Starting with its Chelsea outpost in New York, global fast-food giant McDonalds plans a revamp of its American outlets with Jacobsen-inspired furnishings, wireless connectivity, and plasma-screen televisions. The changes come as the ways customers use the spaces are changing:

The menu at the 186-seat Chelsea outlet is the same as any other McDonald's. But the differences are stark. The walls are decorated with bold vertical stripes or with what looks like a zebra design but is actually French architect Philippe Avanzi's magnified thumbprint. Tables are of different sizes to accommodate small groups or an informal business meeting — and Hendel said nearby workers have started meeting there. There are reproductions of Danish designer Arne Jacobsen's chairs including the Egg chair, a classic of mid-century functionality that would look right at home on "The Jetsons."

More.
Earlier.

Two massive infrastructure improvements--one underway, the other recently completed--aim to transform transportation connections in and out of central Dublin. Below, a video describes DART Underground, which will unite multiple modes of transportation and forge a new and vital link under the ancient city center.



To the east of where most DART Underground construction will take place, a new, high-tech, harp-like bridge gracefully spans the River Liffey.

(Via the Guardian.)

The designer was Santiago Calatrava, the Valencian architect who has made expressionist bridges and weirdly torqued structures a trademark. Never mind that Beckett made a virtue of muted understatement. The writer once said "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness". Calatrava does not think that way. He's in the landmark business.

This is Calatrava's second bridge in Dublin – the first was dedicated to James Joyce and opened in 2003. The new Beckett Bridge is technically interesting: the structure is cable-stayed from a 40-metre pylon. The span across the Liffey is 124m and carries two lanes of motor traffic, one of cycles and one of Godots. Trains may come later. Hydraulic apparatus allows the bridge to swing through 90 degrees in the horizontal plane to allow ships to pass.

More.

(Via the NYT.)

Vancouver, Washington--a city of over 160,000 residents, sitting serenely across the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon--is giving itself a stern talking-to. A search for identity ensues:

With world attention about to focus on that other Vancouver, the one with the international cachet, the creative cuisine and the cosmopolitan diversity, this Vancouver is having a tough talk with itself. How, it is asking, can a former mill town that has become an increasingly assertive city, a place that courts high-tech companies and takes pride in its expanding university campus, make a name for itself when another city with the same name in the same misty vicinity of North America has already done so and then some?

More. 

A nonprofit Los Angeles tour operator plans bus circuits of some of that city's most notorious gang turf, "including decayed public housing, sites of deadly shootouts and streets ravaged by racial unrest." It's a tourist's quest for authenticity on one end, and a micro-financing plan on the other:

After a VIP preview last weekend, L.A. Gang Tours expects to open to the public in January, giving tourists a look at the cradle of the nation's gang culture -- the birthplace of many of the city's gangs, including Crips and Bloods, Florencia 13 and 18th Street. "This is ground zero for a lot of the bad in this city. It could be ground zero for a lot of the good too," said Alfred Lomas, a former Florencia member who has become a leading gang intervention worker in South Los Angeles and is spearheading the tours. "This is true community empowerment."

First, Shawn Micallef  of Spacing--one of my favorite publications--travels the length of Spadina Avenue, one of Toronto's main thoroughfares. Simply put, it's good writing about a cool street and the great city that has grown up around it.

Second, pause to consider this essay in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that mulls how different development patterns affect more than just quality of life. After time spent in a typically convivial, walkable Spanish city, the author takes a huge letdown of a ride through the deserted streets of Milwaukee. Sound familiar? Far too many places could replace Milwaukee in this piece without the story sounding any different:

Arriving home from Spain, we drove through Milwaukee from Mitchell International Airport, and the eerie calm of sealing ourselves behind car windows settled over us; the "carness" of our life here spread out like a gray pall all around us. Instead of people, conversation, shopping, eating and attending to business on the hoof, we were surrounded by access roads, parking lots, highways and bridges until we eventually passed under the shadow of the hulking three-story garage whose gloomy, and empty, cavern overshadows our magnificent art museum.

We Americans are all infrastructure - and no people.

