Brand Avenue: Four More Years

Well, readers, George Washington's 276th birthday is upon us, as is Carnaval, and Purim is in just a couple of weeks. While unrelated, these things remind me that Brand Avenue turns four years old this week! So it's my time once again to thank you sincerely for your interest, your input, and your support of a project that I continue to enjoy.

Writing about place, space, and identity--a trio of thoroughly malleable concepts that, essentially, are what propelled me into architecture and urban planning, and continue to drive the content of this site--remains a valuable and gratifying exercise for me. I hope that you've enjoyed what you've seen here over the last year, and I am excited about the year to come.

A brief recap of the last year:

- In October, I attended the Creative Cities Summit in Detroit, and managed to post every day while I was there. It was fascinating, and I learned and saw a great deal.

(Above, the exterior of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit at night, with neon piece by Martin Creed over mural by Barry McGee. via)

One impression of the Summit that endures with me is the idea that "design" solutions to urban problems lie more in the creative allocation of financial, natural, and human resources, and less in any self-referential back-and-forth about architecture. But then I look around at news of collapsing economies and stimulus packages and wonder if this is, in fact, that thesis being brought to bear; or if the reality of it is that design and economics walk hand in hand, and that practitioners of both would benefit from knowing more about the other.

I hasten to add that, in retrospect, it was both eerie and poignant to hear these things pronounced in the bowels of the Renaissance Center, the overblown symbol of once-invincible General Motors, especially as time passes and economic woes permeate most everything.

- Focusing on the areas where economic forces that shape urban form are perhaps most powerfully visible--the suburbs--Brand Avenue virtually visited Buckeye, Arizona; the new shopping arcades of Glendale, California and Allen, Texas; and the big box retail rings of the postmodern metropolis. Each provided food for thought about the future of the urban edge and its ongoing, inevitable metamorphosis.

I'm reminded of something Renzo Piano said a few years ago in a Guardian interview, reacting to riots that shook the high-rise banlieues of Paris:

The big topic of today, and of the next 20 years, will be peripheries. How you can transform peripheries into a town. What is happening today in Paris is happening everywhere. It is mad, mad, and the insensitivity of people and politicians . . . They create ghettos. In Paris it is particularly bad. Now people are starting to understand that the real challenge of the next 30 years is to turn peripheries into cities. The peripheries are the cities that will be. Or not. Or will never be.

Above, "The Gardens of Gaithersburg," a plan by Daniel Rippeteau Architects that converts unused big box space to a "truck garden," wherein the parking lot becomes an orchard, and the indoor space is retooled for agricultural production. Another take, here.

- An ongoing exploration of the production of urban identity, both official and otherwise, yielded interesting results. Stretching from Houston to Belfast, Middlesbrough, Montreal, London, Curitiba, and Little Rock, examples of multidisciplinary efforts that merge marketing with architecture, preservation with economics, tourism with planning, art with transportation. Below, the book Houston: It's Worth It, the physical artifact of an unofficial marketing campaign of the same name.

- Also, I linked Brand Avenue to Streetsblog and the Sustainable Cities Collective. Check them out. Brand Avenue got a bit of press, too!

More to come soon--but in the meantime, please feel free to visit previous birthday lists. And a list of some personal favorite posts that reach back further. All book reviews from the last three years: here, here, and here. Timelapse city video posts, here and here.