A little bit of self-promotion: my article on Direct Trade was published in The Warehouse. High-end coffee was just beginning to reach the East Coast when I left Montreal, and I find it definitely easier to have access to good coffee in Vancouver. What a blessing! I will always remember the hour I spent with Jean-François Leduc, owner of Montreal’s Caffè in Gamba. “Isn’t this macchiato delicious!” he exclaimed, after force-feeding me the third cup of dark mixture. (I spent the most energetic hours of my life after this.) Indeed it was, and I have since then been accustomed to this creamy and salty taste.

I’m glad North America is discovering quality coffee. These huge cups of tasteless “sock juce,” as we call it in France, served in non-reusable cardboard cups, are nonsense. Coffee should be savoured during a good conversation with a good friend, or while looking at passers-by, or while reading a good book. Coffee gives you the opportunity to sit back, take a break for a few minutes and enjoy your surroundings. So here’s my article:

It’s early in the afternoon and I’m enjoying one of the last warm days of September, sitting on the terrace of Café Myriade. I’m savouring a cup of thick, black Tanzanian coffee that the barista recommended for the brewing technique I selected.

Located in the heart of the new Quartier Concordia in downtown Montreal, Café Myriade’s competitors are numerous. No less than four coffee shop franchises and a few other independent ones can be found in the blocks surrounding Concordia University, in addition to those located inside of the school’s buildings.

Café Myriade is nonetheless packed. Puffy-haired twentysomethings line up at the counter to order their daily latte while a few teachers discuss school politics between two sips of espresso.

Celebrating its first birthday in October, the café owes its success to the high quality of its products. After years of making do with mediocre coffee, Montrealers have finally caught on to a West Coast wave from cities such as San Francisco, Seattle and Vancouver that has seen coffee enthusiasts become increasingly scrupulous about what goes into their cups.

The trend has led to an emergence of quality shops and online bean retailers like Citizen Bean and Utopia, as well as the popularization of barista competitions. Even Starbucks tried to capitalize on the opportunity by introducing the revolutionary Clover coffee machine in selected stores in an effort to rebrand itself as a quality chain. In Montreal, the lead has been taken by small, local businesses owned by genuine coffee lovers.

“In Montreal there were so many coffee shops, but nowhere to drink good coffee,” explains Caffè in Gamba owner Jean-François Leduc.

This former lawyer, who discovered what espresso is all about during a trip to Rome, opened his Mile-End café two years ago. Leduc greets most of his customers by their name and strikes up conversations with those he does not know. Each beverage is prepared with equal dedication and seemingly effortless gestures, from the single espresso to the latte and its flower-shaped foam. Customers do not necessarily know much about what they are drinking, he says, but they have learned to appreciate good coffee – and to ask for more.

Specialty coffee is often compared to wine because of the knowledge and attention it requires in each step of its production, from growing to roasting to brewing. The intricate process is even recognized internationally through the prestigious Cup of Excellence award and an annual rating program.

“Coffee to me is more difficult than wine,” explains Vince Piccolo, owner of Café Myriade’s main supplier, Vancouver-based 49th Parallel Coffee Roasters. “If you buy a good bottle of wine and bring it home, you can’t really screw it up. With coffee, you can screw it up a hundred ways.”

49th Parallel, like other roasting companies involved in the high-end beans trade, have chosen not to use the Fair Trade certification that has become so popular in the coffee world. Instead, they follow another set of guidelines dubbed ‘direct trade’ by Chicago-based Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea.

Although this decision has been perceived negatively by some, it is motivated by practical reasons. Fair Trade does not differentiate yields according to quality. Farmers receive the same price for a pound of average beans or a pound of exceptional ones, even though the latter are more expensive to produce. They therefore have no financial incentive to invest in the techniques, equipment and knowledge necessary to produce the beans sought by speciality roasters and retailers. Fair Trade, having not seen price increases in years, is not adapted to this high-end market.

“Buying Fair Trade coffee isn’t enough,” explains Leduc, who uses and sells Intelligentsia’s beans. “If it still tastes bad, you’re still not satisfied.”

Direct trade roasters understand the attention required in farming exceptional coffee and travel extensively to meet the farmers themselves, instead of relying on intermediary buyers, in an effort to build long-lasting relationships based on trust and respect. The entire production process, from growing to labelling, is as transparent as possible. As for the buying rate, direct trade can cost roasting companies upwards of 50% more than Fair Trade.

