AndrewBlum.net

Planning Rwanda (Metropolis)

Thirteen years after the genocide, the tiny African nation begins imagining its future. (link)
Just before nine one morning in May, I arrived at the Alpha Palace Hotel, not far from the center of Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. A team of American architects waited nervously outside, dressed in blue suits and holding battered travel tubes of drawings. In them was the conceptual master plan for the future of Kigali: a sweeping vision to turn today’s red-dirt ad-hoc city into a verdant capital with tree-lined boulevards, mixed-use neighborhoods, a new university, parks, and a network of wetlands to mitigate storm-water runoff. OZ Architecture, from Denver, along with EDAW, a landscape-architecture and urban-planning firm, had been quietly working on the scheme for three years. This morning, 13 years after Rwanda’s genocide, they would present it to an audience of local planning officials, foreign consultants, and politicians. I had come to watch, to see what American-style urban planning looked like in Rwanda, and what it could possibly do to help transform a place of poverty and struggle into one of prosperity and peace.

Local Cities, Global Problems: Jane Jacobs in an Age of Global Change

Originally published in the book "Block by Block: Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York," coinciding with the exhibition "Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York," at the Municipal Art Society, September 25th 2007 - January 5th 2008.

My block in Brooklyn plays a good Hudson Street—at least at first glance. Each morning, the cigar-store owner throws open his gate, the barber puts out his chairs, the baker begins her muffins, and the old man a few doors down takes up his surveillance from the second-floor window. When I make my own first entrance a little after seven, with the dog, the newspaperman calls me “boss.” It may all look like Jane Jacobs’s glorious sidewalk ballet, but this is no longer Jane Jacobs’s city.

When I “look, listen, linger and think” about my corner of the world, I am persistently confronted with the broader world beyond. The barbershop chatter is in Creole, the cigar store might be closed for the end of Ramadan, and the cyclical chanting of capoeira, the Brazilian martial art, echoes from an upstairs dance studio. Planes pass overhead on their way to La Guardia. And at all hours people pause at the top of the subway stairs to finish their cell-phone conversations.

This last activity is remarkably dominant and has come to define the character of the place. They lean against the station railing three or four at a time, talking with one hand to an ear and their heads cocked high. Like a lot of things here, they are deeply connected to other places. Their attention is divided. And, by extension, so is ours. While this feeling is common to all cities over time, cell phones bring the tangible immediacy of the faraway to the street. Helped along by media and the global logistics networks that define our material lives, our moment-to-moment experience of the local has become increasingly global. And so have our problems.

Jacobs fought modernist urban planning’s “dishonest mask of pretended order,” and what concerns me today about cities is a corollary: Call it the dishonest mask of pretended localism. Thanks in great part to Jacobs, we talk a lot about preserving neighborhoods, which most often means keeping them the way they are. But for me, preserving an urban community—not merely its architecture, its open space, or its independently owned stores—now means recognizing what the local is made of, the warp and weft of all its pieces, wherever they come from, near or far. And that requires recognizing the global community behind it—for better or worse, in the face of both nostalgia and change.

San Francisco Federal Building (AIASF podcast)

San Francisco Federal Building from AIA San Francisco on Vimeo.

Produced for the exhibition STREET CRED San Francisco: Architecture and the Pedestrian Experience, this podcast features architect Thom Mayne, principal of the Los Angles-based firm Morphosis and designer of the new San Francisco Federal Building, in conversation with Andrew Blum, a Brooklyn-based writer and contributing editor at Metropolis and Wired magazines. Mayne discusses the social implications of his most recently built project—both in terms of how it serves federal employees and the public. Produced and edited by Melanie McGraw, with photography by Keith Baker, Tim Griffith, and an introduction by exhibition co-curator Julie Kim. (link)

The Big Pixel (Print Magazine)

The future of "mediatecture" (link)

In his 2001 book, Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies, architect James Sanders describes the relationship between the city and iconic films like Annie Hall and Miracle on 34th Street. Recently, though, as he discussed at a recent event in New York, Sanders has been thinking a lot about Shark Tale. True, it’s a movie about talking fish, but Sanders sees in it a compelling vision of a city of the future, in which the lines between real events and their video representation become blurred. In one scene, TV newscaster “Katie Current” reports live on a battle against a villainous shark. At the climactic moment, the shark smashes into an outdoor video screen—which turns out to be the very screen we’ve been watching Katie on, in the center of Times Square. In an explosion of flashbulbs and falling fish, we are confronted with what Sanders sees as the coming urban reality: a city that is simultaneously itself and its media representation.

