a way...even if much of that free time is spent in the car, staring at a bumper. As a result, we've given up on that whole "extra time with the family" thing; in fact, divorce rates have soared as our population has spread out, stretching marital relationships to their breaking points by removing the basic social frameworks that might allow spouses to have some much-needed time apart outside of the workday (since both work full-time to pay for the oversized McMansion and the two SUVs).

Then again, that scenario is as well-worn as the term "American Dream." Still, the Dream itself is in no need of an overhaul. We would do well, perhaps, to wrestle it out of the arms of marketing-types still using it to pitch the 1-Acre Lots For All, Ford Chevy Ram MegaCharger bullshit. But the American Dream is as honest and straightforward and bright today as it ever was. You can see it in the modern sustainability movement in the same way that you can see it in Disney's adorably retro vision of the superhighways of tomorrow: the American Dream is about change. More specifically, it's about things changing for the better, and about people having the freedom to enjoy and participate in the process of change. Society and culture are driven -- and have always been driven -- by the masses. The dream of a brighter future took the "American" moniker from the fact that the United States was the first modern nation to do away with the European monarchal system. Change will always happen since the people will demand it; the US was one of the earliest countries to make that its raison d'etre.

In the eternal quest for the elusive "brighter tomorrow," we will continue to make mistakes. We will have disasters and wars, and terrible things will happen. People will die, dictators will rise and fall, and the oceans might rise up to claim some of our cities. But we will continue to evolve with the world around us. So the American Dream is in no need of modification. It is always a good idea to stop along the path and shake off some cobwebs, but hope for something better is the essence of what makes us congregate, collaborate, and create.

Cities are based on this principle; at their core, they rely on change. Cities lose buildings and parks and whole districts; much like any living organism, old cells must be shed to make way for the new. While it is sometimes painful, change will always happen, and as the largest, most interactive manifestations of mankind's ambition, cities will have to change for the good and the bad, just like we do. In short, you can't curse the suburbs; you'll just run out of breath. Instead, try to imagine what the next batch could look like. Try to imagine a brighter tomorrow while accepting that the suburbs will be a part of it.

More on this soon, as a review of Paul Lukez's Suburban Transformations is forthcoming.

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


Links:
Changing the American Dream (The Streets)

Magic Highway USA (Part IV)

Magic Highway USA Publicity Stills (Paleo-Future)

Connectivity Wherewithal (Guest Post by Jim Russell)

Where is Pittsburgh? Capturing the essence of a place is not easy. Manufacturing a place may be impossible. But the location of a place is relatively straightforward, yes? I'm here to tell you that where Pittsburgh is might surprise you.

Where is Real Pittsburgh? Answering that question will bring out the connoisseurs of place as well as Pittsburgh aficionados. I suspect most of those experts would dig up an authentic Pittsburgh rooted in nostalgia and steeped in local lore, "You know you are in Pittsburgh when..."

I'm skeptical of place mythology. When I lived in Vermont, a friend visiting asked to see the "true" part of the state, not the countryside overrun with New York City refugees seeking utopia. I brought him to a trailer park in Bolton and told him that the state tree should be the satellite dish, not the sugar maple. My decidedly unromantic view of Vermont did not sit well with my visitor.

If you want to see where a place in the United States is today, then eat at a national chain restaurant at an interstate interchange in some suburb of the central city. Multinational corporations would love to homogenize your experience, but they will ultimately fail. A local McDonalds is as good an indicator as any as to where you are.

However, McDonalds is globally a place unto itself. There is an identifiable McDonalds experience and a strong sense of place, regardless of context. The places that exist in more than one location serve as my muse for the Burgh Diaspora blog. My posts are about Pittsburghs (and other "places"), wherever they may be.

The geography that gets me up in the morning is the landscape between places, how connected locations form a unique experience that has all the characteristics of place. I have argued that Authentic Pittsburgh is found in the parking lot tailgate of a Steelers away game or at a Steelers bar in a city far from Heinz Field. In these places, Pittsburgh is preserved.

