The sculpture will fill what is currently a rather bleak landscape between Middlesbrough's Transporter bridge and the Riverside stadium and, appropriately, at 110m will be as long as a football pitch. The 50m-high steel structure consists of a pole, a circular ring and an oval ring, all held together by a kind of cat's cradle of steel wire.

Part of a regional regeneration scheme, Temenos' construction will be followed by similar structures in several nearby communities. The "why" of the project is explained by Joe Docherty, the head of Tees Valley Regeneration:

He said it was a declaration that the area had changed, that it was prepared to take risks. "This isn't something we need in the Tees valley. It's something we deserve. This is a calling card that the area is on the turn."

Kapoor, who is collaborating with structural engineer Cecil Balmond on the sculptures' designs, expands on how public art, particularly at such a massive scale, can transform perceptions of place:

"In many ways scale is a deep, mysterious and wonderful thing, and yet at some levels it gets a bad name. To reinvigorate and re-initiate scale is one of the things we're about," said Kapoor.

"There are all the arguments about public art - couldn't we have spent money on a hospital, say - and all the arguments are correct. But what happens after a while is that these things have the possibility of infiltrating people's consciousness. You can't say it's going to happen, but you can hope it does."

Watch a video about the project, here.

Further south in Sheffield, two "self-proclaimed 'post-industrial city lovers' in their mid-20s" propose the adaptive reuse of two disused cooling towers, landmarks on the city's skyline. (Below, via Flickr. More photos)

The Tinsley cooling towers - bleak, elegant, real - are often the first and last thing people see as they enter and leave the city. But soon, like Sheffield's industrial golden age, they will be consigned to history, demolished to make way for a new power station....Over the last three years, the 1940s towers have become symbolic of the battle for the city's soul - between those determined to create a 21st-century gleaming metropolis and those intent on preserving and celebrating some of the city's industrial heritage.

Tom James and Tom Keeley...have been campaigning to have the redundant 76 metre-high towers, which stand just 17 metres from the motorway, transformed into a space for public art. "The idea was to transform the cooling towers into something amazing," Keeley says. "Our Angel of the North - something that would really make people think about Sheffield differently".

But after competitions, petitions and endless meetings, after internet campaigns, the promise of public money and support of internationally acclaimed artists, the dream is finally over. E.ON, the company that owns the towers, has said they must be destroyed. 

Watch a beautifully done promotional video explaining James' and Keeley's vision for the towers as "icons for the evolving city," here. Despite the apparent, tragically unhappy ending coming up for the towers, a really brilliant idea.

The new brand is spearheaded by a heart-shaped B logo, accompanied by messages including the word 'be' — such as 'be welcome', 'be part of it', and 'be vibrant'. Its aim is to help market Belfast to international visitors and potential investors, promoting the city as an exciting, vibrant and welcoming place....

[Lord Mayor] Hartley said the unveiling of the new branding of Belfast was significant. "This is not about a logo on a piece of paper. It is an opportunity for us all to embrace a new, vibrant and forward looking identity and ethos which says that Belfast has come of age. We all know how unique the city and its people are and now we have a golden opportunity to take the message that this is Belfast's time, its moment and we want to share it with everyone. Be inspired."  

Forming the beginning of a phrase, the logo is literally "read" as open-ended, suggestive of possibility and appropriateness no matter the situation or sentiment.

Belfast's malleable new identity comes in multiple colors, too. And there are television spots to expand the theme of individual and collective inspiration. Is it effective? Does it inspire love? Does it effectively tie to the experience of place? Time will tell.

     

- An interesting Smart City Radio program from 2007 explores the rebranding and redevelopment of a historic, and downtrodden, neighborhood in Cincinnati, here. Following that, an interview with a professor at SUNY Buffalo introduces the Tactical Sound Garden, wherein urban space is "overlaid" by audio files chosen to evoke certain feelings in different locations. Thus a place is continually modified through the way it "sounds."

- Speaking of sound, read about one woman's obsessive collecting of songs for the creation of "cinematic moments" for this summer's Olympics. Explore another facet of branding with sound:

When NBC's producers prepare a segment, they use the database to zero in on the exact tone they're looking to set. Producers can search by artist, album, instrumentation, mood, decade, and culture of origin, so when recapping a Norwegian's javelin victory subsequently overturned by a rules violation, they can utilize key words such as "rousing," "Scandinavian," and "moody" to hone their choices.

- In Philadelphia, Inga Saffron reviews Robert Stern's new Comcast Tower, 58 stories of smooth silver glass, a "high gloss," "frozen mountain cataract," opened earlier this month.

(via Flickr; that's some curtainwall!)

From Saffron's review:

Ultimately, though, it's the image of the great obelisk, shimmering like mercury in the afternoon sun, that many will remember. They may eventually forgive its vacuous facade, preferring to see the glass expanses as a blank canvas on which the city can project any dream it chooses.

- In Melbourne, a fun video from Streetsblog extols the virtues of the city's laneways and sidewalks, and the public realm that thrives there. The filmmaker writes:

Melbourne is simply wonderful. You can get lost in the nooks and crannies that permeate the city. As you walk you feel like free-flowing air with no impediments to your enjoyment. For a city with nearly four million people, the streets feel much like the hustle and bustle of New York City but without omnipresent danger and stress cars cause.

