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A Concrete Fix to Global Warming (MIT Technology Review)

A company in Nova Scotia says it has developed a process by which manufacturers of precast concrete products can store 60Ts of CO2 in every 1000Ts of concrete product. This would be factory carbon dioxide (produced by heating the plant, running the machinery, etc.), which would be redirected onto the concrete, and absorbed (sequestered) by it, effectively negating the initial production of CO2. From the article: QUOTE: Concrete accounts for more than 5 percent of human-caused carbon-dioxide emissions annually, mostly because cement, the active ingredient in concrete, is made by baking limestone and clay powders under intense heat that is generally produced by the burning of fossil fuels. Making finished concrete products--by mixing cement with water, sand, and gravel--creates additional emissions because heat and steam are often used to accelerate the curing process. But Robert Niven, founder of Halifax-based Carbon Sense Solutions, says that his company's process would actually allow precast concrete to store carbon dioxide. The company takes advantage of a natural process; carbon dioxide is already reabsorbed in concrete products over hundreds of years from natural chemical reactions. Freshly mixed concrete is exposed to a stream of carbon-dioxide-rich flue gas, rapidly speeding up the reactions between the gas and the calcium-containing minerals in cement (which represents about 10 to 15 percent of the concrete's volume). The technology also virtually eliminates the need for heat or steam, saving energy and emissions. UNQUOTE One of the comments to the article notes that carbonated concrete wouldn't be good for use in reinforced concrete buildings because the carbonation reduces the alkalinity of the product, and that in turn affects the durability and strength of the rebar/ steel, but that it would work well for sidewalks (and presumably cinderblock type materials?). Interesting development, at any rate, as concrete production accounts for 5% of the world's human-caused carbon-dioxide emissions annually.

Tags: mit_techreview, concrete, carbon_emissions, carbon_sequestering, environment on 2008-07-23 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.technologyreview.com

A Canadian company says that it has developed a way for makers of precast concrete products to take all the carbon-dioxide emissions from their factories, as well as neighboring industrial facilities, and store them in the products that they produce by exposing those products to carbon-dioxide-rich flue gases during the curing process.
Concrete accounts for more than 5 percent of human-caused carbon-dioxide emissions annually, mostly because cement, the active ingredient in concrete, is made by baking limestone and clay powders under intense heat that is generally produced by the burning of fossil fuels. Making finished concrete products--by mixing cement with water, sand, and gravel--creates additional emissions because heat and steam are often used to accelerate the curing process.
Robert Niven, founder of Halifax-based Carbon Sense Solutions, says that his company's process would actually allow precast concrete to store carbon dioxide.
Work is expected to begin on a pilot plant in the province of Nova Scotia this summer, with preliminary results expected by the end of the year. If it works and is widely adopted, it has the potential to sequester or avoid 20 percent of all cement-industry carbon-dioxide emissions, says Niven. "If the technology is commercialized as planned, it will revolutionize concrete manufacturing and mitigate hundreds of megatons of carbon dioxide each year, while providing manufacturers with a cheaper, greener, and superior product." He adds that 60 tons of carbon dioxide could be stored as solid limestone--or calcium carbonate--within every 1,000 tons of concrete produced.

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Computer says get a life – and we have | Simon Jenkins - Times Online

Simon Jenkins ponders the seeming paradox that while music cd/ record sales plummet and prices for individual recordings drop as well, live concerts sell out at premium prices. He ponders other, related phenomena, too -- readings by writers, lectures, live performances of any kind: all seem to get more attention (and MONEY) than the products themselves. He concludes and argues that people are willing to pay for what they want, and what they want is the real, authentic thing (i.e., person), not another technologically mediated simulacrum. Two things: one, if he's right, this has dire consequences for visual art, unless the visual arts want to devolved strictly into performance art; and two, for those of us who are terrified of public speaking/ public performances, this isn't comforting news. Some of us like the internet because it preserves our sanguinity (if that's a word).

Tags: socialcomputing, socialtheory, reality, face_time, business, art_reception, arts on 2008-07-20 -All Annotations (6) -About

