As readers are undoubtedly beginning to intuit (and those of you who’ve met me already knew the whole time), I feel deeply and strongly about planning and Vancouver. It probably makes me think about planning in a slightly-different, perhaps even saccharine sort of way, because I’m negotiating my way through too many streams and stories-in-progress. I apologized for it for a really long time, but now it’s just what happened to me.
With that in mind, here’s a song that says a lot of things about how I feel about planning. Buildings and Bridges by Duncan Sheik and David Poe (who I saw perform — alas, before this song was written — in that other city I love, Toronto).
Once these trees were saplings; this house was wood and steel; this parking lot was forest; this shopping mall a field. I was young and beautiful; the years they take their toll. Stay on this path for a while, then it will become a road. All the buildings and the bridges, and everywhere you roam — gonna turn to rust, gonna turn to dust. All that’s left is love.
First day of the year of the Dragon. Expect more channeling of my mother (a dragon-lady. No, not in that way).
Lessons from the front lines of social design: Design Observer
In the last decade, much has been written about architecture for the greater good, and it would seem that the field, as a whole, is invested in bringing design to underserved communities. Yet all of this talk — at conferences, in the press, at universities — has focused hardly at all on how to put together a career in social design. I have sought out and pursued a suite of unconventional experiences, all the while finding it difficult to make a living and advance professionally. The careers of those I admire, from Soleri to Mockbee, all seem to end in up in the same place — starting a non-profit of one’s own. Some folks are doing just that. […]
Forinash and Pilloton exemplify the entrepreneurial bent of my generation, trying to find the opportunities buried in the recession. I hope, deeply, that their ventures succeed, but fear they may fall into similar traps — struggling for funding and depending on a workforce of unpaid idealists. My own experience has convinced me that long-term engagement with a place and a community is the best way to effect change, as long as it is approached self-critically and strives for iterative improvement. I am skeptical of prescriptive, outcome-based projects that garner a lot of press and then disappear once the participants drift on to newer, more exciting things. Change is messy, it’s hard, and it doesn’t resolve itself in neat timelines.
Before I set off for Arizona, four years ago, I still thought, in the back of my mind, that my professional destiny lay with a regular architectural firm. Now I’m not so sure. I’ve met people from all over the world and established lasting friendships with folks of all ages, classes and races. I’ve built furniture, buildings, landscapes and futures. I’ve traveled the width of this country, experiencing a broad swath of cultures and climates. I feel I’ve earned some stripes in this emerging field of “social design,” whatever that may be. I’ve debated if my work with these organizations was right, or even good, but, as soon as I abandon that debate, I’ve betrayed this meandering education of mine. I’m not sure what’s next for me, for architecture, for the economy, or for the country, but I do know I’ll be on the ground, pushing forward.
I wonder a lot of the same for my career as a transit planner-technologist-sustainability advocate. The existing categories of institutions all seem to have some chafing points - for the long-term.
This morning, I’m writing down some talking points in preparation for the walking tour I am leading about Broadway for the Canadian Association of Planning Students conference in two weeks. The walking tour is going to touch primarily on the regional implications of the TransLink’s UBC Line Rapid Transit Study and the City of Vancouver’s Central Broadway Planning Program. And it’s a ton of fun because I get to talk about all the stuff I’ve accumulated in my head through thinking about this stuff for the Vancouver Public Space Network.
It’s giving me a chance to sort through a lot of my thoughts on Broadway. One of the neat, breath-taking, completely unintended side effects of that is that I’ve been able to remember what Cambie and Broadway looked like before the Crossroads Building came in — something buried so much in the tangle of details and gradual change, that until now I couldn’t even bring it to mind when I tried. Things like,
there was a mall. it was tacky and pink coloured, and had this weird courtyard-surface parking-mall layout. Fairchild Radio was based there. There was a coffee shop and a clothing store right off the street. A corner of the mall had a noodle shop, where there was seating facing the street. I remember grabbing coffee to take the 99 to UBC (on one of the rare occasions I did, as I probably went to UBC a grand total of 15 times between 2000 and 2009).
my parents bought our first car in Canada, a 1989 red-coloured Taurus, at the Ford dealership that was on the block across the street from the Wendy’s. I kept the balloons branded Stadium Ford given to me by our car salesman in a drawer in my desk for a really long time, because I’ve always been a bit of a hoarder. That was the car my mom drove to temp assignments before she got her job at the School Board. One time, she got stuck during a snow dump leaving work in
AbbotsfordDelta (maybe there was a ditch involved?) and a friend’s parents had to drive me home — all 4 blocks! — from daycare.the car dealership was eventually re-purposed into an outdoor sporting goods store and a Doppler computer parts store. The TV show Sliders filmed there (which I was a massive horrible fangirl for), and the main character worked as a salesman at that store. My brother has a deeply personal story about that store that really set the tone for him and I as siblings for a really long time. (I would later see the actor for that main character walking down the street on Robson in the late-nineties, after my fannishness got really, really embarrassing.)
the design of the Canadian Tire on the block north of the Ford dealership is basically exactly the same as the Canadian Tire at Hastings and MacLean in East Vancouver - surrounded by parking, grey steel-like massing. (Incidentally, I lived next to that one for a little while — and it is, too, right next to a car dealership.)
I will never have stories quite like this for any other place in the world. But everybody’s got stories like this, and we also never stop making new memories and stories. And now I live here and have all sorts of other reactions to the intersection, as a completely different brain-layer than the stuff in this post. I’m glad they are still there.
