Subscribe/Feeds

• Subscribe by Email
• Subscribe in a Reader
• Subscribe to Comments
• Become a Facebook Fan
• Follow on Twitter
• View Photos
• Watch Videos

Search

Sunday, November 6th, 2011

Review: Urbanized – A Film by Gary Hustwit

Urbanized is the third entry in Gary Hustwit’s so-called “Design Trilogy,” the first of which was Helvetica (which I saw and enjoyed greatly) and Objectified (which I have not yet seen). Because I liked Helvetica so much and because of the hype surrounding this film in the urbanist community, I was really looking forward to seeing it. Alas, Urbanized turned out to be a disappointment. This is a weak film that did not in my view measure up to Helvetica. Here are a few reasons why.

1. No narrative or thematic coherence. Urbanized consists of a series of scenes shot in various cities around the world. These are essentially standalone elements that do not appear to have any particular narrative or thematic connection. As a result, this is basically a collection of random vignettes.

Now, Helvetica works similarly, but is a much more effective film. Let’s contrast to see the difference. In that work, Hustwit chooses to focus on a single typeface, Helvetica, and uses it as a lens to give us a glimpse into the larger universe of typography, graphic design, the design process, and various theories on design. This is an effective type structure also used by, for example, in The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, which tells the story of the post-war American city through the lens of a notorious housing project in St. Louis. It was also used by Greg Lindsay in his recent book Aerotropolis, that gives us a view into the world of globalization through the lens of the airport.

In Urbanized, however, Hustwit fails to lock in on anything as an anchor, spinning us around through various places, ideas, and bits and pieces of information, and leaving us to try to sort out for ourselves what it all means. The film, however, does not equip either the urbanist or the average viewer with any tools to do that (see below).

Indeed, I’m not even sure I know exactly what this film was supposed to be about. If I didn’t know anything about Hustwit or his previous work, didn’t know this was part of a design trilogy, didn’t know much about cities, I’m not sure that I’d come away thinking this was a film about the discipline of urban design, though clearly it is mentioned several times. It could equally have been a film about man’s attempt to cope with the mass influx of people into cities. Or to use/adapt cities to deal with larger environmental and social forces. Or all of the above. All we can tell for sure is that this has something to do with cities.

This is reinforced by the film making style, which is similar to Hustwit’s previous work. There are various pictures of cities along with a variety of big-name talking head segments, with an indie style soundtrack. It’s all vaguely “cool” and so works on that level, even if we’ve already seen this playbook before. But given the lack of a narrator, the lack of anyone asking questions, the lack of any thematic progression or unity, it’s not clear what any of this means. We are treated to “debates” between Oscar Niemeyer and Jan Gehl, Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, etc. Yet we are never sure which of these the film maker intends for us to believe. Even if this is about design, it’s as if Hustwit doesn’t have a point of view on it, either what urban design actually is, or what constitutes good urban design. He clearly has some sort of an agenda as he edited this to set up these contrasts. Indeed, he even uses extremely manipulative film making techniques (see below) at times to shape our reactions. But I’m still not quite sure what that agenda is.

2. The film’s examples are conventional and uninteresting. One of the most irritating things to me about the film is that practically every segment profiled something that would already be familiar to even the most casual of urbanist: Mumbai’s slums, New York’s High Line, Bogota’s BRT and bikeways, shrinking Detroit, etc. It’s as if Hustwit did only a cursory study of the topic at hand and took the first high profile examples he came across in “Cities for Dummies.”

Some on Twitter suggested that this shouldn’t be seen as a knock, but rather that we hard core urbanists should get that this is for the mass market film goer who might be exposed to all this for the first time. We urbanists aren’t the target market. Fair enough. But a really good film maker would have squared that circle. As the people Hustwit profiles in his films might note, this is the sort of thing that sets apart really good design from merely average. Good design is able to appeal to both the expert and the novice at the same time, to operate on multiple levels. Had Hustwit dug a bit deeper, he probably could have found better examples that would have appealed to both crowds. As it stands, the film comes across as a bit lazy.

Also, if the casual film goer is the target audience, Urbanized still fails to illuminate. The various issues facing urban areas are treated on such a shallow level – at times not even directly highlighted as all – that it can be difficult for a non-urbanist to even identify them at all, much less think about them in any serious way.

For example, the segment on a protest over a rail project in Stuttgart was set up as a conventional “the Man” versus “the People” debate. Protest itself seemed to be the theme. But this actually had interesting content to it. On one side you’ve got people promoting a high speed rail line. On the other, preservationists. This was perhaps a perfect way to highlight the conflict of values – in this case sustainability/addressing climate change and 21st century transport on one hand, and historic preservation and open space on another – that good urban design has to solve. There are lots of things that we want that are all goods, but we can’t have them all and have to make tradeoffs. Yet Urbanized was totally silent on this and it’s not clear that a casual non-urbanist film goer would connect all the dots to make this leap. In this regard, Urbanized leaves even the newcomer to the field a bit bewildered, even if perhaps feeling good and soma’d up from the hipster film styling.

Other items that were only hinted at but without sufficient context or tooling to enable the viewer to really engage with the ideas:

• The boundaries of what constitute design. The film starts with Amanda Burden implying that anything that’s consciously considered is design, but by that standard I’m a “breakfast designer” because I consciously decided to have an orange this morning when I woke up.
• Design as a top down vs. bottoms-up enterprise and the virtues or lack thereof of populist revolt. The film seems sympathetic to populism, but I wonder what Hustwit would make of the Tea Party or those in America who would prefer not to do anything about CO2 emissions.
• The limits of design. This is hinted at in the top-down vs. bottom-up debate but not directly addressed. To what extent can we design a complex urban organism in the same way we design a font? Are cities fundamentally designed or is spontaneous order or emergent properties a better paradigm?
• The historic record of design and design failures. We see here some attacks at modernists and the legacy of Robert Moses. But from what I see, today’s designers are often just as ready to remake cities in accordance with their own theories. Is this type of endeavor inherently flawed?
• The real Bogota story. I love Enrique Peñalosa and what was accomplished in Bogota. But he lost his re-election bid. And while this was too recent for the film, he just lost another election. Why is that if he did all these wonderful things?

3. Miscellaneous criticisms. A couple things jumped out at me as just off. The first was the almost complete lack of economics as a driver of the city. But arguably this is the most important factor that gives cities their rationale and the reason all those people are streaming into cities. I would have thought this would have rated higher mention.

Also, the film seems to treat the design of physical systems as determinant. In both the Cape Town and Rio case studies, for example, safety is presented as an artifact of physical design. Clearly, that plays a role. But I’d argue that social conditions and other factors play a much larger one. The focus on design as a behavior determinant robs people of moral agency.

4. Use of propagandistic and manipulative film techniques. Given the general approach of the film, we are led to believe that the film maker is letting cities and people speak for themselves without attempting to impose a PoV. But this is clearly not always true as Hustwit uses various techniques to sway the viewer. Two key examples leaped out at me.

The first was the sprawl example from Phoenix. Generally Hustwit goes for very high profile commentators. For example, the anti-spawl narrative was provided by Ellen Dunham-Jones, a noted New Urbanist proponent. Yet the pro-sprawl narrative was from a guy named Grady Gammage, Jr. I’d never heard of. He’s a local zoning attorney. Is this the best advocate Hustwit could find? There are many more high profile people Hustwit could have reached out to. For example, Joel Kotkin has thought about this issue for many years, is an articulate defender of suburbia, and is very experienced being on camera.

I’m also going to be a little unkind myself here by picking on Gammage. But even his physical appearance I found interesting. He isn’t ugly, but is a bit overweight with a vaguely Jabba the Hub appearance that Hustwit uses to tap into a sort of “big fat tax attorney” stereotype to make him appear a bit sinister.

A similar technique was on display in the Stuttgart example. He shows a police action against protestors that includes shots framed to show riot police in which their boots are prominently featured, as if to say, “Get it? Jackbooted Germans.” And despite the high levels of English proficiency in Germany, this segment was filmed almost entirely in German and subtitled. Hustwit could find people in China that speak English but not in Germany? The choice of heavy German language for this segment almost had to be deliberate. Again, drawing into German stereotypes.

