congestion pricing?

(click image for full size)

One of the books I’ve picked up in this cycle of research is Jill Grant’s Planning the Good Community: New Urbanism in Theory and Practice. I’m still working my way through it, but today I skipped to the good part where she actually breaks down the relationship between theoretical goals of New Urbanism and the visible effects of these goals in recent development projects. Her conclusions are not positive:

Car use shows no signs of decreasing. Public transportation ridership is increasing in some cities, but is still a very small percentage of overall transportation. Cultural attachment to car use is strong, too strong for urban design to overcome.

Density patterns have shifted significantly, but overall population per square foot of urban space is not necessarily increasing. North American stigma associated with high density housing remains. I’ve made the attached image to illustrate what is happening in many places. It is a bit of an exaggeration,* to make the tendencies more visible and show how New Urbanism didn’t even necessarily deliver on the density promise, the one change that seemed like it was happening. The increase in interior square-footage per person has actually increased the environmental impact in many ways.

One thing that Grant references briefly in this chapter is the idea of “hidden values.” These are values that are rarely or never articulated in theory but often achieved in practice: racial and economic segregation, even though New Urbanism is supposed to diversify communities; the maximization of profit for developers and speculators, and high turnover of residents, even though New Urbanism is supposed to promote connected, active communities of resident-owners; car-centric development even when New Urbanism is vocally opposed to car-centric development; status-symbol nature of new development marketing materials, even though New Urbanism is supposed to be about authenticity.

I will still say that Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities is one of the most important books of North America’s last century. However, the real impact of the New Urbanism movement has very often been the opposite of what she and other early New Urban theorists advocated for. Hidden values haven’t really changed, and this is why the theory can radically shift while the effects remain the same.

*On Sundays my friends and I frequently tour the open houses in our neighborhood. This weekend we saw one house listed as a 4 bedroom, 4 bath. It was located right near a busy retail street with an active, vibrant community; an extremely desireable location, rental units in the neighbourhood get snapped up very fast. We toured it, and were amazed to see that this 4 bedroom house was the residence of a single man who was rarely home. He used one bedroom as a guest room and storage, one as a tv room, one as an office and storage, and one to sleep in. Such arrangements are not that uncommon, we once toured a 6 bedroom in the same area that was the home of one retired woman. So this illustration is not such a gross exaggeration.

How does your space use you?

Home Delivery at MoMA

We don’t really like each other very much. We don’t like living near other people and we don’t like traveling with them either. We must have our own houses and our own cars; except for those of us who already live with and thrive with them, we almost universally loathe the idea of apartment buildings and all forms of public transportation. … We basically want to be alone, and in both our hankering and the reality we’ve achieved, we really are alone.

James Wagner

——

I decided to revisit this blog because I’ve gotten back into researching urban space and social contexts. I copied the above quote months ago. Today I was sitting on my friend’s porch as part of the Hammock Residency and thinking about exactly these same topics once again.

Space, in a city, is a precious resource.

People widely recognize that cars are bad for the environment yet continue driving their cars even when other options are available, because they like the experience of being in control. And I think people prefer living alone/living in detached single-family houses/having large lots because of the same thing. They want to have control over their space, over what happens in it and who is allowed in and where things get put; they want to know exactly what is going on around them all the time. Even if they are not using the space, even if they are living in a place which is far larger than they need or just completely underutilized, they don’t want other people coming in and using it. This need for control manifests itself in dozens of ways, including disturbing Craigslist ads that want a subletter who doesn’t move after 9pm, never invites a friend over, never uses the kitchen.

Unlike most members of North American society, I love having people around, even when they get on my nerves. I love living with people, and being very together-ey. I don’t want my own house or my own car. I love apartments, and I prefer to have as many people living in them as can be made practical. I think taking public transportation makes people more thoughtful and considerate. I have no desire to be alone in a space. Clearly, I was born into the wrong society. I think I was made for the future. I think in the future North Americans are all going to have to get cozy and learn to be considerate and community-minded because everyone is going to be up in each other’s space all the time. I hope so.

I grew up in a large family, in a small house, with constant visitors. I’m not often in situations where my particularly unique views on space are brought up, though, so I forget that other people have different views. Recently these issues have been brought to my attention because I have found myself inhabiting several provisional or interstitial spaces:

1. I am staying on my friend’s couch while I look for an apartment. The couch is a fold-out so it’s not uncomfortable, but I’m definitely sleeping in a common space. Everyone has to walk through to get out the door. I feel that this arrangement would make most people uncomfortable and anxious, but I’m feeling much more relaxed than I would if I was living in an apartment by myself. Living alone in a space feels unnatural.

