Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2008

FOCUS Magazine articles now up-to-date

Yay me, and Scribd to the rescue…

The remaining three FOCUS Magazine articles are up. They are, in order:

• Overdue: rethinking the library (May 2008) The February to March lockout exposed library board dysfunction. But perhaps it’s about time we thought about a new building, as well.
• Let’s demo co-development (June 2008) The synergistic power of providing physical space for the airing of new ideas helps nurture the type of economic development advocated by Jane Jacobs.
• Why a bowling green makes sense (July 2008) One of the key downtown blocks is being re-envisioned — unfortunately without a unique and quirky landmark.

The April 2008 FOCUS Magazine article is up

Scribd works like a charm — it’s just I who am slow in getting these print articles scanned and then formatted into a single document for uploading!

Without further ado (but a bow to Richard Florida for title inspiration), here’s my April 2008 FOCUS Magazine article, Who’s your heritage?, which argues that even for heritage architecture, buildings need to earn their keep, not just look pretty.

Trying out Scribd.com, and getting my print articles online

Ok, one down — or “up(loaded),” actually — and four to go…

Via the fabulous and easy-to-use Scribd, here’s an online PDF of my March 2008 article, published in FOCUS Magazine, Victorian Fables: Does Victoria have an urban planning blindspot?

I’m going to take another day or two to get the others up, alas.  First I have figure out how merge two separatly scanned pages into one document before uploading to Scribd.

Sometimes the simplest challenges manage to knock me sideways…

Housekeeping (again)

Sleep-deprived but feeling like it’s vacation time, I’m happy to say I finally got my August FOCUS Magazine article finished (it was due some days ago).  Maybe it took forever to write because it deals with BC Provincial Legislation, which is typically written in language that has the effect of a soporific potion. I challenge anyone try sounding sexy/ interesting/ whatever about urban planning when you’re tied up in clauses.

The article describes Bill 27, and after I spent nearly 800 words of my word allotment to explain what Bill 27 entails, I overstepped my word limit to write about what we (in Victoria) might do with it.  One idea?  Use the special Development Permit Area provision to create a Dockside Green version 2.0 in Harris Green.

While I’m off now to attend to mundane housekeeping in my non-virtual (what a silly way of saying “real”) domain, I do have plans this week (finally!) to upload my PDFs of articles (from February or March through July).  That process languished, partly because of upload limits on the Berkman server that hosts my blog.  But I recently discovered Scribd, which seems perfect for what I need.  Another service (as yet unexplored by me) is Issuu.  Might try both.

But first it’s laundry.

Web discipline: instructed skid marks

It’s a day shy of July, and I had hoped that by now there would be a “finish” to some still-open “action items.”  But things are not quite yet falling into place.  It’s not entirely my “fault,” but I confess that I’m skidding into inefficiency myself.

At the same time, I’m reluctant to beat myself up in public (on this blog), so I won’t try, just now, to analyze why I have come to feel like such a drudge.

On a different note (but also, curiously, part and parcel of what contributes to my present discombobulation), here are a couple of items — trails, if you will — that I came across online and that I’ve scattered randoms thoughts into.

First, last night I read David Weinberger’s Government by these people, a brief pointer to an article by Matthew Burton.  Burton’s piece (Why I Help “The Man”, and Why You Should Too) inspired me to leave a long-ish comment on David’s blog.  It’s about government, especially local government.

But what was then more intriguing from my perspective was that I came across an article by the Toronto Star’s Christopher Hume this morning, For fire trucks, bigger isn’t better, which I subsequently twittered (”Can’t you just see the burning babies already?”) and commented on in my Friendfeed:

The job of service providers (such as firefighters), says Hume, “is to serve Toronto, not alter the very fabric of the city to serve your needs.” The key clause is “not alter the very fabric of the city to serve your needs.”

That’s the key in the relationship between infrastructure (including services) and urban fabric (historical & living thing built up over time): too often, the service gets an “improvement” that destroys what was built over time — as though time, during which the embodied energy of past users accrued, doesn’t matter (is immaterial).

It’s not immaterial: in cities you can see time as matter.

