Brand Avenue

On the Move

Among other things, moving from one city to another (hence the silence around here--sorry everyone!) makes me think of this:

Just as George and Weezie contemplate their new lives on the Upper East Side, it's natural that the travel time involved leads one to thoughts about the relative merits of different places, neighborhoods, cities, regions. Perhaps, if you're like me, things lead from there to thoughts about city rankings, the vagaries of their evaluation criteria, mobility, and the Creative Class. Fortunately there's been a spate of rankings in the last month to consider.

For the second time, Fast Company Magazine published a list of "Fast Cities" that piqued my interest, wherein "speed" of place is defined thus:

What makes a Fast City? It starts with opportunity. Not just bald economic capacity, but a culture that nurtures creative action and game-changing enterprise. Fast Cities are places where entrepreneurs and employees alike can maximize their potential--where the number of patents filed is high, for instance, or where the high-tech sector is expanding. The second component: innovation. Fast Cities invest in physical, cultural, and intellectual infrastructure that will sustain growth....Finally, Fast Cities have energy, that ethereal thing that happens when creative people collect in one place. The indicators can seem obscure: number of ethnic restaurants, or the ratio of live-music lovers to cable-TV subscribers. But they point to environments where fresh thinking stimulates action and, by the way, attracts new talent in a virtuous cycle of creativity.

Take a look at Fast Company's rankings, where winning cities are divided into nine subgroups: Creative Class Leaders, Global Villages, R&D Clusters, Green Leaders, High-Tech Hot Spots, Urban Innovators, Culture Centers, Unexpected Oases, and Startup Hubs. The magazine also publishes a list of cities where things are "too fast," where, putting it mildly, "the risks outweigh the upside;" and too "slow," with places like Detroit and Havana that traditionally conjure gloomy connotations. Of course, such lists are highly subjective, and notable just as much for the places they omit as those which they include.

Afterward, take a look at Grist Magazine's 15 Greenest Cities, and then The Economist's Most Livable Cities list. Or Best Places. (See you in Vancouver. Or Cleveland or Pittsburgh, apparently.)

Meanwhile, Money Magazine publishes a yearly list of its Best Places to Live, skewed rather differently. As the authors of Boomburbs (currently on my shelf) note, the magazine tends to favor its namesake rapidly growing suburban locales: places like Naperville, IL that are quintessentially suburban but with populations approaching those of major urban centers. Where Fast Company's list has an entrepreneurial bent and Grist's has a green tint, Money's seems to more closely reflect typical middlebrow aspirations.

Richard Florida's fingerprints are present, of course, in a lot of these rankings--interesting also, because he recently made a move (parallelling his words in Flight of the Creative Class): he is relocating to Toronto to head the new Centre for Jurisdictional Advantage and Prosperity (aka the Martin Prosperity Institute) at the University of Toronto Rotman School of Management.

Tomorrow's Cities Today

Keeping in mind Prime Minister Gordon Brown's stated goal of constructing three million new housing units in the UK by 2020, as well as a great amount of public debate about density (brought on by omnipresent discussion of climate change, the 2012 Olympics, and all the new, tall buildings planned for central London), it's all the more amazing to look back at the planning and construction of England's most famous New Town, Milton Keynes. "MK" is 40 years old this year. (Building Design features an excellent special section on the city's development.)

Brown's plan foresees 40,000 new homes every year by 2016, mostly on surplus public land. The plan includes the development of five new carbon-neutral "eco-towns." While the form of these new towns is nebulous, it's fair to assume they will differ substantially from that of autocentric Milton Keynes, a large-scale embodiment of postwar optimism and architectural experimentation, with decidely mixed results.

Derek Walker, former chief architect of Milton Keynes, defends the design decisions made in the city's development:

MK was built for cars and that’s fine. Do we want to go back to the bloody horse and carriage? No we don’t. Listen, you design something for the public, not for an architectural critic and you don’t design it for an urban dweller who is happy as a lark in a single bed flat in Brixton. We were designing for families. For every family the car is a heavy part of their aspirations. The development group asked people what they wanted and we’ve given them that.

Who wants to bring up a family in a 23-storey building with urine in the lifts? One of the reasons I wanted to do Milton Keynes was that I’d seen Yorkshire totally bloody destroyed, with lovely little towns like Rickmansworth, Dewsbury and Huddersfield ruined by high rise blocks. If you talk to any family - and we talked to every family that came here and we did a major household survey every year asking people what they wanted - 99% want this, they want suburbia.

We’ve never had shortage of people wanting to come here. People came here because of the Open University and because it was an incredible location for distributive industry. At the 1972 exhibition at the Design Museum we signed up 70 employers. The show was largely just astroturf with models and on the basis of that people wanted to come because they saw nice simple dwellings and pleasant courtyard schemes. The city has been enormously successful commercially.

Perhaps what most completely describes the utopian aims of Milton Keynes' designers are the scenes shown in renderings created to promote the city's development by German architectural illustrator Helmut Jacoby in the 1970s. They're just staggering. Jacoby brought to life the "village centres" scattered through the "wobbly grid of 1 km squares" that would constitute the city. Take a look:

Above: the vision for the central concourse of the unrealized Milton Keynes City Club; the wave pool in the aforementioned City Club; a view down a main boulevard in the new city; Queens Court in the city's central shopping district; and an aerial view of the city center, as it would look in 1990 (complete with helicopter).

Dress Rehearsal

The NYTimes peeks inside the complex world of hotel branding, where everything from the provenance of the staff uniforms to the functionality of the showerhead work in concert to provide a finely articulated sense of comfort:

"Since 2005, some 31 (hotel) brands have been announced, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, more than at anytime since 1988-89, when 27 were introduced. And with this increased competition, identifying market segments and customer preferences has become essential to creating customer loyalty -- which is where the showerhead, among other details, becomes crucial."

Sheets with high thread counts are not enough. This is an ubiquitous issue across so many companies, from coffee to furniture to clothing, that architects undoubtedly understand: how can you provide something that is at once highly standardized while remaining recognizably distinctive? It's a design problem, both in terms of business structure as well as product design.

"Competition...has taken the art and science of hotel branding to a new level. Enormous resources are being poured into researching and designing hotel rooms, lobbies, amenities and services -- all intended to inspire brand loyalty by creating what hoteliers hope will be a distinctive experience for guests."

While the largest hotel chains are busy developing niche hotel brands to appeal to different demographics, not all players are big. The CEO of Nylo Hotels, a niche hotel brand based in Atlanta, puts it this way:

"Now it's time for a whole new category, the lifestyle brand. People like their Mini Coopers, they like to be connected, they like different architecture and design, and they live in loft-style apartments. Yes, 30 new brands have been launched, but only three or four will rise to the surface, and that hinges on creating a unique brand."

(The implicit message, of course, is that people wish they did have these things, even if they don't. The architecture and finish of the hotel must evoke those aspirations.)

Nylo is customizing everything in its guest lofts (don't call them rooms), including the staff's fashion wear, which was designed by Daniel Vosovic, one of the more successful contestants from the cable television series "Project Runway." Nylo is also spearheading a contest with local artists, whose work will be selected for display throughout its hotels. But Mr. Russell (Nylo's CEO) says that this is not just about decor but also about experience, a word often repeated by hotel brand developers.

Below: Nylo's future "guest lofts."

Words from Malcolm Gladwell's Blink (which I read a few weeks ago, while staying in a particularly nice hotel, coincidentally) seem apropos here. Particularly the part about "sensation transference:"

This is a concept coined by one of the great figures in twentieth-century marketing, a man named Louis Cheskin, who was born in the Ukraine at the turn of the century and immigrated to the United States as a child. Cheskin was convinced that when people give an assessment of something they might buy in a supermarket or a department store, without realizing it, they transfer sensations or impressions (or aspirations, as per above) that they have about the packaging of the product to the product itself. To put it another way, Cheskin believed that most of us don't make a distinction -- on an unconscious level -- between the package and the product. The product is the package and the product combined.

It's interesting to consider Cheskin's point alongside what the CEO of Starwood Hotels says about hotel branding in the NYT article. The brand experience is roughly equal in importance to the design and configuration of the hotel. In these things we search for validation:

Exhaustively researching details like a showerhead is important, but the sum is greater than the parts, Klein said. "When people are traveling," he said, "the first thing they're asked is, 'Where are you staying?' The answer, the hotel brand becomes an emotional representation of the guest's personality, and that is new to the landscape."