Brand Avenue

The Indie City

Slate pointed out last week that musicians have flocked in recent years to Portland, Oregon, despite the seeming absence of an established music scene:

Why, you might ask, haven't you really noticed Portland's incredible concentration of musical talent before? Because unlike, say, Seattle's grunge boom in the '90s or the Bay Area's recent hyphy movement, Portland has neither a distinctive "sound" nor a "scene" to speak of. Sonically, there's not a whole lot that the twisty pop of the Shins has in common with the "hyper-literate prog-rock" (to borrow a phrase from Stephen Colbert) of the Decemberists. And virtually none of these groups can be considered "Portland bands" since, with very few exceptions, they all moved to town after gaining some level of fame. (Generally speaking, it's rare to meet a young, creative Portlander who's from Portland.) You might see Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss parking her Volvo station wagon in front of Stumptown Coffee Roasters, for instance, but you seldom feel these luminaries exerting any influence on the local musical landscape. They all just kind of live here.

(Below: a couple shots from around the Hawthorne neighborhood of Portland, from the beautiful photoblog Portland Ground.)

So what's the attraction? Lifestyle attributes, mostly, with a certain, ineffable sense of openness:

Ask a musician why they relocated to Portland and, from Britt Daniel on down, the most common response is: "We came through on tour and I thought it was awesome." It might not be enough to lure the glitterati, but Portland's combination of affordability, natural beauty, and laid-back weirdness is an independent artist's dream....

The rockers themselves have somewhat confusingly praised Portland as a city "entrenched in juvenilia" (Sleater-Kinney's Carrie Brownstein), a place with a sense of "calm longevity" (chief Decemberist Colin Meloy), and a home of "really great public transportation" (the Shins' Mercer, who, it's safe to assume, didn't come here for the bus routes). If there's any alluring indie mystique to Portland, it's most likely due to the late Elliott Smith, who attended high school on the west side of town and recorded his most-loved work here. (Mercer even owns Smith's old house.) Before Smith, Portland's primary musical contribution to the universe was the Kingsmen's "Louie Louie." But Smith, on albums like Roman Candle and Either/Or, sketched a virtual map of the city with his whispery voice, and he went so far as to adopt a local street name, Elliott Street, as his first name—his birth name was Steven. For fans like myself, Smith's music made Portland seem infinitely more romantic than it ever could be in real life. (Case in point: 45 consecutive days of rain = not actually romantic.)

Urban form and local economics play crucial roles. The experience of both is marked by a sense of independence: the musicians cite the city's walkability and the abundance of locally-owned businesses:

Chris Walla spent a month in Portland, walking to work at a church-turned-recording studio in Northeast and to Wild Oats for meals. It was the first time in his adult life that Walla, a member of indie darlings Death Cab For Cutie, didn't need a car to get around. Then he returned to his band in Seattle. Stuck in traffic, Walla felt "held hostage" by a city so enticing and yet so incapable of unsnarling rush hour.

So two years ago, he joined the stream of rising and big-name alternative rockers moving to Portland. Though Seattle gave birth to the independent music scene, Portland is the latest hub of chart-topping talent....

Singer/songwriter Laura Veirs, who bought a house near Alberta last year, fretted at a local gig recently about her overgrown yard. A landscaper in the audience offered to help and then showed up to blast the moss off her birch tree. "I was like, 'Wow,' " says Veirs, 33. "We're all in this together. It's not like you're the big star and they're ingratiated fans."

The musicians say they feel energized by Portland's independent businesses.

Veirs writes short stories over coffee at Alberta's Concordia Coffee House, the Star E Rose and Random Order. Walla frequents Concordia and also Extracto, a cafe on Killingsworth. "There's homogeneity everywhere else in your life," Walla says. "I enjoy my street and I like that there's not a P.F. Chang's yet."

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.

The 20-Minute Rule

In the textbook university town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, two former automotive engineers now boast of their abilities to live life within a few city blocks:

And if Ann Arbor filled Gauri Thergaonkar and Giri Iyengar's need for community when they were at Ford, it became an even more obvious choice in 2003 and 2004 when they both left Ford, capitalized on their love of good food and wine, and traded vocation for avocation.

"Thergaonkar jokes that she lives her life within four blocks, and if she and Iyengar didn't have to venture outside of downtown to buy certain necessities - like toilet paper ­- it would probably be accurate. The neighborhood feeling reminds Thergaonkar of her childhood neighborhood in Bombay, India – the familiarity with people you see every day, the neighborhood grocery, the continuity of old, established businesses.

"This is a place that had the feeling of community," she said. "I think Giri and I were sort of both seeking the same thing - that sense of having neighbors…I feel like this is my neighborhood; these are my people. I realized that I never really missed it until I got it back....Every time we actually considered doing anything different, it was 'Where do you want to be when you walk out the door?'" Thergaonkar said.

