Jane Jacobs on “differences, not duplications”
September 1, 2008 at 9:52 am | In cities, victoria | No CommentsRereading Jane Jacobs’s classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and came across the following on p.169, in the chapter on “The Uses of City Neighborhoods”:
Almost nobody travels willingly from sameness to sameness and repetition to repetition, even if the physical effort required is trivial.
Differences, not duplications, make for cross-use and hence for a person’s identification with an area greater than his immediate street network. Monotony is the enemy of cross-use and hence of functional unity. As for Turf, planned or unplanned, nobody outside the Turf can possibly feel a natural identity of interest with it or with what it contains.
I find Jacobs’s insights so compelling and rich because they apply not just to cities, but to life-systems. What she has to say about “differences, not duplications” applies equally well to all the places of human use: cities, but also natural and digital/virtual places, and user interfaces of every kind.
She goes on to add the following, pp.169-170:
Centers of use grow up in lively, diverse districts, just as centers of use occur on a smaller scale in parks, and such centers count especially in district identification if they contain also a landmark that comes to stand for the place symbolically and, in a way, for the district. But centers cannot carry the load of district identification by themselves; differing commercial and cultural facilities, and different-looking scenes, must crop up all through. Within this fabric, physical barriers, such as huge traffic arteries, too large parks, big institutional groupings, are functionally destructive because they block cross-use.
This is something to think about with regard to Victoria’s Tourism precinct: the district defined by two giant architectural landmarks, built at the end of the 19th / beginning of the 20th century by Francis Rattenbury, The Legislature and The Empress.
I never before thought about how these structures (which can arguably be called “big institutional groupings”) are not just “district defining” (and used by NIMBYs who live near the district as a reason to thwart all other adjacent development), but are also in a very real sense “functionally destructive because they block cross-use.” Thinking about them in those terms helps explain the curious sense of artifice and sterility that sometimes pervades this district.
Now that the Empress (in the 1980s?) blocked off the grand front door — designed by Rattenbury as a front door to the Inner Harbour, a door symmetrically centred on the building and the Causeway — effectively killing the lobby, and instead moved the entrance off-center, for use by guests only (i.e., literally no more cross-use of the building by the ordinary people), the potential for destructiveness to the district is even bigger.
Not that the Empress should be reduced, no. What should happen is for life to grow up around and beside it, and that includes additional new development unrelated to the hotel, but still in the district.
Click here for a closeup image of the hotel’s original main wing, which shows at centre the former grand lobby entrance (now blocked off, although the barriers aren’t visible in the photo). Click here for an image where you can see the new entrance, housed in the comparatively tiny, conservatory-style off-centre pavilion, toward the left side of the hotel.
This new pavilion entrance was added so that the original main lobby entrance, which attracted into the lobby hundreds of gawkers, both tourist and local, could be blocked off and the hotel could strengthen control over who could enter and therefore use the premises. With this measure, the hotel protected itself, but cross-use by non-specialized users (i.e., users other than guests) was killed off, too.
That also means that you won’t find the Jane Jacobses of today, casually using this space to have a drink and conversation (we won’t mention the cigarette, now banned everywhere in Victoria)…
Diigo Bookmarks 08/30/2008 (a.m.)
August 29, 2008 at 5:31 pm | In Uncategorized | No Comments-
“Image Disembodiment?”, by Bernard Languillier
Found via …? Kazys Varnelis?, Geoff at BLDGBLOG? (can’t place it, but at some smart blog I read), an essay by Bernard Languillier about how the digital process is changing our relationship with printed images. It’s a to-read-later piece for me right now - haven’t had time to read it thoughtfully yet, but it promises some compelling insights (something a bit better than Emily Gould’s recent piece in MIT’s Technology Review, “It’s not a revolution if nobody loses,” which ostensibly bases itself on Walter Benjamin’s pivotal essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”).
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Intro page from the Royal Society for the Preservation of Birds (RSPB) to a report by a Dr. William Bird (ha!) called “Natural Thinking,” available as a PDF download. Bird’s report is an “investigating [of] the links between the natural environment, biodiversity and mental health.”
