Tending to Cities

Does it matter how a city or neighborhood looks? Many would say it does, though much less than, say, health or safety. So if it matters to some extent, what makes a place visually attractive? Are there any common characteristics, or is it only in the eye of the beholder?

Maybe "looks" is the wrong word. How about the way a place feels? This would include all the senses -- the different variables that make an area appealing. Of course, people have unique tastes and I don't know if there are any qualities loved by everyone. However, there are places generally considered attractive. They are usually in wealthier districts, but should extend to poorer communities as well. If we work towards achieving this throughout our cities, without displacing low-income groups, we might look back some day and wonder how we ever lived in some of the neglected areas we know today.

Maybe we can start by identifying the places people value most, why they are valued, and how to preserve them. (I'm not sure how best to do this. A popular vote doesn't seem practical, but maybe it would work. I wonder which areas would win out? Greenwich Village, for example, or Times Square?). We could go through a similar process for areas that people find unappealing, focusing on improvement. This might be considered a form of public participation in city planning. At the very least we would find out if there are any shared values among urban populations. If this kind of study reveals anything useful, it might inform the design of new places.

A recent article on preservation in Pittsburgh shows how the adaptive reuse of urban areas can be an effective means of environmental sustainability. Cities are environments, and great urban settings should be valued and protected in a way similar to national parks. This is not a call to restrict new designs, but we can work to make sure the results are worth preserving. Setting standards for the quality of building materials might help. Design standards are another possibility, although that seems kind of arbitrary and stifling to creativity.

I wonder if there could be periodic review processes for all planned and existing development, assessing its contribution to the urban environment and how it might be improved. These reviews could address aesthetics as well as health and safety issues. Public funds might be used to make improvements. Sometimes small changes can make a big difference. A new paint job or facade can transform an area with minimal destruction of existing buildings. In other cases, shoddy construction can be removed to make way for something better. Would we be able to agree on what improvements to make? Who would be involved in the review process? How would we deal with the legal issues surrounding private property? There are many reasons why this would be difficult or impossible, but it would be great to set up a continuous process of developing healthy and attractive environments.

(Photo of Plaza de la Constitucion de Oaxaca (Zocalo) from The Project for Public Places. Photo of Pittsburgh from Statepa.org)

Wherever you go, there you are.

It struck me the other day, while reading one of Springwise's increasingly frequent posts on the mass customization of travel, that the types of travel apps and sites being developed right now to personalize the urban travel experience could have a profound impact not just on how we visit cities, but on how cities themselves function, as well.

Urban travel has long been a two-sided coin, with time in a new city being divided (in different ratios, depending on the tourist) between the standard landmarks like the Empire State Building, or the Forbidden City, and the day-to-day urban world that exists on the edges of guidebooks; think of Brooklyn back in the 1990s, or Beijing's fast-evaporating hutongs today -- places to which people are drawn to observe the day-to-day lives of other people, to experience the spectacle of the extraordinary-ordinary.

The Postcard City and the Real City are inevitably pitted against each other in a battle for the urban tourist's limited time. But as cities grow bigger and bolder on our increasingly urban planet, it seems fair to assume that greater and greater numbers of tourists will make their way down the streets of cities that they do not call home; as such, the traditional landmarks and attractions become more and more crowded, making the prospect of tooling around a lesser-seen part of the metropolis an increasingly attractive option for visitors.

The aforementioned trendblog has spotted some real doozies lately; a site that allows you to navigate cities by mood (Could Yelp-like testimonials about certain blocks, streets, parks, or even whole neighborhoods define or even change the mood of a given place?); another that uses personal data to create personalized guidebooks (Would the diversity of interests force travel publishers to re-think the meaning of the term "attraction?" I.E. cyclists' internationally competitive quests to speed up the steepest slopes could reboot the way a whole subculture navigates hilly cities like San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Guilin, and Lisbon); and yet another that helps you track down a hot scene at the last minute with crowdsourced GPS data (Anybody up for an impromptu, flashmob-style block party?)

The customization of the urban tourism experience not only makes wandering off the beaten path more common, but more enticing as well, and has the potential to distribute visitors more evenly around the city than old-school printed-paper guides, with their hyper-selective map insets and restaurant listings.

But does this dispersal of small-time explorers legitimize or cheapen the Real City? It seems like an echo of the ongoing argument about gentrification; after all, while tourists themselves are a temporary presence in a given location, their combined influence can be very powerful over time. (You could make a strong case for the influence of tourism in speeding the process of gentrification, itself.) And, while the carving of initials into a famous landmark is a time-honored tradition (as old as the very idea of "landmarks"), the tourists of tomorrow could soon be able to carve their very presence into the city in the unpredictable paths that they cut through it, shifting not only the way that other visitors, but the very citizens of the city in question, navigate and experience a place.

(Photo from Flickr users LondonSLR and neiljs. The original full-sized versions can be viewed by clicking the photos.)

The Next, Next Street Art

Street With A View is a performance/digital art hybrid (I know! So rad!) coordinated by a small team of artists, residents of Pittsburgh's North Side, and Google. The artists thought up the idea to create vignettes in the city's streets that would be coordinated with when Google's Street View camera car would drive down those same streets. They tapped local residents to act out a series of scenes, coordinated with the Googleheads, and the rest is history.

SWAV's staged "interventions," as the team refers to them, point out an interesting possibility for street art. Referring to an earlier post on the subject, tech like RFID chips and barcodes will make digital graffiti a more ready possibility in the future. SWAV highlights one of the many ways that this type of art could be achieved: take a 360˚ photo (of which there are plenty freely available through Street View for an enterprising hacker), doctor it, and attach it to an RFID chip installed inconspicuously nearby. Set it up with an automatic trigger, and any passersby with an iPhone or a Blackberry will be treated to an alternate reality version of the place that they're walking through.

Aside from the potential for humor, there is political potential here as well. Think of preservationists looking to impress upon people the importance of preventing the destruction of historic structures; take the current, well-publicized battle over St. Vincent's in Manhattan, for example. A skilled digital artist with a penchant for quirky 1960s-vintage low-rises could create a digital, 360˚ recreation of the intersection of 7th Ave and 12th Street in which to-scale renderings of the 300 and 233 foot towers planned by the adjacent hospital replaced the distinctive O’Toole Medical Services Building. Passersby could get a better sense of the scale and blandness of the new development than they ever could from a wallet-sized picture in the Times.

