Urbanffffinds 027

Apologies for the lack of Urbanffffinds last week. This week, please accept this double-shot of urban imagery goodness as a peace offering. And some more happy news: part-time employment has been secured, and regular posting will resume at Where, starting with almost three weeks of great arch&urb stuff in a hearty linkdump, tomorrow morning.

Urbanffffinds 026

So what I actually meant when I said "no new posts" was "no new long, fancy-pants psuedo-philosophical ramblings." Urbanffffinds is too fun to put on hiatus. Besides, the crop this week is hot. And so:

It Takes a Video Game to Save a Village

Most cities have a love-hate relationship with tourists -- civic officials love them, and residents hate them. Tourism generates billions of dollars in revenue for cities across the globe each year. The number of traffic accidents caused by tourists not watching where they're walking? So far, no reliable estimates have been made.

Still, tourism is a vital part of any urban economy. Even moreso, it can be a powerful factor for a neighborhood that is trying to lift itself up. Tourism As Economic Strategy is a well-worn path. But with all of the emerging technologies related to the web and wireless communication, it seems like the old urban tourism formula (cleaned up historic buildings + quirky neighborhood attraction + Starbucks and/or Cold Stone Creamery and corresponding independent cafe/gelato bar = success!) is due for an overhaul.

Let's start by thinking small, with the traditional Japanese village. Japan's demographic woes have been well-reported over the past few years; indeed, as young residents of this highly urbanized island nation put off having families and move to the cities in droves to pursue fast-paced careers, the raw population number isn't the only thing being affected. Culturally, Japan is seeing the evaporation of its small villages, and the slow death of ancient rural and cultural traditions.

Enter: mixed-reality gaming. An explanation, c/o Very Spatial: "One of the areas of convergence for location-based applications and gaming is the idea of mixed reality, where places in the game correspond to real-world locations, and actions in one lead to events or consequences in the other." A recent Nintendo DS game, Treasure Quest: Enoshima, follows this very blueprint, using a small island north of -- surprise! -- Tokyo as the setting for a handheld video game. Players have to visit and explore the actual island to play the game. The DS unit acts as the mixer, blending the fictional and real worlds, literally with the push of a button.

The problem with Treasure Quest, though, is that it's over. The software could be downloaded off of the internet, and the game only ran until February 19th. Makes sense, considering that Nintendo doesn't own the island, and thus can't stake any real claim to it. But what if they could? What if, as a way to draw in tourists, a rural village somewhere in Japan agreed to sell off a large number of its abandoned buildings to Nintendo in an agreement to become the permanent setting for a mixed-reality video game?

It sounds crass at first, but with the right amount of finesse, it just might be a win-win economic development strategy. For instance, to prepare the town for guests (players), Nintendo would agree to upgrade local utilities. It would also take on the responsibility for upkeep of public areas. Streetscaping, garbage collection, and parks maintenance would be taken care of by the entertainment giant. Villagers would enjoy a higher quality of life at a lower rate of taxation (though I'm assuming the American system there since I know very little about the governance of rural Japanese villages). In return, residents would agree to coexist peacefully with players. A particularly savvy game designer would craft the game as a cultural experience, creating some sort of mystery or adventure plot that made use of the area's native traditions.

The argument could be made that Nintendo (or whatever company helmed the project) was being given too much power over a municipal entity; it could also be said that cultural traditions were being bastardized and pillaged in the name of commerce and fleeting entertainment. But when the options for the village are Sink or Swim, the picture becomes less black and white. After all, don't most -- if not all -- preservation efforts (architectural or cultural), on some level, tokenize the very things that they aim to preserve?

So assume that Nintendo creates a mixed-reality game around a rural Japanese town, and it becomes a wild success. Players start booking rooms at a nearby hotel months in advance for their chance to play. The villagers find new opportunities to pass along their cultural history and traditions. Nintendo makes a buttload of cash. Everyone's happy. A small town in rural Portugal hears of the success and decides to give it a try. Sony's European headquarters gets a call from the mayor...

Ten years later, mixed-reality gaming has become an economic silver bullet. Hundreds of villages in countries around the world have mixed their realities with fantastical virtual counterparts. The trend goes big-time when the city of Detroit sells a square mile of its infamous "urban prairie" to the Walt Disney Co., which painstakingly re-creates the neighborhood circa 1930 to stage a depression-era mob mixed-reality urban epic. The arts & crafts bungalows are the hotel. Visitors live in the game. A month later, Blizzard Entertainment announces a joint deal with CCTV and the city of Shanghai to buy up hundreds of defunct surveillance cameras and create the world's largest multi-player mixed-reality on-and-offline mega-game. The setting? Pudong.

