Last year, Sha Stimuli, a 33-year-old Brooklyn rapper, packed up and moved to Atlanta.  He wanted to widen his audience, he says, and the South beckoned. He’s not the only one moving on.

In recent years, there is a growing sense among hip-hop heads that New York, and Brooklyn in particular, is passé. While there are still stars emerging from the borough, the action, the excitement is taking place elsewhere.

“In the last decade, New York has been left behind,” says Sha Stimuli. Although being a Brooklyn rapper may have helped his career ten years ago, today he sees it more as a disadvantage. “Me saying I’m from Brooklyn doesn’t actually help, because there is no novelty there,” he says. “People got bored of Brooklyn and New York.”

But people weren’t always bored of Brooklyn. Hip-hop may have first emerged from the Bronx in the late 1970s, but it is Brooklyn that, for a generation, has been known around the world as the genre’s incubator. Brooklyn, along with the rest of the East Coast, withstood the coming of a rival from the West Coast—and a resulting battle whose intensity escalated into bloodshed, with the murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. More recently, both East and West Coasts have seen the rise of southern hip-hop in such cities as Atlanta and New Orleans, which have produced a sound more focused on the beat than on the political message that made the East Coast’s success.

All the while, the names associated with Brooklyn hip-hop have remained the same—Jay-Z, Notorious B.I.G, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Busta Rythmes, M.O.P.—leading to talk that perhaps after all these years Brooklyn, once so essential in hip-hop’s evolution, has lost its touch.

But has it? As Notorious B.I.G. once rapped, “where Brooklyn at?”

via thebrooklynink.com

It seems as though there is a highly compartmentalized, perhaps sanitized, version of quaint Montréal we present to tourists and visitors on a scale that resembles cartoonish stereotypes of American excess. We don’t show the outside world what makes us powerfully unique and a thoroughly desirable place to live. No, instead, we put a dinky local spin on what remains a bad interpretation of American pop-culture. Its the Three Amigos, the Nickels and the thankfully forgotten foray into Planet Hollywood and Hard Rock Café territory that I think make some of the distinguished addresses of our city thoroughly un-Montréalais. We need to stop designing our city along what’s popular elsewhere, because at best we can only reproduce a pale imitation.

But people love us for who we are, and love coming here specifically for what sets us thoroughly apart from the pack. A good deal of the tourism experience in this city, based on what I’ve read in guide books, is the insistence on exploration. In general I agree with this kind of mentality, but why not open the market the better competition for key commercial real estate a little closer to beaten path.

Consider our local film industry, constantly advertising our city as a universal stand-in for any other city on either side of the pond, but never advertising Montréal for Montréal’s sake (and as we should know by now, capturing the aesthetics of Montréal on a whole is a difficult proposition, despite the beauty so apparent to any visitor). I’m tired of being told I’m looking at New York or Paris when I know I’m looking at Montréal. What sets those cities apart is that their citizens are perennially dissatisfied with the status quo, and we’re desperately trying to slow ourselves down and take the path of least resistance. Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

All great cities need to prepare for and execute a constant self-criticism that leads to impassioned and driven local entrepreneurs to lead individually for the common good. Ultimately, the common good is typically well aligned with the business interest’s bottom line.

via www.taylornoakes.com

A great read. What's a place's public face?

The stars of the romantic comedy Sex and the City spent six seasons searching for love. Relationships came and went, Big, Aidan and the Russian, but the love affair that remained constant was the one they had with their city. Their emotional connection to the vibrancy, character and style of New York was the show's consistent thread....

While urban design has focused on the engineering of movement, it has ignored the issues of beauty, social engagement and livability that inspire emotional connections to the city. Who could be in love with the oceans of asphalt and the concrete canyons of Pembina Highway?...

The great cities of the future will be the ones that successfully reintroduce the human spirit into their urban environment. Cities that invest in creative architecture, public art, green space and the urban streetscape while promoting vibrancy through density and mixed-use development will be the ones that rekindle an urban love affair with its people. The modern transient economy will no longer settle for inhumane solutions to urban design....

