Brand Avenue

Is the iPhone Why Gen Y Love Public Transport?

The “mystery factor” driving faster patronage growth on public transport may be Gen Y’s enthusiasm for staying connected through smartphones. Speaking to a reporter from The West Australian last week, Professor Peter Newman argued that previous generations found freedom and flexibility through the car, but generation Ys find freedom and flexibility by staying connected to friends, family and workplaces through information devices like laptops or iPhones (H/T Human Transit).

He went on to say: “They can stay connected on a bus or a train. They can bring the office with them. They can bring their study with them. They can’t if they’re driving”. The same news report also quotes a spokesperson from WA’s Public Transport Authority who says commuters aged between 18 and 25 years now make up 35% of all train users and 40% of all bus users, up from 30% and 38% respectively last year. As this same age group constitutes just 13% of all Australians aged over 17 years, that’s a phenomenal set of numbers.

Frankly, I’m a little sceptical about the claim that the patronage share of trains in Perth has risen five percentage points in just one year, but since I can’t find any other relevant information on the age profile of public transport users, I’ll (conditionally) go with it. However I’m in no way sceptical of the proposition that new technologies make public transport more attractive than it used to be. Like reading before it, the mobile phone was a big step forward in the 90s and now 3G means travellers can do even more things on the train or bus. Bring on free wi-fi – I hear even some stations on Sydney’s otherwise sad and sorry rail system have this facility.

I’m not convinced, though, that access to communication and entertainment technologies is the potent driver of young adult patronage that Professor Newman takes it to be. A much more likely driver, I think, is Gen Y’s falling interest in cars. It seems eminently plausible that if young adults aren’t driving as much as previous generations then they’re likely to be using public transport more. This is a topic I’ve discussed before in more detail, but in summary there is a range of reasons why members of Gen Y (born between 1982 and 2001) are driving less than previous generations.

via melbourneurbanist.wordpress.com

The Medium Chill

The medium chill involves what economists call satisficing: abandoning the quest for the ideal in favor of the good-enough. It means stepping off the aspirational treadmill, foregoing some material opportunities and accepting some material constraints in exchange for more time to spend on relationships and experiences.

It turns out, though, that satisficing doesn't come easy to us human beings. We have an extremely hard time saying, "okay, this is good enough." Why?

Part of the reason is that we hate closing off opportunities, and that's what satisficing feels like. We like to keep our options open in case something better comes along.

But will a better thing make us happier? We're inclined to think, "of course it would!" But that's because, as social psychologists have come to understand quite well, we're not very good at predicting what will make us happy. In fact, we suck at it.

Most of all, we radically overestimate the impact of external events, both positive and negative. We think winning the lottery would vault us into bliss and losing a limb in an accident would leave us permanently depressed, but neither is true. Experiments and surveys show that within a year, a lottery winner and an amputee will be roughly as happy as they were before events struck. We drift back to our natural equilibrium fairly quickly. This is counterintuitive and difficult to accept at first, but the implications are profound.

via www.grist.org

Today's word is "satisficing."

One Of the Four Corners of the Earth, Reborn

A 110-square-mile, windswept outcrop of bald rock overlooking the raging north Atlantic, off Newfoundland, Fogo is home to 2,700 fishermen or descendants of, and a considerably larger population of gannets whose shrill cries provide a constant soundtrack.

This is life right on the edge. Indeed the Flat Earth Society considers Fogo Island one of the four corners of a flat earth.

It's also the least likely place you'd think of finding members of a cutting-edge international art scene. But that's exactly who's coming to Fogo now.

By all accounts, traffic should be going in the other direction: for centuries the inhabitants of Fogo lived between wind and waves in search of cod – until a 1992 cod moratorium strangled their livelihood and the small island suffered as the population moved away.

But that's forgetting the enterprising nature and deep sense of home of Fogo's people. And the equally deep pockets of one islander – a dot.com success story who came back with an experiment to give Fogo a future, by using its past.

via www.guardian.co.uk

The Rising Value of Uniqueness

What’s going to happen to destinations we cherish for their sense of place?