Of course, it must be asked: when is the reality in question no longer considered to be mixed? When does "mixed" become simply "augmented?"

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


Links:
Mixed Reality Gaming In Japan (Very Spatial)

Review: Suburban Transformations

I'll start this review off with an apology to PA Press, since they sent me a review copy of architect Paul Lukez' new book Suburban Transformations back in early November and I'm just getting around to actually reading and reviewing it more than two months later. There was NaNoWriMo, then there were holidays...it has been a crazy winter. And so, without further ado...

There is a lot of discussion these days, at least in architecture and planning circles, about what will happen to today's sprawling suburbs as people wake up to the fact that the current suburban model is unsustainable. There have been calls for a complete return to cities, though I think most everyone knows that this would be extremely difficult if not outright impossible. Cities have physical limits, and density becomes unhealthy after a certain point. Compare Paris to the infamous Kowloon Walled City for an exemplary contrast.

Still, it is widely assumed that the suburbs of tomorrow will look quite different from the beige, cul-de-sac draped landscapes that currently surround central cities throughout much of the developed world. While the speculation about the external changes that will force suburbs to shape-shift is frequent and varied, ideas (not to mention actual visualizations) of what these nouveau suburbs might look like are surprisingly few and far between. Suburban Transformations fills a unique gap in that regard, and the pragmatic novelty of author Paul Lukez's descriptions and images of prospective suburban densification and evolution is what makes them so very impressive.

Stylistically, Suburban Transformations is something of a hybrid; it is too colorful to be called an academic text, and yet a bit too dry to be read purely for entertainment. Still, the mix works well, with the text augmented generously with drawings and photos. The bulk of the book is spent discussing the methods Lukez envisions for changing the shape of traditional auto-centric suburbs as painlessly as possible; his process -- deemed the "Adaptive Design Process" -- is appropriately simple. It offers ways to examine and reshape suburban spaces characterized (ironically?) by their lack of character. If suburbs are to be criticized for their generic appearances, Lukez' process should conversely be commended for its ability to take these incredibly generic places and not only make sense of them, but also to make valid suggestions about how to take supposedly hollow, meaningless places and re-think the context to provide opportunities for site-specific design.

The bulk of the book focuses on a single hypothetical case study of the area around a mall in the Boston suburb of Burlington. Here, the author puts his theories into action, using everything from the topography to the noise levels to the freeway interchange -- yes, the freeway interchange -- to give texture and meaning to the site. The book suggests that Burlington's history as an important transportation route -- established first by Route 128 in the early 1900s and reinforced by the freeway in the 60s, can and should be used as a contextual element to guide the design process for transforming the site. The massive roadway is thoroughly and thoughtfully integrated into all of the adaptive designs that are envisioned during the second half of the book. In the end, the freeway itself becomes more closely related to the site; at the same time that it gives the site meaning, the reconfiguration of that site transfers increased significance to the road itself.

Further exploration of the Adaptive Design Process is helpful to understanding its versatility. As a result, Lukez also takes time at the end of the book for three shorter case studies of Amsterdam, Dedham (another Boston suburb), and Shenzhen. Illustrations are plenty and the ideas presented exciting. In fact, this is perhaps the book's greatest strength: its ability to turn a seemingly dire problem (the proliferation of soulless suburbs) into a golden opportunity. Suburban Transformations envisions the dramatic altering of the suburban landscape. And whether or not the process described in the book is ever widely used, the true value of this book is how effective it is in dramatically altering the reader's perspective.


Links:
Suburban Transformation (Powells.com)

Paul Lukez Architecture

WEEKEND READING: November 10-November 16, 2007 (Guest Post by Colin Kloecker)

Hi, I'm Colin and I usually cover the intersection of humanitarian issues, sustainability, and the built environment over at Blog Like You Give A Damn. But this month you'll find me here, curating Where's Weekend Reading segment. Five Items of interest for you this week.