Globalization, often mischaracterized as the destruction of geography, redefines a place in terms of connectivity. You can map these relationships and easily comprehend how each city has its own profile. A city's global network is how I would define a place and the essence of Pittsburgh is found in the locations of the region's expatriates.

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Big thanks to today's guest blogger, Jim Russell, the blogger behind The Burgh Diaspora. Check out Jim's blog for a more in depth exploration of the process of "realizing a new geographic understanding of Pittsburgh."

Airoots Gets Lost in Deep Urbanmess (Guest Post by Matias Sendoa Echanove and Rahul Srivastava)

We arrive at a narrow commercial street lost somewhere between Bombay and Tokyo. It is crowded with pedestrians, bicycles, street vendors, food stalls, and wandering cows and dogs that don’t allow cars to pass through. Most of the buildings lining the street are two to three stories high, covered either with faded, dusty shop-signs painted in art-deco fonts, or snazzy neon lights. Billboards with smiling Manga faces and Bollywood movie stars eye each other warily.

An intricate web of wires, pipes, pathways, and cables connect the buildings, huts, cottages and shop-fronts to each other. They hang overhead or lie snugly underground. They are like masses of snakes intertwined into each other – alive and organic. They buzz with whispering voices, crackle with coded e-mails and crisp exchange of smses, gurgle with water or sewage and are swollen with pornographic images looking for immediate release, along with religious icons that appear on screens of high-tech devotees who bow to them in tiny studios.

The air is abuzz with invisible energy fields. Wireless networks that feed on cables and transmit the cyber-world into this dense neighbourhood. They compete for airspace with the smells of food, fish, gutters, and incense and the crowded sounds of the city.


Walking through the gulleys and streets one sees second-hand electronic shops selling tiny bits of chips and wires. We bump into a bull, resting in front of a poster selling Chinese medicine. Withdrawing, we stumble over a robot-dog who yelps angrily, snapping mechanically and uselessly at our ankles.

Going deeper one sees nimble hands stripping off circuit-board wires. They magically transform the pieces into copper jewelry that is marketed as tribal art. On one side otakus and geeks wait to devour cheap electronic left-overs – on the other, hippies and high-fashion lovers wait to decorate themselves with re-designed electronic waste.

An entrance to one street looks particularly crowded. It is lined with Japanese tea-shops, Iranian Samovar-houses and Chai-stalls served by kids. Old men and women sip tea, keeping an eye on children playing dangerously close to railway tracks. The street shudders as two trains zoom pass each other – one a yellow and brown old-fashioned rusty local train with open doors and another a sleek silver, futuristic machine made of steel, its windows covered with dark tinted glass.


The sound of new stalls being put up and old ones being pulled down rent the air. A bearded man with wild eyes sells mangas in a makeshift stall right next to an old sadhu with dirty, matted hair, who tells your fortune. The mangaman reads out stories to a group of teenaged girls who giggle crazily as he shows them explicit pictures. The palmist-cum-astrologer catches a hapless European tourist and predicts that he will hook up with one of the teenaged girls, who is already smiling at him.

The two connect and vanish around the corner hand in hand. To be continued...


(All of the images above are photoshop collages of Bombay and Tokyo.)

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Big thanks to today's guest bloggers! Matias Sendoa Echanove and Rahul Srivastava are the bloggers behind Airoots/Eirut. Check out their blog for more ruminations on "adventitious roots, urban forests & villages, natural cities, lost tribes, new nomads, and everything in between."

Urbanffffinds 003

The thrill of the unexpected is an ephemerality that defines the urban experience. The idea that "real" urbanites are jaded cynics may have a bit of truth; but if we are less likely to be surprised it is because we have come to expect the unexpected. Still, it is the variety of cities that keeps us interested, always wondering what we may find around the next corner. This week's Urbanffffinds each highlight, in their own way, the strange and delightfully unpredictable nature of urban places, be it in the startling geometry of a structure seen from an uncommon vantage point, the juxtaposition of architectural styles, or a good old-fashioned zoo escapee.

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)

(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)

Conveyer's Subjective Atlas of Jersey City

Josef Reyes, the publisher/editor of Conveyer, was kind enough to send me the latest copy of the zine that, in Reyes' words, "[attempts to articulate] Jersey City's 'sense of place' by documenting snatches of daily life in the city. The idea is that by examining how people experience the city on an everyday basis, we get a vivid picture of what the city really feels like."