Inverting the perspective, SWAV says some interesting things about Google's Street View feature as well. When examining the interventions on the Google Maps website, try to imagine what a normal user, unaware of the SWAV project, might think when encountering the digital parade. At the same time that it makes Google Street View more fantastical, SWAV also makes it, in a way, seem a bit more real. Certainly moreso in examples like the moving truck or the garage band practice. Add to that the impromptu "meta-interventions" staged by locals unaware of the project until it was happening, and the lines between reality and digital representation get delightfully blurry.

To ponder: If people become more aware of the Google Street View camera car and scenes like those staged by SWAV become more common (which seems very plausible, I think), what role does the Street View feature take on? Its parallel reality becomes heightened; humor and politics are woven into the scenery, and become as valid as the built environment that the feature was intended to represent. In addition, what does a more theatrical representation on the web mean for the real place being represented? If one were to walk down Sampsonia Way in Pittsburgh -- a charmingly "Pittsburgh" kind of street -- would it seem boring? Less authentic or interesting than its Street Views counterpart? Does the digital city draw from the real city, or add to it?


(Photo from Street With a View. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

You Have to Earn It

(Cross-posted from the Neighbors Project blog)I'm moving out of my current apartment at the end of the month. When I go, the next people to live here will be paying literally almost twice as much as I currently pay in rent. My neighborhood -- on the border of Wicker Park and the Ukranian Village in Chicago -- is being gentrified. I feel weirdly responsible, even in my leaving of the place. Since I don't have any control over the management company, I'm not really doing anything, per se; but as it turns out, that's exactly the problem.

Moving to a new neighborhood does not guarantee that you will be welcomed into the existing community -- especially when the neighborhood in question is going through large-scale change. I was reminded of this fact this morning while researching today's Neighbor News post. I came across this story from Pittsburgh, where a team of young urban farmers has created a working farm in one of the poorer areas of the city, bordered by one of its most infamous ghettos, The Hill. One of these people articulated quite nicely the idea that first got me involved with Neighbors Project last fall: "We're aware we didn't grow up in the Hill," she said. "We have to earn a place here."

When anyone, young or old, moves to a new neighborhood, they become agents of change. There will be things that we make worse for some people, and things that we make better for others. Few people can claim to wield the power of a developer or city councilman; indeed, our impact on a new neighborhood, as individuals, is small, but it is still important. The choice that we are each presented with is: will I merely pass through this neighborhood, or will I earn a place here?

I'll let you in on an embarrassing little secret: I never really earned a place in the community that I'm moving away from. I had originally intended to stay longer than I'm going to wind up staying, so I'd just assumed I'd get more involved in the future. I heard about neighborhood meetings and saw people out on their stoops, but I was always in a hurry. Even working closely with a group like Neighbors Project, it was easy to feel too busy to engage with my own block.

And now I can't help but wonder if, had I gotten to know the people living around me, I might have been able to find a way to keep my apartment affordable. Maybe one of my neighbors has a relative or a friend moving to town, and I could have re-signed my lease and subletted the apartment. It's a pretty fruitless line of thinking, really, since the past is the past and the rent has already been hiked. Still, it's disturbing to see how much impact a lack of effort can have, and it's made me remember why it's important to slow down and engage with my surroundings.

When you move to a neighborhood, and are immersed in a new community, remember that doing nothing within that community is doing something.

-----------

I wrote this post recently for the blog of Neighbors Project, a nonprofit that I've become more and more involved with since I first reported on it a year ago. I've been working for NP over the summer and recently joined the National Board of Directors, and I figured that, since I can put a little of the blame on NP for the lack of posts on Where, I'd cross-post to share a bit of what I've been up to. As for Where, there are big changes on the horizon. More on that later. For now, get out and earn your place in your neighborhood.

Rankability

WalkScore has taken their delicious color-coded walkability maps, previously covered on Where, national. The results are...well, a bit disappointing. Perhaps I'm the only one, but I'm getting a bit tired of seeing rankings that use central city populations to determine the sample cities when metropolitan populations are far more important in determining the stature of an urban area. It makes little sense that Jacksonville, Tucson, and Oklahoma City make the cut for such rankings while St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh -- the central cities of much larger, more important metropolitan areas -- are left out because they've lost population to suburbanization.

This methodology has been a minor annoyance to me for some time, but the oversight seems particularly egregious in the case of WalkScore's ranking since it punishes densely-built urban centers for falling victim to exactly what the site is supposedly working against, and rewards cities that inflate their population counts through annexation and suburban deveopment patterns. The end result is a bit embarassing, with the overall city scores dropping under 70/100 points before you even get past the top ten on the list. Average everything out and the US gets a big fat F for walkability in its cities.

While there's a long way to go for Americans to become a more pedestrian-minded people, the idea that only a handful of our major cities are walkable is a bit absurd, and seems more like a misrepresentation than useful information. While it certainly shows the damage that suburbanization has done to our cultural understanding of urbanity, it says little about the actual state of walkability in America.

And that's too bad, because the maps look great, and the idea behind the rankings is a good one. If real estate is about location, the mantra for academic study should be "Execution, execution, execution."

Urban Sandboxes

CEOs for Cities recently relayed an interesting story from USA Today that has some interesting implications for older, depressed urban centers as Gen Y and the Millennials gear up to make their mark on history:

Tulane's applications almost doubled from 17,572 pre-Katrina to 34,100 this year. As one Loyola's vp of enrollment told the paper, "Students know they are coming down to have an adventure. It's a great time to be part of something... the rebirth of a city."

NOLA and other struggling burgs -- think Detroit, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Baltimore, or even smaller cities like Canton, Reading, and Flint -- together provide a unique opportunity in their hard times. These are the urban sandboxes, the cities that present young people trying to prove their mettle with the opportunity to do so in new and interesting ways. Desperation breeds innovation out of necessity.

Previous generations have tried and blundered efforts to turn Rust Belt and Northeastern cities back into growing, productive urban hubs. We now know that stadiums, riverwalks, and high-end condos have a limited (if any) effect on cities. What is encouraging about the surge of interest in New Orleans is that the challenge of repairing the city is so blatant, and so thoroughly un-glamorous (try as Brad Pitt might to change that).