And what can we do with that? What is our relationship to all this asphalt, and what does it say about us? Another recent piece queries the psychogeographical significance of highway interchanges, referring to one particular interchange, also in Milwaukee, that this author's brother had a hand in redesigning.

A city and country centered on the automobile are by necessity also centered on the road. Today’s highway intersections are not just landmarks but the modern equivalents of crossroads and town squares, meeting places that become geographical centers of reference. And both as landmarks and utilitarian features of life, they are getting more consideration. With federal stimulus money flowing to shovel-ready projects that have been on the drawing boards for years, new intersections are sprouting all over.

Elsewhere, infrastructure that inspires: news of the opening of a sculptural new footbridge spanning the Brisbane River, in the Australian city of the same name:

About 36,500 people are expected to use the new Kurilpa Bridge each week to walk or bike across the Brisbane River between the CBD and the arts precinct at South Bank. The bridge, which has been described as looking like knitting needles, is not only one of the longest footbridges, but also features a sophisticated LED lighting scheme that is powered by the sun and can produce a number of different lighting effects.

 
(Via the Architectural Review.)

An airy, humane, and striking piece of public architecture, it happens to be the world's largest tensegrity bridge. It also happens to be entirely solar-powered, the world's largest example of such a thing. Designed by Australian practice Cox Architects, it spans 470 meters, is 6.5 meters wide, and is projected to save nearly 40 tons of carbon emissions yearly, compared with a conventionally lit structure.

 
Disneyland, Anaheim, CA.

A similar criticism can be leveled at Celebration, Disney's model town, located near Disneyworld outside Orlando. It's not so different from Main Street USA, except it has actual residents. It's the ideal American small town of the near future--prosperous, orderly, comfortable. Its New Urbanist perfection combines the bones of the fast with the guts of the future. But then: isn't the social engineering side of it really creepy? Doesn't it feel contrived? Fake? Fascist, even? It might be densely planned and easy on the eyes, but how could there possibly be a there there?

Here's an idea. What if, instead of scoffing at the potency of the Disney fantasy as a matter of course--that would be the singular focus on the design of a totalizing experience, and how to synthesize the influences that inform said experience--we acknowledge that the company's forays into urbanism have informed how we think about our cities, our buildings, and ourselves? Could we get ourselves to acknowledge that maybe--just maybe--there are lessons to learn from this particular corporate giant about the way cities work?

Any urban designer can tell you that it's the way different components and activities in an urban ensemble play off and communicate with each other that helps generate the kind of magic, even fantasy, that is essential for placemaking (and making money). The raw material for that magic is both form and function, and deep understandings of programming and time. Disney's "imagineers" know how to manipulate that, and that is very powerful stuff.

Of course we can bemoan the idea that such magic no longer happens organically, preferring an idealized past to an imperfect present. But it would be vastly more interesting to critically engage with the work that Disney does, and see how it connects to other impulses in the planning and design world.

 
Times Square, NYC.

This is all meant as a lead-up to how this article about the redesign of the Disney Store, the company's chain of retail outlets in North America and Europe, caught my eye:

Chicago:
Madrid: Rio de Janeiro: Tokyo:

Regardless of all the other ramifications of something as massive as the Olympics, I find their marketing completely fascinating. (Some earlier examples of my enthusiasm for this topic here and here.) It is, among so many other things, a gargantuan exercise in place branding, and a massive projection of local qualities--culture, geography, language--to a global audience. What are the graphics, sounds, colors, that convey a sense of place that is, at once, both specific and universal? Separate from logistics, architecture, and politics, how do you package, express, and demonstrate something as complex and ever-changing as a city of millions, in a supposedly homogenizing world? Even without the Olympics, what are these four world cities' brands?

Together the images provide meditative fodder on different forms of urban development, the hidden texts of the built environment, and the image technology that allows us to read them.

More of the aerial alphabet of Britain, here. The Australian version, here.

The concept plumbs the possibilities of new municipal legislation in that city that legalizes the conversion of garages and sheds into secondary housing units. It's a great concept, and it ties into a few things I've hit on before, out of a generalized curiosity about alleys, and the roles they play as public space and transportation route: what potentials do they hold? How could they be transformed? Need they be decrepit and utilitarian, or could they be play another role?