Related: A fine article from the Toronto Star on "the lost art of strolling:"

And so it is a measure of how far removed we have grown from ourselves that many of us now see walking as extraneous. It is viewed as a kind of hobby, a pastime, a luxury, certainly not essential, and definitely not a means of transportation.

Indeed, we have reached a point where we classify ourselves according to whether we walk or drive. Thus we are either drivers or pedestrians. Because walking is not considered necessary, we give precedence to those who travel in cars and trucks. From their perspective, people who walk are obstacles, in the way.

As the French realized 150 years ago, walking--specifically urban walking--is about much more than getting from one place to another. It is a mode of being, a way of relating, of existing in the world. The mere act of going out onto the street opens up a whole set of possibilities that lie at the heart of urban life.

- Also in Toronto, a couple improves upon what is already a significant undertaking--the demolition of their home and the construction of its replacement--with exhaustive documentation of their process.

With an eye toward creating a resource for other would-be builders, Jeremy Bell shares the ongoing story of 360 Winnett Avenue:

We had originally planned to build a rather traditional home, however at some point along the way our priorities changed. While we still need the extra space, we've come to realize we should be building a smarter home and not just a bigger home. We've also come to appreciate our eco-responsibilities and we felt it was important to document the realities that came with this decision.

So what started as a simple renovation, has blossomed into a true eco-challenge. How "green" can the average family actually be? What sacrifices will need to be made along the way? Is building "green" even worth it? I also think it's important to show people that building green is indeed possible, but doing so requires a change of priorities....

From start to finish, I want to share our experience with complete transparency; finding a contractor, choosing an architect, defining our green strategies and balancing the budget. In the end, I hope the site will stand as a guide for other would-be home builders. Something that will help eliminate the unknown and make a project of this scale more approachable.

More here. (Thanks, Jeremy!)

- The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What it Means For the World, by Thomas Campanella.

I knew Concrete Dragon would be fascinating from the first page of the first chapter, wherein Campanella explains the "theme song" of the Chinese city of Shenzhen, which has ballooned in population from a few thousand people in the 1970s to the millions that call it home today. The song is called "Story of Springtime:"

"In the spring of 1979/An old man drew a circle/On the southern coast of China/And city after city rose up like fairy tales/And mountains and mountains of gold/Gathered like a miracle."

The fact that such a song even exists, or is as popular as "Story of Springtime" is, speaks volumes about China's explosive economic growth; its attendant, mindblowingly large urban overhaul; its insatiable need for raw materials; the influence of its centralized political leadership; and the shared aspirations of the populace. As the international spotlight shifts to Beijing for the Summer Olympics, the book's subject matter is particularly pertinent.

Laden with statistics and images, and with extensive discussion of the myriad influences, risks, ideas and trends that are driving the full-tilt transformation of China's physical fabric as well as its society, Concrete Dragon is as informative as it is thrilling. It is made all the more so because the story it tells is happening right now.

- Large Parks, edited by Julia Czerniak and George Hargreaves.

Large Parks is a collection of essays from leading academics and practitioners of landscape architecture, centering on not only the design of both existing and new large public parklands around the world, but also surveying the many parties who typically have a stake in their creation, and the process by which these important spaces are wrought.

Parks are not just "green lungs" of a place, and are more than just civic amenities: they are zones of immense cultural, ecological and economic value that enhance shared quality of life in multi-dimensional ways. They offer significant opportunities for urban redefinition (especially as global economic shifts continue to yield empty post-industrial zones in many cities), environmental remediation, building community, education, and recreation. James Corner explains in the foreword that the best large parks will always be more than the sum of their parts:

"Large parks will always exceed singular narratives. They are larger than the designer's will for authorship, they exceed over-regulation and contrivance, and they always evolve into more multifarious (and unpredictable formations than anyone could have envisaged at the outset. They are complex, dynamic systems. As such, the designer of large parks can only ever set out a highly specified physical base from which more open-ended processes can formations take root....If this staged groundwork is too constrained or too complicated or too mannered, it will eventually calcify under the weight of its own construction; if it is too loose or too open or too weak, it will eventually lose any form of legibility and order. The trick is to design a large park framework that is sufficiently robust to lend structure and identity while also having sufficient pliancy and 'give' to adapt to changing demands and ecologies over time."

The book is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the ongoing creation and redefinition of the public realm, and the roles parklands play in the form and configuration of cities.

- A + T magazine.

Do you know A + T? You should. It is a beautiful bilingual periodical from Spain, refreshingly free of advertising, with abundant photography, drawings, and interpretive diagrams. Each issue is substantive, concise, and graphically powerful.

A + T's publications are organized thematically, in series of varying lengths, with 10-15 projects per volume. I have the "In Common" series, four volumes exploring the design of different kinds of new public spaces worldwide at multiple scales. Short essays accompany a broad range of work, mixing some projects that will be commonly familiar (the High Line, Madrid's Ecoboulevard, Melbourne's Federation Square) with many that are less well known, but no less intriguing (Kengo Kuma's glass facade for Shibuya Station in Tokyo; the "urban lounge" of St. Gallen, Switzerland; or Milwaukee's Marsupial Bridge, to name a few).

Actually, "In Common" dovetails nicely with the contents of Large Parks above, in that the book and the series both emphasize the enormous potentials of public space, as a venue that combines both architecture and landscape.

Equal parts great inspiration and invaluable resource, you will want to save each volume of A+T you can find.

