Bi-Weekly Topic for Nov. 15, 2004
Maybe not. Of life and style
By P.
Cleveland boasts two "lifestyle centers" -- not gay-lifestyle centers, though we have two of those, too -- but commercial-lifestyle centers of the kind developers have been touting recently.
Some algorithm has determined that two is what we shall have, east and west. Presumably this is the same algorithm that determined we shall have no Ikea. The developers say they aren't just shopping centers, though that is what they look like, but places where people will live, or stay in hotels and work at offices.
I was all set to rant about how awful the one I know is, but then my thinking evolved, my brobdingnagian rant fell into a tar pit and died, and something more nimble and less hungry took its place. I had considerably resented the new east-side center, which took over a big natural area and turned it into a parking lot that washes the feet of a cluster of exaggerated neo-Victorian stores with just enough decoration on the brickwork to suggest the 19th century. Phooey, I was inclined to cry, give me the real thing, where I can walk beneath the cornices and the ornaments and the towers and arched windows and see the dust and the rippled glass of the windows and know they are the actual work of frostbitten masons of a century ago, and where I can honor their work by enjoying it.
I know such places, like the Warehouse District in Cleveland itself, and the Armory Square in Syracuse, N.Y., and a handful of others in New England where developers and individual investors have renewed their old buildings to try to attract new customers. They're walk-able and interesting to look at, and generally as expensive as the new construction, but without the parking lots.
Comically, a magazine for developers burbled that our new lifestyle center wouldn't be like all the others, because instead of having standard stores it would have different brands ... but they all sell the same things, since that's what the focus groups have said the customers want, and nobody wants to go out on a limb with a hundred million dollars. They all seem to have Cheesecake Factory stores. Our Cheesecake Factory is decorated in a bizarre Temple-at-Karnak theme with purple walls and bulging pillars that seem to say, "you're not fat, look at THESE! So buy our cheesecake!" How unique.
I guess I hate the idea that gray-suited guys with Powerpoint presentations and market statistics have decided the best way to gather in the public and make money is to offer this, and this, and that in such an environment, with certain vistas and certain attractions for the eye and the dollar. They do it well, so that when I visit the mall I feel drawn in in spite of myself, even though I'm repelled by the calculation behind it.
My thinking stepped into the tar pit as I walked among the leaves along the Shaker Lakes near my home, admiring the reddish-brown and tan carpet under the oak trees and thinking they looked like a Victorian woman's wedding dress, meant for wear in the fall, after the crops were in, when there was time for such entertainments as weddings.
Across the street from the lake and its lifted curtain of trees is a girl's school, in a distinctly '50s and '60s modernist style. The blocky brown building's best feature is a huge glassed-in lobby that runs a couple of hundred feet under a zigzag white roof with huge pleats, which look a bit like a nun's headdress. The modernist school supplanted an estate, which in turn replaced an orchard planted by the Shakers. All that remains of the first settlement is a huge stone wall, sometimes in dubious condition and never pretty, that shuts out the main roads.
And I remembered that the natural area the lifestyle center wiped out was formerly the home of TRW, once a defense contractor that we all considered the spawn of the devil in the '60s. (Where have all the defense contractors gone? Does anybody picket Dow Chemical anymore? If they did, would someone come outside and hand around Teflon-coated pot scrapers and explain the explosives are really made in Bangladesh?) Before that it was an estate, like so many other big properties on the East Side.
And I came around to the idea that places -- the peopled ones, at least, are continually renewing themselves, and that where I'm repulsed by the calculated commercialism of lifestyle centers, my daughter merely sees them as cool places to shop. Well, she has more money than I do.
I visited Dallas 20 years ago in the midst of a building boom. All the towers there seemed to have sweeps of green glass. I wonder what they look like now. And I saw Houston in the spring. A friend and I took a walk from the conference hotel to a corner where several tall white buildings loomed, connected by a walkway that made a complete circle overhead, like something out of a fanciful Star Trek set. We looked around for a while for the famous sign but found nothing -- but for the flamboyant architecture, there was no trace left of the place's infamous tenant -- Enron.
If there's any solace to getting old and having to avoid cheesecake, it's being able to see stirrings of movement in the history of one's surroundings. I can't begin to guess where it's going, but it's not painful to speculate, if you keep your perspective, and it may be reassuring to know something's going on.
Source: http://my.core.com/~pzicari/text/Lifestyle.html
New Urban Place
By London and the North
Ecotone's topic currently is on NewUrbanPlace.
When I had a look at some New Urban Theory web sites I was reminded of a module I did on social policy way back in the late seventies when doing a sociology degree at a polytechnic in East London. I was fascinated at the time to find that during and after the second world war many bombed out East End families had decamped to the countryside of Kent, erected makeshift dwellings and bought up old railway carriages to make into homes. These people probably had had very little before the war and had even less afterwards aside from these homes.
With the emergence of the welfare state in the early fifties there came a round of public legislation to improve the standards of housing. Included in this legislation was the requirement that all dwellings had running water and adequate sanitation. The consultation about what type of housing people wanted was largely ignored. The remaining slums of the East End were demolished. The green fields of Kent were cleared of the shanty towns and many people were shunted back to the new tenement blocks of London.
Posted by Coup de Vent at 12:48 AM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20050213043022/http://www.airenet.co.uk/alife/2004_11.html
Mixed Living
By Feathers of Hope (Pica)
When we were in Madrid last December, we stayed with a friend just down the hill from where I grew up. When I was growing up, though, the area was fields of thistles, parched in summer and a good place for madrileños to dump their old mattresses and whatnot. Now there are high rises.
In the manner typical of European planning, this new tiny barrio has plenty of shops at the foot of the apartment blocks: pastry shops, light fixture specialists, and of course the fabulous papelería where I bought my Stypen-Up are all downstairs. There are two buses that run along the street, and two different metro lines are both within walking distance.
This is so normal there that it arouses no comment. Here, when they opened the Davis Lofts, a small mixed-use complex in downtown Davis, it was hailed as a breakthrough in planning and design. Yet if we are to make cities livable in the 21st century, this is going to have to become the norm.
This is for the Ecotone Wiki's New Urban Place.
Posted by Pica at November 16, 2004 10:16 PM
Comments
Indeed. They may even have to build less than 1 parking space per unit :)
Posted by: Jarrett at November 16, 2004 10:29 PM
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2004/11/16/mixed_living.html
---
New urban places in post-industrial England? often fall prey to the 'dereliction of regeneration'. They are created with high hopes and usually not quite as much regneration funding as would be ideal. They are created by removing those who lived there or had a connection there before. The new space that is created is assumed to be one that 'the community' (who they? - certianly not the planners, who live in nice rural villages far away) will 'take care of', with no funding or training to do so. Unsurprisingly; after a few years the nice wooden fences start to rot, the weeds sprout, the broken bottles are not swept up, graffiti appears, etc etc. A bit like Ecotone and the Chinese wiki-spammers, I guess :)