Conventional approaches to slums and slum dwellers are thoroughly paternalistic. The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so. To overcome slums, we must regard slum dwellers as people capable of understanding and acting upon their own self-interests, which they certainly are. We need to discern, respect and build upon the forces for regeneration that exist in slums themselves, and that demonstrably work in real cities. This is far from trying to patronize people into a better life, and it is far from what is done today.

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

There seems to be somewhat of a discrepancy between the way certain cities portray themselves to the outside world and the reality. Vancouver is often praised for its highway-free boundaries and high-density downtown core. I found these areas (downtown, Yaletown and the West End) to be mostly spiritless and, dare I say it, soulless. Some vast areas of Yaletown and the West End are strictly residential (we’re talking about huge condominium towers here) and deeply lack these small stores that usually give life to neighbourhoods. In the West End, I walked by some condo buildings whose first floor was non existent – the structure relied on cement pillars, suppressing all hopes of creating a community feeling. What would Jane Jacobs think about this?

Downtown, I noticed a certain disrespect for the history of the neighbourhood. The façades of the old buildings that have not been razed are not carefully maintained, unlike neighbouring tourist-friendly Gastown. It took me several times walking on Granville street to realize that the cement façades of most clubs and theatres were in fact layers hiding gorgeous art deco structures. One of my friends, who had lived in Vancouver for several years, had never noticed them. The neon signs that had become a symbol of the city have been banned.

When I visited Portland, having read so much about their dynamic urban planning department and enterprising city government, I expected something else than the small city I found. Don’t get me wrong, I love Portland. It’s a very vibrant city where many innovative initiatives are taking place. But Portland, with its cute houses and low-density, is a Pacific Northwest city, and by definition not walkable. Can any amount of well-intentionned urban planning change this?

In comparison, certain cities that have rather moribund urban planning departments nonetheless have an urban fabric that works pretty well, relying on other frameworks such as history to maintain vibrant neighbourhoods (Montreal and Seattle, I’m talking about you.) I’m not staying that urban planning is useless. Montreal has been suffering dearly from poor planning (for those of you who know the city, names like Griffintown and Turcot may mean something to you. The old city would have been razed if it wasn’t for Phyllis Lambert!) What I’m getting at is that trying to export some urban planning models that have been created according to local determinants isn’t right. Each city, even if it can get inspired from what has been done elsewhere, must develop its own planning strategy. What’s more, things that work on paper don’t necessarily feel right in real life. Vancouver is the most livable city in the world according to the Economist and its urban planning model is widely praised. That’s a great PR campaign they don’t even have to pay for. The thing is, when you get there it’s another story. And here I am, ranting about Vancouver once again…

The city of Portland has taken a number of groundbreaking measures over the years to increase its sustainability. How do you get the support from the public to enact such measures?

Michael Armstrong: A big part of what we do about setting a vision is setting public engagement. We do that through surveys and public workshops attended by the mayor, and we’ve also been working in small groups. We learn a lot from this, and people understand how things work city-wide.

There’s a long tradition of that here. There is this well-established institutional culture and citizen engagement. We sort of joke about this, some people say “do we really have to get people’s opinion on this issue?” Well in Portland, we do. In Portland people care and that’s how they understand the outcomes. People who have less interest in what the municipal government is doing are less likely to move to Portland than, say, Houston.

Some of these measures, like promoting local food, aim at changing people’s behaviours. How do you do that?

We actually think food is relevant to the overall strength of the community. We want these changes to have a health impact, a carbon impact, and local economics impact. The ways we can influence that are somewhat limited, but what the city can do is to support farmers markets, or community-supported agriculture. We have turned city-owned lands into public garden projects. We have a zoning code that we make sure is not getting in the way of these things. We can help people see the relationship between food choices and climate change for example. This goes back to seeing our community as a resource.

One of your newest initiatives is the Clean Energy Works, which encourages residents to renovate and upgrade their houses to reach energy efficiency. How does that work?

