Brand Avenue

Today's Notes

A whole bunch of interesting things to point to today:

- An interesting Smart City Radio program from 2007 explores the rebranding and redevelopment of a historic, and downtrodden, neighborhood in Cincinnati, here. Following that, an interview with a professor at SUNY Buffalo introduces the Tactical Sound Garden, wherein urban space is "overlaid" by audio files chosen to evoke certain feelings in different locations. Thus a place is continually modified through the way it "sounds."

- Speaking of sound, read about one woman's obsessive collecting of songs for the creation of "cinematic moments" for this summer's Olympics. Explore another facet of branding with sound:

When NBC's producers prepare a segment, they use the database to zero in on the exact tone they're looking to set. Producers can search by artist, album, instrumentation, mood, decade, and culture of origin, so when recapping a Norwegian's javelin victory subsequently overturned by a rules violation, they can utilize key words such as "rousing," "Scandinavian," and "moody" to hone their choices.

- In Philadelphia, Inga Saffron reviews Robert Stern's new Comcast Tower, 58 stories of smooth silver glass, a "high gloss," "frozen mountain cataract," opened earlier this month.

 

(via Flickr; that's some curtainwall!)

From Saffron's review:

Ultimately, though, it's the image of the great obelisk, shimmering like mercury in the afternoon sun, that many will remember. They may eventually forgive its vacuous facade, preferring to see the glass expanses as a blank canvas on which the city can project any dream it chooses.

- In Melbourne, a fun video from Streetsblog extols the virtues of the city's laneways and sidewalks, and the public realm that thrives there. The filmmaker writes:

Melbourne is simply wonderful. You can get lost in the nooks and crannies that permeate the city. As you walk you feel like free-flowing air with no impediments to your enjoyment. For a city with nearly four million people, the streets feel much like the hustle and bustle of New York City but without omnipresent danger and stress cars cause.

Related: A fine article from the Toronto Star on "the lost art of strolling:"

And so it is a measure of how far removed we have grown from ourselves that many of us now see walking as extraneous. It is viewed as a kind of hobby, a pastime, a luxury, certainly not essential, and definitely not a means of transportation.

Indeed, we have reached a point where we classify ourselves according to whether we walk or drive. Thus we are either drivers or pedestrians. Because walking is not considered necessary, we give precedence to those who travel in cars and trucks. From their perspective, people who walk are obstacles, in the way.

As the French realized 150 years ago, walking--specifically urban walking--is about much more than getting from one place to another. It is a mode of being, a way of relating, of existing in the world. The mere act of going out onto the street opens up a whole set of possibilities that lie at the heart of urban life.

- Also in Toronto, a couple improves upon what is already a significant undertaking--the demolition of their home and the construction of its replacement--with exhaustive documentation of their process.

With an eye toward creating a resource for other would-be builders, Jeremy Bell shares the ongoing story of 360 Winnett Avenue:

We had originally planned to build a rather traditional home, however at some point along the way our priorities changed. While we still need the extra space, we've come to realize we should be building a smarter home and not just a bigger home. We've also come to appreciate our eco-responsibilities and we felt it was important to document the realities that came with this decision.

So what started as a simple renovation, has blossomed into a true eco-challenge. How "green" can the average family actually be? What sacrifices will need to be made along the way? Is building "green" even worth it? I also think it's important to show people that building green is indeed possible, but doing so requires a change of priorities....

From start to finish, I want to share our experience with complete transparency; finding a contractor, choosing an architect, defining our green strategies and balancing the budget. In the end, I hope the site will stand as a guide for other would-be home builders. Something that will help eliminate the unknown and make a project of this scale more approachable.

More here. (Thanks, Jeremy!)

Summer Reading I

Keeping in the same spirit as last fall's recommended book list, here is the first of at least a couple upcoming posts about good books, new or otherwise, worth your time this summer:

- The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What it Means For the World, by Thomas Campanella.

