Brand Avenue

National Identity and Disaster Movies

When films like Independence Day show news reports of spacecraft threatening major global cities, they always seem to leave out Calgary or Montreal. For some reason, Godzilla has yet to make a detour to Halifax and Roland Emmerich has yet to drop an aircraft carrier on Medicine Hat. And when Canadian landmarks are destroyed on film, like Vancouver's Lion's Gate Bridge in the centerpiece action sequence of the upcoming Final Destination 5 or Toronto City Hall in Resident Evil: Apocalypse, they're meant to be located either in the U.S. or in a fictional metropolis.

The more you think about it, this lack of apocalyptic destruction isn't just baffling – it's infuriating, and more than a little bit depressing. Disaster movies target cities like Los Angeles and London because they occupy a massive place in the global imagination. 2012 toppled the Vatican because it's the biggest symbol of one of the world's major religions. The fact that Canada hasn't been attacked on film has an implicit, dispiriting message: The rest of the world just doesn't care about us, or about that giant antenna we built in the middle of downtown Toronto. As architecture professor Max Page wrote in the Boston Globe, the fact that New York is the frequent setting of people's worst fears means that it is also the home to their greatest hopes. If Canada never bears witness to its own destruction, it suggests we have nothing worth destroying in the first place.

via www.theglobeandmail.com

On wanting a particular piece of the pop culture pie, and what that says about place.

Goodbye, White Picket Fence

After nine years, we did what some people would deem inappropriate. Others might even call it unthinkable. We sold our suburban house, got rid of 90 per cent of our stuff and moved back to the city.

It’s not like we were empty-nesters downsizing once the kids had left. No, we still had the kids in tow – two in elementary and one in high school.

You’re not supposed to do that, right? You’re supposed to covet the backyard you never really used. And Dad’s supposed to work a gazillion miles away so the kids don’t see him much, and when they do, he’s recovering from the commute.

Driving everywhere in the suburbs was absolutely essential, while walking anywhere was practically non-existent. The neighbours were okay, but with the houses so far apart and all the entering and exiting from the garage, we didn’t get to know them that well.

Just over the horizon from our fixer-upper was a huge new development. Like the rest of us, it was plopped in the middle of nowhere. But no matter – the houses were big and impressive. There they sat in all their majestic glory, like a salute to the North American dream: “Congratulations! You have arrived. You’ve made it!”

I wanted to feel that way. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to aspire to? What was wrong with me?

via www.theglobeandmail.com

We're going to hear more and more stories along these lines in the coming years.

"Poor But Sexy" vs. Manhattanism

"Brooklyn" now carries with it a cultural cache that I have become inured to after living here for 5 years. Brooklyn, in my world, means visitors asking if my neighborhood is safe to visit at night, RSVPs that don't show up to events, friends in Manhattan complaining about how "accessible" various neighborhoods are. Brooklyn, outside of New York, means something else. Basically, it means the enclave of Williamsburg.

Rather than call one city the next [other] city, I hope it is possible to develop useful terms and analytical tools to describe and measure contemporary urbanism. If Detroit is being called the next Brooklyn or Berlin, it is possibly because we have not yet sufficiently understood what Brooklyn and Berlin are made of. We have not yet created the terms of assessment, parsed the mechanisms at work, so we must point from one thing to another, like a child calling every dog by the name of the family puppy. "Look, it's another Fido, and another!"

As far as the similarities from one urban circumstance to another, there is a case to be made for the emergence of a global typology and the slow transformation of American cities toward a global model. White flight, the demographic phenomenon that defined American cities in the 2nd half of the twentieth century, is finally unwinding itself. Witness the rise of the "hipster," which is really just a polite and racially sublimated way of talking about white culture as urban culture. Alongside this, we are witnessing the rise of the black and immigrant suburbs. American cities are moving in the direction of operating more like European and South American cities. The latter part of the twentieth century in this country was an anomaly compared to global urban and suburban development, and that historical moment is over.

via www.domusweb.it

Unpacking the idea that Detroit is "the next" [insert city name here].

Buzzword: Urban "Acupuncture"

Could urban design infused with Chinese medicinal theory offer a solution? Watch for the "urban acupuncture" movement to transform urban life in the coming decade. Traced to Finnish architect Marco Casagrande, this school of thought eschews massive urban renewal projects in favour a of more localised and community approach.

"Urban acupuncture is a surgical and selective intervention into the urban environment," said Los Angeles architect and professor John Southern in an interview, "instead of large scale projects that involve not only thousands of acres, but investment and infrastructure that municipalities can no longer provide."

Southern explained that the urban acupuncture approach treats cities like a living organism. Such micro-targeting, low-cost, democratic, and empowering tactics provide urban residents the much coveted green space that they desire without driving to a specific location. Although city politicians want to score points from the creation of enormous parks or even large building complexes that score a green certification, those projects often run over budget and even take away space that could benefit local communities in other ways. Furthermore, Southern noted that only a limited number of practitioners profit from large scale projects, while micro-targeted initiatives benefit more individual designers and architects.

via www.guardian.co.uk

Small is the new large. Sad, though, to acknowledge that municipalities (at least in the States) typically can't be relied upon for project support nowadays.

From Holland, "Starting" With Bike Lanes

For American cities to think outside the car would seem to require a mental sea change. Then again, Americans, too, are practical, no-nonsense people. And Zef Hemel, the chief planner for the city of Amsterdam, reminded me that sea changes do happen. “Back in the 1960s, we were doing the same thing as America, making cities car-friendly,” he said. Funnily enough, it was an American, Jane Jacobs, who changed the minds of European urban designers. Her book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” got European planners to shift their focus from car-friendliness to overall livability.

When I noted that Manhattan’s bike lanes seem to be used more for recreation than transport — cyclists in Amsterdam are dressed in everything from jeans to cocktail dresses, while those in Manhattan often look like spandex cyborgs — Mr. Hemel told me to give it time. “Those are the pioneers," he said. “You have to start somewhere.”

What he meant was, “You start with bike lanes” — that is, with the conviction that urban planning can bring about beneficial cultural changes. But that points up another mental difference: the willingness of Europeans to follow top-down social planning. America’s famed individualism breeds an often healthy distrust of the elite. I’m as quick as any other red-blooded American to bristle at European technocrats telling me how to live. (Try buying a light bulb or a magazine after 6 p.m. in Amsterdam, where the political elite have decreed that workers’ well-being requires that shops be open only during standard office hours, precisely when most people can’t shop.)

But while many Americans see their cars as an extension of their individual freedom, to some of us owning a car is a burden, and in a city a double burden. I find the recrafting of the city in order to lessen — or eliminate — the need for cars to be not just grudgingly acceptable, but, yes, an expansion of my individual freedom. So I say (in this case, at least): Go, social-planning technocrats! If only America’s cities could be so free.

via www.nytimes.com

Russell Shorto's observations on Holland predictably make me green with envy.