This could be a useful reference for urbanist writing, insofar as it underscores the importance of amenities as a necessary complement to density. You don’t want to have density while simultaneously “automating” everything (no more walking, driving only, no interaction with nature, etc.). Even small “hot spots” of natural interaction will work, or more walking with actual natural elements at hand.
Diigo Bookmarks 08/29/2008 (a.m.)
August 28, 2008 at 5:31 pm | In Uncategorized | No Comments-
reportonbusiness.com: Harper defends cuts to arts programs - Annotated
G&M article on recent announcement of cuts in arts funding, which co-incided with the Conference Board of Canada’s report on the significance of the arts to Canada’s economy.
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Valuing Culture: Measuring and Understanding Canada’s Creative Economy - Annotated
The Conference Board of Canada’s July 2008 report on the value of culture to the Canadian economy.
Diigo Bookmarks 08/12/2008 (p.m.)
August 12, 2008 at 5:30 am | In Uncategorized | No Comments-
Voices From the Suburban Blogosphere, by Bob Tedeschi - NYTimes.com
Article that chronicles the role of blogging in the creation of new hyper local / local news eco-systems.
QUOTE:
For readers, the blogs are providing news in ways unseen in traditional local news media.
(…)
Like other journalists who run news sites, Paul Bass, New Haven Independent’s editor, does not consider himself a blogger.“We’re a news site,” Mr. Bass said.
To underscore the difference, Mr. Bass said the site has three full-time reporters and one part-time reporter, all paid for by $185,000 in grants, corporate sponsorships and private donations. The site’s coverage, he added, helped remove a city budget director, change city towing policies and shame board of education members into better attendance, after it publicized the fact that the board’s truancy dwarfed that of city students.
“A lot of neighborhood boards weren’t covered until we came around, so we’re just showing up,” Mr. Bass said. “That’s the promise of hyperlocal journalism, as opposed to blogging.”
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Hanif Kureishi profile in NYTimes: “My Beautiful London”
August 9, 2008 at 4:54 pm | In ideas | No CommentsI found this observation really compelling:
France, as well as the rest of Europe, is “going through a huge crisis about identity, race, religion,” Kureishi went on to say. “Their identities have been shattered by immigration. That’s the price you pay. If you want a modern economy, you have hundreds of thousands of workers around your country, you give up . . . a certain part of your identity. That’s the deal.” Then, he pointed out, you have to remake the society, and “it’s that remaking that Europe is experiencing at the moment. But it’s really tricky to have your identity shattered and remade.”
It’s from a profile of Hanif Kureishi, by Rachel Donadio in the Aug.8 New York Times, My Beautiful London. What I like about his remark is that he manages to put the economic underpinnings right into the middle of the issue, exactly where they belong: "If you want a modern economy, you have hundreds of thousands of workers around your country, you give up . . . a certain part of your identity. That’s the deal.”
Diigo Bookmarks 08/09/2008 (p.m.)
August 9, 2008 at 5:30 am | In cities, comments, links | No Comments-
Michael Dudley, who only the other day came out with a brilliant analysis of The Dark Knight, now looks at Mama Mia! across a range of feminist texts as well as some urbanist readings. Fascinating stuff, a must-read…
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The end of suburban sprawl - Annotated
Well, well …an opinion piece in the Ottawa Citizen (republished across the CanWest newspaper empire, therefore also in Victoria’s Times-Colonist), unsigned, that lays out the tenets of anti-sprawl and pro-urbanist thinking succinctly and favorably. (Except that while the title calls it “suburban sprawl,” the author calls it “urban sprawl” in the first paragraph. Odd.)
Of interest for a Canadian perspective is that the article hints at the realities of infrastructure funding in Canada.
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You can’t eat Whuffie (but it’s getting harder to eat without it) | ::HorsePigCow:: marketing uncommon - Annotated
Tara Hunt wrote an interesting post on “whuffie” and what it means today. She also then broached the minefield of how (if) the whuffie factor gets monetized. The comments board is fascinating, and I also added my 2cents (actually, more like a $1.25 since I inflated those 2 cents into two too-long comments…).
