Today, a few noteworthy follow-ups and add-ons to earlier posts, and a bit of clerical work.
- A global search for authenticity arrives in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, as a German developer imagines today's favela as tomorrow's development coup de grace. Crazy, possibly; but who can argue with the view?
Rolf Glaser zips his motorbike up the twisting alleyways of Vidigal slum, past a bunch of cheerful, gun-packing drug traffickers, and emerges at a cliffside plateau next to some demolished shacks. This, the German developer says, could be Rio de Janeiro's next tourist hotspot.
"Can you imagine sitting up here on a terrace with a glass of wine?" he muses, motioning toward the sparkling azure Atlantic Ocean.
Many Brazilians, Glaser admits, think he is missing something by planning to turn one of the hundreds of Rio slums — whose names are synonymous with violence, drug-dealing and poverty — into a trendy new spot on the city's tourist map. Residents are often criminalized in people's minds purely by association with the shantytowns, or "favelas," which are often controlled by heavily armed drug gangs. But Glaser is one of a small, bold band of foreigners going where most Rio residents fear to tread, catering to tourists who want to see the "real" Rio beyond the Copacabana beach district and the Christ the Redeemer statue.
Vidigal played the backdrop in parts of City of God, after all. (Earlier.)
- In the very last print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, an update on Starbucks. I find their struggles fascinating, for the civic role their outlets often play, as extensions of the street and guardian of "third places" worldwide; and for their strenuous attempts to create something in both product and experience (which ties to design at all scales, of course) that is at once both local and global, idiosyncratic and uniform.
Company CEO Howard Schultz:
"There's a myth out there," Schultz said. "The myth is that there is a $4 cup of coffee at Starbucks."
He pointed out that half the beverages sold cost less than $3, and
one-third cost less than $2. He also said that the company would defend
its image on cost and on quality.
"We can't stay quiet," Schultz said. "Don't let anyone tell you that their coffee or that coffee is the same as Starbucks. It's not. We've been silent about these issues, and I can assure you that we're not going to be silent for too long." The company has been stepping up on traditional advertising and will likely continue to do so, marking a change in strategy from its historic communication with customers by word-of-mouth.
"The issue of perception has got to be addressed," Schultz said. "One of the things I recently read is that Starbucks Coffee Co. is not cool any more. I've been here 27 years, we have never set out to be cool. We don't want to be cool, we want to be relevant. We want to be trusted. We want to be valued."
(Earlier.)
- Outside Toronto, a new neighborhood "fails." New Urbanists, city officials, and residents point fingers and wag tongues.
More than 10 years ago, a charismatic Cuban American architect
embarked on a bold plan to transform a plot of Ontario farmland into a
bustling urban utopia, a place where dwellers would swap cars for
walking shoes and enjoy a sense of urbanity in what would have
otherwise been just another suburb.
Or so that was Andres Duany’s plan.
Instead, cars today zip up and down the narrow avenues and not a
pedestrian, charming coffee shop, nor restaurant is in sight. It is a
Tuesday afternoon, and two beauty salons are inexplicably closed for
the day, a real estate office is locked with snow piled high outside
its door, not a single child is playing in Mews Park, and the
convenience store sees only a trickling of residents. Here and there a
York Regional Transit bus rolls along, but public transportation to,
from and within Cornell is far from comprehensive.
“The mindset was that people wanted a village feel, but what emerged was a sort of pseudo-village,” said Michael Spaziani, a Toronto architect who a decade ago helped create Cornell’s open-space master plan, adding that Cornell is so far nothing more than a “cuter form of sprawl.”
What's the matter? Duany believes the developers currently constructing Cornell--apparently free from the formal regulatory guidance that often accompanies the development of New Urbanist communities--are being careless. However, a couple of smart comments on the article at Planetizen point out that the relationship between the development and its greater context--at the edge of the metropolitan area, with few services nearby and no pre-existing fabric to connect to--is what's problematic:
1) This should come as a surprise to no one, least of all city planners. Since the mid 1990's many of us have decried the notion of "new urban" development in the greenfields. It is not urban and it certainly is not new. These developments (Duany, Calthorpe, etc...) are antithetical to the notion of urban planning. They are what they appear to be, a new style of suburb that does not produce quite as much environmental guilt in the new residents. In fact, they are more dangerous as a result....
2) Cornell's particular circumstances aside, New Urbanist practitioners should focus on retooling existing urban areas rather than trying to create them out of whole cloth. It should be no surprise that TND oases like Cornell and Celebration don't function as intended from inception because they are only a small feature of the large metropolitan desert that surrounds them. If the dominant metropolitan infrastructure dictates long car trips between single use areas of residence, employment, retail, and recreation, it will swamp whatever hoped-for effects a small pocket of TND development will bring. Moreover, the New Urbanist development's incongruity with its larger environment creates an inescapable feeling of inauthenticity, much like I experience when I visit a "town center"-style shopping mall....
That's not to say that Markham's leadership isn't trying to create something unique and sustainable as the city develops. In fact, the city is home to both Cornell and Cathedraltown, a New Urbanist community with another story, featured here earlier.
- As for the clerical work mentioned above: Brand Avenue has entered the world of Twitter, here, and in the right-hand column. Right now is a trial period--to be honest, I'm not convinced that Twitter actually does anything, and I'm rather partial to my Delicious bookmarks as a mode of networking. I'd enjoy being proven wrong, though. And hey, maybe it will help us all find new jobs?
