Brand Avenue

Beyond Sprawl

In a spectacular Web post, Patterson, the county executive of Oakland County, Mich., continued to wax poetic on the topic: “I love sprawl. I need it. I promote it. Oakland County can’t get enough of it. Are you getting the picture? Sprawl is not evil. In fact, it is good … [it] is new jobs, new hope and the fulfillment of lifelong dreams.”

Patterson’s rousing stump speech for sprawl is emblematic of how we as a culture are far too invested in a vision of the American dream that doesn’t make sense in the 21st century. Over the past 30 years we’ve stripped away the supporting mechanisms of sprawl but have continued to create it.

We’ve built more houses than we’ve needed — and built them farther away from jobs. This has led to longer commutes, which has created more traffic. In response, we built more highways, increasing fuel consumption and, as transportation planners acknowledge, doing little if anything to reduce traffic. It’s a vicious, seemingly endless cycle, and at its core is the notion that the American dream can exist only within the framework of the single-family home on a large lot.

Indeed, we’ve become so fixated on this as the sole delivery mechanism of that American dream that we’ve spent a disproportionate amount of our collective energies (home-) improving it without considering meaningful alternative visions — or devoting at least a smidgen of attention to what’s outside the front door or down the block. Everything in our culture today reinforces this idea of home as castle (or fortress) rather than home as part of a larger whole (i.e., neighborhood). We need to find our way to the latter view, and part of that means finding a better way to talk about it.

The good news is that more and more people are.

via opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

Another country, other cities, and other ways of life are possible, but we have to want them. They don't just happen to us.

Ode to a Place Whose Best Stories Haven't Yet Been Written

When someone says they love a city — or hate it — they are often telling you what they think of the version of themselves they see reflected in it. They love — or hate — who they are in that city. I love Berlin, Seville, and New York. I came to a grudging kind of love for Delhi. I fell out of love with Toronto. I love Montreal, but don’t we all, often with the adoration for a starlet on a screen, in a place you will never really belong. I’ve never had much time for Vancouver or Ottawa. I’ve hated London more than once, and I’m not sure why (but I do know it’s me, not London). The hardest love is the everyday kind, the one that lingers on after commuter traffic and parent-teacher interviews and byzantine arguments at City Hall. The kind I have found, to my surprise and delight, that I now have for Calgary. It’s the reason why I’m here. Still. Indefinitely.

Why stay? There are mundane material explanations, of course. Because my wife grew up in a house on an artificial lake called Bonavista in the southern suburbs, because her father is here and comes by to take the kids to the zoo, because we could buy a great little patch of 100-year-old downtown property just before the boom priced us out of the last big Canadian urban market we could afford. Because it’s sunny 300 days a year, because even on the coldest day the next chinook might already be on its way. But that’s not it, not all of it. That’s logistics, not poetry.

I’m dug in. It still surprises me sometimes, but I am. I’m here because Calgary is a city whose best stories haven’t been told too many times. Because it’s a city whose best stories maybe haven’t even been written yet. I’m here because everything but the cowboy hat is still an open question, wide open like the prairie, hinting on the horizon of soaring mountains. It is a young city, stupid and headstrong, brilliant and bold, and it may embarrass itself (again), but it will probably surprise you yet. It surprised me. I walk down my block in Hillhurst near the river with migrating birds overhead, I stroll under poplar branches to the century-old house with the white picket fence (no word of a lie) and the stained glass transoms over the front windows, and I cross the threshold, and I am home in a way I have never been anywhere else. How the hell did that happen?

via walrusmagazine.com

On Calgary, but many embedded gems about a person's relationship to place, applicable to anywhere.

How to Get to Sesame Street

What ultimately separates my living situation from those of the characters on Sesame Street is its impermanence. Television shows are often accused of simplifying life, creating problems that will all be solved within a half-hour or hour. But the beauty of Sesame Street is its permanence, even in the midst of constant, incremental change. Gordon the schoolteacher has been played by three actors, but he's always lived on the first floor of 123 Sesame Street. Hooper's Store isn't run by Mr. Hooper anymore, since the actor who played him died, and the store itself has changed from a soda fountain into more of a bodega, but it's still called Hooper's Store, and it's still just down the street from 123.