In a film that in effect purports not to take sides, clearly these techniques were intended to shape the viewer’s impression. And Hustwit is too good a film maker not to know how these things would appear to viewers. To me it came across as heavy handed and I thought it was unfortunate.

Conclusion
I’m probably coming overly negative in this review myself. The film was actually moderately enjoyable to watch. Given its high profile, it’s definitely something urbanists should see. But I think it could have and should have been a lot more, particularly in light of what Hustwit accomplished with Helvetica. I think he would have been better served to lock in on something – a city, a theme – as an anchor, to dig deeper to find mind-blowing examples for the urbanist and Average Joe alike, and to ditch some of the slanting techniques. As it was, I came away from this very disappointed.

You might also be interested in reading Alexandra Lange’s review over at Design Observer, which makes some similar points.

Tuesday, October 25th, 2011

Cities as Software by Marcus Westbury

[ For those of you who haven't heard the story or checked it out, I highly encourage you to check out Renew Newcastle, which is a great urban success story out of Newcastle, Australia. There are a lot of lessons here to be learned, particularly for places that struggle with a lack of financial resources. Hopefully this article can give you some ideas and some hope - Aaron. ]

This article was written for the latest edition of the Dutch architecture/ design journal Volume…

Let me put a scenario to you. Say you live in an aging, fading industrial town. One that has been on receiving end of repeated shocks from earthquakes and natural disasters to the closure of its largest industries and mass unemployment. A city where an old urban core – a legacy of an era of trams and public transport long gone – has hollowed out and emptied. Retail has moved to the suburbs and a growing suburban sprawl. A city with dozens, if not hundreds of empty buildings in the old downtown. A place where the feedback loop has become so desperately negative that many of the shops and offices that remain are forced to leave by the growing vacancies around them.

How do you turn such a place around? How to bring life and people back to it? How to bring interest, curiosity and commerce? How to make it – or at least some of it – liveable and desirable again and to bring its decaying urban character back into flower?

Almost always, the answers to those questions are about physical things. They involve long planning process, research, workshops and facilitation followed by attempts to attract large amounts of capital to invest in new buildings, public amenities or to kickstart new industries.

But what if you can’t do that?

Suppose you have access to none of the above. Suppose that to varying degrees of quality and effectiveness all of the above has been tried and failed or at least stalled – lost in posturing and process.

Imagine that you have no money. That you cannot buy or build anything – that you are stuck with the building stock and the hard infrastructure. Imagine you are not the government and have little or no capacity to persuade them to make major investments or decisive changes.

If all that doesn’t make things difficult enough, let’s say the budget you have to work with is tiny – amounts you can put on a credit card. All you have is the city – beautiful, fading but endowed with many interesting small scales spaces, a talented enthusiastic creative community and a generous broader community willing to donate their skills and time and resources in kind.

What could you do?

Actually, this is not a thought experiment. It’s a real place. It’s my home town of Newcastle, Australia. As recently as 2008 the situation in Newcastle was pretty much as described above. Yet as of a few months ago more than sixty new creative projects, initiatives, galleries, studios, and creative businesses – all experiments of various kinds – had started up in the old downtown. The city – far from being a failed post industrial basket case – was being hailed by the world’s biggest travel publishers Lonely Planet as one of the top 10 cities in the world to visit in 2011 on account, in large part, of a vibrant creative resurgence that had taken place in the long dead downtown.

So how did we get here from there? Two years is too short and the budget was too limited to address any of the city’s real hardware problems. Instead, Newcastle took a different tack. To do so we engaged the immediacy of enthusiasm and activity and stepped back from the contentious and divisive debates about what should and shouldn’t happen in the long term. To do that you need to start by rewriting – or hacking – the software to change not what the city is but how it behaves.

Perhaps this is an Australian thing but virtually every urbanist I know is a hardware person. They come from backgrounds in town planning, engineering, design, architecture or activism around the preservation or possibilities of the built environment. They like to draw things, design things, build things. They like tangible things. The futures that they desire, imagine and will into being are full of hard physical things from bike lanes to green buildings, transport links and physical amenities imagined and preserved.

The built environment and geography of a city is its hardware. It defines much of what a city can and cannot be. The hardware of the city – its topography, the scale of its spaces, its architecture, its patterned dense grid or its narrow laneways or its chaotic sprawl – places a hard limit on what is and isn’t possible. While the hardware of cities can and does change and evolve slowly over time, in the short term it remains relatively fixed – major changes are invariably expensive, can be paralysingly slow and often contentious.

The ability to design, imagine and build the hardware of a city are valuable skills and important catalysts but for better or for worse I am not a hardware person. I’ve spent much of my life as a festival director. Festivals – or at least the kind of un-institutional ones that I have been involved in – are places where artists, DIY media makers, installationists treat cities as places of opportunity and experimentation.

Unencumbered by the possibilities of permanence, they treat cities not as fixed places in which to build fixed things but as laboratories in which to try and experiment. The extent to which they can and can’t is defined only in part by what the city is – creative people are usually capable of hammering their own ideas around whatever starting position or location you give them. To a much larger extent their possibilities are defined by how a city behaves in response to their initiative. It is the software of the city – which is often intangible, bewildering and complex – that defines their possibilities.

Cities are also software – they actually have many layers of software. They have an operating system – a hard set of rules and constraints that are imposed and enforced by governments. Operating systems are hard boundaries too – they are laws that forbid and allow. They define what you can and can’t do as much as the hardware does. Far from open to opportunities, the operating systems of cities are often defensive, risk averse and closed to possibility.

In many respects the operating system needs to be defensive – it is vulnerable to exploitation and malicious intent. In Australia at least, many who seek to use the city are attempting to do little more than run a virus – a parasite of a program – called something along the line of Maximising_my_commercial_return.exe. They are attempting to do little more than build the cheapest building, with the greatest amount of saleable space, in the shortest time possible. Cities have quite rightly developed a series of strategies to mitigate the virus and its impact.

Yet processes that assume that this is all that people wish to do with a city misses the point. Artists, creative types and community minded collectives are often caught up in the same defensive systems. The fact that they have limited capital, their limited access to political processes and specialist expertise, their limited opportunity to recoup an expensive investment, and their precarious ability to survive complex and time consuming processes means that they are often more vulnerable to being stopped by process than malicious developers.

In my previous life as a festival director I was often asked by artists “can I do this?” Too often I had to tell them no, they could not – despite the obvious benefits it would bring. More often than not it was not for any particular reason but for the absence of a process – a software error. A failure to distinguish the nature of the activity. A category error around scale that could inadvertently treat a one night only event for 30 or 300 people in process terms in the same way that it treats the building of a new development or planning a subdivision. It’s a software error that fails to distinguish between creative and commercial intent. A process error that did not allow – or did not easily allow – the intended use despite the absence of objections or even wide community consent. A bug that introduces compliance, complexity and costs to people incapable of navigating it. Cities often fail to recognise the transformative powers of momentum and enthusiasm by blunting it with confusion, cost and complexity.

In many respects the software of the city is subtle – it is at least partially the cultural context, its history and its economic circumstances. Yet, in most respects the software of the city is codified and hard-coded – height and noise restrictions, planning processes, rules that enable certain possibilities and disable others. They can be embedded in common law rights and privileges. As an ephemeral user of cities I had inadvertently spent many years experimenting with the limits of what types of a behaviour a city will and will not tolerate. The more you do so the more it becomes apparent that cities can be arbitrary, irrational and incentivise entirely the wrong the things.

Renew Newcastle, the not-for-profit company that we established in late 2008 is a piece of software. It is a broker. It is an enabler. It is an interface between the aging, decaying, and at times boarded-up built environment and those who seek to use and activate it. It connects the many empty spaces in the city with the passion of people who want to experiment and try things in them. It has facilitated more than 60 projects in more than 30 once empty spaces in just over two years. It has done so without building, buying or owning anything other than some computers and some second-hand furnishings. It does not fund things – nor was it funded itself in its early stages – it just allows them to happen.