I think back to my parents’ or grandparents’ generations. When they traveled or moved from the U.S. to Europe: Poland, Paris, or London—never mind Asia or Africa—they had a completely different experience from being at home. There were completely different places to stay, different foods, different fashions, not to mention different languages. Now I’m struck by the degree to which our world has become homogenous. Whether we’re in France, the United States, China, or Japan, we tend to eat the same foods, wear the same clothes, drive the same cars. But then simultaneously, people are trying to find what’s unique and authentic in the world, and that interest makes those things rise in value. In some ways, capitalism is wrapping its arms around a place’s sense of history and authenticity, viewing them as economic assets, a storehouse of value and profits. And yet, popularity threatens those assets. Coming to grips with that contradiction is an important challenge, because once that history and authenticity are eradicated, they’re impossible to get back.

via travel.nationalgeographic.com

From an interview in the May/June 2011 issue of National Geographic with noted author Richard Florida.

Food As Life, Not Just Lifestyle

 

All the recent talk of Agrarian Urbanism has sent me down a tangential thought process. The difference between life and lifestyle. Lifestyle has come to mean how we spend our money on the weekends – or maybe squeeze in after work – before we get back to the grind. Things that often have more to do with entertainment than community. Over the last 50 years or so, shopping and golf have become central national pastimes.

What if, instead, life became a little more organic again?

Innately, life is internal. Lifestyle is external. However, in my parent’s generation, in a more agrarian time, they were one and the same. We were more connected – by necessity – to what sustains us.

The coming age of austerity has caused all sorts of redefinitions, and has brought a number of reprioritizations. Lifestyle has perhaps been put in its place a bit, giving life its due.

Yesterday, Andrés Duany said something that particularly struck me. That, in the next generation, the market square is likely to replace the shopping square.

When my parents were kids, this was certainly true. The farmer’s market was a gathering place that was not only fully integrated into both local urbanism and culture, but was also essential to life. Most cities had at least one in each quadrant, although sadly few historical examples have survived. The ones that have are regional destinations and National Historic Register material. Now you’d be hard pressed to find a community-based economic development plan without a farmer’s market, in both rural and urban settings.

via placeshakers.wordpress.com

On the horizon: the coming of the market square. Can't wait!

Bias In The Economist’s ‘Most Liveable Cities’ Report

Is Vancouver the best city and Zimbabwe’s Harare the worst city? Yes, according to this year’s Global Liveability by the Economist. The ranking considers indicators in five categories – Stability, Healthcare, Culture & Environment, Education, and Infrastructure.

The choice of indicators seems ambitiously comprehensive and fair. The top-ten chart is populated by, perhaps unsurprisingly, cities of Canada, Northern Europe, and Australasia. However, as far as ‘liveability’ is concerned, how the cities are ranked exposes a systemic bias. To be sure, Vancouver, Vienna, and Melbourne are admirably high-quality cities in and of themselves. By the same token, it goes without saying Nigeria’s Lagos, who scores a scanting 33% in Education, is no child’s paradise. But how the indicators are chosen reveals the report’s pre-selected audience.

One salient instance is ‘humidity/temperature’ which is rated as acceptable, tolerable, uncomfortable, undesirable, or intolerable. This indicator almost naturally rules out Brasilia, Kuala Lumpur, and other tropical cities as remotely ‘tolerable’, much less questioning how one can assess without bias an in-group’s inclination towards certain weather types. Therefore, it’s one thing to factually describe how adverse a country’s weather can be, but it’s quite another to give ‘points’ or grades to something as locale-specific as climate and geography as if the city could attempt to improve or alter. Similarly, another indicator – the climate’s ‘discomfort to travellers’ – relies predominantly on the outsider’s perspective and preference-based attitude. There is no accident, then, that cities with climate rated as ‘tolerable’ (read most pleasant) are also those that pose least discomfort to travellers, ignoring the stark seasonal variations that can make Sydney’s summer as unforgiving or as ‘undesirable’ as Ho Chi Minh or Bangkok. For better or worse, humidity/temperature’ along with other indicators like ‘sporting and cultural availability’, and ‘food and drink’ carry a weight of 25% whereas Education, a basic benchmark of local literacy health, is factored in at only 10%.