more fromwww.timesonline.co.uk

Futurology seminars have long been obsessed with one question: what next after
the internet? The answer is always the same, a new electronic gizmo. There
will be a novel way of downloading into the ear or eye, a new web phenomenon
or interactive device. Since the invention of the telegraph and gramophone,
innovation is interested only in kit that yields profit. What is becoming
plain, even under the strains of recession, is that the futurologist’s
answer should lie in the realm not of electronics but of reality. It is in
reality television, reality politics, reality entertainment and sport, the
immediate, the active, the present, the live.
Recorded music became overnight what it had not been since the invention of
recording: publicity for live rather than live being publicity for
recording.
What is happening is a reversal of history. Artists can no longer sell the
products of their genius because the internet supplies it virtually for
free. What can be sold is that genius in the flesh.
Nor is the “rise of live” confined to high-profile music, art and sport. The
fastest growing cultural activity in Britain is literary and music
festivals.
These are not financial extravaganzas and pay their performers little or
nothing, but they draw big crowds to socialise and meet, or at least hear,
celebrity performers. They generate turnover and employ people. The
musicians and writers who are their staple input will soon earn more from
live activity than from mass-produced versions of their work.
Add Sticky Note
- Ok, I do have a problem with this assessment: if these festivals aren't really making enough money even to pay the performers, what's in it for the performers? Elsewhere Jenkins suggests that performance will pay the bills, yet here he references festivals that draw on free talent. Will that talent make money "in the future" (how far off, anyway)? Is that something to bank on? It's quite a gamble, imo...
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-20 04:18:56
when a poet’s work can be
instantly disseminated on the web, the only real income will in future come
from the gift book market and public recitals. The festival and lecture
circuit, well exploited by retired politicians, may yet be many a writer’s
chief source of income.
Lectures – surely the most archaic form of public entertainment – now cram the
London what’s-on schedules. Popular debating series such as IQ2 regularly
sell out at the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington.
Add Sticky Note
- Just as with music (and with the Pope, in the next paragraph below), these crowds are getting all this entertainment and experience for free. So where is the business model? (And I merely ask because Jenkins points out that the internet's making so many products *freely* available has wrecked a couple of older business models -- such as CD/ record sales.) So if "live" presence is an alternative to the internet's culture of "free," where is the business model if the crowds we're talking about still aren't paying? Or, in the case of music festivals, the organizers charge the crowds (who pay for tix), but don't make enough money to pay the performers? Hmmm?
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-20 04:22:19
Cathedrals are booming thanks to the fame of their architecture and choirs.
Add Sticky Note
- THIS I find very compelling, and something to think about. I worried earlier about visual art, and about how it can compete unless it wants to be "performance" art.
  
  But here's the deal: if the art is *housed* in a building that is practically a performance -- i.e., that attracts an audience by virtue of its famous architecture -- then the art can use that sort of "live" or "reality"-based popularity as its frame or as a stepping stone to access public consciousness.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-20 04:25:09
One demonstration of this phenomenon lies in the oldest form of human
communication, politics. In the early days of the internet in 1992, Ross
Perot, the Texan tycoon, claimed that he would transform democracy by
campaigning for the presidency on the web. Bill Clinton responded by
campaigning old style, from the back of a train.

Sixteen years later, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were still barnstorming
around every key state in their primary election battle. They knew that
people would not believe in them unless they were physically and visibly
present on their territory.

The difference of the internet to the campaign lay in sending messages and
raising money. If it supplanted anything it was other media such as the
letter post, radio and television. Obama’s online securing of $270m combined
the e-mail with computer banking to sensational effect. As with show
business, the internet supports live but is in no way a substitute for it.
Clicking a mouse can never beat pumping flesh.
The reason why public figures such as Clinton and Tony Blair can command huge
sums for “personal appearances” is not that people are eager to hear their
wisdom. That is available on the web for free. The reason is that people pay
to be in the presence.
Futurology has a built-in distortion towards technological novelty, while
ignoring the continued appeal of what has gone before. It cannot recognise
what the historian David Edgerton of Imperial College has dubbed “the shock
of the old”. Our demands rarely change over time, only the way in which the
market supplies them.

I find this form of conservatism vastly encouraging. People like people. They
crave the immediacy of human contact and congregation. They want to see
those who inspire or excite them live, not digitised. And what they want,
they will pay for.
where is the money being made?
For that’s where we should be”.
The money is now being made in supplying a public craving not for technology
but for human experience. It lies in flesh and blood. Live is live.

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A design-savvy city defined, by Knute Berger (Crosscut Seattle)

For future reference: Berger's article about a report by architectural firm RMJM, which identifies America's top 10 best-designed cities. His article focuses on the aspect of heritage preservation, which factors into RMJM's weighting and criteria, and he notes that Portland seems to beat out Seattle. From there, Berger segues into whether or not (or to what extent) citizens are "pleased with their urban architecture," and observes that only LA residents are "less happy with their city" than Seattlites. (I'm not sure how he manages the leap from heritage preservation to 'being pleased" by contemporary/new architecture, but there you have it.) Anyway, the really useful thing about this article is that Berger lists the 7 categories RMJM used to answer the question, "what makes a design-savvy city?", and also summarizes each aspect (with commentary of his own, in italics). All in all, the list makes a great framework for thinking about urban design.

