justforview

Check out this video of more DIY urban planning. This comes from streetblog’s Streetfilms and covers Depave.org’s efforts.

What struck me is the woman half way through who talks about why she moved to Portland. This is the power of a city promoting and building DIY planning opportunities.

How do you see this? Reverse graffiti is made by drawing into the dirt and grime found in everyday spaces. Think “wash me”, but way more advanced. The images and video below are some beautiful examples by Moose from England, who is actually working largely for ad agencies, and Alexander Orion, working in Brazil.

but that is the first sign of a problem.

I think that the justifications for revitalization are often placed on saving buildings and ignoring what happens to people, or at least not thinking about how it impacts different people differently. This article about does a good job at exposing the psychological impacts and not just the realities of displacement.

While welcoming safer, cleaner streets, longtime residents have found themselves juggling conflicting emotions. And those who enjoyed a measure of stability in the old Harlem now long for the past — not necessarily because it was better but because it was what they knew

The bodegas are gone. There’s large delis now. What had been two for $1 is now one for $3. My neighbor is a beer drinker, and he drinks inexpensive beer, Old English or Colt 45 or Coors — you can’t even buy that in the stores. The stores have imported beers from Germany. The foods being sold — feta cheese instead of sharp Cheddar cheese. That’s a whole other world.”

No one — almost no one — is wishing for a return of row upon row of boarded-up buildings or the summer mornings when lifeless bodies turned up in vestibules,

Those who stayed during the worst years say they developed an even stronger psychological attachment to Harlem, its flaws not unlike their own. The perceived diminution of that neighborhood, caused in part by an influx of middle class people of all races, can feel like a loss of self, they say.

Change is good, and progress is inevitable,” she said. “But the feeling is, ‘What are we going to do? Where are we going to go?’”

Social service organizations in the neighborhood said that they have noted an uptick in clients complaining about insomnia and hypertension related to fears about losing their homes, even when there is no indication that they will be evicted.

To be sure, these emotions can be expressed in terms that sound extreme. An example came after street shootings wounded eight young people in the neighborhood on Memorial Day.

Earlier this year, the average price for new condominium apartments in Harlem hit $900,000, although average household income remains less than $25,000.

The Rev. Dr. Charles A. Curtis, senior pastor of Mount Olivet Baptist Church, one of Harlem’s oldest black churches, said that people feel powerless when they see change that they believe is not intended to benefit them.

“There are great developments going on,” said Pastor Curtis. “You can see things in your sight, but they’re just out of reach.”

Yesterday I posted about Indy’s Cultural Trail and almost wrote a thought that I have been saying for a while. That is that in the next five years Indy will be the Portland of the midwest. But I am not particularly fond of such comparisons. Today I came across this article about Indy becoming the Las Vegas of the East.

The Next American City post is about the development of a casino in Indy and how it is a quick fix to a long range problem. I know Cincinnati and, Ohio in general, is debating the whole casino issue at the moment so I thought it would be worthwhile to point out the article and how the Indiana is developing its casino game.

It should also be pointed out that the site is actually south 23 miles south of the city. While there are regional implications it is likely more beneficial/ harmful to the state and county where it is located. I doubt that it will take away from the other development that of the city because it is far enough removed, physically and socially that it will attract a different demographic than that which would find themselves attracted to what the city offers.

Yesterday Indianapolis celebrated the completion of the first phase of the Cultural Trail. There is more to be done, but the completion of this stage is noteworthy for a number of reasons. First, there is no other project like it, probably anywhere but certainly not in the region of similar sized cities. Secondly, in the context of current social and economic trends it signifies the type of efforts that can be accomplished. Related to that point, it shows that cities like Indianapolis can be forward thinking, and innovative and not just rely on what other cities have done.

The Cultural Trail, when fully completed, will be a “urban bike and pedestrian path that connects neighborhoods, Cultural Districts and entertainment amenities, and serves as the downtown hub for the entire central Indiana greenway system.”

The design of the Cultural Trail reclaims lanes of city streets and dedicates this space to pedestrians and cyclist. This entire greenway system and specifically the cultural trail integrates issues of mobility, health, economic development, physical planning and land-use, social justice, cultural heritage and public art and much more all through the redistribution of public space.

This project is an excellent example of good planning and design, not just in its final product, but also the process, financing and functionality.

These images are from a few weeks back, and center around one intersection, but show a good amount of the various details.

I love maps. I probably fall short of being a cartophile, because there are some serious collectors and scholars on the subject, but maps fascinate me. Not only are maps visually beautiful as artistic and design endeavors, but they encompass many of my other interest as well; geography, cities, their planning, sociology, the list goes on. So I was generally excited about the current show at the CAC, Uncoordinated: Mapping Cartography in Contemporary Art.

