The Vine

As only she can, Jessica Hagy captures a deep truth of human behavior in this elegant little diagram, cleverly titled Giving the finger with your thumbs.

It’s a spot-on commentary, and yet I was also reminded of a counter-perspective from Misha Glouberman, a facilitator and designer of participatory events. (He is also—by his own claim, as yet unchallenged—Canada’s foremost charades instructor.)

In an intriguing, sometimes meandering but always insightful book, The Chairs Are Where the People Go, Misha shares this observation about our public/private divide:

“I hear people complain that…people don’t say hi on the street or make eye contact on the subway. And people try to remedy this problem by doing public art projects that are meant to rouse the bourgeoisie from their slumber. But that’s ridiculous! It’s perfectly reasonable for people not to want to see your dance performance when they are coming home from work. People are on the subway because they’re getting from one place to another, and for all you know, they’re coming from a job that involves interacting with lots and lots of people, and going to a home where there’s a family where they’re going to interact with lots more people. And the subway’s the one place where they can have some quiet time, get some reading done, not have to smile, not have to make eye contact.

That’s what a city is: a city is a place where you can be alone in public, and where you have that right. It’s necessary to screen people out. It would be overwhelming if you had to perceive every single person on a crowded subway car in the fullness of their humanity. It would be completely paralyzing. You couldn’t function. So don’t try to fix this. There is no problem.”

We need human connection. Until we need a break from it.

With TED 2012 kicking off next week and awarding its annual TED Prize not to an individual, but rather to the idea of promoting “The City 2.0,” the video below seemed like a perfect tie-in.

Urbanized, the third installlment of Gary Hustwit’s design film trilogy, is a feature-length documentary about the design of cities, featuring commentary from some of the world’s foremost architects, planners and policymakers—Rem Koolhaas, Eduardo Paes, Norman Foster and Oscar Niemeyer, to name a few.

In the filmmakers’ own words:

Over half the world’s population now lives in an urban area, and 75% will call a city home by 2050. But while some cities are experiencing explosive growth, others are shrinking. The challenges of balancing housing, mobility, public space, civic engagement, economic development, and environmental policy are fast becoming universal concerns. Yet much of the dialogue on these issues is disconnected from the public domain.

Who is allowed to shape our cities, and how do they do it? Unlike many other fields of design, cities aren’t created by any one specialist or expert. There are many contributors to urban change, including ordinary citizens who can have a great impact improving the cities in which they live. By exploring a diverse range of urban design projects around the world, Urbanized frames a global discussion on the future of cities.

The film is being screened at festivals and events in North America and Europe, with more dates to be announced. You can also stream it online for a fee, or rent it from Netflix or iTunes. And the trailer is below.

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Jon Rafman is a new-media artist and curator of Nine Eyes, a collection of photos culled from Google’s massive (and, to some, controversial and intrusive) Street View project. However you feel about the privacy issues, these raw images—in Rafman’s words, “unspoiled by the sensitivities or agendas of a human photographer”—are a fascinating, snapshot archive of our times.

Rafman’s full collection spans the comic and tragic, profound and prosaic, beautiful and bizarre. A handful of my favorites are below.

In a similar vein, from a different source, there’s also this charming and clever short video.

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^ Paved with good intentions.

^ Now that’s vernacular architecture.

^ Freeze this moment in time. They don’t get much better than this.

^ Not everyone appreciates the all-seeing eye.

^ Is anything photographed in Paris not romantic?

^ This one simultaneously lifts and breaks my heart. A makeshift, sidewalk residence decorated with a little girl’s dreams. Add walls and I could be looking at my daughter’s bedroom.

^ Party on, Wayne. Party on, Garth.

Community is a slippery thing to describe, more easily understood by its absence than presence. Usually it’s best captured through stories of people and places. Here are three wonderful examples.