ITEM ONE: I've been saying it for years: Skyways suck the vitality out of our city streets, "we should tear them all down". Living in Minneapolis/St. Paul I often get blank or bewildered stares when I tell people this (which I probably do far too often), but I feel my argument has been bolstered now that top urban designers Jan Gehl and Gil Penalosa have come out and expressed a similar sentiment.

ITEM TWO: Time-travel ALL the way back to September 29th, 2007 when nearly 100 teams from 70 different cities around the world participated in "Snap-Shot-City" and photographed a day in the life of their urban environs. Billed as an "urban photographic treasure hunt", the resulting photos are a wonderful celebration of city life. The CityDwellers team from London gets credit for the photo this week.

ITEM THREE: Is Jean Nouvel designing the most exciting Skyscraper to hit New York City since the early 20th century? This blogger thinks so. Straight out of a Hugh Ferris painting, 53W53rd is a thing of beauty. NYT article here.

ITEM FOUR: The Dharavi district (an urban mega-slum with over 1 million inhabitants) of Mumbai, India is getting "rehabilitated". So how much space will current inhabitants get out of the deal? Each of the 57,000 families are allotted a meager 225 square feet, no more and no less. Social Design Practice Blog has more, including an interesting memo from Matias Echanove suggesting that the city use Tokyo's revitalization after WWII as an alternative development model - see airoots for more on that. (Thanks Matias!)

ITEM FIVE: 250 Million Urban Planners! Planetizen reports that the $200 XO-1 laptop (the first model designed for the One Laptop Per Child program) will come packaged with Will Wright's 1989 classic planning game Sim City. OLPC plans on getting the laptop into the hands of 250 million poor children around the world by 2012. Want one too? You only have 11 more days.

Until next week, Happy Friday!

WEEKEND READING: October 20-26, 2007

No good news on the laptop front...the machine is very dead, but whether the files on the hard drive are salvagable or not is a mystery until next week. In the meantime...

ITEM ONE: Built Environment Blog chimes in on the Atlantic Yards megadevelopment in New York with a brief history of the Superblock.

ITEM TWO: The Map Room features João Machado’s colorful map creations.

ITEM THREE: The Affordable Housing Institute highlights a series of articles from the Times of India that illustrate how myriad urban problems in Mumbai are interrelated.

ITEM FOUR: Does Big Development kill the American Dream? The American thinks so (and I agree!).

ITEM FIVE: Richard Florida's new report (with Tim Gullden and Charlotta Mellander), The Rise of the Megaregion, presents us with a whole slew of new opportunities for "BosWash"-esque portmanteaus -- and some kickass demographic images like the one at the top of this post.

Have a great weekend, everyone! Hopefully I'll be able to get my paws on a laptop for Urbanffffinds on Sunday.

WEEKEND READING: October 13-19

It has been a busy week in the blogosphere. That makes for a fat WR list!

ITEM ONE: Wikipedia's impressive list of urban squares ranked by area. This is the kind of thing that the internet was invented for.

ITEM TWO: A post at Line of Sight covering the delightfully wacky buildings of Argentine architect Francisco Salamone. (Photo credit)

ITEM THREE: BLDGBLOG's got a crush on Los Angeles...

ITEM FOUR: ...and over at Spacing Wire, an Angeleno has a crush on Toronto.

ITEM FIVE: Kazys Varnelis with an interesting take on the city vs. suburb debate.

ITEM SIX: Interesting post at IAdotO about Emotional Architecture (with the added bonus of a link to a free online version of the book The Emotion Machine).

ITEM SEVEN: Antonio Gaudi's got a Brazilian doppelgänger.

ITEM EIGHT: International Listings' take on the Top 100 Architecture blogs -- a good resource with lots of blogs both old and new. Where comes in at #100 thanks to good old-fashioned alphabetization. ;-)

Have a great weekend, everyone!

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)

The Effects of Non-Sustainable Transit

Shocking!

Framing Urbanism

Anyone who lives in a city is a student of urbanism. We have the choice of whether or not to pay attention to the lessons we are being taught, but they are taught either way. Every day of living in a city is a chance to learn about how the place works. So it helps to have a way of organizing the observation process.

