justforview

This post from CityKin a little while back showed the ghost sign at 13th and Republic. Today I noticed it was being partly dismantled. Not sure, but it seems like structural issues. I am curious if anyone knows.

A report at NAC brings up the issue and role that opinion plays in our society. It shouldn’t be underestimated. Even the philosophical text On Bullshit has become required reading for architecture and design students.

The report points towards a new book and uses the combined sewer overflow issue in Milwaukee to illustrate the point.

The book, True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, “explains how modern media technology has exacerbated human tendencies to selectively absorb information that comports with our beliefs, and to screen out information that doesn’t jive with our version of “reality.” In a post-fact society, the line between what is fact and what is opinion has become blurred to the point of irrelevance.”

“We now conduct public debates without a base of verified, agreed-upon facts. …the lack of fact-based debate also shows up in questions of local infrastructure and services, where the public is called upon to decide how to invest public dollars to solve public problems.”

Most interesting to me is how information technology plays into this. Obviously, this site factors in to this. I’ll be the first to admit it my opinions presented here add to the masses of information we have to sort through. I imagine most people choose to agree or disagree, but it is nice when there is evidence of a dialog that goes somewhere unanticipated.

So is the “blogosphere” part of the problem or part of the solution? Should we leave information disemenation to fact purveyors, or is opinion just as important in shaping cultural discourse? Sometimes it seems more divisive than anything.

Mine is probably only found on the shelves of the library but these theoretical meanderings are one of my muses. One of my favorites is the online journal Urban Reinventors. In the latest issue, Celebrations of Urbanity, the introduction by Alessandro Busà “deconstructs the rhetoric of urbanity”.

Busà suggest that “In a new, after-modern era wherein the notion of urbanity is widely celebrated, bill boarded and squeezed into an often narrow iconic vision by realtors, private enterprises as well as by entrepreneurial administrations, our first aim must be to question, challenge and re-discuss urbanity.”

Busà then describes some of the existing models

We have the archetypal Jane Jacobs’ urban model of Manhattan’s West Village, with its narrow lively streets, its short blocks, its mix of old and new architectural styles, its density of smallscale retail and its pedestrian friendliness.

We have the “dirty” urban model of places such as Jackson Heights in New York’s borough of Queens, where urbanity results from the crowding of people of all races mingling together in a multicultural, chaotic, untidy and extremely lively environment.

We have the selective urbanity of the gentrified city, home to Florida’s “creative class”, such as the new downtowns in Berlin Mitte, in Paris’ Le Marais or in London’s East End, with their array of Starbucks cafés, lounge bars and trendy commercial streets.

We have the “urban renaissance” model, such as the new Covent Garden in London, where a brand new urbanity made of polished architectures, fine stores and coffee tables in the streets are mostly catering to gentrifiers and tourists, and where a strong surveillance through cameras and police guards is constantly needed.

We have the “festival marketplace” model of a nostalgic, inauthentic urbanity, invented or reinvented as a commodity for mass tourism.

We finally have the New Urbanist model, with its brand new, if often historicist, architectures, its pedestrian oriented environments, its dense urban fabric, its promises of an urban quality of life unknown to most US dwellers.”

What is important here is to investigate whether urbanity may be the answer to our concerns of social inclusion, tolerance, quality of life, individual and collective fulfillment. And if so, what kind of urbanity do we stand for?

Alright kids, let this be a lesson. Don’t vandalize. And adults, don’t leave paint lying around for us to literally paint the town red. According to the Enquirer the mysterious Washington Park vandal has been identified by red spots on his jacket.

Now if we can just catch the idiot that painted the southern gates all one solid color as if it makes it looks nicer. Its stone, you shouldn’t paint it. Maybe power-washing would have been a better choice, but the patina adds to the character.

Yesterday some rendering of the first phase of the banks were released. I haven’t seen them all, but there are a few here. I’m curious what everyone thinks, specifically in regards to the idea from the article about how the “riverfront development’s look fits Cincinnati.” Seems like it could be in Anywhere USA to me.

I also thought that changing the heights of the elevation to make it appear to be separate buildings is just a faux finish. It reminds me a lot of contemporary mixed use buildings. Why can’t these large developments reinvent how mixed use feels. Even changing the materials on the street level and offsetting the setback a touch would make more sense than altering the heights. Especially, because it should be about the pedestrian.

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.

Cities all over are on the rebound. But this isn’t you parent’s urbanism; it’s a New Urbanism. These two words are often equated with mixed use, public transit, walkability, and my personal favorite ambiguous term, livability. New urbanism may encompass these some of these ideas, but it also represents a new ideology in planning that in some ways is not that different from Modernism. Before we start jumping on the bandwagon we should know where we are headed.

Keep reading →

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.