Without a widely-used Direct Trade certification, the guarantee farmers are well-treated is in the cup. “Customers don’t buy coffee because it says Fair Trade or direct trade,” concludes Piccolo; “they buy coffee because it tastes great.”

This week, I’ve been looking at how chain stores can participate in urban revitalization. While doing some research for an article, I stumbled upon this 2005 Seattle Times article. American Apparel had just opened its first Seattle store in an area that was trying to take on a new lease of life, and hoped their presence would attract other boutiques. The article described their strategy:

While scouting locations for American Apparel stores, Webb looks for signs that speak to a hippay sensibility. Literal signs, such as “Loft Available” or “Vegetarian Restaurant.”

In a few instances, American Apparel is an active player in bringing other retailers to a street, leasing more space than it needs and subletting to those that cater to the same demographic.

In Houston, a city of malls, American Apparel opted to open downtown, where fashion boutiques do not exist, and is negotiating for a location in downtown San Jose, Calif. Yes, San Jose has a downtown.

And in Portland, American Apparel opened a store 18 months ago among boarded-up buildings on Southwest Stark Street instead of in the nearby Pearl District, where trendy redevelopment already had taken hold.

(By the way, did anybody stick with the term “hippay”?)

I never thought of urban revitalization as a conscious process, especially not operated by retail giants. Most of the time, revitalization happens progressively when store owners and artists look for cheap retail spaces and studios. But I incidentally found a similar example of this.

Urban Outfitters

Urban Outfitter’s new headquarters are housed in a huge five-building, 11-acre campus located in the Philadelphia Navy Yard. The building houses offices for the company’s different brands (Urban Outfitters, Free People, Anthropologie and Terrain) as well as employee services: a cafeteria, a coffee bar, a library and a fitness centre. The clothing and houseware company undertook the redevelopment of this former shipbuilding complex in 2004. The revamped buidings are a wonderful example of adaptation of turn-of-the-century industrial archictecture to contemporary purposes.

This great article from Metropolis magazine sums up pretty well the change this represented for the company:

The idea of yanking more than 600 of Philadelphia’s most creative—not to mention best-dressed —workers out of downtown was the equivalent of exiling Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue fashion houses to an industrial park near JFK. Losing so many trendsetters would surely diminish the Center City District’s hard-won cool quotient. Meanwhile all those hipsters in skinny jeans and vintage boots would have to figure out how to get to a compound so far off the city grid it was practically tumbling into the Delaware River. There wasn’t a coffeehouse or magazine stand in sight.

Other businesses have since relocated to the Navy Yard, creating more than 4,000 jobs and participating in the rebirth of South Philadelphia.

See more pictures on Decor8’s Flickr photostream.

Read a Q&A with Romer on the New York Times’ Freakonomics blog.

Visit the project’s website.

Watch Romer’s TED talk:

The Globe and Mail’s Gary Mason had a humorous column in the paper yesterday that brought to light some of the lesser-known aspect of poultry-raising.

I also wonder how the lawyer-by-day/chicken-owner-by-night is going to handle certain situations. Like when an egg gets stuck coming out. It happens, not infrequently. And when it does, you have to stick your hand in there and get it.

It’s also not uncommon for a hen’s vents to collapse. A vent is the external opening at the bottom of the bird’s vaginal canal. To fix the problem, you’re supposed to moisten your fingers (hemorrhoid cream is the lubricant of choice) and move the vent back into place. I can see hockey dads and soccer moms throughout the city just dying to snap on the rubber gloves to perform that little procedure.

More realistically, I imagine the offices of veterinarians being overrun with city folk having chicken problems. Urban dwellers and their children are going to become attached to these creatures. When the little birds are feeling under the weather, Vancouverites will spend thousands to get the problem diagnosed.

Urban farming might be trendy, but it’s still farming, and therefore not always glamorous. On the other hand, going chicken-feeding at my grandparents’ farm was one of the greatest and funniest activities I could think of as a little girl. Being awaken by the rooster at 6a.m., however, was not (but roosters are forbidden in Vancouver.)