This is a key piece of our climate action plan. We have a goal of reducing our carbon emissions to 20% of the carbon we used in 1990, and we’ve been trying to push people to think about how this translates into their daily life.

Energy improvements are paid for by the city and the homeowner repays the loan over time through the energy bill. The key is that it’s the city that makes the investments. Our community workforce agreement has been putting in place standards for labour practices to make sure the jobs that are created by that program are quality jobs. Right now we’re in the pilot phase, doing the first 500 homes.

It's not only about the environment...

These types of upgrades can take years to pay off. How do you gather political consensus to invest into programs that may not yield immediate results?

Cities are used to make investments over periods of time. We think of Clean Energy Works as providing public service. This has value to the community, in the same way that fixing potholes in the street has value, or building a bridge over the river. The difference is that the buildings are privately-owned whereas the roads are publicly-owned. We’re never going to solve problems like climate change if we leave the responsibility to change to the people only.

Another new initiative is EcoDistricts, which aims at increasing sustainability at the neighbourhood level instead of concentrating on single buildings only.

There are opportunities to do much better by sharing resources among buildings. The big challenge there is that our whole system has been structured around not sharing things. If anything goes wrong in my building it’s my problem. This notion of sharing and thinking about ways groups of buildings can perform together much better than individually is exciting. It reminds me about the things we learned in kindergarten like sharing… This is driven by climate change, we’re taking all kinds of risks. There’s a degree of urgency. It’s a safe bet compared to the risks we’re taking with our current emissions.

Next: an interview with Naomi Cole from EcoDistricts.

The idealist

Steve Brand is better known as the co-founder of the Long Now Foundation and the Global Business Network. His controversial ideas about environmentalism have been summed up in the book Whole Earth Discipline.
Brand sees contemporary slums as a means to limit population growth and provide opportunities to million of residents in developing countries. His short TED talk sums up why we should care:

Brand sees a huge potential in turning slums into sustainable neighbourhoods. Slums are already “green” because of their high density of population. Urban farms, green roofs, solar panels and mass transit systems could be implanted in order to make these communities self-sufficient.

Read Brand’s article in Prospect magazine here.

The pragmatist

Journalist Robert Neuwirth has been witnessing life in slums first-hand by spending several years living in various squatter cities around the world. He is the author of the book Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World and of the blog Squatter Cities.
Where some see poverty, Neuwirth sees neighbouroods that can be extremely vibrant, rapidly developing, home to intricate social networks and business opportunities. He notes that some of them are naturally evolving toward better standards of living, to the point where they become similar to any other neighbourhood. Neuwirth sees two conditions to this: the ability of residents to avoid eviction and remain on the land, and access to politics.
“The issue is not urban poverty,” he said as a conclusion to his 2005 TED Talk. “The issue is for us to recognize that these are neighbourhoods, this is a legitimate form of urban development.”
Neuwirth has been critical of the United Nations, whose Settlements Programme, also known as U.N. Habitat, has been ineffective. Its world headquarters are ironically located near Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya, one of the poorest slums.

Here is his PopTech! talk, slightly more informational than the TED one:

The theorist

Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums has been written from the comfort of his home. An urban theorist, historian, and political activist, Davis’s work is mostly theoretical and seeks to analyze slums from a global, historical and political perspective.
Davis notes the interest of the American military in studying slums. Modern warfare, having shifted toward urban guerillas, needs to understand the functioning of slums and capitalize on it.
He also underlines the rise of religious movements in slums, notably Pentecostalism and its importance in Latin America and Africa. “The largest self-organized movement of poor urban people in the world” according to Davis, Pentecostalism is responsible  for many social behaviours in squatter cities.
According to him, slums have been seeing a rise in political  and social movements within their limits. However he doesn’t believe in formal political institutions as a way for slums to access better living conditions, in large part because of corruption.
Davis’s work has often been described as “anti-urban” and “apocalyptic.” He has been rebuked for failing to see the potential of slums as sustainable communities.