Our young people do not flock to cities like Vancouver looking for bigger roads and better parking. They are searching for a city to be in love with. Jogging along the sea wall, shopping on Robson or taking the Sky Train to work, are the types of experiences they are seeking and we must provide in order to compete.

via www.winnipegfreepress.com

An essay about Winnipeg, true of everywhere.

Truth is, the locus of innovation has been shifting away from the technological to the social, and from engineers to “culturistas” for some time now. It’s no accident that Kickstarter began through indie music (trying to find a new way to fund concerts) and is headquartered on Rivington Street (and soon to move to Brooklyn). It’s no accident that a large and growing number of successful startup folks have music, design, or art in their background, in addition to, or in place of, engineering. These include the people who brought you Apple (yes, it is still important to remember Steve Jobs wasn’t an engineer, loved Bob Dylan and music, was entranced with the aesthetic simplicities of Japanese and German Bauhaus design, and framed himself as an artist), YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr, Etsy, Airbnb, Behance, Instagram, Vimeo, Hunch, Gowalla, Path, Blurb, Square, About.me, YCombinator, the Designer Fund, and many more.

Designers, musicians, and artists understand the user experience in a way that engineers don’t. TechCrunch highlighted the shift away from engineering as a driver of innovation with an article on the death of specs. It said that product reviewers now focus on the user experience, not speed or memory or power--all the techie stuff engineers obsess about and forced all of us to pretend we cared about for so many years. That “user experience” is more and more social, local, and urban. Music, fashion, food, movies, advertising, art, personal manufacturing--the “indie” stuff of “indie” capitalism, are increasingly the driving forces of and the models for innovation today. And they tend to take place in cities. You need to be in Chicago (or perhaps Cincinnati) to create Groupon; Seattle (where they read a lot) for Amazon; Yelp in foodie San Francisco; Portland for Weiden + Kennedy’s “Imported from Detroit” ads; New York for Kickstarter.

via www.fastcodesign.com

Fascinating article. Ostensibly about Stanford's loss to Cornell in the battle for a massive new applied technology campus in New York City; but really about the "where" of startups. Building on local culture and existing market niches, startup culture is more location-specific than we may readily acknowledge.

Does the perfect neighborhood that suits everyone exist? As an experiment it’s interesting, and also for bloggers and other media it’s nice. But can IKEA do the same to urbanism as what it did to interior design? Is it able to create neighborhoods that are as comfortable, cheap, good-looking and popular with the majority as its furniture? Perhaps it can, with its design skills as well as its capacity to organize big areas, as IKEA did to its shops that almost turned into complete villages themselves.

On the other hand, we should conclude that ‘one-size-fits-all urbanism’ will not be good for the variety and attractiveness of cities in general. Imagine the same number of people to live in an IKEA house as owning a Billy cupboard… These neighborhoods are not meant to solve problems or improve the city to some extent. In essence they are there to earn money for the company. The simple idea of IKEA is to give the people what they think they want...I think this neighborhood will feel the same as everything else from IKEA as soon as it’s realized. It looks better in the brochure than in real.

via popupcity.net

Can the kit-of-parts for which IKEA is known be rolled out at an urban scale?

Given that a place is made out of people, I doubt that this development will be as soulless as the author suggests. Then again, can a built environment provided by IKEA do the community that will inevitably grow up in the place justice?

As Portland grows and changes, is there a sense of resentment from locals as new people come in and create their own vision of what they want from the city?

It’s not so much that. Really, any new resident has that sense where you go to a place and you want to shut the door behind you. People discover Portland in a certain way and resent what it becomes later. Everyone has this insecurity about Portland like, ‘when does it arrive?’ and that comes with growing pains ... Portland is a very curated city. Because of growth slowly, deliberately taking shape, people here have been able to make it what they want it to be. It’s almost like a “Greatest Hits” city. It’s a little weird, but I love it.

When creating content for Portlandia, do you and Fred need to be in Portland the whole time or does it benefit to step outside that and develop ideas in another city?

