The American Scholar: Uncommon Sense – Paul Goldberger

Lovely essay from 2006, Paul Goldberger on Jane Jacobs:
QUOTE
Jacobs was never as eager as Mumford for acolytes, though she ended up with plenty of them, and she saw right through many of the things that were presented as consistent with her views. She didn’t even have much patience with the New Urbanists, whose philosophy of returning to pedestrian-oriented cities would seem to owe a lot to Jacobs. But she found the New Urbanists hopelessly suburban, and once said to me, with a rhyming cadence worthy of Muhammad Ali, “They only create what they say they hate.”

What Jane Jacobs really taught wasn’t that every place should look like Greenwich Village, but instead that we should look at places and figure out their essences, that we should try to understand what makes cities work organically and to think of them as natural systems that should be nurtured, not stymied. I think of her less as showing us a physical model for cities that we need to copy and more as providing a model for skepticism.
UNQUOTE

tags: paul_goldberger jjacobs urbanism american_scholar

Say What? | Metropolis Magazine

Interesting piece by Karrie Jacobs on the word urban’s changing meaning(s) …in Austin, Texas.
QUOTE
Up until recently, I hadn’t taken “lifestyle centers” seriously as places or as proto-cities. But on this trip to outermost Austin, my attitude changed. I’m not sure whether it was the perceptual magic worked by Dresher, Benedikt, and Rotondi, who literally turned my point of view around, or the shock of returning to the Aloft late on a sunny Saturday afternoon and encountering Dogtoberfest, a full-scale street fair for dogs with booths selling artisanal biscuits and doggie portraits, and a costume parade. I showed up just as hoards of people were leaving with their tutu-wearing pets. Suddenly, I understood what I was seeing. While The Domain and its ilk are not replacements for real cities, they are genuine urban places. They’re a conscious remix of the twentieth-century mall and the postwar subdivision, for a generation that wants absolutely nothing to do with either.
UNQUOTE

tags: metropolis_magazine karrie_jacobs urbanism austin_tx

Q&A: John Maeda, president, Rhode Island School of Design | SmartPlanet

John Maeda on Twitter.
QUOTE
Q: You’re very active on Twitter. In fact, you’ve said that your new book, Redesigning Leadership, is based on some of the “micro-posts” you’ve Tweeted about leadership and innovation. Why did you decide to start using Twitter?

A: First and foremost, I think of myself as an artist and designer, and I’m also the president of a college. Being the president of a college, your role is to be the authoritative leader. I own that and I embrace that fully, but at the same time, as an artist, I want to express my creativity in some shape or form. I can have a show once a year somewhere in the world and that’s okay, but every day I have to make art somehow, and making art is about taking emotion and making it into something. I found that using Twitter gives me the chance to have a gallery online where I can share different thoughts that I’m forming and thinking and struggling with. Also, I have very little time, so I use little micro-minutes to just summarize something and put it out there.
UNQUOTE

tags: john_maeda risd creativity smartplanet interview

General Discussion – VibrantVictoria.ca Discussion Forum

Portland grows into a capital of conscience

Interesting Jan.2012 op-ed by Jeff Jahn in the Portland Tribune. Jahn is an independent curator and critic.
QUOTE
Since the mid-’90s, artists and designers have emigrated to or stayed in Portland for very specific and often moral reasons. In a nutshell, it is because Portland is the first U.S. city to grow out of the adolescent attitudes of America in the second half of the 20th century. The laundry list: non-car-reliant transportation, green thinking, proximity to nature, a very non-1 percent-centric civic attitude, high-tech savvy and a permissive attitude that was essentially humanistic rather than purely capitalistic.

In other words, the original Occupy Portland started around the mid-’90s by artists and has only gathered steam since. Think of artists as canaries in the coal mine of civilization — it is a tough job, but it’s very important to watch what they do. Artists bring immense cultural cache, even jobs. Ultimately, they redirect our attention, giving us a new aesthetic and conceptual compass. Then they export those ideas in distilled, compact creative endeavors.