Lanefab, founded by a carpenter and a designer, aims to realize those potentials through its low-impact, compact home designs, specially suited to tight alley sites. In a dense, burgeoning city like Vancouver, the need for such a product is apparent.

“Vancouver’s lane system [presents] a real opportunity,” says [Lanefab founder] Davidson, who five years ago founded the Dynamic Cities Project, a nonprofit organization designed to help communities respond to the challenges of climate change and oil depletion. “I think between seventy and ninety thousand lots in the city are now open to laneway housing.”

That's a lot. Now multiply that across all the North American cities with languishing, neglected, eclectic systems of alleyways threading through their old neighborhoods. Even in cities where the population has long fled, think about how a radical reconsideration of the alley could play a part in changing a place (not to mention the perceptions about that place).

Check out some Lanefab prototypes here, and check out some not-so-distant cousin-type projects, here. Also check out Smallworks, another Vancouver company poised to fill--literally--this interesting niche.

(Earlier, somewhat related.)

Blocky, colorful, and suggestively intricate, the city of Melbourne's new M is meant to conjure visions of a city on the cutting edge, "modern, vibrant [and] cool," evoking the accolades for which the place is known: progressive, smart, welcoming. It was designed by the Sydney office of global brand consultancy Landor. I would love to be a fly on the wall for the process behind this kind of thing--the development of a visual story, and the editing of said story, seems especially rich with potential when the city is the story, and the city in question is commonly held as one of the world's loveliest.

To my eyes, there seems to be something vaguely origami-like in the abstract, diagrammatic geometry suggestive of a work in progress, an idea called "Melbourne" that can resolve itself any number of ways, but always remains its essential M-shaped, prismatic self. Further, the connotation of math--and more broadly, that which is rational, and at once both complex and straightforward--supports the impression of serene, level-headed modernity that the city elders and the designers sought. It's iconic and will be instantly recognizable.

A reaction to some of the logo's other aspects, from the awesome branding site Brand New:

There is something very appealing and avant garde about this logo and it walks a fine line between trendy-and-useless and progressive-and-defining, but I think it definitely swings to the latter. There is a really great tension created by the detail and overlay on the left side of the M and how it resolves into something more simple on the right side. The gradients are subtle and help add a sense of depth and breadth that you would not get with a flat logo...

As one of the commenters on that article says: "This identity system is a living metaphor of the culture and spirit of a modern city. Simply beautiful." Though I think that the flip side of all the abstraction of a city branding exercise is that there are certain, inherent risks--is the resulting visual material specific enough to its place, or could it refer to anywhere?--I tend to agree, Melbourne's new M is quite elegant.

Above, the logo in motion. What do you think?

Of course, food trucks are a staple piece of street furniture worldwide, and zooming out a bit, it's not a stretch to state that taking part in their offerings can often provide a seductive, kaleidoscopic meditation on place. Does rotisserie chicken "go" with San Francisco? Of course. Dumplings in New York? Sure. These things, and many others, enter the pantheon of global street foods that you already know; the trucks are part of the streetscape, the food an authentic descriptor of place.

Apart from the sense of place so often imparted by a food truck's wares, the other half of their appeal is wrapped up in their ephemerality; drag your feet, and you miss the goods. The NYT piece mentions how Kogi has garnered fame for using Twitter to complement its business: Kogi's owners tweet real-time updates about their truck's location, as well as any can't-miss daily specials. The restaurant's Twitter feed brings together food, commerce, and geography--an entertaining read, even if you are thousands of miles away (like me)--and the constantly-updating stream of locations seems to add cache to the restaurant's product, as something uniquely specific to the city.

So, it's fun to think about the ties between food and place; as the WSJ notes, the combination of Twitter's emergence and the ongoing economic downturn (to which I would add growing interests in walkability, local food, and a curiosity about urban transformation, out there in the ether) are, interestingly enough, spurring a food truck boom.