Fred and I do spend a couple weeks in Los Angeles putting the show together. It helps to leave Portland at times but it’s more beneficial when we’re all here and entrenched in our environment. We want to transcend what Portland is because there’s a version of it in every city. You want to give it a realness. Ironically, the more specific we are about Portland, the more it translates to a broader audience.

via www.theatlanticcities.com

A bit of a great interview with Carrie Brownstein, of Sleater-Kinney and the show Portlandia.

When Jennifer Keesmaat began thinking about how to transform the boomtown heart of the oil sands into a thriving centre, she grew slightly despondent.

“When we started in Fort McMurray, the very first thing we said is, ‘This is the twilight zone. No rules that apply anywhere else apply here,’ ” said Ms. Keesmaat, an urban planner with Toronto-based Dialog, which has been hired to help fix the city. But she returned from an initial visit to the area this spring questioning how to do it.

“I came back and held my head in my hands and thought, ‘Oh my, finally I’ve met my match. This nut is too big to crack.’ ”

But as Fort McMurray faces a future of explosive growth, it is nonetheless trying to do exactly that. It has employed a network of consultants, and petitioned its own people, in an attempt to figure out how to remake a modern-day hinterland gold rush town into an entertaining, vibrant city.

It’s not just a municipal issue. Industry today spends tens of thousands a year on each worker it flies in and out of northern Alberta. That has created significant incentives to convince people to move nearer the oil sands.

With an average household income of $177,000 – the highest in the country – Fort McMurray is awash in cash. But the town, and the Municipality of Wood Buffalo it sits in, have struggled to tread water amid the deluge of new arrivals. Planning for the future has been tough. Asked what’s wrong with Fort McMurray’s downtown today, Toronto real estate executive Ron Taylor says simply: “There is none.”

via www.theglobeandmail.com

The success of Korean food in Philadelphia is part of a larger story of how the city has been able to cultivate a wide-ranging international food scene. Former Inquirer food critic Rick Nichols told Zagat that the city is an destination. Much more culinarily advanced, he argues, than Washington or Boston. "People [here] are curious eaters," Laban says. "They don't just stick with what they know."

Here's why. For one thing, Philadelphia is a veritable capital of the small, scrappy restaurant – rents are cheap, and up-and-coming chefs can afford to open little 35-seaters (many of which are BYOB). The city also hosts one of America's fastest-growing (and most diverse) immigrant populations.

But there's something else: Philadelphia has a relatively young population. And that's important, according to Krishnendu Ray, an NYU professor who studies the relationship between food and immigration. There's this tipping point in the life of an ethnic restaurant. Ray calls it the "hipster realm." It's the moment when outsiders—usually younger, adventurous types in search of something cheap and different—start frequenting a place and creating buzz about it. It's happening now nationally to Korean food and Chinese food, the "up-scaling of a cuisine."

It usually takes about three generations for this transition to take, Ray says, and it often coincides with an ethnic group doing better financially and moving out of poverty. Some cuisines—like Greek—are hitting their peak. Others—Japanese and French—have always had an international reputation as food for businessmen. Hence, owners can attract a broad crowd off-the-bat.

Philadelphia has these young eaters. And the city is relatively small, which means most of them can easily make it to different neighborhoods. "In Philadelphia," Ray says, "much more innovative things happen."

via www.theatlanticcities.com

I never knew anything about restaurant culture until I lived in Philadelphia. This article hits the proverbial nail on the head in highlighting Philly's culture of gastronomy.

Hey, world! Buffalo is calling! And it wants you to know its steel mills closed down like 30 years ago, the Blizzard of 77 is so yesterday, and the Buffalo wing was invented way back in 1964. Your impressions of Buffalo are so out of date.

This is the 21st century. Buffalo is turning the page. We’re getting wealthier, smarter, and more productive. We’re green and we’re hip. We’re sneaking up on you, world! You have no idea how how cool we are.

Rust Belt cities like Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and Minneapolis are actually doing pretty well economically. And you know what else? Rust Belt cities are greener and more sustainable than all the Sun Belt sprawl cities, so we’re probably going to be pretty competitive in the coming years.

Pretty soon, all those Sun Belt cities are going to wish they’d developed in the late 20th century the way Buffalo did in the early 20th century. Buffalo’s mixed-use, compact neighborhoods are still here. We’re reviving them one by one. And unlike the sprawling cities built for the car, Buffalo starts with traditional neighborhoods built for people.