That being said, I came across an organizational tatic of which I am particularly fond recently on re:ACT, a blog run by a dozen architecture students in Singapore. Ronald Lim, one of the re:ACT bloggers, put up a post entitled "My Wishlist for Architecture in Singapore." It's short (five items), practical, and the objective is very clear even without being directly stated. That objective is to make Singapore into a more architecturally conscious city, to improve the quality of the buildings being designed there by improving public awareness of architecture and design. Lim calls for an architecture and design department at the Singapore Art Museum, an annual competition similar to PS1 or the Serpentine Gallery, and an interesting set of tax incentives (among other things).

The benefit of having such a list, as an individual observer of a specific city, is that a person can identify what it is they are looking for in terms of an area's strengths and weaknesses. It's a framing technique, really. But a wishlist is especially helpful, I think, because it gives a person something to look for when visiting other cities. Even more than framing how one sees one's own city or even one's neighborhood, it frames how one approaches the urban form in general. This is beneficial because it allows the observer to absorb information from one place and take it home with them, using it to enrich their own city.

I've always thought it'd be really interesting to see a neighborhood group do this kind of thing, collectively. The common perception of the Neighborhood Association or Block Group is that of a stodgy, reactionary coalition of anti-growth crumudgeons with pickett signs and way too much time on their hands. Rather than hearing moaning and groaning about the death of a neighborhood's precious, precious character every time someone so much as proposes to trim their hedges, it'd be fascinating to see how a group might impact their community by identifying what defined the character that they were trying to preserve and coming up with a wishlist of ways in which that character could be strengthened and enhanced, and maybe even improved. Imagine a neighborhood group that actually courted developers to help achieve their goals of enhancing the architectural character of a neighborhood, welcoming and even helping to speed a long the process of approval for a new building in exchange for architectural sensitivity and some streetscaping improvements.

I wouldn't be surprised, actually, to hear that this has been or is being done. In fact it would be great to hear stories of this kind of thing; a neighborhood threatened by the dreaded gentrification beast working with developers instead of against them. I wonder how that works out...are the neighbors better off in the end, or do they wind up getting screwed over time? I'd be willing to bet on the former, but I'm open to arguments for the latter...

***

By the way -- while we're on the topic of taking observing what other cities are doing right when traveling, if you haven't heard of Civic Tourism yet, check out the link below. It's a great concept, and it seems like the kind of thing that could really give some extra oomph to your next urban vacation.

(Photo from Flickr user Erik Sevilla Estrada.)


Links:
My Wishlist for Architecture in Singapore (re:ACT)

Civic Tourism

Build, Rebuild, Build Anew

One of the best articles written about New Orleans' progress (or lack thereof) two years after its tango with Katrina has come from within the Crecent City, itself. Nola.com's article by Doug MacCash, entitled Architectural Soul of the City at Stake, discusses in great detail the efforts of preservationists to save the city's pre-hurricane architecture; and that label is very deliberate, as there is a general push to save anything, be it from the 1800s or the 1960s, that survived Katrina and the resulting floods.

MacCash's article has particular resonance because it so very subtly ties New Orleans' architectural soul to its overall civic soul; indeed, the city's identity, now in crisis, is intrinsically tied to its built environment. New Orleans faces the intractable problem of having to build, to rebuild, and to build anew. That is to say, NOLA must replace destroyed buildings (build) without further damaging -- and trying to maintain -- its legendary sense of place (rebuild) in a way that avoids painful, regressive kitsch (build anew). This explains the desire to save everything -- no matter the architectural style -- that wasn't truly irreparably damaged.

John Magill, a historian with The Historic New Orleans Collection, is quoted in the Nola.com article as saying "There are so many houses lost. Nobody can comprehend what's gone." This quote is particularly telling because it refers not to Garden District mansions or classic Victorian shotguns, but to the so-called "slab city" neighborhoods built in the post-war era. Magill's lamentation is for the brick-veneer bungalows that can be found blanketing suburban tracts from Seattle to Atlanta, but that "meant a great deal to the people who lived in them." The point being made here is that what has been decimated in New Orleans is not just a physical vernacular, but an emotional one as well. A page of the city's cultural story has been savagely ripped from the binding.

But the name of the game on the bayou is Resilience, and the destruction of New Orleans has presented a dream scenario for architects and urban designers. Visions for the city's future have not been scarce, though traction with public officials, unfortunately, has been. Still, they continue to come pouring in. Most recently, Thom Mayne's National Jazz Center and TEN Arquitectos, Hargreaves Associates, and Chan Krieger Sieniewicz's reimagining of the downtown riverfront have added some lustre to the city's architectural news roster.