Infrastructure as “embodied” money, cities as embodied time.

To see embodied money in totally new infrastructure, to the point of seeing capitalism’s astral body, go to Las Vegas (which provides a fabulous experience). (Comment to self: Q: why am I making blog/ book/ article notes to myself on Friendfeed? A: Because it’s there?…)

That comment in turn somehow connected with what I had written on David’s Hyperorg blog, as well as with something I’ve been thinking about ever since my first visit to Las Vegas last October.  The thought (then) was that Las Vegas makes capitalism’s astral body visible.  Somehow, in the triangulation between (1) Burton/my comment on Hyperorg and (2) Hume/my comment on Friendfeed and (3) my remnant impression of Vegas, a more firmly defined thought clicked into place.

I’m just a bit depressed by how distractedly it clicks, though.  I’m also worried that the distributed nature of its clicking will mean that it stays dispersed instead of being pulled into a reasoned, written article.

And so we (I?) am back to where I started at the outset of this blogpost: the nature of skidding into inefficiency, as embodied by my undisciplined ways.

Writer’s block: coming or going?

I’ve managed to avoid blog posts that report on my own navel-gazing for a long time, but right now I’m ready to cave in and just write about belly-button lint.

In a nutshell: I feel stuck.

Call it writer’s block, call it cumulative frustration from constant interruption, call it an inability to visualize clearly… I don’t know.

Oh, let’s call it electrical gremlins, eh? I’ve written before about how there’s something weird about my Pentrelew house, how it’s sited, its naughty L-shape (missing corner!) — and how all things electrical inexplicably fritz up, that appliances go on and off mysteriously, seemingly with autonomy. (Naturally I can’t find the entry anymore …pixels seem equally afflicted.) Whenever you take two steps forward on Pentrelew, you’re obliged within moments to take one step back, too. “Pentrelew,” incidentally, is the name of the street I live on. I’m told it’s some sort of old Cornish word that means “land which slopes both ways.”

Uh-huh.

The street was named for the now-demolished estate of the Crease family. I guess they felt that with a name like “crease,” they could afford to live on a sloping piece of ground where you don’t know if you’re coming or going, and so called their estate “Pentrelew.” The acreage their property sat on is criss-crossed by underground streams (I once hired the dowser who re-found neighbouring Fernwood’s public well, to map the underground streams in my postage-stamp backyard), and if one wanted to indulge in magical thinking (and let’s face it, who doesn’t when the moon is at a certain phase?), one could argue that there’s something fundamentally confused about the feng shui here.

Pen-tre-lew: going in opposite directions at the same time.

I have blog posts, plus project notes, plus correspondence, plus another article deadline up the proverbial yin-yang …and can’t write them out.

Oh, and about those gremlins? They’ve invaded my online programs, I think. Diigo bookmarks aren’t showing up as blog posts, even though they’re supposed to, which contributes to the bereft look of these pages of late. There are a couple of good ones, though. See my Diigo page here.

So that’s my navel-gazing complaining boo-hoo-hoo post — and I promise I won’t do it again …for a while, anyway.

A case of loose cannon remorse

Well, that’s it: I will in future refrain from using a feature called “sound off,” which is appended to some online articles in our local paper (The Times-Colonist, part of the Asper media conglomerate). The “sound off” acts as a kind of comments board, but it doesn’t seem to allow for any sort of formatting, previewing, or immediacy. Unlike Crosscut, which allows readers to comment instantly, a submitted “sound off” is held for hours — sometimes days, it seems — before an editor approves it. This means that you can’t really follow a conversation, because everything is so slowed down and filtered.

The other issue is that, should you criticize (in however a politic — or in my case: impolitic) fashion some flaw in the article, the article might be edited to fix that flaw, but your comment stays — which might magnify an apparent irrationality on the part of the commenter.

I submitted a most impolitic sound off last Saturday evening. It was already fairly late in the day when I read the article, Giant canoe will hang over Bastion Square, by Carolyn Heiman (a very good reporter), about a public art piece that apparently was just approved by …”the city,” although it beats me what the process was by which (and by whom) the decision was made.