Buffalo is still losing population (10.7% from 2000 to 2010) and poverty is still very high (28.2%). Buffalo is a city of no illusions. We don’t run away from harsh realities, but we also don’t shy away from showcasing our strengths.

via americancity.org

An admittedly boosterish article about Buffalo points to coming shifts that may find Buffalo perfectly positioned to shine again.

Florida has its key lime pie, Idaho its potatoes and Georgia favors grits as its official state food. Arizona, hungry to lay claim to a state food of its own, is circling the chimichanga.

There is a fierce rivalry here over who exactly dropped the first burrito into a vat of hot oil and thus invented the chimichanga. But evidence supports the contention that the first mouth to savor the fried concoction, and the first stomach to churn in torment from it, may well have been that of an Arizonan.

There is little doubt that chimichangas have become hugely popular here, so much so that a movement is under way to make the chimi the state’s official food. With Arizona’s centennial coming next year, Macayo’s Mexican Kitchen, a Phoenix chain, has started a petition drive to lobby the Legislature to officially adopt the chimichanga, as lawmakers have done for the bolo tie (official neckwear), the saguaro blossom (official flower) and the Colt revolver (official firearm).

via www.nytimes.com

In many ways, as pundits are noting, Detroit is starting to become a feel-good symbol for a weary nation. The auto companies reinvented themselves -- yes, General Motors and Chrysler partly did so with government help -- with innovative products like the electric Chevy Volt.

Some developments surprised us, including the reopening -- after so many false starts -- of the Book-Cadillac Hotel downtown, or the cleanup of the contaminated Uniroyal site on the Detroit River.

Do you remember downtown before Compuware, Ford Field and Comerica Park? It was vacant lots, the abandoned Hudson's department store and at least one brothel.

And Detroit continues to draw an international crowd of artists and urban explorers. In the last few months, French filmmakers, German urban planners, Japanese professors, Dutch students and others have turned up to study the city. Key Detroiters like Sue Mosey, head of the nonprofit civic group Midtown Detroit Inc. -- and known informally as the "mayor of Midtown" -- gets inundated with requests for interviews about her work. On a recent weekend at the flourishing D-Town Farm on the west side, two separate film crews, one French and one American, were filming documentaries about urban agriculture and efforts to reinvent Detroit.

The city's core -- downtown and Midtown (which through another bit of marketing no longer goes by the notorious moniker "Cass Corridor") -- has made strides from just a decade or so ago. Probably 10,000 more people work downtown today. Cheap, available real estate and a willing work force, not to mention an excess of engineering talent, drew the high-tech firm GalaxE Solutions, which has about 130 workers downtown and is hiring another 200 or so. GalaxE embodies one of the newest slogans bandied about business enclaves these days: "Outsource to Detroit."

via www.freep.com

Twenty years from now, what do you think people will say about this turning point in Detroit? What will you remain proud of and what do you think will have people scratching their heads?

I think they’ll scratch their heads over two things. First, how it was possible for a major American city to have dug such a deep hole — financially, administratively and in so many other dimensions. And second, how getting out of that hole happened so quickly.

Looking back, they’ll see that the current period presented a remarkable moment of inflection in which multiple sectors agreed to collaborate for a common outcome. What we’re experiencing here that’s different from, say Pittsburgh or Portland, where the leadership was largely coming out of the private sector, is a different allocation of roles among the sectors. The public sector is attending to the basics – finance, administration, neighborhood blight.  The private sector is contributing to the physical infrastructure necessary to make the City an attractive place for its employees to live and work. The federal government is focused on optimizing pre-existing investments – introducing flexibility in ways that permits the City to use federal dollars more flexibly and creatively. And the philanthropic sector has developed a wrap-around vision for the city – everything from transportation reform to a more robust arts and culture ecosystem, from a green economy to an anchor institution community engagement strategy. No one of those sectors could do it alone. I think we’ll be able to conclude in retrospect that this remarkable cross-sector and cross-discipline approach was the key to overcoming Detroit’s most intractable problems.

via americancity.org

From an interview with Rip Rapson, a key player in the current story of Detroit.