- The Option of Urbanism, by Christopher Leinberger.

Leinberger is a pioneering developer whose career has combined understanding of real estate development with concern for social and environmental realities. He is also the head of the Graduate Real Estate program at Michigan and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. His new book outlines the "next American dream"--one that will undoubtedly be much different, and more efficient, than the autocentric, sprawling version everyone knows. This new American dream will be characterized by more compact communities, improved street life, and less dependence on the automobile.

Tracing the growth of the 20th-century autocentric suburb, the forces that shaped it, and its unforeseen consequences, Leinberger subsequently makes a powerful case for "walkable urbanism:" the radical notion that walking more and driving less enhances quality of life, while reinforcing the urban fabric. Clear and concise.

In this radio segment, Leinberger discusses how demographics and changing consumer preferences are bringing about this shift. Listen. And read! 

Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder....

How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you'd be able to transcend your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time.

As an example, anyone who lives in the Boston area (including many of the commenters on Graham's website, it seems) will recognize the sentiment behind what he says about the clustering of brainpower in his hometown of Cambridge, and what that does to the message the area "sends:"

Cambridge with good weather, it turns out, is not Cambridge. The people you find in Cambridge are not there by accident. You have to make sacrifices to live there. It's expensive and somewhat grubby, and the weather's often bad. So the kind of people you find in Cambridge are the kind of people who want to live where the smartest people are, even if that means living in an expensive, grubby place with bad weather.

As of this writing, Cambridge seems to be the intellectual capital of the world. I realize that seems a preposterous claim. What makes it true is that it's more preposterous to claim about anywhere else....Cambridge as a result feels like a town whose main industry is ideas, while New York's is finance and Silicon Valley's is startups.

I’d argue that Cambridge doesn’t have a monopoly on the production of nebulously defined “ideas”—residents of many other cities could also claim the same. But the construct of the essay offers an interesting way to distill a sense of place through what it produces.

Cambridge’s main industry (as well that of its eponymous English namesake) is education. Detroit makes cars. Trenton, New Jersey makes condoms (oops--made). You could probably say that Paris makes romance, Venice and Orlando make tourism, and Los Angeles makes entertainment. These "products" shape the image of the place and contribute to its brand.

What does your city make? What does it "say"? (above, a well-known bridge over the Delaware River connecting Pennsylvania to New Jersey, via)

An echo of Graham’s sentiments about geography and intellectual power shows up in a piece by Elia Powers published recently on Inside Higher Ed, about the notion of the “college city.” Naturally Boston, home to some 50 colleges and universities, appears:

It’s not just the number of colleges or dot.com startups located in a given region that determine a place’s attractiveness to academics, according to Sampson. Cities that are “naturally diverse” in population and are able to offer a range of cultural amenities like theater and museums prove to be most appealing.

By that definition, New York and Washington would be at the top of the list of so-called college cities. They are immensely diverse and have an abundance of museums and performance venues. Mark Hutter, a professor of sociology at Rowan University and author of Experiencing Cities, said that while these cities certainly cater to the creative class and are filled with faculty and students, they aren’t classic college cities.

Put another way, New York and Washington are undoubtedly “college friendly,” but they’re hardly “college centered” like the quintessential college city—Boston...

“The cultural climate of Boston is defined by its universities,” Hutter said. “It seems to be so predominant, and there’s no counter identity unless you talk about the sports teams. That’s unique — the only similarities are small college towns.”

In essence Powers makes the same conclusion about the Boston/Cambridge area that Graham does, but spells it out differently. For the former, “cultural amenities and regional density” fuel Boston’s exceptionalism beyond its academic offerings; for Graham, it is people and their aspirations that color the place. Maybe it is all of the above.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as anchors. Norman Fainstein, chair of the sociology department and former president of Connecticut College, and an author of several books on urban affairs and policy, said that Harvard and M.I.T give Boston
an aura that can’t be matched — even by other cities with several prominent institutions. Combine the academic reputation of the colleges with the cultural amenities and regional density, and you have a formula that makes Boston the prototypical college city.

I have moved from state to state and country to country 12 times in my life, with many a change of apartment or house in-between. Like most Americans, I have never stood on the ground where my great-grandparents once stood. And as the years go by, I find myself asking, What does it feel like to stand on that ground? What does it feel like to come from somewhere? Where’s home?

Is home a place? Can it be more than one place? Is it a sensibility, an emotion? Is it sets of things unique to individuals and groups? Is home other people? Is it music? Language? Time? Image? 

I'll quote liberally here, because I think the essay asks good questions, and--on a personal note--not just because they resonate with me:

Where’s home? There’s the quick answer we all give—San Francisco!—but what’s your deep answer? Where is the stake that marks home ground? And if you cannot find that stake, how do you move out from nowhere?...We do what we can. To make up for my lack of ties to the land, I spend a lot of energy on people. But because I have fewer relationships than a person who lives where his grandparents lived, since I’m not bonded to a ground, I wind tighter to those dear to me. It’s good to have close bonds, but it’s not necessarily good to expect people to take up the slack left by the lack of a center....

We’re not migrating swallows or trail-bound Apache: we take random routes. We stay for a while. We don’t come back. We may admire Wen­dell Berry and nod our heads wisely over his elegant prose, but we don’t have a family farm, we have no ties to the land—we have a mortgage on a house in a town where we’ve lived for a few years....

