Letters From Here

Through this process, every last ounce of efficiency and performance is wrung out of each car. And so it will be with cities like PlanIT Valley, currently being built from scratch in northern Portugal. Slated for completion in 2015, PlanIT Valley won’t be a mere “smart city” — it will be a sentient city, with 100 million sensors embedded throughout, running on the same technology that’s in the Formula One cars, each sensor sending a stream of data through the city’s trademarked Urban Operating System (UOS), which will run the city with minimal human intervention.

“We saw an opportunity … to go create something that was starting with a blank sheet,” said PlanIT Valley creator Steve Lewis, “thinking from a systems-wide process in the same way we would think about computing technologies.”

Detroit has always been a refuge to makers, hackers, tinkerers, and industrious do-ers. In many ways, the socio-cultural life of the city thrives on grassroots production, and increasingly, these micro-enterprises are beginning to enter into the economic conversation as well. Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to tour three Detroit makerspaces: OmniCorpDetroit; Ponyride; and Tech Shop. All three are fairly recent additions to the city’s culturescape, and although they diverge in organizational structure and affiliation, each was created to cultivate making through access to space, tools, and a network of expertise.

“Dark tourism” - where visitors travel to sites of death, brutality and terror - is to be the subject of a dedicated centre for academic research at the University of Central Lancashire.

Demographic projections  [suggest that] more young people want to move into cities, more baby-boomers want to downsize there, more demand for apartments is coming, and more people want to relocate in close proximity to prizes like metro stops.

If all of this is accurate, and even more people will soon be living on top of and right next to each other – while sharing sidewalks, roads and public plazas – could we design better places where we could all live together without hearing quite so much of each other?

And just what would that sound like?

This strikes me as pretty embarrassing — something that should have been written in a notebook, not in public.

Comprising an elite group of bankers, industrialists, politicians, merchants, and newspapermen, characters such as Charles Collier and Rufus Bullock embodied the spirit of a place they insisted on calling the New South.

A rhetorical invention, the idea of the “New South” itself represented aspiration more accurately than reality: in 1895, thirty years after the close of the Civil War, the former Confederacy’s transition to an industrial economy from an agricultural one was not only not over; it had hardly begun.

Atlanta, as an industrial center and railroad hub, was one of the few economic bright spots in an otherwise bleak landscape. And in the 1890s, amidst nationwide depression, even the relative promise of Atlanta fell short of expectations.

The difference lay in the expectations themselves: in Atlanta, stakeholders and enthusiastic boosters labored tirelessly to keep them high. The city’s energy was so pervasive and persistent that visitors could not help but find it worthy of exclamation.

“Atlanta,” wrote W. J. Lampton for the New York Sun in anticipation of the exposition, “is the best town in the south, present and future…She doesn’t wait for other people to come along and reap the advantages, but she buckles right to herself, and the result is—well, it is Atlanta, the Imperial City of the Empire State of the South, the City of Unceasing Endeavor, the City of Get There, the City of Atlanta.”

Lampton’s words acted simultaneously as evaluation and challenge: though it might be the Imperial City of the Empire State of the South, Atlanta and her stakeholders had a way to go before becoming an imperial metropolis not “of the South,” but on the world stage.

It was a genuine revelation to me that the term “New South” dated back to the late 19th century.

Maybe they weren’t hustlin’ round Atlanta in their alligator shoes quite yet, but the archetype is evidently far older than I would have guessed. Fascinating.

This points out one of the negatives often highlighted about these cities, namely that they are getting more exclusive as increasingly you need to be in the educated elite to be able to live there (or at least to make it worth living there). This might be good for those cities at some level, but I’m not sure it’s entirely good for America.

Hm.

It is the latest of several revitalization efforts that have stretched over decades, and it is part of a new wave of efforts developing from residents and business owners who say they must have a louder voice and a greater stake in decisions that are made.

The interesting phrase here, particularly given that this is a local news story that otherwise takes the expected rah rah tone, is: “revitalization efforts that have stretched over decades.” That strikes me as a dog whistle to the experienced/knowledgeable local reader. 

As for big regional shopping malls, almost no new malls are being built any more anywhere in the country. In fact there are scores of malls that are dead and abandoned. Many others are on life-support and are close to being boarded up or redeveloped into more productive use. Here in Puget Sound, the last regional mall built was Silverdale, almost 20 years ago — even though the central Puget Sound population has grown by more than 2 million people in that same time! (I am not counting outlet malls as they do not fill the same role as regional malls anchored by major department stores.)

Writing inForeign Policy, James Manyika, Jaana Remes, and Javier Orellana of the McKinsey Global Institute argue that cities in general and particularly smaller cities will power the new U.S. economy.

Examples of “smaller cities” include Austin and Raleigh.

WALK [YOUR CITY] is a Kickstarter project by Raleigh based Matt Tomasulo that is trying to get America walking. Consider it “guerilla wayfinding” that helps soon-to-be pedestrians find their way from place to place. The funds will go to create an open source tool that will enable anyone to create and print simple signs that indicate how many minutes by foot it takes to get to a certain destination. Simple instructions like these can shift public perception and get more folks on their feet.

Travel + Leisure magazine has ranked Dallas last in a list of 35 hipster-friendly cities.

New York, San Francisco, and Boston, the top three major cities on Walkscore.com, are three of the most liberal cities in the country. In fact, the top 19 are all in states that voted for Obama in 2008. The lowest-scoring major cities, by comparison, tilt conservative: Three of the bottom four—Jacksonville, Oklahoma City, and Fort Worth—went for McCain. What explains the correlation? Don’t conservatives like to walk?

Only the mediocre are always at their best, someone said, which could be why Austin is so damn proud of itself. Welcome to Mediocre, Texas, the home of Harry Knowles, the bats, Bright Light Social Hour, Jeffrey’s, dog-friendly patios, KGSR, the weekly 10K fun run and street closer, “country legend” Ray Benson, the pot luck architecture of E. 11th St. and bands playing at the restaurant when you just want to fucking eat in peace.

Thx: Brian Z.

Whether it is the Beehive of Industry, the Renaissance City, or the Creative Capital, this city has been changing hats for centuries. That isn’t a typo, this place is old. Not unlike other rust belt cities, Providence has been struggling to shake off the ashes of the golden age of manufacturing in favor of greener pastures. In each pursuit to reinvent itself every decade or so, this town certainly goes all in. Economic crises seem to hit here harder than most places. So, who or what is Providence and where does it plan on going from here?

The power of “Brand Detroit.” I’ve talked about it many times. It’s the power of a city that draws the world’s attention. Not all of it good, but attention nevertheless. In a region of cities that all too often see themselves as lacking identity to themselves much less a brand in the world, Detroit stands apart. Like a Chicago or Los Angeles, the stories of Detroit overflow the page. This is a place with resonance. A place that matters.

One way this manifests itself is in the huge number of books, articles, photos, and films that have been made of the city. Recently Brewed Fresh Daily out of Cleveland pointed me at a Buzzfeed thread that had a collection of short films about Detroit. Some of these are longer than you might be used to watching in an internet video, but they are well worth checking out when you have the time.

Click through for videos etc., some have been linked here before. But handy to have this roundup.