After two years of debates and committee meetings, Austin officials have unveiled a broad vision for growth that condemns traditional suburban development and is garnering both praise and skepticism.

The proposed, 197-page "comprehensive plan" would be the city's official philosophy for managing a booming population and the new housing, businesses, shops and restaurants that will come with it. The plan, dubbed Imagine Austin, envisions mixed-use development along corridors serviced by transit and new centers of housing and commerce miles north and south of downtown.

The plan is intended to guide every city decision over the next three decades, from where to allow construction to how much to collect in taxes to managing the economy.

It is unusually blunt for a municipal document. It talks of rectifying past mistakes. It plans around big-ticket initiatives such as urban rail or significantly expanded bus service.

And it excoriates the city's rapid suburban growth, stating that the pattern of the past 60 years came "at a troubling price in terms of social segregation and isolation, (diminished) public health, air and water quality, loss of natural open space and agricultural lands, and climate change (while) driving up the public costs for roads, water lines and other infrastructure that must be continually extended to far-flung new development."

via www.statesman.com

I used to seriously entertain the idea of moving. This was back when I was less encumbered and traveled quite a bit. Every trip wound up as an audition for my New Hometown. Within a few days, I’d have decided which house would be mine, picked out which coffee shop I’d frequent, relished the thought of how much cheaper and easier it would be than living in New York City. The classic New York narrative is one of strivers drawn to the city by their ambition to be artists, Broadway sensations, contortionists, or what have you. I, on the other hand, live here essentially because my parents did, just as their parents did before them. Back then, it still seemed I might be able to break that chain. I came really close to moving a few times. But since having children and settling into a home in Brooklyn a block from where my father was born, I’ve pretty much given up the dream. Uprooting seems impossible, except when I visit the land of fantasy relocation.

Though my forays to this land are furtive and infrequent, I know I’m not the only visitor. Indeed, there is a whole genre of magazine feature that caters to moving-obsessed people like myself, providing lists that tell us which cities in America are offering everything in life we currently lack.

via www.good.is

Sound familiar?

Western Massachusetts does not resemble the metastasizing landscapes we’ve come to recognize over the last decade, the frenzy of bulldozers and stoplights, the clusters of KB Home or Toll Brothers signs pointing toward levees outside Sacramento or into hardwood copses north of Raleigh, the subdivisions tamped into Florida citrus groves. The history of my dad’s town, and perhaps more importantly, its ethos, the communal imagination of what it means to live there, sets it apart from the kind of exurb you might see in the national news.

Or at least, that’s what I would like to think. Yet if I take a closer look at the town in light of the Brookings criteria, I’m hard pressed to argue with the report. Most of the people I know commute to work. Housing is low-density: during the last speculative real estate boom-and-bust, in the 1980s, the town voted to create a two-acre minimum lot size. And it doesn’t take much development to create high population growth in a small rural town. Recently, one person who’d purchased land when it was cheap decided to retire elsewhere, carving the wooded property into parcels with road frontage. Realtor signs hash-marked the roadside, and now dirt driveways appear at regular intervals along a stretch of road that had been woods. Not the same in density or scale as a swath of new housing outside Dallas, but a subdivision just the same.

via places.designobserver.com

Rural New England functions a lot more as suburbia than it might appear at first glance.

Much like a landmark, it seems that a smell can distinguish one city from another.

New fragrances capturing the “essence and spirit” of destinations have hit the airport duty free shelves, promising tourists lingering memories of their trip abroad.

The Scent of Departure collection was launched in April with five perfumes inspired by the cities of Frankfurt, Budapest, Vienna, Munich and Istanbul.

The brand capitalises on the ability of scents to evoke vivid, tangible memories of a certain place.

Each city scent is sold exclusively in the duty free airport stores of the cities they symbolise, in a cool glass bottle featuring the airport’s three-letter code on a boarding-pass tag.

By spritzing on Vienna – or “VIE” as it is universally known by a three letter airport code –holidaymakers are taken back to “the peaceful Danube banks full of enchanting scents of mint, cut grass and water flowers”, as well as “the gourmand scents of Wien’s pastries, with their notes of vanilla, liquorice, chocolate and coffee.”

via www.terminalu.com

To me, the Boston scent would allude to both salt air and the smell of the Downtown Crossing T.

