onetenchelsea

No Zoning: March 3rd @ LivableStreets

2010-02-19T18:17:00.004-05:00

I'll be giving a talk on Houston at the LivableStreets Alliance in Cambridge on March 3rd if anyone is interested... and assuming anyone still follows this woefully out of date blog...

GSD Platform 2

2009-12-14T20:32:00.002-05:00

Another book that I have a small piece in has come out. You can buy a copy here. The Platform books are a yearly overview of the work that goes on at the GSD. Unlike A View on Harvard GSD, which everyone submits to, the work that goes into Platform is selected by the instructors.

My chunk is page 165, which was, unfortunately, mislabeled, and honestly isn't my favorite image from my first year. That said, it's always nice to be selected.

The book was published by Actar in Barcelona, and is available on Amazon and pretty much anywhere you can get architecture books.

Dirty Coast Sojourn 1

2009-08-21T19:13:00.004-04:00

A View on Harvard GSD Released

2009-07-16T19:32:00.007-04:00

A book that I contributed to is now available on the internets for those who are interested. It was published in London, so it's a bit expensive here in the states, but if you're in the market for an architecture coffee table book, it looks quite nice (though I have yet to actually see a physical copy).

For the book, students and faculty at the GSD were asked to submit a single page highlighting our current research or studio projects. Over 350 of us contributed. My contribution was a short essay entitled "The Territorialization of Identity" that highlighted my research from the Balkanization Seminar I took with Srdjan Weiss last fall.

The book is available for sale at Tank Books for £29.90 with shipping to the US. I believe it will be available on Amazon here soon as well. *Update: Amazon.co.uk has it available for pre-order for £12 plus around £7 shipping to North America*

There is also an opportunity to win a free copy here.

No There, There

2009-07-06T01:18:00.008-04:00

Once again I've fallen far below my goals about posting here more often. I've been planning a long critique of Oakland culture for some time now, but I think I'm going to do the short version now instead.

The most famous thing that's ever been said about Oakland has to be Gertrude Stein's famous observation that when she got there, she found out there was "no there there." For most people not in the know, Oakland is at best a footnote to San Francisco and at worst "California's Detroit." I can't say I'd ever thought much about Oakland before the possibility of my moving out here for the summer came up, but when I did, it was often through the lens of my own childhood in those other Twin Cities. Specifically, coming from the big one and not thinking the other one had much to recommend it at all (though I've changed my mind about Saint Paul a lot in the last few years).

So of course, I was pleasantly surprised when I came out here and found that I actually prefer Oakland, in all of its decrepit, funky weirdness to its more touristed, upper-class sister across the bay. I mean, how uninteresting can a city that inspired these guys:

this guy:

and these guys:

really be?

Also, what other city would purchase dozens of Imperial AT-AT Walkers to guard the coastline?

Open Late, originally uploaded by Jeremy Brooks.

Due to my job, I've also been following a lot of great Oakland bloggers. They're saying more about Oakland culture then I ever could, so let me round this out with a few links. Living in the O and A Better Oakland are two of the very best. Lastly, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out just how awesome Oaklandish is.

Week One in Oakland

2009-06-16T23:39:00.005-04:00

I'm just finishing up my first week in lovely Oakland and loving it so far. I'm living right next to downtown in a neighborhood called Lake Merritt. For Minneapolitans, think a cross between Lake Calhoun and Loring Park. It's a fabulous neighborhood and I'm sort of right in between Vietnamese and Mexican sections, which means being surrounded by great food.

I borrowed an old bike from one of my co-workers, so I've been spending a lot of time exploring the East Bay by bike. Oakland is great and has a ton of cool neighborhoods. I've especially enjoyed hanging out around the Grand-Lake area, which has a spectacular farmer's market on Saturdays (mmm. nectarines...). I got to an A's-Twins game last week, courtesy of my roommate/landlord's amazing box seat. The Coliseum is definitely one of the crappier stadiums I've visited, but in sort of a lovable way. I spent a day in SF (reminded me of Manhattan. lots of reasons I should like it, but too many yuppies and tourists) and Berkeley (which has great bookstores and a beautiful campus).

More on all this later, but I wanted to get up a short update.

A Little Radical Cartography...

2009-06-08T12:33:00.003-04:00

My new home superimposed on my old home.

2009-06-04T15:27:00.009-04:00

As part of my summer internship with TransForm, a transportation advocacy group in Oakland, CA, I'm going to be experimenting a lot with the possibilities of using social networking sites for community organization. It's an interesting project, and one that I feel a lot of people are talking about, but no one has really completely figured out. The first project is actually a part of a larger fund-raising event that we're throwing called the Car-Free Challenge. It's sort of a reverse walk-a-thon. Instead of raising money based on how much you walk, you raise it based on how little you drive. We've got well over a hundred people participating, and one of the main things I'm doing is encouraging them to blog. The following is one of my own posts about the first day of the challenge.

originally uploaded by Professor Bop.

Day One: 984 Miles Car Free

I usually tell people that I try to avoid flying for the same reason I try to avoid driving. A) It’s bad for the environment and B) It stresses me out. For me, June 1st happened to fall on the last day of my vacation. I’d spent the previous two weeks in Minneapolis (visiting family) and Chicago (visiting friends) and was traveling back to Boston on Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited.

A few years ago, I had used one of those internet emissions calculators to find out how I compared to the average. OK. Let’s be honest. As someone who’s been car-free for a long time and lives in an apartment building in a downtown neighborhood, I was looking to confirm how awesome I am. However, I found that, due to the amount of flying that my partner and I do (she’s an anthropologist and we tend to travel to Asia more often then most), we had the emissions of a family of four in the suburbs. My first thought was, of course, to pay for carbon offsets. But when it comes to making a decision between paying some money and changing my behavior, I usually lean towards changing my behavior. It makes me more comfortable. Obviously, there are very few ways to get to Asia from the US, but I did decide to try out Amtrak for as much of my domestic travel as I could.

Since then, I’ve traveled by rail as far as Boston to Santa Fe… and I’ve loved it. One of my favorite things about traveling across the country by rail is the view of America it gives you. Traveling by interstate, the country is remarkably uniform. You see the same highways, the same gas stations, the same cars and the same subdivisions all over the country. The rail lines tend to go through back areas, far off the beaten path. You get an amazing view of America before the interstate system. Mostly though, unlike flying, which is just transportation, taking the train really becomes part of the trip. We pack enough food, wine and games and just sit back to enjoy the ride…

Bicycles and Rooftops

2009-05-20T13:56:00.005-04:00

Day three in Minneapolis and we finally got out on some bikes to enjoy a record-settingly-hot day in the city. We took the Minnehaha Creek from my parents to the Falls, then the light rail to the 29th Street greenway, hung out for a rooftop beer in uptown, then cut by the lakes and back to Minnehaha back home. Yeah for Minneapolis biking!!!

(click this one for a MUCH larger version)

Everyday Aquidneck: Core 2 Project 3

2009-05-17T14:44:00.003-04:00

Summer Home?

2009-05-13T18:04:00.002-04:00

originally uploaded by altair nouveau.

2009-05-08T09:16:00.004-04:00

Now that studio is finished for the year and I'm wrapping up my writing projects for my other classes, I'm gearing up for hitting the rails for a few weeks at the end of May.

We'll be in MPLS from May 16th through the 27th and Chicago from the 28th to the 31st. Drop a line if you will be too.

The Superblock in the American Psyche

2009-04-23T16:05:00.006-04:00

One of my current projects is a historical piece for a book on the Megablock in Chinese urbanism that is being put together by Columbia's School of Architecture. One chunk of the book is going to be on international comparisons, so I'm writing a short piece about the experience of Boston's West End.

The West End is (or was?) a neighborhood on the northwest side of the CBD bordering the North End, the Financial District and Beacon Hill. It was one of the city's densest neighborhoods and had a building stock much like the North End does today. It was a pretty mixed neighborhood ethnically (especially for Boston in the 50s), with big Italian, Jewish, Polish and Albanian populations as well as a small mixture of Blacks and Bohemians (in the Greenwich Village sense, not the Prague sense). As I already said, it was dense, with about a 150 units per acre (the North End today is around 100, a suburb is usually between 2 and 6) and over 70% building coverage. At its height around 1910 there were about 22,000 people living there, although by the 50s this had dropped to around 7000.

And then came urban renewal:

originally uploaded by Nick DeWolf Photo Archive.

Through the 50s and 60s, the neighborhood was demolished and the roughly 1000 3 to 5 story buildings were replaced by about 10 highrise apartment buildings (strangely enough, the number of units stayed almost exactly the same, although they tended to house significantly fewer people). The intricate street grid was replaced by a pair of superblocks. Ever since, the West End has been the example to generations of architects and planners being trained at MIT and Harvard as what not to do as a planner.

To me, there are several stories here. The first is, obviously, the displacement. For Bostonians thinking about the West End, this sociological story is the most important part of what happened. Indeed, I've been working lately with the community in Allston and I don't think it's a coincidence that the West End comes up fairly often in discussions about their own struggle with Harvard's expansion. What's interesting about this is that the West End, as it exists now, is being judged an architectural or planning failure for sociological or political reasons.

When judged by straight up quantitative methods, the West End is pretty successful. The apartments are almost always fully rented. The income levels of residents is higher then the area median. If I was an urban planner from Mars, with no idea of the history surrounding them, I think it's possible that I would accept that they are a successful part of Boston and say that they, in terms of architecture and planning, could be replicated in other parts of the city. Yet, the historical background of displacement makes that sort of statement completely impossible.

Obviously, this isn't just a statement that is true in Boston. Almost every major city in US has had some type of horrible urban renewal story that ended in highrise apartments and superblocks. And so, instead of being a tool that planners can use today, the superblock and highrise apartment housing are persona non grata in American planning.

New Layout

2009-04-17T11:18:00.004-04:00

As you've probably noticed, I've been working on a new layout for this site over the past month or so. I'm hoping to start using it more professionally. I've cleaned up a lot of old (no longer functioning) links and added a CV. My full portfolio will be following soon, but for the moment, I've simply linked to work examples on Flickr. I'm also hoping to start writing more often about my various research objectives. I feel that, for the last two years or so, I've been too busy to blog, but at the same time it's taken away from the ease and fluidity of my writing. In any case I think it's important to start again. If you do link here and you haven't already switched, the URL is now www.zakcqlockrem.com as well.

Also, I recently finished up working on a short "zine" for the GSD's Ecological Urbanism conference (which I also live-blogged here) with some other people from the TRAYS journal. Click on the image below to download.

NOLA Spring Break

2009-04-14T15:01:00.003-04:00

I just uploaded pictures from spring break in New Orleans to Flickr.

Studioworks: Core Studio 2: Assign. 2

2009-04-06T10:44:00.003-04:00

Studio project number 2 for this semester. This is basically a smart growth project where I used bicycle paths and pedestrianization as an organizing principle.

Studioworks: Core Studio 2: Assign. 1

2009-03-01T15:44:00.003-05:00

I almost forgot to post this one. This is the first project for Core Studio 2. We were given a square in Cambridge and told to make a collage of a temporary use for the square. My partner and I came up with this idea of burying a Mammoth in the snow and then letting it slowly be uncovered as the snow melted.

2009-01-18T17:31:00.003-05:00

If anyone is going to be in Montréal any time soon, make sure you check out the Canadian Centre for Architecture's current exhibit Actions: What you Can Do With the City by Mirko Zardini, who happens to be teaching a Montréal studio at the GSD this semester, and who also did the awesome exhibit Sense of the City a few years back.

My Playground

2009-01-13T20:15:00.005-05:00

I guess in retrospect it probably was pretty unlikely that Free Style Walking was invented in the nineties in the parking lots of Southwest Minneapolis and Edina... we were this good though... at least as I remember it.

2009-01-08T15:29:00.004-05:00

I finally got pictures uploaded to Flickr for Mexico City:

and Teotihuacán:

Green Street Project Progress

2009-01-02T17:48:00.006-05:00

Happy New Year everyone.

I finally managed to get some pictures to upload to facebook, although, for some reason, flickr still refuses to cooperate.

Thinking about my project here, one of the most challenging things has been trying to some up for a framework for what "sustainable" really means in the context of Mexico City. I got this following chart from a book called Environmental Problems in Third World Cities by Jorge Hardoy, Diana Mitlin and David Satterthwaite (and in true GSD form, made it prettier... the little icons, by the way, are based on the Mexico City Metro icons).

As I'm sure anyone who knows me much could tell you, my personal interests lean towards the upper left and the lower right.

During my final review for studio last semester, I got called to task, essentially, for not having presented on what my project was really about. Without having thought much about it, I made a lot of decisions in my plan that had a lot to do with reducing car traffic and creating a good public realm. To be honest, those things come so naturally to me that I didn't even realize that I'd done them until it was pointed out in the review. It was a reminder to me to develop my own interests instead of thinking that my projects need to be about something else. You have to dance with who you came to the dance with.*

The first few days of my current project, I found myself getting frustrated. The sites weren't great and I was having a hard time figuring out what, exactly I was here for. My task had been cast pretty wide. It was basically do whatever you need to to move this project forward. Yet, during all that time, I was having a really hard time reconciling the project that I'm working on and the life of the city (which I was really enjoying). On about day four, after having participated in Ciclovia, hung out in beautiful parks and watched pedestrianized streets fill up with thousands of people, just happy to be out for a walk without worrying about traffic, I realized what the project is about...

And it made sense. In a lot of ways, Mexico City already has many of the habits of a "green" city, at least as it's defined by LEED standards. People live in dense situations in smallish apartments. They use significantly less water then a city like New York or London. Buildings are made mostly from local materials, and, even more importantly, those materials work well in the climate, reducing the need for heating and cooling. I've even seen double flush toilets.

So the question became: what parts of that sustainable development chart are most lacking? My personal opinion (but one that I feel is based on the evidence that I've seen) is that the worst part (socially, economically and ecologically) of Mexico City is the traffic and along with that, the amount of otherwise usable human space that is taken up by it.

What I'm planning on proposing now is that the "Green Street" should actually be a bike and pedestrian path that links a few other "green" districts on the east and west sides of the city. To that end, I've been working on designing a few small, inexpensive, design interventions that can convert car streets to bike streets.

In terms of research, I've really started to pay a lot of attention to the bike infrastructure in the city... existing bike lines, bike sharing programs, ect. Today, I went down to UNAM (the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) and took a look at the amazing bike infrastructure (everything from cages to bridges over major roads) that they've invested in. And, unsurprisingly, it's one of the few places in the city where I've seen lots of people actually using bikes, despite the fact that the campus was pretty empty because of the holiday.

bike cage at UNAM (you notice I got the Arquitectura one!). As I understand it, you can park your own bike here, or, if you want, you can borrow one of the university's bikes and drop it off at any other cage within a half an hour

this is a bike and pedestrian bridge over a major road

this is the major bike facility right next to the university metro station

Tomorrow I'm taking a day off to visit the ruins at Teotihuacan. Then it's a few more days of site visits and measuring streets until I'm back to Boston on the 6th, where I'll write up my report and develop a presentation for the foundation.