Overall, Conveyer is a very thoughtful read, but my favorite part came right at the beginning; "A Subjective Atlas of Jersey City" is made up of four maps, hand drawn by individual JC residents, accompanied by photos of the places marked and explained on the maps. It's likely that this has been done somewhere before, but that hardly lessens the impact of the article. This simple mapping out of different peoples' experiences of the city, as disparate as they are, helps to form an idea of what it might be like to live in Jersey City.

Reading about urban design projects or shiny new buildings or traffic problems in cities scattered across the globe is easy enough to do; that is to say, there's no shortage. Nor do we lack stories on what it's like to visit these disparate places; if anything, there are too many stories about what it's like to be a rich tourist in a foreign city. But the stories that seem hard to come by are the ones that tell us what life is like, day to day, in a given place. What, we are left to wonder, are the places with these fabulous buildings, avenues, and metro stations really like for the people why actually use them?

In its mission to shed some light on this question for Jersey City, Conveyer succeeds most readily with the "Subjective Atlas." It's a really lovely collection, and it manages to convey (oops, a pun!) a great deal of meaning in a relatively short space. The places that the reader learns about through the maps become almost personal; the vicarious experience of the reading scratches the same itch as reality TV...yet it does so in a much more satisfying way. The maps are scripted, in their own way, but this is done by the person whose life we are peeking into, not for them.

Jeff Edwards' map depicts the neighborhood where he and his s.o. Amy were living in September of 2001. Edwards makes his own experience of the 9-11 attacks real by using the context of his former community to illustrate how he grappled with the effects of what happened that day. We learn about the place by learning about the people who live[d] there. The last marker on the map, at the bottom of the page, is an arrow pointing away from the neighborhood. "On the first anniversary of 9-11, [we] were working on a condo we had just bought. Our new neighborhood is this way. Sometimes we miss the old one." And I couldn't help but think, as I turned the page, that I kind of would, too.


Links:
Conveyer (Image credit)

Build, Rebuild, Build Anew

One of the best articles written about New Orleans' progress (or lack thereof) two years after its tango with Katrina has come from within the Crecent City, itself. Nola.com's article by Doug MacCash, entitled Architectural Soul of the City at Stake, discusses in great detail the efforts of preservationists to save the city's pre-hurricane architecture; and that label is very deliberate, as there is a general push to save anything, be it from the 1800s or the 1960s, that survived Katrina and the resulting floods.

MacCash's article has particular resonance because it so very subtly ties New Orleans' architectural soul to its overall civic soul; indeed, the city's identity, now in crisis, is intrinsically tied to its built environment. New Orleans faces the intractable problem of having to build, to rebuild, and to build anew. That is to say, NOLA must replace destroyed buildings (build) without further damaging -- and trying to maintain -- its legendary sense of place (rebuild) in a way that avoids painful, regressive kitsch (build anew). This explains the desire to save everything -- no matter the architectural style -- that wasn't truly irreparably damaged.

John Magill, a historian with The Historic New Orleans Collection, is quoted in the Nola.com article as saying "There are so many houses lost. Nobody can comprehend what's gone." This quote is particularly telling because it refers not to Garden District mansions or classic Victorian shotguns, but to the so-called "slab city" neighborhoods built in the post-war era. Magill's lamentation is for the brick-veneer bungalows that can be found blanketing suburban tracts from Seattle to Atlanta, but that "meant a great deal to the people who lived in them." The point being made here is that what has been decimated in New Orleans is not just a physical vernacular, but an emotional one as well. A page of the city's cultural story has been savagely ripped from the binding.

But the name of the game on the bayou is Resilience, and the destruction of New Orleans has presented a dream scenario for architects and urban designers. Visions for the city's future have not been scarce, though traction with public officials, unfortunately, has been. Still, they continue to come pouring in. Most recently, Thom Mayne's National Jazz Center and TEN Arquitectos, Hargreaves Associates, and Chan Krieger Sieniewicz's reimagining of the downtown riverfront have added some lustre to the city's architectural news roster.