I’m pretty sure my remarks are way too theoretical and esoteric, but they helped me make some connections and sort out a few things, so even if they’re useless to others, I benefited. Not sure if that has anything to do with whuffie, but there you go…
Diigo Bookmarks 08/09/2008 (a.m.)
August 8, 2008 at 5:32 pm | In cities, links | No Comments-
PDF: The Entrepreneurial Advantage of World Cities
31-page PDF (still to read), “The Entrepreneurial Advantage of World Cities,” subtitled “Evidence from Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Data.”
From the abstract:
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Recent discussions in the Economic Geography literature increasingly focus on creative cities and the importance of creativity for achieving economic growth. Considering the increased attention on urban areas it is not surprising that the regional dimension of entrepreneurship is a subject of great interest. We set out a framework encompassing the individual process between entrepreneurial perceptions and entrepreneurial activity and demonstrate how the urban environment can have an impact on this process.
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How Buildings Learn | PSFK - Trends, Ideas & Inspiration
PSFK’s Piers Fawkes writes an entry that provides the links (now available on Google Video) to the BBC series, “How Buildings Learn,” by Stewart Brand. In addition to the six parts (each ~30 min. long), Fawkes includes some choice quotes.
For those who know and appreciated Stewart Brand’s book, this series is a great addition.
Diigo Bookmarks 08/07/2008 (a.m.)
August 6, 2008 at 5:33 pm | In links | No Comments-
Be Nice to the ‘Creative Class’! :: Views :: thetyee.ca
Why does one too often get the impression that publications like The Tyee are fighting a rear-guard and even anachronistic battle? That somehow, somewhere different patterns are emerging, which its journalists just don’t see, preferring instead the familiar world of what they knew “back in the day”?
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Lobdell’s OC: 42 things I know
William Lobdell’s entry about leavng the Los Angeles Times after 18 years of working there, and his list of 42 things he knows re the newspaper industry (and its moribund state).
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What’s really killing newspapers: They’re no longer the best providers of social currency. - By Jack Shafer - Slate Magazine - Annotated
Shafer’s subtitle says it all, “[Newspapers are] no longer the best providers of social currency.” What’s “social currency”? It’s “the information we acquire and then trade—or give away—to start, maintain, and nurture relationships with our fellow humans.”
In other words, it’s no longer relevant to your interaction with friends and co-workers and other citizens whether or not you’ve all read the same newspaper that morning. There is other social currency that’s more valuable, more interesting, more useful — as currency.
In that sense, the “news” is secondary to “currency” / “value.” It seems that newspapers need to figure out — if they can, if it’s possible — how to leverage currency, not news.
Diigo Bookmarks 08/05/2008 (p.m.)
August 5, 2008 at 5:30 am | In cities, copywrong, creativity, innovation, links | No Comments-
Technology Review: 3-D Printing for the Masses
From p.2 of this article:
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“Ultimately, I think people will have these [3-D rapid prototyping] printers at home,” says Lipson. The idea is that people will pay a nominal amount for blueprints and then download them, in much the same way that music is shared over the Internet now, he says.
UNQUOTEExciting, especially in relation to Larry Lessig’s REMIX ideas — see his TED presentation, 11/07, where he talks about culture getting the creative remix treatment. Having RPT technology enter the home-use market means manufacturing will get that same treatment. Interesting days ahead…
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Pattern Recognition: Latest Trends (July 08) | PSFK - Trends, Ideas & Inspiration
PSFK’s round-up of trends (recent, 2008). Top of the heap in the list: lists, aka data (how to sort, how to represent, how to use); next, urbanism (varieties).
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San Francisco & Entrepeneurialism | Marktd
I watched this video a couple of days ago (via PSFK’s Twitter feed), and loved the emphases brought to light by the interviews.
- Entrepreneurs liked the density of the city — the ability to encounter colleagues by chance, run into folks, rub shoulders;
- Some talked about liking the “small” aspects of San Francisco: that there isn’t *so* much going on to distract one’s attention from the tasks (work) at handI thought that latter point was kind of intriguing, something to remember when someone once again goes off on how it’s such a bad thing that *this* isn’t as happening a place as NYC or Toronto.
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