(1) Wrigley Is Wrigley, and Nothing Else Is

Native Chicagoan Dave Eggers captures the communal essence of Cubs baseball at Wrigley Field—an experience soaked in history, fraternity and beer. Every so often, fans also take in what’s happening on the field.

Known as the “Friendly Confines,” Wrigley is one of the oldest—and arguably the most neighborly—of all major league ballparks. (Bostonians will make their case for Fenway Park, which is two years older, but the fierce intensity of its crowd creates an entirely different atmosphere than laid-back Wrigley.) “I grew up with the Cubs,” Eggers writes, “and I don’t remember the possibility of winning ever being high among the reasons we went to Wrigley.”

Despite (or perhaps because of) the Cubs’ perennial futility and heartbreak, fans flock to Wrigley as “[a] place that celebrates not just a team but a city—and a city’s refusal to plow the past under. [It] is the ultimate neighborhood stadium, the ultimate urban stadium, the ultimate statement that some semblance of tradition is more important than the money you could make with a hundred new skyboxes in some spectacularly soulless new stadium.”

(2) Dr. Don

Don Colcord is a pharmacist in the small, rural town of Nucla, Colorado (population: “around 700 and falling”). As proprietor of Nucla’s Apothecary Shoppe, he is, within a two-hour driving radius, the area’s de facto health care provider, dispensing medicine and medical advice in equal measures. He knows his customers’ names, and also their circumstances. When someone’s insurance has lapsed, or he or she simply can’t afford to pay, Don rings up the order anyway and sets aside the receipt for payment at a later date (if at all—each year he writes off ten to twenty thousand dollars in unpaid bills).

“At the Apothecary Shoppe, Don never wears a white coat,” the author tells us. “He takes people’s blood pressure, and he often gives injections; if it has to be done in the backside, he escorts the customer into the bathroom for privacy. Elderly folks refer to him as ‘Dr. Don,’ although he has no medical degree and discourages people from using this title. He doesn’t wear a nametag. ‘I wear old Levi’s,’ he says. ‘People want to talk to somebody who looks like them, talks like them, is part of the community. I know a lot of pharmacists wear a coat because it makes you look more professional. But it’s different here.’”

(3) Keep it up and we could solve our gang problem

(The above link opens a PDF.) The Vine’s own Chris Grant is the architect of an ambitious project in which star players from the Great Britain hockey team (field hockey to Americans) trained and mentored a group of youngsters from East London’s poorest neighborhoods.

“The scheme is quixotic, to say the least,” the writer comments. “Take 30 unsporty 11 to 14-year-olds from tough areas…, introduce them to a sport associated with toffs and private schools, organise a highly competitive fixture in three months’ time, and get star players with little or no background in coaching to teach them how to play.” Without giving away the ending, it’s a Disney-esque story of redemption for the kids and stars alike.

“Society is increasingly stratified,” Chris says. “But the hockey project showed that those barriers can be broken down very easily. People from different backgrounds need to be brought together. We need to revive the idea of the club as a focal point for communities.”

Photo credit: Seth Anderson

Don Anderson is well known to many Vinesters as the creative soul who, for 38 years, led an extraordinary team of designers at Color Design Art. The studio’s award-winning work was informed and inspired by cultural anthropology, human empathy, insatiable curiosity and a spirit of play.

Don describes himself as “mostly retired” these days, and one of his favorite activities is exploring the diverse communities of Los Angeles by bicycle. “I feel it’s the perfect means of getting to know a neighborhood,” he says. “It’s faster than walking but slow enough to see and feel from all your senses.”

While on these bike rides, he’ll frequently stop to photograph the sights—and in particular the “strange juxtapositions”—that catch his eye. Don sent me some of his photos and graciously allowed us to post them, which I’ve done below along with his comments.

Thank you, Don, for helping us see the quirks and character of L.A. through your eyes.

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This apartment is on Overland Avenue in Palms.

Well you know what they say… This guy took it to heart. This castle is planted in the midst of a nice neighborhood just South of Wilshire near LaCienega.