The compact spatial dimension of the couple's daily lives is made possible by the mix of uses available to them within a small radius of their home, and as such they rarely need to travel elsewhere. In a 2006 article I've long wanted to mention here, the NYTimes details how the importance of such proximity in another setting is ultimately compounded--not weakened--by the global spread of network technology:

Fiber networks cross the world. Data bits move at light speed. The globe has been flattened, and national boundaries obliterated. Yet in Silicon Valley, the one place that is responsible more than any other for creating the network technology that supposedly renders geography irrelevant, physical distance is very much on the minds of the investors who provide venture capital.

Meet the “20-minute rule” that guides fateful decisions in Silicon Valley. Craig Johnson, managing director of Concept2Company Ventures, a venture capital firm in Palo Alto, Calif., who has 30 years of experience in early-stage financings, said he knew many venture capitalists who adhered to this doctrine: if a start-up company seeking venture capital is not within a 20-minute drive of the venture firm’s offices, it will not be funded....

YouTube and Google share the same source of venture financing: Sequoia Capital, situated among the venture capital firms clustered in a handful of blocks in office parks along Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, near the Stanford campus. Google’s other source of venture capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is nearby, too. Sequoia makes its preference for the 20-minute rule almost explicit, telling applicants whose companies are at the “seed stage” (receiving less than $1 million) or “early stage” ($1 million to $10 million) that “it is helpful if the company is close to our offices” because they “require very frequent contact.”

That frequent contact is not that dissimilar from that which Thergaonkar and Iyengar experience in Ann Arbor's downtown. For them, the end product of the overlap of their professional and personal lives is peace of mind; for the venture capitalists, it's money. So proximity yields profit in multiple forms.

It's worth mentioning that the "nature" of this proximity is really quite complex, dependent on the interrelationships of many, many players:

Entrepreneurs who live in Silicon Valley also find the technical talent they need faster than they can in any other place; they pay more for that talent, but speed is the sine qua non for success. Seth J. Sternberg, the chief executive of Meebo, an instant-messaging company in Palo Alto that is backed by Sequoia, described Silicon Valley with the fervent appreciation of a recent transplant from New York, where he had suffered three separate bad experiences with start-ups, none of which had attracted venture funding.

The ecosystem in Silicon Valley, Mr. Sternberg said, includes “incredible techies, who live here because this is the epicenter, where they can find the most interesting projects to work on.” The ecosystem also includes real estate agents, accountants, head hunters and lawyers who understand an entrepreneur’s situation — that is, emptied bank accounts and maxed-out credit cards.

How do these "ecosystems" bear themselves out in physical form? Logically, mobility is centrally important, which underlines the need for efficient transit networks, as well as walkability:

The common thread in communities that are now drawing the entrepreneurial, 25-40-year-olds, says University of Michigan architecture and urban design professor Christopher B. Leinberger, is walkable urbanism. "From an urban planning point of view it means a place where, within a quarter-mile to a half-mile radius, you can get pretty much everything you need and maybe even walk to work," said Leinberger.

Indeed, the 20-minute rule is circumscribed by the frequent traffic problems of Silicon Valley (no one's example of walkable urbanism), though this is considered a necessary trade-off:

Even if the process goes smoothly and requires only 15 meetings — the fewest possible, given the lowest range of possibilities — and even if most of those meetings are set up in advance, the time consumed in getting to Sand Hill Road, even using local highways, can be significant. The problem is that much worse when, as often happens, a meeting is called with just an hour or two of notice. “If you live in Santa Clara, it’s doable,” Mr. Morgan said. “If you live in Dubuque, it’s not.”

Workingman's Paradise

Among the many interesting articles in The Next American City's Summer issue is one tracing the trajectory of the company town from the early days of the Industrial Revolution to the job-rich boomburbs of the present.

(Above: Life in the Googleplex; Mountain View, CA. More here.)

Author Elizabeth Evitts provides a useful definition of company town along the way:

According to the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, a company town is “a community inhabited chiefly by the employees of a single company or a group of companies which also owns a substantial part of the real estate and housing.” Margaret Crawford uses this definition in her 1995 book, Building the Workingman’s Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns. Crawford, a professor of urban design and planning theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, describes the first American iteration of this community type, the mill village, created by the textile industry in the late 1700s.

The best location for the company headquarters has changed dramatically, and this bears itself out at urban and regional scales. With the advent of network technology and the exodus of industry from most cities in the developed world, things like navigable waterways and proximity to natural resources become quaintly irrelevant. The most (only) important proximity is the one between a talented pool of labor, and the relative abundance or lack of opportunity for lifestyle pursuits (leisure, education...). While it may be fashionable to locate your company in the hull of a old factory in your city's formerly industrial waterfront, the raison d'etre of said water frontage--and said neighborhood, really--is cosmetic, its infrastructure a signifier of past productivity.