My own private Sesame Street won't last. My life, and that of my friends, is deracinated. We don't live near our families, we're ready to move at any time for reasons of business or pleasure, and we're unlikely to build up the dense weave of long-term neighborhood relationships over decades. I may end up moving temporarily to New York. When, and if, I come back, someone else will most likely be living in my apartment. Pamela and Taj, who run the building and are mostly responsible for its current atmosphere, are moving to Charlotte, North Carolina when Taj's employer leaves Seattle. The stores may all change their names and wares at any time.

I hold out hope that, since I've found it once, I can find Sesame Street again, here or elsewhere. I'd still like to live in a place where a brownstone like 123 is affordable (which becomes harder to find all the time). But I'm learning not to require perfection of form, not to think that finding Sesame Street relies on finding its exact architectural equivalent. More important is the web of uses people find for a specific neighborhood; the people in it and what they do.

To find Sesame Street again, I've taken a lesson from the note that precedes the text of Jane Jacobs' sprawling defense of the messy vitality of real urbanism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her book has no illustrations; the explanatory note reads, "The scenes that illustrate this book are all about us. For illustrations, please look closely at real cities. While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger, and think about what you see."

Sesame Street suffuses her book, even though it was published in 1961, almost a decade before the TV show's debut. And like the illustrations to Death and Life, the program's manifestations are all about us, but not in any literal sense. The Sesame Street of the real American city is built from small details -- my stoop, the connections among my building's tenants, the guy who runs the neighborhood restaurant and waves when I walk by, the paths I take to walk to work, the things we notice as we walk through the neighborhood.

via www.thestranger.com

On the eternal search for Sesame Street. Great, deeply true piece. Many people my age could have written this.

Becoming a Grown-Up City

What D.C. hasn’t yet figured out, or even really planned for, is what happens when this raft of newcomers grows out of one-bedroom condo living. What happens when their lives evolve past the urban-playground stage and they are less interested in speakeasies than in parks for their kids?

Caroline Armijo and her husband joined the wave of new D.C. residents when they moved to the 6th Street Flats apartment building in Chinatown in 2005. At the time, so few people lived there that they had to fight to stop the dumpsters from the Chinese restaurants next door from being emptied in the middle of the night. “A lot of the initial issues were just, ‘Don’t pick up the trash at 4 a.m.,’ ” she said.

A few years later, Armijo, now with her infant daughter in tow, attended one of the first meetings of a Penn Quarter parents group. There she met a mother who made her realize that raising her child downtown would involve more challenges than just finding the right school.

“She kind of scared me,” Armijo said. “She said, ‘The first thing that’s going to sort of push you away from downtown is not the schools — not that the schools aren’t bad — but it is that you realize you need a safe place to play.’ ”

Now that her daughter is 3, Armijo said, finding places to take her is a daily struggle; she swings on bike racks like monkey bars, climbs on a sculpture outside the restaurant Zaytinya or runs atop the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial. Armijo and other downtown parents have begun crusading for a neighborhood playground, starting a petition and bringing their requests to the D.C. Council, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton and the National Park Service.

Former D.C. mayor Anthony Williams may not have envisioned the importance of something like a playground in Penn Quarter when his administration began sketching ambitious plans for growth, but the demand is a direct result of those plans. Williams set a goal in 2003 of adding 100,000 residents over the next 10 years and developing at least 15,000 new homes.

He was working off of a Brookings Institution report that said by attracting 50,000 well-off single people and couples without school-age children, the District could increase its revenue by $300 million. Williams and his planners laid the groundwork for nearly all the current major real estate projects and for the new condominiums and apartments that continue to rise — faster than anywhere else in the country since the recession began. If you look up and see a crane today, it is probably at work on a project that Williams’s team set in motion.

via www.washingtonpost.com

The next frontiers in any city wishing to hold onto population gains are definitely public services, specifically schools and public transit.

Where No One Has Any Fun

If you took all the clichés about horrible urban design and shoved them into 75 acres, you’d probably end up with something pretty close to Dallas’ Victory Park. A pre-planned billion-dollar collection of imposing hyper-modern monumental structures, high-end chain stores, enormous video screens, expensive restaurants, a sports arena and tons of parking, completely isolated from the rest of the city by a pair of freeways, Victory Park is like the schizophrenic dream of some power-hungry capitalist technocrat.