*if anyone gets that reference I'll be really impressed

2008-12-31T11:46:00.003-05:00

In past years, I've always done top ten lists for my favorite books of the year. Here and here are 2007's and here are the 2006 ones.

Every year I've gotten a little more eclectic in my reading, so the lists have gotten a little shorter. I haven't had time to put together a full list for this year, for obvious reasons, but I thought I'd at least put up my favorite fiction and non-fiction from this year.

Insurgent Citizenship by James Holston
This was a great book on land tenure and the law in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Part ethnography, part history and part planning (much like myself).

In fiction, I think my favorite that was actually published this year is Roberto Bolaño's 2666, which I'm reading right now. His literacy and use of vocabulary remind me of Michel Houellebecq, but without hating the world and everything in it. Really, it's just about assuming that your readers aren't stupid.

Once I've gone through what I read this year and figured out what is actually recent, I may add to the list.

Addendum: First Impressions that I Forgot to Write About Last Time

2008-12-29T23:00:00.005-05:00

1. About one in three defeños seems to be a police officer. As I figure it, there are roughly 2 million street corners in Mexico City. Each one has, on average, three cops. That makes 6 million police officers. I think the math works. The last place I remember seeing so many police was in Thailand a few weeks before the 2006 coup.

2. The little walk guys on the stoplight move like they are sprinting. Which you pretty much have to be to cross a street.

3. They read like crazy here. Finding books is like finding handbags in New York. And they don't all suck. The dude on my corner selling photocopies has Habermas and Foucault.

Also, discovered the secret behind the streetscape question. Every building owns their sidewalk up to the street, so it doesn't have to match the stuff around it (in texture, material, height, plantings, ect). It makes for kind of interesting streets, but also messes with the public realm.

ps. still can't upload photos. kinda bummed about that.

Day One: Ciclovia and First Impressions

2008-12-28T21:50:00.009-05:00

Every time I fly, it seems to get a little worse. Last summer after our experimentation with long distance Amtrak we decided that we were going to use the train from then on for every possible trip… and if I absolutely had to fly, I resolved to create within myself a zen-like state of inner calm.

Last night almost broke me.

It began with a delayed flight, followed with one of those times when they get you all on the plane and then you sit there for hour before they even move from the gate and moved from there to seating me next to a young marine who went from bragging about his weapon to puking on my shoes. Awesome. Once we finally made it to JFK, Delta gave me the wrong terminal info for my transfer, so I literally had to run through the airport with no shoes on to be the last person on the Mexicana Flight 3… which then proceeded to show Beverley Hills Chihuahua as the in flight entertainment…

Wow. The saving grace was reading the first two books of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, which I highly recommend.

Anyways, I finally made it and am adjusting to life in the DF. My friend Pablo had suggested several walks through neighborhoods to get a feel for the context of Mexico City, so I spent most of my day just walking, though I did take a break to sit through part of a service at the Cathedral this morning. It says something about my christian-high-school Spanish that I can understand 90% of a sermon but ordering food is challenging.

The newest mayor here, Marcelo Ebrard, is something of a bike enthusiast and he’s imported Ciclovia from Bogotá (if you don’t know what that is, watch this video on Columbia’s). I had a really good time participating in that today. I didn’t find the place where they had the free bikes until all they had left were kids bikes, but I walked a couple miles of the route. I’ll try to get there earlier next week to get a bike.

And I made my first visit to one of my sites: Av. Presidente Masaryk. When I do site visits, I like to do my first one without taking any notes or pictures, but rather just walking to get a sense of the place. I’m going to continue to reserve judgment for now until I’ve seen the second site and the properties that the foundation controls (I’m getting a tour tomorrow).

I took a lot of pictures from Ciclovia today, but unfortunately, Flickr is being buggy, so I don’t think I’m going to get them up tonight.

Overall first impressions:

The city has a lot of really interesting streetscapes. I started doing a bunch of sections in my journal to play around with when I get back. All of the streets are very individual in their layout and there are some fantastic boulevards. Oh! And I have to mention the amazing street furniture… not so much benches as sculptures to sit on. I have many unuploadable pictures of those as well.

It doesn’t feel like a city of 19 million. It’s relatively low rise (though I think some of the outer neighborhoods have a little higher densities) and there are a lot of nice, popular open spaces. Overall, I’d say it handles its size well (other then in its transportation systems, but that’s a post for later). It’s certainly not like going to Hong Kong or even Manhattan for the first time.

There is a ton of variety in the neighborhoods. I walked through places that made me think of Rome, Berlin, Phnom Penh, ect. all within a few blocks of each other.

The Metro is awesome. Unless I’m mistaken they are the same trains as Paris and Montréal, with the rubber tires. They also do this cool thing here where each station has it’s own logo. So you don’t have to remember names like Coyocán and Tacubaya… you can just remember that you get on at the pen, transfer at the grenade (or maybe it’s a water bucket) and get off at the fountain. Also, wicked cheep. I think I got 5 ride tickets for 10 Pesos (75 cents).

And of course the food and weather are great. But I won’t brag…

Sorry again for the lack of pictures... hopefully I'll have more luck later in the week.

One Day to Go

2008-12-26T17:12:00.006-05:00

Fantasmas en CU, originally uploaded by Eneas.

I'm just finishing up all of my prep for the trip tomorrow. I've gotten to spend a good part of the last few days collecting materials and reading. By coincidence, J got me the book The Endless City for x-mas, which has Mexico as one of the 6 cities that it focuses on (along with Berlin, New York, London, Shanghai and Johannesburg). And it's been pretty interesting reading. In fact, it's really challenged my perceptions of some of how cities in the developing world are shaped.

the mexico city info page from endless city

For a long time, I've been influenced by Manual Castells, who has said that we are moving farther and farther away from actually having developed and developing countries. Rather, throughout the world, we can see a greater tendency towards what might be called "first world" cities surrounded by "third world" peripheries and rural areas. Even in the US, which is often seen as being the "opposite" of the rest of the world in spatial terms (poor cities/rich suburbs rather then rich cities/poor suburbs), I feel that we can see the beginnings of this orientation asserting itself in NY, Boston, and even in LA. I still hold that in general, this is probably true. What I've been realizing, however, is that this has led me to think of peripheral urbanization as the only part of cities in the global south that needs "community development."

In the case of Mexico City, there seems to be two different population trends that are both putting a lot of pressure on the city. The first, as I've commented, is the poorer (and largely informal) development at the edges of the metro area. The second (and one that I'll be coming into more direct contact with on this trip) is the loss of population at the center, in what would still be considered upper middle class areas of the city. So instead of this two tiered system of rich at the center, poor on the outside, Mexico is become more of a three tiered city: poor on the outside, rich in the middle and a hollow center.

From a community development standpoint, I think this leads to a lot of interesting questions. Is an empty center part of the solution for the pressures of urbanization at the outside? is it recolonization by the rich who have been leaving? worker housing? and, of course, what is a politically palatable solution in a city that is simultaneously the eighth richest in the world, but still has more then 30% of it's residents living well below the poverty line?

Anyway, that's some of what I've been thinking about over the last few days. I will be getting into MX late tomorrow night, and on Sunday, my friend from the foundation gave me a bunch of walks that he said would be good to get a feel for the city. I'll probably try to blog again on Sunday night.

Finally, here's a little of the most interesting reading I've seen so far:

First, check out Alex's comment on the last post.

After that, the most directly related book has been Keith Pezzoli's
Human Settlements and Planning for Ecological Sustainability. Keith happens to be a Planners Network guy as well has having been my friend's-girlfriend Melissa's advisor at USC. I've also found a bunch of his articles in Progressive Planning magazine that i'd be willing to spread around.

Some other ones I've liked on Latin American urbanism are:
Mike Davis' Magical Urbanism and Joseph Scarpaci's Plazas and Barrios.

If you are into Anthro, Claudio Lomnitz' Death and the Idea of Mexico is really good.

I'll probably add some links to more articles as time goes on. The next post will be from Mexico City.

What I Did Will Be Doing For My Winter Vacation

2008-12-22T12:01:00.006-05:00

Sábado Distrito Federal, originally uploaded by Sonia Carolina εïз.

For those who haven’t heard, I was lucky enough to receive a GSD International Community Service Fellowship Grant to do research / work on a project in Mexico over the holiday break. The grant has a couple of stipulations that go along with it. Most significantly, I’ll be giving a talk in the GSD’s student lecture series next semester (which I’ll expect you all to be at), but along with that, I have to blog about the project while it’s going on.

For the project itself I’m working with a community development foundation (the Fundación Horizonte) in Mexico City to develop a “green street” project. I know the founder of FH from my time at BU. He used to work with the Fundación Centrohistórico, which is the CDC that has been working to revitalize the Centro Histórico, the oldest part of the city.

The idea behind the project is essentially to use the concept of a green street to stimulate sustainable development in Mexico and test out the idea of green development as a community development strategy. The street will be a showcase of sustainable technologies, but beyond that, the foundation will work towards getting organizations, community groups, businesses and artists that work on environmental issues to move into the space as well so that it becomes an incubator district for green thinking in the DF.

My place in the project is to evaluate a couple of sites for their suitability. I’ve been asked to generally ignore the technical aspects of “greening” the streets and to think about the project more from a social, community development, perspective. I’ll be looking at traffic, social structures, the physical form of the areas, possibilities for urban agriculture, ect.

I leave on Dec 27th and I’ll be in MX for 10 days. My goal is to blog every day if possible while I’m there. Between then and now, I’m going to be doing research on the city and developing a better framework for evaluating the areas, so I’ll probably be posting a few times between then and now as well.

I look forward to hearing your comments (on the project, restaurant and museum suggestions, whatever else).

Studiowork: Final Project

2008-12-22T11:15:00.004-05:00

We finished up the final review of our first semester last week. The project itself should look familiar from the last set of boards I posted. Essentially we took our work from the last project, added implementation stuff and reworked the things that weren't working well in the last presentation.

Studiowork: Project 3

2008-11-23T18:35:00.001-05:00

This is the main project that we've been working on in studio this semester. We present these on Monday, and then add two more boards on implementation after the thanksgiving break.

Planners Network Boston Chapter

2008-10-19T19:11:00.002-04:00

Planners Network, originally uploaded by siqi.zhu.

This semester, a group of MUPs at Harvard have been working on founding a Boston Chapter of the Planners Network. The Planners network "is an association of professionals, activists, academics, and students involved in physical, social, economic, and environmental planning in urban and rural areas, who promote fundamental change in our political and economic systems."

We will be having an INITIAL MEETING on OCT 25th at Ravneet Grewal's house, 47 Meacham Rd, Somerville (right near the Davis Square T stop) from 3 TO 5 PM to found the Boston chapter and to talk about the sort of events and community involvement that we'd like to have.

Some major beliefs of the Planners Network: "We believe that planning should be a tool for allocating resources and developing the environment to eliminate the great inequalities of wealth and power in our society, rather than to maintain and justify the status quo. We are committed to opposing racial, economic, and environmental injustice and discrimination by gender and sexual orientation. We believe that planning should be used to assure adequate food, clothing, housing, medical care, jobs, safe working conditions, and a healthful environment. We advocate public responsibility for meeting these needs, because the private market has proven incapable of doing so."

Or, in summary, we're a group of people who believe that planning can be a primary tool in defending human rights.

We've been in touch with a lot of people around Boston who are interested in joining with us: students and professors from MIT, Harvard, BU, Tufts and UMass, as well as activists and practitioners, so this will be a great chance to meet and work with other planners from around Boston.

Check out the website and and the "disorientation guide" and please think about coming to the meeting and being involved.

Zakcq Lockrem
MUP Candidate | Harvard Graduate School of Design
Teachers Assistant | Boston University Department of Applied Social Science

2008-10-17T09:41:00.004-04:00

A few samples of work from our second assignment, which we just finished up:

And, as is featured here in my friend Siqi's iPod photo, due to a last minute room mixup, we ended up presenting in Piper Auditorium, which is the main hall at the GSD. Fancy Harvard lectern and all.

More Southie, originally uploaded by siqi.zhu.

My Flickr site has the rest of the presentation and Siqi's has more photos from the presentation as well as his team's boards (he's an amazing graphic designer).

2008-10-10T16:44:00.004-04:00

I’ve finally got some time for an update, so I think I’ll spend it explaining life at Harvard, so that I can just jump into what I’m working on in the future. I’d say I’ve settled in pretty well to life at the GSD. I’m spending about 50-60 hours a week there, but compared to my previous life of working 40 hours a week at Borders and then being at BU for 9 hours a week with all the travel time in between, it doesn’t seem all that bad.

Life at the GSD revolves around our studios. We take 8 credits of studio per semester and 12-16 credits of coursework, but studio definitely takes up more then half of our workload. For the first two semesters, we (by which I mean all the first year planners) are in the same studio, and then in the second year we get to select our studios based on the kind of project that they are doing. Second years this year, for example, are doing things in Newark, the Netherlands, Las Vegas, Mumbai, ect. This semester, my studio is working on the South Boston Waterfront, which is a mostly undeveloped ex-industrial site just east of downtown Boston. It the moment we’re just doing preliminary work, and I’m excited to get started on the actual stuff, however so far I have gotten to use a lot of new skills, especially in mapmaking as well as getting much better with Illustrator and Photoshop.

My courses this semester are mostly pretty basic: Market Theory and Methods of Planning. On top of that I have one research seminar titled “Balkanization: From Metaphor of War to Shaping of Cities” with an architect named Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss (one of his projects is below). I’m just beginning my research, but I think I’m going to be looking at Balkanization as a metaphor in Canadian media discourse and how that relates to territorial differentiation at national and urban scales. I’m sure I’ll be writing more about it as I start getting into it more.

Outside of school (outside being relative, everything in my life seems to be interrelated at this point) I’m also teaching a module of an Urban Design class at BU, which is going well. Right now we’re considering what design interventions would go into making a streetscape more “livable.” I’ve also beginning working on a project with a friend of mine from BU dealing with a prototype design for a sustainable (environmentally, economically, socially) street for Mexico City. If things go well, I’m hoping to spend a few weeks down there over the holiday break doing some site visits. Lastly, several others and myself have been working toward founding a Boston chapter of Planners Network, which is a group for planners who are interested in seeing planning activities primarily from a human rights perspective. If anyone out there is from Boston (or for that matter from anywhere else) and would like to be involved, please drop me a message. It seems like a great organization, and a lot of people that I really respect are involved (Peter Marcuse, Robert Beauregard, Keith Pezzoli, Faranak Miraftab, Kanishska Goonewardena, ect). I’m sure I’ll be writing more about that in the near future as well.

ps. I've added links for a Planners Network as well as for my friend Siqi from the GSD, who's a great writer and designer (but unfortunately doesn't post often) and for my friend Ben's girlfriend Mellisa who we met in Chicago this summer and writes both well and often and... added bonus... happens to have studied anthropology of food at University of Chicago, which means her posts are full of yummyness... mmmmm.