Read Davis’s interview with BLDGBLOG.

I really tried to love Vancouver. I will not spend a great deal of time trying to convince you that I did, but I really did. The fact is, five months after moving here, I’m a shadow of my old self. I will not spend a great deal of time trying to explain to you what happened, all you need to know is that the city had a pretty hard way of showing me our personalities don’t match. I can’t wait to get the hell out.

I hold Vancouver personnally responsible for all of this. You see, I’m an over-confident, stubborn twentysomething French girl. I refuse to believe that one can go in a few months from “hyper-active young graduate about to conquer the world” to “I feel like I’m dying inside.” Especially when each time you leave the city, be it for one day, you suddenly get all jumpy and annoyingly energetic again.

I know this sounds weird, but think about it for a minute. If you’re Canadian, you know that anyone who’s spent some time in Vancouver either loves it or hates it. Loves it like “I’ve visited 30 countries and I wouldn’t live anywhere else,” hates it like “this place has no soul and is truly depressing.” Actually, Canadians have pretty strong feelings about every major city in the country. “Toronto totally sucks.” “Montreal is just sooooo awesooome.” There doesn’t seem to be any middle ground.

Now the people who hate Vancouver usually have a hard time explaining why it is so. Of course there’s the rain, lack of cultural events and nightlife, unappealing architecture, etc. But then they always end up adding something like “there’s just something to it.” Or, “it’s the vibe, I don’t dig it.” And eventually they conclude with “I don’t know what it is, but it’s just depressing.”

I’ve been trying to convince myself that maaaaybe the summer will reveal the city’s hidden treasures, feeling guilty to not be content with what I have. But the truth is, my mind was made up after a few days only. I remember the first time I walked on Commercial Drive. It didn’t take long before I thought “I don’t know what it is, but this street has something weird to it.” I didn’t feel comfortable at all. Nowhere in the city did I have the same sense of wonderment that Montreal elicited in me.

Where did that feeling come from? What is that “thing” about Vancouver that nobody seems to be able to explain? What happens in the brief moment during which we discover a new place that makes us decide whether we’re comfortable or not? I won’t take “gut feeling” for an answer. I shall discover what happens in our brain when we visit a city for the first time, how cities and places can affect our personality, and why we love or hate our cities so passionately. This will be an exciting trip into the fields of environmental psychology, urban sociology, psychogeography and more.

I’ve also decided to regularly give an account of the state of my research in this blog. Posts will be classified in the category “research.” You are encouraged to participate by submitting your ideas and hypotheses as well as by giving your opinion and advice.

Wish me well!

Flavie

This week, I’ve been looking at how chain stores can participate in urban revitalization. While doing some research for an article, I stumbled upon this 2005 Seattle Times article. American Apparel had just opened its first Seattle store in an area that was trying to take on a new lease of life, and hoped their presence would attract other boutiques. The article described their strategy:

While scouting locations for American Apparel stores, Webb looks for signs that speak to a hippay sensibility. Literal signs, such as “Loft Available” or “Vegetarian Restaurant.”

In a few instances, American Apparel is an active player in bringing other retailers to a street, leasing more space than it needs and subletting to those that cater to the same demographic.

In Houston, a city of malls, American Apparel opted to open downtown, where fashion boutiques do not exist, and is negotiating for a location in downtown San Jose, Calif. Yes, San Jose has a downtown.

And in Portland, American Apparel opened a store 18 months ago among boarded-up buildings on Southwest Stark Street instead of in the nearby Pearl District, where trendy redevelopment already had taken hold.

(By the way, did anybody stick with the term “hippay”?)

I never thought of urban revitalization as a conscious process, especially not operated by retail giants. Most of the time, revitalization happens progressively when store owners and artists look for cheap retail spaces and studios. But I incidentally found a similar example of this.