Or in this case, his son’s. The — neighborhood? development? — was built by Ross Perot Jr. as an “urban lifestyle destination.” But what it really is is an entertainment district: that swath of cityscape whose character has been preordained by a city council vote and is now identified by brightly colored banners affixed to lampposts. (The entertainment district’s close cousin, the arts district, is often lurking somewhere nearby.)

What could be wrong with a district where nightclubs and galleries are encouraged to thrive? Nothing, necessarily; done right, a city can help foster these scenes with a gentle guiding hand. Constructing an entire milieu from whole cloth, however, is where cities get into trouble. “The problem with these created-overnight districts is that you’re trying to create a culture as opposed to letting one grow,” says Nathaniel Hood, a Minneapolis-based transportation planner. “You’re getting the culture that one developer or city council member thinks the city needs, as opposed to the ground-up culture that comes from multiple players.”

Victory Park is an extreme example, hyper-planned right down to the performances to be held at its American Airlines Center. (“A U2 concert is fabulous,” Perot told the Wall Street Journal. “KISS, not so good.”) But the Dallas Arts District, though less micro-managed, has struggled with its identity as well. Conceived in the 1970s by design consultants in faraway Boston, it relocated the city’s arts institutions to the northeast corner of downtown. Another planning consultancy drew the boundaries of the district, and one by one, the city’s cultural icons were moved there. Today, it contains the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Winspear Opera House. It’s home to buildings by Renzo Piano, I.M. Pei, Rem Koolhaas and Norman Foster. In fact, you’ll find everything in the Dallas Arts District except a lot of people, says Patrick Kennedy, owner of the Space Between Design Studio and the blog Walkable DFW.

“A district inherently becomes a single-use idea,” says Kennedy. “Everything has to be ‘art.’ You end up with a bunch of performing arts spaces and when they’re not in use it becomes a vacuum.” This vacuum has made the district itself a museum of sorts, something impressive to observe but strangely inert. (The Chicago Tribune called the area “the dullest arts district money can buy.”) It has few apartment buildings; one is the new Museum Tower, a 42-story condo residence that, as of last month, had sold only 16 of its 102 units. The Museum Tower recently made news when its glass facade began reflecting 103-degree sunlight directly into the Nasher Sculpture Center next door. Now the tower’s developers and the Sculpture Center are embroiled in a fight over which party should alter its building — essentially, arguing over whether art or residents should reign supreme in the Dallas Arts District.

via www.salon.com

Quality of Life = Opportunity

Susan Messier’s career in television journalism took her to such places as Bluefield, West Virginia, and Erie, Pennsylvania. There were also stops in western Texas and, most recently, Fort Wayne, Indiana. Although she and her husband, Jon, established themselves in each TV market, they also continued to seek out a community in which to put down permanent roots.

“We wanted to find the right fit,” she says.

After a year of research, the Messiers moved into a new home in the South Hill area of Eastern Pierce County. The location was convenient to Susan’s new job at Puyallup’s Good Samaritan Hospital, where she is manager of media relations and publications. Jon Messier is a freelance videographer in the area.

“We’ve always moved because of our jobs,” Susan Messier says, “but this time we moved our jobs around where we wanted to live.”

via livability.com

You Can't Send Places As Attachments

For a city to be worth seeing, there must be something unique about it, said Douglas Coupland.

A Vancouver native, Coupland is an artist and novelist famous for his book Generation X. He’s also the author of a number of non-fiction books, including City of Glass, which features a collection of essays about Vancouver. He’s a proud Vancouverite, and though he argues that his is one of the greatest cities in the world, he told a crowd at the recent Cities Summit in Vancouver that his city and others need to do more to differentiate themselves from each other and from the digital world.

"The download revolution affects everybody, cities especially," Coupland said. "Your new competition isn’t that city down the river with three-bedroom hotels and a slightly better golf course. Your competition now, for citizens and tourists, is World of Warcraft ... It is season-long bingeing fests of Breaking Bad and Downton Abbey.”

Cities should celebrate the assets that only they have, and the embrace the fact that to see and experience them, people have to actually be there. He says our overly digital lifestyles are making physicality that much more crucial.

"The places that people are going to want to visit are those places that spark their imagination," Coupland said. "People want experiences that cannot be downloaded, however you want to define that. People want to see physical things and they want to do things with their bodies. You can’t download a Henry Moore sculpture and you can’t attach a ski slope to an email."

via www.theatlanticcities.com

To Survive in Rochester

Creative destruction will continue to wreak havoc across the global economy. The experience of Rochester, San Diego, Pittsburgh and other cities in surviving offers several lessons.