2. I’m participating in the aforementioned Hammock Residency for June. It’s run by my friend Heidi Nagtegaal, and it is at once very formal and very informal. Participants get a key to her house, where they can come over whenever they want and sit in the hammock on the back porch. Other participants have used the time to get done all of those things they’ve been putting off, to read those books and write those thoughts, reconsider their art practice. I plan to restart my research and writing about urban concerns. By framing her hammock as an ‘artist residency,’ Heidi has created a novel use of a space that would otherwise be rarely used. She can still use her back porch as always, and I’m not there all the time. But just having that space available to me, set off from my daily life, is so useful and it has been useful to many other artists/writers. It would never happen if Heidi hadn’t been willing to conceptualize her space differently: both more generously and more efficiently.

3. My friend Sam Rudolph and I have lucked into a little piece of studio space to call our own, but it has been a difficult process. We are renovating an unused shed behind a house which some acquaintances rent. Though they don’t own the property themselves, and they weren’t using the shed for anything besides storing some rotten wood, it was extremely difficult to convince them to let us use the space. They kept talking about all these plans they had for the space. They had been living there for more than a year, and hadn’t done anything in that time, but they still wanted to have that control over the space. Now that we’ve done a lot of work to clean it up I constantly worry that they are going to change their minds and demand the space back.

Vancouver’s 0.1% rental vacancy rate means that it is very difficult to find a place to live and it is extremely difficult to find a place to make work. Many artists make do with little studios shared with many people, or no studio at all. The problem of real estate has fundamentally shaped contemporary Vancouver art practices: in obvious ways (I think it has driven Vancouver art’s continuing conceptual focus) and less obvious ways (lots and lots of work involving walking the city).

As I settle in to the idea of being in Vancouver for a while, and into my new spaces, I’m going to be continually reflecting on the way that Vancouver’s space functions in my life and in my creative practice.

Little bits and pieces that have been sitting in a draft post for a while.

3191, a year of evenings Portland, ME and Portland, OR seem to attract similar people. The types of emotions and images they evoke can be similar too. I would like to see a pairing of Miami and Vancouver, or London and Istanbul, or Manhattan and Shanghai. Perhaps also Flagstaff, AZ and Avignon, France. Ottowa and Izmir. Helsinki and Kyoto. Halifax, Canada and Cork, Ireland.

Beautiful object all made of useful parts, each doing its own thing. All alone up there, being beautiful. I want a continuous video feed of this thing turning in the sun, projected onto my bedroom wall. With accompanying feed of charts and graphs showing the progress of each experiment. Not sure what this has to do with cities, except that it is inspirational.

Project for Public Spaces, a great resource. They are working for the future of cities as great places to live.

Background on why cities are greener from worldchanging. It seems that developing green cities and developing livable cities is often the same thing, whereas the opposite is true for low-density areas.

YES! I love cities at night, I have never been afraid walking around at 3am even in very “dangerous” areas. I fear rural areas at night, I grew up in a rural area and I know about the bad things that can happen. Jane Jacobs has a lot to say about how cities can be made safer at night, and it is mostly: put in more bars and all night establishments, spread them around the city. The polar opposite of most current city planning tendencies.

The Architecture of Fear is great to browse through, and is going in the sidebar.

Amazing art: Chiharu Shiota, 2008 work made of millions of black lines connecting things. Benjamin Edwards, digital city pieces… generated from user input or painted on canvas, and many other projects; a site worth lots of exploration.

Please take a moment and read this article I wrote about Vancouver, Situationists, and Jane Jacobs. It is pretty short, perhaps it covers too many ideas in too little space. These ideas will be expanded in the future; I hope to find time to take a more complex approach. There is still so much I need to read. In the meantime, if you are interested, read Richard Sennett’s Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization. A remarkable book.

The Jacobsean Order of Concrete Ecologists (colloquially known as glassfarmers) are a semi-secret religious sect dedicated to the cultivation of urban architecture. They believe that buildings are living beings and that humans were created to cultivate them.

Concrete Ecologists are entrusted with a sacred duty to achieve the salvation of the earth by covering it with holy architecture. They place a mystic value on reinforced concrete. The appellation “glassfarmers” specifically refers to the fact that the Jacobsean Order is associated with the breeding of glass-covered buildings.