It has done so by changing the software of the city. Not in the slow and traditional way – the hard way – of seeking the political power to amend the rules, change the laws and rewrite the operating system. It has done so in an easier but less obvious way – it has followed the path of least resistance. Rather than rewrite the operating system it has hacked it and made it work in new ways.

Renew Newcastle started by hacking how much spaces cost and the terms they were available on. While there were over 150 empty buildings in Newcastle few if any of them were cheap or simple to access. They were bound up in complex rules – from bad tax incentives to complex, costly and long-term commercial leases that made it difficult to access them flexibly. Renew Newcastle traded cost for security. We created new rules, new contracts, and convinced owners to make spaces available for what was effectively barter – we would find people to clean them use them and activate them and they could have them back if and when they needed them. We stepped outside the default legal framework in which most property in Australia is managed and created a new one. We used licenses not leases, we asked for access not tenancy and exploited the loopholes those kinds of arrangements enabled. While such schemes are institutionalised in many European countries they have little precedent in Australia – in Newcastle, the entire scheme was devised, brokered and implemented directly from the community without the involvement of a government or formal development authorities still grasping at hardware based solutions. Only after the first dozen buildings had been activated did any funding appear. More than two years later any changes to rules and regulations – to the operating system – are yet to transpire.

Yet cheap space is not in itself enough. It is not enough to simply change how much space costs, it is also vitally important to change how it behaves in the face of initiative. Renew Newcastle created a whole system to lower barriers to initiative and experimentation. We created another layer – between the operating system and the users to make it simpler and easier to enable experimentation and risk.

Again we followed the path of least resistance. We decided to make things simple that could be made simple and not butt up against what would remain impenetrably hard. We managed to do what is easy rather than get caught up in waiting for the ideal – to find spaces that were usable and use them. Renew Newcastle designed systems – an API in programming terms – that made activation simple. We took spaces, brokered cheap access to them and gauged what could be done in them easily – what they were already approved for – and set out to find it and plant and water it.

In doing so we effectively made a whole system to make space behave as quickly and responsively. To allow people with enthusiasm and passion to direct it into the city. We made it quick for people to try and cheap for them to fail. We removed capital and complexity from the equation and in doing so we seeded more than 60 experiments – unleashing the energy of hundreds of people.

We made the city work for people for whom it had not worked in a long time. People without capital for whom low barriers to entry and not certainty of outcome were the defining issues. Those who were operating digital cottage industries and Etsy stores, artists and fashion designers, bedroom record labels and Flickr photographers. In effect we made the physical space behave as their virtual spaces did – easy to get into and out of, allowing of experimentation and failure and most importantly full of tools and structures and plugins designed to make it simple and cheap for them to do what they are passionate about.

As cities age, the challenge is not always to rebuild them physically but to re-imagine how they might function and adapt. In Newcastle in many respects nothing has changed since 2008. The buildings are mostly the same. The hardware is unchanged. Nothing has been built. No government has fallen. No revolution has taken place. Yet, on another level much has changed – dead parts of the city are active and vibrant, 60 projects have started, hundreds of new events have been created, and whole new communities are directly engaged in creating whatever it is that the city will become. The software – the legal templates, the contracts and the thinking – that has enabled has changed Newcastle is becomng a kind of shareware – downloaded, hacked and implemented in cities and towns across Australia from Townsville to Adelaide.

Cities are software. Yet as hard as the software of the city is to conceptualise the consequences of changing it are very real. It is only the results that give it away. They are as evident and visible as the process that led to them is invisible. There are new stories and narratives, new people and new possibilities, and a glimmer of renaissance where there was previously only ruin.

This article is reposted from MarcusWestbury.net with permission of the author.

Sunday, September 18th, 2011

Will Sagrada Família Be Mankind’s Last Ever Great Artistic Statement for God?

Sagrada Família via Domus.

Without a doubt the highlight of my trip to Barcelona a couple years ago was touring the work in progress that is Sagrada Família, the final masterwork of architect Antoni Gaudí. Gaudí started work on this church in 1883 and worked on it until his death in 1926, at which point only about 15-25% of the project was complete. Gaudí was actually living in the church while it was being built at the time, and was killed in a most unfortunate way by being run over by a tram.

Sagrada Família has been entirely funded by donations (today mostly in the form of admission charges to tourists, I believe). It was originally projected to potentially take some hundreds of years to complete. However, with modern design and fabrication techniques, the current projected completion date is 2026, the 100th anniversary of Gaudí’s death. Though still unfinished, the church was consecrated on November 7, 2010.

Sagrada Família via Domus.

Back in March Domus magazine published a fantastic essay on Sagrada Família called “In-Finite Architectures” by Oscar Tusquets Blanca. Blanca was very forthright in admitting his own change of heart towards the building over time.

At the start of 2002, to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of the architect Antoni Gaudí, Domus asked me to write an article on the controversial issue of the continuation of construction work on the Sagrada Família Church. Published in May of that year, my article explained that, in the early 1960s, while I was still at university, I had been one of the instigators of a manifesto against the continuation of the church, which received the unconditional support of all the intelligentsia of the day—from Bruno Zevi to Giulio Carlo Argan, Alvar Aalto and Le Corbusier…..How could we have been so wrong? This wonder would not exist if people had listened to us 50 years ago. It would have remained a ruin or it would have been finished by an in-vogue architect of the time….I do not know whether it is the finest work of the last century but it will certainly be the greatest religious building of the last three.

Sagrada Família photo by The Urbanophile.

While one can never attribute ultimately pure motives to anything or anyone, clearly the Christian religion was a major inspiration for Gaudí. It’s difficult to imagine such a project even being conceived, much less executed, absent the reality of faith.

Which immediately raises another question. We sense in our gut as we tour this place that it is a product of another era, one closer perhaps to that age which produced the medieval cathedrals than our own, no matter what the calendar might say. Will there ever be another buildings like this created again? Perhaps there will be, but the mere fact that such a question can be asked in all seriousness shows the change in our world.

Angkor Wat (12th century). Originally a Hindu but now Buddhist temple currently located in Cambodia that is the world’s largest religious building.

Claudio Monteverdi’s “Vespro della Beata Vergine” (Vespers of 1610)

In ages past it almost went without saying that the greatest artistic works of humanity were in large part inspired by the religious impulse. Certainly not all artworks were so-inspired, and certainly art of a religious nature might also be inspired in part by temporal matters such as advancing the career of the artist or symbolizing the earthly power of the king or church. Nevertheless, the power of faith was often very real in the life of the artist – Monteverdi became a priest and Bach was a devout Lutheran – and the spiritual often informed the scope, theme, content, form, etc of the work not just for the artist, but for the audience.

The Parthenon (5th century BC). Image via Wikipedia

JS Bach, Mass in B Minor (1749)

Today it is quite a different story. Even among those who profess passionate religious faith, that faith no longer seems capable of inspiring the greatest creative endeavors of the human spirit. Indeed, listen to prominent Evangelical Christian leaders and they practically brag about how little money they spend on facilities. I’ve yet to see a mega-church structure that in any way impresses architecturally. Syrupy contemporary Christian music often can’t even match the simple profundity of the hymns, much less approach the great masses and other religious works of serious creators past. Evangelical Christianity is not exactly noted for its production of high art.

The rationale is frequently that of accessibility and investing in mission versus grandiose edifices. Yet in the process we have a movement that has become unmoored from the transcendent and the overwhelming glory of God. This is perhaps faith that can inspire good works, but not great ones.

The more passionate strains of Islam fare no better. Though the discouragement of representational art in Islam closed off some fields of creative endeavor, Islam produced some of the most striking works of architecture in human history, as well as many fantastic non-representational works. Yet today I’m unaware of any powerful artistic movements in fervent Islam to match its religious passion.