A Worldchanging piece by Julia Levitt considers what this combination of impulses could yield for the fixed parts of the built environment. In the same way that Kogi and its counterparts harness social networking to do business--making the urban fabric more dynamic while doing so--consider how private, fixed spaces could transform themselves, if seen through an analogous lens:  

The next time you're waiting at an intersection, look around and imagine how much of the built (and furnished) environment stands empty and unused at any given time. Cafés in the financial district are closed at dinnertime; restaurants that specialize in dinner fare are silent until mid-afternoon; parking lots that fill during the workweek are largely vacant after 6pm and often on weekends.  

This idea, however, harnesses another kind of embedded energy -- by creating meaning, activity and experience where there would have been emptiness, waste or worse. It's about using up every bit of urban space to its fullest.

The article cites an example where two restaurants operate from the same space on different days. But there's a lot of possibility here. It proceeds from a provocative question--how can we make our building/neighborhood/city more dynamic, strong and efficient? The answer lies in brainstorming complementary uses for a single site. Just as single-use zoning becomes an anachronism, so could single-use programming. As Levitt points out, aside from a practicalty standpoint, "there's something magical about transience:"

The feeling that you're partaking of an experience, an ambience, an event that simply cannot happen the same way again creates an immediate sort of scenius. The quality of impermanence adds a kind of specialness to an everyday activity – visiting a restaurant, crossing a public square, or even taking a walk. Vonnegut mocked the superficial connections between granfalloons – groups of people who attended the same college, or follow a certain sports team. (Or those that follow the same Twitter feed.)  But when the thing you all showed up for is rare and will only happen once, the connection clicks.

What I like is that temporary spaces can be both transcendent and practical at the same time. These exchanges enable innovators to grab hold of useful spaces whose owners haven't previously seen a way to make profitable, and use them to mutual benefit. Even better, they often make our neighborhoods more lively in the process.

Temporality: it's the next frontier in infill urban development.

Exclusivity, as much as sun and sand, is part of the gravitational pull of the Hamptons, where Them and Us divisions are as fastidiously tended as a billionaire’s privet hedge.

It’s not exactly news that clothes denote status, but in beachside communities...the signs of inclusion among local elites are more challenging to convey. And, while there is no formalized uniform to identify which group one belongs to, a lot can be read in an item that upon a time was worn as underclothes.

Okay, I get it. Vacationing in the Hamptons is an endless game of signaling group affiliations to others. That's not much different than any other getaway spot. Florida, and where one goes on vacation in Florida in relation to where one is from, is a prime example in my own experience. In large part it seems to be about choosing for or against one's own background: my parents, inexplicably, prefer to vacation among the Quebecois when in the Sunshine State, despite having no ties to La Belle Province. Meanwhile, my in-laws prefer a certain city on the Gulf Coast where other escapees from their hometown are plentiful.

And sure, I am aware that mentioning Florida--as opposed to the Turks & Caicos, say, or Cinque-Terre--does carry with it a certain amount of information about me and the taste cultures of my relatives. Choosing where to travel is an autobiographical act, a consumer choice. It's fairly obvious, but is rarely taken seriously, as the tone of the article indicates.

In fact, it is interesting to regard the extent to which the activity of leisure travel is really a yearning and searching for placeness and belonging elsewhere, and how that exists in tension with one's identity. You become more yourself, while also stepping into someone else's shoes. That can be quite magical: travel is of course a vehicle for seeing the world, but also seeing oneself in relation to that world. This is me, slathered in SPF 45, as a beachgoer; this is me, changing trains at Chatelet, as a Parisian.

I got a whopping dose of this thinking as an exchange student in high school, where symbols of difference and belonging are perhaps the most closely scrutinized. As it happens, this awareness of the connections between people and place lends itself naturally to a career in architecture and design.

Back to clothing though, and specifically t-shirts, that broadcast status:

It signals localism, but a “friendly localism,” said Ms. Adams....It suggests that the wearer is in on something, has the key to what Tracy Feith, the surfer and designer who operates a shop at the Surf Lodge in Montauk, called “the authenticity everyone’s trying to find in the marketplace.”