GSD Photo Blog

2008-10-03T13:11:00.004-04:00

I've been meaning to write a little more for awhile, but have gotten pretty busy. In the meantime, here's a quick photo tour of my new life at the GSD.

We live in Gund Hall, a wonderful brutalist building:

This is our exhibition space. What's up rotates. In the picture it's new projects by architects from Croatia and Slovenia. Around graduation time, we all get to display:

Pun Lovers Rejoice:

The back side of the building is called the trays. This is where we have our studio space (and therefore spend most of our time.

We're seated along with everyone else in our studio, which in our case is all of the first year planners:

And my desk:

2008-09-04T18:30:00.002-04:00

With two more days of work this summer and orientation beginning at the GSD on Monday, I think it’s pretty fair to say that I’ve completely failed in my goal of resurrecting my blog this summer. My new thought is that I’m going to try to update a little more often, but in a little more organic (meaning less polished) format focusing on two things: a) life at the GSD b) some of the various topics that have been swirling in my head.

Here goes.

I’ve been thinking through some new research in the last couple of weeks. A flight attendant at work asked me if it was “ok to walk in Boston” and it made me think about the various responses to that question. The easy answer (and the one she was probably looking for) has to do with safety. The less obvious one is about community’s reactions to outsiders in their neighborhoods. This all got me thinking about whether or not Jane Jacobs’ “Eyes on the Street” concept and Michel Foucault’s concept of the “Gaze” are different sides of the same concept. With an understanding of the increased surveillance and militarization of urban space and of the potential for social exclusion (I’m going to call it “othering,” to play with the Foucauldian terminology), should we (we being radical urban designers) rethink concepts of public/private space and, especially, should we be considering the provision of unsurveillable space (like the road underpass by my house where the Latino teenagers make out) a public good.

This all got me reading a lot of pretty interesting stuff, starting with Foucault (who’s about as much fun to read as… I just realized I have no way to end that sentence. Let’s just say it’s dense) and then getting into some pretty interesting writing on the topic of surveillance. The most interesting stuff so far has been in queer theory, where Michael Warner and George Chauncey especially have given me a lot of food for thought. I also just finished a book by an Israeli architect Eyal Weizman about the role of architecture in the occupation of Palestine. I was especially struck by his descriptions of how settlement architecture is purposely constructed to give settlers the ability to survey Palestinian space. And of course the other side of the coin, how “according to rules of engagement issued by the occupying forces at the end of 2003, soldiers may shoot to kill any Palestinian caught observing settlements with binoculars or in any other ‘suspicious manner’.” Somehow I don’t think that’s what Jane Jacobs had in mind…

As for the life at the GSD, the resources at Harvard overwhelm me. I just spent an hour goofing off on the websites of the Film Archive and the Map Library. Woo. I’ve got a fear that two years is too short to really take advantage of everything that there is on offer. That said, I’ve really enjoyed the time I’ve spent so far with the other incoming people in my program and I’m really looking forward to getting into the meat of what we’re doing there.

The Late, Late Travel Blog

2008-07-27T14:41:00.002-04:00

So… not as good about blogging on the trip as I was hoping to be. Usually when we travel, we stay in hostels, which usually have free wireless. On this trip, I had pricelined a few nicer hotels, which all, without exception, make you pay for internet. Lame. Anyway. Here’s the condensed version:

A. Amtrak was amazing. If the train doesn’t go there, neither do I from now on. Considering how crappy the whole experience of flying has become, I’m surprised that everyone hasn’t figured the train out yet. The seats on the long distance trains give you slightly more space then first class on a good Asian airline, meaning with the seat reclined I could put my feet straight out. However, except for sleeping, we usually spent most of our time in the observation car watching movies, playing cards and drinking wine. People watching was also pretty cool. An interesting combination of people take trains. There are the old train nerds, a healthy smattering of the Amish, a few crazies (and by the way, do the old men who like to tell people about Jesus really think that we don’t notice that the only people they want to tell about Jesus are girls in their late teens? Be creepier.) and a lot of people with small kids, which makes a lot of sense to me. Why stuff poor children in a car or a plane for that long when they can be up playing and making friends.

Part of what was so interesting for me, though, was getting a new perspective on the US. Whenever I’ve taken long road trips, I’ve always been struck by how homogenous the US can be. Every interstate and strip mall looks a lot alike. Well, it turns out that the interstate itself must be the homogenizing influence. On the train, you almost never see a car and most of the small towns that you pass through are way off the interstate. So you see a lot of cool stuff, from elk grazing in southeast Colorado to tiny farms in the Appalachians to a small town in southern Iowa where rowhouses seemed to be the dominant building type (rowhouses west of the Mississippi!)

So, yes. We shall be using Amtrak again. In fact we’re floating the idea of Christmas in New Orleans. Plus the Crescent (the train we’d take) passes through every state east of the Mississippi that I haven’t visited before.

B. It’s been almost 5 years since we had been to Chicago, so it was nice to see that we still love it. Chicago was one of the first places where I really began thinking about urban life as a kid and it’ll always have a place in my heart for that.

Ben and John showed us an awesome time, featuring rooftop 4th of July parties with 360 degree fireworks shows and some Southside brunch and White Sox fun.

I also really enjoyed Millennium Park, which had opened since my last trip. I have to admit, I’m a little skeptical about corporate funding for public place and about over programitization of urban space, but I was pretty well convinced that that’s a really successful place. I could go on, but I think I may write more on the topic later, so I’ll save it.

C. New Mexico was a very interesting place, and very much not what I expected. Despite the fact that about half the population of the state is Latino/a (more in the cities) and the food and architecture was very Mexican influenced, you really didn’t get the feeling you were in a Latin American place. In fact, if anything Santa Fe was the largest colony of pretentious-middle-aged-art-collecting white women that I’ve ever seen. Albuquerque was a little better, but I still felt like I hear and speak Spanish more often in Boston then there. The main annoyance to me was how much Indian and Spanish history was white washed and the conquest treated like it was mere act of transfer. Kind of an “oh well, they just had to send their taxes to DC instead of the DF, no one really cared,” which I just don’t buy.

So yeah, Sante Fe was small, but we did see some cool art (both high and folk, whatever that means) and J’s friend Megan from Viet Nam, which was great. Los Alamos was the creepiest place ever. ABQ was pretty nice for as small a city as it was, but I think we managed so see pretty much everything of interest in about a day and a half. The Albuquerque Isotopes have one of the nicest minor league stadiums that I’ve ever been too, and we had a great baseball experience, although there are no buses running on Sunday nights and finding cabs wasn’t working out, so we ended up walking about 3 miles in the middle of the night to get home. Visiting Taos Pueblo was definitely one of the highlights of the trip. I’ve wanted to go there for a long time. I was very struck by how much the Pueblo Indians have influenced American architecture. Here’s a few pictures to prove it:

Taos Pueblo:

Fallingwater by Frank Lloyd Wright

Habitat ’67 by Moshie Safdie

I could go on...

So that was our trip in short form. I put some more pictures on Facebook. (I didn’t put up pictures of Taos because I only got a permit for personal use. Ask me if you’d like to see them).

2008-07-01T18:50:00.005-04:00

Only 36 hours left until we board Amtrak for our cross-country vacation sojourn, first via the Capital Limited to Chicago for the weekend and then the Southwest Chief to Santa Fe. Although we do get away to the other big cities of the Northeast like New York and Montréal pretty often, we usually only go for a short weekend. This is the first long trip we've taken in several years. I am, accordingly, pretty excited.

Cloud Gate III, originally uploaded by Craig S.

Before we even decided where we were going, we decided to make the trip by train. We are both rail fans, and the idea of making a trip across country seemed like both an interesting experience as well as more in-line with some of our core values relating to transportation. We wanted to see what travel is like in a much slower, but much more sustainable trip. Chicago was a natural jumping off point, as most of the countries rail lines pass through, and both of us like the city and wanted to spend some time there anyways.

2008-06-13 Architecture Santa Fe New Mexico 0051, originally uploaded by radzfoto.

My interest in New Mexico comes largely through my interest in general in Stateless Nations. Although, taken as a whole, the settling of the United States was, of course, a colonial act, there are only really a few places in the country where the populations of people living there were great enough for them to remain a force in intervening years; Hawai'i, Alaska and Nuevo México being the most apparent three (and not accidentally, the last three states admitted to the US). Even today, the state is roughly 45% Spanish-speaking, 45% Anglo and 10% Indian. I find this intersection of varying populations extremely interesting, especially as, like Québec, the state can be said to function both as a sort of internal colony, but also enjoying all of the powers and freedoms that any other state would have. Of course, my main interest is to see how this is inscribed in physical space.

I hope to blog relatively frequently and (though to be honest I haven't been feeling the photobug lately) to have pictures uploaded as we go.

Now let's just hope that the rain in the midwest stays down long enough for the train to get through Iowa and Missouri.

2008-06-25T18:36:00.004-04:00

I've been wrestling for awhile about what to do with this blog now that I'm down to posting about six times per year (I blame Facebook). I finally decided that I'm going to transition this into a sort of online resume-slash-portfolio-slash-manifesto. Step one has already been completed, which was changing the url to www.zakcqlockrem.com. Step two will be a massive redesign, which is in process now. I hope to be done before school starts in the fall.

I do intend to keep blogging (especially since I've got a cross-country train trip coming up next week), but in the future that will only be one part of the available resources here.

So, yeah. Check back every now and then. It'll get better.

In the meantime, here's a good event coming up next week:

"Contested Streets" film screening
Tuesday July 1, 2008 7:00pm
@ LivableStreets office space, 100 Sidney Street, Central Square, Cambridge

"CONTESTED STREETS explores the history and culture of New York City streets from pre-automobile times to the present. This examination allows for an understanding of how the city - though the most well served by mass transit in the United States - has slowly relinquished what was a rich, multi-dimensional conception of the street as public space to a mindset that prioritizes the rapid movement of cars and trucks over all other functions.

Central to the story is a comparison of New York to what is experienced in London, Paris and Copenhagen. Interviews and footage shot in these cities showcase how limiting automobile use in recent years has improved air quality, minimized noise pollution and enriched commercial, recreational and community interaction. London's congestion pricing scheme, Paris' BRT (bus rapid transit) and Copenhagen's bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure are all examined in depth. New York City, though to many the most vibrant and dynamic city on Earth, still has lessons to learn from Old Europe."

2008-05-05T17:23:00.003-04:00

I just finished up these three boards for my presentation for the Jackson Square Master Plan that my class has been working on this week. The student presentations are tomorrow (I'll probably upload some pictures). I did my own plan just for fun. It's a little basic (I didn't do a lot of the research that a full plan would have needed) but I think it turned out pretty nice.

2008-05-04T14:53:00.001-04:00

I just added a link to my friends Michelle and Luke's travel blog (Hillestad Nomads). Check out their amazing stories and beautiful photography as they experience Thailand and Norway this year.

2008-04-11T15:14:00.004-04:00

After much consideration, I finally decided on the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. It was a difficult decision, but I'm confident that it's the right one. I LOVE the studio aspect of the program and the physical studio space (the trays) are awesome as well. I also love the faculty, and there are several that I'm looking forward to working with more closely. One of them was the head planner in Barcelona for many years, so I'm pondering the idea of doing my thesis comparing the Olympics in Catalunya and Quebec and their role in building identity. So anyway, it's two more years in Boston. Now I'm just wishing it were September.

We're also expecting a new member of the family... a macBook pro. My old iBook served us well, but it's time for an upgrade. I remember when I thought it'd be impossible to fill up a 30 gig harddrive, now I need 175 plus a 250 gig external drive for school. Crazy. (oh, bonus... the GSD has sooo much free software. That's the perks of being a Harvard student I guess... that and the polo shirts with little crocodiles).

Admissions Update:

2008-03-22T21:10:00.001-04:00

Harvard: Yes
Penn: Yes
Toronto: Yes
Berkeley: No
UBC and MIT: Still Waiting

2008-03-07T15:16:00.007-05:00

I finally had some time to sit down and type a longer post after what has been a pretty crazy week.

When I started applying for master's programs, my professors advised my that I should shoot for the top tier, so basically I took the top ten schools for Planning in North America and, given my elementary French and Spanish, said "non, merci" to UQAM and "no, gracias" to UNAM and ITESM, and then dropped UCLA based our agreement that two years in LA just wasn't something we were ready to do now. Then I applied to the rest.

So about two weeks ago, one of my professors e-mailed me and a friend of mine who is also applying to schools this year to see if we had heard anything yet. Neither of us had. The professor also told us that he had heard that applications to planning school were way up this year. Unlike my friend, who had also applied to a couple of the better second tier schools, I hadn't done a back up at all, so I've kind of (ok, a little more then kind of) been freaking out the last couple weeks.

But anyway, long story short, I heard from Penn this week (two weeks before they are supposed to be sending out responses) and I'm feeling pretty good about it. I visited the department a few months ago and liked it. The studio space used to be Louis Kahn's studio, so it's got a lot of good energy. Of course I'm also still hopeful that I'll have some choices.

Beyond that, I've been working at finding an internship for the summer so I can quit my job a little sooner, and I've had a lot of good responses. The one I've been having the most back and forth with is an organization that does housing policy stuff in Washington (DC not State). There is also one I'd really like in San Francisco doing sidewalk design.

So yeah. Lot of stuff in the works. More later.

*** I heard from the School of Design at Harvard today. Got in there too. yeah!

2008-03-05T15:50:00.002-05:00

I got accepted to the School of Design at UPenn...

in Philadelphia...

the city of brotherly love...

...more later.

WalkBoston Event

2008-03-03T13:43:00.003-05:00

Thursday, March 6
4:00pm

Downtown Development Walk - WalkBoston Annual Meeting Walk
Meet: South Station Summer St. entrance under the eagle.

Walk to the Annual Meeting led by John Palmierei, new BRA Director and Kairos Shen, BRA Director of Planning. Learn how proposed projects will benefit and impact pedestrians and shape the downtown streetscape. Please RSVP to info@walkboston.org or 617-367-9255

5:30pm

WalkBoston Annual Meeting/Celebration
60 State Street, 26th floor, offices of WilmerHale

Eat-Drink-Schmooze with WalkBoston Golden Shoe Awards and Speaker Jon Orcutt, New York City DOT Senior Policy Advisor. Jon was recently named the recipient of the 2008 Civic Leadership in Transportation Award by the NYU Wagner Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management. During his long and impactful tenures at Transportation Alternatives and the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, Jon won many improvements for bicycling, walking, and transit, including the restoration of bike access to the Queensboro Bridge and fairer funding for bike and pedestrian safety. Last year he joined the NYC DOT's "dream team" with Bruce Schaller, Dani Simons and other stalwarts of livable streets.

Little Boxes on the Hillside...

2008-02-19T17:34:00.006-05:00

Suburbs, originally uploaded by corremadrid.