In Baltimore, and in cities around the country, manufacturing buildings have new uses. Procter & Gamble’s former manufacturing home on Baltimore’s Inner Harbor was redeveloped in 2002 by developers Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse. Renamed Tide Point (after the soap product that was made there), the 15-acre, multi-building campus serves as the headquarters for IT companies like Advertising.com, and for sporting apparel giant Under Armour. Notable at Tide Point are the on-site amenities for workers. There is a daycare center for employee children and a modern, sunny café; a gym and a waterfront promenade with hammocks, where, in summer months, delicate mists of cooling water refresh workers taking a break out of doors. Inside, the offices have ping-pong tables and lounge areas.

Location on the water, once a necessity for city industries, is no longer required. Business today is not as reliant on topographies. Increasingly, a company’s most important asset is between the two ears of its employees. In a creative class economy, the water imparts a psychic value rather than a logistical one, an amenity to attract creative workers. With business no longer wholly tethered to topology, cities are forced to rethink their relationship with companies.

Evitts notes that while such locations meet the needs of niche employers, many of the largest engines driving the current economy make their homes in bewilderingly large and complex corporate campuses, offering an all-encompassing lifestyle for employees. One such example is that of software company SAS in booming Cary, NC:

SAS is laid out like a college campus of sorts....You enter through a guarded gate and drive along winding roads lined with pristine gardens punctuated by outdoor sculpture. On a spring day in April, the sky that famous Carolina blue, a cool breeze rustles through thick woods over a footbridge traversing a meandering creek, giving the feeling less of a corporate facility and more of a state park. But then you look to the clearing, and topping the hill is a large building clad in corporate reflective glass surrounded by a landscape dotted with other large, innocuous office buildings. Unlike the college campus it’s emulating—where nice weather would lure class-skipping coeds to the outdoors—the sidewalks and footpaths at SAS are totally empty.

To encourage employees to be more productive, SAS offers employees a wide range of benefits within the confines of the corporate campus—a huge benefit, or a huge detriment, depending on whether you think this is all too Big Brother-ish. Lunch breaks, health club visits, childcare, and doctor’s appointments all take place right on the corporate campus. “You start feeling sick, you go get an antibiotic at the health center and you don’t get sick,” Chambers says. “So you don’t miss work.” Tide Point, Google, and SAS may not be the salt mines of yore, but the goal of companies over the centuries has remained relatively constant: maintain a productive workforce. “Companies are giving a lot of amenities today, especially in really prosperous industries like IT,” Crawford says. “In a way, it’s exactly the same thing as the company town of the past. The only reason companies ever really did that was because they needed to retain workers.”

The architecture of the SAS campus, in contrast to that of the Gap and Google, is intentionally generic:

Inside Building U, the environment is equally sterile. Quiet and still, there is a sense that workers are busy behind closed office doors. At SAS there is an unyielding focus on production and output. And there is definitely more conversation about software architecture than literal architecture. Goodnight never collaborated with an architect on the design of his mega-campus. As it grew, he hired a variety of planners and designers, and the resultant aesthetic is your standard corporate office park. The buildings are basic, the hair salon a modest room tucked in a corner of a much bigger complex. Some office buildings are designed to resemble an Embassy Suites, where a large interior courtyard is surrounded by several stories of open walkways with offices wrapping the exterior.

While the economic might of giants like SAS undoubtedly adds to the local tax base, the abundant in-house perks may end up hurting the local economy, says Evitts:

While cities like Baltimore struggle with big ticket concerns like housing and transit, they still benefit from inner-city companies’ creative class workers, who spend their disposable income on area businesses, arts and culture. At larger, far-flung corporate compounds like SAS, business and services normally provided by the township are corporate matters, further reducing income to the town and decreasing worker interaction with the community at large. Employees relate less to their non-work surroundings when errands like doctor appointments, schooling, daycare, gym, and salon trips happen under the auspices of the company. Any sense of normal life-work balance, or rather, work-community balance, seems fairly out of reach.

Unlike the mill towns of the 18th and 19th centuries, on-site worker housing is generally not part of the corporate campus equation:

Notably absent from the benefits list is the traditional company town perk of housing. Today it’s hard to imagine an American company dabbling in housing developments on its employees’ behalf, the way that, say, IKEA, does in Europe....In places like California, where prime real estate can be prohibitive, there seems to be a willingness to commute. Workers are trading higher salaries for longer drives (the award for the longest commute was given last year to a software engineer at San Jose-based Cisco Systems, who travels 372 miles every day). Crawford, the Harvard professor, says she thinks it’s unlikely that American companies will start offering worker housing again anytime soon.

The article ends with a fascinating proposition: what will happen to these complexes when, for unforeseen and inevitable reasons, they become obsolete? Will they be recycled like old factories and warehouses are now? Can they be?