I call this one “Unsuccessful NIMBYs.” These guys are the lucky ones on the South side of Wilshire. Homes on the North side never see the sun!

This is a recently freshened up home nearby. You likely won’t see this color in Irvine!

Rick Mockler—an intriguing guy whose background includes creation of both social and physical communities—wrote to me a while back about Apple’s proposed new headquarters. In particular, he noted the contrast between Apple’s insular, auto-centric, fortress design and Facebook’s declared plans to knit its campus into the surrounding community.

Rick was ahead of that story (I was slow to post), and since then L.A. Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne has voiced a similar response.

“Though the planned building has a futuristic gleam,” Hawthorne writes, “in many ways it is a doggedly old-fashioned proposal, recalling the 1943 Pentagon building as well as much of the suburban corporate architecture of the 1960s and ’70s. And though Apple has touted the new campus as green, its sprawling form and dependence on the car make a different argument.”

The circular building, Hawthorne concludes, “is essentially one very long hallway connecting endlessly with itself.” He could just as well have been describing the prevailing approach—among many corporations; I’m not picking on Apple—to office parks everywhere.

Both projects are still in the design stage. Based on what we see so far, though, Facebook’s plan is the one that’s got me clicking “Like.”

Although not widely known in the US, British graffiti artist Banksy has achieved cult status across the pond, provoking reactions of both admiration and outrage, apparently in equal measures.

His satirical works have appeared (always anonymously, adding to his mystique) on streets, buildings and bridges in cities throughout the world—primarily in and around London, but also in post-Katrina New Orleans, the West Bank, Disneyland, the Louvre and many other exotic, far flung places.

They are public expressions of political and social commentary, with themes ranging from whimsical and irreverent (as shown here) to subversive and dark. Some of his indoor pieces have sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds, and his celebrity collectors include Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and Christina Aguilera.

He’s also the subject-turned-director of Exit Through the Gift Shop, an indie documentary of the underground street art scene. When Banksy realizes that amateur filmmaker Thierry Guetta is, well, an amateur, he takes over the project and fashions it into a thoroughly entertaining story.

As with all graffiti—even graffiti as witty and astute as Banksy’s—it raises the question: Is it art or vandalism?

It’s a slippery one to consider, and you find yourself falling into “eye of the beholder” and “I know it when I see it” non-answers.

But then again, maybe it’s a lot simpler than all that. Does it make my community more interesting? Does it make me smile? Does it make me think? If a Banksy piece surreptitiously appeared in my town, would I be pleased it’s there?

Yes. Unequivocally yes.

That, to me, makes it art.

We may find out.

Facebook is relocating its corporate headquarters from upscale Palo Alto to the decidedly more gritty, blue-collar community of Belle Haven in Menlo Park. And their design plan, from the sounds of it, involves knitting the campus (formerly a cloistered compound that housed Sun Microsystems) more closely into the surrounding community—physically and socially.

That process began this past Saturday with an “urban planning hack-a-thon.” Ryan White of Fast Company’s Co.Design participated, and he writes of the experience:

“Some 150 architects, designers, and students forfeited their Saturday and wired in for a 12-hour draft-a-thon that produced a bevy of ideas for connecting the isolated Facebook campus with the surrounding community and adjacent wetlands, as well as suggestions for redeveloping the area with better transit, denser mixed-use housing, and lively retail and business districts. …

“Facebook says it wants to change the fortress vibe and embrace the community. So to kick things off on Saturday, designers took morning bus tours of the adjacent Belle Haven neighborhood — several dozen local residents came along to lend their thoughts — and then broke into Red, Yellow, Blue, and Green teams. Teams of 20 to 40 each rolled up their T-shirts and began cranking out as many hand sketches and digital models as they could before an after-dinner deadline: a show-your-work presentation before a packed assembly of fellow architects, Facebook reps, Menlo Park city officials, and a sprinkling of nearby residents. The day’s mission, as Norman tells it: ‘creating a sense of community’ — or perhaps, more to the point, to create a larger sense of community, one that very conspicuously features Facebook. …

“Designers repeatedly sought ways to transform the area immediately adjoining the Facebook campus into a dynamic ‘hub’ of restaurants, retail and transit, a kind of physical manifestation of the company’s reputation for knitting people together.”