Every now and then a read an article that reminds me just how much American concepts of the urban/suburban divide are deeply ingrained in our collective understanding. This week's Economist has an article about "Black Flight". Now, I don't want to go off on the Economist too much. Although it's center-right, it's one of the better sources of world news out there, certainly better then Time or Newsweek. All of that aside though, the ridiculous misinterpretation of demographic changes in Southern California in this article really bother me.

The article is basically about the move of the black population from central LA to suburban (or, more correctly) exurban locations. OK. That's true. And given numerous reasons, both demographic and economic, that is to be expected. Where the article looses me is it's general theme that the suburbanization of blacks is good, either for society or for the suburbanized blacks themselves. It buys into the simplistic binary of suburb/good-city/bad (and J's been reading Judith Butler lately, so don't even get me started on binaries).

Here's Zakcq's general theory of the world: for a long time now, American cities have been generally opposite of the cities in the rest of the world, that is to say, poor in the middle, rich on the outside. I'd say, for about five to ten years now, we've been in the process of inverting that spatial arrangement. New York, Boston and San Francisco are already completing that change, and many other cities are well into the process. There are a lot of reasons that this is happening. Quality of Life is one, but so are housing prices, access to services, costs of transportation and many other things. What this means, in my opinion, is that blacks moving to the exurbs are not following the American Dream. Instead, they are being relegated to the most marginal land, farthest from job opportunities and, since, make no mistake, most of the low paid jobs will remain in the center city, many of these exurban dwellers will be stuck with insanely long and expensive commutes. blech.

Given these stupid notions of suburban superiority it's of little surprise that our housing is in such a crisis.

And as a afterthought this article is really funny.

Update your maps...

2008-02-17T11:21:00.002-05:00

One more shot from Pristina, originally uploaded by jungle/arctic.

2008-02-06T15:11:00.001-05:00

happy birthday crosswalk, originally uploaded by greynotgrey.

Rock on crosswalk guy.

Another Top Ten List

2008-01-29T15:46:00.001-05:00

Planetizen has posted their yearly top ten list here. Like I said earlier, I think it was actually a pretty slow year as far as planning books go. There was no High Price of Free Parking that everyone was talking about this year (and yes. I hang out with people who talk excitedly about parking. and it's awesome.) Out of the books on the list, I've honestly only even seen three of them before, and I haven't yet read any, compared with most years where I've read at least a couple and paged through most of the rest. There are a couple of interesting things to note in the list though.

The first is that there seems to be much more emphasis on design in the books that are coming out. Four of the books on the main list and two of the runners up are essentially design books. Compared to the all time top 20 list, where only two books are really design books (plus maybe 2 others that are nominally so), that seems like a major jump. Perhaps that means that there is a general trend towards planners taking a more important roll in design. Or maybe I just hope that's what it means. Either way it's interesting. From the list I think Sustainable Urbanism by Farr will be the first one I pick up.

Second, why in the world is there an anti-planning tirade from the Cato Institute on the list? I mean, come on. I realize there is some value to understanding your enemies, but, like Ann Coulter or Jean Le Pen, some things are so ridiculous that it's better to just ignore them. Sometimes listening just gives strength to a stupid argument. Boo, Planetizen.

Finally, it's nice to see a book about Immigration and the US's aging population. I was starting to think that I was the only one who realized that if you don't have enough workers to pay into social security you'd better start importing some new ones or legalizing the ones that are here.

Graduation, Urban Revitalization, Design Compitition and Congradulations...

2008-01-23T19:52:00.001-05:00

Boston University: BU Central, originally uploaded by wallyg.

So, as of tomorrow, I've officially got a BS in Urban Affairs from BU. yeah!!! Which means that I'm going to try and blog a little more often to keep up on my writing skills.

I finished up all of my grad apps, so (fingers crossed) I should be hearing back starting towards the beginning of February, stretching through April. Once I start hearing about schools, I may make a quick trip to the west coast to talk to some faculty, so if anyone's in the Bay Area or around Vancouver/Seattle and wants to get together let me know.

In the mean time, I'm working on editing my thesis down to make it a publishable length and auditing/t.a.ing a design studio. We're working on a redevelopment project for the BRA in Jackson Square in JP, which should be both really fun and educational. It's great to be doing something that has a chance of being built. I think we've got a pretty good team put together for it from a lot of different backgrounds (planners and architects... and even a media guy), so it has a good chance of being a quality project.

I've also been kind of amused by this and I've been thinking about putting together a submission. If there is anyone out there in blogland who'd be interested in teaming up on this, please let me know. I think it's an interesting design challenge and could be kind of fun.

Also, congrats to R and B on the birth of Olivier. I can't wait to see you guys.

2008-01-15T10:10:00.000-05:00

OK. Now for the other list. I've got a little bit different format for this one this year. All of the books list were published, either in paperback or hardcover, in 2007. Now, obviously all of the books I read this year weren't published this year, and I've always been a little annoyed about not being able to put the books I really liked from the year before on the list just because I didn't get around to reading them right away (Millennial Monsters by Anne Allison and Hip-Hop Japan by Ian Condry are two good example from 2006). So this list will have my favorite six non-fiction books, followed by the ever popular top four coffee table books, followed by the top seven books I'm looking forward to reading, but haven't yet. So here it is, the top seventeen of 2007.

The Best Non Fiction of 2007!!!

#1: The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art and Music Drive New York City by Elizabeth Currid.

So #1 is a planning book, in what seemed like a pretty weak year for planning books. Currid's research takes up some of the important questions that were left in Richard Florida's Creative Class work, but on a more sociological level, rather then macro-economic. It also relates to Lloyd's NeoBohemia, but more from a public policy standpoint. The book is basically about the economic benifits of the arts in the urban economy.

#2: Parallel Paths: The Development of Nationalism in Ireland and Quebec by Garth Stevenson.

Parallel Paths traces the development of modern Québécois and Irish nationalism in overlapping chapters that seek to explain why Ireland became independant while Québec has remained withing the Canadian federation. It's one of the most readible histories of Québec I've ever read (and I've read a freaking lot of histories of Québec) with the bonus of some great Irish history mixed in. It was published in Canada so it's a little tough to find, but very worth it.

#3: No One is Illegal: Fighting Violence and State Repression on the US-Mexico Border by Mike Davis and Justin Akers Chacón.

This was one of Mike Davis' three books this year. He's awesome. This one has a really great history of immigration in the US with a focus on the way that business interests benifit by keeping labor divided into legal and illegal groups who are constantly at odds with each other. The second half focuses on the tiny vigilante groups like the Minutemen and how they manage to dominate so much of the media discourse surrounding the immigration debate.

#4: The Story of French by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow.

These two Québecois writers take on the the history of the French language. This was the Governor-General's Prize winner for non-fiction this year. It's very accessible, even if you aren't a Francophone. And if you are a Francophone there is a lot of interesting little tidbits about the origins of some of your favorite words: for example, poutine comes from the english word pudding.

#5: Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism edited by Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk.

Here's the second Mike Davis book of the batch. This one is a serious of academic papers regarding the role of neoliberal economics on urban form, from the megamalls of Dubai to little California suburbs in the deserts of Iran. Since there are a lot of different authors, the chapters very pretty widly in topic and quality, but there is a little bit of something for everyone (or at least everyone who is into history, urban planning, architecture or sociology).

#6: The Suburbanization of New York edited by Jerilou Hammett, Kingsley Hammett and Martha Cooper.

Book 6 is another planning anthology. A lot of it relates to the losses of ethnic, social and economic diversity NYC and the proliferation of suburbanesqe chains. It's a pretty interesting way to look at the booms of inner-city gentrification around the country. In the end it begins to ask the question: If urban life becomes the new American dream, does that mean that there must simply be a reversal of the former status quo (ie richer and whiter in the center, poorer and darker on the periphery) or does the move to reurbanization also have possibilities for unification across class and color lines.

The Best Coffee Table Books of 2007!!!

#1: Transit Maps of the World by Mark Ovenden and Mike Ashworth.

A collection of every urban transit map in the world? Hell, yeah. The book also nicely outlines the evolution of the design of these important maps throughout time. Did you know Montréal is one of the only cities in the world with a black background on it's transit maps?

#2: Design Like You Give a Damn by Architecture for Humanity.

A very cool book with tons of architectural projects all over the world, from Darfur to New Orleans. The architecture is amazing and the social relevance is great. It's a wonderful organization and a great book.

#3: Imagining MIT by William J. Mitchell.

My Boston pick for the year, this goes over the evolution of MIT's campus focusing on the recent spate of building, including Gehry's Stata Center, Kevin Roche's Zesiger Sports and Fitness Center, Steven Holl's Simmons Hall, Charles Correa's Brain and Cognitive Science Complex, and Fumihiko Maki's Media Laboratory. Lots of very cool architecture in good photographs.

#4: Robert Moses and the Modern City edited by Hillary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson.

This book grew out of several different museum exhibits around New York last year. For anyone who doesn't know, Robert Moses is the person who is probably most resposible for New York's urban form, for better and worse. In fact, there are probably few people in American history who are as responisible for a city (save maybe for Alan Jacobs in San Francisco and L'Enfant in DC). It's a great book.

The Best(?) Books I Haven't Read Yet of 2007!!!

#1: greenTOpia: Towards a Sustainable Toronto edited by Alana Wilcox, Christina Palassio and Jonny Dovercourt
#2: Lagos: How It Works by Rem Koolhaas
#3: Diamonds, Gold and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa by Martin Meredith
#4: Fidel Castro: My Life: A Spoken Autobiography by Ignacio Ramonet and Fidel Castro
#5: India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy by Ramachandra Guha
#6: Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary by Gao Wenquin

2008-01-02T16:13:00.000-05:00

Every year I think I'm going to beat Ryan to the end of the year list thing, but I always seem to get busy in the last week of the year. oh well. So anyways, here's my first list:

The Best Fiction of 2007!!!

Now, I actually read a lot more fiction this year, so I think it's a better list. Here's my top five novels:

#1: The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz.

This was my favorite. It's the story of the world's only Domincan nerd. It's written in a Jersey Spanglish with a very lyrical, almost conversational style. The little footnotes on Domincan history are hilarious ("Trujillo was Mobuto before Mobuto was Mobutu").

#2: After Dark by Haruki Murakami.

Murakami is my current favorite all-time author, and this was his new book this year. It is the story of a couple of sisters over the course of one night, one pulling a wierd all-nighter in a diner, the other in some kind of metaphysical coma. It's a short book, but you'll be thinking about it for quite awhile.

#3: I Have the Right to Destroy Myself by Young-ha Kim.

This is a last minute addition to my list. I finished it today. I picked it up on my theory that, since only 3% of the books publised in English are translations, that most books that are translated are probably pretty good. The writer is Korean, and the book falls squarely in the whole asian-magical-realism thing (along with Murakami and Oe), which, unlike the Latin American version, which tends towards historical and rural, is very urban and hyper-modern. This book is absolutely kinetic. I read it straight through, almost without stoping.

#4: This Children's Hospital by Chris Adrian.

This was one of the McSweeney's novels this year, and you can tell it's the sort of thing that Dave Egger's would dig. It's beautifully writen with a very haunting complex story. On the downside, it's very long and not everything seems to be going in the same direction. It probably could have lost 200 pages without losing too much, but it's so beautifully written that you really don't mind.

#5: The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold.

Almost Moon gets up here based simply on the great first sentence rule. Ready? OK. "When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily." That's all I'm going to say. It should be enough.

And, as an added bonus, I'd also highly suggest the following two short story collections:

1. No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July

2. Blind Willow, Sleeping Women by Haruki Murakami

Non-fiction will be up in the next week, when I get around to it.

2007-12-10T12:44:00.000-05:00

Growing up in South Minneapolis, it's hard to avoid the weight of Mall history. Southdale, widely believed to be the first mall (which it isn't, it's just the first CLIMATE-CONTROLLED mall in AMERICA), was about 5 miles from my childhood home. It was actually designed by a Socialist who hated suburbs and was trying to reintroduce downtown style commercial districts what he saw as the soul-sucking horror of suburban life. Way to achieve the exact opposite of your goal, big guy. Anyway, when I was about 11, the MALL OF AMERICA opened. At the time, it was the biggest mall in the world, and, as far as I know, it was still the last mall built in the Minneapolis metro. Over the next few years, the newspapers were generally saying that mall traffic was slacking off, no more would be built, and that the Age of the Mall (you have to say that part with a Lord of the Rings narrator voice) was ending. Well you can imagine how surprised I was to come across a current list of the ten largest malls in the world. Surprise, surprise, MOA doesn't even make the list anymore. Here's the current top ten:

1. Dubai Mall, Dubai, UAE, 12 million sq feet
2. Mall of Arabia, Dubai, UAE, 10 million sq feet
3. Mall of China, China, 10 million sq feet
4. Triple 5 Mall, China, 10 million sq feet
5. South China Mall, China, 9.6 million sq feet
6. Oriental Plaza, China, 8.6 million sq feet
7. Golden Resources, China, 7.3 million sq feet
8. West Edmonton Mall, Alberta, Canada, 5.3 million sq feet
9. Panda Mall, China, 5.0 million sq feet
10. Grandview Mall, China, 4.5 million sq feet*

So basically, Dubai has the biggest Mall in world and the biggest building. Talk about out America-ing America. And then there's China, with 7 of the 10 largest malls in the world. Is anybody else thinking about what's going to happen if Americans refuse to stop consuming at thier current levels and if China starts to too? Cause it kind of freaks me out.

Anyway, on a personal note, I've finished my applications to UBC and Berkeley, and I'll finish U Toronto up today and I've just got two more weeks of school. yea!

*This list comes from Sand, Fear and Money in Dubai by Mike Davis, published in Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism edited by Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk (New Press, 2007)

2007-11-02T11:53:00.000-04:00

I spent last weekend at an openhouse at the School of Design at Penn. To be honest, Penn had been the school that I was least excited about, but I had a really great time. The facilities and the staff were awesome (the Planning Studio space is in Louis Kahn's old studio) and the quality of the students work was amazing. I also really liked Phily. I'd only spent a couple of days there before, and I only spent a few hours wandering around this time, but it's got a good vibe. A lot like Boston, but less stuck up.

I go back and forth between being freaked out that I won't get in anywhere and that I'm going to get in to to many schools and I won't be able to choose.

Anyway, my first application is due Dec 1st. I'm taking the GRE in 12 days. Ahhhhh.

Photo Tour: Fallingwater

2007-10-17T07:42:00.000-04:00

Pittsburgh is not what you thought...

2007-10-13T20:37:00.001-04:00

There's a certain west coast city (that I've never had the opportunity to visit) that everyone talks about like it's a mythical Valhalla for urbanists. "There is light rail transit! The housing is so dense! The natural setting is so beautiful!" Now, I don't want to rail on Portland. Like I said, I've never been there, but I have to wonder, after having spent a day now in Pittsburgh: why is Portland so admired and Pittsburgh so demeaned? It's almost exactly same size. Pittsburgh's got the light rail. It's denser then Portland (2,100 to 1640 people per square kilometer). It's got a super cool location. It's even got better universities (Carnegie Mellon is rated 23rd in the country, one worse then Berkeley and one better then Georgetown). So why doesn't anybody know that? Is it all just the way that cities market themselves? Or is it age? Do Americans prefer a newer city?

