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04 Aug 08

"Trading Places" by Alan Ehrenhalt (The New Republic)

Interesting article (which incidentally puts Vancouver front & centre), blogged by Richard Florida at Creative Class: the subtitle is "the demographic inversion of the American city." It's about how the "inner city" and its "inner city suburbs" are now desirable (and expensive) places to live, creating a 24/7 downtown (desired & theorized early on by Jane Jacobs, eg.), while the less affluent (ok, the poor!) are forced to live on the outskirts (suburbs). This used to be called "gentrification," but Ehrenhalt points out that it's a much more complex process than just that.

Haven't read all the comments to this article, but it starts with some excellent ones -- intelligent observations by readers.

www.tnr.com/...story.html - Preview

cities downtown creative_cities suburbs gentrification trends urbanization urban_renewal demographics

In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be "demographic inversion." Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city--Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center--some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white--are those who can afford to do so.
Developments like this rarely occur in one city at a time, and indeed demographic inversion is taking place, albeit more slowly than in Chicago, in metropolitan areas throughout the country. The national press has paid very little attention to it. While we have been focusing on Baghdad and Kabul, our own cities have been changing right in front of us.
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- Before September 11, 2001, the number of people living in Manhattan south of the World Trade Center was estimated at about 25,000. Today, it is approaching 50,000. Close to one-quarter of these people are couples (nearly always wealthy couples) with children. The average household size is actually larger in lower Manhattan than in the city as a whole. It is not mere fantasy to imagine that in, say, 2020, the southern tip of Manhattan will be a residential neighborhood with a modest residual presence of financial corporations and financial services jobs. What's happening in Lower Manhattan isn't exactly an inversion in the Chicago sense: Expensive condos are replacing offices, not poor people. But it is dramatic demographic change nevertheless.
- If you want to see this sort of thing writ large, you can venture just across the Canadian border to Vancouver, a city roughly the size of Washington, D.C. What makes it unusual--indeed, at this point unique in all of North America--is that roughly 20 percent of its residents live within a couple of square miles of each other in the city's center. Downtown Vancouver is a forest of slender, green, condo skyscrapers, many of them with three-story townhouse units forming a kind of podium at the base. Each morning, there are nearly as many people commuting out of the center to jobs in the suburbs as there are commuting in. Two public elementary schools have opened in downtown Vancouver in the past few years. A large proportion of the city's 600,000 residents, especially those with money, want to live downtown.
- We are not witnessing the abandonment of the suburbs or a movement of millions of people back to the city all at once. But we are living at a moment in which the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the second half of the twentieth century is coming to an end. For several decades now, cities in the United States have wished for a "24/7" downtown, a place where people live as well as work, and keep the streets busy, interesting, and safe at all times of day. This is what urbanist Jane Jacobs preached in the 1960s, and it has long since become the accepted goal of urban planners. Only when significant numbers of people lived downtown, planners believed, could central cities regain their historic role as magnets for culture and as a source of identity and pride for the metropolitan areas they served. Now that's starting to happen, fueled by the changing mores of the young and by gasoline prices fast approaching $5-per-gallon. In many of its urbanized regions, an America that seemed destined for everincreasing individualization and sprawl is experimenting with new versions of community and sociability.

11 Mar 08

Downtown to be painted with digital light

Downtown Vancouver's corporate buildings will be "grafitti-ed" with laser art, as part of Cultural Olympiad. See http://2007.newformsfestival.com/neograf for more info.

Wish we had something comparable in Victoria (hint, hint!)...