Perhaps this is an early sign that the next generation of urban innovators gets that top-down, aesthetic-focused efforts aren't what improves a city; indeed, the "fix downtown and the neighborhoods will follow" theory is proving itself to be pretty weak over time. Could the interest in the Big Easy mean that tomorrow's civic leaders are now planting the seeds, as college students and recent grads, for a reversal of this process?

Besides -- if Millennials can fix Detroit, the "Greatest Generation" mantle may be up for grabs.

(Photo from Flickr user Alex Summer. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

WEEKEND READING: February 23-29, 2008

Happy Leap Year everyone! The crappiest month gets a whole day longer...Seriously, y'all, I hate February. Hooray for Weekend Reading, right?

ITEM ONE: TNAC becomes NAC, and kicks off a contest to come up with a tagline. The response so far has been El Lame-o, so go make some noise.

ITEM TWO: A massive wishlist for Hong Kong, Asia's Global City.

ITEM THREE: Pop City talks to Urban Design Associates honcho Don Carter about the eight things Pittsburgh needs to become a 21st Century City. It's about the Steel City, but many of Carter's points can be applied universally.

ITEM FOUR: Richard Florida frames urban development with an article about the Sex Pistols, and some interesting conversation follows.

ITEM FIVE: The Ground Floor explores the relationship between density and safety in urban areas.

ITEM SIX: Planetizen takes a look at Rotterdam's new "Blue Building" (seen in last week's Urbanffffinds).

ITEM SEVEN: A detailed written account of the soundscape of the boomtime Chinese city.

Have a fantabulous weekend, everyone! This blogger's headed home to Milwaukee for the weekend.

(Photo from Flickr user cblee. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Chicago vs. Pittsburgh: Conclusion

Tonight's post is the last of three in a blogging debate, in which Jim Russell of The Burgh Diaspora, who guest posted at Where last month, and I will discuss the relationship between Pittsburgh and Chicago, and which city relies more heavily on the other.

After Monday and Tuesday's conversation between Where and The Burgh Diaspora, Richard Florida became an impromptu (but welcome) third party to the debate; responding to my conjecture from yesterday and Dr. Florida's musings on Chicago's inherent geographical disadvantages in the globalized marketplace, Jim Russell came up with the following nugget of vocabularial wonder:

"Pittsburgh's bet on Chicago might be a bad one. The network economy springing from the migration of human capital could result in a cul-de-sac for global connectivity...both cities should seek to diversify their connectivity portfolios. No city is a standalone cash cow. Chicago is not a world onto Pittsburgh, nor should it be." (Emphasis added)

Tonight, we wrap up the "blog duel" with some conclusions; what have we learned from this exchange?

The concept of the "cul-de-sac for global connectivity" strikes me as a key takeaway here. The world has always, to some extent, operated regionally. The size of the regions that we are expected to follow and respond to has changed dramatically over the course of human history; where mankind's regional interests were once tied directly to the changing seasons and animal migration patterns, we now take in news at all times from across the globe. We belong to multiple tribes that move in different directions, at different speeds. We follow our neighborhood, our state or territory, our country, and our specialized circles of interest around the world.

But as cities become more closely woven through globalization, it is regionalism that becomes a threat to places like Chicago. I found Dr. Florida's suggestion that Chicago maintains no global geographic advantage particularly interesting because that very point highlights the exact problem posed by the rise of the global city: it has become very easy, in contemporary culture, to assume the inevitability of places like Chicago, which have in fact gained their prominence for very regional reasons. The loss of importance of physical regions and the diminished need for literal proximity represent a very basic but worldview-altering paradigm shift; Chicago is important in terms of American and especially Midwestern economics -- it rose as the transportation and distribution hub of the country -- but without increased efforts toward economic and connectivity diversity, it might just wind up as the Pittsburgh of the global megacity hierarchy.

Thanks again to Jim Russell for proposing this week's debate. Make sure to check out The Burgh Diaspora -- a must not just for Pittsburghers, but for anyone interested in learning more about diasporic networks in the global urban age.

(Photo found on FFFFOUND!. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)


Links:
Chi-Pitts Globalization (The Burgh Diaspora)

Chi-Pitts, or Vice-versa (Richard Florida and the Creative Class Exchange)

Diasporas, In and Out (Richard Florida and the Creative Class Exchange)

Chicago vs. Pittsburgh: Round 2

Tonight's post is the second of three in a blogging debate, in which Jim Russell of The Burgh Diaspora, who guest posted at Where last month, and I will discuss the relationship between Pittsburgh and Chicago, and which city relies more heavily on the other.

Yesterday and today, in arguing Pittsburgh's heavier reliance on Chicago, The Burgh Diaspora made the following points:

(1) "Pittsburghers are using their extended network and doing all the heavy lifting concerning the connectivity between the two cities. On the other hand, I suspect that a Chicago located firm looking for opportunity discovers Pittsburgh through Pittsburghers, not via transplants to the City of Bridges."

(2) "Chicago needs the talent developed in Pittsburgh...However, Chicago is also an impressive producer of human capital. If Chicago retained all of its local graduates, then would the city need Pittsburgh at all? Like Pittsburgh, Chicago's research universities are world class. Furthermore, Chicago attracts global human capital in ways Pittsburgh has not...Chicago does not actively seek Pittsburgh talent, but Pittsburghers still move there as a result of established migration patterns[.]"

But these two passages, when read together, play off each other in a way that suggests that Chicago's reliance on Pittsburgh and other domestic second-tier cities plays a very major role in Chicago's establishing itself as a global city in the first place.

Let's start by looking at the second statement. Assuming that it were able to retain the talent developed at universities like U of Chicago, Northwestern, Loyola, and UIC, Chicago would indeed be sitting pretty. So would Pittsburgh, if it were able to retail all of the graduates of Pitt, CMU, and Duquense. This is, especially in a fluid global economy, impossible. As sociologists have recently documented, a new phase is being added to the life cycle for young people in developed countries: the odyssey. Young people have a tendency, once they have their diploma in hand, to strike out into the world, seeking their proverbial fortunes.

This creates a diasporic network of people across the country and the world with strong roots in a community other than they one in which they are living. As its title suggests, this is exactly what The Burgh Diaspora covers in depth: Pittsburgh's diasporic population, often considered to be one of the most extensive such networks. This is where cities like Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Milwaukee, traditionally viewed as demographic "losers," gain a foothold. As the process of globalization continues to make centralization less of a necessity and more of a luxury, second-tier cities not only provide the cheaper business climate than their megacity counterparts (though, ironically, Pittsburgh is currently burdened by byzantine economic policies), they also become the default choice for smaller start-ups, making second-tier cities even more important incubators for the kind of talent needed to keep a megacity economy chugging along.