No city owns its artists, but a city can choose to (either) support or take its artists for granted.

To be overly simplistic, Portland became a 21st-century leader because it rejected both of the 20th century’s main models: Manhattan’s top-down corporate verticality and LA’s car-driven suburban sprawl. Instead, as a more 19th century-style city of shopkeepers and artists (defined by our citizens more than institutions), we should own the title and take care to not become complacent.
UNQUOTE

tags: portland jeff_jahn artculture socialcritique

Human Transit: human transit (the book): introduction

Introduction to Jarrett Walker’s book, Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking About Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives. Excellent points. Eg.:
QUOTE
Transit debates also suffer from the fact that today, in most of our cities, most of our decision makers are motorists. No matter how much you support transit, driving a car every day can shape your thinking in powerful subconscious ways. For example, in most debates about proposed rapid transit lines, the speed of the proposed service gets more political attention than how frequently it runs, even though frequency, which determines waiting time, often matters more than vehicle speed in determining the total time a transit trip will require. Your commuter train system will advertise that it can whisk you into the city in thirty-nine minutes, but if the train comes only once every two hours and you’ve just missed one, your travel time will be two hours and thirty-nine minutes, so it may be faster to drive or even walk.
UNQUOTE

tags: human_transit jarrett_walker transportation planning portland

TEDxVictoria – Garth Lenz: Provincial Distance in a Tar Nation – YouTube

I love this presentation by Garth Lenz – and (sorry, but it has to be said) I hate Canada very much for condoning the tarsands. Canada gets away with pretending to be better than the US, but the tarsands show otherwise.
QUOTE
A visual journey through the Alberta Tar Sands and a discussion of the the local regional and global impacts and how we can respond.

For almost twenty years, Garth’s photography of threatened wilderness regions, devastation, and the impacts on indigenous peoples, has appeared in the world’s leading publications. His recent images from the boreal region of Canada have helped lead to significant victories and large new protected areas in the Northwest Territories, Quebec, and Ontario. Garth’s major touring exhibit on the Tar Sands premiered on Los Angeles in 2011 and recently appeared in New York. Garth is a Fellow of the International League Of Conservation Photographers

Filmed at TEDxVictoria on November 19 2011
UNQUOTE

tags: tarsands oil_sands boreal_forests canada garth_lenz tedx victoria video environment

Jobless artist lives in house literally made of money | SmartPlanet

Pretty amazing, when you think about it: a house built from shredded decommissioned European currencies, a protest against the Euro being foisted on Ireland…
QUOTE
A cheap flood of credit at the introduction of the single currency caused an extensive property bubble in the early 2000s. However, following its rapid decline, the euro has left Ireland amassed with derelict and empty building, and faced with a deep recession which forced it to accept a humiliating EU bailout last year.
UNQUOTE

tags: ireland euro currency art architecture smartplanet

Architect Brad Cloepfil: On architecture, design in Portland, and Allied Works’ first creative phase | OregonLive.com

Great interview with Brad Cloepfil. On Portland:
QUOTE
I don’t know why Nike for instance doesn’t spawn innovation in architecture. Ziba has played its role — it hired John (Holmes, a principal at Holst). It’s really about how a company sees themselves.

What I like is that people are so critical. That’s the thing. Everyone is so hard on the Pearl. It’s because we care so deeply. We want more and want the best.

Another way of looking at it is that the people who do those kinds of buildings and residences are people who care about culture deeply. And they care that their company participates in that level of dialogue. That’s rare. Here or anywhere else.

Q: How would you tell the next mayor of Portland how to improve design in this city?

