Brand Avenue

A "Moment of Inflection" for Detroit

Twenty years from now, what do you think people will say about this turning point in Detroit? What will you remain proud of and what do you think will have people scratching their heads?

I think they’ll scratch their heads over two things. First, how it was possible for a major American city to have dug such a deep hole — financially, administratively and in so many other dimensions. And second, how getting out of that hole happened so quickly.

Looking back, they’ll see that the current period presented a remarkable moment of inflection in which multiple sectors agreed to collaborate for a common outcome. What we’re experiencing here that’s different from, say Pittsburgh or Portland, where the leadership was largely coming out of the private sector, is a different allocation of roles among the sectors. The public sector is attending to the basics – finance, administration, neighborhood blight.  The private sector is contributing to the physical infrastructure necessary to make the City an attractive place for its employees to live and work. The federal government is focused on optimizing pre-existing investments – introducing flexibility in ways that permits the City to use federal dollars more flexibly and creatively. And the philanthropic sector has developed a wrap-around vision for the city – everything from transportation reform to a more robust arts and culture ecosystem, from a green economy to an anchor institution community engagement strategy. No one of those sectors could do it alone. I think we’ll be able to conclude in retrospect that this remarkable cross-sector and cross-discipline approach was the key to overcoming Detroit’s most intractable problems.

via americancity.org

From an interview with Rip Rapson, a key player in the current story of Detroit.

A New Blueprint for Austin

After two years of debates and committee meetings, Austin officials have unveiled a broad vision for growth that condemns traditional suburban development and is garnering both praise and skepticism.

The proposed, 197-page "comprehensive plan" would be the city's official philosophy for managing a booming population and the new housing, businesses, shops and restaurants that will come with it. The plan, dubbed Imagine Austin, envisions mixed-use development along corridors serviced by transit and new centers of housing and commerce miles north and south of downtown.

The plan is intended to guide every city decision over the next three decades, from where to allow construction to how much to collect in taxes to managing the economy.

It is unusually blunt for a municipal document. It talks of rectifying past mistakes. It plans around big-ticket initiatives such as urban rail or significantly expanded bus service.

And it excoriates the city's rapid suburban growth, stating that the pattern of the past 60 years came "at a troubling price in terms of social segregation and isolation, (diminished) public health, air and water quality, loss of natural open space and agricultural lands, and climate change (while) driving up the public costs for roads, water lines and other infrastructure that must be continually extended to far-flung new development."

via www.statesman.com

Place Porn

I used to seriously entertain the idea of moving. This was back when I was less encumbered and traveled quite a bit. Every trip wound up as an audition for my New Hometown. Within a few days, I’d have decided which house would be mine, picked out which coffee shop I’d frequent, relished the thought of how much cheaper and easier it would be than living in New York City. The classic New York narrative is one of strivers drawn to the city by their ambition to be artists, Broadway sensations, contortionists, or what have you. I, on the other hand, live here essentially because my parents did, just as their parents did before them. Back then, it still seemed I might be able to break that chain. I came really close to moving a few times. But since having children and settling into a home in Brooklyn a block from where my father was born, I’ve pretty much given up the dream. Uprooting seems impossible, except when I visit the land of fantasy relocation.

Though my forays to this land are furtive and infrequent, I know I’m not the only visitor. Indeed, there is a whole genre of magazine feature that caters to moving-obsessed people like myself, providing lists that tell us which cities in America are offering everything in life we currently lack.

via www.good.is

Sound familiar?

The Road to Exurbia

Western Massachusetts does not resemble the metastasizing landscapes we’ve come to recognize over the last decade, the frenzy of bulldozers and stoplights, the clusters of KB Home or Toll Brothers signs pointing toward levees outside Sacramento or into hardwood copses north of Raleigh, the subdivisions tamped into Florida citrus groves. The history of my dad’s town, and perhaps more importantly, its ethos, the communal imagination of what it means to live there, sets it apart from the kind of exurb you might see in the national news.

Or at least, that’s what I would like to think. Yet if I take a closer look at the town in light of the Brookings criteria, I’m hard pressed to argue with the report. Most of the people I know commute to work. Housing is low-density: during the last speculative real estate boom-and-bust, in the 1980s, the town voted to create a two-acre minimum lot size. And it doesn’t take much development to create high population growth in a small rural town. Recently, one person who’d purchased land when it was cheap decided to retire elsewhere, carving the wooded property into parcels with road frontage. Realtor signs hash-marked the roadside, and now dirt driveways appear at regular intervals along a stretch of road that had been woods. Not the same in density or scale as a swath of new housing outside Dallas, but a subdivision just the same.

via places.designobserver.com

Rural New England functions a lot more as suburbia than it might appear at first glance.

The Scent of Departure

Much like a landmark, it seems that a smell can distinguish one city from another.