Back to the first of Burgh Diaspora's points: Pittsburgh's network, now, provides it with a unique opportunity to lift smaller businesses looking for a less overwhelming (read: risky) market in which to develop their product. Pittsburgh is able, through its extended diasporic network in Chicago, to earn free word-of-mouth advertising from its expatriate sons and daughters that could potentially drive these smaller companies east to the Appalachians. In the end, the Pittsburgh market is not as important to Chicago companies as the Chicago market is to Pittsburgh companies; I'll concede this. But in a global marketplace, Chicago's larger companies do need Pittsburgh's smaller ones to stay ahead of the international competition.

(Photo from Flickr user scoobyfoo. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)


Links:
IntoPittsburgh: Chicago (The Burgh Diaspora)

IntoPittsburgh: Chicago II (The Burgh Diaspora)

Chicago vs. Pittsburgh: Round 1

Tonight's post is the first of three in a blogging debate, in which Jim Russell of The Burgh Diaspora, who guest posted at Where last month, and I will discuss the relationship between Pittsburgh and Chicago, and which city relies more heavily on the other.

Nowadays, anyone following urbanism, economics, public policy, or related fields will have certainly heard of the theory that we are entering into an age of global urbanism where cities all over the world will be competing directly with each other for talent. Talent, we are told, will be more and more valuable as society becomes more technologically advanced, shifting even more heavily toward an international information economy. What you know, essentially, will become what you're worth. In this economic environment, megacities like Chicago will no longer merely be competing with New York, Washington DC, and San Francisco for talent; soon (already, many would say) Chicago will have to go head to head with London, Paris, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Mumbai, Tokyo, Shanghai, Sydney, and on and on.

This is a fairly logical progression of events. The major city has always acted as a magnet throughout its history in human civilization. People come to the city to get a job, to prove themselves, to make their fortune. The individual reasons are myriad, but the inspiration is the same: people come to the city to improve their quality of life. It doesn't always work out that way, but that's the basic impetus. Chicago, then, has long needed Pittsburgh -- and other cities like it -- to sustain itself. The larger the city, the more daunting it is to dream-chasers and immigrants. Medium-sized cities, then, are a prime source of population for larger cities.

Without Pittsburgh, in the literal sense, Chicago would not crumble and blow away; to think so would be naive. But Pittsburgh is a part of a group of cities that, together, have allowed Chicago to experience its recent -- and rather stunning -- revival over the past two decades. As post-industrial Western megacities like Chicago, New York, or London began to try to pick themselves up after losing manufacturing jobs in the 1970s and 80s, they began to rely on what you could call innovation-intensive fields like biomedicine, design, information technology, and (of course) the arts. These are highly specialized fields, and ones that many traditional middle class workers were not trained or educated to particpate in. Megacities, then, needed to draw in new talent from surrounding smaller cities.

Here's where Pittsburgh gets the upper hand over Chicago. As a mid-sized city, Pittsburgh is large enough to provide a genuinely urban lifestyle while not overwhelming the newcomer. As a bonus, the city also happens to be an important center of higher education, with two of the nation's best colleges (U of Pitt and Carnegie-Mellon) located in the Oakland neighborhood of the city. Generationally speaking, this works in the city's favor because it becomes an excellent place for people to move from a smaller city to start a family, where the parents can take advantage of the lower cost of living and provide for their kids, who can then more easily take advantage of nearby educational resources. Pittsburgh is, for all intents and purposes, a creative class factory.

This happens around the country. Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Saint Louis -- all of these mid-sized cities have traditionally fed job-seekers into Chicago. Today, the competition is national, and Chicago draws more than ever from Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Birmingham, San Diego, Denver, et. al. As the stakes are raised in coming decades, Bordeaux, Liverpool, Fortaleza, Adelaide, Fukuoka, Busan, Medellin, and Alexandria will all enter the mix. And not in the sense of traditional immigration, which creates ethnic communities, but in the sense of global creative class migration, which could create massive gentrified (or at least economically stable), internationally diverse areas in cities around the world.

Western society already operates as a sort of imperfect meritocracy. As this becomes more true, Chicago will need places like Pittsburgh more and more as it works to maintain and build its competitive creative core. Pittsburghers have the option to stay put; Chicago needs to convince them not to. It has to prove, however possible, that it can provide a better life. The burden lies with larger city.

(Photo from Flickr user -Nicole-. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)


Links:
The Burgh Diaspora

WEEKEND READING: December 8-14, 2007

Oh, this is an exciting week. There is a lot of really fantastic reading for you, if you are interested.

ITEM ONE: A short but stunningly effective piece at Spacing Wire on the need for humanism in the environmental movement proves that, sometimes, you really can say the most with the fewest words. It's a must-read.

ITEM TWO: The Burgh Diaspora puts out a call to all Rust Belt bloggers (and citizens).

ITEM THREE: Critical Spatial Practice takes a look at the history of labor struggles in urban America.

ITEM FOUR: Airoots goes gangbusters on Tokyo retail and high-end boutique architecture. This is another must-read.

ITEM FIVE: Does Marseille hold the key to Europe's future? The Smithsonian mag thinks so.

ITEM SIX: David Adjaye's Whitechapel Idea Store gets the Flickr treatment from Life Without Buildings.

ITEM SEVEN: And to finish up this wonderfully weighty edition of WR, a good, old-fashioned traffic joke that will at least inspire a chuckle.

Have a great weekend, and enjoy the reading!

(Photo from Flickr user hampshiregirl. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Architect Disconnect

While I do try very hard to keep things positive in Where posts, occasionally something comes along that's so gratuitously heinous that I just can't help but rail against it. That is the case with College Squeeze's recent post on the "20 Ugliest Colleges in the USA."

To wit:

"It does have a nice quad and trees, but seriously. Who cares about trees?" No one. No one at all.

"Sure, it’s full of smart people, but it’s just a brick campus." Hilarious.

"For once, I’d just like to see a building that was intentionally designed trying to be beautiful, but just failed badly." Because most buildings are designed to be ugly, you see.

"I haven’t actually been to Carnegie Mellon, just heard horrible things about it and Pittsburgh." Brilliant technique! Masterful analysis!

