WEEKEND READING: March 29-April 4, 2008

First things first: MONU has put out a Call for Submissions for their upcoming issue on "Exotic Urbanism." Sounds freaking brillaint. Now, on to this week's cream o' the crop.

ITEM ONE: New-ish blog Boredom Is Always Counter-Revolutionary with a cutting rant about advertisements, architecture, and envisioning the city of the future.

ITEM TWO: Lee Bey has his own cutting rant this week, this one zeroing in on race, crime, and public housing in Chicago. Spot-on.

ITEM THREE: Switching gears a bit, MNP's post on suburb-eating robots will blow your mind and tickle your funny bone. (Photo credit)

ITEM FOUR: Interchange blogger Scott Page on DIY Urbanism and the upcoming Wicker Park Bucktown workshops in Chicago.

ITEM FIVE: CS Monitor examines Hugo Chavez's plan to build a Venezuelan Brasilia of sorts. Welcome to Caribia, the 21st Century Socialist City.

ITEM SIX: Some eye candy from The Map Room -- a collection of late 19th and early 20th century maps of Latin American cities.

ITEM SEVEN: More humor to cap things off this week. The Onion features an hilarious exposé on the aristocrization of gentrified neighborhoods in American cities (via Super Colossal).

Adios, compadres. See you next week!

Integration 2.0

Links:
MoveSmart.org

Next Generation Diversity

Our cities are changing, and the discussion of diversity must now change to keep pace with their evolution. Civic and community leaders must begin teaching citizens how to communicate and understand each other across neighborhood boundaries, shifting the focus from physical diversity to philosophical.

After his controversial study last October revealed that ethnic diversity significantly lowers the level of trust in a given community, Bowling Alone author Robert Putnam, was quick to point out that his report was not meant to be read as a warning that different people shouldn't live near each other. "What we shouldn’t do," Putnam told the Financial Times, "is to say that they [immigrants] should be more like us. We should construct a new us." But uniting people from different communities and walks of life has proven a very difficult challenge thus far (see: gentrification). Ethnic and racial diversity are stated goals in many revitalization efforts. The fact that these efforts often fall short of expectations not only undermines the efforts of anyone trying to change their community for the better, it undermines the case for diverse cities, period.

Another study of diversity, this one from the University of Michigan's Scott Page, offers some insight into how this "new us" might be constructed. Diversity, Page asserts, greatly improves productivity in organizations "because diverse groups of people bring to organizations more and different ways of seeing a problem and, thus, faster/better ways of solving it...If we’re in an organization where everyone thinks in the same way, everyone will get stuck in the same place."

For cities, this idea is a more academic expression of the Jane Jacobs quote that Richard Florida so often cites: "When a place gets boring, even the rich people leave." When there are too many people who all think in similar ways living in the same area, "sense of place" tends to suffer. Meanwhile, enclave-type neighborhoods often draw their distinct character from their demographic solidarity; think of Harlem in New York, Calle Ocho in Miami, Boystown in Chicago, or Chinatown...just about anywhere. These are strong, proud communities that are relatively happy with where they live and who they live near -- namely, people who look and act similarly.

That doesn't have to be a negative thing. When considering diversity and vibrancy, remember that Manhattan has always been rather famously segregated, but the different ethnic neighborhoods gained strength from compactness and proximity. Unfortunately, white flight turned this into a negative, and gentrification is the same process moving in the opposite direction. But as young people start to move back to cities, they are understanding those cities in a way that the previous generation did not: they are recognizing that cities aren't contained within municipal boundary lines. When considering urban problems, the next generation will have to look at entire metropolitan areas for solutions. The "new us" is regional.

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

Links:
Study paints bleak picture of ethnic diversity (Financial Times)

In Professor’s Model, Diversity = Productivity (NY Times)

Living in SimCity

SimCity, one of the most popular electronic games of all time, played an undeniable role in the return to the popular consciousness over the past few decades of urban planning. While the original game succeeded by breaking cities down into their most basic elements (residential, commercial, industrial, institutional, infrastructural, recreational), subsequent versions have become more complex, and more nuanced. And with the most recent version of the game, SimCity Societies (the first version not developed by creator Will Wright and his team at Maxis), came and went with barely a whimper, the franchise is ideally poised for a thorough revamp.