What is the emotional toll of having no place to call home? What is the psychic result of moving for the company every three years? What is the price of a Best Buy and Staples at every 40-mile interval along the interstate? Of suburban houses that could as easily be in North Carolina as in California?

Put more optimistically, I suppose home could be everywhere, in a sense. But regardless the essay offers plenty to chew on, especially for those who purport to make places for a living.

Along these lines, check out the clever place finder function within the website of Richard Florida's brilliant new book, Who's Your City?, which I'll review here more fully soon. If nothing else, it quantifies one's own personal perceptions of place, and is a smart way to gather data about collective buzz as well, I would imagine. Unsurprisingly, I discover upon taking the quiz that I should probably leave the city in which I currently live.

There is still one frontier that remains wide open: experience innovation. This is the only type of business innovation that is not imitable, nor can it be commoditized, because it is born from the specific needs and desires of your customers and is a unique expression of your company's DNA. Yet the design of an experience is often overlooked in the rush to market.

One need look no further than a NYT article from Wednesday's paper about the re-branding of the Le Méridien hotel chain (hotel design covered here earlier; travel being an obvious and rich place to look for "experience innovation") to see how this latter-day gesamtkunstwerk approach draws on broad, disparate cultural influences to become something in excess of architecture or event-planning:

A “cultural curator,” Jérôme Sans, founder of Paris’s exhibition space Palais de Tokyo, has been retained by the hotel to oversee a range of amenities, including creating programs with six institutions, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Mr. Sans is also developing in-house amenities like business breakfast menus by the celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten; specialty Illy coffee drinks; and a Méridien scent, LM01, by the French perfume company Le Labo.

What of the "cultural curator" role described above? Wouldn't it be interesting if architects and even planners did more of the same? Perhaps there's some poetry lost in the segregation of responsibilities.

In addition to perfume and coffee, the hotel chain has commissioned the composition of a "distinct sound" for its elevators, lobby and rooms. In lieu of a chocolate on the pillow at night, hotel staff leave a book of fairy tales instead.

“We’re trying to create a chic culture of discovery,” said Eva Ziegler, senior vice president for Le Méridien brand, “where the sophistication of art, architecture, and cuisine are available to travelers in a way that is subtle yet refined.”

As Sans points out in an article in the IHT from last fall, "Culture is not just deluxe. For once, companies understand that dealing with culture is a key issue, and it needn't be intimidating."

In other words, focusing on user experience, which naturally has cultural dimensions, is not additive to the design process. Big and little touches, such as the design of a hotel's key cards, are all part of a whole:

Key cards will be decorated with artwork, and the hotel hopes that people will collect them. Guests will also get separate cards with information about exhibits at nearby cultural institutions that are partners of Le Méridien.

Above, one of Le Méridien's new key card designs.

I mention these things because I think they're fascinating; but also because I think there's an interesting possible overlap for architects and even planners here. There is the odd architecture firm that already does things like event planning or brand identity, and plenty of architects design furniture, but how many do perfume, or oversee menu choices? Examples of broader and more (for lack of better terms) explicitly experiential approaches to design in the planning and architecture world seem quite rare. Maybe you know of some.

One of the more interesting points that Lerner makes in his presentation are that of the "metronization" of the Curitiba bus system; that is, the establishment of stations that are more akin to subway stations in their design and form, but serve the city's vaunted bus rapid transit (BRT) system instead. For their part, the buses also act more like trains, serving a greater capacity with increased length and larger door openings.

From an exhaustive NYTimes article last year about the city, an explanation from Lerner of how this unusual system came to be:

“We tried to understand, what is a subway?” he recalls. “It has to have speed, comfort, reliability and good frequency. But why does it have to be underground? Underground is very expensive. With dedicated lanes and not stopping on every corner, we could do it with buses."...

In 1992, Lerner and his team established the tubular boarding platforms with fare clerks and turnstiles, so that the mechanisms for paying and boarding are separated, as in a subway. To carry more people at a time, the city introduced flexible-hinged articulated buses that open their doors wide for rapid entry and egress; then, when the buses couldn’t cope with the demand, the Lerner team called for bi-articulated buses of 88 feet with two hinges (and a 270-passenger capacity), which Volvo manufactured at Curitiba’s request. Comparing the capacities of bus and subway systems, Lerner reels off numbers with a promoter’s panache. “A normal bus in a normal street conducts x passengers a day,” he told me. “With a dedicated lane, it can transport 2x a day. If you have an articulated bus in a dedicated lane, 2.7x passengers. If you add a boarding tube, you can achieve 3.4x passengers, and if you add double articulated buses, you can have four times as many passengers as a normal bus in a normal street.” He says that with an arrival frequency of 30 seconds, you can transport 36,000 passengers every hour — which is about the same load he would have achieved with a subway.

The other role of the bus stations is that of design icon, which Lerner uses to demonstrate the need for urban "reference points," architectural pieces that help engender an identity for the modern city, and in turn create a sense of ownership for the city's residents.

Another issue is, a city is like our family portrait. We don't rip our family portrait even if we don't like the news of our uncle, because this portrait is you.

In other words, a place is made of people; and the sense of place and a community's sense of itself act reciprocally on each other.