Readers of this blog will have already noted the myriad political, zoning and funding obstacles that stand in Facebook’s way—welcome to our world—and indeed Menlo Park’s mayor is anticipating loud, contentious opposition when the design concepts are presented at the next City Council meeting.

Undoubtedly it will be years before the fullness of the plan is realized, and many of the project’s rough edges (rough in a good sense, as in creating traction, not splinters) will be sanded down along the way. Such is the reality of urban redevelopment.

But when the world’s largest cultivator of digital community turns its attention to the physical realm, we should all be watching their progress with great interest.

And rooting for them to succeed.

[ NB: the rendering above is one of multiple concepts generated at the charrette, not the actual plan. ]

Super Bowl XLV between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Green Bay Packers is being heralded as an historic matchup. Pitting two of the league’s most iconic franchises, it’s the first-ever title game in which both teams are more than 75 years old.

I’d add this to the significance: you’re hard-pressed to find two sports franchises anywhere in the country so tightly woven into the culture and identity of their cities and regions. (Although you could make a strong case for the Boston Red Sox or the New Orleans Saints.)

It’s been said that there are two topics that will draw complete strangers into conversation: the weather and a winning local sports team.

“Sports are us,” observes Eric Angevine, “and we are sports.”

For better or for worse.

For the record, I’m predicting…Steelers 27, Packers 24.

Photo credit: melissajonas

The New York Times Magazine has a fascinating article about Geoffrey West, a theoretical physicist who set out to study cities—specifically, whether there might be fundamental laws governing their patterns and growth.

“We spend all this time thinking about cities in terms of their local details, their restaurants and museums and weather,” West says. “I had this hunch that there was something more, that every city was also shaped by a set of hidden laws.”

As it turns out, apparently they are. The article elaborates:

“After two years of analysis, West and Bettencourt discovered that all of these urban variables could be described by a few exquisitely simple equations. For example, if they know the population of a metropolitan area in a given country, they can estimate, with approximately 85 percent accuracy, its average income and the dimensions of its sewer system. These are the laws, they say, that automatically emerge whenever people ‘agglomerate,’ cramming themselves into apartment buildings and subway cars. It doesn’t matter if the place is Manhattan or Manhattan, Kan.: the urban patterns remain the same.” (Emphasis added.)

Without giving away too much of the article, West’s findings reveal (in his interpretation, debated by others) a bit of an urban Gordian knot: The denser we are, the more innovative and productive we become. The more we innovate and produce, the more resources we consume, and the harder it becomes to sustain that growth. Unless, of course, we innovate our way to new resources.

Cities, West concludes, may be the only solution to the problem of cities.

(Click for full-size images)

I’m thinking the placement was intentional. A vicious cycle of customers.

Your move. Be sure to lift with your legs, not your back.

Dreams can be had for 99 cents. But the cheap, shitty trinkets that end up in landfills—those will set you back a dollar or more.

The Social Web, version 0.0.

The weather’s always nice, your marriage will be happier, your kids will never need braces, and your golf handicap will drop to single digits.

Even in sidewalk graffiti, there’s always an idealist. And always a cynic.

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NB: All photos posted through a Creative Commons license, with thanks to the creativity and generosity of the artists who freely shared them.

Much has been written of Las Vegas’s CityCenter, ranging from rapturous to scathing.

Reality lies somewhere in between, and I think Paul Goldberger may have nailed it best here.

For all of its modern architectural splendor and LEED credentials, from a planning standpoint CityCenter is no more urban—in the Holly Whyte walkable, accessible, inviting sense—than its kitschy neighbors up and down the Strip.