Illuminated signs in public spaces have been around for a century, but recent advances in LED and projection technology are bringing us closer to truly transforming buildings into video screens. Boosters of this phenomenon call it “mediatecture.” For advertisers, it’s obviously irresistible; for the rest of us walking around the city, it could be either terrifying or thrilling. What’s clear is that the final effect depends enormously on designers and their ability to wrangle a larger canvas than ever before. We’ve arrived at a strange time when many designers must scramble to create good solutions for tiny cell-phone screens and, at the same time, devise the best approach for a quarter-acre of pixels.

Since the Sony JumboTron debuted at the 1985 world’s fair in Japan, enormous public video screens have become a familiar sight. But LED technology, with its lower operating temperatures, eliminates the need for big cooling mechanisms to be built behind the screen. The tipping-point products in this more streamlined genre have been developed by ag4, a German architecture and media design company, in partnership with GKD Metal Fabrics (which produces woven metal fabrics for interiors and exteriors). Mediamesh and Illumesh embed LEDs, along with all power and control cabling, into a structural metal mesh resembling an elegant security grate. The electronics are sleek enough to be transparent, so the screen can be used on a full facade without blocking daylight in or views out. For the same reason, it doesn’t look like a blank black wall when turned off. This doesn’t come cheap—prices hover around $200 per square foot—but that hasn’t prevented installation on a handful of buildings in Europe (including projects for Adidas and the 2006 Cannes Film Festival) and, soon, outside shopping malls in California.

The Dream Life of Toronto

(Originally published in ROM, the magazine of the Royal Ontario Museum)

Places may seem like physical things, but they come to life only when imbued with meaning and memories. And that’s what thrills me about the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at the ROM: more than just a museum of objects, it seems destined to become the leading repository of the dream life of Toronto. And not a moment too soon.

In 2001, not long before the ROM began its expansion project, I moved to Canada from New York—for love, and  to study human geography at the University of Toronto. My academic focus was “sense of place,” which I soon found to be a very complicated thing. In the old formulation, a sense of place was most closely identified with traditional villages, where people share a history and build that history into the landscape with their homes and monuments. But my new city was proving itself to be a different kind of place altogether—seemingly bent on reinventing the idea of cosmopolitanism.

As an American in Canada during those charged months after September 11, I felt this personally, as I faced what it meant to be a global citizen of a changed world. And I watched as the city faced it physically, as this current crop of architecturally ambitious public buildings, helped along by the Ontario SuperBuild Fund, brought that old question back to the fore about Toronto as a “world city.” With the release in the newspapers of each new set of architect’s renderings—wild squiggles and flying tabletops—the questions became clearer and the arguments in the press and at the dog park more tense: What is Toronto’s place in the world? What should the city become? And what does that have to do with architecture?

What's Next for US Cities (Dialogue)

The Brookings Institution's Christopher Leinberger and Alan Berube consider what regional real estate and demographic trends imply for the future of American cities. (link)

Christopher Leinberger directs the Graduate Real Estate Program at the University of Michigan; researches walkable urbanity at the Brookings Institution, where he's a visiting fellow; and puts his ideas into practice as a founding partner of Arcadia Land Company, a progressive real estate development firm whose projects include Woodmont, a 49-acre community that is three times as dense as its suburban Philadelphia neighbors.

Alan Berube is a fellow of the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program, overseeing its Living Cities Census Series, including "The State of American Cities" and "Finding Exurbia." In 2004, he held the Atlantic Fellowship in Public Policy at the U.K. Treasury and the London School of Economics. Before joining Brookings in 2001, he was a policy advisor in the Office of Community Development Policy, U.S. Treasury.

What's the biggest change in U.S. cities?