British company Omlet sells cute and practical chicken coops for the urban poultry. www.omlet.co.uk

The David L. Lawrence Convention Center is, according to the article, the world’s first and largest LEED-certified convention centre. It is located in an area that used to be filled with sex shops, adult theatres and prostitutes. The centre is part of the Pittsburgh Cultural District, a redevelopment effort that seeks to transform this so-called redlight district into a cultural hub. The district also includes several theatres and cultural centres as well as the High School for Creative and Performing Arts.

Pittsburgh's Agnes R. Katz Plaza. Photo courtesy of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.

“The Cultural District today attracts over 2,000,000 visitors annually generating an estimated economic impact of $303 million,” boasts its website.

Pittsburgh is not the only city having gone through the effort of getting rid of its embarrassing debauchery-oriented areas. Amsterdam’s legendary red-light district is opening its prostitute booths to local designers. Montreal, where I currently live, has recently tackled on the e of its own “Red Light.” Located at a major intersection close to downtown, the area will be home to green buildings and cultural organizations.

Montreal's historical Café Cléopâtre. Flickr user thehoneybunny, held under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

The case of Montreal is quite sensitive, though. The city is known for its low criminality rate, and even the Red Light was never a place to avoid (at least not since I’ve been here.) Local cabarets are a fixture of Montreal’s nightlife and sometime host events geared to a regular, although open-minded, public. What’s more, some historical buildings are now threatened by the redevelopment project, which causes the ire of some local residents and heritage activists. Although the changes will undoubtedly positive, many don’t want the Red Light to entirely disappear.

It is interesting to see how these cities are going through the same transformations, which reflect an overall shift in priorities as far as urbanism is concerned. I’m especially curious to see how city governments will help and follow the green and cultural movements.

The situation of dependence of third-world countries on foreign aid has been going on for far too long to remain healthy, and it has been leading to abuse in many cases (the example of the mosquito net, used several times by Moyo, is a good one. Mosquito nets manufactured by rich countries are then sent to poor ones out of good will, even though poor countries would gain more from manufacturing the nets themselves thanks to foreign investment.)

Reading Moyo’s essay has brought me to think about altruism and the act of giving. One thing I’ve learned from my trips to developing countries is that I had much more to learn and receive from the local population than the opposite. The reasons that motivated my trips had to do with a feeling of collective guilt that we try to address through aid. I do not wish to be in that position ever again, since I’ve come to think that it does more harm than good. What I’d now like to concentrate on, as far as international cooperation is concerned, is to foster mutual understanding and learning.

As for giving, I believe that many issues still need to be taken care of around me, even if I live in one of the richest parts of the world. I’ve thereby come up with a list of innovative ways to make good use of your money. Rule n°1: know where your money is going.

• Don’t focus on the material stuff only Journalism might be going through what might be its biggest crisis ever, but there will always be a need for reporting. Spot.Us gets readers directly involved in the editing process by allowing them to choose and fund the stories that they think are worth writing about. The website started out in the Bay Area and is now providing the same services for Los Angeles. If it works, this model could be brought to many other communities.

• Be picky With the growing success of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, we’re going to start seeing more and more online platforms that will facilitate the making of ideas and projects. Kickstarter acts as a fundraising platform for creatives who have a specific project in mind. For example, artists, photographers, filmmakers or writers can get help for their next book, film, or endeavour. Projects only receive fuding when the target amount has been reached, although this amount can go beyond expectations. In return, donors get involved in the creative process by staying updated and receiving little perks. A relationship can therefore be initiated between donors and receivers. Firstgiving is based on the same principles, but concentrates on charitable initiatives. Individuals can create a personal profile and raise money for the nonprofit of their choice. These platforms allow for donors to choose which project, among hundreds, suits them best.
  

• Be original If you have a lot (and I mean, a lot) of spare change you’re willing to give away for a good cause, the Globe and Mail can show you how . Their weekly column Giving Back, published each Saturday, features original ways of donating or raising cash. A soccer camp for kids with cancer, a community association, a specific research area, a student in need of a scholarship are example of recipients. Donations can amount to several thousand dollars.

• Invest in entrepreneurship I don’t want to rule out financial aid to developing countries entirely, as there are several kinds of initiatives I believe in. Microcredit is one of them, even though its efficiency is still subject to debate. Kiva acts as an intermediary between lenders and entrepreneurs in need of a boost for their business. Because you’re lending the money and expect to receive interests in return, receivers can keep a sense of pride that is lost in the traditional aid process.

