Brand Avenue

Suffering From Success

A story today in the NYTimes about inclusionary zoning for the middle class, in cities around the country where home prices have risen far beyond what an average salary can afford. Formerly confined to places like Manhattan, is this practice the wave of the future in "economic winner" cities? Does it work?

The author interviews one of the directors of the Boston Redevelopment Authority. The precarious presence of the middle class in places such as Boston poses a serious economic risk:

"Our thinking is that a healthy middle class is important to the city," said Geoffrey Lewis, assistant director of policy at the Boston Redevelopment Authority, which has overseen the building of hundreds of units reserved for middle-income earners. "We want to keep these people in Boston; they are the glue in the neighborhoods and the glue in the economy as well."

Sometimes called low-cost, work force or inclusionary housing, the cut-price units are most popular in places "suffering from success," as one study described the cities where real estate costs outpaced incomes and where government officials, businesses and housing advocates were struggling to increase homeownership for all but the rich.

In places such as San Francisco, it is common for a house to be even out of the reach of a dual-income family making above $100,000. The choice between a place like San Francisco or Boston, and someplace less glamorous, can become a pure trade-off between lifestyle and affordability.

For example, these cities face competition from Nashville and Charlotte, two of several ascendant Southern cities, both poised to capture the middle-class jobs fleeing Boston. The article notes in particular Charlotte's push to provide the lifestyle amenities of larger cities, but at a much lower price overall.

Cittaslow

An outgrowth and an expansion of the Slow Food movement, the Slow City movement, or Cittaslow in Italian, is a global effort to protect the geography of lifestyle and culture against globalization. This article describes how cities qualify for Slow City status, and describes the effects of the effort on three different cities in Italy, where the Slow Food movement originally began in the 1980s:

I'd been in Positano barely 10 minutes and already the challenge of parking my rental car had given me a bigger headache than a month's worth of alternate-side searches in New York. Positano may be the most celebrated town on Italy's Amalfi Coast, but it's no joy to drive in. The town is set precariously on a cliffside, its white and pink houses rising from the sea in tiers like a giant wedding cake. One single-lane, one-way street runs through it, and by the time I'd unloaded my bags and carried them to the hotel, a line of 20 cars was reaching all the way up the hill. I was saved by the hotel owner, who freed me from my motorized albatross and whisked it away to some hidden garage.

It could have been worse. Had I arrived in high season, May through October, the police would have fined me $100 for blocking traffic. That's just one of the rules Positano has enacted since becoming a founding member of Cittaslow, or Slow Cities, an organization aimed at preserving the quality of life in Italy's small towns. Yes, it's ironic: in order to ensure "slowness," Positano insists that you keep moving. This, as I was to discover, is only one of the ironies of a movement that's trying to codify the unwritten rules of la dolce vita.

Here is another "Cittaslow" article, and the website of the Cittaslow movement itself, the portal to the "international network of cities where living is easy." Reading the "urban quality" section of the website reveals that participating cities need to address anti-Slowness at myriad scales, ranging from "restoration of the original conditions of the historical centers" to planning for "the elimination of noisy alarm systems," while simultaneously advocating the establishment of a "city-wide Internet-based network for citizens." Interesting.

The Republic of Samsung

My gut feeling is that people crave juxtaposition and stimulus in every arena of their day-to-day lives. It could be our desire and love for possibility and complexity in our experiences that ultimately determines our feelings of satisfaction and fulfillment. We look for new definitions, new combinations, new contrasts. We are curious.

In architectural terms, I think this means that sameness is a killer. As architecture and urban design frame the situation (whatever that may be), leaving room in the design for varation, whether spontaneous or engineered, is key. Why are loft spaces so popular? Because they are unfinished, and hold a promise that the individual can contribute to the space's production; the configuration of loft space affirms flexibility and potential. (Big box architecture can work the same way.) It needs to be able to spur imagination, not merely fulfill expectations. People are able to perceive this open-endedness, and act accordingly.

