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.)

Archisatire

"I invite you to invest in the ninth wonder of the world."

Hilarious.

via

Three Short Urban Navigation Blogedankens

No prizes this time, but I do encourage you to leave comments if these exercises lead to any interesting answers...or more interesting questions. Click the links to see the inspiration for each thought experiment.


Blogedanken #1: Imagine that your city were like Venice; where would the Grand Canal be located? What streets would remain streets, and what ones would be sunken to form the city's canal network? Create a corresponding map. Does this map tell you anything about transportation and infrastructure networks in your city? How could such a map be used to plan transit lines, or a park system?


Blogedanken #2: If someone asked you to write a guide to your city for visitors that didn't want the tourist experience, where would you send them? Determine 5-10 places and/or experiences that you consider essential for the un-tourist in your city. Now create a walking-tour route that connects these spots in a way that creates a meaningful way -- a way that can direct the visitor's interpretation of your city. Compare your route to a map in a typical tourist guide. How do the two differ? What does this tell you about the way that you have experienced the city, yourself? What has your city taught you?


Blogedanken #3: Cities are very much about paths. Numerous networks of people, information, and physical infrastructure create a massive web often referred to as the urban fabric. Almost every city has one or two once-crucial cords in this web that have faded from prominence, or even disappeared completely. Imagine that you are creating a virtual guide, using GPS and voice recordings, to one of these defunct lines in your city. How have the areas around this forgotten path adapted since its decline? If they have not adapted particularly well, speculate as to why that might be. Based on what need the path and its surrounding infrastructure originally served, what currently vibrant paths through your city could become deserted or forgotten in the future? How might this be averted?

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

Chicago: Creative Capital?

Fast Company's Fast Cities 2008 list (which is about a thousand times more coherent than last year's) came with a delightful cherry on top for this blogger, as it named Chicago the "Creative Capital of the Universe." Being from Milwaukee (Chicago's little brother to the north) and currently residing in the Windy City, I found this exciting news; Chicago has long suffered from what you might call Second City Syndrome, always trying to get out from under New York's shadow. (For the record: we don't really think of Los Angeles as a real place, so we're still #2).

All About Cities' Wendy Waters wrote a post tonight questioning whether or not the title was quite accurate; indeed, her assessment of the title's pithy, attention-grabbing nature is right on: it would be boring to read another article about New York or San Francisco being the most creative. But there's more merit to the title than you might think if yer not from 'round these parts.

I'll turn to Paul Graham's recent essay, "Cities and Ambition," for my defense. In his highly enjoyable piece, Graham asserts that cities that act as hubs of ambition have a way of communicating with people; New York says to its residents, "You should make more money;" Silicon Valley says "You should be more powerful;" Cambridge says "You should read all of those books you've been meaning to read." Chicago is most certainly an ambitions place -- it's the Emerald City of the Midwest, the Mount Olympus of Flyover Country. All (rail)roads lead here, so to speak. But after reading Graham's essay, I had trouble picking out exactly what Chicago was saying through its citizens' ambition.

"Creative Capital of the Universe" hit me like a brick in the face. Of course! Chicago says to its citizens, "You should be more interesting." The city is a domestic melting pot, pooling people from a region that is typically overlooked and underappreciated. We of the rust belt and great plains cities flock to Chicago to prove ourselves. Chicago's Second City Syndrome is a great asset; a city that is constantly trying to prove itself, after all, demands that its citizens do the same. And because of the slight sense of inferiority, Chicago is less pretentious than other global hubs like New York, London, or San Francisco. That lack of pretention has the power to erode fear of the unknown; Chicago has always understood that, to make big headlines, you need to take big risks.

In a world as spiky and competitive as the one that we live in today, it's pretty much impossible to claim that one city can claim to be the creative capital. But in terms of big headlines, Chicago seems to have inspired exactly what it was hoping: controversy. Screw being rational. Be more interesting.

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


Links:
US City of the Year: Chicago (Fast Company)

Chicago: Creative Capital of the Universe? (All About Cities)

Cities and Ambition

Gender Rolls of Cities

Today while taking silly internet quizzes about which Classic Leading Man and Classic Dame most matched my personality (don't judge), I noticed something interesting and, perhaps, subliminal. In the Leading Man quiz, choices for what kind of town to live in and what kind of dwelling were generally urban. The Classic Dame's choices for where to live, however, were exclusively suburban and/or rural.

This reminded me of an interesting contrasting example of urban gender associations. A map created for Richard Florida's new book, Who's Your City, shows the gender imbalances in cities across the United States. In contrast to the urban/rural perceptions associated with classic movie stars, older, grittier, more densely populated cities (aka more urban places) typically have much larger concentrations of women as compared to men. While San Francisco, Charlotte, and perhaps Minneapolis provide notable exceptions, women seem more likely to live in places like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and DC, while men dominate the populations of more auto-dependent places, like LA, Dallas, Las Vegas, and Phoenix.

I wonder where that discrepancy might come from.