Aside from that, Heiman’s article mentioned a well-known city councilor, yet didn’t introduce her as such, and simply quoted her (…’We just announce the winner in consideration of the privacy of the other artists, [sic] said XYZ.), seemingly out of the blue.

I bet the New York Times, when quoting a well-known city politician (let’s say the mayor?), would do it like this: “Blah, blah blah,” said Mayor Bloomberg. At least then you know, ah, he’s the mayor: you’re informed as to who (or what) he is. If only his last name is mentioned, and the reader doesn’t have the entire council and mayor roster of names at his or her mental fingertips, the reader might be left in the dark. But if the reader is literate enough to read the paper, he or she will know what a mayor or a councilor is. The rest is deduction, of a relatively easy sort.

I’m no Lynn Truss, but I have certain issues that really push my buttons, and one of them is clarity in newspaper articles. I know Heiman is a good reporter, but I also suspect that there are many sloppy editors who get careless when they cut the reporters’ submitted texts to fit the column space available. I’d bet that the article originally did identify the speaker as a city councilor, but that this was edited out (for space reasons?). So I first commented on that, impolitically because I charged the editors with not doing their job.

(As an aside: nothing drives me up the wall faster than the colloquial use of the “is” contraction to replace “has,” as in “It’s been a while since he attended.” It is been a while…? What does that mean? It seems that newspapers are constantly bleating about the evil bloggers diluting standards, yet they’re in the front ranks of offenders themselves. When a blogger blogs colloquially, it’s one thing — but when the “official” and usually printed media get all sloppy like that, it’s not ok. And still it happens all over every newspaper, and all the time. “She’s got the experience to make it work.” She is got the experience…? That might work in conversation, but can we keep it off the written page, please? Where are the editors? I think the reporters/writers are doing it to cut their word count. “It has” is two words, “It’s” is just one. Use contractions of all sorts often enough and you can really shave the word count, which I suppose might be important when you know editors are going to whack your pieces to fit the space.)

But, to return to Carolyn Heiman’s otherwise excellent report, what has also really infuriated me for well over a year is this: it is impossible to find out anything online about some of the city’s boards or committees. There’s an Advisory Design Panel — who is on it?, when does it meet?, why are its minutes and agendas so out of date? There’s an Advisory Planning Council — again, same questions. There is also a Public Art Project Advisory Committee, which seems to be dormant and whose domain (according to the city website) “is currently under review.” So who made decisions regarding the winning public art proposal which has been chosen for installation in Victoria’s Bastion Square?

Well, that was the other button. The night before, I managed to catch a short video clip posted to the same newspaper’s website, from CHEK-TV, which showed an interview with a local artist who appears to be part of some committee — one that has done the jurying. He just talked about the winning artist, but said nothing about the committee or the process.

Furthermore, Heiman reports that the two runner-up candidates will remain anonymous:

A seven-member jury trimmed the 21 submissions to three finalists who where given $1,000 to create maquettes to show in more detail how their art would look. Gallant’s maquette is now on display at the B.C. Maritime Museum in Bastion Square.

The city will not disclose who the other two finalists were or describe what their work was like. [emphasis added]

But if these two runner-ups were also each paid $1000 of taxpayer monies to produce maquettes — which the public won’t see — shouldn’t the public have a right to know who they were? (* See “Edit” addendum, below.*)

Why the shroud of secrecy? Why does the city create this fundamentally undemocratic, secretive climate?

And so, while I regret my tone — holy cow, I was incensed when I wrote the “sound off” — I stand by my basic questions.