Wearing that t-shirt ("Ithaca is Gorges," for example), a person becomes a walking billboard for a place, and all its attendant connotations, at relatively little cost. As pointed out earlier, that's actually quite powerful--it reinforces both the identity of the individual wearing the shirt as well as that of the destination in question. And as is obvious, this hunt for synthesis with place, for belonging, only expands in a networked world, making actual travel to the place in question almost unnecessary. A person can be, and often is, of many places simultaneously.

Here's a studio project that I'd like to see, one that starts with a t-shirt: design the stuff of a place--the slogan, the souvenirs, the apparel--and then go about designing the place itself. Who is your audience, and what is their back story? What will they do when they arrive? How will your souvenirs be displayed, worn, used? How does the souvenir play on or interact with the physical aspects of the place you're designing?  Is your project a boutique hotel in a global city, or a resort in an exotic location? Is it a coffee shop in a college town, or a nightclub on the beach? What is the most authentic thing about your place, and how did it become so? How would you keep the appeal fresh, even after your inevitable success?

(Related.)

# This argument, which holds that Michael Jackson would not have become who he was were it not for the urban form of Los Angeles. Sure, there were other big factors at play in his evolution into the grotesque superstar we all knew, the author notes. But among those were the way that the environment of Los Angeles--its "feel," which is shaped, of course, by economics, culture, and geography--configures the lives of its citizens in unique ways. 

I think that the author is on to something, but her argument falters by pointing the finger directly at LA specifically--in my opinion, the real landscape of alienation is not endemic to Los Angeles, but in hermetically sealed, privacy-obsessed outlying suburbs around the country. ("Weeds" and "Big Love" spring to mind: both prominently feature suburbia and issues of privacy and alienation.)

It's interesting, this overlap between celebrity and sense of place, how the one informs the other. Yes, a place like New York, with bona fide density and a functioning public realm, does to some extent disallow the kind of autonomy and focus on the self that a town made up of "th[ose] estate[s] on top of the hill" would. But LA is also dense, more so than you may think. Its image as airy, bright, spacious--exacerbated by photographers like the recently departed Julius Shulman (above)--is myth. Or at least history.

Actually, maybe it's that myth of LA that shaped Michael Jackson and shapes countless other celebrities--that old Modernist myth that Southern California is the most perfect, final manifestation of what's American; the place you become yourself, to the most perverse Nth degree--and not LA and California as it actually is. There's that tired old concept that the defining charcter of California is its unreality; but I think anyone who has ever read Margaret Crawford or Mike Davis knows better.

# The book Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, by Paul Auge. A reprint of a 1995 analysis of the anonymous, quasi-public spaces where we spend so much time: shopping centers, airports, hotels, highways.

In other words, the Aerotropolis and its environs. The backdrop to Airworld.

From PD Smith's March review:

The forces of globalisation and urbanisation are creating ever more of these Ballardian non-places, symptoms of a Muzak-filled supermodernity in which "people are always, and never, at home". Unsettling, elegantly written and illuminating: essential reading for anyone seeking to understand our supermodern condition.

# Speaking of non-places, check out this plan for soundscaping the subway station at 96th St. in New York, featuring natural Muzak:

Chirping birds, rustling leaves, a burbling brook: not the first sounds that come to mind about the New York City subway. But starting next year, the city’s subterranean soundtrack — a familiar overture of clanks, screeches, groans and beeps — is poised to add a few noises of a more verdant variety.

The sounds will join a canopy of stainless-steel flowers hanging above the turnstiles, an abstracted nod to the station's once-rural surroundings and the tension between that past and the hustle of the station's present.

I join the author of the NYT article in wondering how this will come off during the course of a normal day's operations, with the din of trains passing through and announcements booming overhead. The only comparison I can come up with is the sounds of a ship's horn that play at the baggage claim in the Fort Lauderdale airport when one's luggage arrives (an allusion to the nearby port, no doubt)--but this comes off as silly, not contextual. But who knows--maybe the sounds of an imagined, pre-settlement 96th St. will prove soothing?

