Brand Avenue

The Power of Love

The stars of the romantic comedy Sex and the City spent six seasons searching for love. Relationships came and went, Big, Aidan and the Russian, but the love affair that remained constant was the one they had with their city. Their emotional connection to the vibrancy, character and style of New York was the show's consistent thread....

While urban design has focused on the engineering of movement, it has ignored the issues of beauty, social engagement and livability that inspire emotional connections to the city. Who could be in love with the oceans of asphalt and the concrete canyons of Pembina Highway?...

The great cities of the future will be the ones that successfully reintroduce the human spirit into their urban environment. Cities that invest in creative architecture, public art, green space and the urban streetscape while promoting vibrancy through density and mixed-use development will be the ones that rekindle an urban love affair with its people. The modern transient economy will no longer settle for inhumane solutions to urban design....

Our young people do not flock to cities like Vancouver looking for bigger roads and better parking. They are searching for a city to be in love with. Jogging along the sea wall, shopping on Robson or taking the Sky Train to work, are the types of experiences they are seeking and we must provide in order to compete.

via www.winnipegfreepress.com

An essay about Winnipeg, true of everywhere.

What Stanford Loses

Truth is, the locus of innovation has been shifting away from the technological to the social, and from engineers to “culturistas” for some time now. It’s no accident that Kickstarter began through indie music (trying to find a new way to fund concerts) and is headquartered on Rivington Street (and soon to move to Brooklyn). It’s no accident that a large and growing number of successful startup folks have music, design, or art in their background, in addition to, or in place of, engineering. These include the people who brought you Apple (yes, it is still important to remember Steve Jobs wasn’t an engineer, loved Bob Dylan and music, was entranced with the aesthetic simplicities of Japanese and German Bauhaus design, and framed himself as an artist), YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr, Etsy, Airbnb, Behance, Instagram, Vimeo, Hunch, Gowalla, Path, Blurb, Square, About.me, YCombinator, the Designer Fund, and many more.

Designers, musicians, and artists understand the user experience in a way that engineers don’t. TechCrunch highlighted the shift away from engineering as a driver of innovation with an article on the death of specs. It said that product reviewers now focus on the user experience, not speed or memory or power--all the techie stuff engineers obsess about and forced all of us to pretend we cared about for so many years. That “user experience” is more and more social, local, and urban. Music, fashion, food, movies, advertising, art, personal manufacturing--the “indie” stuff of “indie” capitalism, are increasingly the driving forces of and the models for innovation today. And they tend to take place in cities. You need to be in Chicago (or perhaps Cincinnati) to create Groupon; Seattle (where they read a lot) for Amazon; Yelp in foodie San Francisco; Portland for Weiden + Kennedy’s “Imported from Detroit” ads; New York for Kickstarter.

via www.fastcodesign.com

Fascinating article. Ostensibly about Stanford's loss to Cornell in the battle for a massive new applied technology campus in New York City; but really about the "where" of startups. Building on local culture and existing market niches, startup culture is more location-specific than we may readily acknowledge.

A Vision of IKEA Urbanism

Does the perfect neighborhood that suits everyone exist? As an experiment it’s interesting, and also for bloggers and other media it’s nice. But can IKEA do the same to urbanism as what it did to interior design? Is it able to create neighborhoods that are as comfortable, cheap, good-looking and popular with the majority as its furniture? Perhaps it can, with its design skills as well as its capacity to organize big areas, as IKEA did to its shops that almost turned into complete villages themselves.

On the other hand, we should conclude that ‘one-size-fits-all urbanism’ will not be good for the variety and attractiveness of cities in general. Imagine the same number of people to live in an IKEA house as owning a Billy cupboard… These neighborhoods are not meant to solve problems or improve the city to some extent. In essence they are there to earn money for the company. The simple idea of IKEA is to give the people what they think they want...I think this neighborhood will feel the same as everything else from IKEA as soon as it’s realized. It looks better in the brochure than in real.

via popupcity.net

Can the kit-of-parts for which IKEA is known be rolled out at an urban scale?

Given that a place is made out of people, I doubt that this development will be as soulless as the author suggests. Then again, can a built environment provided by IKEA do the community that will inevitably grow up in the place justice?

Portland, The Gradual City

As Portland grows and changes, is there a sense of resentment from locals as new people come in and create their own vision of what they want from the city?

It’s not so much that. Really, any new resident has that sense where you go to a place and you want to shut the door behind you. People discover Portland in a certain way and resent what it becomes later. Everyone has this insecurity about Portland like, ‘when does it arrive?’ and that comes with growing pains ... Portland is a very curated city. Because of growth slowly, deliberately taking shape, people here have been able to make it what they want it to be. It’s almost like a “Greatest Hits” city. It’s a little weird, but I love it.

When creating content for Portlandia, do you and Fred need to be in Portland the whole time or does it benefit to step outside that and develop ideas in another city?

Fred and I do spend a couple weeks in Los Angeles putting the show together. It helps to leave Portland at times but it’s more beneficial when we’re all here and entrenched in our environment. We want to transcend what Portland is because there’s a version of it in every city. You want to give it a realness. Ironically, the more specific we are about Portland, the more it translates to a broader audience.

via www.theatlanticcities.com

A bit of a great interview with Carrie Brownstein, of Sleater-Kinney and the show Portlandia.