"And…oh my, a cottage." And...oh my, an idiot.

"At least Yale tried to make their buildings architecturally interesting by pouring acid all over them." Better architecture through chemistry!

I love good snark -- crave it, even -- but when it's done poorly it tends to make reading feel like having your molars drilled. And this? This is bad. If I were guessing, based on basic grammar and mechanics (not to mention a total lack of aesthetic focus and an embarrassing misuse of architectural vocabulary) I'd put good money on the author being a college freshman with an obnoxiously over-descriptive Facebook page. The explanations for each entry on the list are so self-indulgent that you'll actually grow a year younger just by reading them. (Sorry, Joan Rivers...you'll still look old). Worst of all, they're just not funny. Well, not in the way they were intended to be. As evinced above, the writing itself is quite entertaining.

But what really got my attention -- and that of the folks at Chicagoist, from whence I procured the link -- was this paragraph on the #9-ranked campus, IIT:

"This is the third 'institute of technology' on the list. They need to get better architects at these schools. The low-rise buildings are so nasty and dull that they feel like a blast from the past. Some serious renovation is in dire need at this school. Only the Main building is okay, but the rest just falls short with its flat, square-ish design that feels like an office complex. Of course all of their pictures focus on the Main building, because the rest is just not camera-worthy."

Emphasis added by yours truly.

The Chicagoistas and I were all thrown by the author's utter disregard for architectural history. It's one thing to dislike the Miesian aesthetic, or the Koohlaasian. I hate Koolhaas! Who doesn't? But to say that IIT needs "better architects" is a bit...well the word "ludicrous" comes to mind.

That was my initial reaction, at least. Then my mind started to wander, and I got to thinking a lot about how public opinion affects architecture and legacy. Architects, planners, designers, and those of us who care about what is done by the aforementioned parties have a way of sealing ourselves off from the general public. So it can come as a shock sometimes when we find out that buildings hailed within the architectural community aren't held in high public esteem. And that, in turn, raises the question of what makes a "great" building. Yes, yes, art is subjective and there is no such thing as a building that pleases everybody. But who gets to determine what constitutes "great" -- the learned (obsessive?) few, or the ignorant (honest?) masses?

Sorry if the tone in this one was overly personal...I can be a bit self-indulgent myself, I suppose.

(Photo from Flickr user Hagen Stier. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)


Links:
IIT: Get a "better" architect (Chicagoist) (I just can't bring myself to link directly to the actual College Squeeze post...you can find a link at Chicagoist if you want to read it.)

Connectivity Wherewithal (Guest Post by Jim Russell)

Where is Pittsburgh? Capturing the essence of a place is not easy. Manufacturing a place may be impossible. But the location of a place is relatively straightforward, yes? I'm here to tell you that where Pittsburgh is might surprise you.

Where is Real Pittsburgh? Answering that question will bring out the connoisseurs of place as well as Pittsburgh aficionados. I suspect most of those experts would dig up an authentic Pittsburgh rooted in nostalgia and steeped in local lore, "You know you are in Pittsburgh when..."

I'm skeptical of place mythology. When I lived in Vermont, a friend visiting asked to see the "true" part of the state, not the countryside overrun with New York City refugees seeking utopia. I brought him to a trailer park in Bolton and told him that the state tree should be the satellite dish, not the sugar maple. My decidedly unromantic view of Vermont did not sit well with my visitor.

If you want to see where a place in the United States is today, then eat at a national chain restaurant at an interstate interchange in some suburb of the central city. Multinational corporations would love to homogenize your experience, but they will ultimately fail. A local McDonalds is as good an indicator as any as to where you are.

However, McDonalds is globally a place unto itself. There is an identifiable McDonalds experience and a strong sense of place, regardless of context. The places that exist in more than one location serve as my muse for the Burgh Diaspora blog. My posts are about Pittsburghs (and other "places"), wherever they may be.

The geography that gets me up in the morning is the landscape between places, how connected locations form a unique experience that has all the characteristics of place. I have argued that Authentic Pittsburgh is found in the parking lot tailgate of a Steelers away game or at a Steelers bar in a city far from Heinz Field. In these places, Pittsburgh is preserved.

Globalization, often mischaracterized as the destruction of geography, redefines a place in terms of connectivity. You can map these relationships and easily comprehend how each city has its own profile. A city's global network is how I would define a place and the essence of Pittsburgh is found in the locations of the region's expatriates.

------------------

Big thanks to today's guest blogger, Jim Russell, the blogger behind The Burgh Diaspora. Check out Jim's blog for a more in depth exploration of the process of "realizing a new geographic understanding of Pittsburgh."

Mapping Manifest Destiny @ The Newberry Library

From a curatorial standpoint, Mapping Manifest Destiny at the Newberry Library (which is in a gorgeous building, in case you were wondering) is an excellent exhibit. The gallery space where the maps are displayed is large and quiet, and the information is carefully organized into four color-coded areas that chart the history of the North American West through cartography. The four sections illustrate the progression of the continent from exotic terra nova at the edge of the world to civilized nation linked by a sophisticated network of railroads by defining the primary focus of mapmaking in four different eras of exploration. You can basically watch the centuries-long process of the formation of the United States (and Canada and Mexico, to lesser extents) take place in under an hour. In addition, scale is provided by the inclusion of maps that detail Chicago's own growth from a swampy outpost into a major transportation hub for the rapidly-growing nation. It's downright artful curation.

Oh, and the content is pretty good, too. ;-)

In fact, the collection is a perfect illustration of the fourth use of maps as explained by the Field Museum's Festival of Maps exhibit: these are maps that "bear witness to and shape history." The first two sections, which explore Maps for Empire and Maps to Serve the New Empire show the evolution of the shape of North America as ever more sophisticated cartographical methods and new knowledge about the continent became available over time. Centuries-old European maps are on hand, as are some of the earliest maps of several modern major American cities, such as San Antonio, New Orleans, and Pittsburgh (the last one being drawn and annotated by none other than the young George Washington).

Halfway through you'll find a real treat: William Clark's (of Lewis & Clark fame) original, hand-drawn map of the Corps of Discovery's exploration of the American West in search of an overland river route to the Pacific. The edges are frayed and the ink slightly faded, but this is history, staring you in the face. It almost glows; it gave me goosebumps.