Of course, the reality is that these projects could quite possibly fizzle out like their predecessors. "Still," a NY Times article on the proposals points out, "the scope and creative ambition of these projects suggest how architecture could someday be vital to the city’s physical and social healing. Both seek to transform dead urban areas into lively public forums, employing powerful architectural expressions of a democratic ideal."

New Orleans hasn't been a center of contemporary design since "contemporary" refered to the kind of flowery aesthetic that makes today's historicists salivate. In the wake of an event that has changed the very way in which the city thinks about itself, there is a chance that this could change. In fact, while the artistic merits of modern architecture (as with any style) will forever be argued, with its clean lines and frank honesty modernism is (metaphorically speaking) exactly what the city needs

Trahan Architects have come up with what may be the most enticing endorsement of modernism in the new New Orleans with their impossibly sleek update of the city's most beloved piece of vernacular: the shotgun house (pictured above). If built, this house would be a new, flood-conscious building that could easily nestle into a newly cleared lot (build) that draws from the city's architectural and cultural tradition (rebuild) in a way that is neither chintzy nor dishonest (build new). This is democratic architecture at its best.

People will always be wary of buildings built in newer styles of architecture because they suggest, whether it's true or not, that the places around them are changing. But New Orleans is a city that can not afford to deny change, and it can likely be agreed that, after Katrina, it would be particularly bullheaded to do so. Modernism is certainly not the answer to every problem facing this city, and shouldn't even necessarily be the primary architectural mode in the city's reconstruction. But embracing innovative and progressive architectural values, in a place where architecture is so vital to the civic character, can help to bring about important changes in a city desperate for a new raison d'être. The people of New Orleans cannot rebuild simply for the sake of doing so; the hurricane has given them an incredibly rare chance to create a built environment and a community that together form something greater and stronger than the insular, stagnant city that they had before.

It's time to consider building change into the vernacular.


Links:
Architectural soul of the city at stake (Nola.com) (found via Life Without Buildings)

Two Infusions of Vision to Bolster New Orleans (NY Times)

Trahan Architects (Photo credit)

The New Pittsburgh: Creating a Humane Urban Model

So a new idea hit the blogosphere a few weeks ago and, because I don't keep up with reading about my favorite city nearly as much as I should, I'm just now getting around to writing about it. It's the Manifesto for a New Pittsburgh, compsed by three Burgh bloggers (Mike @ Pittsblog, Jim @ Burgh Diaspora, and Jim Morris.) These guys have put together a pretty grandiose vision (the inspiring, Daniel Burnham kind of grandiose) for the Pittsburgh region but, as is noted in the introduction to the Manifesto, it's an idea that is not yet set in stone. Responses were requested.

One of the responses to this manifesto, which focuses largely on increasing connectons at the community, city, regional, and international level, asks how, exactly, Pittsburgh can reach out to the diaspora of Burgh natives across the planet. How, in essence, can former Pittsburghers living in Los Angeles or London or Tokyo be persuaded to invest money, time, or resources in their hometown when they live so far away?

Coincidentally, Pittsburgh played host to a Humane Metropolis Workshop just a week before the manifesto was posted. The conferrence is described thusly: "The objectives...include reviewing current urban improvement initiatives in Pittsburgh, promoting partnerships among local citizens and public officials, sharing relevant experiences from other cities, generating new ideas, and fostering awareness of Pittsburgh's emergence as a role model for other cities." There's all that "increased connectivity" talk again.

Greatness is what wins international attention--greatness in vision, leadership, innovation. Pittsburgh is a city that, thanks to its congenial attitude and ecologically rich setting, is particularly well-suited to becoming a global model of the "Humane Metropolis" discussed in the previous post. Most of the Pittsburghers I've met have had a real sense of pride in place; though they may not live there, they have strong feelings about their hometown. Thus, their own pride is, in part, tied to the fortunes of the city. Re-shaping Pittsburgh as the new model of greatness for healthy urban regions in the coming century could serve as an excellent means for inspiring members of the diaspora to contribute to the prosperity of their former home.

The Manifesto includes passages about "enfranchizing new and marginalized voices" and "reaching out to a 21st century global Pittsburgh of many colors, nationalities and ethnicities." It looks to me like there's quite a bit of connectivity between these two ideas already...


Links:
Manifesto for a New Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh: A More Humane Metropolis Workshop