www.canada.com/...story.html - Preview

downtown grafitti light_art neograf neografik_project nomlg public_art vancouver

Downtown corporate office towers will be rebranded on Friday and Saturday night when a group of graffiti artists paint their 10-metre tall designs on the sides of buildings with light.
The non-destructive art form uses new open-source software called laser tagging. It allows artists to create real-time designs with light instead of Jiffy markers and spray cans.
Called NeoGraf, the digital graffiti performances will be taking place as part of Midforms and the 2010 Cultural Olympiad.
On both nights, the digital graffiti starts and ends at Open Studios, 252 East First Ave. On Friday, artists Rhek and Virus will be doing laser tagging and over the course of several hours and they'll be moving to several locations in the downtown core including the east wall of the Holiday Inn on Howe and Helmcken. For location details check http://2007.newformsfestival.com/neograf.
On Saturday, artists Neal Nolan and Adam Dodd will be creating more detailed and complex murals. The software allows artists to create different looks, ranging from standard, hard-edge graffiti to more painterly images.
NeoGraf is being brought to Vancouver by NomIg, a Montreal-based duo that investigates the relationships between audio and video.
Ed Jordan from NomIg said people are invited to drop by, watch, and participate on Friday.
"You'll see on Friday a crowd of people and some spontaneous drawing on walls. It'll look large and bright. You'll probably see someone drawing a stick man to people who will be doing some skilled patterns and drawing," Jordan said from Montreal.
"We'll probably have some music playing. These aren't already created images just being projected on a wall. This is about watching the creative process unfold."
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- Jordan said he came up with the Neografik Project as a way of reclaiming public space by filling it with art instead of corporate logos. The software for laser tagging was developed by new media artist Agent Watson in Amsterdam and the Graffiti Research Lab in Brooklyn, N.Y.
  NeoGraf is the most visible portion of Midforms, an annual multidisciplinary festival celebrating new technology and music. Midforms also includes Dubforms, which explores dub and electronic music, on Friday, and TechForms, an electronic and ambient music event, on Saturday. Both are ticketed events that take place at 10 p.m. each night at Open Studios.

14 Feb 08

Genuflecting to the high rises by David Brewster (Crosscut - Seattle)

Crosscut's publisher, David Brewster, calls out the Seattle P-I and the Seattle Times for their gushing endorsements of two major downtown Seattle development proposals (Fifth Ave. twin condo towers by Ishmael Leyva Architects and, also on Fifth Ave., the United Methodist Church block by Zimmer Gunsul Frasca). Brewster points to the curious alliance btw developers and eco-density champions, which is wearing a bit thin in Vancouver, acc. to an article by Frances Bula, which Brewster references (see http://tinyurl.com/333ehj ). In Vancouver, there's talk of putting density & height in formerly sacrosanct areas, like Gastown & Chinatown, too. Some interesting comments showing up in the comments board, too.

www.crosscut.com/...Genuflecting+to+the+high+rises - Preview

architecture crosscut development downtown eco_density seattle urban_design

We get a shower of superlatives: $900 million, according to the New York financiers, 550 feet tall, 200 hotel rooms, and 400-500 condos.
But not to worry: These massive buildings will be "designed for neighborhood," meaning shops along the streetfront. The developers, with the engaging name of Hummingbird Advisors, are going to take a pretty dead block and "make it into a vital, vibrant pedestrian area." Of course, much of the lower level will be a blank wall concealing hotel ballrooms, but that's OK because the Monorail already blocks those views. (The architects' drawing artfully turns the Monorail into gossamer.)
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- The developer deserves credit for coming up with a scheme to save the old sanctuary (no uses have yet been found), but one wonders at the tradeoffs. A few years hence, if not already, we are going to wonder why downtown Seattle has become such a lightless, windswept, glassy canyonlands. But more vibrant? The office tower will be mighty quiet evenings and weekends. And the amenities of the new condo-hotel towers (open-air arboretum, lots of recreation space) may turn these abodes of "urban aspirationals" into self-contained zones.
  - I think Brewster is on to something in asking after the amenities. They have to be first-class and work well, especially if these aren't residential towers (and therefore dead after hours, as he points out). - on 2008-02-14
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- The reason for all this genuflecting is the alliance of environmentalists, enchanted by the density created; developers eager to cash in on Seattle's "underpriced" real estate market; low-income housing advocates, who get millions in mitigation payments from these luxury towers; and City Hall, salivating over the tax receipts.
  - ...interesting... - on 2008-02-14
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- But now there is some sign that the ecodensity coalition is beginning to feel some internal splits. A good illustration is Vancouver, B.C., where residents are grumbling that the amenities supposed to make all this density tolerable (libraries, transit, affordable apartments) are just not showing up.
- We're tired of our city being raped, razed and regurgitated as just one more homogenized, condo-canyoned McCity stripped of our unique character, style and gritty working class charm.
  - Oh brother... this sounds familiar. Define "charm," please... - on 2008-02-14
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