While the first half of Mapping Manifest Destiny shows how the land manipulated the people that explored it, the second half shows how, once the continent had been properly charted, people then manipulated the land. This half is separated into Maps for Enlightenment and Maps for Business, and details the United States' growth into a commercial juggernaut. The gridded system of land surveying that directed property sales and distribution as the US expanded westward, spurred on by the ideology from which this exhibit takes its name, shows up here. Maps for Enlightenment features see nineteenth-century text books opened to maps (my personal favorite was the one that color-coded the world on a scale from Savage to Enlightened). Maps for Business covers Chicago's rise to dominance of the field of commercial cartography. Several maps and books by Rand McNally (the company largely responsible for the Windy City's cartographical supremacy) are on display. The Business section is rounded out by maps of the expansion of the nation's railroad system and the California gold rush.

Mapping Manifest Destiny is short, sweet, and to the point. It's certainly not the kind of thing you'd bring the kids along for (especially if they're the crying type -- the ceilings are high, and everything echoes) as the material is presented in a very mature way. But anyone interested in US history (or the art of exhibit curation) will find the Newberry Library's contribution to the FoM to be a truly enlightening experience.

IF YOU GO
Mapping Manifest Destiny is on display at the Newberry Library on Chicago's Near North Side until February 16th, 2008. The library's exhibit galleries are open Monday, Friday, and Saturday from 8:15 am - 5:30 pm, and Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday 8:15 am- 7:30 pm; the galleries are free and open to the public. While you're there, check out Ptolemy's Geography and Renaissance Masters in the gallery across the lobby. A short bus ride down LaSalle Street is Encyclopedia Britannica's US headquarters; the building's lobby is host to a variety of maps from the Britannica collection, marking the company's contribution to the FoM.


Links:
Mapping Manifest Destiny (Newberry Library)

Ptolemy's Geography and Renaissance Masters (Newberry Library)

Encyclopedia Britannica

Festival of Maps

Five Innovation Myths Applied to Urbanism

A recent CEOs for Cities post pointed out a great article by Dev Patnaik that outlined five common mistakes made by businesses looking to be innovators. All of them, in one way or another, dealt with the myth of the silver bullet, and the article made a clear and concise argument for the importance of institutional context and diversified methodology. The myths that Patnaik does away with are all important for urbanists to consider as cities work to position themselves as both innovative places and as incubators of economic and technological innovation. On top of that, responding to context (cities each have very different conditions, physically and economically) and diversification (urban problems are both numerous and intrinsically interconnected, and there is no one solution to anything) are particularly applicable. The following is a breakdown, in urbanism terminology, of Patnaik's ideas.

• Over-reliance on high-profile, "sexy" projects

The Guggenheim Bilbao made just as big a splash in the fields of urban planning and policy as it did in architecture. Now, it's a commonly-held belief that cities can build megaprojects that will catapult them into the international spotlight and trigger a surge of prosperity. In reality, even when such projects are independently successful they are never the silver bullet that was imagined. Chicago's Millennium Park, for example, is by all accounts a huge success as a public space and tourist attraction. Still, it was a financial fiasco, and the glamour and goodwill afforded the city by the park is now being squandered by the miserable failure of the city's transit system -- a battle in which the City of Chicago is too strapped to play any meaningful role. Big projects can be important to cities, but it's even more important to pay close attention to what trade-offs will need to be made in terms of basic services (transit ain't the only thing hurtin' in Chicago) in order to pull off a good piece of stunt urbanism. Millennium Park is an innovative piece of landscape architecture, but as an urban regenerator it's as archaic as they come.

• Unhealthy fascination with unique, charismatic civic leaders

Michael Bloomberg, Gavin Newsome, and Ken Livingstone all command a considerable amount of media attention for their efforts to improve their cities. This innovation red herring is especially potent in urbanism: everyone loves a superstar mayor. And while these mayors can teach us a lot, it is important to remember that the best and most innovative mayors from the past (Jaime Lerner is a prime example) were willing to take risks; that is to say that great mayors have often made names for themselves by bucking trends and trying new ideas that were responsive to their specific cities rather than following standard procedures being replicated, cut-and-paste style, in other cities.

• Misapplication of other cities' approaches

Building on the previous point, it is often assumed that because Idea X worked in City Y, it will be equally successful in City Z. This is absurd. Take, for instance, the public transportation system in Medellín. The city's 3.2 million inhabitants live in a long, narrow valley. While the central part of the city, located in the lowest and flattest part of the valley, is served by a standard subway system, the densely populated neighborhoods that climb up the western hillsides are served by the Metrocable, a cable-car line that has become very successful both as a transit line and -- to the delight of city officials -- a tourist attraction that has helped (along with other projects) to lower crime and improve the economic outlook for the neighborhood's poorer residents. The lesson to be learned here for other cities is that unconventional transit options can be worth the risk if they are properly tailored to the needs of the community. The misapplication of this lesson would be for a flat city to assume that building a cable car would be a good idea since it worked in Medellín. This is a relatively simple illustration, but you get the idea.

• Descent into a cycle of self-recrimination

Pittsburgh, the oddball city so dear to my own heart, is the poster child for this kind of thinking. Many Pittsburghers labor under the assumption that their city is suffering because it is unable to hold onto the talented young people who graduate from major universities in the area like the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon University. (In fact, Pittsburgh has an unusually high rate of retention of its young natives). Pittsburghers see Creative Class capitals like San Francisco and Austin attracting large numbers of young creative types and makes the assumption that it is not cool enough to compete. Untold energy is put into trying to make the city cooler and more attractive to young people. Meanwhile, the draconian tax system that discourages start-ups (the number that exist regardless of this fact is a testament to the city's unrealized potential) go unchanged because Pittsburgh fails to realize that music festivals and extensive bike paths aren't going to save the city. The Burgh was a global hub of commercial and technological innovation at the turn of the 19th century. To be successful today, all cities (Pittsburgh included) would do well to look back at their strongest points and learn how to replicate that kind of success.

• Resignation to superficial changes

Patnaik uses the example "Let's just paint the walls purple" to mock companies' shallow understanding of the funky interiors of creative business HQs -- most famously, the Googleplex. Cities have a long and storied history of believing in the power of cosmetic changes only to be let down by the results. A phenomenon that you might call Trinket Urbanism had a death grip on North American cities until relatively recently as every city rushed to have their version of one-off amenities built in other cities. Baltimore's Festival Harbor spawned a gazillion of those so-called "Festival Marketplaces." Arenas were all the rage throughout much of the 1990s. Making a city more attractive is certainly not a bad idea, but there is a dangerous perceived correlation between beautification and prosperity. Flowering medians do not a center of innovation make.