I knew Concrete Dragon would be fascinating from the first page of the first chapter, wherein Campanella explains the "theme song" of the Chinese city of Shenzhen, which has ballooned in population from a few thousand people in the 1970s to the millions that call it home today. The song is called "Story of Springtime:"

"In the spring of 1979/An old man drew a circle/On the southern coast of China/And city after city rose up like fairy tales/And mountains and mountains of gold/Gathered like a miracle."

The fact that such a song even exists, or is as popular as "Story of Springtime" is, speaks volumes about China's explosive economic growth; its attendant, mindblowingly large urban overhaul; its insatiable need for raw materials; the influence of its centralized political leadership; and the shared aspirations of the populace. As the international spotlight shifts to Beijing for the Summer Olympics, the book's subject matter is particularly pertinent.

Laden with statistics and images, and with extensive discussion of the myriad influences, risks, ideas and trends that are driving the full-tilt transformation of China's physical fabric as well as its society, Concrete Dragon is as informative as it is thrilling. It is made all the more so because the story it tells is happening right now.

- Large Parks, edited by Julia Czerniak and George Hargreaves.

Large Parks is a collection of essays from leading academics and practitioners of landscape architecture, centering on not only the design of both existing and new large public parklands around the world, but also surveying the many parties who typically have a stake in their creation, and the process by which these important spaces are wrought.

Parks are not just "green lungs" of a place, and are more than just civic amenities: they are zones of immense cultural, ecological and economic value that enhance shared quality of life in multi-dimensional ways. They offer significant opportunities for urban redefinition (especially as global economic shifts continue to yield empty post-industrial zones in many cities), environmental remediation, building community, education, and recreation. James Corner explains in the foreword that the best large parks will always be more than the sum of their parts:

"Large parks will always exceed singular narratives. They are larger than the designer's will for authorship, they exceed over-regulation and contrivance, and they always evolve into more multifarious (and unpredictable formations than anyone could have envisaged at the outset. They are complex, dynamic systems. As such, the designer of large parks can only ever set out a highly specified physical base from which more open-ended processes can formations take root....If this staged groundwork is too constrained or too complicated or too mannered, it will eventually calcify under the weight of its own construction; if it is too loose or too open or too weak, it will eventually lose any form of legibility and order. The trick is to design a large park framework that is sufficiently robust to lend structure and identity while also having sufficient pliancy and 'give' to adapt to changing demands and ecologies over time."

The book is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the ongoing creation and redefinition of the public realm, and the roles parklands play in the form and configuration of cities.

- A + T magazine.

Do you know A + T? You should. It is a beautiful bilingual periodical from Spain, refreshingly free of advertising, with abundant photography, drawings, and interpretive diagrams. Each issue is substantive, concise, and graphically powerful.

A + T's publications are organized thematically, in series of varying lengths, with 10-15 projects per volume. I have the "In Common" series, four volumes exploring the design of different kinds of new public spaces worldwide at multiple scales. Short essays accompany a broad range of work, mixing some projects that will be commonly familiar (the High Line, Madrid's Ecoboulevard, Melbourne's Federation Square) with many that are less well known, but no less intriguing (Kengo Kuma's glass facade for Shibuya Station in Tokyo; the "urban lounge" of St. Gallen, Switzerland; or Milwaukee's Marsupial Bridge, to name a few).

Actually, "In Common" dovetails nicely with the contents of Large Parks above, in that the book and the series both emphasize the enormous potentials of public space, as a venue that combines both architecture and landscape.

Equal parts great inspiration and invaluable resource, you will want to save each volume of A+T you can find.

- The Option of Urbanism, by Christopher Leinberger.

Leinberger is a pioneering developer whose career has combined understanding of real estate development with concern for social and environmental realities. He is also the head of the Graduate Real Estate program at Michigan and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. His new book outlines the "next American dream"--one that will undoubtedly be much different, and more efficient, than the autocentric, sprawling version everyone knows. This new American dream will be characterized by more compact communities, improved street life, and less dependence on the automobile.

