American Foreclosures

Excerpts taken from article: All Boarded Up by ALEX KOTLOWITZ

"...And in December, just when local officials thought things couldn’t get worse, Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, posted a record number of foreclosure filings. The number of empty houses is so staggeringly high that no one has an accurate count. The city estimates that 10,000 houses, or 1 in 13, are vacant. The county treasurer says it’s more likely 15,000..."

"...When Jimenez arrived in Cleveland, he learned that the house had been vacant for two years; scavengers had torn apart the walls to get the copper piping, ripped the sinks from the walls and removed the boiler from the basement..."

"...When they lost the house to foreclosure, they left nothing for the scavengers. They stripped their own dwelling, piling toilets, metal screen doors, kitchen cabinets, the furnace and copper pipes into a moving van. “They said, ‘Why should someone else get it?’ ” Gardner told me. “So they took it themselves.” In December, Gardner’s neighbor watched a man strain to push a cart filled with thin slabs of concrete down the street. It explained why so many of the abandoned homes in the city are without front steps, as if their legs had been knocked out from under them. Perhaps such pillage is part of the natural momentum of a city being torn apart. If you can’t hold onto something of real value, at least get your hands on something..."

"...Already places as diverse as Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas and Minneapolis have neighborhoods where at least one of every five homes stands vacant..."

“Cleveland is a bellwether,” Immergluck says. “It’s where other cities are heading because of the economic downturn.”

"...The first question outsiders now ask is, Where has everyone gone? The homeless numbers have not increased much over the past couple of years, and it appears that most of the people who lost their homes have moved in with relatives, found a rental or moved out of the city altogether. The county has lost nearly 100,000 people over the past seven years, the largest exodus in recent memory outside of New Orleans..."

"...The legislation was labeled the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, but Cleveland and a handful of other cities had to lobby hard to convince Congress that “stabilization” in their cities meant tearing down houses — not renovating them. Last month, Cleveland said it planned to use more than half of its $25.5 million allotment to raze 1,700 houses. This presents an opportunity to reimagine the city, to erase the obsolete and provide a space for the new. (There’s little money now to build, so imagine is the operative word.) ..."

Organic New Urbanism

"...a utopian experiment in New Urbanism (is) being molded out..."


Seems we are always in flux rethinking urbanism. An ever evolving state of inquiry. and rightly so. In this New York Times article the author refers to the Inn at Serenbe as an experiment in New Urbanism.

Why is a farmstead now novel as being a new way of living? What are the shifts in cultural values? what are the emerging lifestyles? What sort of impact could this really have on the economic development of not only housing stock but the agricultural lands needed to support it?

What are the "organic new urbanist" building codes? Can these tourist destinations...set an example for contempory american living or will they remain a "day trip" fantasy for the everyday american?

Narco-Tour Destination

For Some Taxi Drivers, a Different Kind of Traffic by Marc Lacey
Mazatlán Journal

Travel and tourism offers the rare opportunity to see a location for the first time, risking the attempt of creating your reality of the place through the first set of steps, movements and experiences.

Your perception is the place is framed by what you do, where you go...the honeymooner in Cancun's has an experience much different from the volunteer environmental activist, for example.

These experiences can literally map the identity of a place...
as these examples illustrate.

Reality Tours
$3.95 Star Map












related articles:
Gadling

Taming Times Square

Bloomberg announces plans to make portions of broadway at Times Square more pedestrian friendly by closing off the traffic and installing new public spaces.

related website

What is it that makes a public space "friendlier"? And what sort of models are out there comparable to the likes of Times Square? What is the experience of Times Square...what are the infrastructures, systems...schedules? And what is the user experience without the cars?

related articles.
Times

The life of clothing

Artist Zoe Leonard

Within the city a number of environmental, economical, cultural flows move in and out and around. From water to the water shed, to immigration and GDP. Artist/photographer Zoe Leonard documented the life chain of clothing. The simple item, created for the material culture of America...doesn't begin here or end here. Her work almost could act as a photographic mapping of clothing.