Süleymaniye Mosque (1558), Istanbul

Interestingly, non-religious art has fared not much better. I’m generally a contemporary art skeptic. Even at its best, this work tends to be idiosyncratic and highly context specific (anchoring it to a particular time and place rather than to the universal). Too often in degenerates into cheap political statements and pretentiousness. How many contemporary art works do many of us really believe represent the highest and greatest achievements of which humanity is capable? How many do we really think will be marveled at hundreds or thousands of years from now, except perhaps as examples of our age? As for too much contemporary serious music, don’t get me started.

Lest I sound too much like a curmudgeon, architecture has fared perhaps a bit better. I suspect many of our buildings will stand the test of time. But even here we see self-indulgence and an excessive fascination with novelty. Yet above all what these buildings lack is any sense of transcendent purpose.

New York City

It’s not surprising to me to see what we so-often get today when motivated by purely humanistic concerns, namely the tall building. The author of Genesis seemed to get that in his gut when relating the story of the Tower of Babel. Yet despite their impressiveness, these buildings generally lack any larger spiritual purpose.

We seem to have forgotten the creation of sacred space as an essential function of the city. Our cities themselves no longer satisfy the longing of the human spirit for transcendence, to be part of a cosmic order greater than ourselves, to inspire extravagant gestures that seem to defy the strictures of our existence. Today, we seem satisfied with simple commercial success and the basics of production and consumption.

Nietzsche mourned when he said that God was dead, not because he believed in God, but because he understood what the passing of God meant to our modern world. With the death of God, something in the human spirit perished along with Him, even for those who still actually believe.

As for the question of whether we will ever produce another great artistic statement for God, perhaps we won’t even finish the last one. As Blanca noted:

The second and certainly more serious problem is that of finding contemporary artists capable of executing the Master’s figurative designs. Gaudí wanted the facades to explain the Holy Story in pictures, the way medieval cathedrals had done. That was already a difficult demand by the start of the twentieth Century but the genius of Gaudí solved the problem on the—almost kitsch—Nativity facade with walls that fold into figures, many created from casts of real people and animals (George Segal 50 years earlier). The pitiful result of the Passion facade, commissioned to the sculptor Josep Maria Subirachs, shows the huge difficulty of pursuing the same course of action. The main Glory facade has yet to be built. Finding a contemporary artist anywhere in the world capable of taking on this task is the biggest challenge now faced. Figurative art is having a difficult time, that with a religious content even more so and an art that can express the Glory of the Resurrection is now extinct. Contemporary art has given us many crucifixions but no remarkable resurrection.

Sagrada Família

Related: Religion and the City

Thursday, July 14th, 2011

Replay: Do Cities Need a Creative Director?

[ The second part of my point-counterpoint on the usefulness of states is a bit delayed. In the meantime, enjoy this one from the archives - Aaron. ]

Cities that suffer from various brand stigmas or problems often want to give themselves an image makeover. Even cities that are doing well can fret about how their brand is faring versus the global competition. This had led some cities to ask whether or not they need to appoint a creative director, as in the private sector. For example, see this article about Birmingham, UK. Tyler Brûlé, whom I mentioned yesterday, listed appointing a creative director as one of the five things he would do as mayor of a city. As he put it, “All strong brands have a creative director with a strong vision. Cities need them too. And no, they’re not called mayors.”

I think this notion has appeal because a) most cities have no concept of brand or vision, and b) strong creative directors have pulled off miracles in the private sector by reviving fallen brands. Tom Ford at Gucci comes to mind.

Yet while strong branding consciousness is clearly an imperative for cities – and I mean branding in the true sense, not just creating logos or marketing – I wonder if a creative director is the type of person could pull it off.

In the the private sector, a creative director is actually in charge. In the public sector, a wide variety of agencies and private institutions are doing their own thing. What would the creative director for a city actually control? Logos? Signage? Street design? Planning reviews? It strikes me that in almost any case, the creative director would be a classic “czar” – that is, someone with nominal responsibility for something, but no real portfolio. The job of a czar is virtually impossible, as anyone who has held one can attest. If you don’t own bodies or budgets, you are basically reduced to begging people to do what you want. This requires deft salesmanship and relationship skills, but are those what creative director types are known for?

Consider Adolfo Carrión, who recently moved over to HUD from the White House Office of Urban Affairs. He took a lot of flack from certain quarters for not making more of an impact. But consider this poor guy’s position. Unlike Sec. LaHood, he doesn’t own a bureaucracy or a budget. He had a tiny staff. And he was trying to create a cross-functional federal urban policy for the first time ever. The degree of difficulty is overwhelming. It’s hard enough changing a battleship organization even when people actually report to you.

A czar only has influence to the extent that the CEO provides support. In this light, the mayor – or another major power broker such as a local billionaire or business leader – absolutely does need vision and to “get it” on matters of brand. As I wrote previously, CEO responsibilities like strategy and brand very much are the responsibility of the mayor. Maybe he doesn’t need to know every detail, but he has to at least get it at a high level. As Machiavelli put it:

This is an axiom which never fails: that a prince who is not wise himself will never take good advice….Good counsels, whencesoever they come, are born of the wisdom of the prince, and not the wisdom of the prince from good counsels.

The input of the best creative director in the world would be wasted if the leadership doesn’t get it. Before seeking the best creative input, what is first needed is to cultivate an understanding of the importance of brand, strategy, and vision in municipal leaders. The new 21st century competitive landscape demands more from leaders than ever before, and they have to grow beyond operational excellence and prudent financial management to having the skills such as brand vision that have traditionally been the hallmarks of the private sector. Only with that prerequisite in place does hiring a creative director or other expert make sense.

This post originally appeared on May 6, 2010.

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

Conscious Urbanism: The Heidelberg Project by Brendan Crain

[ I'm extremely delighted to be able to begin sharing today a series of posts that previously appeared in the Where blog. This blog, which ran from 2007 to 2010, was one of the single most inspiring urbanist sites on the web. Originally a project of Brendan Crain, it grew into a very popular group site before going the way of all blogs. I've previously shared some material from Where contributor Drew Austin, and I'm stoked that Brendan himself has allowed me to re-post some of his pieces as well. They certainly deserve to be read far and wide. Brendan himself is not blogging at the moment that I'm aware of, but some of his old Where contributors are still going over at Polis, which is definitely worth checking out for an international take on cities. Thanks so much to Brendan and I hope you all enjoy these posts that will appear in the coming weeks and months. - Aaron ]

As the city that has fallen on the hardest times (in America, at least), Detroit has the most potential as a proving ground for new solutions. The city is a massive laboratory for urban theorists, developers, and boosters alike. How, many wonder, can Detroit be saved? Or can it be saved at all? Certainly one of the more interesting answers to these questions has come from Tyree Guyton, the man behind the Heidelberg Project, which has appropriated several blocks of the city’s near east side into a spectacularly off-the-wall community art project/revitalization effort.

It’s certainly not what you’d traditionally refer to as “revitalization,” but that’s kind of the point. On its website, the Heidelberg Project explains its vision thusly: “The Heidelberg Project envisions neighborhood residents using art to come together to rebuild the structure and fabric of under-resourced communities and to create a way of living that is economically viable, enriches lives, and welcomes all people.” What this translates to in the physical environment of Heidelberg Street is a collection of abandoned houses — and their surroundings — covered in murals, knick-knacks, mannequins, coins, pie tins, pieces of repurposed trash, stuffed animals, and (literally) just about anything else you could think up. It’s like the Watts Towers, but even more organic.

The Heidelberg Project teaches people who live and have grown up in desolate surroundings how they can change the public spaces that make up their neighborhood and how this change can affect them. It serves as an inspiration and a source of hope. So, of course, the city government has tried to kill the project several times. It has demolished a number of homes that were a part of the project on several different occasions, even though Heidelberg Street is an internationally-recognized project that attracts 275,000 visitors each year. As the project’s Executive Director, Jenenne Whitman, observes, the fact that the city tried so hard to “squash the project … shows how powerful art can be.” Indeed.