In urban, and even societal terms, places flourish or decline correspondingly: cities that welcome outsiders and new ideas grow, while close-knit, insular communities flatline. University towns become economic engines, while one-horse factory towns fade into obscurity. This is based on physical connectivity to the world, but also culture; and, of course, culture is explicitly spatial.

With all this in mind, when I read about the near-complete dominance of one corporate entity over so many aspects of everyday life--physical, economic and cultural--I begin to wonder when it will fall apart. Because I still think people instinctively crave difference and are suspicious of the overarching unity of such things. The hold that Samsung has over South Korean society, like the way that Disney controls the character of its town Celebration, cannot possibly be tenable in the long term. The impulse that drives people to move to the fringe of an area, (whether a suburb or an obscure urban neighborhood) where the nature and narrative of that place is more malleable, is the same one that will drive people to look for ways to exist outside of a corporatized environment/society. Right?

(Or--crap--is Samsung the corporate/societal equivalent of a loft structure, in how it provides basic services necessary for its users/customers? Is this the Corbusian ideal of a "factory for living" at the scale of the conglomerate?)

Vancouverism and Manhattanism

The architecture critic for the Vancouver Sun comments on the challenge of shaping high-density housing into urban settings, comparing a traditional example of high-density residential use (Manhattan) with the emerging example of Vancouver (new neighborhood at left). Despite their vast differences, the two share the unusual distinction of being the two densest residential areas on the continent:

The clearest evidence of the changing realities of city building is the fact that downtown Vancouver has recently eclipsed Manhattan as North America’s highest density residential area. But this may change again, as Downtown Manhattan is currently home to a high density housing boom, much of it sparked by loan guarantees and direct investment made available in the wake of the urban devastation of 9/11. The two cities have adopted quite different institutional and urban design strategies towards the same ends: the creation of livable, socially-mixed, high-density neighborhoods with high level amenities that co-exist happily with conventional downtown functions. And my title lies a bit; because it is not really “Vancouverism Versus Lower Manhattanism,” but “Vancouverism Plus Lower Manhattanism,” as there are ideas in both places that might well migrate elsewhere.

Vancouver breaks all the supposed rules of North American urbanism. In breaking them – while simultaneously building equity, amenity, and livability – my city may now be writing a new rulebook of city-making for the 21st century. The Vancouver that is now generating such interest amongst planners and architects was shaped by a complex interaction of geography, politics, principles, ideas, and contingency, yet out of its particular history may come some fresh notions that might apply elsewhere. “Vancouverism” has now become a term in the literature of city planning, a cousin to that older descriptor of the hyper-dense city – “Manhattanism.”

Urbanphoto offers a recent photoessay of Vancouver, here.

Star Power

When "starchitects" are sought out expressly to breathe life/generate publicity for otherwise backwater locations, does this represent a cultural shift toward greater acceptance of bold design, or greater marginalization? What exactly is the cult of personality being propogated by Gehry, Libeskind, Calatrava doing to architecture? What are our expectations of "signature buildings?" How old is this tendency, anyhow? (Much older than the "Bilbao effect," I'm sure.)

Is this just an evolution of the relationship between architecture and market forces?

In one day of web browsing it occurs to me how much well-known architecture that places itself outside of the corporate realm is being used as a vehicle for corporate ends. Just a few examples (there are many, many others):

-- I noticed while perusing Dominique Perrault's website that he has a lot of hotels on his plate right now, which seem to me to be much more about the consumption of experience and "Style" than any of the intellectual content I have always appreciated in his approach.

-- Frank Gehry's Disney Hall in LA is being touted as a development magnet, and he will follow it up with a residential skyscraper, his first, nearby. Meanwhile, way off the radar, he is also lending his design eye to a hotel in a small city in Denmark. He must have other projects in between...

Ah, yes, here's one: a new and improved Art Gallery of Ontario, which falls between Disney and Denmark in magnitude, if you ask me. An article in this month's ULI magazine by Morris Newman (sorry, you have to register) discusses Gehry and peers like Daniel Libeskind, whose commission at Ground Zero seems to have led to, among other things, a new condo project in Kentucky.