"The project then expanded in scope as Leonard concentrated on tracing the circulation of everyday commodities, particularly secondhand clothing, as they were sold and resold in far-flung destinations. The final compilation includes images captured in Mexico City, Mexico; Kampala, Uganda; and Warsaw, Poland."
Dia Art

"...While exploring the neighborhood, she became intrigued with clothing resellers who purchased garments from thrift stores, sorted them by type and quality, and then packed them in large bales for export to Asia and Africa. In 2004, she traveled to Uganda to see how these items were distributed to their end users. Leonard also visited markets in Poland and Cuba, constructing a meandering travelogue that links images of mom-and-pop shops in New York with shots of jackets, pants and Nike T-shirts in African market stalls. A visual diary illustrating the flows of international commerce, the images also explore how objects are reassessed and reused in different contexts, raising questions of relative worth and the affluence and poverty that influence it..."
Time Out New York

Anamorphosis Mapping: Maps in Time

Map of Europe based on rail travel distance in time.
Spiekermann, K. and M. Wegener. 1996.

















Tube Map based on time

other maps:
World Mapper

The HD Social Media Wedding

Nothing is better than hearing from an old friend getting married, than learning they plan on doing a Social Media Wedding. I wouldn't expect anything less for Hillary and Dan (the HD). Hillary is an incredible designer, mother of two, cancer survivor, and is rethinking "wedding" for the 21st century.

The Process:

"I posted a Craig's List Quandry asking people with apartments, condos, or business buildings downtown if we could rent their rooftop for a wedding. I emailed friends and family. I IMed my friends. I posted the link on Facebook. I started getting responses! After a few leads that didn’t pan out, I got a link to an article in the Kansas City Star from a friend on Twitter about a community park being built on the roof of the parking garage next to the new Cosentino’s Market downtown."

"I called the journalist who wrote the article and the Marketing Director for Cordish who manages the park. And then I realized what I was doing. I was using my mad social networking skills to plan my wedding my way with help from some very nice people on the Interwebs. So this blog is all about how Dan and I are bucking the system to make this occasion our very own, using help from our friends, family, and online community...."

Communication plays a much bigger role. The process becomes transparent with participants (wedding guests) supporting the newly weds with more than new blenders and coffee pots. The process is open, allowing for evolution, flexibility and great ideas.

The site:

No better place for a Social Media Wedding than on a rooftop in downtown Kansas City. A newly developed city park is about to be completed on top of a downtown parking garage.

“...We could have had parking on the roof,” Stephens said. “We saw this not just as a public area but an environmental piece to the development. When you have all this dense development that draws millions of people, you need some private, quiet space, too...”

"...The park features a half-acre of turf. Another half-acre is made up of environmentally friendly sedum plants. There are benches and trees along two sides, and additional landscaping is in the works..."

The event:

Hillary explains in the blog: "I want to have an upload station for people to upload their pics/video on the spot..." and asks her social network on ways to make it all happen.

"...Also, I want a photobooth-type situation, with a really cool vintage couch and props for people to experiment with in taking their pictures..." ask and you shall receive - create your own reality (thru virtual interface) ?

I will be shadowing and helping in anyway I can in this event and post updates on the process here.

1. What is the greater impact of utilizing social media in the creation of an event? The extent of information is more vast and more accessible. The network of people, ideas and resources is also greatly expanded offering a greater adapability to success.

2. Multi-programmatic actions can become less bounded. Site offers new opportunities: guest view and entertainment is provided by Kansas City and the annual fireworks display scheduled for that night. Parking is a no brainer, and ADA accessibilty via elevator and ramps is in place.

3. How can the event itself take on the elements of the site? Food: what opportunities are within reach? community gardens, local produce/chefs? What other opportunites can the site lend? access to live music? bands...music.

4. Decorations: can the wedding party bring and plant flowers for the occasion...at once adding value to the event, while investing in the space when they are gone the next day?

Twittering Celebrities Take Fans Backstage in Their Lives

EXYZT Presents Situation Room

Storefront for Art and Architecture
EXYZT presents Situation Room
Feb 20 2009 - Mar 31 2009

" The architecture .../... will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space... It will be a means of knowledge and a means of actions."
Gilles Ivain alias Ivan Chtcheglov, 1958

We will act to defend architecture that is plural, used, complex, diverse, real and alive; architecture that is about action and interaction, formation and deformation, transormation and appropriation.