Tags: urban_design, urbanplanning, seattle, crosscut, knute_berger, heritage, preservation, designsavvy on 2008-07-19 -All Annotations (4) -About

more fromwww.crosscut.com

Public transit and urban infrastructure: Public transit systems can't stand still, even in mature transit cities like Boston and New York.
Portland was off the charts in transportation favorability, rating a higher approval than any of the top 10 cities at 79 percent.
Sustainable design: It's important to make things greener and some cities, like Seattle, have ambitious greenhouse goals, but the report found that in the top-10 designed American cities, only 45 percent of people surveyed were even aware of their city's sustainable initiatives. Those numbers were higher in Seattle (59 percent) and Portland (64 percent).
Add Sticky Note
- - if residents aren't aware of it, that indicates that city planners (staff) aren't articulating it clearly enough for the elected politicians to convey the message to residents/ voters. It's a failure of leadership on both sides.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-19 16:22:58
Art and design education: "Creative schools, especially at a university level, spawn creative businesses and endeavors and, in turn, elevate design sensibilities in their local communities," the report maintains. Boston, with top architectural programs at Harvard and MIT, is an exemplar. The gist: Break the barriers down between city and classroom.
Innovative architecture: The report says the "Bilbao effect," where one stunning building can put a city on the map, actually dates back to the ancient Greeks. The Parthenon was the first Guggenheim. World's fairs and the Olympic games are occasions for creating legacy structures which act as statements "of investment in a city, demonstrating commitment to the future and driving up tourism."
Add Sticky Note
- - in his aside, Berger asks, "How do we overcome our tradition of hiring great architects to do mediocre work (Frank Gehry's EMP, Robert Venturi's SAM). Do the ephemeral Rem Koolhaas library or Olympic Sculpture Park get us off the hook? Or should we be satisfied that the Space Needle will make a great ruin one day?"
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-19 16:25:13
Creative community: Great cities, it seems, are filled with idea people, the creative class who, if they are not lucky to be architects are perhaps their social and creative equals. San Francisco is cited as being "one of the most well-known havens of the creative economy."
(Great cities, in other words, need to have a high tolerance for over-educated trustafarians and a capacity for vigorous self-regard.)
Art, galleries, theater spaces, and museums: All the places where the creative class does its business are important, but so is bringing art to the masses. The study points to Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper's public art initiative, timed to coincide with the 2008 Democratic National Convention there in August and featuring, according to a press release, "10 site-specific art installations catalyzing public discourse in neighborhoods" throughout the city. "Catalyzing discourse" is always good for bonus points in a "savvy city" competition.
Preserving historic buildings: The report says, "How a city treats the past says a lot about its values for the future. And anecdotal evidence suggests that cities that take care of their old landmarks are likely to embrace new ones." In addition, the study encourages sustainability through preservation by touting an effort in Boston to "revitalize the existing City Hall in Government Center as opposed to relocating it to the South Boston waterfront, claiming adaptive reuse would provide more environmental benefits than building a new sustainability designed building."

The Bellows » How Good is Houston?

Ryan Avent of "The Bellows" critiques Ed Glaeser's piece for the New York Sun, which, according to The Bellows, is riddled with errors and is undermined by Glaeser's own research. Glaeser's neo-con thesis in the NY Sun article is that Houston is middle-class-friendlier and somehow more affordable due to its libertarian anti-regulationist stance, and that NYC is unaffordable because it's regulated to the nines. It's a very familiar argument in some circles, and it's interesting to see Ryan take it apart quite deftly.

Tags: nyc, edward_glaeser, ryan_avent, urban_development, regulation, affordability on 2008-07-19 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.ryanavent.com

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architecture for hertzian space | varnelis.net

Fascinating essay by Kazys Varnelis, which takes as its jumping off point the potential discrepancy between designing for "hard" stuff (whether factories, industrial production, or ...architecture/buildings) vs. designing for networked stuff and software and mobile technologies. After this initial set-up, Varnelis then quickly goes into describing some very specific site- and urban-intervention type projects that subvert the "hard" aspects of planning & building via software/ new technologies. The former points are not that difficult to address, using predictable interventions and affordances (see my notes/ annotations), but the latter are mind-blowing and difficult to contain within predictability.

Tags: varnelis.net, futurismo, architecture, urban_design, portals on 2008-07-17 -All Annotations (10) -About