# Finally, take a look at a series of videos describing the Denver Living Streets Initiative, via Rocky Mountain PBS. More than a streetscape improvement plan, the Living Streets Initiative aims to fine-tune and revamp a range of Denver city neighborhoods, addressing "green living, community health, local economic growth, greater transportation choice and improved accessibility and connectivity for all users of the street (bikes, pedestrians and cars alike)." An impressive, holistic push to improve the quality of the built environment, tying to economics and lifestyle and corresponding with the construction of a vast new commuter rail network.  

As anyone who is familiar with a long-distance move knows, it is not just the physical distance that poses a challenge, but also the amount of mental space and attention that such a thing can occupy, if you let it. Needless to say I'm glad to be here, and to open a new chapter in my own life, as well.

I had intended to write a farewell note, to the overpowering civic symbol that broadcasts an image of my home base for these last two years far beyond its obstinate, staid, stable confines. It is a heavy piece of metal that makes a bold statement--one that I have spent many moments pondering over these last two years, at stoplights, seeing it in the distance; or at its base, watching the river roll past while I eat my lunch. It is a Modern architectural landmark; an act of mathematical precision, alternately graceful and agressive; a bombastic, heroic, very 20th century thing that speaks volumes about one city's competitive nature, aspirations and extreme self-consciousness. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that a familiarity with the ideas that led to the Arch have informed my approach to writing this blog; it is the defining icon of a city I know pretty well. 

But, for now, it suffices to say: goodbye, Gateway Arch. Goodbye, St. Louis. For those of you who don't know the city, I'll defer to the mixed impressions of the place that Jonathan Franzen provides in his writing, in lieu of my own narrative, to lend a sense of place. For what it's worth, the place is important to me.

So, more very soon. In the meantime, sit back and enjoy the following, a 1985 advertisement for the English planned city of Milton Keynes. I love a good promotional video about place, especially when the social engineering is laid on extra thick. Like the Arch, an extremely optimistic piece of the recent past. (Via Kosmograd.)

The fragrance of sage-scented candles and sounds of jazz fill the air of a 2,600-square-foot house a block from the beach. Tiger-striped chairs flank tables crafted from exotic woods. Photos of a chubby baby hang on the walls. Whoever occupies 211 Windward Way, they seem to live the good life. 

Posting over the next few weeks may be a bit sparse, as we rack up frequent flier miles running back and forth and try to get ourselves squared away, in a place that is, excitingly for us, both familiar and new. Therefore, along with my Delicious bookmarks, I'm enlisting Twitter as a way to bridge the content gap here, and I rescind my earlier statement about not understanding its utility. This essay takes care of the rest.

More on all that later; at some point I do intend to organize my thoughts about why Providence is a great city, and why I'm excited to be there. In the meantime, here's a video explaining why other people think so.

Right now, I'd just like to offer a bit of YouTube kitsch, a music video only tangentially related to issues of urbanism, the content of which was voted the "worst song ever" a couple of years back. I report, you decide.

And now, back to regularly scheduled programming...

At one point the arc of the story arrives at Marco, resident of London, who muses about the city's Underground as he goes about his day. I'm excerpting it here, as a meditation on place, for how Marco views the personality of the different tube lines, and by extension London itself:

As the fine denizens of London Town know, each tube line has a distinct personality and range of mood swings. The Victoria Line, for example, breezy and reliable. The Jubilee Line, the young disappointment of the family, branching out to the suburbs, eternally having extensions planned, twisting round to Greenwich, and back under the river out east somewhere. The District and Circle Line, well, even Death would rather fork out for a taxi if he's in a hurry. Crammed with commuters for King's Cross or Paddington, and crammed with museum-bound tourists who don't know the craftier short-cuts, it's as bad as how I imagine Tokyo....Docklands Light Railway, the nouveau riche neighbour, with its Prince Regent, West India Quay and its Gallions Reach and its Royal Albert. Stentorian Piccadilly wouldn't approve of such artyfartyness, and nor would his twin uncle, Bakerloo. Central, the middle-aged cousin, matter-of-fact, direct, no forking off or going the long way round. That's about it for the main lines, except the Metropolitan which is too boring to mention, except that it's a nice fuchsia colour and you take it to visit the dying.

Then you have the Oddball lines, like Shakespeare's Oddball plays. Pericles, Hammersmith and City, East Verona Line, Titus of Waterloo.