Yesterday I submitted a second comment to the same “sound off” board — but the editors don’t seem to want to publish this one — at least it’s not up yet, well over 18 hours after I submitted it. It read:

At the risk of digging myself a deeper hole here after my somewhat vehement comment above: I know that in the first version I read, Mrs. Madoff was NOT introduced as a Victoria councilor (otherwise my quoted text, in my first comment above, would have shown this). That suggests that the article was edited *after* I commented. I still maintain that bringing someone into an article without a proper introduction is a breach of standards, even as I’m appreciative of the fact that the TC must have fixed this initial error. Also to clarify: my criticism was directed at the TC editors, not at Carolyn Heiman, who I think is a very good reporter. Finally, I’m still totally in the dark however as to what or who this “city of Victoria selection committee” is (which clearly involves Mr. Porteous, as per the CHEK-TV video clip — see above — but which isn’t in any other way identified). That’s not the reporter’s fault, if it’s a case of the city making the information nearly impossible to track down. I’m still annoyed that the City of Victoria’s website doesn’t have up-to-date information on many of its committees, including the ADP (Advisory Design Panel), APC (Advisory Planning Committee), or the apparently dormant (or not?) Public Art Project Advisory Committee. I don’t think that transparency should be so difficult to achieve in our digital age. Put the information online and put it out in *real time*, not with a delay of months. Many City of Victoria committee websites are inexcusably out of date.

Perhaps they’re not comfortable letting this one through because I claim that they can edit articles after the fact. Or perhaps it’ll magically appear later?

Whatever, but I’m done with this silly method of “reader interaction.” The invitation to “sound off” isn’t an invitation to conversation. It’s really just noise, in my case of cannons going off. And while I hate being a loose cannon, being a cannon shaped to the restrictions of a media conglomerate’s “sound off” is even worse.

**Update** Sometime between my blog post from late this afternoon and now (it’s 10pm), that second “sound off” comment of mine made it through the filters and is up on the website.

Now, let’s see… How else can I tick the city off? Hmm, how about by asking why people who live in the municipalities of Oak Bay, Saanich, Esquimalt, or elsewhere in the CRD, who can’t vote in City of Victoria elections, can nonetheless run for and be elected either to council or even as mayor of the City of Victoria? Does this mean that someone from Langford could become mayor of Victoria, …and vice versa? If that’s the case, why not let those folks vote in City of Victoria elections?

If memory serves, in Boston you can’t even work for the city as staff — never mind be a city councilor or mayor — if you don’t live in Boston.

Why does the City of Victoria staff its city hall with staff bureaucrats and elect politicians and officials who don’t actually live in the city, yet simultaneously have political elections that exclude those folks?

(Edit, March 6: the chosen art work itself will be paid for by funds raised by the Bastion Square Revitalization Association, which means taxpayers aren’t paying for this. Presumably the $1000 paid to each of the 3 finalists was also provided by the BSRA fund. However, my point that public — and publicly appointed — committees should be transparent, their roster readily available, their meetings posted and open: that still stands.  Furthermore, the sculpture will occupy public space, and therefore it’s the public’s business.)

A DemoCamp for Victoria?

Mark Lise wants Victoria to have its own DemoCamp, and he has been busy trying to find a downtown locale that can accommodate it. See his blog entry from Feb.26/08, DemoCampVictoria Chapter for more details.

From my urbanist perspective, it’s really important that this event is held downtown, in the city, instead of moving into the fields of suburban Saanich. To that end, I’ve been busy the last couple of days writing emails to a few people about possibly donating space for, oh, say two hours? Unfortunately I haven’t heard back from anyone, but it’s still early days and hence I’m optimistic.

In other news, I’m now officially behind in getting my April FOCUS Magazine article written, which is why posting to the blog has slowed down and will be slow until I’ve figured out how I can hone in (with 800 words) on a topic that could easily expand much further.

Concrete plans

Spacing Toronto published an interesting entry back in November, which I just stumbled across when I read Shawn Micallef’s entry today, Concrete Toronto: Looking at our city. Today’s entry announces a panel discussion about concrete and Brutalism, taking place tomorrow evening in Toronto. It’s organized around the book, Concrete Toronto, published last fall.

I started to write a lengthy comment in response, and then thought I’d better just post it to my blog instead.

~

There is, I think, an interesting (and unspoken) relationship between concrete architecture (which is often “car-centric”) and what it replaced (”heritage”). I just finished writing an article for the March issue of FOCUS Magazine, where I look at our city’s Centennial Square once again. This 1960s-era plaza, which everyone agrees is a pretty big failure as far as creating urban vibrancy is concerned, is officially hailed on UVic’s Maltwood Museum website as “the beginning of a vast scheme to preserve, restore and revive downtown Victoria.”