Above, street furniture becomes civic symbol (via), part of what makes Curitiba unmistakably Curitiba. If it wasn't unusual in its appearance--if it didn't stand out from its surroundings, and wasn't clearly "readable" as a form--we probably wouldn't notice it. A simple, strong idea that offers significant justification for unconventional urban design approaches.

[Potter] So what are the keys to successful place branding at the national level?

[Papadopoulos] The few that do show signs of some success tend to be those who try to focus more on what we might call the "core competencies." In study after study after study that we have done in the last 25 years or so, and in practically every other study done by anybody else who has tried to measure the image of Canada, one thing comes out loud and clear -- and this is the image of trustworthiness. People trust Canadians, no matter whom you ask, no matter where. That is a core competence. When I say they trust us, we score at the top of any other nation anywhere.

Most interesting to me is the discussion about "core competences" versus attempting to graft some type of identity onto a place. Mainly, that the latter always falls short, much as a designer, planner, or marketer may wish otherwise:

[Papadopoulos] That goes back to something you said before: when they invented "Cool Britannia," nobody asked the Brits, "Do you feel cool?" It was some central unit that decided, "Gee, this is cool. Let's do it." There are so many others that have failed this way.

[Potter] That's interesting, because it strikes me that if you're trying to sell yourself or your country or your place to others on a certain brand proposition, you can't separate that out from how the people see themselves and understand their own identity. So to get back to Canada for a second, we like it when people say they see Canadians as friendly and trustworthy and what-have-you, but the flip side is Canada, the country that has an ongoing identity crisis.

Below: The Millennium Dome, perhaps one of the most widely-known architectural outcomes of of Tony Blair's Cool Brittania. (via)

Sidenote: Cool Britannia is coming back again.

(Much, much) earlier. Also, here, here, and here too, to name a few.

Yao Ming's Houston is not Beyonce Knowles' Houston, and not just because the 7-foot-6-inch Rockets star needs two more feet of head room. George and Barbara Bush's Houston is not George Foreman's Houston, either, nor Dr. Denton Cooley’s, nor A. J. Foyt’s....If this booming world center of energy traders, doctors and space scientists is hard to define, with a problem even worse than a negative image — no image at all — the Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau has a remedy....(For Mr. Foyt, it was driving 200 m.p.h. on the 610 Loop — back when the traffic wasn’t so bad; for Dr. Cooley, it is his “full schedule of surgeries.” And Yao — well, Yao likes Yao Restaurant & Bar where, he says, “I know the owner.”)

The city's approach stems in part from its lack of distinct identity among American cities, despite being the country's fourth largest, just behind Chicago in population. This reputation for banality puts extra weight on the personal perspective:

Other cities and states have tried variations on “My Houston,” but this subtropical metropolis of 2.2 million people, the nation’s most sprawling city, spread over 630 square miles — large enough to encompass Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Detroit — has a special burden: a reputation for banality, even ugliness.

The approach makes an interesting counterpoint to the Toronto Unlimited campaign, mentioned here several years ago, for a city attempting to use its nebulous global image to its advantage.

Two of the "My Houston" ads, featuring fashion designer Chloe Dao, formerly of Project Runway; and "art car" artist Mark Bradford, below.

Clashing with planners who tend to see Houston's explosive growth as ugly and unsustainable, futurist Joel Kotkin contends that the place is indeed vital, exciting, and full of possibility. It may not have the physical beauty or cache of San Francisco or Barcelona, but what it lacks in geographical interest, it makes up for with human capital and tolerance.

In an era when many other cities try to position themselves with trendier distinctions (as “smart growth” exemplars or as magnets for high-income households, for instance), Mayor Bill White, a Democrat, is happy for Houston to be known simply as an “opportunity city,” which is a pretty good description of what the place has been since its inception: a venue where people who work hard can get ahead....

The answer, I have come to understand as I have worked in Houston as a reporter and consultant, echoes something that the late Soichiro Honda once told me: “More important than gold and diamonds are people.” This critical resource, more than anything, accounts for Houston’s headlong drive toward becoming not only the leading city of Texas and the South, but also a player on the global scene: it is emerging as one of the world’s great cities....

Lauding Houston to urban planners is not much different than extolling red meat at a convention of vegans....Ultimately, it’s a question of defining what makes a city great. Many city planners today focus largely on aesthetics, the arts, and the perception of being “cool.” Academics and many economic-development experts link urban success to cities’ appeal to the “creative class” of college-educated young people. In this calculus, the traditional practice of gauging a city’s success by studying patterns of population or employment growth, or noting the opportunities available for working-class or middle-class families to flourish, rarely registers as important.

For contrast to the Convention and Visitors' Bureau high-gloss approach, look to a marketing campaign entitled "Houston. It's Worth It," produced by an independent advertising agency four years earlier. In the campaign, the details that usually inspire complaints about Houston--cockroaches, sprawl, humidity--are foregrounded in an ironic way, with a clean typeface. The idea behind the guerrilla campaign, developed by ttweak, is that the city's inconveniences are heavily outweighed by the its everyday attributes, optimistic atmosphere, lack of pretense, and personality:

"Houston. It's Worth It." was created believing that acknowledging the difficulties of living in Houston only makes the reasons why it's worth it more compelling. We can all reach a consensus on the relatively few complications of living in Houston; the reasons it's worth it, on the other hand, are as diverse and numerous as its citizens. "Houston. It's Worth It." is a conduit for those reasons.