The Jacobsean Order follow Jane Jacobs as their primary saint. They are the largest and most widely known order, but many others exist. Concrete Ecologists usually find work in urban planning or architecture. Important players in Vancouver’s recent condo development boom have been glassfarmers. Even many of Vancouver’s politicians and businesspeople are secret believers.

next time: innovations in literature and experience

I haven’t been posting because I’ve been busy melding myself with architecture in the hopes of becoming some sort of hybrid life form. It is going well so far, the utilities have been hooked up and I am mostly drywalled and plastered. This experience has led me to the discovery of other hybrid human-architecture life forms which live among us, namely the sitarounds.

Sitarounds are rhizome shoots produced by buildings of a sufficient age. They take the form of old men, indistinguishable from actual old men who sit around all day. Sitarounds gauge and regulate the social/neighborhood climate to promote the health and upkeep of their buildings. It is recommended that everyone cultivate sitarounds in their neighborhood, they are beneficial to the overall well-being of the inhabitants.

I’ve also been inventing new art forms and religions. That’s for next time.

Another link collection as I rev up to write my grad project proposal for the semester. I have a temporarily-broken computer, a hefty pile of library books at home to work through, plus an ever-expanding sprawl of links, ideas, video, images, and moral systems which relate to my project and which somehow all have to fit into one proposal with 3 lines of inquiry.

In our first class of the semester, my professor talked a little about designing for empathy. So here we have Amanda Spielman’s Island of New Ephemera, created for Stefan Sagmeister’s “Can Design Touch Someone’s Heart?” class or assignment (not sure which… the Metropolis mag post which a bunch of people had linked to has been hidden behind a paywall.) I think this is a very successful and funny little project. Otherwise insightful people often respond to such an assignment by taking the most pedantic, overwrought or just plain sledgehammering method to touching someone’s heart. We’ve had similar assignments at ECI. Spielman’s project works by inspiring, not demanding, a response. This is the sort of thing I aspire to.

Another inspiring little bit-of-something which I recently added to my collection: the phrase “an inverse Odyssey in which the islands themselves do all the travelling” from this post which has very little to do with the topic of the post but gave me some interesting experience-concepts to ponder. The Odyssey (I recommend the Fagles translation) has always been a source of inspiration for me, a kind of metaphorical tool that I use to examine life. The Odyssey is concerned with Odysseus’s journey towards his home, which he continually reminisces about and pines for. But a home is, after all, an experience more than a physical location. Reading the above phrase from BLDGBlog* made me imagine being stuck in one geographical location while the “place,” better described as an experience or context (but that’s really what makes a place itself) wanders around and you keep trying to pull it towards you… it gets closer but then is snatched away. I feel like this is the way a lot of people relate to the idea of “home.” Ithaca keeps floating towards Odysseus and getting blown away again, while he stays in one place: lost, that is.

A little writeup and some good images of Tate Modern’s Global Cities project. Check out those graphs! The original Tate website is now linked in the sidebar. It is becoming a really important resource for me, in terms of information and also methodology.

Another really important resource is… science fiction! I am re-reading a bunch of William Gibson’s novels to look at possible textures and emotional tenors for social spaces. He has an excellent sense of the way objects, clothing, music and architecture all affect our perceptions of a certain person, place or experience. I also found this post about overcrowding and dystopia in sci-fi to be very interesting. The author argues that we should get over our patholog(ical/izing) fear of human density and embrace it as positive or at least not an inevitably negative force (the argument that I am also making in my project). Much of 70’s “golden-era” sci-fi was predicated on the what-if of massively dense human settlements. Living in one seemed to lead, inevitably, to psychotic behaviour. Gibson seems to have a different opinion about density; for example, with the Golden Gate Bridge settlement in his novel Virtual Light: it is an overcrowded, marginalized and anarchic community but the residents prefer it to a sterile panopticized existence (yes, I’m also brushing up on my Foucault). Gibson glorifies dense spaces, and the interdependencies and macgyverisms that allow them to function. I want to avoid romanticizing “slums,” but at the same time I don’t want to see them bulldozed (see Jane Jacobs for the negative consequences of that… it directly relates to panopticizing society and the criminalization of poverty).