In contemporary society, public places themselves are not often thought of as art; actually, they are more often viewed as containers for art. The design of high-end contemporary places is sometimes considered artistically merited, it’s true. But the more interesting and subtle artistic expression in the public realm is community usage. The creation of great places, after all, absolutely requires heavy human interaction. This is usually considered a confirmation of the artistic integrity of the place’s design, but is it not an art form in and of itself? After all, don’t communities transform unplanned spaces into vibrant public places as frequently if not moreso than they do planned places?

The bustle of urban streets and other public spaces in the city is sometimes refered to, quite poetically, as a great pedestrian ballet. And if this is true, it can be logically assumed that, while policy and planning choreograph parts of this ballet, each individual person moving through the city takes part in its choreography by making their own independent choices. People go to parks and plazas and promenades for so many reasons: to eat, to play, to run, to chat, to meet, to dance, to stroll. And by doing so, each person becomes an artist, taking part in the endless urban ballet. Simply to use the city, to exist within it, is a work of art. It’s a lovely idea, no?

The Heidelberg Project is a very concrete visual manifestation of this ballet. It teaches the disenfranchised and the isolated how to shape the world around them into something beautiful. In a way, it is the most public kind of public place: the kind where the planned social infrastructure failed, and the people moved in, did what they do, and created something really useful.

Links:
The Heidelberg Project
Heidelberg Turns 21 (Model D) (Photo credit)

This post originally appeared in The Where Blog on August 27, 2007.

Friday, November 19th, 2010

Replay: Louisville – An Identity Crisis

Following on from my article on Cincinnati, I’ll now take a short 100 mile trip downstream to another old river city, Louisville. Louisville came of age in a similar era and traditionally viewed itself as a sort of little brother to Cincinnati. However, while Cincinnati was once the Paris of the west, Louisville never held so lofty a position, so it lacks Cincy’s grandeur. Luckily, it also appears to be missing some of the dysfunction.

See here the river city tradition as the Belle of Louisville steamboat fires up. There were obviously no emissions standards back in the day.

Straddling the Ohio River, which serves as a border of sorts between the South and Midwest, Louisville has always had a bit of an identity problem. A recent article in Leo, a local alt weekly, highlights this.

For some reason for which modern science has no accounting, the subject of Louisville’s identity keeps coming up — in bar conversations, coffee shop summits, Chamber of Commerce meetings, at church, at shows, in this newspaper — and nobody knows really what to say about it. We are a city of naturally prideful, boasting people who are, to some degree, unsure about what we’re pitching. In some ways, we grate against our inferiority complex by offering wildly optimistic comparisons: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Austin. It’s hard to just be Louisville.

Louisville is a jumble. It’s got that genteel Southern feel at the Derby. It’s also the place that was “strike city” in the 1970’s, a bastion of hard core unionism and industry more befitting a Rust Belt burg than a southern metropolis. It retains the legacy of Kentucky and its rivertown heritage as a traditional haven for vice. Old school leading industries have included tobacco (Brown and Williamson cigarettes), booze (Brown-Forman and other distillers), gambling (Churchill Downs), and freon (DuPont). It has extremely low educational attainment levels, but has also been home to a large number of influential creative types, especially in the indie rock world, with people like Will Oldham, Janet Bean, Slint, Rodan, VHS or Beta, and others. It is comparatively lacking in corporate headquarters. It has been a home to innovative architecture. It’s heavily segregated by race and class, but has an comparatively large number of thriving in-city neighborhoods. It is a hotbed of evangelical Christianity and also home to a large regional gay entertainment complex. It’s too small to be a true big city, but big enough to force itself into the conversation. It has a phenomenal selection of local independent restaurants.

Here is some of that innovative architecture. The Michael Graves designed Humana Building is on the right. This mid-80’s structure was one of the buildings that really created his reputation as an architect you’d actually hire for a structure you planned to build.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Louisville is that the locus of civic identity is not downtown, but rather in the neighborhoods. Louisvillians have an immense attachment to their native soil. I’ve never been to a place where it is so frequently stated as a point of pride that “I’ve live here my whole life.” People who move away are viewed a bit strangely, as if, what’s wrong with this person?

For those in Jefferson County, what matters first is the segmentation by class and race. The West End is almost totally black, the South End working class whites, and the East End the home of the white upper classes. This class consciousness is highly pervasive and permeates people’s vision in a way I’ve rarely seen in other places.

At the next level down, Louisville has many distinct and thriving neighborhoods in the city, mostly spreading to the east and south of downtown. And one of the things that is really different about Louisville from Cincinnati is that these neighborhoods are basically still connected to the downtown. It is possible to walk or bike from downtown through Old Louisville and out to the University of Louisville, for example, without passing through a bunch of slums to get there. Similarly to the east end there is a chain of more or less intact neighbhoods extending all the way from downtown to the eastern burbs. Louisville experienced in city decline and population loss to be sure, but is never had the central city implosion that hit so many other places. The one exception is the West End, where one finds the unfortunately standard impoverished black neighborhoods. The river cuts off the West End, leaving it as an isolated island of blight in an otherwise surprisingly strong inner city, it’s residents largely ignored and forgotten.

Unfortunately in my view, the city has overly fixated on building up downtown as the heart of the region at the expense of investments in neighborhoods. As the Leo article would suggest, Louisville has a major inferiority complex and so feels compelled to invest in the trappings of big city downtowns so that it doesn’t appear to be “falling behind”. This is misguided in my view. Louisville does not have the population base, corporate base, or financial heft to compete in this game at the level it would take to build a distinguished offering.

That’s not to say Louisville doesn’t have a nice downtown. It does, including some great architecture that includes, for example, a large cast iron storefront district on west Main St. I also think that judicious investments in downtown are a good thing. It shouldn’t be left to whither on the vine, that’s for sure. But disproportionately investing in downtown ignores Louisville’s greatest strengths in favor of a game where it is not well positioned win.

Buildings along Main St.

The Kentucky Center for the Arts, also on Main St. The concentration of attractions on Main St. is one of the nicer elements of downtown.

Louisville has always self-consciously viewed and promoted itself as a city with a great arts community. Some of this is overblown, IMO, but that’s not the important thing. What’s important is that Louisville is a city where the arts are taken seriously, and where having a strong arts scene is something that is core to what the city is about. I do think this is something that should be played up and leveraged for the future.

The Louisville Science Center, a sort of children’s museum, also on Main St.

The cheesy 4th St. Live entertainment complex occupies what was once a failed downtown mall called the Galleria. Louisville bought into the dubious trend of pedestrianizing its traditional principal shopping street, in this case 4th St. While I guess having a downtown bookstore like Borders is a good thing, I can’t believe investing in cheesy bars downtown is really the key to having a great city.

Since I’m saying that it is Louisville’s neighborhoods that are so great, I probably shouldn’t spend too much time on downtown, though I must confess that’s what I mostly have photos of. In case you were wondering, downtown Louisville does have its share of classical architecture, such as this example.

Just south of downtown is a neighborhood called Old Louisville. This was actually an earlier suburb where the moneyed folk build their mansions. 2nd and 3rd Streets and awesome for just walking around and leisurely enjoying the architecture under a canopy of trees.

The Filson Club, a local historical society.

A streetscape, I believe along 2nd St.

I noted that three of the things that are great about Louisville are its neighborhoods, its great independent restaurants, and its funky arts scene. All of these are on display in the Highlands. Now the definition of the Highlands is fluid and depends on what real estate agent you are talking to. But the popular conception of its spine is the major commercial district extending outwards along Baxter Ave. and Bardstown Rd. This is an area that doesn’t photograph well, but to me has a very college town type of feel to it.

A yuppie running store across the street from a tattoo joint.

Seviche, one of those great restaurants I mentioned.

Not to be missed if you are on Bardstown Rd. is a quick visit to the legendary Ear X-tacy record store. Pick up a bumper sticker and slap it on your guitar case.