The city's lack of definition, and a narrative that is necessarily fluid, ends up being incredibly productive. A great takeaway impression.

Below: a few images of Houston captured by the photoblog Phototainable, searching for personality of place.

As commenter #2099 in the "Houston. It's Worth It." guestbook says, screw conventional thinking: "we defy logic, but we still rock." And #2064: "I feel normal here. Maybe it is because I am imperfect, like this city."

Smartly, the "It's Worth It" folks have come out with a coffee-table book of photography juxtaposed with quotes from commenters like those above (many thanks, Randy!) and other clever schwag to accompany the campaign.

Moore and Williams address Schultz's concerns regarding the loss of "romance and theatre" and sensory richness that long characterized the Starbucks experience for customers. Seeing as Starbucks has long promoted itself as a "third place" or community living room, it behooves an urbanist to pay attention. From Schultz:

For example, when we went to automatic espresso machines, we solved a major problem in terms of speed of service and efficiency. At the same time, we overlooked the fact that we would remove much of the romance and theatre that was in play with the use of the La Marzocco machines. This specific decision became even more damaging when the height of the machines, which are now in thousands of stores, blocked the visual sight line the customer previously had to watch the drink being made, and for the intimate experience with the barista....The loss of aroma -- perhaps the most powerful non-verbal signal we had in our stores; the loss of our people scooping fresh coffee from the bins and grinding it fresh in front of the customer, and once again stripping the store of tradition and our heritage? Then we moved to store design. Clearly we have had to streamline store design to gain efficiencies of scale and to make sure we had the ROI on sales to investment ratios that would satisfy the financial side of our business. However, one of the results has been stores that no longer have the soul of the past and reflect a chain of stores vs. the warm feeling of a neighborhood store. Some people even call our stores sterile, cookie cutter, no longer reflecting the passion our partners feel about our coffee....While the current state of affairs for the most part is self induced, that has lead to competitors of all kinds, small and large coffee companies, fast food operators, and mom and pops, to position themselves in a way that creates awareness, trial and loyalty of people who previously have been Starbucks customers.

Schultz's problem is complicated: how does one introduce a sense of uniqueness into 13,000 stores while ensuring a uniform product? How can Starbucks cafes be both individualized enough to encourage customer loyalty and ownership, while upholding ubiquitous company-wide brand standards? Local and global?

Below: Starbucks in Melbourne; Tokyo; and Berlin (via).

Moore and Williams dissect the issues facing Starbucks into five interconnected elements: loss of "theatre;" loss of "coffee aroma;" loss of "store soul;" lack of merchandise focus; and loss of identity. In a time of big-box retail, clone towns and the like, it makes for excellent reading on the values of sameness and difference. The two produce an impressive amount of ideas for changes to everything from the brewing of espresso, to different product foci for different stores, to allowing "homemade" promotional materials, to new ways the company's local outlet can get involved in the goings-on of its immediate neighborhood--all in the service of customizing the experience of each store, while preserving the qualities that define the company's brand.

From Brand Autopsy, Moore's side of the series:

Starbucks is opening a minimum of six stores a day somewhere around the world. The company has mastered the build-out process of opening new stores fast and inexpensively....The Starbucks “Kit of Parts” approach is akin to children playing with paper dolls. You remember paper dolls, right? Armed with an outline of a person and pages full of plug ‘n play paper clothing cut-outs, a child could create numerous looks for a person or for a family of people. Starbucks took this same mindset to its store expansion process by designing a palette of plug ‘n play pieces which can fit any store size....These plug ‘n play design pieces include point of sale counters, condiment bars, wall art, merchandise wall bays, Frappuccino-prep stations, Espresso Machine stations, etc....But this "Kit of Parts" mentality is really an issue of control for Starbucks....Starbucks needs to continue giving more individual control to each and every Starbucks. Allow them to make more decisions at the store level....A homemade sign promoting a jazz trio performance will not detract from the strength of the Starbucks brand. The time has come for [Schultz] to invest in giving his stores more creative control. To counter the loss of store soul and to inject warm neighborhood feelings, [Schultz] needs to unleash the power of creativity at the store-level. He needs the soul of Starbucks to shine through decisions made at the level closest to the customer—the store. After all, that’s what Mom & Pop shops do.

Why is this important? For the architectural ramifications of Starbucks' re-branding and the future of the "third place," of course; but also for Moore's and Williams' careful consideration of how the customer experience is orchestrated, and how stores are differentiated. These are design issues analogous to architects (such as Anna Klingmann), planners (such as Jan Gehl) and real estate developers seeking to deliver buildings, neighborhoods, and even cities that provide the kind of variation, amenities, and "quality of life"--that complex combination of ubiquity and uniqueness--that people desire.

While writing the previous post, I ran across a point made by Andy Guy of the Michigan Land Use Institute, made during a 2006 walk through Grand Rapids, Michigan with a writer from Dwell, that seems appropriate here. What's good for Starbucks could be good for cities, ultimately:

We walk through downtown, with Monroe Avenue full of people, a warehouse district full of remodeled factories and lofts, and up on the hill a huge new medical complex under construction signaling Grand Rapids’ intent to attract health-industry jobs. “The way that we develop is essential to how we compete in the global marketplace,” Guy says. “If we just look like anyplace else, who’s going to want to live here?”