The first is to make better use of local intellectual capital, starting with universities. One challenge Rochester faces is replacing the young people who once came to work in Kodak’s laboratories. Here’s where higher education comes in handy: public and private organizations should build connections with students through internships and other efforts that give graduates a reason to stick around.

Moreover, universities provide stability in a rough economy by drawing in state and federal dollars, which can compensate for the decline of a major employer.

Of course, private companies need to be part of the game as well. Those left behind when a dominant employer disappears must be willing to pivot to a longer view, as Kodak did for generations. Instead of managing quarter to quarter, they must help reinforce the local work force, as well as invest in the community so as to keep it attractive to new high-skilled workers.

Put differently, there is no single answer for cities facing the departure of a major employer, and there are many things unique to Rochester, Pittsburgh and San Diego that have allowed them to thrive where others have foundered. But long-term investments in education, culture and community have made all three postindustrial success stories, and there is no reason such a strategy can’t help the next city hit by a big-business bankruptcy to follow their lead.

via www.nytimes.com

"Coffeeshopification"

Coffee is the fuel of the modern world. When Europeans began drinking less ale and more caffeinated beverages in the 17th century, and talking about ideas rather than just seeking a break from manual labor, the Age of Enlightenment was born.

Today, in many American cities, there are coffee shops on every corner, whether they’re independent cafes or Dunkin’ Donuts or Starbucks. Amid all the business and institutional models that are changing in the face of our growing ability to do everything online, the coffee shop alone seems secure: an irreplaceable gathering place full of beverages that cannot be downloaded.

This fact is not lost on those businesses and institutions that are struggling. And, probably wisely, they are all beginning to remake themselves in the coffee shop’s image. What we are about to witness: the coffeeshopification of everything

via articles.boston.com

The South Beckons

Last year, Sha Stimuli, a 33-year-old Brooklyn rapper, packed up and moved to Atlanta.  He wanted to widen his audience, he says, and the South beckoned. He’s not the only one moving on.

In recent years, there is a growing sense among hip-hop heads that New York, and Brooklyn in particular, is passé. While there are still stars emerging from the borough, the action, the excitement is taking place elsewhere.

“In the last decade, New York has been left behind,” says Sha Stimuli. Although being a Brooklyn rapper may have helped his career ten years ago, today he sees it more as a disadvantage. “Me saying I’m from Brooklyn doesn’t actually help, because there is no novelty there,” he says. “People got bored of Brooklyn and New York.”

But people weren’t always bored of Brooklyn. Hip-hop may have first emerged from the Bronx in the late 1970s, but it is Brooklyn that, for a generation, has been known around the world as the genre’s incubator. Brooklyn, along with the rest of the East Coast, withstood the coming of a rival from the West Coast—and a resulting battle whose intensity escalated into bloodshed, with the murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. More recently, both East and West Coasts have seen the rise of southern hip-hop in such cities as Atlanta and New Orleans, which have produced a sound more focused on the beat than on the political message that made the East Coast’s success.

All the while, the names associated with Brooklyn hip-hop have remained the same—Jay-Z, Notorious B.I.G, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Busta Rythmes, M.O.P.—leading to talk that perhaps after all these years Brooklyn, once so essential in hip-hop’s evolution, has lost its touch.

But has it? As Notorious B.I.G. once rapped, “where Brooklyn at?”

via thebrooklynink.com

Even Better than the Real Thing

It seems as though there is a highly compartmentalized, perhaps sanitized, version of quaint Montréal we present to tourists and visitors on a scale that resembles cartoonish stereotypes of American excess. We don’t show the outside world what makes us powerfully unique and a thoroughly desirable place to live. No, instead, we put a dinky local spin on what remains a bad interpretation of American pop-culture. Its the Three Amigos, the Nickels and the thankfully forgotten foray into Planet Hollywood and Hard Rock Café territory that I think make some of the distinguished addresses of our city thoroughly un-Montréalais. We need to stop designing our city along what’s popular elsewhere, because at best we can only reproduce a pale imitation.

But people love us for who we are, and love coming here specifically for what sets us thoroughly apart from the pack. A good deal of the tourism experience in this city, based on what I’ve read in guide books, is the insistence on exploration. In general I agree with this kind of mentality, but why not open the market the better competition for key commercial real estate a little closer to beaten path.