One of the other great assets Louisville has is a great park system designed by the firm of Fredrick Law Olmsted. Places like Iroquois Park and Cherokee Park are just lovely. You can experience a slice of Cherokee Park for yourself by driving east from downtown on I-64, where you almost don’t know you are in the city.

Louisville currently has a first class, ambitious initiative ongoing called City of Parks, which is designed to add thousands of acres of parks and trails, mostly in the outer county area. While I’m all in favor of this, it also illustrates the Savitch and Vogel theory that city-county consolidation in Louisville, which occurred recently, would lead to the center city tax base being exploited to build suburban infrastructure. I’ve written before about Louisville’s big plans. I’m not so sanguine on all of them, but really like City of Parks.

Speaking of big plans, that reminds me that one of the more innovative proposals floating out there is one that would tear down this:

That idea is called “8664“. Proponents want to tear down I-64 along the riverfront near downtown in order to reconnect downtown to the river. It is touted as a cheaper and better solution to traffic problems than the $4.1 billion Ohio River bridges plan. As financing prospects for the bridges become ever more bleak, 8664 continues to gain supporters. The establishment doesn’t even want to evaluate it, fearing it will shatter the fragile consensus around the bridges that took nearly 40 years to build.

The bridges project is an interesting case study because it highlights a problem that has long bedeviled the region: civic strife. It has proven extremely difficult to gain consensus on any major local project because of in-fighting between the various parts of town and various interest groups. The various ends of town area all suspicious of each other. Indiana and Kentucky have poor relations across the river. Mayor Jerry Abramson has long been outright hostile to any development of any type occurring outside the city limits.

The bridges project had this in spades. Indiana demanded an east end bridge to complete the I-265 link across the river. Abramson, then mayor in the pre-consolidation age, saw this as a threat and demanded a new downtown bridge instead. Wealthy residents of the east end hated the eastern bridge too, as did various environmental groups, some of which were east end fronts. In the grand spirit of political compromise, ultimately it was decided to build everything, leading to a crazy price tag and opening the door to 8664. I think it is still fair to say that nobody trusts anybody on this project, even to this day.

Fortunately, the situation generally is much improved post-merger.

Before I go too far astray, I should probably complete my neighborhood tour with this shot of Crescent Hill. This is a small commercial district along Frankfort Ave., another one of Louisville’s fantastic neighborhood arteries. It is well worth a drive out from downtown along through this, as you see the transition from Louisville’s established neighborhoods, to the older suburb of St. Matthews, and out into the full metal burbs. Heine Bros. coffee is money, by the way.

One other unique characteristic of Louisville is that it has not experienced a collar county boom. This is probably partially due to its smaller size versus places like Cincinnati. The vast bulk of people and commercial development is still inside Jefferson County. I don’t believe there is any significant Class A office space outside its borders for example. This gives Louisville the opportunity to get ready for the future before Jefferson County is full and the suburban counties really explode. Places like Oldham County have gained people, but are still largely rural in character and without a significant population or commercial base.

The key challenge facing Louisville is what to do about the transition to the 21st century globalized world. It was traditionally a manufacturing center and has a workforce and education levels with that orientation. But its manufacturing base is significantly eroded and continues to experience significant threats. Ford, which manufactures the Explorer here, has downsized considerably. General Electric’s appliance division is based here, employing 5,000 people, including a large number of white collar employees. But GE is planning to dispose of that division, and it seems likely Louisville is going to experience significant job losses, and perhaps the near total disappearance of that business.

So what should Louisville do?

I’ve long argued that Louisville should focus on being a Geneva-like jewel of a city, not a “big league city”, whatever that means. That is, focus on having the best quality of life, the best neighborhoods, etc. Strengthen the traditional city assets such as the park system, the local restaurant scene, unique architecture, and the arts community. Louisville has long appealed to offbeat, funky types of characters. It is sort of reminiscent of a college town in that respect, so taking a page from the Austin playbook and self-consciously cultivating this would be a great thing. The clear focus of civic development should be the neighborhoods, with downtown in a supporting role. This is a reversal of current priorities.

I don’t believe 21st century jobs are going to rain down on Louisville like manna from heaven, so the onus is on the city to principally drive its economic future through organic growth. I’m don’t believe attracting the creative class is the only things cities need to do to be successful, but Louisville is definitely well positioned to attract that sort of person and indeed has traditionally attracted it. The question is how to turn that creative firepower into economic growth.

Lastly, I would be remiss if I did not mention Museum Plaza. This great proposal was vintage Louisville. It was innovative, unique, and would really show the world the differentiated character of the place. However, this project appears to be on life support, and likely not to secure financing. If it fell through, that would be unfortunate, but as with bridges, arenas, etc. Louisville has always seemed to find an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

This post originally appeared on May 18, 2008.

Sunday, September 26th, 2010

Present at the Creation

When Heather Mac Donald’s piece “Classical Music’s New Golden Age” came out in the summer edition of City Journal, I tweeted it enthusiastically. Articles like this are one of the reasons I’m a City Journal subscriber. In a world where we’re constantly bombarded with doom and gloom predictions about classical music’s future, it was refreshing to read to a contrarian perspective as a corrective. As a bit of a contrarian myself, I can especially appreciate this. One need not believe that the article is in fact literally true in order to enjoy the different point of view.

This piece prompted classical music writer Greg Sandow to pen a series of rebuttals (see here, here, here, here, and here). Sandow was obviously irked, and his tone shows it. I thought perhaps he’d taken Mac Donald a bit too literally.

Then it turns about that she took herself a bit too literally too. Not content with 7,000 words in print, she responded to Sandow’s series with a 5,000 word online diatribe titled, “The Unsustainable Declinism of Greg Sandow.”

But that’s mostly for another day. What I’d like to discuss are some of the reasons that Mac Donald gave for being so insistent this is for sure a golden age, which, believe it or not, is a topic relevant for cities. Among her reasons:

1. We have access to far more classical music today than ever before. While previous generations where limited to a narrow slice of the repertoire or only current hits, we have instant access the best of all of Western music.
2. There are more orchestras than ever, more people studying classical music than ever, and we spend more money than ever on it.
3. Musicianship today is a level of technical excellence never before seen.
4. Performers today have stripped away the tendency of previous generations to alter or bastardize works to suit contemporary tastes, and have instead have recreated music in line with the composer’s intent, the way it was originally intended to be heard and as close to the way it originally was heard as we can make it.

While one might possibly quibble with these, I’d have to agree with them. And in that regard today’s musical world is far healthier than many might give it credit for.

But abstract these to generic propositions, and one could make an argument that today is a golden age of pretty much anything. We’re fortunate to live in a wealthy, mostly peaceful and free society, one that values inquiry, and in which we have tremendous technology and techniques available at our disposal far exceeding those people of the past ever dreamed. I dare say its true that we have more of pretty much everything, more people studying everything, amazing technical excellence in every field, and incredible scholarship about how almost everything really was in the past.

Consider philosophy. I can instantly download a vast array of works from the entire history of human kind, not just in the Western tradition but any global tradition. Where once philosophy was the pursuit mostly of the leisured classes, today it is accessible to all. There are probably more students than ever. And we probably know more about Plato and Aristotle than they knew about themselves.

So ask yourself: is today a golden age of philosophy? Or of literature? Or of religion? Or of art? Or of food?

By Mac Donald’s criteria I think we could probably answer Yes to all. So in that sense I think what she’s actually doing is making an observation about the times we live in rather than a particular point on classical music.

And it’s a valid point. I must say, I’m glad to be alive today. It doesn’t take much consideration of what people lived like and what they went through even a short time ago to make me thank God I’m alive right now. While the future could get better I suppose, now is still pretty darn good, the present economy notwithsanding. This is clearly a special epoch in human existence to date.

Now back to the question. Whether one judges this a golden age must depend on what you value. Do you value being able to consume the best of what the world has ever produced with a few clicks of the mouse? Today is your time.

But will anyone tomorrow in retrospect judge this age, or any age of consumption, a golden age of classical music, philosophy, etc? It strikes me as very unlikely. Presumably, by Mac Donald’s standards, tomorrow will be even more golden, so today will rapidly lose its allure.

