placespace

Eastward to Doha

Hijacking Aspen's latest posts from Doha: horses & mosques

Paradise, USA

In Travel and Leisure this month Karrie Jacobs proves once again-- far more elegantly than I've ever read before-- that "New Urbanism" is absolutely confounding. I remember one particularly heated argument about Celebration, back in 1997, just as the town opened-- an argument I would have won if I knew this, even if it was obvious!:

Everyone I meet along the way tells me the same story: Disney actually has less and less to do with Celebration. In 2003 the majority on the Celebration Residential Owners’ Association shifted from representatives of the Disney-owned Celebration Company to the home- owners. According to the locals, Celebration—à la Pinocchio—is on its way to becoming a real town. On the other hand, in early 2004, Disney sold the entire business district to a company called Lexin Capital. The fact that downtown Celebration can be sold in its entirety—18 acres, 16 shops, six restaurants, some office space, and a number of apartments—explains a lot about why it doesn’t feel real.

Make sure to read through to the part about the "Third Place Pub & Grille." (link)

photo of downtown Celebration by Martha Camarillo for Travel & Leisure

Flaneur of the Air

This was inevitable: Mike Davis heads to Dubai, the archetypal city of the decade. Or, as he puts it, "the new global icon of imagineered urbanism," and "a hallucinatory pastiche of the big, the bad and the ugly." It takes a searing turn, not surprisingly. But I was struck by the similarity of his opening to my friend Greg Lindsay's excellent piece on Aerotropolises.

There seems to be only one way to describe Dubai -- as a sort of flaneur of the air.