January 18, 2012 at 04:52AM via http://bit.ly/y8RC3K (via stoweboyd)
Obviously they’ve never dated a sysadmin.
A quote from The Media City by Scott McQuire:
In contrast to the paranoia towards strangers that constitutes somuch of official rhetoric post 9/11, [the art installation] Body Movies celebrates the spontaneous alignments that can make genuine public encounters - in Sennett’s terms - so memorable. These kinds of tactical interventions into u rban space provide a striking comparison to more manufactured ‘media events’, where the media simultaneously uses the lure of spontaneity to attract an audience, but generally occludes the spontaneous by imposing standardized frames in order to minimize the risk of ‘nothing happening’. Rather than adhering to the cybernetic goal of informational speed and transparency, media technology in Body Movies becomes the basis for affective experience capable of sustaining reflexive public interactions. Body Movies takes the openness of relational space as the starting point for developing a dynamic and participatory social space. As Timothy Druckrey argues,
It is an evocation of the kind of social space in which active participation is not a by-product, but the driving force in the creation of dynamic agora in which every position is established in an open system that ruptures hierarchies and dismantles the notion that the public is an undifferentiated mass, the media not the harbinger of a utopian global village, interactivity not the opiate of shoppers.
The quote I would like to draw your attention to in this post is the geekiest, densest, most academic prose anyone could possibly ever choose to quote. In some instances in this very passage, I have to read the sentence twice — and hey! I am more often than not the sort of person who is the one writing ridiculous sentences like this (before someone inevitably points it out and goes, “WTF was that?!?! An 8-line sentence?!?!”).
And yet, I find it absolutely beautiful. The many, many words with which the author, David Bissell, has chosen to describe what he is saying, perfectly convey why the small things matter in a big way. In this case, the small thing is being nice to each other on transit. And the big thing is, that these small things make or break our collective experience of community.
Quote (citations removed for your reading pleasure, it’s already challenging enough; and emphasis mine):
Coexistence; being-with others is an integral aspect of railway travel. Yet dwelling within the transient community that characterises spaces of public transport is arguably something that we need to understand better. Whilst it might be easy to suggest that, since passengers are united in their motivation to travel from A to B, travelling on public transport constitutes a common experience, such an instrumental characterisation obscures the diversity that is shot through the passenger body criss-crossed with multiple expectancy, use of travel time, rationale, thresholds, and so on. As such, aspirations of positive belonging motivated by assumptions of unity, agreement, and common-being are inherently unsatisfactory.
[…] But this invokes the illusion of an individual, reflexive passenger with a capacity for responsibility; to “act autonomously according to conscience”. Yet, as this paper has described, a greater attention to affective modulations and their force that transcend the individual takes the onus of responsibility and primary ethical agency away from individual passengers towards a more collective rendering of responsibility that envelops humans and non-humans within the emergence of affective atmospheres. Here, the sociality of the railway carriage is tangled up as much with the agentive force of music players, signage, paper tickets, and seat backs, as with ‘individual’ bodies. In this respect, the spaces of public transport present an arena for an ethics in process to emerge, rather than hostage to a prescriptive, circumscribed ‘morality’. Such “a caring for belonging” is visible in the light-touch gestures of generosity that flicker between passengers and objects. These events of kindness, which Brennan (2004, page 124) describes as “the refusal to pass on or transmit negative affects and the attempt to prevent the pain they cause to others”, illustrate a collective sense of conviviality, but one that operates through affective registers.
Bissell, D. (2010). Passenger mobilities: affective atmospheres and the sociality of public transport. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28(2), 270-289. doi:10.1068/d3909
The entire paper is frickin’ fantastic, once you can get over the shock of reading many, many fancy words to describe something you’ve already known and felt every time you take a bus or train.
(via Bike Shelf |)
If my building didn’t have a bike room, I would have THIS.
this and other bike storage solutions look real nice and all, but they really tend to not play well with my hybrid with a (straight but angled) drop bar. Here’s to a future with stylish bike accessories that don’t assume you have a road bike frame!
While I am an Apple user, I’m definitely in there with Cory on the need to be able to make sure the policies on our general purpose devices which become our hearing aids and cars have policies that benefit me and not those who might have designs on me. What I am equally nervous about is “austerity for the rest of us” — sustainability via restrictive hardware policy. (Perhaps watching all that Firefly has had an effect on me after all.)
I met Ridley Scott years later, maybe a decade or more after Blade Runner was released. I told him what Neuromancer was made of, and he had basically the same list of ingredients for Blade Runner. One of the most powerful ingredients was French adult comic books and their particular brand of Orientalia—the sort of thing that Heavy Metal magazine began translating in the United States.
But the simplest and most radical thing that Ridley Scott did in Blade Runner was to put urban archaeology in every frame. It hadn’t been obvious to mainstream American science fiction that cities are like compost heaps—just layers and layers of stuff. In cities, the past and the present and the future can all be totally adjacent. In Europe, that’s just life—it’s not science fiction, it’s not fantasy. But in American science fiction, the city in the future was always brand-new, every square inch of it.
INTERVIEWER: Cities seem very important to you.
GIBSON: Cities look to me to be our most characteristic technology. We didn’t really get interesting as a species until we became able to do cities—that’s when it all got really diverse, because you can’t do cities without a substrate of other technologies. There’s a mathematics to it—a city can’t get over a certain size unless you can grow, gather, and store a certain amount of food in the vicinity. Then you can’t get any bigger unless you understand how to do sewage. If you don’t have efficient sewage technology the city gets to a certain size and everybody gets cholera.