A: (…)
…a mayor and government has to feel the cultural expression of their city is important. And I just don’t think we have that here. It would be wonderful.
UNQUOTE

tags: brad_cloepfil architecture portland

At Lincoln House: Teardowns and the value of land

Lincoln Institute comments on teardowns:
QUOTE
…teardowns in established neighborhoods with good density can be a green concept — better than building something new in a cornfield miles away, smart growth advocates would argue. Teardowns take advantage of existing urban infrastructure. And while embodied energy is lost, demolition materials can be recycled; if the new building is energy efficient, so much the greener. Municipalities tend to like the increased property tax revenues from more robust assessments.
UNQUOTE

tags: lincoln_institute teardowns infill built_environment

GPS, Smartphones, and the Dumbing Down of Personal Navigation – Technology – The Atlantic Cities

Right on.
QUOTE
A few days ago, I was walking home with my 9-year-old son when I came upon a young woman standing in the middle of Cadman Plaza Park in Brooklyn, a block-wide island of green in the city’s downtown. She was staring fixedly at her smartphone, which she held up in front of her as if using it to sense a magnetic field, or perhaps radioactive contamination.

As I passed, she turned to look at me suddenly, her face drawn and anxious. “Excuse me,” she said. “Can you tell me which way to the Brooklyn Bridge?”

I turned around and pointed to the bridge entrance, which was in plain sight about 20 yards from where we were standing. “Thank you so much!” she said. “I just couldn’t figure it out with my GPS!”

“Wow,” said my kid as we continued on. “That’s really sad.”
UNQUOTE

tags: city_smarts urban_design gps navigation atlantic_cities

Urban Farming :: Welcome To Urban Farming!

Via Taja Sevelle, so inspiring:
QUOTE
Urban Farming began in 2005 with 3 gardens and a pamphlet. We now have planted and facilitated over 43,000 community, residential and partner gardens around the world.
UNQUOTE
Victory Gardens ftw.

tags: victory_gardens urban_farming taja_sevelle gardening

data and thoughts on the stakes of JSTOR, copyright, and open access // mattBernius.com

Bang-on analysis and critique of JSTOR:
QUOTE
In theory, the point of publishing is to disseminate research for the development of knowledge. Further, many of those 3 million articles were built on data collected through publicly funded research. I have a hard time seeing how we can say the public is getting a solid return on its research investment when it still doesn’t have open access to research it helped funded over fifty-​years ago.
UNQUOTE

tags: matt_bernius jstor opendata access

One eBook Platform to Rule Them All – Technology Review

This could get interesting!
QUOTE
Right now Adobe and WoodWing are charging magazine publishers something like six figures just for a system that will transform their magazines into apps that can be sold through Apple. And magazines are basically just enhanced ebooks. Meanwhile, companies like OnSwipe are trying to become the de-facto system for publishing content to tablets—but only on the web. Companies like Arcade Sunshine, whom I’ve written about before, are also limited to Apple’s App store.

The Atavist Platform, meanwhile, promises to do all of that, and then maybe turn its competitors’ bones into bread when it’s done.
UNQUOTE

tags: atavist e-books platforms publishing mit_techreview

NASA video shows global warming is real | SmartPlanet

Very effective video, and sobering commentary.
QUOTE
And if you’re wondering about the link between CO2 and global warming, here’s what the data from NASA shows:

The carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere was about 285 parts per million in 1880, when the GISS global temperature record begins.
By 1960, the average concentration had risen to about 315 parts per million.
Today it exceeds 390 parts per million and continues to rise at an accelerating pace.

While scientists don’t expect temperatures to rise consistently year after year, they do expect those figures to continue climbing over decades with extreme temperatures predicted in the next two to three years due to increased solar activity and the effects of El Nino on the tropical Pacific region.
UNQUOTE

tags: climate_change nasa video smartplanet global_warming

Rethinking the row home | SmartPlanet

Chad and Courtney Ludeman build LEED Platinum homes for ~$300K sales price. This is great, but consider building 3-BDR units so that people don’t move out when they’re expecting a second child?
QUOTE
2012 holds much promise for Postgreen Homes. Despite suboptimal economic conditions, the company plans to construct 16 row houses, two condos and a retail space in a completely new area: South Philadelphia. Plus, Postgreen will try its hand at its first rental project and a six-unit co-housing building.
UNQUOTE

tags: ludeman philadelphia leed green_buildings urban_development infill