Or as Goldberger so eloquently puts it: “CityCenter is the Las Vegas you already know, but in modernist drag.”

Don’t get me wrong, the place is spectacular. It’s well worth visiting. I’m just not sure it’s worth emulating.

Photo credit: Trey Campbell

Bicycling Magazine has published its list of the top 50 bike-friendly cities in America.

Kudos to Vinester Nate Garvis‘s hometown of Minneapolis, which received the #1 ranking.

And I can’t resist bragging on my college town of Davis, California—a city that boasts more bikes than cars—which was awarded the top spot in the under-100,000 population category.

It came as no surprise to yours truly, who spent four years cycling to classes, football games, bars, you name it. (Although to be honest, it had more to do with poverty than purity.)

Photo credit: Bright lite photos

Congrats to The Vine’s indispensable adviser, supporter and friend Sandra Kulli, who was selected to give an audience talk at this year’s TED conference. Served up in four-minute (tightly monitored) segments, it’s no easy feat to communicate a message that is at once substantive, focused and crisp.

In this very short window, Sandra took us on a Pecha Kucha-inspired photographical tour of the 17 homes she’s lived in throughout her life.

Sandra is a connoisseur of, among many things, places and books. And so, while narrating the slides, she paired each location with a favorite book that reflects the spirit of that particular neighborhood, city, or in some cases stage of her life.

The presentation was every bit as thoughtful and moving as it sounds. (In just four minutes!)

We’ll post the video once it becomes available. For now, enjoy Sandra’s booklist.

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• Toby Israel — Some Place Like Home: Using Design Psychology to Create Ideal Places

• Merry Ovnick — Los Angeles: The End of the Rainbow

• Richard Louv — Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder

• Sunset Magazine Editorial Staff with Cliff May — Western Ranch Houses

• Lucy Lippard — The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society

• Allan B. Jacobs — Great Streets

• Karen Stabiner — Inventing Desire: Inside Chiat/Day

• Witold Rybczynski — A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century

• Andrea Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz — The Daring Book for Girls

• Dave Isay — Listening is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life from the StoryCorps Project

• Ray Oldenburg — The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores…and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community

• Gordon MacKenzie — Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace

• William H. Whyte — The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

• Reyner Banham — Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies

• Adah Bakalinsky and Larry Gordon — Stairway Walks in Los Angeles

• Romy Wyllie — Caltech’s Architectural Heritage

• Rachel Herz — The Scent of Desire: Discovering our Enigmatic Sense of Smell

• Sarah Susanka — The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live

• Clare Cooper Marcus — House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home

• Stanley Kunitz — The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden

• Frederic Morton — Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914

I recently had lunch with Vinester Randy Sater, who brought me a really cool gift accompanied by an equally cool story.

Randy is president of StoneBridge Properties, the residential development arm of Teichert, a 125-year-old, family owned and operated construction materials producer here in my hometown of Sacramento. (To most Sacramentans, Teichert is synonymous with rocks. But that may soon change.)

With Teichert’s land nearly depleted of mining resources, Randy and his team are repurposing a 3,800-acre infill site as a new masterplanned community designed around urban farming, a tribute to the area’s early agrarian heritage. “It’s time to knit this land back into the community,” he says. “But in starting this process, we wanted to look to the past before planning for the future.”

To do so, StoneBridge commissioned local historical environmental author Paula Peper to research the history and culture of the region. Her work has now been published as a beautifully crafted, limited print, commemorative book, “Sacramento’s Brighton Township: Stories of the Land.” (I got copy #162 of 300.)

Two more books are in the works, which will chronicle the influence (environmentally, aesthetically and culturally) of Sacramento’s trees and surrounding park neighborhoods. All three can be viewed here on StoneBridge’s website. A more detailed account of this project is nicely captured here by the Sacramento Bee.

At lunch Randy lamented of the development industry, “We’re good at building houses, but not building experiences people will remember.”

I beg to differ. Some of you are doing it exceptionally well. Keep up the good work.