Key issue: what does "starchitecture" do for urbanism?

The question of who will deliver architectural star power to major urban projects has become a topic of newspaper columns, along with the love life of celebrities and the players traded among major sports franchises. Over the past quarter century, architects have become steadily more visible in the public eye as the people who can give a project not just stylishness, but also that extra something that plants the image of the building firmly in the public mind.

Currently, it seems that every city wants to have its own Frank Gehry (or Santiago Calatrava or Zaha Hadid or Rem Koolhaas, to name a few of the leading architectural celebrities). Just as cities in the Middle Ages would strive to build the most impressive cathedral, which in turn would raise their status as market towns, modern metropolises seek celebrity-designed, one-of-a-kind buildings as proof of their status as cosmopolitan centers. Architectural boosterism is not very different, in fact, from the mania for sports teams and expensive new sports stadiums.

But is celebrity culture—the celebration of the individual, of personality, of success, stylishness, and sexual mystique—really a good thing for architecture? And, for that matter, is celebrity architecture creating works of enduring value for America’s cities?

(Google results: "Bilbao Effect")

Retro and Metro

A corollary hobby to my interest in how we perceive place is mining demographic information. I love to explore new and unfamiliar cities and neighborhoods, to discover the statistical patterns borne out in the physical form of a place--the average age of a population, the relative health of the local economy, etc, all contribute to the physical fabric of a place at the scale of the architectural as well as the urban. (Perhaps this interest comes from being from a city that is a perennial favorite on now-ubiquitous "Best Places to Live" lists.) For places I have never been to, I imagine what life "there" must be like. With the Internet at my disposal it is easy to compare and contrast certain aspects of different places.

What a place is known for, its popular image (Seattle for its outdoorsy lifestyle; the South for being conservative) is usually where it stands out statistically. There are a multitude of different ways of measuring such things, privileging different variables; here, here, and here are just a few. Here is a timely (also, ridiculous) list of the Best Places to Live in the US based on susceptibility to natural disaster, for example. Meanwhile, Richard Florida's books track a monumental economic and social shift related to the "Creative Class."

Another book I have come across recently is The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro. Its base premise is that of the sharp regional contrasts expressed in maps of the last two presidential elections. Much can be inferred from these maps, the book says, regarding lifestyle, economics, mobility, and local culture. The book and website are more expressly political in nature but explain themselves through geography and demography. In any event, I agree more with Barack Obama about America being more "purple" than "red" or "blue."

The book must have inspired the name of a well-done weblog I came across, about real estate development and urban design in a place which I've always heard is rather nice, but last visited over 20 years ago. Perhaps because the Columbus metropolitan area is known as the most statistically average city in the entire country?

Crescent of Embrace

Apparently various people are offended by the form the winning design for the Flight 93 Memorial has taken:

Mark McMorrow, who runs the Constitutional Conservative blog online, wrote this yesterday: "Didn't anybody pick up on the crescent/Islam relationship? Didn't this occur to any of the victim's family members? Even if it's an accident, I don't think this design is acceptable." Later, in a phone interview, McMorrow said he was surprised to learn family members of those who died in the attack weren't offended by the use of the crescent. "It's like figuring swastikas into a Holocaust memorial," he said.

Give me a break.

The architect initially expressed a willingness to rename the design, and has now said that he would consider revising the actual design as well. The space is a generic enclosure that opens itself on one side to a view of the actual crash site. It is an enclosure in an otherwise open field. The space of the enclosure is the symbol, not the shape itself.