New fragrances capturing the “essence and spirit” of destinations have hit the airport duty free shelves, promising tourists lingering memories of their trip abroad.

The Scent of Departure collection was launched in April with five perfumes inspired by the cities of Frankfurt, Budapest, Vienna, Munich and Istanbul.

The brand capitalises on the ability of scents to evoke vivid, tangible memories of a certain place.

Each city scent is sold exclusively in the duty free airport stores of the cities they symbolise, in a cool glass bottle featuring the airport’s three-letter code on a boarding-pass tag.

By spritzing on Vienna – or “VIE” as it is universally known by a three letter airport code –holidaymakers are taken back to “the peaceful Danube banks full of enchanting scents of mint, cut grass and water flowers”, as well as “the gourmand scents of Wien’s pastries, with their notes of vanilla, liquorice, chocolate and coffee.”

via www.terminalu.com

To me, the Boston scent would allude to both salt air and the smell of the Downtown Crossing T.

PGH, the White

It would be hard for any metropolitan area to be whiter than Pittsburgh.

It's so hard, in fact, that of the 100 largest metro areas in the United States, only one has a smaller share of blacks, Hispanics and Asians -- the Scranton-Wilkes Barre region of northeastern Pennsylvania.

A new Brookings Institution report released last week, examining 2010 census data on how Americans identified race and ethnicity, found that southwestern Pennsylvania is whiter even than the Amish country around Lancaster, the Mormon population center of Salt Lake City, Midwest agrarian capitals such as Des Moines, Iowa, and far more isolated places like Boise, Idaho.

It is not stunningly new data for this former melting pot -- findings from the 2000 census were much the same -- but what might be eye-opening is that the pace of change toward greater diversity is even slower here than for all those places above, as well as the rest of America.

via www.post-gazette.com

Meanwhile, my relatively cosmopolitan hometown is the eighth least diverse of all cities in the survey.

231st Street Builds Its Future

Kingsbridge has long been home to an ethnically diverse cross section of middle- and working-class residents. Now developers of two new condo buildings are trying to attract more affluent families to the area from northern Manhattan and beyond. One selling point for West Kingsbridge is its proximity to Riverdale, a wealthier Bronx community on the Hudson River.

While West 231st is just two subway stops from Manhattan on the No. 1 train, getting potential residents to cross the border into the Bronx has always been difficult. But developers say that affordable prices—along with quiet streets and an abundance of private, parochial and charter schools—is helping them overcome the negative perceptions of the Bronx.

"We're trying to tell people that if they stay on the subway for another 10 minutes, they can save hundreds of thousands of dollars and have lower taxes and live in a doorman building," said Rutherford Thompson, a managing director at Jackson Capital Partners Corp., the sales and leasing agent for Sycamore Court, a 63-unit building that opened recently at the corner of 231st and Corlear Avenue.

Watch the Bronx change before your eyes.

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.

How To Build An "Innovation District"

"Innovation district” is an oxymoron. Today many innovators could be anywhere as long as they have a laptop and a place to get a good cup of coffee. But creativity does have a spatial component, which is why Boston; Barcelona, Spain; Portland, Oregon; and a host of other cities have pinned their hopes for urban renewal on areas branded as Innovation Districts.

Both academic studies and common sense suggest that dynamic clusters of people working together are the source of most social and technological breakthroughs. Boston Mayor Thomas Menino is trying hard to put this insight to work as new development on 800 acres of South Boston waterfront takes shape. He sees its tightly packed old warehouses on Fort Point Channel, a few newly built office and residential buildings, ongoing maritime industries and vast expanses of underused land as the place to be for the creative class.

But can an innovative spirit be built into a brand-new 6.5 million-square-foot speculative real estate deal proposed by the developers of Seaport Square and supporters in Boston City Hall? The corporate-size floor plates, distance from academic institutions and congested inner-city location don’t conform to successful Innovation District precedents. There is the potential for a clash of cultures—invention requires breaking down boundaries; renting property and collecting taxes is about erecting them.Historically, most centers of innovation have emerged organically in compact areas where complex webs of relationships grow over time. Fort Point Channel’s warren of brick-and-beam lofts, like parts of Brooklyn and San Francisco’s Mission District, have provided exactly the kind of small-scale, low-rent urban environment where innovators in hooded sweatshirts thrive. Rising rents have, unfortunately, been pushing these start-ups and artists out.

via www.architects.org

Can there be an atmosphere of "innovation" without a university presence in the neighborhood?

City Avenue Redux

In the 1970s, the stretch of City Avenue located just west of the Interstate 76 interchange was known as the Golden Mile for Lower Merion's gleaming collection of corporate headquarters, which were drawn there by its low tax rate and easy access to Philadelphia. But the luster has dulled. Decline has set in. And it's visibly worse on the suburban side.