(Photo from Flickr user emsef. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)


Links:
Innovation Mistakes (CEOs for Cities)

Five Common Mistakes in Innovation (Business Week)

Speculative Urban Blogging

I came across two great new blogs this week that do what you might refer to as "speculative urban blogging" in two very different (if equally innovative) ways. So consider tonight's post sort of an in-depth lead-in to Weekend Reading, if you will.

Audacious Ideas takes a look at how things are going in Baltimore and makes some rather audacious suggestions as to how these problems might be addressed more effectively. Here's the catch: the entries are written by Baltimore professionals who work in fields that deal directly with the problems that they are writing about. Audacious Ideas takes big questions and provides answers sized to match. And even with only five posts (not including the introduction), AI has provided audacious[ly pragmatic, in most cases] suggestions for policy reform in the areas of public health, the city budget, childrens' safety, drug treatment, and education.

Even better, the audacity is apparently just what the doctor ordered, so to speak. Every topic has spurred a discussion at least a dozen posts long. Baltimoreans are taking inspiration from this new public forum, and from everything that I've read the readers are taking the discussions seriously -- a rare occurence on the internet. It certainly helps that these discussions are being started and led by community leaders with experience and wisdom. Online conversations almost always benefit from having a curating presence, and as this blog continues to build a body of posts and public discourse, it stands a better chance of becoming a real engine for change in Baltimore. Speculating on the future of the city opens up possibilities and puts some 2.0 juice into public policy.

The Blurgh looks at Pittsburgh's future from an entirely different angle: the writers are already living in it. Written in an imagined 2027, The Blurgh is a rather audacious blog, itself. "Frank" and "Gretchen" are two twentysomethings, a student and a writer, making their way in the now-resurgent Steel City. Written as a simple journal-style blog, The Blurgh is coy. The bloggers mention massive changes in the city's physical and economic environments -- Pittsburgh's status as a hub of sustainable technology, the city's impressive literary scene, an über-extensive mass transit system -- in passing, stopping only occasionally to do a sort of "gee, whiz" look back at the past (aka our present) and comment on how glad they are to be living in the "new" Pittsburgh (aka the one in 2027).

It's the realism that is so clever. If this very blog were being written in 2007, it would be wholly unremarkable, another drop in the massive bucket of naval-gazing public journaling that has earned the field blogging its currently somewhat uneven reputation. Well, okay...it is actually being written in 2007, but you get what I mean. The writer(s) of The Blurgh seem to know exactly what they're doing and, while it's too early to tell, they could turn this blog into a very important forum for the discussion of Pittsburgh's future, and how the city got/could get there. At the very least, it will be interesting to see how The Blurgh -- and its community of readers -- evolves.

So much of urblogging is focused on keeping tabs on what's going on right now in a neighborhood or a city. The local everyday politics of potholes, homelessness, new construction, and Starbucks are important to local discourse, and this is not a knock against of-the-moment urblogs. But it certainly wouldn't hurt, I don't think, if bloggers in a few more cities took on the challenge of trying to imagine a better and brighter future for the places they live. The hyperlocal movement is very much tied to the immediate present, and sometimes this means that urbloggers can't see the forest for the trees. A better future for our cities is something worth speculating about, and blogging provides those interested with the perfect medium to address rapidly-changing problems. As Audacious Ideas and The Blurgh show us, there are many different ways to use this technology to speculate on a brighter urban future.

(Photo from Flickr user joey kennedy. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)


Links:
Audacious Ideas (via CEOs for Cities)

The Blurgh (via The Burgh Diaspora)

WEEKEND READING: September 1-7, 2007

It has been a busy week at Where. The last couple of days have been slow news days, but there was a glut of good stuff earlier in the week. Here are the highlights...

ITEM ONE: Airoots has posted the most eloquent lament of New York's homogenization yet...

ITEM TWO: ...and the authors' following post, on the fluidity of Tokyo nightlife, confirmed that airoots is, in fact, the best urbanism blog that you're not reading yet.

ITEM THREE: A new urban issues zine, The World Edition, is up and running this week with articles from founder Alexander H. Johnstone, Archidose's John Hill, and (in the interest of full disclosure) me. Heh.

ITEM FOUR: Gran Raccordo explains why New York is actually Pittsburgh.

ITEM FIVE: The AHI blog takes a look at what the recent presidential election in Turkey will mean for affordable housing in that country.

ITEM SIX: Mark the date - Wikicity Rome takes place tomorrow (Saturday, September 8th).

ITEM SEVEN: BoingBoing covers the fascinating Homeless World Cup, which is exactly what it sounds like.

Have a great weekend!

(Photo from Flickr user diebmx.)

WEEKEND READING: August 4-10, 2007

It's been humid here like you wouldn't believe this past week, but the weekend is supposed to get a bit cooler. (Note to self: stop starting every Weekend Reading post by commenting on the weather...)

ITEM ONE: The US Affordable Housing Institute's blog is both informative and hilarious. Quite a feat, hey?

ITEM TWO: Milwaukee Magazine has a great article up about the unsinkable Whitney Gould, the architecture critic who has played quite a large role in the development in Milwaukee's attitude (and thus, my own) toward design and architecture.

ITEM THREE: The headline takes care of this one - Asia's biggest slum set to turn into India's Madison Avenue .

ITEM FOUR: One Porteño's commentary on (and photos of) Buenos Aires' new $46 million, 16 block tram. Oy. (Found via the excellent Global Voices Online)

ITEM FIVE: Some good news out of New Orleans -- the city's population has reached 60% of the pre-Katrina level.

ITEM SIX: Great post this week on brain drain at the Burgh Diaspora blog.

ITEM SEVEN: In case you missed it, proposals for San Francisco's Transbay Tower from Richard Rogers (ouch), Cesar Pelli (double ouch), and SOM (actually quite good) were unveiled this week. Life Without Buildings points us to some gorgeous animations of SOM's tower and station buildings on YouTube.


That's all for now, folks. Enjoy your weekend!

(Photo from Flickr user fddi1.)