Anyways, I'm enjoying my time here. The city's got good neighborhoods. Personally I like things a little bit skeezy, which Pittsburgh definitely has down. One thing I really like is that it's the sort of place that can have total dive bars and designer clothing stores on the same block. There's a good mix of shops and people. The residential architecture is mostly little, fairly undistinguished, but nice, rowhouses.

One of the best things is the location. It's kind of perched on the sides of a bunch of littlish mountains (more then Duluth, but less then Hong Kong). So basically, people just plopped houses wherever they could find enough flat land. There are these blocks where people have a huge cliff as a back yard, which gives it a lot of character.

Oh, and I finally did find a part of town that smelled (for reference: worse then East St. Paul, better then Gary, Indiana).

Today I basically wandered around neighborhoods. I like the South Side Flats a lot and the Mexican War Streets. Downtown is pretty nice. Oakland was kind of generic. Station Square sucks. The gate for the Pirate's stadium was open, so I wondered in and looked around. It seems really nice.

I also went to the Andy Warhol museum. It was pretty impressive. Warhol's images are so common that I don't think I ever really appreciated them before. When you are right in front of them, you can't help but be struck by both the scale and coloring. Its all so vulgar but beguiling. They also had a cool exhibit of Bruce Nauman, who works entirely in neon lights. My eyes didn't go back to normal for quite a while, but it was pretty cool.

Tomorrow, I'm going to see Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater.

First Impressions of Pittsburgh

2007-10-12T18:13:00.000-04:00

1. It doesn't smell. I always imagined it smelled.

2. I have the distinctive feeling I'm not on a coast anymore. I don't know why.

3. It's layed out interestingly. Because of all the hills, it seems more like a bunch of little villages then a continuous urban space.

More later...

We're Moving!!!

2007-10-02T21:46:00.000-04:00

So, we've officially taken a new apartment. It's larger, and slightly closer to the center of the earth (which means we're keeping the same address, so no blog-name-change). Major pluses include a bedroom that's big enough for us to actually walk around the bed, a washer-dryer, a backyard, and enough space to have friends stay with us when they visit Boston (hint, hint). We're spending the next week or so painting and then moving slowly down.

In other news, ArchitectureBoston has an entire issue about Boston City Hall. Check it out. I especially like the article where several area architects reimagine how the building could be adapted for the future. My favorite is Moskow Architects design, which reminds me of my childhood idea of what Babylon's hanging gardens must have looked like.

2007-09-25T18:08:00.000-04:00

J and I are just back from TO.

We really liked it there... but then we stopped in Montréal for a day on our way back, so now I'm basically forcing myself to go back and justify why I liked it.

So, here are things I really liked about Toronto:

1. Streetcars. I really like subways, but having quiet, roomy streetcars running above ground is really awesome. I love being able to watch the city go by.

2. People. TO is all about the hipster (in a good way). People seem very political and activism driven. Just in the days we were there, there were protests for Native Treaty Rights and for a "don't ask, don't tell" policy in housing illegal immigrants. The demographics were really interesting. It seemed to be about 50% Asian.

3. Food.

4. Neighborhoods. TO has a lot of great neighborhoods. The Annex was very cool. Kensington Market was unlike anything I've ever seen in the first world (it reminded me a little of the neighborhoods in Berlin that had been taken over by Anarchists. The Islands were also really cool.

Anyways. In a lot of ways it reminded my of a really nice Minneapolis. You get a major sense that the whole city is in a major state of change right now. It'd be an interesting place to live.

We also stopped at Niagara:

And in Montréal:

And J got her nose pierced!

2007-09-18T17:03:00.001-04:00

Month and a half without a blog post, huh. I assume that's long enough to ensure that no one is reading this anymore.

My official excuse is that my computer was broken for a few months and I didn't have money to fix it. Unofficially, it seems like everyone is getting pretty lazy about their blogs lately. I'm thinking it's just that facebook is easier/faster then actually having to come up with something to write, which is kind of too bad. Technology allows us to communicate faster and easier, but it also homogenizes the sort of discourse that we have until all we do is update our status and put up a different picture once and a while and post on everyone's wall for their birthdays. (I'm ranting).

Anyways, I promise (well, maybe not promise, that's kind of a strong word) that I'll be writing a little more on here now that my computer is ok.

I’m FINALLY in my last semester of semi-full-time undergraduate studenthood (it’s looking like I may need one more elective next semester to completely finish). I’m looking forward to finally being done my degree so I can go on to grad school. I’m for sure applying to University of Toronto, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, University of British Colombia and UC Berkeley.

J and I are actually going out to Toronto this weekend to check out the city some (we’ve never been there before) so there should be some more posts and photos about that.

This wasn’t a very good post. I apologize. I’m rusty.

mmmm. Crisitunity.

2007-08-06T17:06:00.000-04:00

So, I've got to make this a pretty quick post, but I wanted to react to something that Driver 2165 said on his blog regarding the recent 35W bridge collapse in Mpls:
"Unfortunately they're going to rebuild it as a freeway. It's not like when the Embarcadero and the Central Freeway in San Francisco collapsed twenty years ago; they were able to scrap those unnecessary freeways and turn them into functional streets and public space."

Responding to that comment, Bill said:
"I love the freeway removal project in S.F. I was there this spring, and walking around down by the embarcadero is so lovely now. It's almost impossible to imagine a raised interstate existing there."
and I responded as well that if people are interested they should mobilize to do something different (like in SF, BOS, Portland, ect).

Ryan responded (and in some ways I agree with him):
"I don't think there's anything that can be done regarding the freeway. It's still freeway on both sides of the river, and you can't really connect that with with anything other than a freeway bridge. San Fran lost the whole highway, not just a 300 foot long bridge."

I did want to point out the other possibilities though. For example, what if 280 was renumbered 35W and widened slightly:

This would eliminate what seems to be a fairly redundant highway anyways. 35W from the south would still feed commuters to downtown, and from the north there is still 280 or 94. The major benefit would be the improved movement between neighborhoods like four corners and downtown and generally between the university and northeast and north mpls. And unlike the current alignment, which severs neighborhoods, 280 runs through mostly industrial land. It would also be a possibility to keep a little of the current 35W on the northside to serve that industrial park.

These are just thoughts of course, but I would hope that if this sort of thing is something that Minneapolitans want that they would speak up instead of being bullied by the status quo.

2007-07-30T19:17:00.000-04:00

So, awhile ago I wrote about my annoyance that the Guthrie Theater got torn down. As I see it, we are entering a pretty dangerous era for Modern Architecture. It’s just nearing the age at which it can be put on preservation lists but many people currently see it as being so common (or so ugly) that it really doesn’t matter. I think it does.

Anyway, I’m taking a grantwriting course this summer and had to pick a topic to write a fictional grant about. I decided to do a grant relating to the preservation of Boston City Hall. Well, after a bit of research, it’s come to my attention that there are no groups in Boston, and very few in the country, that are working on preservation issues relating to Modern Architecture. So here’s the deal: I’m thinking of actually starting one.

I figure that we could start by trying to learn the process using City Hall and then, if we’re successful there (or even if we aren’t) move on to identify other Modern buildings that should be put on lists and work to get them there.

I don’t want to do this alone, so I’m looking for people who are good with research, photography, graphic design, web design, handing out money, ect., who might be willing to partner with me on this. If anyone is interested, please pop me an e-mail.

Half-past Fifty-Second Street

2007-07-05T17:05:00.001-04:00

I'm not really much on repeating things from other people's blogs, but I found this on bldgblog and it seemed cool enough to repeat:

"As it happens, then, Manhattan's mathematically rational street grid is actually rotated 29º off the north-south axis – and this angle has interesting astronomical side-effects... because of the off-center orientation of Manhattan's street grid, you can only see the setting sun "down the middle of any crosstown street" on two specific days of the year: May 28 and July 13. July 13 is, of course, next week – so watch out for it."

This reminds me of both Aztec and Khmer city building, in which cities actually functioned as giant calenders.

If I were in New York, I think I'd throw some kind of party.

2007-06-26T11:10:00.000-04:00

Schmap used another one of my photos for their new Harlem guide (I've also contributed to thier Newport, Rhode Island guide). They are pretty neat looking free downloadable travel guides. Of course they don't have a Mac reader yet, so they aren't much use to me, but if you are a PC user or are travelling later then July of this year, you should check them out.

2007-06-14T13:22:00.000-04:00

So, apparently a Boston Blog-News aggregator thingy called Universal Hub has been picking up my blog lately. Not as cool as my buddy's best Minneapolis blog of the year in 2005, but still enough to amuse me. I shall be adding a link.

I've been taking a Transportation History class this semester (actually, it probably should be called Tangents Relating to Transportation History) and have come up with several amusing anecdotes for your enjoyment:

- You know how the Green Line takes a really tight turn between Boylston and Arlington? That's because there is a cemetery above the tunnel. They wanted to disturb as few bodies as possible when they were building it. Of course, this really freaked people out, so they used to have priest come down a bless the tunnel every now and then and they even used to whitewash the walls so that ghosts wouldn't have anywhere to hide.

- America didn't start having timezones until November 18, 1883. Before that, noon was whenever the sun was directly overhead (so Noon in Manhattan was 12:01 in Brooklyn and 11:59 in Jersey City). They railroads needed a way to regulate the train schedules so they pushed it through. Of course the Christian Fundamentalists of the time had a problem (surprise, surprise) with us not using "God's Time" so it wasn't made official until 1918 (way to go guys!)

- The first year that gas prices averaged around $1 per gallon was 1973. The last year that they did was in 1999. During the same time, the cost of a new car when from about $2000 to about $18,000 and the average cost of a house went from about $40,000 to about $250,000. So if anything, gas prices are way below inflation. Let's stop whining, huh?

- During the height of the construction of the Interstate, there was a plan in California to vaporise up a mountain with 22 atomic bombs so that they wouldn't have to tunnel through. The Kennedy Administration was on board because they wanted to demonstrate the peaceful uses of atomic weapons. Of course, they still didn't really understand radiation at the time, and if they had done it, Phoenix would probably still be uninhabitable.

2007-06-12T12:59:00.000-04:00

The summer is always a little bit of a weird time in Boston. Since there are so many students here, a lot of the leases for apartments turn over in the summer, so neighborhoods tend to have a big change over of residents all of the sudden instead of just a little bit at a time. Every year that we've lived in Eastie (we'll be starting our 4th in August) we've noticed a big change demographically about this time of year, and this year is no different. What is a bit strange is that it seems like the commercial scene of the neighborhood is catching up to the residential: that's right, Eastie now has it's first yuppie coffee shop.

Not that I'm complaining. Coming from a cold northern city, one of my biggest complaints about Boston is the complete lack of coffee shops that aren't Dunkin' Donuts. But is it kind of funny to have a place that is always full of hipster white kids in the middle of Eastie. Especially one that names their paninis after large condo complexes. I guess for me it's just a case of the first gentrifiers complaining about everybody who comes after them. It's like when you are a punk in high school and all of the little junior high punks kind of piss you off.

The other major change in the neighborhood is the two new parks (Memorial and Bremen St.) that just opened. From a planners perspective, it's amazing to see. The parks were created from unused industrial sites, one was a rail bed and the other a parking lot if I'm not mistaken. Both of the parks were pretty much completely full from the day they opened. It's one of those cases where you can really see that there was a need in the neighborhood that has now been filled. Plus it cuts a few minutes off of my walk to work, so that's a bonus as well.

Overall, it's been a pretty interesting process to watch in East Boston, but so far, I don't feel like the new people moving into the neighborhood have been displacing many old residents (at least not ones who didn't want to go). Rents have stayed pretty stable. But I kind of feel like this year we might be hitting a tipping point where the process is going to accelerate. It'll be interesting to see what happens next.

Inside/Outside

2007-06-07T13:23:00.000-04:00

There is a pretty interesting article by architectural critic Philip Nobel in the newest Metropolis about the ICA in Boston (which I've also posted about before).

the ica when it was under construction

Now, obviously a critic is paid to be critical, so the article is a little down on the building. His biggest complaint seems to be about the way the building relates to its surroundings, which is a valid complaint considering the building is currently surrounding by nothing. It is a little silly though to complain about planning when there is already a plan in place and beginning construction.

Generally though, what I get from Nobel is that he's unhappy with the way the building is oriented. It turns it's back to the city, with it's harbor-side being the photogenic part and the interior most of its most interesting (architectural, philosophically) feature.

So here's my question: Is it important for every building to relate at street level to the city? Can some buildings work better (especially symbolically) relating at a skyline (or seashore) level? And, for a public building like a museum, is the interior (which, in the ICA, is an intense experience) perhaps the more important feature?

I'd love to hear ideas. For pictures of the museum check out my previous post on the subject or my flickr account.

**** I happened upon this quote today from the architect (Ricardo Scofidio) and thought it was pretty interesting:

"We began the project with the assumption that architecture would neither compete with the art nor be a neutral backdrop. It had to be a creative partner. The first step was to reconcile the paradox: the museum wanted to turn inward; the site wanted to turn the building outward. The building had to have double vision."

Physical Politics

2007-05-27T14:09:00.000-04:00

Before I get into the meat of what I actually wanted to post about, I have a couple of quick things that are off topic. First, J actually has gotten around to posting a couple of times about Thailand, so you should all really go and read those. Second, In the last few days, I've read Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood twice, and I pretty sure it's on it's way to being my favorite book (I need to wait a couple of weeks to see how it weathers to say for sure), so everyone should really read it. Now on to what I really wanted to post about:

I've been withholding my judgement on what I think about Menino's new plan to move the City Hall to the Fort Point waterfront. Mostly, I've been waiting to see if it's just Menino saying something so it looks like he has opinions or if it's something that could actually happen. Well, a few months have passed now and it seems that people haven't forgotten about it, so I figured it's finally time for my grand opinion to come out. So here's what I think... I'm in favor of it, but only if the old building is preserved. I know what you're thinking. Most everyone who has come out in favor of moving the City Hall have done so emphatically and loudly because the city would knock down the old building, and as a student of planning in Boston I obviously have heard (and participated in) numerous bashing sessions against the Government Plaza (which has actually been named one of the worst public spaces in the world, not just the US, the world). I am not, however, one of those people who is unable to resolve the apparent contradiction between hating Modernist planning and loving Modernist architecture. They simply aren't the same thing to me.

So let me try to explain my position. First though, I have to get into some of my general beliefs about cities and architecture. I believe pretty strongly the ideology and social beliefs shape the physical environment. And that goes beyond the obvious cases like Washington, DC being a symbolic tie to classical democracy, for example. Rather, I think pretty much everything is shaped by those forces. What I really mean by this is that I think that, instead of writing the history of the city from the perspective of the forces that shaped it, I think you can "read" the physical fabric of the city and figure out the forces that constructed them.