Links:
The Classic Leading Man Test

The Classic Dames Test

The Singles Map (Richard Florida)

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)

Typing Utopia

An excerpt from the article on São Paulo highlighted in last Friday's Weekend Reading post:

But while the city of enlightened tropical urbanism – housing blocks with masses suspended over open breezeways, free-form plantings, walls of vertical wood blinds, beautiful decorative ceramic brises-soleil and elaborate mosaics – is occasionally visible [in São Paulo], it was overtaken by incremental failures to live up to the promise. The sunny future imagined in the 1950s succumbed to the repression of the 1960s and ’70s and the economic disasters and neo-liberalism that followed. Today the disparity between inconceivably rich and unimaginably poor is creating a new cityscape. A simmering low-grade siege mentality has become an everyday fact of life, and as a result the city is gradually obscuring its confidence behind multiple layers of improvised urban fortification and strategies of avoidance. Sampa is increasingly segmented, festooned with surveillance cameras and a boggling variety of gates, barriers, photoelectric tripwires and enclosures defended by an army of private security guards. If left unchecked, warns Brazilian anthropologist Teresa P.R. Caldeira, this metastasizing de facto topography of exclusion and suspicion will lead inevitably to the implosion of modern public life and the values of civil society.

This evolving mess, which nobody planned and no one wants, is the crux of Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain’s Utopia font. Trained as graphic designers and practising as artists, the duo have created a pictographic alphabet (which can be downloaded from their website4) in which the upper case is represented by silhouetted glyphs of Niemeyer or Niemeyeresque architectural icons and the lower case by some of the more grimly prosaic elements of contemporary Sampa. Using the font, typing even the most harmless text can become an exercise in creating unintended disorder and blight. In the end, the reality of the street scrimmage between public and private trumps the best intentions of any planner.

Welcome to CyberSampa:





Links:
Detani Colain

What's in a Name? (Or: Car-Free on the High Seas)

To discuss San Francisco's redevelopment plans for Treasure Island, one must first confront the name and its legendary implications. It is an evocative piece of nomenclature, conjuring up iconic images of towering pirate ships, buried chests filled with gold of an unearthly shimmer, skulls, crossbones, and all that jazz. But the little island in the middle of the 'Frisco Bay is not at the center of any pirate legends, glamorous or not. It does, however, have its own rather unique and storied history.

Built from dredged silt to host San Francisco's 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition, it was supposed to be converted to an airport after the expo, but the Navy bartered Mills Field, now the site of SFO, for the island. The Navy decommissioned the base in 1996 along with the Presidio, and since then it has been used as a mish-mash neighborhood largely populated by students and low-income residents.

All that is set to change, though, thanks to the recent approval of a plan by Skidmore Owings and Merill to turn Treasure Island into one of the first (if not the first) car-free communities in the United States. And what better place to try such an idea out than an isolated island in one of the most environmentally progressive cities in the world? Indeed, the concept of a car-free community going up anywhere seems almost too good to be true; but in the US, the birthplace of the autoculture? Treasure Island is taking on a whole new kind of legend.

What makes this plan so exciting, I think, is that it doesn't appear to treat the environment as a token. It joins the ranks of other eco-cities like SOM's Chongming island development in Shanghai, in the recent push to plan cities that encourage (or even mandate) eco-conscious lifestyles (see Planning Cultural Values Part II). From SOM's website: "Housing is designed at a density as high as 100-units per acre—enough to support ferry service while allowing the majority of the island’s acreage to be dedicated to a variety of open spaces. The plan designates these to include wetlands capable of filtering the island’s gray water, bike and hiking paths, and a large demonstration site for organic gardening." It's holistic eco-urbanism.


In real estate, location is everything. But what is a good location? This is a classic urban development conundrum. If a location is too good, if it is already intensely desirable, trying to build there comes with a whole slew of extra problems. Building in iconic locations, trying to borrow the status of a famous building or public space or district, can be a nightmare for developers -- as anyone who has tried to build anywhere in San Francisco recently has likely learned. The more impressive the location, the harder it is to try something new there.

Treasure Island, then, poses a very rare opportunity indeed. It is a spot rich with history and blessed with a very iconic name. To see this megadevelopment taking shape in a way that takes cues from the site's intangible contextextual elements to create an iconic place is very exciting. The island is flat and small, but the design is anything but. The buildings and streets are carved out by the wind, and the enterprising architecture pays subtle homage to the modern, streamlined buildings that made up most of the Exposition for which the island was created. That island has always showcased leadership and ambition. Now that legacy is being interpreted in a new and exciting way.

And as for the name? The new Treasure Island might not have much to do with pirates or burried gold. But creating a car-free oasis in the middle of one of the largest urbanized areas in the world? Sure sounds adventurous to me.

(First photo from GGIE.com; second from SOM, see link below.)


Links:
California Redevelopments Move Forward (Architectural Record)

Bending the Grid (SOM)

If a green utopia on Treasure Island sounds far-fetched, dreamers have a plan (SFGate)