Brand Avenue

City as "Family Portrait"

TED ("Technology, Environment, Design") is a yearly exchange of ideas from influential thinkers and doers in many fields, and many participants' talks are available online, on TED's excellent website. One of the more germane to Brand Avenue is a presentation by Jaime Lerner, architect, planner, and well-known former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, touted as "the most innovative city in the world."

One of the more interesting points that Lerner makes in his presentation are that of the "metronization" of the Curitiba bus system; that is, the establishment of stations that are more akin to subway stations in their design and form, but serve the city's vaunted bus rapid transit (BRT) system instead. For their part, the buses also act more like trains, serving a greater capacity with increased length and larger door openings.

   

From an exhaustive NYTimes article last year about the city, an explanation from Lerner of how this unusual system came to be:

“We tried to understand, what is a subway?” he recalls. “It has to have speed, comfort, reliability and good frequency. But why does it have to be underground? Underground is very expensive. With dedicated lanes and not stopping on every corner, we could do it with buses."...

In 1992, Lerner and his team established the tubular boarding platforms with fare clerks and turnstiles, so that the mechanisms for paying and boarding are separated, as in a subway. To carry more people at a time, the city introduced flexible-hinged articulated buses that open their doors wide for rapid entry and egress; then, when the buses couldn’t cope with the demand, the Lerner team called for bi-articulated buses of 88 feet with two hinges (and a 270-passenger capacity), which Volvo manufactured at Curitiba’s request. Comparing the capacities of bus and subway systems, Lerner reels off numbers with a promoter’s panache. “A normal bus in a normal street conducts x passengers a day,” he told me. “With a dedicated lane, it can transport 2x a day. If you have an articulated bus in a dedicated lane, 2.7x passengers. If you add a boarding tube, you can achieve 3.4x passengers, and if you add double articulated buses, you can have four times as many passengers as a normal bus in a normal street.” He says that with an arrival frequency of 30 seconds, you can transport 36,000 passengers every hour — which is about the same load he would have achieved with a subway.

The other role of the bus stations is that of design icon, which Lerner uses to demonstrate the need for urban "reference points," architectural pieces that help engender an identity for the modern city, and in turn create a sense of ownership for the city's residents.

Another issue is, a city is like our family portrait. We don't rip our family portrait even if we don't like the news of our uncle, because this portrait is you.

In other words, a place is made of people; and the sense of place and a community's sense of itself act reciprocally on each other.

Above, street furniture becomes civic symbol (via), part of what makes Curitiba unmistakably Curitiba. If it wasn't unusual in its appearance--if it didn't stand out from its surroundings, and wasn't clearly "readable" as a form--we probably wouldn't notice it. A simple, strong idea that offers significant justification for unconventional urban design approaches.

A Core Competence

Andrew Potter (whose tremendous book Rebel Sell I mention here repeatedly) interviews Carleton University professor and nation-branding expert Nicolas Papadopoulos about why "people trust Canadians, no matter whom you ask:" (via)

[Potter] So what are the keys to successful place branding at the national level?

[Papadopoulos] The few that do show signs of some success tend to be those who try to focus more on what we might call the "core competencies." In study after study after study that we have done in the last 25 years or so, and in practically every other study done by anybody else who has tried to measure the image of Canada, one thing comes out loud and clear -- and this is the image of trustworthiness. People trust Canadians, no matter whom you ask, no matter where. That is a core competence. When I say they trust us, we score at the top of any other nation anywhere.

Most interesting to me is the discussion about "core competences" versus attempting to graft some type of identity onto a place. Mainly, that the latter always falls short, much as a designer, planner, or marketer may wish otherwise:

[Papadopoulos] That goes back to something you said before: when they invented "Cool Britannia," nobody asked the Brits, "Do you feel cool?" It was some central unit that decided, "Gee, this is cool. Let's do it." There are so many others that have failed this way.

[Potter] That's interesting, because it strikes me that if you're trying to sell yourself or your country or your place to others on a certain brand proposition, you can't separate that out from how the people see themselves and understand their own identity. So to get back to Canada for a second, we like it when people say they see Canadians as friendly and trustworthy and what-have-you, but the flip side is Canada, the country that has an ongoing identity crisis.

Below: The Millennium Dome, perhaps one of the most widely-known architectural outcomes of of Tony Blair's Cool Brittania. (via)

Sidenote: Cool Britannia is coming back again.

(Much, much) earlier. Also, here, here, and here too, to name a few.