Let me give some brief examples from Boston. If you look at the earliest colonial maps of the city, most people note how random the layout appears. Especially when you compare it to other contemporary cities, like Utopian Philadelphia or Charleston, SC, you are really struck by how strange Boston is. This probably reflects a high value on individualism in the colony (or maybe not individualism, but rather a general distrust of government). If you look a little further, you'll also notice that the city was lacking in a defined hierarchy of spaces. There are various small squares spread throughout the city, not one central one. Important buildings (churches, government ect) are scattered throughout the city. This is what I call a centrifugal city. If you look culturally at Boston now, you'll still see the social leftovers of this beginning. For example, New Englanders still really, really distrust government. Look at Christy Mihos' (from the perspective of an outsider) completely insane campaign for governor last year. The man's main point was that he was just going to do whatever the hell he wanted but at least he wasn't with a party and people still voted for him. I really don't think there is anywhere by New England where a campaign like that would get a second thought.

Another good example is the creation of the Back Bay in the early to mid nineteenth century. By that time, the randomness of Boston's streets had stopped symbolising individual opportunity and instead were understood as symbolic of the disorder of immigration and Catholicism. What the Anglo-Protestants created for themselves in the Back Bay, by comparison, is the epitome of logic, order and cleanliness. When you look at a map of Boston, you can tell by the fact that that is the only part of the city which is on a grid that there is something different about that neighborhood, both socially and spatially (especially since the Mass Pike cut through and started serving as a "city wall" to protect the Back Bay from the neighborhoods to the south: the South End and Roxbury).

So back to my point: why do I think moving the City Hall is a good idea and why do I think the old one should be preserved? I think the City Hall is also, symbolically, important to Boston's history. It represents the period of authoritarian Boston, when the West End disappeared and the city fell apart over busing and in the worst period of public housing. The building itself, with its brutallist facade raising fortress like over the windswept no-man's land of Government Plaza is a fitting memorial to all of the people who lost their homes or lived in poverty during this period. To remove it would be to give up or gloss over this period of Boston's history, and I think that's wrong. I think we need the building there to remind us what urban governance in the second half of the twentieth century was like. We need to remember Boston's dark age. My personal hope would be something like a Museum of the West End (how cool could that be, with so many residents still living who could contribute), Museum of Boston History, Museum of "Urban Renewal" or something like that. The square itself could still be redeveloped, but with building still intact.

But that doesn't mean that we need to keep the functions of our government there. To me, the movement to the waterfront makes perfect sense in our new post-industrial city. It symbolizes the democratization of space that has come with deindustrialization, namely, the fact that we've now regained the waterfront from its former industrial uses for uses of public space and recreation. Now, there are still a lot of questions that need to be addressed to make sure that the City Hall actually would be public space. For example, transit would need to improve to make sure that everyone can get there. But that's maybe for another post. For me, the idea of a waterfront City Hall perfectly fits into Boston's vision for the future, one that, hopefully, will be a whole lot more participatory then the past.

Advertising a la Montreal

2007-05-21T10:53:00.000-04:00

I commented in my last post that the tourist agency for Montreal had put up a billboard outside my window last week. It turns out that that was just the tip of the iceberg. Walking around the city last weekend, I found myself overwhelmed by advertising for Montreal. They actually have street teams out talking to people (and by the accents, I would say they were probably actually Quebecois). There is a little movie theater set up at Feneuil Hall (I would have taken pictures, but the camera is with J in Thailand) and one of the street walker guys had a cool backpack thing that supported a flat screen TV over his head. All around this seems like a huge investment from Montreal's tourism board.

This isn't the first advertising campaign that I've seen in the city for another city. Philadelphia and Quebec both have adds sometimes and Berlin did for a summer too (which I think is because Boston buys its street furniture from a Berliner company, Wall), but this is by far the most intense campaign I've seen. It's really got me thinking about the nature of tourism today.

I guess it's no surprise that urban space is being commoditized (that's what Disneyland is, isn't it?), but it seems like it's reaching new levels. It's almost like cities are being repackaged as baseball cards. You're given a quick and easy view of what's different about that particular one and then you can move on a collect the rest (I know I'm guilty of that). Why else would things like this exist:

create your own visited countries map

I'm not really sure where I'm going with all this, but it really does raise some questions for me. First of all, is this kind of advertising really good for a city? It's marketing something that is created by a huge group of people (all of the citizens of the city) but obviously the most tangible benefits only accrue to a small group. How can the city even gauge what kind of an effect this advertising has? And lastly, I can understand why a city like Philly, which has had some tough years, might need to advertise (by the way, Philly's "City of Brotherly Love" adds in gay neighborhoods around the country were pure genius), but why do cities like Berlin and Montreal, who have been at the top of the quality of life reports for years, have fairly strong economies and well-known cultural contributions need to do this kind of advertising?

2007-05-17T18:57:00.000-04:00

Having missed posting for so long, I'm now in the awkward position of having too many things to say. What that means to you, the reader, is that I am going to say to much. You will read the first paragraph or two get bored and stop. Next time you see me, you will ask me about something that I wrote here, and I will look at you confused, since you should have already read it here. Or you will read the whole thing, so as not to antagonize me now that I have warned you. Which puts the pressure back on me (I said I had things to say... not that they are interesting). Also, I've been reading Haruki Murakami lately. If you read him too you'll probably have more idea what I'm talking about. Especially if you like metaphysical sheep.

I digress. The most important news is that J graduated:

She made it through with a 4.0 and got first in her class (Northeastern calls them Class Marshalls). Her parents and brother were out and a good time was had by all.

We took of the next day for a few days in NYC with her parents, who had never been there before.

Followed by a few days in Philly, just the two of us.

More on that later...

During the time away, i was still finishing up the semester. I just finished the last of my thesis on Monday. I'm so tired of thinking about Montreal... hence all of the novel reading that's been going on the last week. I'm really liking both Murakami and Jonathan Lethem. I'm reading The Fortress of Solitude right now. It's about growing up in Brooklyn, but it really reminds me of growing up on my block in South Minneapolis (yes, I realize that mpls is a poor excuse for a real city). The way the kids roam the streets and have a world that the grownups don't really see resonates my childhood. In his world it's all out on the street, in mine it was up and down the alley, but still. There was just a section where the main guy got his bike stolen. I felt some pain for my awesome red bike that disappeared. sigh. (As an aside, the day I finished my paper on Montreal, Tourism Montreal put up a giant billboard directly outside of my kitchen window.)

On Sunday, J flew off to Thailand to work with an NGO for a month (after which she'll be visiting "family" in Ho Chi Minh City for a couple of weeks). She promised to resurrect her blog, so look out for that. I've talked to her once since she got there. So far she's lived through a small earthquake (which she said was probably God's wrath upon the earth for allowing Jerry Falwell to die, which is impeccable logic that the would have done the old man proud).

So, back to Philadelphia. What a cool city. As one of my friends at work said, it's like something halfway between Boston and New York. It's got the oldness and the row houses of Boston but the big city feel and ghettoness of New York (or at least that I'm told NY used to have before Giuliani had all the poor people sent to Siberia or whatever the hell he did with them). I really like a city that has a little bit of edge. Both Boston and New York are a little too clean. I like having some great graffiti and street art around:

Yeah, I gots work ethic too, boy.
There was also a dude who did these incredible mural things all over the place. This is his "garden":

And here's a couple of his buildings:

No way you'd see that in Boston. Menino would have it re-facaded with red brick before you could say wicked.

We went to a Phillies - Cubs game, which was awesome. Great stadium. Ryan, don't worry about those wide concourses. If they do it right it'll be great. At Citizen's Bank Park, everything was just kind of open, so you could get your Hot Dog (or Cheesesteak) and still watch the game. And if you felt like it, you could stand there with your beer and watch from wherever you feel like. Also, the Fanatic could beat TC to a bloody pulp.

Also on the enjoyable list: The Institute of Contemporary Art at UPenn with J's friend Nicole and the crazy security guard lady. Oh, oh, and cell phone audio tours!!! What a great idea. And so democratic. And the theater where we saw Lookinglass Alice.

Horrible transit though. It's not good when your subway is creepier in the daytime then the streets are at night.

Anyways, I'm rambling, and no one really cares.

Last thing, I promise. I ran into James Howard Kunstler at work yesterday. He wroteGeography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency both of which I highly recommend. What an interesting guy. He said he's now writing a dystopian novel about the post-oil world.

Well, that's it. Congratulations for those who made it.

2007-04-30T21:22:00.000-04:00

One class down... unfortunatly, it was the one I liked the most.

Here are some perspectives from my final project. Last semester I did a master plan for a chunk of land overlooking the harbor in Boston for a final group project, so this semester I actually did a design for one of the buildings that we had called for.

Spring Cleaning

2007-04-22T15:02:00.000-04:00

Hey, I figured out enough html to change my header! Now I'm not exactly the same as several million other blogs! yeah!

On top of that, I've done a little other rearranging. All of the people I actually know are under Friends Blogs now (democratically arranged in alphabetical order) and I made a bigger section of planning and design blogs including several internet people I know and read a lot (like Urban Compass from Springfield Mass or BldgBlog from California) and some Magazines I like (like Next American City and Dwell).

I've still got the five books that I've most recently read or am reading (which does not equal a recommendation) and then I added my tags so that the blog is easier to search.

I do this stuff when I'm putting off writing papers.

Baridi Night African Refugee Art and Photography Exhibit

2007-04-20T11:46:00.000-04:00

This is very late notice I know, but one of J's friends used to work at a refugee camp in Zambia. While there, she set up an arts center for the camp. 2 years later, it's still running. Tomorrow (Saturday) there is going to be an exhibit of photographs and artwork taken/made by children from the camp. Some of the stuff will be for sale (at very good prices) to benifit refugees in Africa.

The show is from 1 to 5 at the sacred space at Northeastern University (On the 2nd Floor of Ell Hall, 260 Huntington Ave).

The photos will be for sale for $10. You do have to have a student ID to attend.

2007-04-19T19:34:00.000-04:00

So, here's a question... is it possible to get yourself into Wikipedia?

Anyway. J and I got to go see Glenn Murcutt last night at MIT. He's an Australian architect that won the Pritzker Prize a couple years back. He does pretty amazing stuff with natural ventilation and renewable resourses and sustainable building practices and so on. It was a pretty interesting lecture, although the combo of the Australian accent and trying to get through 6 projects in an hour made it a little difficult to follow. I wish I could throw some photos up, but my flickr doesn't seem to be working.

J and I finally got all of our travel arrangments worked out following her upcoming graduation. We will for sure be in NY from 6-9 May and Philadelphia from 9-12 May (Phillies/Cubs, yeah!) if anyone wants to get together. J leaves for Thailand on the 13th. She'll be in Vietnam and Myanmar for sure too and might throw in a side trip to KL or Singapore. I think I may also be in Mpls for a weekend in June for my brothers graduation.

And speaking of Phillies/Cubs: One of J's professors, Alan Klein, does research on the anthropology of baseball. I just read his book Growing the Game, which is about Baseball and globalization. It was really interesting. I'd highly recomend it for all the baseballers out there. He's also got a book on Baseball in the Dominican Republic and one on a team that plays in both Loredo and Nuevo Loredo that I'm planning on picking up.

Just three more weeks/two papers/one building away from the end of the semester!

2007-04-02T13:50:00.000-04:00

One would think the semester should be winding down, but it seems like I've still got a ton of stuff due. I just spent all morning working on this project for my architecture class:

now I've got to build that out of wood. Not that I don't love doing that, but it's still going to be time consuming.

On top of all that, I'm starting to look seriously at which grad schools I'm going to apply to. Right now, I think it's going to be CCNY, Pratt Institute, Columbia, McGill, U of Toronto, University of British Columbia, MIT and Harvard Design. I'm still considering throwing UCLA in there (I'm not really excited about living in LA, but they've got a great program). I'm really looking for somewhere that is really strong in design. If anyone out there has any other suggestions I should look out for, please comment. J has pretty much decided that she's going to work for a few years instead of applying right away, so I'll really get to concentrate on school for my masters.

Anyway. J is graduating in a little over a month! I think she's only got three more weeks of actual classes. She's had one interview already for work after school, although she's going to be leading a student trip to the "golden triangle" (that's where Laos, Thailand and Myanmar meet) for a month and then for two weeks in Ho Chi Minh City to visit her "family" there before she starts working.

So yeah, that's about it for us. We're going to be in NYC for a couple days at the beginning of May and then either in New Mexico or Cascadia for a week after that if anybody wants to get together.

btw. I'm watching the Braves and Phillies right now. It makes me really happy that baseball is back... but at the same time, it's a little sad that I live in a city where it's too expensive to actually go the the games. What happened to baseball for the people man?

2007-03-20T17:18:00.000-04:00

I guess if your computer has to freak out on you, spring break is the time to do it. For some unknow reason, my poor laptop is freezing up after about 20 minutes. The guy at the Mac Store says it's probably software related, so I've been frantically trying to transfer all of my important files to J's computer before I send it into the shop.

Anyway. I've been wanting to write for awhile, but haven't been able to because of the whole crappy computer situation.

We had a good spring break. We went up to Montréal, which is fast becoming one of our favorite places around.

It was a bit cold, but I also had some research to do for my thesis at Quebec's National Archives, so it worked out fine. We got to see some cool Architecture, including the Archives (that's the Bibliothèque et archives nationales de Québec for the Francophones out there), which were designed by Patkau Architects out of Vancouver and Menkes Shooner Dagenais Letourneux from Montréal:

Moshe Safdie's awesome Habitat 67, which he designed at 24 for his Master's Thesis:

and The American Pavilion from Expo 67, designed by notable ecentric Buckminster Fuller and architect Shoji Sadao:

We also got one nice day and were able to take some nice walks around Parc du Mont Royal and Parc Jean Drapeau.

We took a day to go to Ottawa too, which was fun. J is taking an anthropology of travel class and she needs to write her final paper on her spring break travel, so she got some good stuff about cultural identity in the capital.

I'm using J's computer now and she's got some papers to write so I'll have to write more later.

Where We'll Be and When...

2007-03-06T16:32:00.000-05:00

...get your dance cards ready...

March 8-11

May 6-8

May 15-June 15

...with more to come...

The Institute of Contemporary Arts - Boston A Photographic Essay

2007-03-02T13:56:00.001-05:00

Guthrie Theater (1962-2007)

2007-02-05T14:58:00.000-05:00

Photo by: Paytonc
I didn't get time to write much about my recent short trip to Minneapolis last month. I did, however, want to write about disappointed I am that they ended up tearing down the old Guthrie Theater. It's beyond my comprehension that a building that some architecture historians said was one of the 500 most important buildings in America in 1996 would be knocked down just ten years later.