I recently read two posts at Very Spatial that got me thinking about SimCity and its potential for revival. The first of these posts was about mixed reality gaming, and it discussed a Nintendo DS game that allows players to visit a real island north of Tokyo and participate in a treasure hunt, with the handheld gaming system acting as an interface between the real island and the electronic version of the same place. This technology literally breaks down the walls between the player and the game, blending reality and fantasy. The second Very Spatial post focused on using online mapping technology to record personal histories or memories. The rise of mapping as a customizable, highly social tool should not be ignored by anyone interested in developing a city simulation game. Collaboration and customization are powerful selling points when trying to grab the interest of today's young people.

Mix quasi-reality and personalized cartography together and what have you got? Enormous potential. Consider the possibilities: a game could be created that allows people to create an alternate reality version of their neighborhood or their whole city and then upload that alternate reality onto a central server. Using a handheld device, they could then venture out into the city to interact with alternate realities created by other users. Games could cross paths and interact, teams could be built, and stories could intertwine. Social media and a wiki format could allow users to modify games created by other users, and whole alternate mythologies could be built, each one intrinsically tied to the place where it was developed. Gamers could travel to other cities to take part in other games. It's virtual reality without the stupid headgear.

The truly ingenious part of SimCity is that the game is disguised as a simple simulator that allows one to play God by building (and/or destroying) a city. Entire regions become customizable, and whole worlds and cultures imagined. Meanwhile, the game is also teaching players valuable lessons about how and why cities work: houses and factories don't do well next to each other; large buildings create more traffic, but well-planned transit alleviates that pressure; parks and recreational facilities are vital to morale (or "aura" as it was called in SimCity 3000) and public health. These lessons are still important today, but with advanced technology this type of simulator has the ability to teach an entirely new set of lessons.

In truth, the most basic building block of urban civilization -- more basic than residential, commercial, or industrial -- is social interaction. And by looking at cities at this most basic (and, at the same time, complex) level, we see an entirely new set of problems. Gentrification, segregation, resource distribution, community -- all of these issues could be explored through a SimCity game that mixed reality and personal fantasy.

An example: there is a triangular plaza in my neighborhood in Chicago. While it has a fountain and some trees, this scrappy public space has long been a source of frustration for some of my neighbors, who wish that the "Polish Triangle" would be better cared for, and that it could serve as a beautiful public gathering place. In an existing version of SimCity, a player could cover an empty triangular plot with parks and watch the land value of surrounding blocks rise. Imagine a SimCity that allowed users to completely re-design the Polish Triangle so that any player walking through the area could access this visionary public space and interact with it. The lessons learned would not only be more resonant -- they would be more personal, more real, and might actually affect public sentiment and, eventually, political will.

Another recent phenomenon suggests that this kind of gaming technology could be extremely successful if implemented: the Japanese cellphone novel. These novels, written by teens and young adults on their mobiles, have become a major literary movement in Japan, with half of the Top Ten bestseller list from the last year being made up of cellphone novels that were turned into actual print novels. A striking fact about the genre: most cellphone novels eschew details about the setting of the story. “If you limit it to a certain place," an author explained in a recent NY Times article on the subject, "readers won’t be able to feel a sense of familiarity.” Thus, while a core group is creating personalized content -- for free, unless and until their novels are printed -- massive demand is coming from outside of that core. It is a community that anyone can be involved in, and one where you can very easily make the switch between producer and consumer at your leisure.

The same could be done with a hyperlocal, mixed reality version of SimCity. You could import buildings to your neighborhood from around the world. Stick the Eiffel Tower in the middle of Central Park. Walk through Shibuya in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. Ultimately, the most compelling and useful alternate realities would rise to the top, whatever the reason for their popularity. In the future, you might be able to walk up and down your block several times and see it in a completely different way on each lap.

And, if you didn't like any of what you saw, you could change it in an afternoon.

(Photo from the Centre for Education in the Built Environment. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)


Links:
Mixed Reality Gaming In Japan (Very Spatial)

Creating Memories Using Maps (Very Spatial)

Wicker Park's Dirty Doorstep (Chicago Reader)

Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular (NY Times) (via Smart Mobs)

Mapping the Self @ the Museum of Contemporary Art

At first glance Mapping the Self, the MCA's contribution to the Festival of Maps lineup, takes some serious liberties in how it defines what a map is. But then, as the introduction to the exhibit plainly states, this exhibit is not about maps. It's about how artists use maps, both to define themselves and the physical, social, and emotional spaces that they inhabit and/or experience. In fact the very meaning of the word "map" is derived from the Latin word mappa, for the cloth that maps were drawn on. A map is an exploration drawn out on a physical surface. With the etymology in mind, the pieces at the MCA's exhibit fit the theme a bit more logically.