As for me, I give a little bit each year to WBEZ Chicago Public Radio and WNYC New York Public Radio for my two favourite radio shows, This American Life and Radio Lab.

And now Saturday mornings are really jamming, crowds are gathering for the coffee and the banjo player, and some of your core vendors guess accurately that a lot of these folks are more interested in scented candles than in cauliflower. So they gradually switch their product mix, and that, in turn, encourages still more scented-candle buyers.

Market managers end up allowing non-local and non-organic food to be sold so that buyers can be sure that they find all the products they need.

“These markets are a fucking hayride—they aren’t real,” says a prominent Northern California organic farmer who prefers not to be identified. “They don’t offer a real market opportunity for real farmers, but the public would rather be deceived because it’s too complicated.”

A farmers market in Des Moines, IA. Flickr user WindRanch, held under a Creative Commons non-commercial/attribution/no-derivative license.

I think there needs to be a debate over what we want from our farmers markets and how it’s really suppose to benefit us. Their main goal is to provide us with healthy, local produce, but we all know that in the end it’s all about building a community. Going to your local market is a weekly opportunity to have a chat with your neighbours, meet the farmers who produce the food you eat, and get the latest updates on what’s going on in the community. Going to the market is more than just going grocery shopping, it’s a social experience and a celebration. We bring in street performers and restaurants and scented candles because we want this experience to be as fulfilling as possible.

Going to your weekly farmers market is just like going to church. Both have a primary, functional role and a secondary, social role. Incidentally, my farmers markets takes place every Sunday morning. So I would argue that we should keep the street performers in while holding the market manager more accountable and being less picky about the types of products we want to be able to buy there. If there’s no local asparagus producer, then don’t bring in the giant industrial one.

The news seems to have been perceived as positive among the media and the public.

Photo by code poet. Some rights reserved (Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license.)

“Wal-Mart had been the company that the left loved to hate, because it seemed to have too much power and to use it in non socially constructive ways, squeezing suppliers or keeping wages down,” wrote Rosabeth Moss Kanter on Bloomberg.com. “Today Wal-Mart reminds us that a new kind of capitalism is possible in which big companies can use their power constructively, for the good of society and to move on issues that are still largely unaddressed by government.”

Am I the only one to be skeptical? It’s not because Wal-Mart goes green that it should be hailed as a model for a new capitalism. In my opinion, Wal-Mart is still hurting local economies as well as the urban fabric, and the eco-labelling program will not necessarily improve the food industry’s ethics. Even if we know that the food industry has some serious issues to address, we seem to keep our focus on the environmental side. The organic and local movements are so strong right now that it sometimes seems that it’s all that matters. In fact, going organic or making sure that the food was produced in an environmentally-friendly way might not be enough to improve the global food situation.

“Even if you stick an organic label on Walmart, the system remains the same,” wrote Dorothy Woodend in a review of the documentary Food Inc. in The Tyee. ” The same distribution chains, the same scale of practice, the same billions upon billions of Stonyfield plastic yogurt containers shipped around the country, all so that people can buy more shit with a clean conscience.”

When will we be ready to truly change our habits instead of reading a label for a second?

What has to change, however, is our attitude toward the different sources that feed us information. In the old age of broadcast and print journalism, it was easy to remain passive and take for granted what we heard or read, because these institutions built their credibility on a history of highly-regulated and structured reporting. But now that we are overwhelmed by the amount of information we’re receiving, we’re going to have to be much smarter at sorting this information out and take from it what we need.

“In 2009 literacy isn’t about finishing a book or slogging through 12 web pages to get to the end of an article. It is about knowing what to do with information, how to find the good stuff, how to assess sources. What matters is not that we are readers, but that we are critical readers,” writes Utne Reader’s librarian Danielle Maestretti in the magazine’s July-August 2009 issue.

Whereas the journalism industry will probably regulate itself naturally, media literacy cannot be achieved without effort and education.

I visited the space last April during a trip to the city and had a chat with co-founder Amy Abrams.

How did you get the idea for In Good Company?