Situation Room as playground for [re] creation, collective action, active occupation, open demonstration, and social games will be intuitive, interactive and collective performance, showing an everyday life tools and knowledge Directory. For architecture of process, of fabrication, reaction and interaction, members of Exyzt will inhabit the gallery space, making use of the furnishings as though it were a domestic space.

More than showing past projects, we choose to set up a platform for creation and solidarity inviting people to transform the classic use of the gallery, to experiment diversity of programs and activities with basic cheap materials as moving boxes activated with the Storefront staff.

We propose a platform for action, defending an architecture that is alive. EXYZT shakes up the idea of architecture as an independent field. Working on experimental projects, EXYZT invites architecture, video, graphic-design, botany and any other concept to become devices of expression and creation.

Like a series of disparate notes, ready-to-assemble elements will be put together in situ to create this modular, domestic place, rapidly assembled viral constructions that can be implemented to create and augment a social space. Little by little, each limb of this strange apartment will grow new functions, allowing its users to do more and more things, to occupy and work in its ever-changing space. After the basic living space has been assembled an essential urban infrastructure will be added: water, electricity, radio, TV, Internet, etc... Once complete, a vast variety of individual modules will occupy the gallery space to be used for a moment, a day, or a whole night. Lightness, speed and flexibility will be essential ingredients of the Set-up.

The collective carries out temporary setups. Each project is in line with precise and determined time and special frame. The units can be shaped and rearranged to become a living and sitting space, a workspace equipped with a desk, computers and tools, or a dining room, among other forms. From week to week the space will evolve, taking on different ephemeral forms and functions with the public. The situation becomes the physical medium through which a creative and collective game is expressed. The series of projects questions the relationship between public and private and encourages the audience to move from being a spectator to be an actor too.

Exyzt invites the audience to reconsider occupied areas in a well-defined time-frame. The collective conceive and organize each project as a ludic playground where cultural behaviours and shared stories relate, mix and mingle.

Created in 2003 on the initiative of five architects, they produced and organized a first self-construction and self-documented project on a abandoned plot of land in Parc de la Villette, in Paris. By opening up to various fields, the collective group attempts to render architecture into a different perspective.

Our team is now a community of people who have chosen to act under the same principle of sharing knowledge and abilities, imagining the environment as the terrain of a participatory game, a site for play and appropriation, creating 'transient micro ambiances' as Guy Debord described the constucted situation.

Construction will constitute the first movement. Act!

Text by Philippe Rizzotti & Dimitri Messu

Chicago's New Loops of Security

Chicago Links Street Cameras to Its 911 Network
By Karen Ann Cullotta

“We can now immediately take a look at the crime scene if the 911 caller is in a location within 150 feet of one of our surveillance cameras, even before the first responders arrive,” Mr. Orozco said...

“...In America, we protest the use of cameras for things like enforcing laws that reduce crime or traffic accidents, but we probably ought to do more,” Mr. Alschuler said.

He added: “My more serious concern would be if they start using new audio technologies, which can be calibrated to alert police to loud noises, like a scream or a car crash. What worries me is if police can use technology to listen to anyone who happens to be talking in a public location, which would raise serious privacy concerns...”

Cellphones...Navigating Our Lives

Article and Image

“The map underlies man’s ability to perceive,” said Richard Saul Wurman, a graphic designer who was a pioneer in the use of maps as a generalized way to search for information of all kinds before the emergence of the online world.

As this metaphor takes over, it will change the way we behave, the way we think and the way we find our way around new neighborhoods. As researchers and businesses learn how to use all the information about a user’s location that phones can provide, new privacy issues will emerge. You may use your phone to find friends and restaurants, but somebody else may be using your phone to find you and find out about you..."

"...Indeed, a new generation of smartphones like the G1, with Android software developed by Google, and a range of Japanese phones now “augment” reality by painting a map over a phone-screen image of the user’s surroundings produced by the phone’s camera.

With this sort of map it is possible to see a three-dimensional view of one’s surroundings, including the annotated distance to objects that may be obscured by buildings in the foreground. For starters, map-based cellphones simply translate paper maps into a digital medium, but future systems will probably begin to blur the boundaries between the display and the real world..."