Of course, the reality is that these projects could quite possibly fizzle out like their predecessors. "Still," a NY Times article on the proposals points out, "the scope and creative ambition of these projects suggest how architecture could someday be vital to the city’s physical and social healing. Both seek to transform dead urban areas into lively public forums, employing powerful architectural expressions of a democratic ideal."

New Orleans hasn't been a center of contemporary design since "contemporary" refered to the kind of flowery aesthetic that makes today's historicists salivate. In the wake of an event that has changed the very way in which the city thinks about itself, there is a chance that this could change. In fact, while the artistic merits of modern architecture (as with any style) will forever be argued, with its clean lines and frank honesty modernism is (metaphorically speaking) exactly what the city needs

Trahan Architects have come up with what may be the most enticing endorsement of modernism in the new New Orleans with their impossibly sleek update of the city's most beloved piece of vernacular: the shotgun house (pictured above). If built, this house would be a new, flood-conscious building that could easily nestle into a newly cleared lot (build) that draws from the city's architectural and cultural tradition (rebuild) in a way that is neither chintzy nor dishonest (build new). This is democratic architecture at its best.

People will always be wary of buildings built in newer styles of architecture because they suggest, whether it's true or not, that the places around them are changing. But New Orleans is a city that can not afford to deny change, and it can likely be agreed that, after Katrina, it would be particularly bullheaded to do so. Modernism is certainly not the answer to every problem facing this city, and shouldn't even necessarily be the primary architectural mode in the city's reconstruction. But embracing innovative and progressive architectural values, in a place where architecture is so vital to the civic character, can help to bring about important changes in a city desperate for a new raison d'être. The people of New Orleans cannot rebuild simply for the sake of doing so; the hurricane has given them an incredibly rare chance to create a built environment and a community that together form something greater and stronger than the insular, stagnant city that they had before.

It's time to consider building change into the vernacular.


Links:
Architectural soul of the city at stake (Nola.com) (found via Life Without Buildings)

Two Infusions of Vision to Bolster New Orleans (NY Times)

Trahan Architects (Photo credit)

The Dawn of Digital Urbanism

Blog Like You Give a Damn put up a great post last month on recent advances in online urban cartography (like Google's über-controvertial Street Views) and how these new digital reinterpretations of the world are moving us toward William Gibson's vision of cyberspace as a physically inhabitable place. From BLYGAD:

"Unlike the cyberspace that Gibson describes in [his book] Neuromancer:

'...a graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...' (69)

this new cyberspace will be much more familiar to us. It will look and behave in ways we understand - dangerous because the line between real and virtual will be that much more hazed. As the possibilities for exploration, learning, and knowledge building expand - so too will the potential for surveillance, misuse, and abuse."

Cyberspace is Shangri-la for the internet generation: a mythic miracle of a place that we are sure exists just over the horizon, within a whisper's length of our grasp. Each person has their own idea of this place painted in their mind, but I think the truth about an inhabitable Cyberspace is that it will be very much like Gibson's fantastical vision. It will also be very familiar to us, as BLYGAD predicts. In fact, our physical reality is already merging with its virtual counterpart. For, as the hyperconnectivity brought on by the rise of the internet becomes integrated into the urban fabric, understanding of one's physical environment is becoming more inextricably tied to one's understanding of the web itself. The melding of the physical and virtual (cyber) worlds is already taking place on both ends, with each side moving quickly toward the other. Eventually, of course, they'll meet somewhere in the middle.

We can see this trend online as the "clusters and constellations of data" described by Gibson are being harnessed to create a sort of digital urbanism, recreating various aspects of the physical world for Cyberspace. Akamai recently launched a tool -- Visualizing the Internet -- that has been described as a weather report for the web. Meanwhile, an online art project called We Feel Fine (profiled in the June issue of Metropolis) mimics the richly frenetic atmosphere of a busy public space without actually replicating any of the recognizable features of physical places. If the aforementioned Google Street Views is representational digital urbanism, We Feel Fine is the presentational version, capturing the essence of public space in a wholly new way, reorganizing the traditional tokens of public spaces (trading visual diversity for emotional diversity) into a "place" that could only exist online.