It would be hard for any metropolitan area to be whiter than Pittsburgh.

It's so hard, in fact, that of the 100 largest metro areas in the United States, only one has a smaller share of blacks, Hispanics and Asians -- the Scranton-Wilkes Barre region of northeastern Pennsylvania.

A new Brookings Institution report released last week, examining 2010 census data on how Americans identified race and ethnicity, found that southwestern Pennsylvania is whiter even than the Amish country around Lancaster, the Mormon population center of Salt Lake City, Midwest agrarian capitals such as Des Moines, Iowa, and far more isolated places like Boise, Idaho.

It is not stunningly new data for this former melting pot -- findings from the 2000 census were much the same -- but what might be eye-opening is that the pace of change toward greater diversity is even slower here than for all those places above, as well as the rest of America.

via www.post-gazette.com

Meanwhile, my relatively cosmopolitan hometown is the eighth least diverse of all cities in the survey.

Kingsbridge has long been home to an ethnically diverse cross section of middle- and working-class residents. Now developers of two new condo buildings are trying to attract more affluent families to the area from northern Manhattan and beyond. One selling point for West Kingsbridge is its proximity to Riverdale, a wealthier Bronx community on the Hudson River.

While West 231st is just two subway stops from Manhattan on the No. 1 train, getting potential residents to cross the border into the Bronx has always been difficult. But developers say that affordable prices—along with quiet streets and an abundance of private, parochial and charter schools—is helping them overcome the negative perceptions of the Bronx.

Watch the Bronx change before your eyes.

When films like Independence Day show news reports of spacecraft threatening major global cities, they always seem to leave out Calgary or Montreal. For some reason, Godzilla has yet to make a detour to Halifax and Roland Emmerich has yet to drop an aircraft carrier on Medicine Hat. And when Canadian landmarks are destroyed on film, like Vancouver's Lion's Gate Bridge in the centerpiece action sequence of the upcoming Final Destination 5 or Toronto City Hall in Resident Evil: Apocalypse, they're meant to be located either in the U.S. or in a fictional metropolis.

The more you think about it, this lack of apocalyptic destruction isn't just baffling – it's infuriating, and more than a little bit depressing. Disaster movies target cities like Los Angeles and London because they occupy a massive place in the global imagination. 2012 toppled the Vatican because it's the biggest symbol of one of the world's major religions. The fact that Canada hasn't been attacked on film has an implicit, dispiriting message: The rest of the world just doesn't care about us, or about that giant antenna we built in the middle of downtown Toronto. As architecture professor Max Page wrote in the Boston Globe, the fact that New York is the frequent setting of people's worst fears means that it is also the home to their greatest hopes. If Canada never bears witness to its own destruction, it suggests we have nothing worth destroying in the first place.

via www.theglobeandmail.com

On wanting a particular piece of the pop culture pie, and what that says about place.

After nine years, we did what some people would deem inappropriate. Others might even call it unthinkable. We sold our suburban house, got rid of 90 per cent of our stuff and moved back to the city.

It’s not like we were empty-nesters downsizing once the kids had left. No, we still had the kids in tow – two in elementary and one in high school.

You’re not supposed to do that, right? You’re supposed to covet the backyard you never really used. And Dad’s supposed to work a gazillion miles away so the kids don’t see him much, and when they do, he’s recovering from the commute.

Driving everywhere in the suburbs was absolutely essential, while walking anywhere was practically non-existent. The neighbours were okay, but with the houses so far apart and all the entering and exiting from the garage, we didn’t get to know them that well.

Just over the horizon from our fixer-upper was a huge new development. Like the rest of us, it was plopped in the middle of nowhere. But no matter – the houses were big and impressive. There they sat in all their majestic glory, like a salute to the North American dream: “Congratulations! You have arrived. You’ve made it!”

I wanted to feel that way. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to aspire to? What was wrong with me?

via www.theglobeandmail.com

We're going to hear more and more stories along these lines in the coming years.