My business partner Adelaide Fives and I worked together for about three or four years in a consulting practice with women who were in career transition or women business owners who were experiencing problems. Over the years we found these women kept articulating the same challenges. They had this tremendous sense of not knowing anybody else who was doing this and when they had to see clients they didn’t have a place to meet them. We always wanted to give them a resource to solve this sense of isolation. We couldn’t find that resource so we decided to create it on our own. We thought that what these women were missing was a community of peers, and a place to work at when they needed it. A lot of good resources were getting lost because people didn’t know how to share them.
We knew we wanted to have a physical space and allow people to rent it when they needed it. That already existed, but the key component to what we wanted to do that was different was this sense of community. So we described ourselves as a community membership and a community workspace. In order to ever use our space you have to be a member of our community.

Can you tell me more about this community aspect?

By becoming a member of our organization you get to be part of our community in person and online. We have about eight events a month: lunchtime meetings where we have a specific topic that we’re discussing, panels, evening events, holiday parties and cocktail hours. Sometimes we invite successful local entrepreneurs to speak about their experience. We also have smaller affinity groups, like mother business owners, women consultants, women over 60… We also have an online component, with a membership directory and several ways for people to communicate with each other.

What would be different in a community like this from a mixed community where you have men as well?

I have to speculate on the answer because I’m not involved in a mixed community. What we find in working with women is that there seems to be some significant things that they had in common with one another. Some of them wanted more balance in their lives, whether that be family balance or  otherwise. The flexibility of our workspace seemed to really appeal to them. Sometimes they wanted to work at home, sometimes they didn’t, sometimes they wanted to work three days a week, etc.
In terms of the community, there are a lot of workers organizations that are mixed and I think that they’re great, and many of our members belong to lots of organizations. What was missing was an organization of women business owners in New York that could meet in person and offer a variety of things.

Do you think that women do business differently than men?

Yes and no. I think that if you’re smart, talented and successful it doesn’t matter what your gender is. The women in our community really love to help each other. They look to connect with other people and they have some need to not be isolated, but there’s plenty of other people who like to work by themselves, plenty of men who like to work by themselves and plenty of men who like to work around other people. I think people just self-select for this community’s offerings.

You say that your members have a lot to exchange even if their businesses are different. Can you give me some examples?

Our members tend to collaborate all the time here, if they need a resource, a web designer, a lawyer, a health insurance provider… They make a lot of introductions on behalf of one another. Sometimes they are redesigning their logo and they just want some feedback from people who aren’t related to them.
A lot of time people miss going somewhere and having people that they know they can chat with, where they can see some friendly faces. Humans are social beings. People really crave that and they don’t realize when they start their own business that it’s something that they will miss.

What are the challenges that women face that come back regularly?

Sometimes women entrepreneurs need to be more specific about the amount of money they want to make, and they need to be very clear about how to make that money. They should be very clear about what they do well, and make sure that they’re doing that the majority of the time in their business. People come here a lot of times and they’re very isolated, that is very detrimental to your business. If you’re not around other people who are doing similar things, it just makes it that much harder.
I also think you have to take yourself very seriously and have a professional identity. In some cases it’s totally acceptable to meet in a coffee shop, but in other cases people won’t take that seriously. You need to think about what your goals are in business and make sure that your decisions reflect those goals.

What about family?

For the women who have younger children, this is a perfect blend, because they can work a few days a week. A lot of women go into business for themselves at certain career junctures so that they can have more balance with their family life. Others are taking care of aging parents. Our community allows them to meet other women who are in the same boat and get support from them.

Amy Abrams

What kind of advice would you give to someone who wants to start a business?

If you want to start a business, I would be very clear about what you’re good at, and I’d be very aware of what you’re not good at. For example, let’s say you know that you’re really good at sales but you’re not a great accountant and that’s going be a part of your business. What you should do is find some type of software or keep all your bills organized and give them to someone, but you don’t have to be good at that to do you own business. I would be very clear about what your goals are; do you want to have flexibility, make a lot of money, be the biggest this…
I would also talk to a lot of people in the industry that you’re interested in. For example if you want to sell a product, do your research and make sure that it doesn’t exist or that there’s a market for it. If it’s a service, you want to know what people charge in that industry.
You also want know your peers in that industry, so even if you decide to be a financial consultant, you want to know other financial consultants. They’ll give you leads or they’ll refer people. You should also make sure that you find a community of people who are starting their own businesses so that you have support along the way.

Photo credit: Flavie Halais