The Northern Line is black on the maps. It's the deepest. It has the most suicides, you're most likely to get mugged on it, and its art students are most likely to be future Bond Girls. There's something doom-laden about the Northern Line. Its station names: Morden, Brent Cross, Goodge Street, Archway, Elephant and Castle, the resurrected Mornington Crescent. It was closed for years, I remember imagining I was on a probe peering into the Titanic as the train passed through.

Yep, the Northern Line is the psycho of the family. Those bare-walled stations south of the Thames that can't attract advertisers. Not even stair-lift manufacturers will advertise in Kennington Tube Station. I've never been to Kennington but if I did I bet there'd be nothing but run-down fifties housing blocks, closed-down bingo halls and a used-car place where tatty plastic banners fluppetty-flup in the homeless wind. The sort of place where best-forgotten films starring British rock stars as working-class anti-heroes are set. There but for the grace of my credit cards go I.

London is a language. I guess all places are.

First, take a few minutes to tune into a superlative This American Life episode from a couple of weeks ago about the spiraling effects of speculative development and foreclosure on Rogers Park, Chicago--both inside the "luxury" condominium conversions themselves, and outside, throughout the neighborhood. The physical and economic effects of countless "sexy on the outside, crappy on the inside" renovations extend throughout the neighborhood. Listen.

Above, Clark Street in Rogers Park. (via)

Across the country in Los Angeles, an architect and "social designer" plans for wholescale societal transformation at the scale of the suburban cul-de-sac. NPR contributor Jennifer Sharpe investigates why Stephanie Smith believes the way out of the alienation and waste of the suburbs starts by rethinking the commune:

Ever since my next-door neighbor sent me hate mail, threatening to sue if I didn't cut down my eucalyptus tree, I've been having paranoid fantasies about how badly we'd do together in an apocalypse.

Stranded on a residential street in Santa Monica, Calif., where the neighbors hardly ever interact with each other, I realized we might all die as casualties of our own self absorption.

So when I heard about a social experiment urging people in Los Angeles cul-de-sacs to start communes together, I had to see if this strange suburban mutation could possibly survive.

Cue Smith, founder of Ecoshack, and the project simply called Wanna Start A Commune?, wherein neighbors pool resources for the common good:

From the WSAC manifesto:

Wanna Start a Commune? is a movement dedicated to bringing a communal lifestyle to the forefront of American culture.

A commune is defined simply as "a community where resources are shared." We think the commune idea deserves a much broader audience. Sure, many commune experiments failed. We say don't throw the baby out with the bathwater! Let's learn and move forward. The commune is an idea too good to waste. Let's take this old idea and give it a new attitude.

The good news is that we're already turning towards each other more than ever before; for inspiration, for comfort, for help, for joy. It's a simple act to take that 'turning towards' and make it official. The act of starting a commune can be literal, or symbolic. Becoming more collective is the goal. Join with those around you and together decide how and where.

Listen.

- A global search for authenticity arrives in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, as a German developer imagines today's favela as tomorrow's development coup de grace. Crazy, possibly; but who can argue with the view?

Rolf Glaser zips his motorbike up the twisting alleyways of Vidigal slum, past a bunch of cheerful, gun-packing drug traffickers, and emerges at a cliffside plateau next to some demolished shacks. This, the German developer says, could be Rio de Janeiro's next tourist hotspot.

"Can you imagine sitting up here on a terrace with a glass of wine?" he muses, motioning toward the sparkling azure Atlantic Ocean.

Many Brazilians, Glaser admits, think he is missing something by planning to turn one of the hundreds of Rio slums — whose names are synonymous with violence, drug-dealing and poverty — into a trendy new spot on the city's tourist map. Residents are often criminalized in people's minds purely by association with the shantytowns, or "favelas," which are often controlled by heavily armed drug gangs. But Glaser is one of a small, bold band of foreigners going where most Rio residents fear to tread, catering to tourists who want to see the "real" Rio beyond the Copacabana beach district and the Christ the Redeemer statue.

Vidigal played the backdrop in parts of City of God, after all. (Earlier.)