Tracing the growth of the 20th-century autocentric suburb, the forces that shaped it, and its unforeseen consequences, Leinberger subsequently makes a powerful case for "walkable urbanism:" the radical notion that walking more and driving less enhances quality of life, while reinforcing the urban fabric. Clear and concise.

In this radio segment, Leinberger discusses how demographics and changing consumer preferences are bringing about this shift. Listen. And read! 

Ambition

As a follow-up to the previous post, another fascinating essay, this time by Paul Graham on his website, explores the messages cities "send" to their inhabitants, transmitted through you-name-it: culture, form, and economics, for starters. Sweeping generalizations here, but interesting reading for anyone who cares about jurisdictional advantage:

Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder....

How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you'd be able to transcend your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time.

As an example, anyone who lives in the Boston area (including many of the commenters on Graham's website, it seems) will recognize the sentiment behind what he says about the clustering of brainpower in his hometown of Cambridge, and what that does to the message the area "sends:"

Cambridge with good weather, it turns out, is not Cambridge. The people you find in Cambridge are not there by accident. You have to make sacrifices to live there. It's expensive and somewhat grubby, and the weather's often bad. So the kind of people you find in Cambridge are the kind of people who want to live where the smartest people are, even if that means living in an expensive, grubby place with bad weather.

As of this writing, Cambridge seems to be the intellectual capital of the world. I realize that seems a preposterous claim. What makes it true is that it's more preposterous to claim about anywhere else....Cambridge as a result feels like a town whose main industry is ideas, while New York's is finance and Silicon Valley's is startups.

I’d argue that Cambridge doesn’t have a monopoly on the production of nebulously defined “ideas”—residents of many other cities could also claim the same. But the construct of the essay offers an interesting way to distill a sense of place through what it produces.

Cambridge’s main industry (as well that of its eponymous English namesake) is education. Detroit makes cars. Trenton, New Jersey makes condoms (oops--made). You could probably say that Paris makes romance, Venice and Orlando make tourism, and Los Angeles makes entertainment. These "products" shape the image of the place and contribute to its brand.

What does your city make? What does it "say"? (above, a well-known bridge over the Delaware River connecting Pennsylvania to New Jersey, via)

An echo of Graham’s sentiments about geography and intellectual power shows up in a piece by Elia Powers published recently on Inside Higher Ed, about the notion of the “college city.” Naturally Boston, home to some 50 colleges and universities, appears:

It’s not just the number of colleges or dot.com startups located in a given region that determine a place’s attractiveness to academics, according to Sampson. Cities that are “naturally diverse” in population and are able to offer a range of cultural amenities like theater and museums prove to be most appealing.

By that definition, New York and Washington would be at the top of the list of so-called college cities. They are immensely diverse and have an abundance of museums and performance venues. Mark Hutter, a professor of sociology at Rowan University and author of Experiencing Cities, said that while these cities certainly cater to the creative class and are filled with faculty and students, they aren’t classic college cities.

Put another way, New York and Washington are undoubtedly “college friendly,” but they’re hardly “college centered” like the quintessential college city—Boston...

“The cultural climate of Boston is defined by its universities,” Hutter said. “It seems to be so predominant, and there’s no counter identity unless you talk about the sports teams. That’s unique — the only similarities are small college towns.”

In essence Powers makes the same conclusion about the Boston/Cambridge area that Graham does, but spells it out differently. For the former, “cultural amenities and regional density” fuel Boston’s exceptionalism beyond its academic offerings; for Graham, it is people and their aspirations that color the place. Maybe it is all of the above.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as anchors. Norman Fainstein, chair of the sociology department and former president of Connecticut College, and an author of several books on urban affairs and policy, said that Harvard and M.I.T give Boston
an aura that can’t be matched — even by other cities with several prominent institutions. Combine the academic reputation of the colleges with the cultural amenities and regional density, and you have a formula that makes Boston the prototypical college city.