Philadelphia and Lower Merion have been jointly trying to right the situation, working through the regional authority of the City Ave Special Services District, to rezone the road. Philadelphia has already adopted changes aimed at nudging City Avenue in a more urban direction, with wider sidewalks, fewer parking lots, and more-welcoming facades. Now it's Lower Merion's turn.

The goal is nothing less than the reengineering of an auto-dependent commercial strip into a walkable, urbane street of apartments, offices, and shops. While there are thousands of strips like City Avenue riddling the American landscape, surprisingly few have been reincarnated as true city boulevards. It's not clear that such an ambitious transformation is possible. But if it is, City Avenue is a perfect candidate.

City Avenue differs from the typical highway strip in that it has many qualities we associate with urban places, including distinctive and relatively dense neighborhoods on both sides. There may be fewer pedestrians on the suburban edge of City Avenue - where multistory apartment houses are currently prohibited - but a culture of walking and commuting definitely exists. About 25,000 people work in the area between the expressway and East Wynnewood Road, and probably 40,000 more live within a 10-minute stroll.

via articles.philly.com

Always found City Ave. a fascinating place--an edge condition with a lot of unrealized potential.

"What's Iconic and Supportable?"

As construction cranes dot the sky at Tysons Corner and Montgomery County redraws master plans for its more congested communities, planner Neal Payton just has one question -- who do they think they are?

New town centers' success hinges on creating an identity, said Payton, principal at the firm Torti Gallas and Partners in Los Angeles.

"What about your place is particularly compelling; why would someone come a second time?" he asked planners and developers at the Makeover Montgomery conference last week in Silver Spring.

"What's iconic and supportable?" he said. "Why live there? Why work there? You need to be able to answer these questions as a town and if you can't answer them, you're in trouble."

Part of creating that identity is creating visibility, experts said. Uri Avin, a regional growth expert at planning firm Parsons Brinckerhoff, said Columbia's town center provides a "what not to do" lesson for the planners of today.

via washingtonexaminer.com

The Adolescent West

Logan, Utah, isn’t too anything. It’s not too big or too small, but it’s also not just right. Like many Western towns and small cities of about 50,000 people, it’s as confused as a hormonally challenged adolescent.

Policy moods swing wildly between pro-development mayors and ones who want to go back to family-friendly neighborhoods. We want to restore the downtown, but we keep building more big-box stores on cheap land near the city boundaries. We put in parking meters, then rip them out, like kids throwing tantrums. We’re like teenagers who change their hair color to fit their mood. We just don’t know who or what we are yet.

To put our community’s age into perspective, my house was built about 100 years ago. Many people praised me for taking on such an ancient fixer-upper instead of building something new. Of course, 100 years is old only by Western standards. On the East Coast and in the Midwest, some houses have washing machines that old. Take a trip across the Atlantic Ocean and you’ll find homes with plumbing designed by Druids and Roman arches actually built by Romans.

While there are many desirable things about youth, fickle, irresponsible behavior is not one of them. Adolescents long for popularity and often do embarrassing things to achieve it. I know I was thrilled to get a Lowes, Home Depot and Starbucks in town for my own selfish consumptive reasons. Gone were those trips to the big city for provisions. Many other locals applauded the arrival of Old Navy, PetSmart and Chili’s as signs that Logan was maturing into a metropolis. But every binge is followed by the next morning, with its painful hangover and feelings of regret.

Do we want to be the popular kid with an iPhone and all the right clothes or are we more like the bohemian kid who artfully mixes thrift-shop ensembles and writes poetry at the coffee shop? Because we are filled with the throbbing hormones of youth, most days the answer is yes, no and somewhere in between.

via www.sltrib.com

Great read. What are the things that make a town into a city?

High Street As Knowledge Hub

In looking at how to rebuild the economy, fundamentals need rethinking, and that includes the high street. Speaking last week at the annual Co-operative Congress I found surprising, welcome heretical thoughts percolating up through the membership. "How should we change our model, so that we are not just selling more stuff and promoting consumption for its own sake," asked one. "How can the co-operative movement engage with transition towns," asked another?

Behind the questioning was a big thought. Can high streets become more than places where we go to shop, and can shops become places where we do more than simply buy things? For example, what if the shop of the future had only some of its space given over to shifting goods, and the rest of the space reserved for trading the skills and knowledge to make, maintain, repair, share, re-use and recycle things? Tiny gesture as it might be, Fiona Reynolds, head of the National Trust, pointed out that B&Q was already looking into leasing, rather than just selling, tools.

The degradation of the high street in the face of the economic slowdown and unfair competition from the big supermarkets has big economic and social costs. A vibrant, local economy is the place where community (dare I say the "big society"?) gets built. When denuded the opposite happens. But why can't we rebuild the high street so that it is better than before, and make it a place where we not only shop, but learn, do, share and interact.

via www.guardian.co.uk

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