WEEKEND READING: July 21-27, 2007

Good stuff good stuff good stuff this week. If you're from or going to be visiting Chicago this weekend and don't have time to read them all, skip straight to item seven.

ITEM ONE: All About Cities poses the question "What makes cities great to visit?"

ITEM TWO: Building on the urban agriculture theme from earlier this week: Pittsburgh's Pop City -- the kind of pragmatically upbeaet media outlet that every city should have at least one of -- covers urban farming in that city.

ITEM THREE: Sheer awesomeness from the construction of Amsterdam's new subway: "7,000 mirrors hung in clusters of three on buildings along the 2.4 miles of the route that's underground. Measuring devices shine infrared beams onto each mirror once an hour, measure the reflection, and feed data into a central computer. After triangulating, the computer raises the alarm if any building shifts more than 0.5 millimeters in any direction. A millimeter is the thickness of a paper clip."

ITEM FOUR: Life Without Buildings describes every architecture student's vision of Hell.

ITEM FIVE: Those crazy Londoners have come up with a unique way to direct tourist traffic in their city: Vibrating rings.

ITEM SIX: Paris is not car-friendly. Raise your hand if you're surprised. (Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?)

ITEM SEVEN: Last but not least, Chicagoans looking for something to do this Saturday afternoon should head over the DIY Neighborhood event in Logan Square. It's the first event for a promising new urban community-focused nonprofit called Neighbors Project, which will soon be starting chapters in Brooklyn and San Francisco (or so I'm told).

Have a freakin' awesome weekend, folks.

(Photo from Flickr user shadeofmelon.)

The Dawn of Digital Urbanism

Blog Like You Give a Damn put up a great post last month on recent advances in online urban cartography (like Google's über-controvertial Street Views) and how these new digital reinterpretations of the world are moving us toward William Gibson's vision of cyberspace as a physically inhabitable place. From BLYGAD:

"Unlike the cyberspace that Gibson describes in [his book] Neuromancer:

'...a graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...' (69)

this new cyberspace will be much more familiar to us. It will look and behave in ways we understand - dangerous because the line between real and virtual will be that much more hazed. As the possibilities for exploration, learning, and knowledge building expand - so too will the potential for surveillance, misuse, and abuse."

Cyberspace is Shangri-la for the internet generation: a mythic miracle of a place that we are sure exists just over the horizon, within a whisper's length of our grasp. Each person has their own idea of this place painted in their mind, but I think the truth about an inhabitable Cyberspace is that it will be very much like Gibson's fantastical vision. It will also be very familiar to us, as BLYGAD predicts. In fact, our physical reality is already merging with its virtual counterpart. For, as the hyperconnectivity brought on by the rise of the internet becomes integrated into the urban fabric, understanding of one's physical environment is becoming more inextricably tied to one's understanding of the web itself. The melding of the physical and virtual (cyber) worlds is already taking place on both ends, with each side moving quickly toward the other. Eventually, of course, they'll meet somewhere in the middle.

We can see this trend online as the "clusters and constellations of data" described by Gibson are being harnessed to create a sort of digital urbanism, recreating various aspects of the physical world for Cyberspace. Akamai recently launched a tool -- Visualizing the Internet -- that has been described as a weather report for the web. Meanwhile, an online art project called We Feel Fine (profiled in the June issue of Metropolis) mimics the richly frenetic atmosphere of a busy public space without actually replicating any of the recognizable features of physical places. If the aforementioned Google Street Views is representational digital urbanism, We Feel Fine is the presentational version, capturing the essence of public space in a wholly new way, reorganizing the traditional tokens of public spaces (trading visual diversity for emotional diversity) into a "place" that could only exist online.

Good old-fashioned bricks and mortar urbanism, meanwhile, is getting a digital overhaul as handheld, web-enabled devices and wireless internet for laptop users takes the edge off of some this system's perennial problems. I'll take any chance I can get to highlight Urbanspoon, a site that catalogs every restaurant in several major US cities (DC was recently added), aggregates reviews from major websites, allows for user ratings and reviews, and provides neighborhood breakdowns via kickass "nighttime" maps that show the locations of all of the cities' eateries. Finding a great restaurant has never been so easy. Another genius web service, recently covered on Springwise, is MizPee, a San Francisco-based service that allows users to access a list of nearby public restrooms, eliminating one of the chief drawbacks of pedestrianism.

As cities become more digitally enabled, they are also starting to bleed together. Geographic constraints have been removed from art and culture in the same way that they were from commerce. Even street fashion has crossed over into the digital realm. As the David Report...well...reports, cities across the globe will be represented in "Street Clash," a blog where the tragically hip artkids from dozens of cities will go head-to-head in an effort to determine which city has the ultimate street style. The irony of this is that, while individuals can rep their hometowns in a token sense, they are still independent human beings free to change their geography at any time. That is to say that what is happening here is the formation of an international street style, as a handful of people cannot be representative of an entire urban population. Hipster fashion has been globalized. Whether this is good, bad, or just hilarious is still a question mark.

As BLYGAD's post points out, the transition of the physical world into the Cyberspace of the future could open a Pandora's Box of new social, ethical, and safety concerns. Pittsblog reported yesterday on a proposal from the city of Pittsburgh for a massive urban surveillance system. Mike Madison, who writes the blog, had this to say: "Hopefully the public will respond...to the proposal's Benthamite implications...It's one thing (though it's not necessarily a good thing) to be watched when you know that you're being watched. It's something else entirely -- and rarely a good thing -- to be watched all the time, when you don't necessarily know it" (emphasis his). Madison then asks the age-old question, "who will watch the watchers?" This, I think, will be the most fundamental challenge of Cyberspace: in a universally connected world, the unwatched watcher has more power than ever, as they will have unprecedented access to the masses.

As the internet becomes increasingly ubiquitous and reality moves toward the virtual, the emergent Cyberspace will almost certainly take on an urban form -- though it remains to be seen whether it will lean more heavily on the physical or virtual world. Either way, geography will become less and less binding as cities learn to connect in ever more complex ways, and we will likely come to understand urbanism as something very different from what it is now. Shangri-la is upon us.

(Photo from Flickr user 3views.)


Links:
New Urban Cartography (Blog Like You Give a Damn)

Visualizing the Internet (Akamai)

We Feel Fine

Urbanspoon

Mobile Loo Locator (Springwise)

Street Clash (David Report)

The Pittsburgh Panopticon (Pittsblog)