more fromvarnelis.net

Krushchev promised to outdo the industrial production of the United States within two decades. By the 1980s, the Soviet Union had achieved that goal, producing more steel, more cement, more oil, more fertilizer and more pig iron than its Cold War rival. At the same time, however, the USSR utterly missed the revolution in information technologies.
the PC revolution simply never came in a country tied to a paradigm of information centralized under government control.
Add Sticky Note
- "information centralized under government control" could be corollary to this article's later description of the Windows on the World project, which subverts "information centralized under city planning departments"...?
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-17 21:37:38
Today, however with the boom on the wane, we ask what does this pursuit of the material have to do with the increasing dominance of immaterial forces in everyday life? Is architecture—much like the Soviet Union in the early 1980s—pursuing the wrong path utterly?
Coinciding with the twin cultural ruptures of the dot.com crash and 9/11, Apple turned toward a studied minimalism, to designs that harkened back more to the Ulm School minimalism of Dieter Rams instead of conjuring a vision of the future. Dispensing with the notion that design is primarily a question of unprecedented form, these devices simply get out of the way so that individuals could use them.
Add Sticky Note
- "...get out of the way so that individuals could use them" is key, and in good urban buildings this might be matched by buildings that do a good job in how they "meet the street," creating / designing spaces or interactions that are good for people to use, so that it's not about the building as such, but about the user (pedestrian, urban dweller).
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-17 21:41:44
The iPhone
Add Sticky Note
- - note that this, like so many other devices crucial to our networked world, is a *handheld* device. See comments/ highlights further down...
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-17 21:43:09
Compare this to how today’s top architects think of computation in design, using advanced software to make ever-more-complex forms. The only debate seems to be whether these forms should be produced by scripts or whether they should be tweaked by hand to achieve a desired effect. This pursuit becomes an architectural equivalent of Moore’s law as each avant-garde designer tries to outdo the competition with a project previously impossible to build or model. Ultimately such a condition is unsustainable, producing research that has little day-to-day application and misses the point of a radically changed urban condition as much as the Soviet Union missed the PC revolution.
Add Sticky Note
- Immediately at the end of this highlight, Varnelis gets into Hertzian space, but I want to add the following before we leave the concrete world of city streets...
  Remember that iPhones/ iPods, etc. are all about the human hand: these are HANDheld devices. But then, for purposes of design, consider that the human hand is but synecdoche for the human being: these devices, manipulated by our hands, recreate our whole (virtual) being, from here to there. So, while they're designed for my hand, and I use only my hand to interact with them, they transmit, however, all of me (human being), albeit altered digitally, and conveyed in bits and pieces (or bytes and postings).
  
  Architecture might take that aspect of good handheld design: it can design for humans (whole body); it can focus on the street / pedestrian interaction, on how people enter and exit the building, and how people use the building once they're inside; and it can focus on how people perceive the building from the outside (by using biophilic design principles and evolutionary psychology).
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-17 21:49:37
For beyond corporeal space, we increasingly also live in Hertzian space, a cloud of electromagnetic radiation that bathes us in information.
What might an architecture that actively engaged Hertzian space look like?
Two examples tentatively suggest ways in which urbanism might take into account our radically changed environment. The first of these forces us to confront the invisible forces in our environment. The second proposes to warp the very fabric of the city.
In Osman and Omar Khan’s project “SEEN-Fruits of Our Labor,” the designers crafted an 8’ tall, 4’ wide black acrylic screen, reminiscent of the 2001 monolith or perhaps a massive iPhone (the iPhone was actually released a year after the first installation) and installed it in front of the San Jose Museum of Art.
As the mysterious object incited viewers into photographing it, viewers saw a message that otherwise existed only in Hertzian space, invisible to the eye, on their camera screens. Repeated photographs yielded new messages and, as viewers stood in front of the monument with their cameras, the experience spread virally.
By hiding the messages in plain view, however, the designers subtly expose our own complicit relationship to conditions that we prefer to keep invisible. The project does not so much make visible the invisible as force us to engage in it. We can’t help but ask what mysterious forces—Hertzian or economic—permeate the city?
Robert Sumrell and I produced the second piece, “Windows on the World” at AUDC, an architectural and urban research think-tank in 2005.
We were captivated by an earlier work done in November 1980 entitled “Hole in Space” by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz. A “Public Communication Sculpture,” Hole in Space turned two walls, one at Los Angeles’s Century City Shopping Center and another at New York’s Lincoln Center, into two-way portals. Video cameras transmitted images from each site to the other where they were beamed, full size onto walls. Microphones and speakers facilitated audio transmissions.

Hole in Space lasted three nights. During the first night, encounters were casual and accidental. Many of the first visitors did not believe it was live or thought that the ghostly black and white spectres on the wall were actors on a nearby set. Disbelief soon gave way to the creation of a new social space, to the invention of games and the telling of jokes. As word spread, separated friends and family made arrangements to meet through the portals on the second evening. On the third night, after Hole in Space was featured on television news, so many people attempted to participate in this shared human experience that traffic ground to a halt and the experiment was forced to end by the authorities. Incredibly, Galloway and Rabinowitz's project is all but forgotten today.
Add Sticky Note
- The Kit Galloway/ Sherrie Rabinowitz project, "Hole in Space," could well be an example of something that was too early, too ahead of its time...? Although, what's really interesting is that it was so popular: there was a hunger for it, but at some level the technological infrastructure wasn't there, or was too cumbersome / clunky to allow it to manifest in such a way that people gridlock didn't cause shutdown?
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-17 21:54:16
AUDC suggested that more than ever we need to radically reconsider the already existing. We accept the scale, setting, and privatization of telematic communication too easily and have ignored the fact that these conditions limit the ways by which we communicate.
Windows on the World proposes to site multiple portals in multiple cities to create a true world planetary network, based not on capital and planning but on chance encounters. Remixing Hole in Space and Guy Debord’s map of the “Naked City,” we propose a telematic dérive, with each portal becoming what the Situationists called a plaque tournante, a center, a place of exchange, a site where ambiance dominates and the power of planners to control our lives can be disrupted.

