justforview

This is an interesting strategy being tested in Philly to slow drivers. The 2d painted surface appears to be 3d to oncoming drivers causing them to slow down.

Seems a bit dangerous, but oddly similar to some street artist work. I’ll bet the city gets some calls because of this.

Original article

I don’t mean to pick on Lavomatic, or the other merchants in the Gateway Quarter. Honestly, I think that these places are great and are a crucial part of what is needed for OTR to be a healthy neighborhood. But, as some know, this blog started with a post about the Gateway Quarter as an example of place branding. I thought it would be fun to revisit some of these ideas four months later in the context of an article written about Lavomatic.

More interesting to me than the specifics of this instance are the perceptions and portrayals of transitioning urban neighborhoods in general. The article is primarily about the food and is written by a food critic, so the comments should be understood in that context. I am not trying to devalue the point of the article because it is well written and does exactly what it is supposed to. This is interesting to me because of its relationship to place branding. It is not an expert urbanist’s perception of the neighborhood, but has some implications for thinking about the Gateway Quarter as a place.

The article starts by commenting that “It’s a big scary world out there. So it’s good to find a place that creates its own cozy corner of it, a restaurant with a well-developed sense of where exactly it is.”

I’m not sure how this was intended, but in the context of what follows and the general perception of its location I read a big scary neighborhood. Also, I’m interested to know how this “well-developed sense of where exactly it is” relates to this big scary world.

The article then mentions that “Lavomatic is a cornerstone of the neighborhood that’s evolving as the Gateway Quarter on the blocks of Vine Street north of Central Parkway.” Cornerstone might be an overstatement, but it is important

What my initial post eventually alluded to, is that the development of the Gateway Quarter in being conflated with OTR. Effectively, psychologically isolating an area from the perceptions of its surroundings neighborhood and carving a safe space in the contested territory that is OTR. This has some value, but my opinion is that it can also be detrimental to building a tolerant community. My concern is still that this might be divisive and exclusive.

The introduction concludes by describing Lavomatic.

“In a former laundry (lavomatic, in French) it has a homey theme evoking freshly washed clothes and domesticity. Close to the Art Academy, Know Theatre and Ensemble Theatre, it also feels arty and urban-cool. It’s a neighborhood restaurant worth traveling to.”

“Evoking freshly washed clothes and domesticity” is awesome and I’ll let the “arty urban-cool” go because its exactly what my mother would say. But a “neighborhood restaurant worth traveling to” made me think for a minute. And I still feel a bit puzzled. Is it a neighborhood restaurant that those who live here can enjoy or a place that requires outsiders to travel?

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.

Civitas, a roman term, described the status of citizenship in the Roman empire as well as a type of semi-autonomous settlement made up of cives. Doug Kelbaugh, in comparing different paradigms of urbanism (New Urbanism, Everyday Urbanism & Post Urbanism), focuses on this term in an article that relates the differnt types of urbanism to the public realm (PDF). While it is relatively academic there are a number of interesting insights throughout the article.

The final section that binds the three urbanisms together, subtitled Civitas: the Public Realm, talks at length about how “Without community, without civitas, we are all doomed to private worlds that are more selfish and loveless than they need to be.”

The following ideas fly counter to much of the conventional thinking in American cities, but maybe radical reconfiguration of values is just what is needed as, like rest of the world, we become increasingly urban.

Kelbaugh cites Andrés Duany’s observation that there is “a widespread tendency within architectural avant-garde to equate order with repression and, by extension, disorder with democracy”

I’m guilty of this so it caught my attention. He goes on to say that

“the modern conception of democracy, as set out by western philosophers such as John Locke, has been about civic responsibility as well as personal rights and freedoms. Only this century in America have individual freedom and license trumped civic responsibility and duty. Private rights now overwhelm group rights, at great cost to community. “

There is some explanation o ideas that lead into a more detailed discussion about community that deals with the arguments and counter arguments about why this is, but generally it boils down to the dichotomy between people needing to be part of a larger social system and needing to express themselves as individuals. This requires a balance of tolerance and respect.

This, as he admits, “is easier said than done, as America has found after centuries of slavery and immigration. It is becoming an even bigger challenge as more and more American grow up without first hand experience and skills in city living.”

Community must deal with the full range of human nature, including its own dark side. If it projects its own disfunction and pathologies onto an outside enemy or stigmatized minority, it has not fully faced itself and is in collective denial. More typically, the unity in community is bought at the price of identifying enemies, who are sure to return the favor.

Enemies will get even some day, as the chain reaction of intolerance and injustice is perpetuated. If this dialectic is an inevitable part of the human condition, the question arises as to what is the most hospitiable scale for social harmony and political unity and the least hospitable scale for hatred and enmity.

Americans have been quick to exchange the more raw and uncomfortable sidewalk life of the inner city for the easy and banal TV life of the suburban family room. We have been to quick to give up the public life that American cities have slowly mustered in spite of a long legacy of Jeffersonian rural yeomanry and anti urbanism. It has been our good fortune that immigrants from countires with strong public realms have imported urban and ethnic values for which we are much the richer.

The property rights movement is, in my opinion, one of the greatest threats to civitas. The conflict between private property rights and community rights (including intellectual property rights) could shake this country to its constitutional roots inthe next decade. Property rightist must come to grips with the fact that rights attached to land ownership are part of a social contract and not inalienable, absolute, natural, or God-given.

… property rights are stronger in the U.S.A. than in any other country on earth. They have long played a central role in shaping American urbanism or, more accurately, in keeping government from shaping it. We have increasingly fragmented private development within a public realm that is often little more than leftover space. In other counties, the public sector takes a stronger planning and regulatory role in urban development, and private property rights are more frequently trumped by the public good.

Today on Fountain Square there was a lot of random things happening. On one side there was a Guitar Hero (video game) booth where I witnessed an older woman and a young boy battling it out. There was also a large inflatable Oscar Meyar hot dog that couldn’t muster up the strength to fully inflate. The weirdest thing was a series of putt-putt greens scattered throughout the tables. I didn’t see any one playing on them and am not sure why they were there, but alas. Finally, something in the US Bank building seemed to be on fire. Smoke was pouring out of the street vents and there was four or five fire trucks. But everyone seemed relatively calm about it all.

Downtown Enhanced Marketing Announcement

Please join us for the announcement of the Downtown Cincinnati Enhanced Marketing Campaign
Friday, June 20 - 10:00 to 11:00 a.m.
The Aronoff Center for the Arts – Loge Lobby

Please join Downtown Cincinnati Incorporated and Focus/FGW/Deskey for a presentation of the Enhanced Marketing Campaign – to promote downtown Cincinnati to a broader market and connect with “Urban Mindset” people.

Wilkymacky Way

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 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.