To me, this really shows that we are entering into a time when a lot of great modern architecture is in danger. They aren't quite old enough to be considered historical by the preservation people. The Guthrie, for example, was built in 1962, which means it was just five years short of the fifty years that a building generally needs to be called historic. Additionally, a lot of people don't see anything important about the modern style itself. A few years ago when I was talking about the need to save the Guthrie, my father-in-law commented that it was just a glass and steel box. I realize that there is probably some greater meaning here about modern architecture's failure to connect to the masses or something, but still.

Ralph Rapson and Associates built the Guthrie in 1962. Rapson held his practice in Minneapolis and was head of the University of Minnesota Architecture School. Before that he also ran the New Bauhaus in Chicago and had studied under Eliel Saarinen. His two most important buildings were in Minneapolis. The first was the Guthrie, the second Cedar-Riverside housing complex.

Unfortunately, one of those buildings is now gone. He also designed the US embassies in Sweden and Denmark.

To me this is an important reminder that we (architecture and design students or enthusiasts) need to stay on top of this kind of stuff. The current endangered building in Boston: City Hall. But more on that later.

2007-02-01T17:31:00.000-05:00

We just got these in at work and they're pretty neat. They're little travel guides from Phaidon and Wallpaper Magazine that focus on deisgn and architecture stuff (much like Wallpaper itself). They're pretty cheap, too.

Not quite as cool as the new Moleskine Travel Journal, but what is?

2007-01-29T14:25:00.000-05:00

So, the semester has had kind of a slow start so far, but I'm finally getting into the swing of things. I'm taking Principles of Design at Wentworth, which is great. I was just starting to get comfortable in 2D, so of course we are jumping right into building 3D stuff. I've been using SketchUp a lot for computer modelling, but I still have to put this together in real life. Should be pretty cool though. I really enjoy it.

I've been doing plenty of reading to begin working on the thesis. I'm thinking I'm going to start writing as soon as possible. I've heard from a few people that that is the way to go. I have done one other paper that was this length, so it's not the worst. I've been looking forward to it for quite awhile.

In other news, I finally switched to New Blogger. I kind of like the labelling thingy, but I'm not happy about having to have a Google ID. Whatever. This isn't really interesting. I just felt like writing. Yeah.

Oscar Time Again

2007-01-23T19:57:00.000-05:00

J and I are pretty big film buffs. We see almost a movie every week or two most of the time. For the past three or four years, we've been trying to see all of the films that get major Oscar nominations before the awards, and typically, it seems like we've got a ton still to see once the nominations come out. As an aside, I know there are probably people out there that are rolling their eyes about the oscars... yes, I know that they are over commercialized, and that there are other good films out there. Personally, I see the commercial aspect of film making one of the artistic challenges that needs to be overcome. It's like architecture; there is an artist in there, but he has to wait for someone to foot the bill, and his work is always molded by commercial concerns. It's just part of the nature of the art.

Anyway, usually we've got a lot to see, but this year we did really well in advance. I think it helps that there were a lot of really good movies this year, while last year kinda sucked a little. The Departed, Little Miss Sunshine, An Inconvenient Truth, Notes on a Scandal, Pan's Labyrinth, Babel, Children of Men, Last King of Scotland and Blood Diamond were all really good. oh yeah, and Borat...

My personal favorites were Children of Men, Pan's Labyrinth and Babel (all of which were Latino directors by the way). But really anyone of those ones I just named could probably be Best Picture in a less competitive year.

Letters From Iwo Jima was a little disappointing. I think I built it up too much. And Streep is always a good actress, but I didn't really feel that there was anything at all Oscar worthy about Devil Wears Prada. I would have liked to have seen the little girl from Pan's Labyrinth (Ivana Baquero) on that list.

We still need to see Volver, Little Children and the Queen for sure. I'd also like to see more of the foreign ones (especially the German one and the Canadian/Indian one) and the documentaries (although I don't think I can watch Jesus Camp, to close to home).

2007-01-22T11:30:00.000-05:00

This is the Phoenix' recent article on the 27 worst things about Boston. Some I agree with, some I don't. My favorite on their list: DEEP-SEATED PAROCHIALISM! My favorite not on their list: 3 non-corporate coffee shops for a city of 600,000. And only one has free wireless. Grrr.

2007-01-18T21:43:00.000-05:00

Oh, thank god. Dwight is still around. I think I lost sleep over it last week.

2007-01-17T21:21:00.000-05:00

Though I suppose that there are probably very few people who read this who wouldn't know about this already, I just wanted to point out that my friend Luke just put up a new website featuring his work as a painter and that he has a show coming up in Mpls.

One of the things that I really love about being friends with so many really talented people is how much you can really understand about them from the type of work they do. I think that art, especially visual art, gives you a chance to see things from another persons perspective in a really interesting way. To put it another way, I think that every person sees and understands the world in a different way. Visual art gives you a chance to see the world that others see.

For example, Brother James sees nature in a way that I've never been able to. His landscape photos show something that I wouldn't have see even if I were there...

Likewise, J's photos capture people in ways that I never see them...

Luke's portraits, most of which are of people I know, show people in a very beautiful, very organic sort of light. When I spend time looking at them, I feel like I'm getting a very different view of people that I've know for a very long time, which isn't something you get to do every day.

Hopefully others enjoy them as much.

Marxist Humor

2007-01-14T14:45:00.000-05:00

2006-12-21T20:46:00.000-05:00

The Best Architecture, Planning and Urban Affairs books of 2006

I put a lot of thought into the order of this list, but please remember that it reflects my personal interests as much as overall goodness of the book.

Urban Nightmares: The Media, The Right, And The Moral Panic Over The City by Steve Macek
This is my overall favorite of the year. It rocks (and it's U of M press). Macek takes a long look at film, advertising and the media and the portrayal of the city, as well as the way that the right has used those ideas to gain power in the suburbs over the past 50 years by creating an us vs. them that left the perception of urban dwellers as being poor, non-white, and immoral. One of the books strengths is how often it lets the right speak for itself. Like the wonderful suggestion that we must, "abridge to an appropriate degree the freedom" of urban dwellers. Wonderful stuff.

The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War by Robert Beven
This is also a fantastic book. It's about the targeting of architecture during episodes of ethnic cleansing. There are big sections on Nazi Germany, the Balkans, Israel/Palestine, and Iraq. My thesis work is going to be on the ways that planning and architecture can reflect and promote national identity. Well, this is the dark side. Mosques into churches. Priceless works of art destroyed along with civilian populations. History physically erased.

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis
Mike Davis is one of my favorites and this is a great topic. Davis has to be one of the most intelligent people writing now. The shear amount of information can be overwhelming at times, but at the same time it isn't a difficult read. In this book, he examines the growth of informal housing throughout the world (and for those who think this is a third world problem, there are areas of the US that have ever growing shantytowns) and some of the responses to the problem from groups like UNHabitat or economists like DeSoto.

Cities by John Reader
Reader presents the history of cities from a natural perspective, which is really quite fascinating. He also addresses the whole chicken and egg problem of urban development in a very good way. Did cities begin because people started producing agricultural surpluses or did people start producing agricultural surpluses because cities developed? Reader makes the case that archeological evidence seems to say that people grouped together first and foremost of religious and defensive reasons and developed agriculture to support that arrangement.

The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup
Now, a six-hundred plus page book on parking is not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but if you are interested, this book is interested. It's really pretty amazing how a seemingly little public policy decision like parking minimums shape so much of our physical world. This book has given rise to a whole generation of "Shoupistas," so hopefully we'll see a lot of local policy changes in the near future. This is one area where planners can really take the lead.

Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities of the 21st Century by Leonie Sandercock
Sandercock teaches at UBC now, but she's spent a long career throughout Australia and Canada studying the post-colonial city. This book is about the 21st century city, which, to her, means the diverse city, the demilitarized city, and above all, "I don't want a city where my profession - urban planning... act(s) as spatial police, regulating bodies in space..." Sandercock is also married to John Friedman, who wrote Planning in the Public Domain, which is also awesome.

Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster by Eric Michael Dyson
As promised, one more book on Katrina. Dyson's book has wonderful statistics on rates of car ownership and access to automobiles, a great timeline and some wonderful thoughts on Kanye West's "George Bush doesn't care about black people" comment. Dyson suggests that it didn't mean that Bush personally doesn't care about individual black people but rather that the Republican Party as a whole has written off the possibility of winning Black votes and therefore directs it's aid toward people who may vote for them and in that way collectively doesn't care.

Runner-up books worth reading:
The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful Shape the World by Deyan Sudjic
The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton
Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Post-Industrial City by Richard Lloyd

The Best History Books of 2006

2006-12-17T22:01:00.000-05:00

Back to the Lists. I think I've got two more in me.

List Three:

The Best History Books of 2006
And again, it's a little hard to nail down dates sometime, but I think all of these came out in either hardcover or paperback this year.

Finding George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin
I read this book all the way through in one sitting (an airplane ride actually). The author (I think it's just a pen name) travels through Burma (Myanmar) in search of locations associated with George Orwell's time there. Orwell was born in Burma and his first novel was set there (Burmese Days). She also makes interesting comparisons between the current government and the books 1984 and Animal Farm. It's a quick read but very moving.

Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins
This was the Pulitzer Prize winner in Non-Fiction this year. I always try to read the Pulitzers, as they tend to be so well written. It was a major bonus this year that it also happened to be about Africa. Although it's about the time period of the Mau-Mau insurgency in Kenya, it focuses much more on the lives of the people who weren't fighting. Basically, since all the men were fighting, the British rounded up all of the women and children and placed them in horrible camps where torture, rape and death were daily occurrences. Many of the same ideas (and people) were involved in similar projects with the British in Malaysia and the Americans in Vietnam. It's an excellent academic study, but also manages to be readable and emotional.

A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland by John Mac Faragher
In keeping with the Ethnic Cleansing theme, I spent a lot of time in French Canada this year and also did a lot of reading about Canada's French speaking peoples, the Quebecois, the Metis (the French-Indian living in the west), and the Acadians, who originally lived around the Bay of Fundy (today's New Brunswick and Nova Scotia) but were expelled by the governors of Massachusetts and Nova Scotia just before the American Revolution. This is the story of the expulsion. Like most Ethnic Cleansers, the perpetrators of this crime kept excellent records (in their minds to show the justice of their actions).

The Acadians: In Search of a Homeland by James Laxer
This book, which has only been published in Canada so far, tells the next part of the story. It shows how the Acadians scattered to become Louisiana's Cajuns as well as reconstituted in northern New Brunswick to become a political force there. It's a pretty fascinating look at how a people group can survive culturally without a homeland (kind of like the Latinos in Aztlan?) Hopefully an American publisher will pick it up.

The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker by Mary Fulbrook
I have to admit that I haven't finished this one yet, but it's been really good so far, so I had to add it to the list. Fulbrook is a sociologist from the London School of Economics. While discussing the DDR with many of her students who had grown up there, she found that it didn't fit her ideas of what Communist dictatorship was supposed to be. She gives the idea that we need to look more closely at how power was actually used instead of just using terms like Democratic or Authoritarian. Basically, she thinks that the DDR was what she has termed Participatory Authoritarianism, which basically means that although there was an authoritarian power structure, people were still active in decision making, especially at the local level.

Pol Pot by Phillip Short
I also read a lot this year about Southeast Asia, but most of the books were pretty classic. This is the only one that was actually published recently. Short does a very good job of telling the story of the Khmer Rouge leader and also has a very interesting idea that some of the responsibility for the Khmer Rouge period belongs on the shoulders of the French education system and the way that they still unflinchingly teach that the blood and gore of the French Revolution (which, as a percentage of population was actually the bloodiest revolution in history, far more then the Russian, Chinese or even Cambodian) was necessary for the creation of modern France.

The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself by Philip Fradkin
I read this one for my Urban Disaster class last summer. When I recommend it to people at work, I always tell that that if you want to understand what happened in New Orleans, this book is the best place to start. It shows, in great detail, how disasters effect the poor unevenly and how minorities are often mistreated and left out of disaster recovery. It was quite shocking how little things have changed between 1906 and 2005. There will be more on Katrina in the next list.

The Final List: Architecture, Planning and Urban Studies

Translating Green: A Design Manifesto

2006-12-14T17:51:00.000-05:00

The cities of America are finally growing again. Suburbanites and Immigrants, no longer afraid of images of grime, poverty and Law and Orderesqe crimes that lurk around every corner, are refilling long dormant streets. With them have come new demands for planners and architects. It seems that everywhere people are calling for Green. Perhaps a problem of vocabulary, it seems that Green has become the lowest common denominator in design. Whenever a project gets bogged down, Green is the only thing that can be agreed upon. As trained professionals, we should not get trapped into providing Green without thought to what the public means. Because the public lacks the words to explain what they seek, we must translate what the people are asking for when they ask for Green.

The first, and perhaps most important, possible translation of Green is that of creating sustainable, ecological cities. Planners have a responsibility to think of long-term benefits and detriments of development. Developers, with their focus on money, and politicians, with their short-term focus on the next election, cannot be trusted to look out for the city in this way. At the same time, when the people ask for Green, few of them are probably aware of the long-term ecological consequences of development. A lush park in Phoenix, while Green/color, would be very unlikely to be Green/sustainable. Thus, providing Green/color in much of the water-hungry southwest, for example, is contradictory to the goal of providing Green/sustainability.

This leads to the second possible translation. Green could (and often probably does) mean literal Green. I believe that these Green requests often come from the people in the city who are most enamored of suburban life. The image of the front lawn creates the image of what a streetscape should look like to these urban dwellers.

We must then try to examine what the front yard provides suburban localities. The front yard serves as a buffer between the public realm (the street) and the private (the home). In the best of cases, the yard, along with the front porch, would serve as a sort of semi-public (or semi-private) realm; however, this seldom seems to be the case anymore. The front yard may succeed aesthetically (in the eyes of the suburbanites), but it often fails to give people a meaningful connection to the streets.

If the demand for Green can be seen as a demand for further suburbanization of urban space, planners must resist it. The suburbs already exist. People can choose to live there if they want. If we turn the city into pseudo-suburb (as Jane Jacobs called it), we endanger the diversity and connection between the public and private that create the most meaningful experiences of the city.

Instead, we should concentrate on providing usable, meaningful public and semi-public spaces. In this way, we could reduce the demand for Green to a simple aesthetic preference. Providing a minimum of Green will then enable us to provide more important public spaces.

Philosopher Alain de Botton puts forward another possible translation in his 2006 book, The Architecture of Happiness. De Botton believes that calls for Green are a reactionary response to the extreme rationalization of space that has existed for the past hundred years. In his opinion, people living in the small medieval city sought refuge from nature that existed all around them and demanded a rational planning process. Today, in a world where anyone who visits a city for the first time and spends two minutes studying a map can guess that to find 6527 Third Avenue South-East means going 65 blocks from the east-west axis and three blocks from the north-south axis, people long for a bit of surprise. I believe this is also shown by the tendency of creative people to congregate in areas of gridded cities that do not follow the city’s rational pattern. Greenwich Village in New York, Wicker Park in Chicago, or Uptown or Loring Park in Minneapolis are all examples of irrational neighborhoods in rational cities that are charged with creative energy.