via thisbigcity.net

Romanticizing The Grit

Later, national highway systems (initially only for rural and intercity roads, not urban roads) built the nation, and helped people escape the cities for suburbs that were nothing like traditional rural areas. Part of this difference was fully intended: the urban reformers of the 19th century knew damn well that the rural areas had poor access to jobs, and wanted the suburbs to combine the best of both. But the larger part was not: the suburbs were never truly bucolic, could not offer truly bucolic life except to the very rich, and suffer from the same problems of traffic and social dependence (on homeowners’ associations rather than landlords) as the cities.

I contend that the exact same social trends are happening today, but with cities instead of rural areas. Urbanization happened sufficiently long ago that there’s an entire movement idealizing traditional cities. Real America is no longer just Hope and Crawford, but also Chicago’s South Side.

Under the new paradigm, People who railed against urban renewal, such as Jane Jacobs, become objects of romanticism by disaffected suburbanites, As Sharon Zukin notes in The Naked City, the authentic working-class culture of the West Village that Jacobs loved so much is long gone, but people still cling to its urban design and therefore the neighborhood is still in demand. The now-old working class is every bit an object of admiration today as the peasant class was in 1900.

The current trend for urban revitalization is easy to miss, since it’s only starting. It’s comparable to suburbanization in 1910, not 1955. But New York has had a building boom in the last 10 years, and has been growing faster than its suburbs since 1990 (see ACS data for 2009 here, and census data for 1990 and 2000 here). Since 2000 San Francisco has outgrown its suburbs as well, and in many less gentrified cities, such as Philadelphia, the core has had a population explosion even if the surrounding areas declined. What is more, the growing cores tend to be high-income, fueled by condos rather than low-income housing; this has happened in tandem with the suburbanization of poverty.

via pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com

A Simple Idea to Transform The Life of Our Cities

I am perplexed by the almost complete lack of pedestrian districts in North America.  Why is it that car-free streets—designed for pleasurable strolling, shopping and hanging out—which have become as common as stoplights or McDonalds in European city centers, are almost non-existent here?

I’ve only seen a few—a couple of blocks in downtown Boston, Rue Prince Arthur in Montreal, Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica and short stretches of downtown streets in college towns like Boulder, Ithaca, Iowa City, Charlottesville and Burlington, Vermont.  (A glance at Wikipedia turns up a few more, although I notice many on the list, like the Nicollet Mall here in Minneapolis, are not truly car-free.)

Look what we’re missing.  The heart of many, if not most, German, Italian, Dutch, Scandinavian and, increasingly, South American big cities are bustling pedestrian zones that have become favorite spots for young people to gather, lovers to linger, kids to romp, women to show off their new clothes (and discreetly admire the looks of passers-by), men to admire the looks of passers-by (and discreetly show-off their new clothes) and everybody to feel part of the wider community.

via shareable.net

WikiCity – How Citizens can Improve their Cities

When governments don’t build infrastructure, citizens usually complain, but can’t do much about it. They pressure public officials and protest against proposed projects, but that’s as far as citizen participation in city building usually goes. It’s reactive, not proactive.

However, this model of citizen participation is being rethought by citizens around the world. They are taking control over what happens in their cities. They are helping to build them, mostly with paint. Local groups all around the world are taking the initiative and are building the infrastructure that governments refuse or are slow to do.

One example of this type of action is Toronto’s Urban Repair Squad. This group specializes in painting bike lanes and bike boxes. Although their actions are illegal (and sometimes even reversed by the city government), they respond to a need for this type of infrastructure that isn’t being met. They even put out a manual with instructions on how to paint bike lanes youself that has inspired groups all over the world to do the same.

via thisbigcity.net

Are The Millennials Driving Downtown Corporate Relocations?