Windows on the World operates outside of commerce and planning. There is no advertisement. The project is at its strongest when it is by chance. Some portals are temporary, even hidden. Others are improbable or difficult to access. In a back alley in Prague is a portal to a zoo in Sao Paolo. From a dangerous street in the Bronx, a door opens onto the Champs-Elysees. Another portal, in Zurich, looks out onto a busy railroad yard in Rotterdam.

Expenses are relatively small: each portal needs only a video projector, amplifier, speakers, microphone, webcam, computer, and a wireless link. Portals will be operated by groups following the model of, and in conjunction with the free wireless community networks that have sprung up worldwide. Connections can be easily made with free software and public servers.
Eventually portals would be everywhere. The result would be a new city, a psychogeographic remapping of the Earth according to our desires

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Crosscut Seattle - The founder of ArtsJournal talks about arts and new media

Much to think on in this great interview by James Bash with Douglas McLennan, the founder of ArtsJournal. "Curation" is definitely my word du jour -- I've seen it come up again and again recently, in relation to *very* different products and businesses (clothing & retail, for example). It leads me to think that "curation" is something that's evolving out of "filtering," which in turn was something that sort of / kind of evolved out of (or related to) "gatekeeping." The latter always struck me as something almost hateful, in the sense that gatekeepers protected the various walled gardens to which access was limited or even forbidden. Gatekeepers weren't there for me, they were there for "them." Filtering in turn proposed the notion that users (me, we) should set their own parameters -- it's potentially democratic, anyway, provided we don't let overlords filter for us. DIY filtering can be smart, letting us develop efficiencies in how we access and consume information. But filtering done by censors is bad. Curation can be equally two-edged (like filtering), but it now introduces another aspect: perhaps trust? Some sort of acknowledgement of expertise, or sophistication? Good curation, however, done on a digital platform, is open, accessible, democratic, and transparent. Perhaps curation is an open, acknowledged re-insertion of the human aspect -- which "filtering" can strive to eliminate via automatic settings and controls.

Tags: crosscut, artsjournal, douglas_mclennan, blogging, business, curating, curation, filtering, hyper_local on 2008-07-16 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.crosscut.com