Until, yesterday I didn’t have time to make it to the exhibit, plus there was the added bonus of free admission to the museum on Mondays as well as a lecture by Denis Wood, author of The Power of Maps, which is required reading for geographers and should be for designers. Reading the description of the exhibit (at the link above) it seemed to sum up all my interest of maps rather succinctly and brought it together with my slant towards cultural criticism. Add the context of a contemporary art institution and my expectations shot sky high. I expected to experience first hand what was offered by another top ten book on my list, You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination.

So I was pretty disappointed when I reached the fourth floor and walked around and saw very little that seemed to represent what the exhibit promotion seemed to be advertising and what I had imagined from the exhibit description and my familiarity with Denis Wood and You Are Here, even though both were in some way associated with the exhibit. Very few of the works did little more than appropriate the formal aspects of maps, which to me cheapens both the realm of contemporary art and map making.

The lecture saved the night for me. It was a very detailed, information packed, thought provoking look at the history of maps in art practice. Each example of Wood’s, beginning with dada and including my personal favorite, the situationist The Naked City , really dealt with the ability of art to appropriating not just the form, but the language of maps. Wood actually did an excellent job explaining the reason why maps and art have so often been married to communicate ideas and information, not just geographic but philosophical and social, in contemporary culture.

For those that missed the lecture, or also found the exhibit a bit short on substance, stay tuned for the re-release of Wood’s book The Power of Maps, which will include a new chapter on map art.

Dan Witz is an amazingly detail oriented street artist who is a master at optical illusion, creating 2D images and placing them in public spaces so that they appear to be 3D. Often, changes in scale or color are the only way to know they aren’t real. But his latest project, Ugly New Buildings, really plays up on the illusionary factor.

There are many more at his site as well as a statement about the project and its title.

I came across this excellent series of videos about Bogotá’s mayor, Peñalosa. The series talks at length about the public spaces of the city and how the mayor has created an extensive system of pedestrian, bicycle and bus transit. The scale and political will is unmatched. Check it out.

UPDATE: And an interview in the NYTimes with Peñalosa

This weekend the NY Times Magazine will issue its annual architecture issue. The one article that has been published online, The New, New City, as the title suggest, is more about cities than buildings. Still, its focus is architects and not planners. This is not unusual, but curious to me. I know Koolhaas and many of the others interviewed in the article are experienced and trained in urban design and presumably have planners on staff. But the difference between designing a building and urban districts seems to be lost all the while referring to the failures of Modernism, specifically Le Corbusier, to create successful urban design.

Referring, almost exclusively, to development in Asia the article has some great insights. Some of the things that caught my interest were related to the struggle to create a new city that resists the tendency of “modernism” to ignore context and create a sense of place without resorting to cliché or creating a theme park, as “postmodern” design often does. Specifically the article mentions efforts in China to understand “how people carve a living space out of seemingly inhospitable environments, hoping to develop an urbanist model more deeply rooted in the spontaneity of everyday life.” This is what cities are to me.
In China it might be extreme, but the same can be said of many places closer to home. This doesn’t imply that life is intolerable or even that it lacks happiness. Quite the contrary. Some of the places that appear to be inhospitable are actually innovative solutions to the “problems” of urban life. Even in the “slums” of South America, or any developing country, there is beauty in the everyday solutions to city life.

We have this in my neighborhood too. But it is easier to associate it with the negative activities that receive more attention and concern. But living together within a community, rather than as an “pioneer” it is easy to see that the ugly, gritty, and unsafe aspects of urban neighborhoods are in fact its essence. For me, and as one person in the article aptly points out, the trick is to “to extract the essence of its character without romanticizing the squalor.

Squalor is probably too intense of a word to describe anything close to home, but it is probably perceived as such. I know we aren’t going to be designing anything at the scale of China or UAE, but even the small scale developments that we see popping up are likely to create what the article refers to as instant cities. At least something that might be in a location that we are familiar with but in a manner and character that is entirely devoid of its context.

Here is another great project from LA. I came across this article in the LA Times that describes Ari Kletzky’s public art project, the Islands of LA National Park. The artist says that the project is intended to “generate discussion to explore use of public space by turning islands into a work of art”.

This is the function that I think all public art should have. It should be generative, not just in terms of discussion, but also action. This project seems really interesting because it is multifaceted. It engages the general public, but also specific groups to think about, discuss and implement ideas in public spaces that otherwise receive no attention.