Translating can be a difficult task, however, it is the task that Planners are called to. We must seek to understand the vocabulary of the public and craft it into a physical language (the city) that can be deciphered by its inhabitants. In my opinion, the word Green, when uttered in public forums, can be understood in these three ways. Green = sustainability. Green = public. Green = surprise. As the understanding of language is often relative, this could never be an exhaustive list, however, I believe it is a starting off point.

Conclusion:

1. Planners should seek to increase sustainability in the city.
2. Planners should seek to increase valuable, usable public/open space in the city.
3. Planners should not hyper-rationalize space. Just like chance meetings on the street, the architecture and planning of the city should allow the city-dweller to be occasionally surprised by their surroundings.

In all of these ways, Planners can understand increased calls for Green as calls for creating livable, sustainable and interesting urban environments.

The Best Coffee Table Books of 2006

2006-12-11T15:48:00.000-05:00

OK. I know what you're all thinking. Two posts in one day? Well, that just means that I'm working (or not working) on my papers. I finished one, so now I'm working up motivation on the second. So far I've watched an episode of Friends, done a 3D model of my block in SketchUp and written this post. Next I'm writting the paper. Really.

Anyway, here is list two:

The Best Coffee Table Books of 2005-2006
There were some really great coffee table books over the past year if you are into maps. I'm expanding this list to take up about a year and a half of publishing.

Cities of the World: A History in Maps by Peter Whitfield
This is my favorite this year. It's got great historic maps of the worlds great cities, including Boston, Berlin, Saigon, Rome, ect. as well as some really cool old maps of pre-columbian Mexico City. Whitehead uses the different maps to explain the ways the cities have changed over time and how we've adapted them to modern life. Very, very cool.

The Cities Book: A Journey Through the Best Cities in the World by Lonely Planet
Lonely Planet let people vote on their favorite cities and then made a coffee table book with the results. The photographs are beautiful, plus it's fun to see how everything got rated and (since we're all list people out there) to come up with your own). My current top five (oh, my goodness it's a list within a list): Berlin, New York, Ho Chi Minh City, Montreal, Hong Kong.

Atlas Major by Peter van Krogt
This is Tachen's reprint of an atlas that was originally published in 1665. It was the top seller of the seventeenth century. It's a beautiful book and it's frankly astonishing how well mapped the world was even before GIS and Google Earth. According to Amazon it's $200, but I got my copy from Barnes and Noble as a bargain book for about $25. If you can find it, buy it.

My runners up in this catagory go the teNeues' :and guide (architecture and design) series and the travel edition of Phaidon's Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture. I find these pretty much indespensible when I travel. teNeues really needs to do a Montreal guide.

The Best Fiction of 2006

2006-12-11T11:59:00.000-05:00

So, like my bus driver buddy over at Driver2165, I'm going to break up my end of the year book lists topically. Today's teaser:

The Best Fiction of 2006!!!

Now, I'm not a huge fiction reader, so my base of books read is admittedly small for this one, but I'm going with Dave Egger's What is the What for best book of the year. Kind of like Egger's Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, What is the What is a semi-fictional biography. He worked with the main character in the book for three years and traveled with him to the Sudan in order to write the book. It's the story of one of the Lost Boys.

My runner-up is jPod by Douglas Coupland.

Enjoy.

2006-12-08T10:19:00.000-05:00

So, despite the fact that I still have three papers and a final next week it feels like pretty small fish compared to the two presentations that I had to do this week, so it really feels like school is winding down. My biggest project was the one for Urban Design where we actually had to take an actual place and design something for it. My group worked on a section of abandoned industrial waterfront property in East Boston that has a lot of promise. I'm feeling much better about actually doing drawings now, and I learned how to do 3D modeling with a great program from google called SketchUp that's great and very easy to use. After that I had a presentation on the disastrous results of off-street parking minimums in Massachusetts small towns. Both went well.

My biggest annoyance of the week is that someone from Japan stole $900 from our bank account somehow. We will, of course, get it all back, but it does take a week, plus we had to open a new account which means that we've got to change all of our direct deposits and all of our direct withdrawals and everything else. It's a big pain.

I'm also getting set for next semester already. I'm going to be taking another design class at Wentworth Institute of Technology from the same professor I had this semester and I'll be working on my Thesis. I'm going to continue the work I've done in the past at looking at the intersection of politics, architecture and planning. My major question is going to be if the movement of the Canadian Metropolis from Montreal to Toronto is one of the defining catalysts of Quebecois Nationalism. As far as I've been able to tell, no one has really looked at it that way before because Quebec usually defines it's culture as being rooted in rural tradition, but I think that it's probable that in order for a real nationalist movement to emerge it was necessary for there to be a true Quebecois metropolis to promote Quebecois culture (which is what Montreal was able to become after the Canadian Metropolis shifted to Toronto). I guess we'll find out though.

2006-12-02T09:42:00.000-05:00

Planetizen just posted the yearly list of best books on Urban issues. I've only read the Mike Davis book Planet of Slums, which was excellent and I'm looking forward to reading more, especially the ones on gentrification, roads and disaster planning.

I'm hoping to get my own end of the year list up soon too, but first I have to go through the rather complex process of trying to figure out what was published this year.

J'(coeur) Québec

2006-11-28T14:48:00.000-05:00

J and I spent a relaxing thanksgiving weekend in Québec. Wow. I'm quite simply flabbergasted that that city isn't the most popular tourist spot on the continent. If you're a big city person (as we are) you're going to like Montréal better (as we do), but still, Québec is absolutely amazing, especially for North America.

For those who aren't in the know, Québec is about 100 years older than Boston and still has the walls and gates like any feudal French city would. Beyond all of that, you get a great bang for your buck, especially during the winter. Our bed and breakfast was great and way cheaper then anything you'd find in New England.

Anyway, I have some thoughts about design and planning from up there to put into another post (although, honestly, I'm so busy with finals stuff that I probably won't get around to it) but for now, here are a few pictures.

Nine Parts of Desire

2006-11-12T14:27:00.000-05:00

J and I went to see an awesome play for her birthday last night. It's a one-woman show called Nine Parts of Desire at the Lyric Stage Company in the Back Bay. The play was written by an Iraqi-American Journalist based on her interviews with different women both in Iraq and in exile. The actress does an amazing job of changing people throughout the play. Sometimes you even felt like her face aged suddenly. It was really quite amazing. The theatre was also quite nice. It's very small and intimate. I highly recommend the show. I think they do student rush tickets for $10 or so.

It's the first time since we moved to Boston that we've gone to a play, and I definitely want to do more. In Minneapolis, we would go about once a month or so. As a complete aside, if you are Minneapolitan and you don't go to the theater, you really should. All the fantastic small theatres are probably one of the best cultural amenities in the cities. I really like Theater Garage, Theater in the Round, Theater de la Jeune Lune and Mixed Blood a lot. Of course the Guthrie and the Guthrie Lab also have great stuff, but I prefer the smaller more contemporary and intimate shows. Theater Garage especially was wonderful (as I'm typing this I find myself really hoping they are still around... ok I just googled it and it is...)

So, to sum up, we want to see more plays. If anyone knows of any good companies in Boston, especially with student pricing, please let me know.

2006-11-10T12:44:00.000-05:00

I came across this interesting site, All Look Same, that I believe grew out of someone's frustration that no one in the western world can ever tell Japan, Korea and China apart. There are some quizes that show pictures of architecture, food, urban landscapes and let you guess which country is which. In a world of increased globalization of architecture and urban form it's actually a pretty interesting test. I'd be interested in seeing one of these with more countries. (btw. my picture is Viet Nam. Which is really a part of east asia, culturally if not geographically, so it should be included too).

2006-10-20T19:04:00.000-04:00

Paul had noticed already that in Los Angeles automobiles were a race apart, almost alive. The city was full of their hotels and beauty shops, their restaurants and nursing homes - immense, expensive structures where they could be parked or polished, fed or cured of their injuries. They spoke, and had pets - stuffed dogs and monkeys looked out of their dashboards, and fur tails waved from their aerials. Their horns sang in varied voices...few people were visible. The automobiles outnumbered them ten to one. Paul imagined a tale in which it would gradually revealed that these automobiles were the real inhabitants of the city, a secret master race which only kept human beings for its own greater convenience, or as pets.
-Alison Lurie, The Nowhere City

Reminder

2006-10-18T13:10:00.000-04:00

Boston, Massachusetts
Originally uploaded by Zakcq.

Today is the last day you can register to vote in Mass for the elections in November.

2006-10-17T11:58:00.000-04:00

So, wow, two and a half weeks without a post. I guess I've been busy.

At school, I usually try to take a couple of more challenging classes and an easier one to balance it out. This semester my easy one was supposed to be Social Problems, which was kind of a mid-level soc class. Unfortunately, the professor for Social Problems had the joint problems of not seeming to have a great grasp on the material (showing the movie Remember the Titans is NOT teaching about race in America) and thinking that he's a stand-up comic, which is one of my biggest pet peeves. Anyway, I decided to switch into another class, which means I've got three fairly tough graduate classes right now. Two of the classes, Real Estate Development and Municipal Finance and Budget, are really just on the edge of my interest in cities, so they can be pretty tough. The other, Urban Design, is the most challenging class I've had. Period. I really enjoy it, and it's the way that I've tried to look at my surroundings for a long time, but actually trying to get it out on paper is frustrating. Our assignments are stuff like manifestos and interventions instead of papers and projects. Awesome.

I've also been working a lot, but this week they're sending me to some corporate meeting weekend thing in Pittsfield, Mass (it was originally known as Awesomeville, but there was a truth in advertising suit). I'm not looking forward to it. Bright side is that I was able to take three days off this week, which I'm spending getting ahead in homework, cleaning the house and doing some shopping.

J is off at Jury Duty right now. It's pretty amazing that she's made it two years in Massachusetts without getting called already. I got called about a week after I got my drivers license.

Can Institutions Spawn Development?

2006-09-30T11:07:00.000-04:00

On my day off I walked down to Fort Point in South Boston to see the new Institute of Contemporary Art building.

Fort Point is a kind of interesting place. It used to be mostly industrial manufacturing uses (it's where Necco wafers used to come from), but it's now being redeveloped as residential loft space and office space. It's a little hard to tell how it's going to fit into Boston as a whole. It's got wide streets and shiny new office buildings that would fit into LA or San Diego quite well, but are odd for Boston.

So, anyway, back to the ICA. It's gotten a lot of press this month. Both Metropolis and Newsweek had articles on it recently.

The building was designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, one of those odd architectural entities that has somehow managed to get real famous without actually completing a major building. The building reminds me roughly of a stool that IKEA had a couple of years ago. It's an interesting design, although I think mechanical stuff on top really detracts from the overall look. It'll be interesting to see how the space is actually used.

For me however, the biggest question is the surrounding area. It's parking lots all around, which leads me back to my original question. Do institutional buildings spawn development?

I was reading recently about the filling of the Back Bay neighborhood. Down there, the state donated land to several institutions (a couple of churches, MIT, the BPL, the MFA and the old Museum of Natural History, for example) prior to selling plots for private development. Right now, the area surrounding the ICA consists of a Silver Line subway station, the World Trade Center and the ICA. Will this effect development, or will simply keep the surface parking lots cost effective for their owners?

2006-09-24T11:57:00.000-04:00

I guess I'm a little late in blogging about this, but better late than never.

J & I drove up to Canada last weekend for my birthday.

Or to be more specific, we went to Quebec, which is/is not Canada.

It's a very interesting switch going from the Northern US into Southern Quebec. In northern Vermont (which I just realized on this trip is French for Green Mountian), it's all wooded and hilly and untouched by the hands of men and so on and then you cross the border and it looks like you've somehow been magically transported to southern Minnesota corn country, but with French signs.

We stayed at a bed and breakfast in Montreal, which by my count is the fifth biggest city in eastern continental North America* at a little over one million in the city proper. Socially, it's probably one of the most interesting places I've ever been. The language issue alone is fascinating. I don't know how many times I heard conversations where one person was speaking English and one person was speaking French and it all was completely natural. It's also (like Boston) a very young city, though there were definitely more young families in Montreal. No one in Boston ever has kids.

We spent a good portion of our time shopping and eating, both of which are quite fun (and not super expensive).

I'm an especially big fan of the Poutine, which is french fries covered with gravy and cheese curds. mmmmm.

Architecturally, Montreal has some beautiful turn of the century townhouses (like most of the east coast). Part of what I find really interesting however, is that Montreal, as a French city ruled by the English, used mostly French residential architectural styles instead of the British (mostly Victorian) architecture that you see in other North American cities from the same period.

Some of the neighborhoods also use really tall iron-railed outdoor staircases on their townhouses which have a lot of character, but must be killer (literally) in the winter.

Besides the turn of the century, the other big period of prosperity that added a lot of building must have come during that unfortunate architectural period from the late 60's to the early 70's. The Tour de Montreal, for example, was built for the 76 Olympics.

It's an interesting enough building (tallest sloping tower in the world) but it's set in the middle of a giant moonscape of concrete that felt uncomfortable, to say the least.

The transit was really good all around. As a walker, I sometimes forget that one of the best arguments for good integrated transit is that it reduces congestion for everyone. Driving was noticeably not stressful, despite the size of the city and the subway was good (and quiet, since they use rubber tires on the trains). They also had really great bikepaths.

Instead of making the bikes ride on the streetside of parked cars, the path was on the sidewalk side with the parked cars blocking the moving cars from the bikers. It seemed like a nice solution that will keep bikers safe from cars and cars safe from bikers.

We went to the Biodome, which was also a building from the 76 Olympics that has been converted to a zoo.

We climbed to the top of Parc du Mont Royal, which is a park that was designed by Fredrick Law Olmsted (Central Park, the Emerald Necklace, ect) that sits on the top of a mountain that is right in the middle of town. It's got great views, and it's pretty remarkable how much you feel you are in the wilderness right in the middle of the city.

We also went to a few museums, including The McCord museum of Canadian History (which was good) and the Canadian Centre for Architecture (which was a little disappointing, since the only exhibit at the time was on a building in Boston).

So yeah, I guess that's about all I have to say right now. Here's a few more pictures. I'll probably get the rest uploaded over the next few days.

* New York, Chicago, Toronto, Philadephia Montreal. If you include non-continental North America, Havana and Santo Domingo are also larger, they both fall between Toronto and Philadephia

2006-09-19T16:02:00.000-04:00

I find it completely bizarre that a country that I was in three months ago had a military coup today. It's really strange to think that we easily could have been there today. Thailand was the country that we liked the least out of the ones that we visited for a lot of reasons. The tourists were overwhelmingly disrepectful of Thai culture, for one, and the city was sprawled like a bad version of Los Angeles, but what made me the most uncomfortable was the complete omnipresence of the military. It's easily the most militarized society I've ever been in. All of which probably sounds really weird considering Thailand is/was a "democracy" and the rest of the countries surrounding it are dictatorships. I don't know that I really have a point here. I just found it weird.