A high premium is placed on unique urban identity, then; and it seems more difference is always better. Witness starchitecture and the drive for recognizable icons; witness the global contest between cities for the best and the brightest, articulated through the lens of lifestyle and cultural accoutrements, compellingly articulated in Richard Florida's ongoing work.

As a counterpoint, consider Rem Koolhaas' plan for Waterfront City in Dubai, his vision of the "generic city" brought to life. It is a statement of global monoculture--saturated with global brands, I'm sure--to be wrought in 3D:

His argument was that in its profound sameness, the generic city was a more accurate reflection of contemporary urban reality than nostalgic visions of New York or Paris....Designed for one of the biggest developers in the United Arab Emirates, Nakheel, Mr. Koolhaas’s master plan for the proposed 1.5-billion-square-foot Waterfront City in Dubai would simulate the density of Manhattan on an artificial island just off the Persian Gulf.

A mix of nondescript towers and occasional bold architectural statements, it would establish Dubai as a center of urban experimentation as well as one of the world’s fastest growing metropolises....The core of the development would be the island, which would be divided into 25 identical blocks. Neat rows of towers — some tall and slender, others short and squat, depending on the zoning — line the blocks, as if a fragment of Manhattan had been removed with a scalpel and reinserted in the Middle East.

One wonders about the pratfalls of creating something so purposely generic, especially in light of reading about corporate giants attempting to reinvent themselves, and particularly when "generic" urban conditions already exist in so many places. Additionally specific environmental considerations, such as Dubai's forbidding climate, would seem to impact the concept. Nevertheless, if built Waterfront City would prove an immense work-in-progress in organization, repetition and differentiation at a grand scale. Ironically what would set it apart from other urban districts worldwide is its intentionally nondescript character.

Yes, it misses large parts of a story everyone knows; one about a city in steep decline, wracked by economic loss and racial strife. It predates the riots that tore the city apart two years later, and makes little mention of how the city's dependence on its automobile industry has and will continue to shape it, for better and worse. I am greatly simplifying here--you have to turn to the pages of Middlesex or Them to get a more qualitative, experiential sense of Detroit's modern rise and fall; and to sites like Detroitblog to understand the city's unreal physical fabric. You have to look to things like the Michigan Land Use Institute, Cool Cities, and Model D to get some hope for the area's future.

But, regardless of all that--regardless of the utterly ridiculous scene with the urban planners and their creepy yearning for greater "urban efficiency"--the film is an interesting historical relic, and provides a good jumping-off point to a discussion of urbanism, marketing, and urban planning. (Note that this was a video produced to lure the 1968 Summer Olympics to the city.)

Cavanaugh's dull monologue about the 1960s being Detroit's "finest hour" touches on cultural amenities more than you'd expect, covering fine dining, architecture, music, parks, libraries, and theatre, thereby obliquely implying the construction of a sophisticated lifestyle. In this way, minus the obviously deficient production values and uninspired delivery, the video is not so different from many videos, animations and renderings that cities, neighborhoods and development projects rely on nowadays to promote themselves and to transmit a sense of place. (Related: here, here, and here)

Naturally, one of the flip sides of comparing marketing materials of yore to those of the present is that some of today's will look naively ominous and even silly in hindsight just like the 1965 film does. Another pertinent lesson comes from Elizabeth Currid's recent, and excellent, book The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art and Music Drive New York City: that the things usually left unmentioned in the conventional story of place (in this case, jazz, the Motown sound and electronic music immediately come to mind) are just as central to a city's sense of itself and its economic vitality as the large corporations and traditional cultural institutions. A strong, interwoven set of narratives is centrally important to capture and express, for any planner, designer, or developer trying to market an idea. Cavanaugh's triumphant, simplistic presentation of the city's amenities strikes the viewer as ignorant and outdated, but that's because it is.

Returning to the excellent Model D--who, in my estimation, inherently understand Currid's argument--check out their trove of videos, all of which explore Detroit, its people, businesses, places, and other uniquenesses in fresh ways.

Turning to page 123 of A Free Life produces dialogue translated from Chinese between the book's principal figure, the erstwhile academic Nan; Bao, the editor of a small, New York-based, Chinese-language literary journal; and Liu, an elderly scholar. I'm bending the rules a bit to include more than the allotted three sentences:

"Can you drive?"
"I just got my license."
"You're very brave," Nan put in. "I wouldn't dare to drive in New York!"
"I have to be able to drive, or else I'd feel as if I'm missing a limb. Also, as long as I live here, I'll have to make a living on my own. A driver's license is a means of independence. Once I can drive really well, I'll deliver food for a restaurant."
"You shouldn't do that. You have poor eyesight, don't you?" said Bao.
The old man laughed heartily. "Maybe I can deliver computer parts in the daytime. Anyway, driving a car on the highway gives me a feeling of freedom. What fun! What exhiliration! Do you want to see my car?"

Though I think saying that this passage reveals anything especially significant pertaining to this blog (or me, for that matter) is a bit of a stretch, I do appreciate that it highlights a craving for mobility, which certainly ties to issues of place and space. It's something I think is rather central to living in a city, and perhaps especially strong in a North American one. I also like how it coincides with the book's title, which in turn describes the protagonist's main goal: "a free life" is one that is almost by definition a mobile one, economically, socially, and physically.

Now, to pass the favor on and tag five more sites...