The good thing about ArtsJournal is that it's a curated service. We define what the territory is and then pick out the most interesting things. The curation aspect of ArtsJournal is its strength, but it is also a weakness because the curation reflects mostly my taste.
As users have more access to more information on the Web, the sheer amount becomes overwhelming. So increasingly you have to depend on curators — other people — to find the good stuff that you want to see over time. So you find the curator whom you trust. That way, you have a way to navigate through a lot of information.
The value of a service like ArtsJournal is that it looks a great number of things and with curators, it narrows it down to manageable numbers. But when you start adding more and more, then the curation changes. It may be easy for people to look at 20 stories every day, because they have time for that, but if you give them 30 stories, that takes more commitment. So the challenge is how do we make it easy to offer a lot of information and keep it highly curated enough to so that it is valuable for people who appreciate our judgment in choosing one thing over another.
The idea with the blog is to expand it to hundreds of bloggers, ultimately. But we have to install more curation. With 50 blogs there’s more to offer people. With 200 we have to curate it, to get the best of the best. Every time you add something you have to add another grade of curation.
The kind of mystery here is that as arts journalism disappears out of the traditional media, what replaces it, and how do you build a business model that supports people to do blogs? How do critics on the Web make enough money to sustain themselves? If you had a big network of arts blogs and sell advertising across it, advertisers are able to leverage the content that the bloggers provide across a lot of platforms, and then there’s a business model that emerges that can support someone to earn money from writing an arts blog.
The critical mass if you are a stand-alone is probably 4,000 to 5,000 visitors a day, which very few arts blogs get. This is a very targeted and valuable audience. However, even if you have a blog that gets 300 to 400 people a day, there are advertisers who would love to reach those people. You might get a small advertiser to advertise on a blog that gets 300 visitors a day, but put that blog together with 50 other blogs and you are looking at selling thousands of views of that ad every day, then suddenly the pool of advertisers who want to reach that highly targeted audience increases enormously.
Newspapers have not been the newspapers that I remember for quite a number of years now. The day of many competing papers and views in a city is gone. But the classic newspaper model was not built on a mass-media vehicle. It was a collection niches. People don’t buy a newspaper because of its coverage of city hall. They buy it for the comics section or the crossword puzzle, etc. After they get through their favorite thing, they will read the city hall coverage. But the genius of this model is that none of the niche contents can support themselves, but if you aggregated them altogether, then you have enough readers and enough revenue to sell to advertisers.
In the '60s, '70s, and '80s, the newspapers increasingly looked to TV as the mass media model. The mass market mentality is not niches at all. It is not excellence of product as the key to success. The mass market strategy is to find the place in the middle so that what you produce appeals to the most people. Editors I worked with at newspapers told me to write at an eighth grade reading level — the mythical, average, mass-market consumer. As soon as you do that, and when you assume that every person ought to be able to read every story in a newspaper, then you are not talking to those who are interested in the niches. Then the classical music reviews in a given city are not intended for people who know a lot about classical music. They are pitched to those who don’t know much. So you end up getting this content that isn’t very good. It isn’t very satisfying to the audience that ought to be your core audience, and you get this erosion of leadership of arts coverage.
Also, newspapers have never been able to cover community arts in an interesting way. Things like dance or jazz get really minimal coverage. However, now with the ease and the different ways that you can deliver information, we may discover a new model and improve the way that we cover culture. Right now we are in between the two models. The old one no longer works and the new one hasn’t been established.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. I just spent a week in North Carolina with dance critics from around the nation. Like music, dance is hard to write about. You are trying to describe things that are not easy to describe. What would happen if we tried to describe an event in a new way? I broke them into three teams, and signed them up with blogger accounts, and gave them a Flip video camera, which has a convenient USB port with which to upload movies to You Tube. I asked them to use the video to compare dance styles, or show what you mean, or talk to critics, the audience, or the choreographer. So they had a day and a half to expand the palette on which they are working, to find something that is not so linear in form with which to describe this artistic experience.
People in Seattle say that we are one of the best regional orchestras in the country. That may be true, but when you look at the dynamic cities in the U.S. — the places where things really happen — you don’t think of that for Seattle or Portland when you think of the orchestra world. Why is that? What is the missing ingredient that prevents that from happening?
In Seattle, we have this great concert hall. That’s not to say that the Seattle Symphony is a bad orchestra. I just wonder if the ambition for them is not sufficient. Cleveland or Pittsburgh (among the top orchestras in the country) are not in communities that you would think can support such orchestras. Cleveland has lost half of its population in the last 20 years. But the Cleveland Orchestra continues to be a major, major orchestra.
The ambition to really excel at the first level has not been in Seattle or Portland. Maybe people here are so far away from major arts cities that they have nothing truly first-rate to compare our arts organizations with. But it is just strange, given the money, education, and arts involvement of this region, that the orchestras in Seattle and Portland have been left behind.

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"Get set - the future starts now" by Christopher Hume (Toronto Star)

Well, don't say I didn't tell you so: QUOTE: "Politically," Miller continues, "cities in Canada don't exist, especially at the federal level. As far as I know, this is virtually unique in the world. Throughout the world, federal and national governments invest in cities, but we don't see that here. All cities in Canada are suffering from lack of federal spending." UNQUOTE This is so distressing, from where I'm sitting -- because Victoria has the additional burden of being one of 13 municipalities in an urban conglomeration (the CRD), and has the additional burden of being a "lefty" NDP hold-out in BC Liberal Party-land. It shouldn't BE this partisan, and yet it seems to be...

Tags: christopher_hume, thestar, cities, municipal_funding on 2008-07-16 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.thestar.com

Just eight years after the end of the last century, it's clear that the word "urban" no longer means quite what it did. Indeed, for the first time in human history, more people now inhabit cities than don't. Canada is no exception.
"Canadians don't think of themselves as an urban nation," Miller notes. "But the fact is that we live in cities. The economic ingenuity of cities is what's going to lead us into the future."
But as Miller points out, we have a little governance issue here that we have yet to deal with; namely weak cities, a federal regime apparently unaware of them, and provinces with their own priorities.
"Politically," Miller continues, "cities in Canada don't exist, especially at the federal level. As far as I know, this is virtually unique in the world. Throughout the world, federal and national governments invest in cities, but we don't see that here. All cities in Canada are suffering from lack of federal spending."
And although Miller insists he's an optimist, he also admits he's worried. Toronto and Canada are falling behind the rest of the world, he says, in building and maintaining the urban infrastructure.
According to Miller, "We have tied ourselves up in political correctness and NIMBYism. People have such a fear of change, but at some point things have to change."
The status quo, he warns, will lead inevitably to declining productivity and quality of life.
And while cities everywhere else are busy renewing themselves, Miller fears Canadians have grown complacent, taking the nation and cities' prosperity for granted.
"We need to develop a sense of urgency," he says. "Toronto is such a rich city, but we're not marshalling our strengths in an effective way."
At this point, Miller suggests, the best way to overcome inertia and get some momentum going is simply to pick a project and start.