I suppose this is a valuable lesson in the kind of meanings people can find in design that stray from the original intention. This is uncontrollable. One person finds meaning in certain forms and shapes, and another person feels oppressed by them. The architecture of memorials walks this fine line between compartmentalizing the story of the subject, and trying to let the story exist on its own. Case in point, of course, is the ongoing saga of the "Freedom Tower." Personally I think the winning Flight 93 design is refreshingly low on the theme-park quotient. That being said, architects get really wound up about making solemn, serious spaces, ones where their capacities for the dramatic can shine through. So, whether it's good or bad that the proposed design belongs to the same school as the Vietnam Memorial (everyone's benchmark for these things) is up to you.

Could it be that this kind of reaction is proof that we don't collectively have a clue how we feel about these events yet, and that the rush to memorialize is premature?

Save Humanities

I am thankful Whitney Gould wrote this recent column discussing the impending demolition of the Humanities building at the University of Wisconsin. Ever since I heard about the fate of Humanities a couple of years ago I have been hoping (and doubtful) others would realize what demolishing it could actually signify:

The trick now is to cut some slack for key buildings of the recent past, those whose architects were doing daring things with form and materials. Yes, some of them will prove beyond redemption. Maybe Humanities, just shy of 40, is one of them. But before it consigns this leviathan to the ash heap, the UW should look more closely at a rehab; if someone were to nominate the building for local landmark status, that could force a useful debate on the question.

Here in Madison is a reminder that history is not always pretty - that it can be messy, even fearsome. Since part of a university's mission lies in helping us understand where we came from, UW ought to keep a few of its pricklier icons alive along with the stuff that is easier to love.

For me Humanities' spaces evoke the same kind of raw power that can often be found in Louis Kahn buildings of the same time period: quiet strength and open-ended possibility; exploration and creation of what is new, with abstracted classical references to a long history. Its severely defined free flowing spaces and rough surfaces continually force its occupants to consider how it is best inhabited--which is why skateboarders and art studios, two things it already houses, make so much sense.

I imagine the University plans to replace Humanities with a more conventionally contextual building, or at least one that uses "warmer" materials and is kinder to the street edge. While that sounds nice I can't help but think the context will actually suffer in the absence of what is, admittedly, a behemoth: raised on a platform with slit windows and tons of concrete, Humanities is a classic example of 1970s Brutalist architecture. An urban design professor of mine once noted that it is critical to let some space in the ensemble be uncomfortable, challenging, imperfect; if everything is equally pleasing, then moving through a space becomes extremely boring.

That essence is exactly why Humanities is worth saving. We need to come up with a vocabulary for arguing the preservation of artifacts from the recent past like Humanities, one that pays more attention to the social context of the time period (why wouldn't Madison want to capitalize on its 60s image here?). The building is a brave example of a complex time, optimistic as well as fearful, and different from now; can't the campus and this corner of the city tell this complex story? The building's narrative power is its key strength, and that is something to work with, not obliterate.

Retire Downtown

A key piece of the rejuvenation of city neighborhoods across the country has been the influx of 20-somethings. But another equally important component is that of the movement of retirees into the cities after decades in the suburbs. It's interesting to see how the variables in the urban environment that appeal to the young--walkability and street life--overlap with the desires of retirees.

The Retire Downtown! website is a precursor to a book by the same name coming out next year, both as a chronicle of those who are leading this back-to-the-city trend as well as a guide to those considering the move:

Retire Downtown! presents young-minded and active retirees and empty nesters with a fresh way of viewing retirement--as a new beginning (rather than banishment)--by organizing the chapters into the following downtown lifestyle categories: living, working, playing, shopping, and getting around. This will allow millions of upcoming retirees to throw out their suburban 55+ retirement community brochures and consider living in convenient, stylish downtown housing instead. They will learn how to stay young and sharp by finding quality part-time (and even full-time) employment or meaningful volunteer positions, or dancing until dawn, hanging out or reading poetry at a coffee shop, shopping on Main Street downtown grocery stores, fresh farm markets or specialty boutiques, and discovering the freedom of getting around town. This book provides readers of a certain age with a timely look at the major return-to-the-city retirement trend that is fast becoming a lifestyle movement.