Space and Culture

Bricoleurbanism

Neighborhoods.org

Life Without Buildings

Off Brand

- Elizabeth Diller and Richard Scofidio's use of storyboards to plan and explain the Phantom House, the energy-efficient home of the near future. The narrative integrates the vagaries of a normal day with the home's technologies and design cues, revealing the "how" and the "why" of the project in doing so. This reinforces the primacy of design for everyday living.

Follow along as "J" and "M" go about their day:

As M's car comes within five miles of the house, the Home on the Go unit triggers the DomestiSleep and RapidCool systems to awaken the house and begin to cool it down. M walks inside, throws off his jacket, and prepares a martini. Realizing he has forgotten to pick up the chilies and the turmeric, M leaves J a message and rushes out, overriding the DomestiSleep system.

Long story short: fiction writers and architects ought to team up more often (like this! wow!). All would benefit.

- Those who would brand hotel chains (through the selection of everything from sheets to showerheads) are faced with a fascinating challenge, as explored in August:

Since 2005, some 31 (hotel) brands have been announced, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, more than at anytime since 1988-89, when 27 were introduced. And with this increased competition, identifying market segments and customer preferences has become essential to creating customer loyalty -- which is where the showerhead, among other details, becomes crucial....Competition...has taken the art and science of hotel branding to a new level. Enormous resources are being poured into researching and designing hotel rooms, lobbies, amenities and services -- all intended to inspire brand loyalty by creating what hoteliers hope will be a distinctive experience for guests.

The hotel's design touches work in concert to respond to broader trends in shelter, thus framing a unique experience that a traditional hotel cannot. Guests can live among the trappings of loft living, if only for a night or two. (Below, the guest "lofts" of the Nylo chain. More here.)

- I reviewed a few good books this past fall, and there will definitely be more in the coming months. For the time being though, I'm looking forward to digging into this and this soon.

- What does a city really feel like? Explore through the highly personal lenses of timelapse photography. How does music impact the image of place? What does your town sound like? (Below, Vancouver, rather beautifully.)

I would expect as many of us know firsthand the sensation of walking around town with headphones in, we realize we have some ideas about how these things can go together. Am I right?

- Several posts in this last year gravitated toward the frontier between retail strategy and urbanism, from one concerning the outdoor apparel store Nau to a few exploring the configuration of main streets and public spaces, in terms of traffic, retail offerings, and form. We looked at the design of a new plaza in San Francisco, with event programming and retail outlets chosen to compliment each other; and a new boulevard in suburban Madrid, with ingenious "air trees" growing in its middle.

For fun, here's a few more things to consider, that I just haven't gotten the chance to mention:

- Speaking of boulevards, Boston's Big Dig, the complex, decade-long transformation of a 3.5-mile swath through the downtown of one of America's most storied cities, is now officially finished. Where an interstate highway once stood is now the Rose Kennedy Greenway. So now what? (Photos via Flickr.)

- The brilliant City of Sound posted a fascinating piece recently about technology in the street of the near future, what's visible and what isn't. Perhaps the Phantom House will be built nearby:

Imagine film of a normal street right now, a relatively busy crossroads at 9AM taken from a vantage point high above the street, looking down at an angle as if from a CCTV camera. We can see several buildings, a dozen cars, and quite a few people, pavements dotted with street furniture. Freeze the frame, and scrub the film backwards and forwards a little, observing the physical activity on the street. But what can’t we see?...

We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic.  This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street.

Read on.

- And finally, at the intersection of landscape architecture, humor, cultural identity, iconography, and massive infrastructural undertaking, there is the semi-serious proposal for a new island off the coast of Holland, just one of so many enormous building schemes being dreamt up worldwide nowadays. It's hard to believe that a 50 km-long, tulip-shaped landform is what's necessary to solve a nation's problems, but that's exactly the premise.

Again, many thanks for reading! Feel free to get in touch.

I'm really intrigued by NAU's new retail model, where you go in, try clothes on, check out their look and feel, and then order them for delivery to your home (you can buy them and carry them home yourself, but you pay a premium). The main advantage for you is that you don't have to schlepp (meaning you don't need to be driving to shop there); the main advantages for NAU are that they can carry more items in a smaller space (because they don't need to stock multiples of every item in each color and size) and distributing clothes through a central warehouse is more efficient. The storefront, in effect, becomes a "webfront" -- a physical trial space for online shopping.

Through altering how goods end up in the hands of consumers, the "webfront" concept could also impact urban and architectural form down the line, Steffen explains. It's a conflation of mass environmental awareness, ubiquitous home delivery, savvy store design, and the ascendance of e-commerce.

Is it greener to shop on foot or online and then have the stuff delivered? Well, surprisingly (at least to me) the answer is generally yes. Sometimes it's much greener. The ecological cost of driving a number of online purchases in one truck (a truck, I might note, that is increasingly likely to itself be more efficient than some US cars) on a pre-set route (programmed to also be highly-efficient) is a small fraction of the ecological cost of driving to and from the store to get them yourself. Even when shopping in person, if not having to drag your loot home means you can get to the shop without driving, delivery is still more efficient, I'm told.

And just like that, the exurban rings of big-box "power centers" and "category killers" familar to residents of so many metropolitan areas teeter on the edge of obsolesence. Or they could, eventually.

Above, a prototypical rendering of a dressed-down Nau boutique (via), where the minima