No, when we think about a golden age in the past, we think of the time in which those greatest of works were produced. We talk of the golden age of Athens, when those most primal works of western civilization were created. Would you rather be here reading Plato talk about Socrates, or would you rather have had a front row seat at his trial? Or, perhaps yet, would you have rather have been engaged on the field of battle, to have been one of the participants of those great debates on the ultimate questions of human existence, to strive to be one of the names written in the history books?

Would you rather applaud politely at the end of yet another perfect modern performance of Beethoven’s fifth, or would you have rather been in Vienna with Mozart, Beethoven, Hayden, Schubert and the rest? Do you want to listen to authentically performed early music, or be the composer future generations are still admiring, listening to, researching, performing hundreds of years hence?

Which era is likely to be judged the most golden, the one where the great works are consumed, or the ones where they are produced?

There’s a word for civilizations that featured an excess of luxurious golden age consumption at the expense of creation: decadence. And few decadent eras had staying power in history, except as bywords.

Fortunately for us, our creative energies are alive and well today, in areas ranging from technology (where it doesn’t seem a stretch to suggest this is an Athenian era) to popular music. But not in classical music. Indeed, the rise of imitating as perfectly as possibly, even slavishly so, the styles of the past proclaims our own lack of cultural self-confidence in the field.

Today may perhaps be a golden age, but that all depends on how you define it, and what your own personal ambitions are. We’ll see what the future holds, but I am pleased to see that contemporary composers are increasingly creating works that you can actually listen to again, so let’s hope for the best.

The applicability to cities is obvious. Do you want to be in the place that is already at its apex or at the place where the seeds of tomorrow’s great cities are being sown? I’m always struck walking around cities seeing the bronze statues of heroes and great leaders past. Who, I wonder, will merit a statue tomorrow from our own generation?

If you want to enjoy the best a contemporary American city can offer, then San Francisco is your place. I’ll admit, it’s my favorite city in the US. But I don’t imagine that if I moved there (as opposed to Silicon Valley) that I’d get to witness any great historical happenings, or play any role in defining even that city’s urban future, much less creating America’s next great metropolis.

For those who want to consume urbanism, move to San Francisco or someplace like it. For those who, like the cathedral builders of Europe, want to be a part of creating history and a legacy for tomorrow, even though that might not be recognized in their lifetime, it’s probably best to look elsewhere.

How do you define your own personal golden age? That is the question.

Tuesday, September 14th, 2010

Nuvo: A Mayor for the New Millennium

[ I've written extensively about Carmel, Indiana on this blog - see, for example, Next American Suburb. It's an Indianapolis suburb with a very aggressive agenda of suburban retrofit, and I believe a "secret weapon" for the region. David Hoppe of Nuvo, Indy's alt-weekly, is my favorite local writer on arts and culture. He interviewed Carmel Mayor Jim Brainard, creating an interview that is an absolute must read for urbanists everywhere. Brainard does an incredible job of laying out the case for a more progressive urban vision in a way that speaks to the average person. Nuvo graciously allowed me to run an extended excerpt, but there's much more where this came from so please read the entire interview at Nuvo's web site. You won't want to miss it - Aaron ]

The only mayor in Carmel history to be elected to four terms, Brainard has presided over a remarkable period of growth that has seen his community’s population grow from 25,000 to 85,000, with a median household income of $89,414, compared to $47,966 for the state as a whole.

Even more remarkable is that Brainard has achieved this growth and political popularity in one of America’s most conservative political strongholds (McCain carried Carmel with 61 percent of the vote in 2008; Bush received 74 percent in 2004) by championing policies that place the arts and environmental sustainability high on the civic priority list. While the rest of Indiana has been getting failing grades for air and water quality, Carmel took first place in the Climate Protection Awards presented by the U.S. Conference of Mayors in 2008. And while public funding for the arts in Indianapolis has been cut to pre-2000 levels, Carmel is investing $150 million in a new performing arts center, slated to open this coming January.

NUVO: How did the arts and environment become policy priorities in Carmel?

Brainard: I grew up in a household where my dad was a school music teacher. My mother was a piano teacher. So I suppose that had something to do with it.

But we’re in competition in central Indiana. This region is in competition with cities all over the world. Carmel’s not in competition with Indianapolis or vice versa. We’re in competition with cities across the globe. If I am the owner of a tech company, I can choose to put that tech company anywhere, so long as I can attract the top talent I need.

So how does central Indiana compete? We can compete by creating cities that are beautiful, sustainable cities with good public education. It’s important to remember that one of the things that’s distinguished America from every other country all over the earth is that we were the first to provide free public education. Maintaining that system is absolutely key to making cities successful.

From an economic standpoint, it makes a lot of sense for a city to invest in the arts. For every dollar of investment, six to eight dollars are returned to the taxpayer.

Last fall, a Kennedy School study at Harvard showed the average household in the U.S. drives 104 miles a day. That’s not sustainable from a lot of aspects. But it’s particularly not sustainable from a city financial standpoint because we’re building all these roads and maintaining these roads.

Have you gone for a romantic walk with your significant other recently, past the Walmart parking lot on one side and the six-lane road on the other? Probably not. And the reason you haven’t is because it’s not any fun! It’s not romantic. It’s not pleasing to the eye.

So we’re bringing the buildings back up to the street. Let’s go up a little higher. Let’s accommodate the car, but let’s accommodate them underground with garages. Let’s get people walking in the community. Let’s have options for people who don’t want to live on a big lot. That means apartments and condos and townhomes. And as we build this more walkable, sustainable community, one of the ways we make it beautiful is to have art. Public art.

We started a policy, as many other cities have across the country, of spending one percent of our general reserves for support of the arts about six years ago. Over time we’ve been able to buy a lot of public sculptures, support a lot of arts organizations.

NUVO: What would you say are some of the biggest misconceptions that critics of cultural policy have?

Brainard: We haven’t had that many critics in Carmel. We have a very well-educated group of citizens. I think the last census of folks with a college degree showed us fifth highest in the county. It makes a huge difference. People are willing to listen and analyze because they’re trained – not because they’re different people – because they’ve been trained through the university process not to make quick judgments until they get all the facts.

And we’ve cut their tax rates. I think that’s a large part of it. I’m in my fourth term and residential taxes are lower in Carmel today than they were in 1986. So I think we have confidence from a lot of people in town that we are careful when we make major decisions. They’re not done on a whim, but carefully thought out and part of an overall strategy to keep our taxes low and our quality of life high.

Strategic spending can be a good thing. It can actually keep your taxes down. If we spend on things that attract businesses here that pay the majority of taxes, it means our own taxes don’t have to be as high. So far our strategy’s worked out beautifully. We’ve attracted a tremendous amount of investment. Almost one-third of Carmel’s property tax revenue comes from business. Normally in a city, it’s 10-13 percent.

NUVO: People critical of public investment in the arts often say it’s an elitist enterprise.

Brainard: I think that, in some cases, can be valid. In our case, that’s why we’re focused on public sculpture in the downtown area that can be enjoyed by anybody who wants to walk down the street. You don’t have to pay a high-priced ticket to get in. That’s exactly one of the reasons we’re raising an endowment to support our performance venues – to hold ticket prices down.

I have a relative who was married in Costa Rica last summer. One of the buildings we went to see was their opera house. It was a copy of the Paris Opera House that was built, I think, in 1895. You think about San Jose, Costa Rica in 1895, it probably wasn’t a very developed place yet. I envision dirt streets and jungle. Yet they built this beautiful replica of the Paris Opera House. It’s as if you stepped into Europe. I was talking broken English with the cab driver that took us there and he said the best thing about it is that government supports it enough that people like him can afford to go. He said he was able to see Pavarotti for five U.S. dollars.

And I thought, “that cab driver’s right.” We need to have programs that make it affordable for families and hardworking folks that maybe don’t have a lot of money. I think everybody involved in the arts needs to remember that.