- In the very last print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, an update on Starbucks. I find their struggles fascinating, for the civic role their outlets often play, as extensions of the street and guardian of "third places" worldwide; and for their strenuous attempts to create something in both product and experience (which ties to design at all scales, of course) that is at once both local and global, idiosyncratic and uniform.

Company CEO Howard Schultz:

"There's a myth out there," Schultz said. "The myth is that there is a $4 cup of coffee at Starbucks."
He pointed out that half the beverages sold cost less than $3, and one-third cost less than $2. He also said that the company would defend its image on cost and on quality.

"We can't stay quiet," Schultz said. "Don't let anyone tell you that their coffee or that coffee is the same as Starbucks. It's not. We've been silent about these issues, and I can assure you that we're not going to be silent for too long." The company has been stepping up on traditional advertising and will likely continue to do so, marking a change in strategy from its historic communication with customers by word-of-mouth.

"The issue of perception has got to be addressed," Schultz said. "One of the things I recently read is that Starbucks Coffee Co. is not cool any more. I've been here 27 years, we have never set out to be cool. We don't want to be cool, we want to be relevant. We want to be trusted. We want to be valued."

(Earlier.)

- Outside Toronto, a new neighborhood "fails." New Urbanists, city officials, and residents point fingers and wag tongues.

More than 10 years ago, a charismatic Cuban American architect embarked on a bold plan to transform a plot of Ontario farmland into a bustling urban utopia, a place where dwellers would swap cars for walking shoes and enjoy a sense of urbanity in what would have otherwise been just another suburb.
Or so that was Andres Duany’s plan.

Instead, cars today zip up and down the narrow avenues and not a pedestrian, charming coffee shop, nor restaurant is in sight. It is a Tuesday afternoon, and two beauty salons are inexplicably closed for the day, a real estate office is locked with snow piled high outside its door, not a single child is playing in Mews Park, and the convenience store sees only a trickling of residents. Here and there a York Regional Transit bus rolls along, but public transportation to, from and within Cornell is far from comprehensive.

“The mindset was that people wanted a village feel, but what emerged was a sort of pseudo-village,” said Michael Spaziani, a Toronto architect who a decade ago helped create Cornell’s open-space master plan, adding that Cornell is so far nothing more than a “cuter form of sprawl.”

What's the matter? Duany believes the developers currently constructing Cornell--apparently free from the formal regulatory guidance that often accompanies the development of New Urbanist communities--are being careless. However, a couple of smart comments on the article at Planetizen point out that the relationship between the development and its greater context--at the edge of the metropolitan area, with few services nearby and no pre-existing fabric to connect to--is what's problematic:

1) This should come as a surprise to no one, least of all city planners. Since the mid 1990's many of us have decried the notion of "new urban" development in the greenfields. It is not urban and it certainly is not new. These developments (Duany, Calthorpe, etc...) are antithetical to the notion of urban planning. They are what they appear to be, a new style of suburb that does not produce quite as much environmental guilt in the new residents. In fact, they are more dangerous as a result....

2) Cornell's particular circumstances aside, New Urbanist practitioners should focus on retooling existing urban areas rather than trying to create them out of whole cloth. It should be no surprise that TND oases like Cornell and Celebration don't function as intended from inception because they are only a small feature of the large metropolitan desert that surrounds them. If the dominant metropolitan infrastructure dictates long car trips between single use areas of residence, employment, retail, and recreation, it will swamp whatever hoped-for effects a small pocket of TND development will bring. Moreover, the New Urbanist development's incongruity with its larger environment creates an inescapable feeling of inauthenticity, much like I experience when I visit a "town center"-style shopping mall....

That's not to say that Markham's leadership isn't trying to create something unique and sustainable as the city develops. In fact, the city is home to both Cornell and Cathedraltown, a New Urbanist community with another story, featured here earlier.

- As for the clerical work mentioned above: Brand Avenue has entered the world of Twitter, here, and in the right-hand column. Right now is a trial period--to be honest, I'm not convinced that Twitter actually does anything, and I'm rather partial to my Delicious bookmarks as a mode of networking. I'd enjoy being proven wrong, though. And hey, maybe it will help us all find new jobs?