Urban Outfitters

Urban Outfitter’s new headquarters are housed in a huge five-building, 11-acre campus located in the Philadelphia Navy Yard. The building houses offices for the company’s different brands (Urban Outfitters, Free People, Anthropologie and Terrain) as well as employee services: a cafeteria, a coffee bar, a library and a fitness centre. The clothing and houseware company undertook the redevelopment of this former shipbuilding complex in 2004. The revamped buidings are a wonderful example of adaptation of turn-of-the-century industrial archictecture to contemporary purposes.

This great article from Metropolis magazine sums up pretty well the change this represented for the company:

The idea of yanking more than 600 of Philadelphia’s most creative—not to mention best-dressed —workers out of downtown was the equivalent of exiling Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue fashion houses to an industrial park near JFK. Losing so many trendsetters would surely diminish the Center City District’s hard-won cool quotient. Meanwhile all those hipsters in skinny jeans and vintage boots would have to figure out how to get to a compound so far off the city grid it was practically tumbling into the Delaware River. There wasn’t a coffeehouse or magazine stand in sight.

Other businesses have since relocated to the Navy Yard, creating more than 4,000 jobs and participating in the rebirth of South Philadelphia.

See more pictures on Decor8′s Flickr photostream.

Read a Q&A with Romer on the New York Times’ Freakonomics blog.

Visit the project’s website.

Watch Romer’s TED talk:

The David L. Lawrence Convention Center is, according to the article, the world’s first and largest LEED-certified convention centre. It is located in an area that used to be filled with sex shops, adult theatres and prostitutes. The centre is part of the Pittsburgh Cultural District, a redevelopment effort that seeks to transform this so-called redlight district into a cultural hub. The district also includes several theatres and cultural centres as well as the High School for Creative and Performing Arts.

Pittsburgh's Agnes R. Katz Plaza. Photo courtesy of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.

“The Cultural District today attracts over 2,000,000 visitors annually generating an estimated economic impact of $303 million,” boasts its website.

Pittsburgh is not the only city having gone through the effort of getting rid of its embarrassing debauchery-oriented areas. Amsterdam’s legendary red-light district is opening its prostitute booths to local designers. Montreal, where I currently live, has recently tackled on the e of its own “Red Light.” Located at a major intersection close to downtown, the area will be home to green buildings and cultural organizations.

Montreal's historical Café Cléopâtre. Flickr user thehoneybunny, held under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

The case of Montreal is quite sensitive, though. The city is known for its low criminality rate, and even the Red Light was never a place to avoid (at least not since I’ve been here.) Local cabarets are a fixture of Montreal’s nightlife and sometime host events geared to a regular, although open-minded, public. What’s more, some historical buildings are now threatened by the redevelopment project, which causes the ire of some local residents and heritage activists. Although the changes will undoubtedly positive, many don’t want the Red Light to entirely disappear.

It is interesting to see how these cities are going through the same transformations, which reflect an overall shift in priorities as far as urbanism is concerned. I’m especially curious to see how city governments will help and follow the green and cultural movements.

I’d be curious to know more about this and what having chickens in your backyard really implies.

The project is located in a residential district not very far from the downtown area, in the St. Clair and Christie neighbourhood. These former streetcar repair barns, which had been vacant and decrepit for decades, were retrofitted by the organization Artscape and turned into a community centre. The space opened last November and now hosts offices for arts, environmental and community organizations, housing for artists and a state-of-the-art greenhouse operated by The Stop Community Food Centre.

I met with greenhouse coordinator Lord Abbey and with garden and education worker Kristen Howe. Kristen gave me a tour of the greenhouse and I made a little Soundslides animation with the interview I did with her and the pictures I took.

Please forgive me for the poor sound quality (especially when the ventilation starts toward the end,) I hope to be able to buy a decent digital recorder soon.

Stay tuned as I’ll be posting more material that I collected during my trip, including an interview with the curators of the exhibition Carrot City.