Electric Cars = Electric Resiliency

Seeking greater electric and transportation resiliency.

"And in a true smart grid, electric cars will not only be able to draw on electricity to run their motors, they will also be able to do the reverse: send electricity stored in their batteries back into the grid when it is needed. In effect, cars would be acting like tiny power stations.

“Most days, most cars are going to have lots of extra battery capacity,” said Mr. Kempton, noting that on average, American automobiles get driven for just one hour each day. Electrifying the entire vehicle fleet would provide more than three times the U.S.’s power generation, he said."

NYTimes Article
Electric Cars and a Smarter Grid

Gated Internet Communities?

photo and related NYTimes article

“If you’re looking for a digital Pearl Harbor, we now have the Japanese ships streaming toward us on the horizon,” Rick Wesson, the chief executive of Support Intelligence, a computer consulting firm, said recently."

The internet is under attack. The existing structure of the internet has security gaps, allowing hackers to infiltrate corporate and military data...causing much fear. So the debate ranges now in creating a new internet, one with stricter identification measures and security blocks.

"What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a “gated community” where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety. Today that is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users. As a new and more secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet might end up as the bad neighborhood of cyberspace. You would enter at your own risk and keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there."

"The idea is to build a new Internet with improved security and the capabilities to support a new generation of not-yet-invented Internet applications, as well as to do some things the current Internet does poorly — such as supporting mobile users."

Or does the strategy look not at recreating the web, but instead rethinking the structure and gradually creating new interventions...

"That has not discouraged the Stanford engineers who say they are on a mission to “reinvent the Internet.” They argue that their new strategy is intended to allow new ideas to emerge in an evolutionary fashion, making it possible to move data traffic seamlessly to a new networking world. Like the existing Internet, the new network will almost certainly have no one central point of control and no one organization will run it. It is most likely to emerge as new hardware and software are built in to the router computers that run today’s network and are adopted as Internet standards."

How does the structure of our information relate to the physical built environments. Are the gated communities of suburbia, the super surveillant cities of post 9/11 the future of our communication networks?

"A more secure network is one that would almost certainly offer less anonymity and privacy. That is likely to be the great tradeoff for the designers of the next Internet. One idea, for example, would be to require the equivalent of drivers’ licenses to permit someone to connect to a public computer network. But that runs against the deeply held libertarian ethos of the Internet."

“As soon as you start dealing with the public Internet, the whole notion of trust becomes a quagmire,” said Stefan Savage, an expert on computer security at the University of California, San Diego."

Dubai Slow Down

With the global economy slowing things down, what will come of Dubai? Will it be merely a 21st century urban glitch? Will it evolve to accept the slower economy? What sort of resiliency does a place like Dubai have?

"With Dubai’s economy in free fall, newspapers have reported that more than 3,000 cars sit abandoned in the parking lot at the Dubai Airport, left by fleeing, debt-ridden foreigners (who could in fact be imprisoned if they failed to pay their bills). Some are said to have maxed-out credit cards inside and notes of apology taped to the windshield."

"Last month, local newspapers reported that Dubai was canceling 1,500 work visas every day, citing unnamed government officials. Asked about the number, Humaid bin Dimas, a spokesman for Dubai’s Labor Ministry, said he would not confirm or deny it and refused to comment further. Some say the true figure is much higher."

full article

United Arab Emirates Aid Debt-Ridden Member, Dubai

The Green Zone

The New Green Zone, Baghdad, Iraq.

from The Guardian:

"The US military released the first tentative artists' impression yesterday. An army source said the barbed wire, concrete blast barriers and checkpoints that currently disfigure the 5 sq mile area would be replaced by shopping malls, hotels, elegant apartment blocks and leisure parks."

"American officials stress that final decisions about reconstruction and development rest with the Iraqi government. Karnowski added that as well as the benefits of renovating and demilitarising an important area of Baghdad, the blueprint would help to create a "zone of influence" around the massive new US Embassy compound being built on the eastern tip of the Green Zone. The $1bn project to move the embassy from Saddam's old presidential palace is planned for completion later this year."

Sandbag housing

MMA Architects and new housing strategies using sand filled bags, stacked...
related articles:
Treehugger
Dezeen