No Image At All

In a new multimedia campaign, the city of Houston showcases the city's virtues and idiosyncrasies according to celebrities who call the area home. Or as the NYTimes put it this week:

Yao Ming's Houston is not Beyonce Knowles' Houston, and not just because the 7-foot-6-inch Rockets star needs two more feet of head room. George and Barbara Bush's Houston is not George Foreman's Houston, either, nor Dr. Denton Cooley’s, nor A. J. Foyt’s....If this booming world center of energy traders, doctors and space scientists is hard to define, with a problem even worse than a negative image — no image at all — the Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau has a remedy....(For Mr. Foyt, it was driving 200 m.p.h. on the 610 Loop — back when the traffic wasn’t so bad; for Dr. Cooley, it is his “full schedule of surgeries.” And Yao — well, Yao likes Yao Restaurant & Bar where, he says, “I know the owner.”)

The city's approach stems in part from its lack of distinct identity among American cities, despite being the country's fourth largest, just behind Chicago in population. This reputation for banality puts extra weight on the personal perspective:

Other cities and states have tried variations on “My Houston,” but this subtropical metropolis of 2.2 million people, the nation’s most sprawling city, spread over 630 square miles — large enough to encompass Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Detroit — has a special burden: a reputation for banality, even ugliness.

The approach makes an interesting counterpoint to the Toronto Unlimited campaign, mentioned here several years ago, for a city attempting to use its nebulous global image to its advantage.

Two of the "My Houston" ads, featuring fashion designer Chloe Dao, formerly of Project Runway; and "art car" artist Mark Bradford, below.

Clashing with planners who tend to see Houston's explosive growth as ugly and unsustainable, futurist Joel Kotkin contends that the place is indeed vital, exciting, and full of possibility. It may not have the physical beauty or cache of San Francisco or Barcelona, but what it lacks in geographical interest, it makes up for with human capital and tolerance.

In an era when many other cities try to position themselves with trendier distinctions (as “smart growth” exemplars or as magnets for high-income households, for instance), Mayor Bill White, a Democrat, is happy for Houston to be known simply as an “opportunity city,” which is a pretty good description of what the place has been since its inception: a venue where people who work hard can get ahead....

The answer, I have come to understand as I have worked in Houston as a reporter and consultant, echoes something that the late Soichiro Honda once told me: “More important than gold and diamonds are people.” This critical resource, more than anything, accounts for Houston’s headlong drive toward becoming not only the leading city of Texas and the South, but also a player on the global scene: it is emerging as one of the world’s great cities....

Lauding Houston to urban planners is not much different than extolling red meat at a convention of vegans....Ultimately, it’s a question of defining what makes a city great. Many city planners today focus largely on aesthetics, the arts, and the perception of being “cool.” Academics and many economic-development experts link urban success to cities’ appeal to the “creative class” of college-educated young people. In this calculus, the traditional practice of gauging a city’s success by studying patterns of population or employment growth, or noting the opportunities available for working-class or middle-class families to flourish, rarely registers as important.

For contrast to the Convention and Visitors' Bureau high-gloss approach, look to a marketing campaign entitled "Houston. It's Worth It," produced by an independent advertising agency four years earlier. In the campaign, the details that usually inspire complaints about Houston--cockroaches, sprawl, humidity--are foregrounded in an ironic way, with a clean typeface. The idea behind the guerrilla campaign, developed by ttweak, is that the city's inconveniences are heavily outweighed by the its everyday attributes, optimistic atmosphere, lack of pretense, and personality:

"Houston. It's Worth It." was created believing that acknowledging the difficulties of living in Houston only makes the reasons why it's worth it more compelling. We can all reach a consensus on the relatively few complications of living in Houston; the reasons it's worth it, on the other hand, are as diverse and numerous as its citizens. "Houston. It's Worth It." is a conduit for those reasons.

The city's lack of definition, and a narrative that is necessarily fluid, ends up being incredibly productive. A great takeaway impression.

Below: a few images of Houston captured by the photoblog Phototainable, searching for personality of place.

As commenter #2099 in the "Houston. It's Worth It." guestbook says, screw conventional thinking: "we defy logic, but we still rock." And #2064: "I feel normal here. Maybe it is because I am imperfect, like this city."

Smartly, the "It's Worth It" folks have come out with a coffee-table book of photography juxtaposed with quotes from commenters like those above (many thanks, Randy!) and other clever schwag to accompany the campaign.