The Design Cities exhibition–running at the Design Museum until early January–has been on our list for quite a while and we finally made it along yesterday. The exhibition focussed on seven cities that the curators argued had in turn dominated world design over the past 160 years, and laid out a number of iconic items from each. It seems like almost every exhibition we’ve visited in the past couple of years has been dominated by chairs and this was no exception, but there were also a range of other devices from tableware to consumer electronics.

I had been expecting more exploration of cities themselves rather than a focus purely on the items produced within them. There was a sketch of a proposal (not accepted) for the Chicago Tribune building (interestingly given that Chicago wasn’t one of the featured cities), the obligatory photograph of the Bauhaus, and a quick look at one of the new Olympic facilities being built in East London. But other than that the built environment was ignored and that was a shame. It would have been interesting to have had more depth and an exploration of whether there’s any connection between city planning, architecture and the aspirational consumer goods that actually dominated.

The exhibition started and ended with London, arguing that London is currently the focal point of contemporary design but then leaving a dangling question of whether design has such a focus in our globalised world. It felt like that final section was rather confused as it raised the question but didn’t really grapple with it.

The place of communications was another area that wasn’t really serviced as it could be. The time spent exploring each city’s products in turn was a good introduction, but there wasn’t enough space for looking at the wider ecosystem in which each city enjoyed its moment of glory, how the trends moved on, and so on. Presenting that might have left the visitor better able to assess the questions about whether we have or need a focal point for global design today.

Overall it all felt like the introduction to a great exhibition and a little incomplete, but worth a visit if you’re in the neighbourhood.

Tags: design cities, design museum, exhibitions, london

It has long frustrated me that so many of the thinkers and movements I admire seem determined to denigrate the urban in favour of an idyllic picture of rural or small town living. Partly that’s because my psychology doesn’t deal well with spending too long outside of a large city, but it’s also because whether we like it or not it’s pretty clear that the future of the human race is going to be in cities. Effort that could be spent working out what was good about our rural past and can be translated into our urban future is often spent merely eulogising it.

So comments like this one on Andrew Blum’s blog were music to my ears:

There is a practical need for this double sense of “preservation”: The efficiency of cities is a crucial antidote to global warming and resource management. Yet despite the enormity of these stakes, both social and environmental, traditional environmentalism in America has long resisted an urban identity. Most of the loudest “environmental” voices and most prominent organizations remain focused “out there,” in the countryside and the wilderness—or in their more easily habitable stand-ins, the suburbs and exurbs. But as the historian William Cronon points out, “idealizing a distant wilderness, too often means not idealizing the environment in which we actually live.”

Other parts of the piece are more challenging as Blum challenges a few of the Jane Jacobs derived attitudes which have influenced so many of us who love our urban neighbourhoods, as we adjust to the need for more density and the increasingly tangled and globalised web of interactions we’re all part of. The piece doesn’t answer many of its questions, but that’ll take time. It’s well worth a few minutes of your time.

Several years ago while in Genoa for the now notorious G8 summit, I shared the outrage of many of my fellow protestors about the decision by the Italian authorities to seal off significant parts of the city with a large fence. The areas inside the fence were designated the “red zone” into which you could only pass with appropriate security credentials, those near to its perimeter were the “yellow zone” in which group gatherings were banned and the police presence was heavy, and then the outlying areas were the “green zone” which meant that people could get on with their lives relatively undisturbed.

The irony of the same world leaders who had recently bemoaned poor electoral turnout at home now fencing themselves away from their politically engaged citizens was palpable, but it also didn’t take much observation time to realise that the existence of the fence set up obvious flash points for violent confrontations. Confrontations that many of us felt could have been minimised by a less aggressive security policy.

It’s been with a mixture of that experience and our recent visit to Australia in mind that I’ve read coverage of the security around the recent APEC summit in Sydney. It’s strange to see pictures of the same Circular Quay where we enjoyed the sun and the crowds, now with the Opera House sealed off by a security fence, and of the usually bustling streets in the city centre deserted but for police officers and a few curious onlookers.

There’s been good coverage at Super Colossal and on City of Sound, and there’s been much of interest in this somewhat rambling post on subtopia.

Looking at the photos is naturally a far less visceral experience than experiencing the reality of such a fence, but I find myself very much in agreement with Bryan Finoki when he comments on subtopia that:

It’s more than a little ominous, actually. These types of scaled moments seem more like rehearsals for something much bigger on the horizon, a sequel around the corner. I don’t know what exactly that would entail, but they just create this atmosphere of some future event to come that you may not want to be there to experience, exactly. In other words, this flexing of state power is a kind of indirect terror, or something.