NUVO: It creates a higher level of aspiration in the community.

Brainard: It gives people hope. It allows them to dream and to think and learn. Everybody should be able to afford to go to a concert or see a play. That’s why we already do a lot of outdoor concerts, a lot of free events. We want to continue those. Now, granted, artists like to get paid and make lots of money, and so there will be some events priced higher than others.

NUVO: Are there other ways in which cultural policy informs the community?

Brainard: The arts have played a part for centuries, going back to the Greek playwrights, in forming public opinion and being a vital part of a representative democracy. If we’re going to have a representative democracy, the arts are a way of communicating and discussing ideas. I happened upon a conversation in one of our outdoor cafes in Old Town just a few days ago. I overheard a group of six adults who were having dinner together, discussing the expression on the face of one our sculptures, a statue of a woman carrying a bunch of groceries, whether she’s happy or unhappy. It was fascinating to eavesdrop and hear this discussion about the expression on her face and what it meant. I’m thinking this is good. This is what art’s supposed to do. It’s supposed to inspire conversation and thought. Flower baskets are nice, but they’re not going to create conversation.

NUVO: Don’t you think public transportation has to play a part in helping people understand what a greater Indianapolis metro area can be?

Brainard: Without question we need better pubic transportation in this region, to be connected and to be able to get around. People say it’s so expensive, but what I didn’t realize until I was mayor is that to rebuild just a mile of county road is $5-7 million dollars. And you have to maintain that forever. That’s why so many cities are bankrupt. They can’t maintain the infrastructure of a sprawling development pattern.

I was looking at a comparable city in California. They have 150 miles of roads and the same population we do. We have 400 and some miles of roads. So we’re spending three and half times more on our roads – probably more because they don’t have winter. Then you have to police further out. You need fire stations. Providing decent services to the public goes way up when you have sprawl.

We appreciate that some people prefer to live on big lots – I do, I’m guilty along with everybody else – but there are a lot of folks who don’t want that yard any more. So we’re trying to provide options. When you do that, it makes public transportation more economically feasible. It’s really hard when everybody’s sprawled out. But when you’ve got dense clusters in areas, public transportation makes a lot more sense.

We – I mean, the Indianapolis region – [are] the largest metropolitan region in the country without a light rail or some form of subway system in the country today. Mayor Ballard has been pushing it. I’ve been impressed with him. I think he saw great public transportation systems in his military career when he was stationed in Europe and he wants to do similar things here.

One of the things public transit will allow him to do within a quarter mile of the stations – those areas generally develop in a very dense way. That creates an opportunity for a tremendous amount of redevelopment of those cores around the train or subway station. You get a lot of private sector investment because you know you’re going to have “X” number of people leaving that train station every day.

NUVO: What do you say to people who claim adopting green ideas involves sacrifice?

Brainard: I don’t see it as a sacrifice. Building a city that works better, is more economical, more sustainable and more beautiful – I don’t see that as a sacrifice. I see that as an improvement. And I think it’s evidenced by the fact that as we build this new downtown area, the population is skyrocketing in comparison to other, comparable cities.

Somebody said to me, “I wish so many people wouldn’t move here. I liked it when it was small.” I said, “Well, I suppose we could do that. We could not pick up the trash. Let some chuckholes start. Have some really blighted neighborhoods. Instead of people wanting to come, they’d want to leave.”

If you build an attractive place, people are going to want to come. They vote with their feet. And they’re voting in favor of Carmel.

You can read the rest of this interview at Nuvo Newsweekly’s web site.

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

What Is the Real Function of an Arts Organization?

According to an article in D Magazine, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra is in financial trouble:

There’s no doubt that the symphony, like many nonprofit groups in North Texas, is struggling to make ends meet in the teeth of a still-sputtering economy. The DSO’s plight is especially vexing to many Dallas businesspeople, however, because of the symphony’s importance to the business community as a symbol of the city’s cultural standing….After four straight years of balanced budgets—and a 70 percent increase in its endowment, to $120 million—the DSO ran into difficulty two years ago after its then-president and CEO, Fred Bronstein, left to head the symphony orchestra in St. Louis. Battered by the stock market crash and the so-called Great Recession, the DSO’s endowment would plummet to $84 million.

Local donors are hesitant in a tough economy and Dallas is having difficulty raising funds. What I find interesting is the juxtaposition of the endowment decline with the $1 billion the city just invested in a performing arts complex:

It is clearly one of the most impressive collections of new arts buildings in the country, designed by some of the finest contemporary architects – Renzo Piano, I.M. Pei, Edward Larrabee Barnes, Foster + Partners, Rem Koolhaas and Brad Cloepfil, whose Arts Magnet High School could provide the daily doses of populist energy that the district needs.

How can a city invest over a billion in buildings but not support the on field product? It reminds me of a previous post on Kansas City’s Kauffman Center for the performing arts, whose price tag could have created an endowment that would have funded the entire operating budgets of the symphony, opera, and ballet in perpetuity.

Obviously art is not the primary role of these organizations play in their community, but something else entirely. That’s not to say that expenditures on buildings that seem excessive to some or to have no rational purpose is a bad thing. Man does not live on bread alone. Throughout history great civilizations have raised monuments of a questionable nature that nevertheless continue to inspire to this day – from the Pyramids of Egypt on down. A city that did not have such aspirations, that created a purely utilitarian environment driven entirely by the iron law of cost benefit, would be a place in which the spirit of man was atrophied. Few such places ever achieve greatness.

But there’s a balance to be had. The greatness of Athens was not in the Parthenon, nor Rome in the Coliseum. It was the intellectual, cultural (and yes, military) pursuits that happened in those places. Dallas is a great commercial success. It’s now looking to harvest the cultural benefits that can come from it. But Dallas would do well to heed the lesson of earlier boomtowns like Chicago. As Chicago got wealthy, it didn’t just build imposing Beaux-Arts monuments, it populated them with world class institutions. To this day the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the Lyric Opera of Chicago are among the finest in the world.

Dallas, Kansas City, and others looking to elevate their recognition level and quality of life through the arts should recognize that first and foremost it’s about the art. Building world class buildings populated by second rate, financially starved institutions would send a message to the world about a city alright, but I’m not sure it’s the one city leaders hoped to create.

Sunday, April 18th, 2010

In Praise of the Chicago Opera Theater

I hope you’ll indulge me an off-topic post for my Chicago readers. I’d like to make my annual pitch for the Chicago Opera Theater.

Why do you live in Chicago? Institutions like the COT are why. COT presents productions of lesser performed works from the repertoire, from Monteverdi to the modern day, with fresh, innovative productions and fantastic young singers. This is art you simply can’t get anywhere else – not even in New York City.

Chicago Opera Theater is arguably America’s most important opera company.

Their spring festival season is here. I know opera isn’t for everyone, but if you like it or are interested in giving it a try, I’d encourage you in the strongest way to check them out. I just saw opening night of Mosè in Egitto, a serious opera by Rossini, and it was simply wonderful. And that’s not just me, the entire audience was massively enthusiastic. And check out Andrew Patner’s glowing review as well.

Remind yourself of why you live in a truly world-class city like Chicago and check out a performance by the Chicago Opera Theater this year.

Thanks for reading.

Older Posts »

Telestrian Data Terminal

A production of the Urbanophile, Telestrian is the fastest, easiest, and best way to access public data about cities and regions, with totally unique features like the ability to create thematic maps with no technical knowledge and easy to use place to place migration data. It's a great way to support the Urbanophile, but more importantly it can save you tons of time and deliver huge value and capabilities to you and your organization.

Try It For 30 Days Free!

About the Urbanophile

Aaron M. Renn is an opinion-leading urban analyst, consultant, speaker, and writer on a mission to help America’s cities thrive and find sustainable success in the 21st century.

Full Bio

Contact

• arenn@urbanophile.com
• twitter.com/urbanophile
• linkedin.com/in/aaronmrenn

Please email before connecting with me on LinkedIn if we don't already know each other.