In spite of the U.S. Census data for the past decade showing continued job de-centralization, there is now much anecdotal evidence for the just the opposite. The Chicago Crain’s Business Journal reports that companies such as Allstate, Motorola, AT&T, GE Capital, and even Sears are re-considering their fringe suburban locations, generally in stand alone campuses, and may head back to downtown Chicago. The irony of Sears possibly moving back to downtown could not be greater, having abandoned the country’s tallest building for an equally huge, though horizontal, building 45 miles from the Loop over 20 years ago.

The New York Times has been reporting this week that UBS, the huge Swiss banking firm, is considering moving their U.S. headquarters back into New York City, possibly to the next World Trade Center building, from Stamford, Connecticut. Even downtown Detroit, the basket case of American downtowns, has seen four major corporate arrivals in recent years … most recently the headquarters of the parent company of Quicken Loans.

The reason in nearly every case? The millennial generation is demanding it. Highly-educated young workers, the life’s blood of many industries, have been flocking to center cities in recent years. Trying to recruit this talent to Stamford, Conn., or Hoffman Estates, Ill. is exceedingly difficult. They are voting with their feet for a hip, high-density walkable lifestyle and a reverse commute to the ‘burbs is not in the cards for most of them.

via www.tnr.com

In Scotland, A Public Art Makeover

It has been derided as one of the UK's greatest carbuncles, a "dismal" and "motley" tourist trap famous for being the most northerly settlement on mainland Britain and a launching point for countless charity walks.

But now the windswept and desolate resort at John O'Groats on the northern coast of Scotland is to have an unlikely makeover, by a group of professional street artists armed with spraypaints, giant graphic art posters and a vast, three-dimensional Rubik's cube.

A long-awaited £15m redevelopment of the resort, coastal paths and harbour is finally getting under way and as part of it a street art company based near Inverness has been given a derelict hotel to play with.

The redevelopment of John O'Groats House hotel will be the largest event in an arts weekend in early July commissioned by the regional development agency Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE), when storytellers, ceramic artists and sculptors will "transform" the resort to mark the start of the modernisation programme.

via www.guardian.co.uk

Britain's "Hippest Street"

Gateshead has beaten London in a competition to find the hippest street in Britain.

South Shore Road – home to the Lord Foster-designed Sage music centre and the Baltic contemporary arts building – has won the title in a contest run by Google to name the best streets in Britain. The road, which overlooks the "Blinking Eye" millennium bridge and has a view across the water to Newcastle, inspired a recent travel guide to urge visitors to "think Budapest".

London may shrug off not winning the "most romantic street" category, which went to Copse Hill Road in Lower Slaughter, a corner of the Cotswolds equally famous for quaint villages and appalling traffic jams involving tourist buses. It will, however, have pained the capital's retailers that it did not even make the shortlist for "best shopping street", won by Alnwick's Bondgate Within in Northumberland, with Kingston's Market Place in Surrey a surprising second.

London could only manage third place on the hip list with Whitecross Street, Islington – once renowned for its poverty and squalor, now for its smart foodie street market. Call Lane, in Leeds, came second, while Seel Street, Liverpool, and Henry Street, Belfast, ran fourth and fifth.

The victory for Gateshead is a tribute to the extraordinary reinvention of Tyneside, led by the local authorities, as a culture, arts and clubbing destination after the collapse of its traditional shipbuilding and heavy industry, with new galleries, cafes, and boutique hotels on every street corner. It was the launch venue last month for Gateshead's bid to win city status, to be awarded to a contender next year to mark the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.

Mick Henry, leader of Gateshead council, said local people would treasure the hippest street award. "It says everything that needs to be said about Gateshead – modern, hip, stylish and ambitious."

via www.guardian.co.uk

Why Aren’t We Building ‘Emotionally Connected’ Cities?