Good old-fashioned bricks and mortar urbanism, meanwhile, is getting a digital overhaul as handheld, web-enabled devices and wireless internet for laptop users takes the edge off of some this system's perennial problems. I'll take any chance I can get to highlight Urbanspoon, a site that catalogs every restaurant in several major US cities (DC was recently added), aggregates reviews from major websites, allows for user ratings and reviews, and provides neighborhood breakdowns via kickass "nighttime" maps that show the locations of all of the cities' eateries. Finding a great restaurant has never been so easy. Another genius web service, recently covered on Springwise, is MizPee, a San Francisco-based service that allows users to access a list of nearby public restrooms, eliminating one of the chief drawbacks of pedestrianism.

As cities become more digitally enabled, they are also starting to bleed together. Geographic constraints have been removed from art and culture in the same way that they were from commerce. Even street fashion has crossed over into the digital realm. As the David Report...well...reports, cities across the globe will be represented in "Street Clash," a blog where the tragically hip artkids from dozens of cities will go head-to-head in an effort to determine which city has the ultimate street style. The irony of this is that, while individuals can rep their hometowns in a token sense, they are still independent human beings free to change their geography at any time. That is to say that what is happening here is the formation of an international street style, as a handful of people cannot be representative of an entire urban population. Hipster fashion has been globalized. Whether this is good, bad, or just hilarious is still a question mark.

As BLYGAD's post points out, the transition of the physical world into the Cyberspace of the future could open a Pandora's Box of new social, ethical, and safety concerns. Pittsblog reported yesterday on a proposal from the city of Pittsburgh for a massive urban surveillance system. Mike Madison, who writes the blog, had this to say: "Hopefully the public will respond...to the proposal's Benthamite implications...It's one thing (though it's not necessarily a good thing) to be watched when you know that you're being watched. It's something else entirely -- and rarely a good thing -- to be watched all the time, when you don't necessarily know it" (emphasis his). Madison then asks the age-old question, "who will watch the watchers?" This, I think, will be the most fundamental challenge of Cyberspace: in a universally connected world, the unwatched watcher has more power than ever, as they will have unprecedented access to the masses.

As the internet becomes increasingly ubiquitous and reality moves toward the virtual, the emergent Cyberspace will almost certainly take on an urban form -- though it remains to be seen whether it will lean more heavily on the physical or virtual world. Either way, geography will become less and less binding as cities learn to connect in ever more complex ways, and we will likely come to understand urbanism as something very different from what it is now. Shangri-la is upon us.

(Photo from Flickr user 3views.)


Links:
New Urban Cartography (Blog Like You Give a Damn)

Visualizing the Internet (Akamai)

We Feel Fine

Urbanspoon

Mobile Loo Locator (Springwise)

Street Clash (David Report)

The Pittsburgh Panopticon (Pittsblog)

WEEKEND READING: May 26-June 1, 2007

This week, Where features Speedy Weekend Reading! It's also pretty much Solid States this week...sorry, Entire International Community.

ITEM ONE: Kazys Varnelis writes about the difference between the social structures of Los Angeles and New York and wonders which is more future-forward. (There is also a link to lots of great anti-Hipster stuff at Time Out NY.)

ITEM TWO: On Common Ground brings us this lovely pdf doc about the Pros and Cons of Gentrification.

ITEM THREE: Pruned gives a belated shout-out to the kickass UrbanLab proposal for Chicago that won the History Channel's City of the Future competitiopn a few months ago.

ITEM FOUR: Josh at Built Environment Blog put together a great e-tour of Brooklyn that really gives you a strong sense of the area. (I love this kind of writing.)

ITEM FIVE: Planners in Pittsburgh's South Side Flats neighborhood (which rocks, for the record) made the interesting and innovative decision to include fourth- and fifth-graders in the process of revising the neighborhood plan.

ITEM SIX: In a follow up to a previous Where post, Washington DC continues to struggle with the question of whether or not to re-examine its height limit.

That's all for me for this week. Happy Friday!