The dabbawallahs of Mumbai have an extremely effective organizational system without a central leader or inventor; the system arose through a large number of people attempting to maximize efficiency on a very small budget. They are astoundingly good at what they do. The system itself cannot be exported, but apparently their methodology is of interest to business leaders.

It will certainly be interesting to distill all this down into one something.

*I have a complete blog-crush on BLDGBlog.

The past month has been, as most Decembers are, bursting at the margins of the calendar with things to accomplish, buy, or attend. Earlier in the month I volunteered with the GDC Graphex awards, which seem to be THE design award for Canada. I had intended to write about my experiences but then class projects (including my grad project) were due, and then Christmas shopping. Now it’s almost the end of the month, and I finally have time to write about what happened. If only I could remember…

What I do remember: Marian Bantjes stole the show at the judges’ evening both for being witty, timely and apt and for being the only one to come in under the time limit (the whole show ran 2+ hours over). She was more than a little iconoclastic, and showed some simply smashing images. (Get it? iconoclasm, smashing images… hilarity.) The gist of her speech was that designers need to own up to the creative “art” of what we do. We’re too obsessed with talking about the practicalities of communication, and don’t want to admit that sometimes it’s all moonbeams and divine voices. This was a splash of cold water after the parade of previous speakers, all of whom wore holes in the word “communication.”

It seems that many designers spend lots of time preaching to the masses, trying to convince clients that yes, design really IS worth paying for. So when they have to talk about their craft to other designers, they end up recycling the same sermon. And then the choir goes: “No duh.” But Bantjes is unique: she could talk the choir into a Buddhism class.

Besides the judges’ evening, I also volunteered with the judging itself. It was very cool to get a glimpse into the state of Canadian design—not just the best things, which anyone could check out after the awards are given, but the run-of-the-mill stuff that you’d never ordinarily see all gathered in one place. Of course, I’m sworn to secrecy about all that, but I can give general observations. Number one: most design is mediocre. Number two: polish doesn’t matter, if it’s spiritually empty. Number three: the competition is never as fierce as your imagination makes it. I had assumed that there would be dozens of entries in each category, all with a very high level of accomplishment. While there were very few bad pieces, there were piles which were unremarkable. Lacking in moonbeams, maybe.

With the end of the fall semester and my quickly approaching expulsion from the cushy cushion that is the student’s life, I have been reflecting on what it means to “learn” something. This past semester has been all about “applying what I’ve learned,” according to my professors. From my view, this mostly consisted of realizing that I’ll have to unlearn a lot in order to deal with the real world. Some things will have to be learned the hard way. And some school learning is just plain wrong.

During the semester I spend my time making things, staring at them, then changing them. It involves a lot of Adobe products, and a lot of being alone at my desk, late at night. There’s usually music, coffee, and frequent blog-checking breaks. There is no structure beyond the deadline.

Since the semester ended, two weeks ago, I’ve been voraciously consuming webcasted lectures from Yale and UC Berkeley. They allow you to choose any class, regardless of the fact that you don’t have the prereqs. I enjoy the feeling of being in over my head. (Physics! yes!) I can even pick and choose individual topics within the semester. I can listen in front of my computer, or bring the course on my ipod. Unfortunately, they don’t give away the textbooks with the lectures.

You can learn a lesson, you can learn it the hard way, you can re-learn and un-learn; you can become a “lifetime learner.” You can learn by seeing or by doing. You can learn by ear. You can learn by feel. Can you learn by smell? Maybe… according to popular science-lore, our memories are very connected to our noses.

You can design aromas, or experiences involving them. But the design wing, unlike most areas of the art school, has no smell. (We make up for this by having the lounge with the strongest smell. Ugh.) Are professional design studios also lacking? I need to do some research. I know that corporate office environments have raised smelling-like-nothing to a high art; they somehow manage to stifle the odor of anything you bring into the environment.

I like doing work in coffee shops. Being able to stumble out of bed and arrive at a coffee shop with minimal effort is both a quintessential urban experience and an absolutely necessary one. At least for me. The smell of coffee signifies both comfort and exciting ideas; the experience of coffee shops (not just the caffeine) wakes me up, providing enough sensory stimulation to inspire new ideas but not so much to prevent them being recorded. Maybe, to assist in my retention of today’s physics podcast, I should inhale the aroma of some coffee beans while I listen.

I don’t really have a conclusion here, except that talking about “what I learned in design school” will always end in coffee. Design is, more or less, a byproduct of the metabolization of caffeine.