We think of city infrastructure in a particular way – sort of like bones and connective tissue in a body; the major structural components that support our existence. Beyond the bones, we need to include key pieces that nourish our higher selves- our minds and spirits. If cities are merely paved surfaces and police and fire service, there is nothing that distinguishes one place from another. But this isn’t the case: The Gallup Soul of the Community survey from 2008 to 2010 found strong correlations between peoples’ emotional attachment to the communities they lived in, and higher levels of local GDP. They also found a link between passion for and loyalty to places, and the health of the local economy.

These results should not be surprising — we all recognize that when children, pets, plants or even objects are loved, they thrive (yes objects – just look at the car of someone who loves it). So this emotional dimension to infrastructure should not be seen as superfluous. Not long ago, the medical community discounted the idea that sunlight, plants, laughter and human proximity were inside the serious discussion of medicine. Today, the best hospitals like the Mayo Clinic employ design teams to incorporate gardens, social activity rooms, and more to improve patient outcomes. These elements do not take away from the core science and technology, but rather provide a necessary compliment to our overall approach to health.

So why is it so hard to think about these elements for our cities today?

via www.infrastructurist.com

San Jose Moving Beyond Its "Sprawling Adolescence"

Like other young metropolises developed in the 1950s and 1960s, San Jose has tried to move beyond its sprawling adolescence by encouraging high-rises downtown and implementing urban growth boundaries. But while it has yet to establish the real density and mix of uses that characterize a truly urban setting, the convergence of several major projects west of downtown—from high speed rail to a new baseball stadium—could create something truly novel in the Silicon Valley region. In April, the vision for the new neighborhood, the Diridon Station Area Plan, got initial approval from San Jose’s city council, and the planning department will begin putting together a draft EIR this month, to be completed in early 2012.

“It’s a huge step for San Jose, which I like to call Northern California’s biggest suburb,” said Jeremy Madsen, the executive director of Greenbelt Alliance, a Bay Area advocacy group for smart growth. And, he believes, an important step towards making San Jose a great city.

The prime catalyst for the development is the city’s Diridon Station, and its future as a major transit hub. The Caltrain commuter rail station, located a few blocks from downtown San Jose, will be where high-speed rail stops in San Jose, and eventually, where a BART regional transit station will be built. In addition, the Oakland A’s new ballpark—assuming current negotiations work out—will be another addition to the 250-acre area, currently devoted to light-industrial uses.

via archpaper.com

"Mother of All Airports" Becomes A Garden

Once described by Norman Foster as ‘the mother of all airports’, Tempelhof Airport terminal was closed to the public in October 2008. The airbase is steeped in history, having been originally constructed in 1927 and used to assemble Stuka Dive Bombers and Focke Wulf FW 190 Fighter Planes in World War II. In more recent years, the colossal facility has acted as a commercial airport and maintained its role as a key constituent of Berlin’s urban fabric.

Two Edinburgh-based practices have now joined forces to bring this historical masterpiece back to life. GROSS. MAX. and Sutherland Hussey were recently selected as winners of an international competition to create a large public garden with associated buildings on the site, simultaneously preserving the original shell limestone terminal complex.

At 400 hectares the completed park will be one of the largest urban garden developments in Europe and is set to cost approximately €61.5m. Due to complete in 2017, this green urban scheme looks to frame the memory of an iconic symbol in Berlin’s history, once used by Prussian and later German forces as an army parade ground.

Unconfirmed tales tell of three underground levels which were flooded by a Russian Commander during a raid in 1945 and remain underwater to this day. Over the years this 1.2km long terminal building has endured multiple battles and immense volumes of commercial passengers, acted as a parade ground and construction site for warplanes. Now it is to be transformed once again, and thus the story continues...

via www.worldarchitecturenews.com

Tagging Vancouver's Neighbourhoods

Vancouver is made up of a vibrant series of distinct neighbourhoods. The City of Vancouver is testing a new, online way to connect residents with projects in their neighbourhoods.  Anyone logging into PlaceSpeak.com can express ideas about city issues, but only residents can vote. PlaceSpeak is a location-based community consultation platform that connects citizen users with proponents of issues taking place in their own neighbourhoods.