Consider our local film industry, constantly advertising our city as a universal stand-in for any other city on either side of the pond, but never advertising Montréal for Montréal’s sake (and as we should know by now, capturing the aesthetics of Montréal on a whole is a difficult proposition, despite the beauty so apparent to any visitor). I’m tired of being told I’m looking at New York or Paris when I know I’m looking at Montréal. What sets those cities apart is that their citizens are perennially dissatisfied with the status quo, and we’re desperately trying to slow ourselves down and take the path of least resistance. Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

All great cities need to prepare for and execute a constant self-criticism that leads to impassioned and driven local entrepreneurs to lead individually for the common good. Ultimately, the common good is typically well aligned with the business interest’s bottom line.

via www.taylornoakes.com

A great read. What's a place's public face?

The Power of Love

The stars of the romantic comedy Sex and the City spent six seasons searching for love. Relationships came and went, Big, Aidan and the Russian, but the love affair that remained constant was the one they had with their city. Their emotional connection to the vibrancy, character and style of New York was the show's consistent thread....

While urban design has focused on the engineering of movement, it has ignored the issues of beauty, social engagement and livability that inspire emotional connections to the city. Who could be in love with the oceans of asphalt and the concrete canyons of Pembina Highway?...

The great cities of the future will be the ones that successfully reintroduce the human spirit into their urban environment. Cities that invest in creative architecture, public art, green space and the urban streetscape while promoting vibrancy through density and mixed-use development will be the ones that rekindle an urban love affair with its people. The modern transient economy will no longer settle for inhumane solutions to urban design....

Our young people do not flock to cities like Vancouver looking for bigger roads and better parking. They are searching for a city to be in love with. Jogging along the sea wall, shopping on Robson or taking the Sky Train to work, are the types of experiences they are seeking and we must provide in order to compete.

via www.winnipegfreepress.com

An essay about Winnipeg, true of everywhere.

What Stanford Loses

Truth is, the locus of innovation has been shifting away from the technological to the social, and from engineers to “culturistas” for some time now. It’s no accident that Kickstarter began through indie music (trying to find a new way to fund concerts) and is headquartered on Rivington Street (and soon to move to Brooklyn). It’s no accident that a large and growing number of successful startup folks have music, design, or art in their background, in addition to, or in place of, engineering. These include the people who brought you Apple (yes, it is still important to remember Steve Jobs wasn’t an engineer, loved Bob Dylan and music, was entranced with the aesthetic simplicities of Japanese and German Bauhaus design, and framed himself as an artist), YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr, Etsy, Airbnb, Behance, Instagram, Vimeo, Hunch, Gowalla, Path, Blurb, Square, About.me, YCombinator, the Designer Fund, and many more.

Designers, musicians, and artists understand the user experience in a way that engineers don’t. TechCrunch highlighted the shift away from engineering as a driver of innovation with an article on the death of specs. It said that product reviewers now focus on the user experience, not speed or memory or power--all the techie stuff engineers obsess about and forced all of us to pretend we cared about for so many years. That “user experience” is more and more social, local, and urban. Music, fashion, food, movies, advertising, art, personal manufacturing--the “indie” stuff of “indie” capitalism, are increasingly the driving forces of and the models for innovation today. And they tend to take place in cities. You need to be in Chicago (or perhaps Cincinnati) to create Groupon; Seattle (where they read a lot) for Amazon; Yelp in foodie San Francisco; Portland for Weiden + Kennedy’s “Imported from Detroit” ads; New York for Kickstarter.

via www.fastcodesign.com

Fascinating article. Ostensibly about Stanford's loss to Cornell in the battle for a massive new applied technology campus in New York City; but really about the "where" of startups. Building on local culture and existing market niches, startup culture is more location-specific than we may readily acknowledge.

A Vision of IKEA Urbanism

Does the perfect neighborhood that suits everyone exist? As an experiment it’s interesting, and also for bloggers and other media it’s nice. But can IKEA do the same to urbanism as what it did to interior design? Is it able to create neighborhoods that are as comfortable, cheap, good-looking and popular with the majority as its furniture? Perhaps it can, with its design skills as well as its capacity to organize big areas, as IKEA did to its shops that almost turned into complete villages themselves.

On the other hand, we should conclude that ‘one-size-fits-all urbanism’ will not be good for the variety and attractiveness of cities in general. Imagine the same number of people to live in an IKEA house as owning a Billy cupboard… These neighborhoods are not meant to solve problems or improve the city to some extent. In essence they are there to earn money for the company. The simple idea of IKEA is to give the people what they think they want...I think this neighborhood will feel the same as everything else from IKEA as soon as it’s realized. It looks better in the brochure than in real.

via popupcity.net

Can the kit-of-parts for which IKEA is known be rolled out at an urban scale?

Given that a place is made out of people, I doubt that this development will be as soulless as the author suggests. Then again, can a built environment provided by IKEA do the community that will inevitably grow up in the place justice?

Portland, The Gradual City

As Portland grows and changes, is there a sense of resentment from locals as new people come in and create their own vision of what they want from the city?

It’s not so much that. Really, any new resident has that sense where you go to a place and you want to shut the door behind you. People discover Portland in a certain way and resent what it becomes later. Everyone has this insecurity about Portland like, ‘when does it arrive?’ and that comes with growing pains ... Portland is a very curated city. Because of growth slowly, deliberately taking shape, people here have been able to make it what they want it to be. It’s almost like a “Greatest Hits” city. It’s a little weird, but I love it.

When creating content for Portlandia, do you and Fred need to be in Portland the whole time or does it benefit to step outside that and develop ideas in another city?

Fred and I do spend a couple weeks in Los Angeles putting the show together. It helps to leave Portland at times but it’s more beneficial when we’re all here and entrenched in our environment. We want to transcend what Portland is because there’s a version of it in every city. You want to give it a realness. Ironically, the more specific we are about Portland, the more it translates to a broader audience.

via www.theatlanticcities.com

A bit of a great interview with Carrie Brownstein, of Sleater-Kinney and the show Portlandia.

An Urban Heart for the Oil Sands

When Jennifer Keesmaat began thinking about how to transform the boomtown heart of the oil sands into a thriving centre, she grew slightly despondent.

“When we started in Fort McMurray, the very first thing we said is, ‘This is the twilight zone. No rules that apply anywhere else apply here,’ ” said Ms. Keesmaat, an urban planner with Toronto-based Dialog, which has been hired to help fix the city. But she returned from an initial visit to the area this spring questioning how to do it.

“I came back and held my head in my hands and thought, ‘Oh my, finally I’ve met my match. This nut is too big to crack.’ ”

But as Fort McMurray faces a future of explosive growth, it is nonetheless trying to do exactly that. It has employed a network of consultants, and petitioned its own people, in an attempt to figure out how to remake a modern-day hinterland gold rush town into an entertaining, vibrant city.

It’s not just a municipal issue. Industry today spends tens of thousands a year on each worker it flies in and out of northern Alberta. That has created significant incentives to convince people to move nearer the oil sands.

With an average household income of $177,000 – the highest in the country – Fort McMurray is awash in cash. But the town, and the Municipality of Wood Buffalo it sits in, have struggled to tread water amid the deluge of new arrivals. Planning for the future has been tough. Asked what’s wrong with Fort McMurray’s downtown today, Toronto real estate executive Ron Taylor says simply: “There is none.”

via www.theglobeandmail.com

BYOB To Philadelphia

The success of Korean food in Philadelphia is part of a larger story of how the city has been able to cultivate a wide-ranging international food scene. Former Inquirer food critic Rick Nichols told Zagat that the city is an destination. Much more culinarily advanced, he argues, than Washington or Boston. "People [here] are curious eaters," Laban says. "They don't just stick with what they know."

Here's why. For one thing, Philadelphia is a veritable capital of the small, scrappy restaurant – rents are cheap, and up-and-coming chefs can afford to open little 35-seaters (many of which are BYOB). The city also hosts one of America's fastest-growing (and most diverse) immigrant populations.

But there's something else: Philadelphia has a relatively young population. And that's important, according to Krishnendu Ray, an NYU professor who studies the relationship between food and immigration. There's this tipping point in the life of an ethnic restaurant. Ray calls it the "hipster realm." It's the moment when outsiders—usually younger, adventurous types in search of something cheap and different—start frequenting a place and creating buzz about it. It's happening now nationally to Korean food and Chinese food, the "up-scaling of a cuisine."