Save for a few larger pieces spread throughout the fourth-floor atrium (including a clever recreation of John Baldassari's Framed Heights), the bulk of the work in the exhibit is organized into two rooms; the first deals with artists' use of mapping to define and examine themselves, and the second with the way that they use maps to explore and reimagine the world around them.

A piece by artist Patrick McGee is a notable highlight in the first section as it explodes the traditional concept of the map at the same time that it asserts itself as one. McGee took measurements of his head to come up with a new system of units of measurement; the diameter of his head (the Fit) became the measurement of length, its volume (the immersion) the measurement of capacity, and weight (the burden) the measurement of mass. McGee's piece is both entertaining and thought-provoking, especially in the context of this exhibit. It represents, after all, the physical nature of the artist's head, but it also breaks the head down into very basic calculations and reevaluates the rest of the physical world in relation to the artist. It is a philosophical mapping of the idea of physicality; a delightful mindf*ck, if you will.

The second room contains pieces that look more like...well, maps, or at least more like what you might expect maps to look like. There are exceptions to this rule, but even a glance around this gallery will reassure anyone thrown off by the first section. Chicago plays a major role here as the physical place being examined and/or reimagined in many of the pieces on display, adding to the sense of familiarity. Works by Stephanie Nadeau and John Cage are highlights, but again, one piece sort of steals this half of the show. That piece, Paula Henderson's Extended Remix, takes Chicago's 77 community areas, color codes them by their majority racial demographic, and then puts them into alphabetical order. The boundaries stay the same, but the names and colors shuffle around, creating a vivid and rather jarring reinterpretation of this notoriously segregated city's racial landscape. It is a very different Chicago seen in this map; paired with Nareau's photographic piece Redlined, it makes a potent statement about the history of racial politics in the Windy City.

Overall, complaints about this exhibit are of the petty variety. Single plaques often hold the descriptions for multiple pieces, which can be confusing. Some of the work on display seemed to lack label or explanation altogether. The thematic nature of the two rooms gives the exhibit structure, though it can be a bit loose at times; as a result, some pieces feel a bit superfluous. But as a whole, the exhibit does what it sets out to do by providing a solid exploration of the way contemporary artists are using maps in very different (and very challenging) ways to explore what it means to be human, and what it means to be part of our society.

While Mapping the Self takes up a relatively small amount of floor space, don't expect to make it through this one on your lunch break. While that would be do-able in theory, in reality you can't really get much from this exhibit unless you plan on taking your time. With most of the art on display, you'll find your efforts well-rewarded.

IF YOU GO
Mapping the Self is on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art until March 2nd, 2008. The museum is open 10:00am-8:00pm on Thursdays, and 10:00am-5:00pm Wednesdays-Sundays; it is closed on Mondays. The entry fee for the MCA is $10 for adults, $6 for students and seniors (both suggested). Tuesdays are free admission.


Links:
Mapping the Self (Museum of Contemporary Art

WEEKEND READING: June 9-15, 2007

It's been a slow week here at Where, I know. I've been fighting a massive case of writer's block. But there will always, always be weekend reading!

ITEM ONE: This past week, I came across a great Toronto-based blog called Spacing Wire. Follow the link to read their post about a community planning initiative, then check out the archives.

ITEM TWO: Greg Smithsimon talks about segregation masquerading as diversity in the Big Apple at Interchange.

ITEM THREE: Kiplinger's takes those frivolous city lists to a new (and rather epic) level, beating several dead horses in the process.

ITEM FOUR: Some great tips for building a modern community over at CoolTown Studios.

ITEM FIVE: A thorough examination of poverty and efforts to combat it over at Urban Planning Blog.

ITEM SIX: Inhabitat shows off what might be the coolest fence ever created. (Pictured above.)

ITEM SEVEN: Eikongraphia returns after a brief hiatus with not one, but two posts about Vienna. (Read #2 here.)