 
 

To help promote PlaceSpeak—and build neighborhood pride—the City and PlaceSpeak are  launching a neighbourhood emblem contest. “Tag Your ‘Hood“ invites the public to use our creative genius and come up with symbols for each of Vancouver’s 26 neighbourhoods. They want to know what the various communities in the city mean to each of us.

via yuriartibise.com

Underground Parking Signals "Cultural Shift"

One surefire way to get under suburbanites’ skin is to mess with their parking, and there are few places more sacred, some say, than their wide-open grocery store lots.

“For me, parking in a garage for grocery shopping is really weird,” said Bolormaa Baljinnyam, 40, of Rockville as she waited May 24 for an elevator with a baguette in her cart. “It’s kind of not natural.”

As fellow shopper Marcia Simon, 53, of Potomac put it: “I hate it, hate it! I’ve been in a lot of indoor parking lots, and they don’t usually intimidate me, but this feels very crammed in and very tight.”

Such complaints highlight a cultural shift taking place as planners transform parts of the sprawling suburbs into urban hubs where the car will no longer be king. The vast parking lots born out of the 20th century suburban boom, particularly those near Metrorail stations, are giving way to more clusters of high-rise office buildings, condominiums and stores where people can walk more easily or park once for multiple activities.

via www.washingtonpost.com

Your Commute Is Killing You

This week, researchers at Umea University in Sweden released a startling finding: Couples in which one partner commutes for longer than 45 minutes are 40 percent likelier to divorce. The Swedes could not say why. Perhaps long-distance commuters tend to be poorer or less educated, both conditions that make divorce more common. Perhaps long transit times exacerbate corrosive marital inequalities, with one partner overburdened by child care and the other overburdened by work. But perhaps the Swedes are just telling us something we all already know, which is that commuting is bad for you. Awful, in fact.

Commuting is a migraine-inducing life-suck—a mundane task about as pleasurable as assembling flat-pack furniture or getting your license renewed, and you have to do it every day. If you are commuting, you are not spending quality time with your loved ones. You are not exercising, doing challenging work, having sex, petting your dog, or playing with your kids (or your Wii). You are not doing any of the things that make human beings happy. Instead, you are getting nauseous on a bus, jostled on a train, or cut off in traffic.

via www.slate.com

Quantifying the impact of commuting, beyond the costs of gas and time.

Parenting By Zip Code

I ran into some “mom culture shock” years ago when I moved from Los Angeles to Seattle with my kids, 4 and 2 at the time. On a nice July afternoon, I took them to a sandy Puget Sound beach, peeled down to my bathing suit and, as I was applying sunscreen, realized that I was the only one of a dozen mothers on the beach in a swimsuit.

It turned out that Seattle motherhood had its own rules, on matters both big and small. Take preschool birthday parties: In L.A., cakes were from a bakery and presents were deposited in a bedroom, to be opened after the guests left. The parents stood around and talked about movie deals. In Seattle, you’d arrive to pick up your child from a party to find toys and wrapping all over the living room and the crumbled remains of Betty Crocker or Safeway on the table. L.A. moms didn’t wear their kids on their tummies or backs; that was for dads only.

Another culture shift awaited when we moved to Orange County when the kids were 11 and 9. While mothers had filled the halls of my kids’ schools in Seattle – helping with art exhibits, international assemblies, and Books and Bagels clubs – I was usually the lone parent in the classrooms at my children’s school here. There was the PTA and fundraising, but the cultural norm didn’t include mothers on a daily basis at school. On the plus side, my daughter rocketed ahead in math at her O.C. school, filling out worksheet after worksheet. If a student at our Seattle schools had come home with a worksheet, parents would have organized a protest.

via parenting.blogs.nytimes.com

The terroir of parenting.

Under Construction

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Please bear with me as I tinker with the blog! It's long overdue for some streamlining--both in how it looks and in how I use it. When all is said and done, the result will be easier to use (for me) and more frequently updated (for you).