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With Gas Over $4, Cities Explore Whether It's Smart to Be Dense - WSJ.com

Have had this article open in a browser tab for days now -- time to bookmark. Along with posts by CEOs for Cities, or Richard Florida, this article too points to the effect that gasoline prices are having on suburban housing, and on the "sudden" desirability of urban living. (Well, I say "sudden" because I've *NEVER* understood why anyone would want to live in suburbs instead of living in cities/ densely packed neighbourhoods where you just have to walk a block or two, or less, to find social activity...) From the article, QUOTE: "Expensive oil is going to transform the American culture as radically as cheap oil did," predicts David Mogavero, a Sacramento-based architect and smart-growth proponent. (...) Even though the area's housing market has been wracked by price drops of 25% in the last year and one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country, Mr. Friedman says he already has sold nine of 28 town houses near downtown that he recently completed, and three more are under contract, "which is not bad considering the dismal state of the Sacramento real-estate market." Mr. Morris, the developer, says the housing downturn is hurting the places that have the "dumbest growth. Smart growth works when the rest of it doesn't." UNQUOTE

Tags: smartgrowth, wsj_opinion, urbanplanning, cities, suburbia, gasoline, cost_of_living on 2008-07-14 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Closing on Broadway - Two Traffic Lanes - NYTimes.com

Article about the "Broadway Boulevard" project, which will take some of current automobile lanes and turn them into public seating/ parks and bike paths. The project stresses the importance of wresting public space back from cars, for public/ pedestrian/ non-vehicular use. QUOTE: “Broadway is not famous because there are a gazillion cars going through it,” she said. “We’re trying to have the public space match the name.” UNQUOTE

Tags: nyt, nyc, broadway, traffi_calming, public_space, urban_parks, urban_design on 2008-07-14 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Looming Debate, by Veronique Vienne (Metropolis Magazine)

Interesting article (with some inaccuracies, too), focused chiefly on Bertrand Delanoe, the "Situationist"-inspired left-leaning, assassination attempt survivor and openly gay mayor of Paris, who gets blind-sided by Nikolas Sarkozy, the pro-business president of France, who wants Paris to be a bit more get-go-ish. Delanoe is on the side of the human-scale advocates who want to preserve its "charms," whereas Sarkozy doesn't mind a tall building or two. The article is interesting because it's one of the clearest outlines I've seen so far on making political linkages between certain attitudes toward modernization and height in Paris, vs preservation (and rejuvenation) of what that city's status quo as well as historical "essence" (at least mid-19th century onward) is.

Tags: paris, metropolis_magazine, high_rise, urbanism, urbanplanning, bertrand_delanoe on 2008-07-09 -All Annotations (8) -About

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One of Delanoë’s priorities has been to blur the line separating affluent Parisians from their often less privileged neighbors. In the last decades, Paris has steadily lost its working-class residents, who migrate to poorer bedroom communities beyond the city limits—a trend Delanoë wants to stop.
Add Sticky Note
- Well, good luck. You can "want" to stop something like that, but that won't make the inner Paris more affordable or make land values drop.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-09 06:03:45
Whether it will work remains to be seen, but this solution is a typical Delanoë move. The former head of a PR agency, the mayor likes projects that “speak”—those that tell a good story and make his political intentions clear.
“He is clever, even mischievous. In this town, it’s the only way to be innovative while respecting the fetters of tradition.”
promote small punctual interventions that improve the quality of life of Parisians. He is less supportive of projects that flaunt the vitality of corporations and financial institutions eager to pitch towering office buildings inside Paris
For tall structures to be erected, Delanoë would have to change existing regulations that cap the height of buildings at 82 feet in the center of Paris
Delanoë would rather spend taxpayers’ money improving the urban experience than sweetening deals to attract big investment.
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- again, it's a question of affordability, non? If you can afford to do that as a city, great. if you're not Paris, maybe you can't afford it, though...
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-09 06:06:17
He knows that living well is the most effective business incentive and the reason everyone wants to come to Paris.
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- Isn't that sort of like making a place into a resort community for the well-off? Isn't that what's happening (or in danger of happening) with Vancouver, and even with Victoria?
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-09 06:07:07
The capital can no longer afford to be a museum of its glorious past. It needs to jump over the beltway, reach out to the suburbs, and become the center of the metropolis that encircles it.
But under the pretext of helping him achieve this goal, Delanoë’s political opponents are launching a campaign, spearheaded by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, to create a new administrative chain of command to supervise the economic development of a new urban entity that would incorporate the capital and its suburbs, an area whose outer boundaries are still to be determined but that has already been named Grand Paris. In the wrong hands, this proposal might be used to undermine Delanoë’s authority. And, indeed, recently reelected by a landslide vote that reaffirmed the left-leaning preferences of the historically defiant Parisians, the mayor has many enemies in the pro-business Sarkozy government.
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- - sounds familiar...
  posted by lampertina on 2008-07-09 06:08:10
The question of Paris and its suburbs is linked to that of building heights because it is at the frontier between these two worlds that city planners propose to challenge the traditional size limits and build skyscrapers.
Tall buildings are anathema here for many reasons. The City of Light is built atop a city of shadows. Paris is laid over a subterranean limestone quarry, its huge system of ancient tunnels weakening the ground. Its low-rise skyline is the product of geological circumstances. But there is another reality—a political one—that has shaped the way the city looks: Parisians don’t like authority. They’re an unruly bunch, known to tear down or burn symbols of oppression. In fact, the architectural form that is most typically Parisian is not the mansard roofline or the Haussmann facade but the barricade. A low structure, usually made of a pile of cobblestones and pieces of trash from construction sites, it has been the type of edifice local residents choose most often to express their political views. Tall buildings in Paris? You must be kidding! To Parisians it would be an open invitation to dissent.