It usually takes about three generations for this transition to take, Ray says, and it often coincides with an ethnic group doing better financially and moving out of poverty. Some cuisines—like Greek—are hitting their peak. Others—Japanese and French—have always had an international reputation as food for businessmen. Hence, owners can attract a broad crowd off-the-bat.

Philadelphia has these young eaters. And the city is relatively small, which means most of them can easily make it to different neighborhoods. "In Philadelphia," Ray says, "much more innovative things happen."

via www.theatlanticcities.com

I never knew anything about restaurant culture until I lived in Philadelphia. This article hits the proverbial nail on the head in highlighting Philly's culture of gastronomy.

Buffalo Calls

Hey, world! Buffalo is calling! And it wants you to know its steel mills closed down like 30 years ago, the Blizzard of 77 is so yesterday, and the Buffalo wing was invented way back in 1964. Your impressions of Buffalo are so out of date.

This is the 21st century. Buffalo is turning the page. We’re getting wealthier, smarter, and more productive. We’re green and we’re hip. We’re sneaking up on you, world! You have no idea how how cool we are.

Rust Belt cities like Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and Minneapolis are actually doing pretty well economically. And you know what else? Rust Belt cities are greener and more sustainable than all the Sun Belt sprawl cities, so we’re probably going to be pretty competitive in the coming years.

Pretty soon, all those Sun Belt cities are going to wish they’d developed in the late 20th century the way Buffalo did in the early 20th century. Buffalo’s mixed-use, compact neighborhoods are still here. We’re reviving them one by one. And unlike the sprawling cities built for the car, Buffalo starts with traditional neighborhoods built for people.

Buffalo is still losing population (10.7% from 2000 to 2010) and poverty is still very high (28.2%). Buffalo is a city of no illusions. We don’t run away from harsh realities, but we also don’t shy away from showcasing our strengths.

via americancity.org

An admittedly boosterish article about Buffalo points to coming shifts that may find Buffalo perfectly positioned to shine again.

"Check Yes For Chimi"

Florida has its key lime pie, Idaho its potatoes and Georgia favors grits as its official state food. Arizona, hungry to lay claim to a state food of its own, is circling the chimichanga.

There is a fierce rivalry here over who exactly dropped the first burrito into a vat of hot oil and thus invented the chimichanga. But evidence supports the contention that the first mouth to savor the fried concoction, and the first stomach to churn in torment from it, may well have been that of an Arizonan.

There is little doubt that chimichangas have become hugely popular here, so much so that a movement is under way to make the chimi the state’s official food. With Arizona’s centennial coming next year, Macayo’s Mexican Kitchen, a Phoenix chain, has started a petition drive to lobby the Legislature to officially adopt the chimichanga, as lawmakers have done for the bolo tie (official neckwear), the saguaro blossom (official flower) and the Colt revolver (official firearm).

via www.nytimes.com

Detroit, the "Feel-Good Symbol" City

In many ways, as pundits are noting, Detroit is starting to become a feel-good symbol for a weary nation. The auto companies reinvented themselves -- yes, General Motors and Chrysler partly did so with government help -- with innovative products like the electric Chevy Volt.

Some developments surprised us, including the reopening -- after so many false starts -- of the Book-Cadillac Hotel downtown, or the cleanup of the contaminated Uniroyal site on the Detroit River.

Do you remember downtown before Compuware, Ford Field and Comerica Park? It was vacant lots, the abandoned Hudson's department store and at least one brothel.

And Detroit continues to draw an international crowd of artists and urban explorers. In the last few months, French filmmakers, German urban planners, Japanese professors, Dutch students and others have turned up to study the city. Key Detroiters like Sue Mosey, head of the nonprofit civic group Midtown Detroit Inc. -- and known informally as the "mayor of Midtown" -- gets inundated with requests for interviews about her work. On a recent weekend at the flourishing D-Town Farm on the west side, two separate film crews, one French and one American, were filming documentaries about urban agriculture and efforts to reinvent Detroit.

The city's core -- downtown and Midtown (which through another bit of marketing no longer goes by the notorious moniker "Cass Corridor") -- has made strides from just a decade or so ago. Probably 10,000 more people work downtown today. Cheap, available real estate and a willing work force, not to mention an excess of engineering talent, drew the high-tech firm GalaxE Solutions, which has about 130 workers downtown and is hiring another 200 or so. GalaxE embodies one of the newest slogans bandied about business enclaves these days: "Outsource to Detroit."

via www.freep.com