The reports conjure images of gated communities taken to extremes; of governments using technology not to become more responsive and participatory but more defensive; and offer still more evidence that while we dance on the precipice between unprecedented global wealth and an increasingly likely financial crash, the power divide between haves and have-nots can rapidly become very tangible, and that—while many of us may be wealthier than we sometimes recognise—the former group can quickly turn out to be very small.

As we plan to move back to a big city, something I’m very much looking forward to, I really enjoyed this piece about an older couple who abandoned the suburbs for downtown Seattle.

Obviously the couple in question are affluent enough to enjoy a very particular kind of urban lifestyle, one that perhaps not many could sustain, but after a recent weekend spent in the midst of an ex-urban landscape, I’m happy to take any story I can get of people abandoning that world.

I find much to enjoy in Orion Magazine, but sometimes there is an attitude within its agrarian approach which I find somewhat distasteful. That is a tendency to write off communication technology without seriously considering its context or the ways in which it can be channeled into positive uses. Lowell Monke’s piece “Charlotte’s Webpage: Children and Computers” is a case in point.

While Monke is not entirely negative about the use of computers in education, he does leave half-developed research hanging and ignores contextual details that could run counter to his argument. For example early on in the article he notes:

“There have been no advances over the past decade that can be confidently attributed to broader access to computers,” said Stanford University professor of education Larry Cuban in 2001, summarizing the existing research on educational computing. “The link between test-score improvements and computer availability and use is even more contested.” Part of the problem, Cuban pointed out, is that many computers simply go unused in the classroom. But more recent research, including a University of Munich study of 174,000 students in thirty-one countries, indicates that students who frequently use computers perform worse academically than those who use them rarely or not at all.

What is lacking in this article (and possibly in the original survey) is any breakdown of how those students are using computers. The experience of using a computer, particularly one connected to the internet, cannot be reduced to a monolith. While the cases of children simply killing time online are numerous, there are also plenty of examples of children demonstrating and enhancing their imaginations in ways that significantly benefit from access to the world wide web.

More fundamental, however, is the article’s commentary on how children weaned on what now passes for the information superhighway can find the real world dull and often want to retreat back online. There is a danger of exaggerating this risk, particularly when few educators or parents would be too worried if it were books their children were reading rather than (potentially) exploring online, developing their own narratives in MMORPGs, sharing their nascent musical creations on myspace, or even learning more about their local community.

Used carefully, the internet has a huge amount to offer when it comes to connecting people in a given locality. Aside from very small towns, the connecting power of the net allows people to discover others with shared (or fundamentally opposed) interests from whom we can learn. It connects us to a much more varied range of issues and fosters a very positive form of emergent behaviour. In modern America, sprawling and suburban as so much of it is, this can provide far more authentic experiences than the car-contained existence many of these children grow up with. And in large, high density cities it can offer a space for reflection that is sorely needed.

Certainly we don’t want children learning about their local flora, fauna, streets and buildings entirely online, or learning all about exotic places without knowing their own. We all should be not just spending time outside, but actively exploring our environs. But then we’ll get home. Hopefully we’ll talk with friends and family, hopefully we’ll read some books, but hopefully we’ll also get online and find out what a broader community has to say about what we’ve just experienced.

(via CINO’s Daily Asterisk)

Tags: orion magazine, computers, education

The New York Times on Monday carried a piece by Robert Sullivan arguing that New York City is falling behind other North American cities (and certainly other major global cities) when it comes to being accessible on foot and by public transport. It rings true, though I don’t know New York well enough to really engage.

Of particular interest is the paragraph that begins:

Then there is Grand Rapids, Mich., which has a walkable downtown with purposely limited parking and is home to a new bus plaza that is part of a mass transit renaissance in Michigan. The state is investing in high-speed trains, and it is even talking about a mass transit system for the nation’s auto-capital, Detroit, where a new pedestrian plaza anchors downtown.

Living here, I can’t say I’d take Grand Rapids as an inspiration for downtown redevelopment. There are a lot of good things happening around the fringes but the city is still far from pedestrian and cyclist friendly, and with a few notable exceptions there’s not yet all that much downtown worth walking to. But still, it’s nice to see Grand Rapids getting a little attention.