In Transit

I think there is a point about why mass transit --and in my opinion, specifically not bus transit--is key, that some people fail to acknowledge: it is a lifestyle asset. People want to be able to take transit, so long as the experience of taking transit is pleasant and reliable. While it may not ever be profitable on its own, it can be one of the central forces that drives a city's economy. The connectivity transit provides also holds incredible transformative potential for a place. We've all been in places that we could cite as results of this.

As a public space, too, mass transit systems are where culture can reside and even flourish. They are a "third space" that offers a cultural experience that, separate from the private realm and the streets, speaks to people on a variety of scales--station architecture speaks volumes about a city's hopes, identity, direction, and history. Being able to engage with all of that daily is a lifestyle asset that grounds individuals and community in a physical place, which is interesting. Riding the T is an essential Boston experience in the same way that riding the Underground is part of London: both are unmistakably intertwined with the way a person lives there. The physical form of mass transit shapes people's experience. Therein lies a lot of opportunity.

I found an article about Minneapolis' new light rail which describes the great success it is having and the changes it portends for the Twin Cities themselves as well as the entire region. People are excited by the energy it infuses into the city as well as the opportunity it presents to experience the city in a new way. On the flip side the article describes how Detroit's dependence on asphalt is a proving an economic detriment, that will only get worse with time. Denver's recent approval of a vast new rail system promises a complete overhaul of how the city looks and feels in the future.

Here is a very cool website that merely features beautiful pictures of subway stations, mainly in Europe (the Stockholm ones are the best, carved out of rock and dramatically lit). Metro de Montreal is also a cool site featuring station architecture.

If anyone ever doubted if transit was a civic asset...

PS> Rob, I am looking at all of these and kicking myself for our public art thesis idea that came too late...

Migration and Loss

The scale of the out-migration from the city of New Orleans is unprecendented in this country's history. The shock waves from the hurricane and flooding are being felt in so many different ways and it seems reasonable to believe that the Gulf coast won't be the same for decades, if ever.

One basic result of all of this tragedy is the mass movement of people. Here is an article describing one effect of the hurricane on the nearest city to New Orleans, Baton Rouge: the addition of up to 100,000 people to the city's population, literally overnight. Here is a Christian Science Monitor article that confirms that overall, Katrina has precipitated the largest dislocation of people in 150 years of American history.

Of course it remains to be seen to what degree Hurricane Katrina has forced the permanent relocation of New Orleans' population, but I think in all of this there are strong messages about architecture, planning, real estate, place, identity, culture. Here is a recent NYTimes article, just one of many, about the connections between music and New Orleans, right now being written. Another  deals with the unique architecture of New Orleans, unlike any other throughout the country and now largely in jeopardy. I really wonder what lies ahead for the city and the region.

What's Most Local is Public

I had a thought while traveling to Pittsburgh this weekend: perhaps the places most able to be purely evocative of "place" in a city are its public and shared spaces, and them alone. I mean public broadly, of course: a highway interchange can be as meaningful in the construction of place identity as the old-fashioned town square.

Anyway: the spaces that are most impervious to creeping corporatization are the ones that are solely public. The private realm of the lifestyle center, while drawing on local themes, is too controlled to be authentic. And while there are overlapping characteristics to good, different places, what stands out is how local criteria can produce one-of-a-kind spatial configurations, views, proximities, sensations, experiences. In the configuration of a city's public space is where it character can reside.

The Project for Public Spaces periodically comes up with lists including the World's Best Public Spaces and Five Most Overrated Places, which are interesting--and endlessly subjective and debatable. See what you think. Madisonians will enjoy the fact that the Farmer's Market was recently added to their list of the World's Greatest Places, although I wonder if that is inaccurate. The Farmer's Market is more of an event and less of a place--and we all know that the Capitol Square, where it is held, historically has had foot traffic and urban design problems. But I digress.

Ex-Pittsburgher Allan Jacobs, now a professor at UC-Berkeley, is the author of a favorite book that springs to mind as I write this as a perfect corollary to this topic: Great Streets.