But Lion, like so many French architects, would like to see Paris compete in terms of contemporary architecture with cities like Barcelona, Berlin, and London. He says he enjoys working with clients in cities that are much more dynamic, much more creative—and much more polluted—than Paris, adding, “Yet at the same time, I can’t wait to fly back home where I can walk wherever I want and breathe freely. It’s not just the nice streets and the clean air I crave; it’s the democracy.” As annoying as it is, a convoluted “democratic” process safeguards the public good in Paris, he says. Indeed, in an unprecedented move, Delanoë has imposed on private developers the same time-consuming competition-and-jury review procedure foisted on public projects. “Things are so stagnant in this administratively driven city,” Lion says about this design-by-committee method, “but even I’m grateful for all the resistance. In Paris I feel there is hope for the human race. But they do get on my nerves!”
“We want folks to apprehend Paris in another mode, in a less goal-oriented fashion,” Girard says, referring to the Situationist doctrine of the 1960s, a left-wing movement that advocated deliberate “disorientation” as a cure for conspicuous-consumption boredom.
a generation influenced by the ideology of that time. His vision of Paris stems from a culture of dissent that condemned the constant hype required to sell consumer goods and products.
“We’re here to do a city, not a collection of objects. A collection of objects never amounts to a city. Look at New York. There’s an array of amazing buildings there, but look at the poor quality of the public space! In contrast, compare this with the quality of the streetscape in Paris.”
This antispectacular stance is a Delanoë trademark.
The elegant translucent canopy that will spread its wings over Les Halles’s commercial center is indeed an unobtrusive structure, not the grand architectural gesture likely to appeal to Parisians who would like to see the city demonstrate the vitality of its financial community with truly dramatic buildings.
Dominique Alba, director of the Paris Arsenal museum and the authority on contemporary architecture, bristles every time someone calls her hometown a museum city. “The architectural heritage of Paris is so rich, it swallows the most novel urban forms,” she explains. “There are plenty of exciting new buildings around, but they do not stick out.”
Mercifully few and far between inside Paris, the tall apartment buildings and office towers that “stick out” were built in the 1970s in accordance with poorly understood Le Corbusier design principles.

Rate Your City Councillor : Rating Toronto and Vancouver City Councillors & Alderman

More like this, please: I so WANT this for Victoria: an online feedback tool to rate your city's councilors. So far available only for Toronto and Vancouver, but, one hopes, soon to expand to other Canadian cities. PS: of course you can rate your mayor, too. via Spacing.ca (http://spacing.ca/wire/2008/06/27/rate-your-councillor/)

Tags: local_government, polls, councillors, web_2.0, democracy on 2008-06-28 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Architecture of Change - Sustainability and Humanity in the Built Environment (PingMag - The Tokyo-based magazine about “Design and Making Things”)

Ping Magazine interview with Berlin-based Kristin and Lukas Feireiss on their book, _Architecture of Change - sustainability and humanity in the built environment_, regarding the "conscious contradiction in the title — changing and sustaining. But how can I change and sustain at the same time? This challenge is what we try to put across." QUOTE: There’s more to architecture than its simple purpose of shelter or protection, a cast to architecture. However they are creating social environments, urban spaces and the public spaces where people actually interact. So they are the catalyst for social interaction, for society to work in. This is a big topic and we can go from dictatorial architecture to that of social engagement. (...) This book gives a broad overview of what’s possible in sustainable building practices or social practices in architecture. So it ranges fr