(via Kottke’s remaindered links)

Tags: new york times, grand rapids

To pick up a theme from the previous post, I was very interested to hear (probably via cityofsound) a few months back that Bloomsbury were working on a new series called The Writer and the City. In their words:

The Writer and the City is a series of beautifully produced, pocket-sized books featuring great authors writing about cities they know best.

Patrick McGrath’s Ghost Town is the first I’ve had a chance to read and it’s a great collection of three short stories set in New York City, moving from the tragedy of the War of Independence (when much of the city was burned to the ground), through the bustle of the city’s explosive growth as a financial center in the 19th century and on to the tale of a psychiatrist dealing with her own feelings about the destruction of the World Trade Center as she seeks to manage a patient’s situation.

The real power of the stories lies—as I’m sure was the intention when they were chosen for this series—in the tapestry they together weave, portraying the city in several stages of its development, telling tales of characters from different classes, living through markedly different situations, but all part of the history and the fabric of New York.

This weekend saw me making my first proper foray into Canada, having previously not been further across the border than Windsor, Ontario, and that only for lunch after having my green card approved. This time we headed to Cameron, Ontario on the far side of Toronto for Culture Is Not Optional’s Practicing Resurrection conference.

The conference seemed to go extremely well and was a great time away with friends and meeting new people. It took place on a farm owned and operated by Brian Walsh, Sylvia Keesmaat and Henry and Sarah Bakker. Their experiment in sustainable farming provided a great location that was also appropriate for the conference which, whether purposefully or not, ended up adopting an agrarian theme.

That theme was largely implicit as talks focussed on design, fashion, food, fair trade, place, and more, but emerged consistently as discussion raised questions about how to maintain awareness of our impact on and interconnectedness with others as we go about our daily lives. Much of that came back to maintaining a commitment to a physical space, not only through the now familiar refrain of purchasing locally but also through a commitment to understanding your place’s history and nature.

That discussion became (al)most heated after the second keynote address by Norman Wirzba. Whilst I’m assured that Wirzba is most definitely not anti-city or anti-technology, it was possible to hear his keynotes as such, and that revealed a tension that runs right through the ’sustainability movement’ between agrarianism and urbanism.

As most attendees seemed to agree, true rural and urban settlements are usually complementary and it is the sub- and ex-urban spaces that tend to have an abrasive effect on their surroundings, but coming to an understanding of what it means to appreciate the beauty of urban spaces and commit to environments that are so often transient is difficult, and hopefully future events will be able to address that more directly. With Wendell Berry being so frequently quoted, I found myself wishing for a similarly wise and articulate writer to speak into the conversation from an urban life.

The key question I was left with was what it means to commit to place in the context of an innately displaced lifestyle, such as that of a transatlantic marriage. While ideals of young people returning to their place of origin after studying are noble, I’m not sure I’m willing to accept that they’re the only way or even necessarily more good than alternatives. Even if they were, it’s too late for us! We will always have one eye on another place, and I wonder what, given that, commitment to the one place means.

Tags: culture is not optional, practicing resurrection, cameron, ontario, norman wirzba, agrarianism, urbanism, wendell berry

It’s only been a year since I read Jane Jacobs‘ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, but it quickly established itself as one of those books it feels like I’ve always known. For nearly fifty years, Jacobs was not only the grand dame of urban planning, but a true public intellectual with a power to find and explore innovative thinking in the interests of society.

She died today, aged 89. Kottke was my first source for the news, while Dan Hill provided a link to this obituary at archinect.com.

A review also posted at amazon.com of Eric Jacobsen’s Sidewalks In The Kingdom:

The urban sprawl that blights the USian landscape has had more impact than merely the growth of ugly landscapes. It has broken apart communities, led to less healthy lifestyles, and increased ghettoization. Jacobsen’s book sets out to introduce Christian groups into the new urbanist agenda, calling for walkable neighborhoods, more community-focussed building practices, and support of local business where real relationships can be borne. While this may well be a good primer, anyone who has read any other new urbanist material or who is looking for a thorough theological account may be disappointed.

Jacobsen sets up false dichotomies (community-building is apparently not a part of evangelism for him) and doesn’t dig into the environmental arguments which should be so central for Christians (and indeed, for anyone who cares about the future of the planet and its people). He also talks of how he believes he’s the only Christian member of the Congress for New Urbanism, but without recognising that perhaps he’s the only one who goes out of his way to advertise himself as such. It’s good to see Christians publicly engaging with the vital issues of urban planning, but it would be good to see more serious engagement with urban theology.