What it actually accomplished was the demolition of an old public market and the deletion of an entire block of street (in favour of an overlong, car-friendly street block). Centennial Square was plunked into that sundered fabric, and it’s still just a big concrete plaza that no one seems to use or love. The Maltwood Museum website goes on to enthuse that Centennial Square’s civic impetus was based on “the Norwich plan.”

And that’s where one really has to look if one wants to understand the questions around energy & funding, as well as ideology, behind the sort of urban renewals which Centennial Square (and probably many “renewal” projects in Toronto and other Canadian cities) depended on. The “City of Norwich Plan 1945″ was finalized by 1938, and had more to do with a hatred of urban density and Victorian architecture than German bombers (the usual excuse given for the make-over of many British cities, countered by Gavin Stamp’s 2007 book, Britain’s Lost Cities, and a great review by Stephen McClarence in the Times Online.

Meanwhile, in the fight(s) to preserve 19th and early 20th century heritage architecture, it seems all the blame for its destruction and/or its being threatened is put on the shoulders of “evil” developers. But what Centennial Square and researchers like Gavin Stamp actually prove is that the mind-set for destroying “heritage” was hatched and nurtured by civic planners for reasons of urban renewal.

My own sense is that this is a peculiarly English phenomenon, a sort of psychic hangover, if you will, of traumas experienced by the British during the UK’s rapid (and socially corrosive) industrialization. That process, let’s not forget, produced urban crowding and density of an altogether different order than had ever been experienced before, and I’m convinced that in the British imagination, this history fused the concepts of “slum” and “density” into a single (and consequently frightening) idea — even though “density” no longer equals “slum” in Western cities today.

Hence, the notion of car-centric architecture — and let’s face it, many examples of the 50s-through-70s concrete building type are first and foremost car-centric, with loss of detail and richness at the pedestrian level — fuses in Anglo-Saxon cultures with both a love of the (low density) suburbs and the concomitant attempts actually to decrease the density of cities. Density is at some deep psychological level reviled and feared, and 50s or 60s era rat experiments only served to deepen that revulsion. No one seemed to ask whether it was indeed a “natural” revulsion (because then you’d have to wonder why southerners or Asians manage to live in density without cracking up) or whether it was a lingering social hangover, aided by the strenuous reactions of planners against the “evils” of density as manifested in Industrial Revolution era slums.

As for the concrete or brutalist architecture that either replaced denser, older buildings or that in-filled urban space: what (many) people intuitively reject in those concrete utopias is their sterility. If my argument is right, one could say that concrete renewal was done to “innoculate” against urban density, against slums, against diseases — because in the historical imagination of anyone associated with Britain’s progress through the Industrial Revolution, “slum” and “density” became linked. Through its style, Brutalism tends to banish, minimize, or erase the pedestrian through

• monumentalism (you are insignificant and matter not);
• erasure of the kind of detail experienced at 5 mph (walking speed) in favour of more massive form/shape impressions experienced at 35 mph (car speed), for nothing isolates you from (or “inoculates against”?) rubbing up against other people like cars do;
• and a tendency to be interventionist in the street-scape (what people mean when they talk about its refusal to “fit in” or be “in scale”) — think of someone scouring the kitchen: that’s intervention if you’re mere “dirt”

All of these style factors, I’d argue, point to something programmatic: the desire to embrace the kind of sterility that “cleans up” the germ-laden, densely-populated immigrant or slum areas, typically festooned with “old” and “dirty” buildings. Cleanliness is progress toward godliness and all that, and some want their godliness to be low density…

We’re only now coming away from that and accepting density as a good (urban) thing, which furthermore doesn’t equate to dirt and disease.

Heritage preservation works on the flip side, perhaps: heritage is still approached at times as something that should be kept pristine or separate or pure (apart) from other influences (like encroaching density, development), which seems to me to repeat the attempt to avert contagion or pollution. We’re still treating style as a kind of mental hygiene, even while changing our minds about what’s clean and what’s dirty.

What’s “clean,” what’s “dirty”?  Photo of postwar urban buildings in Norwich, England: