Fall Reading

As the summer winds down (or gears up, depending on where you are), here are a few books, architectural and otherwise, worth picking up--a Brand Avenue reading list of sorts.

- Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter.

I've mentioned Nation of Rebels before here, but it is so good it merits another plug. Heath and Potter (listen to a radio interview here) spell out the relationship between the construction of "counterculture" and its broad and profound effects on consumer behavior. After all, what is the true value of "rebellion" and "avant-garde" ideas and actions? Could it be that these things, rather than fulfilling some nebulous concept of societal progress, are really just manifestations of capitalism's cutting edge, defining new markets and identifying new needs? From another review, in The Atlantic:

The concept of countercultural rebellion and its elusive twin—cool—have resulted in a status competition that has driven consumption to unprecedented heights. It's not conformism that leads us to spend, spend, spend on the unnecessary and the ephemeral, but its opposite: the quest to distinguish ourselves from the masses through our enlightened, hip, or just plain rebellious consumer preferences. And marketers of products ranging from cars (the Volkswagen Bug) to computers (the Mac) to shoes (Doc Martens) have been reaping huge harvests from the countercultural seeds that were sown in the 1960s. The point was never underlined more heavily than when Kalle Lassen, editor of the ragingly anti-capitalist Adbusters magazine, came out with the Black Spot sneaker: a "subversive" running shoe that Lassen hoped would "uncool Nike" and "set a precedent that [would] revolutionize capitalism." As Heath and Potter point out, there is nothing "subversive" about trying to beat Nike. "That's called marketplace competition. It's the whole point of capitalism...."

This premise is essential for understanding the momentum that is transforming city life: every urban regeneration scheme, every "artist" loft project, every "Cool City," and every massive public works endeavor. It makes for an interesting counterpart to Richard Florida's work (below), or even that which David Brooks reduces to stereotypes: while Florida describes the flows of human capital to Creative Class hubs, Potter and Heath explore the diverse cultural and economic underpinnings of an "urban" lifestyle desired by the very same group. A refreshing read.

- City of Glass: Douglas Coupland's Vancouver, by Douglas Coupland.

I love this book for its breadth. I also love this book for its style.

Organized alphabetically, the idiosyncratic and wide-ranging entries in the slick "travel guide cum decoder ring" City of Glass are Coupland's 2001 attempt to distill the essence of Vancouver. Interspersed among text, images, maps, and various ephemera are several autobiographical short stories that add to an incredibly detailed and personal sense of the world's "most livable" city.

A personal favorite is the Colours page, wherein Coupland identifies key shades that express a number of cultural, economic, and even spiritual forces acting in and on the city. It's an fascinating question: which colors make up a place, and what do they mean? It's this kind of qualitative exploration that makes this little book so worthwhile, and it underlines how underskilled designers, planners, and even travel writers tend to be when it comes to understanding place and context. If only more cities were able to "tune into themselves" so precisely.

- Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity, and Tradition, edited by Vincent Canizaro.

Regionalism is the discourse through which architecture's relationship with place is revealed and expressed. In Architectural Regionalism, Canizaro, an architect and professor at the University of Texas-San Antonio, compiles a diverse and engrossing set of several dozen essays relating to regionalism, heretofore a nebulous and widely abused term describing an architecture rooted in (myriad) realities of its place. Spanning history (Mumford, Giedion, Corbusier) and providing an intriguing look into future "regionalist" possibilities, this densely packed reader is both helpful and fascinating.

Canizaro seeks to rejuvenate discourse surrounding ideas of place-specific architecture, specifically as relating to globalization. Concepts of global and local are not mutually exclusive, either:

For all this, regionalism must be more than design by applique or reference alone. It must foster connectedness to that place and be a response to the needs of local life, not in spite of global concerns and possibilities, but in order to better take advantage of them. And as such, the promise of regionalism in architecture is to re-embed us in the reality and diversity of our local places--critically and comfortably....Further, there is no reason why regionalism should not be understood as a progressive and high-performance architecture, one that is highly attuned to the constancy and change of the local environment. It should open up possibilities for understanding where and with whom one lives. It should encourage awareness of local climate and the changing of seasons. Lastly it should open up the possibility of shared purpose, in which the concerns of here are understood as linked to there: ecologically, economically, and socially.

- Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent, by Richard Florida.

In Flight Richard Florida connects American religiosity, the country's faltering international image, and its backward politics with falling numbers of skilled immigrants, and increased interest in Americans in moving abroad. Broadening his scope beyond why Austin and Seattle thrive while Detroit and Buffalo continue to slide, Florida discusses how cities like Sydney, Toronto, and Dublin are poised to capture the dynamism, people, and talent that the US, through its political and religious climate, now discourages. The book hammers home how central individual and collective location and lifestyle preferences and choices really are in crafting regional and national economic policy. Departing from Tom Friedman's The World Is Flat, Florida argues that it is increasingly the opposite:

Because of their ability to harness creativity and foster innovation, cities have become increasingly important social and economic organizing units over the course of the past century....In contrast to predictions that technology--from the telephone and the automobile to the computer and the Internet--would lead to the death of cities, the creative economy is taking shape less around national boundaries and industrial sectors and more around cities....Place is the factor that organically brings together the economic opportunity and talent, the jobs and the people required for creativity, innovation, and growth.

Cities both successful and ailing would do well to understand the rise of the "Global Austins," a term Florida coins in the book: a diverse set of mid-sized cities that echo the success of Austin, TX with their impressive job growth, ample educational and recreational opportunities, enlightened leadership, and ongoing investment in infrastructure and sustainability.

Comments

[Webb Traverse]

These books like The Rebel Sell and from the sounds of it, Nation of Rebels seem to proceed from a lack of understanding of what constitutes a counter-culture. Obviously consumer products can be coded as rebellious by marketers but to purchase them has nothing to do with rebellion or counterculture, and its a bit, err...stupid to tie countercultures (which, by the way is a blanket term for a variety of cultural forms which stand in opposition to components of the dominant culture, it isn't an academic term for "hardcore punk" or "indie" or "youth culture" - a counterculture may also share certain components with the mainstream culture - in fact most do)anyways its stupid to tie countercultures to the fetishistic 'cool' (which also isn't the elusive twin of counterculture, 'cool' is counterculture's transverse: 'cool' is passive, and it IS rooted in conformity!) anyways, like I keep trying to say - countercultures are typically not connected to the fetishistic 'cool' branding of rebellion we can associate with apple products or doc martins or etcetera. Apple Users do not comprise a counterculture and its incredibly ignorant for someone to think that they do. I don't think you have to be a careful interpreter of advertising imagery to see that some marketers want to associate their products with rebellion, but I think to discuss this association in the language of people who actually are engaged in rebellion on some level (by way of using terms such as 'counterculture') is a bit far fetched and dumbheaded. Converse to that, it's dumbheaded to assume that 'counterculture' refers to a unified 'underground' of rebels who are strictly opposed to consumer culture and are a laughing stock because they engage it the same way the normals do. There are a multitude of countercultures - each of whom set their own agenda which may have nothing to do with opposing consumerism (or if they do, it's more rooted in the personal choices of the individuals involved) but still runs 'counter' to some aspect of hegemonic culture.

[chris]

Webb, I'll let the book speak for itself (I still really think you'd find it interesting) but it suffices to say I disagree with you in multiple ways.

In short, no one here is assuming that the term "counterculture" refers to a "unified underground" of anything. Additionally, while I find it interesting that you consider "cool" passive--you see, I find what you say about "opposing...hegemonic culture" rather passive and self-subjugating--my impression of the book is that one of its broader goals was to attempt to describe economic and social roles that counterculture(s) play(s) in the economy.

Because they do, and I see it as absolutely foolish to believe that opting out of our economic and political system actually exists; or that existing within the same tyrannical "hegemonic culture" that the rest of us live in is somehow confining and soul-crushing. I see that as naive, misguided, and selfish.

Instead I'd rather focus on the political dimension that consumer choice (for and against, in myriad situations) inherently has in our consumer society, and how that shapes 100% of us, the form and configuration of the places we inhabit, and the identities we carry individually and collectively.

[Zachary Vishanoff]

Nike is tearing down my neighborhood for Nike-urbanism branded development. I have posted six videos at Youtube about the problem. To find them use the search at the Youtube website with keywords:nike university of oregon.