05.11.08 | connected

RFK Jr. Makes the Case for Cities

From Time's 100 Influential People essay on Michael Bloomberg by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: "I've long argued that one of the most critical environmental issues is the challenges of making our cities attractive, enriching and safe places to live. The best cure for destructive sprawl is to build cities people don't want to abandon, places where they can live healthy, fulfilling lives in densities that don't devour our landscapes, pave our wilderness and pollute our watersheds, air and wildlife. To achieve this, we need to invest in urban schools, transportation, parks, health care, police protection, and infrastructure that makes cities great magnets with gravity sufficient to draw back the creeping suburbs.

"There is a moral as well as an environmental imperative to attend to landscapes that are home to so many. For more than 8 million New York City residents, the environment is not a Rocky Mountain meadow with pronghorns graving beside an alpine stream. It's their transit system and office buildings and the parks where they children play."

He compliments Bloomberg for showing that "a city can be both great and green" with his "visionary" PlaNYC.

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05.11.08 | talented

Another Move Downtown

Oil giant BP PLC announced last week that it plans to move 1200 employees from Chicago's western suburbs to space in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in the heart of the Loop. Why? The decision was driven in part by employees. The employees tend to be professionals and younger, a combination that finds working and living downtown attractive.

As the Chicago Tribune reported, "BP's decision to move workers downtown also appears to be an about-face. A decade ago BP acquired Chicago-based Amoco and moved hundreds of jobs out of the city."

Another move to the central city duly noted.

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05.11.08 | innovative

An Earthquake Rumbling

NYT columnist Frank Rich wrote in this morning's paper, "The part of the press that can't tell the difference between Facebook and, say, AOL, was too busy salivating over the Clintons' vintage 1990s roster of fat-cat donors to hear the major earthquake [of grand-scale social networking and small Internet donors] rumbling under their feet."

It made me think again, what are the major earthquakes rumbling under the feet of urban leaders still going undetected? What is it that could change cities in big, fundamental ways?

Surely, Web 2.0 is one of those earthquakes. We joined a small group of mayors, former mayors, philanthropists and tech execs last week at the Case Foundation to discuss how those changes might unfold. I expect interesting results from this meeting.

Increasing mobility and globalization is likely another one.

The increasing price of oil is another, forcing more people out of their cars and into transit and onto their feet. So may be the price of food. (Urban gardens, anyone?)

It's an important question to pursue.

More thoughts?

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05.11.08 | remix

Universities Are Also Mobile

We've written here before that universities, often thought of as anchor institutions, are increasingly mobile. Now comes a challenging proposal from Greg Mankiw in response to Massachusetts legislators' study of a plan to levy a 2.5% annual tax on the portion of college endowments that exceed $1 billion. (Greg is a professor of economics at Harvard.)

He calls on Harvard to create a second campus in another move favorable tax state, move its endowment there, sell off land in Massachusetts, and even eventually move the main campus.

It's not an impossible thought. Unlikely, but not impossible, especially in light of the international expansion of many universities.

[Thanks to Rich Florida for flagging this item.]

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05.10.08 | distinctive

Shout Out to Amazon Customer Service

I just had the most amazing customer service experience with Amazon. A digital camera I purchased several weeks ago is defective in the most basic way. It will no longer turn on.

First, I went to the Amazon web site, easily found a way to ask Amazon to call me, which the company did automatically. Pretty cool. And rather than a recording, I got a person. The customer service rep, although very polite, explained that I needed to call the camera's maker, Panasonic. He assured me that Amazon would take care of the problem, but that I needed to follow "procedures." He gave me a number for Panasonic. (A nice touch, I thought.)

Next I called Panasonic. I got a very irritating recording that put me through the hoops of "Press One for..." which I endured. Unfortunately, when I got to the end, I was told to call back during normal business hours, which the recording then proceeded to list and they included the very time I was calling. Ok, so now I am doubly irritated.

So back I go to the Amazon web site, enter my phone number and get another automated call back. This time I got Mark, a different CSR. English was his first language as it is mine, so it was a bit easier to communicate with him, and he couldn't have been more accommodating. I explained that I am headed to Pittsburgh Monday for our annual meeting and really needed a dependable camera. Within 10 minutes, he had arranged to send me a new camera and instructions on how to return the defective one.

I was more than a little stunned.

That's how loyalty gets built.

Just to assure... I am in my local (yes, local) Borders 3 or 4 days a week when I am in town. But buying the camera online (along with books not carried at Borders) was a convenience not offered within easy distance from my home. In this anonymous world, it is so so nice to be treated like an honest human being and with some respect. Kudos to Amazon.

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05.10.08 | distinctive

Guerilla Gardens

From Trend Central... A growing group of environmentally conscious consumers are turning neglected public spaces into lush green gardens. So-called guerilla gardeners essentially squat on abandoned land, turning dirt plots into brightly colored flower gardens. Because they are beautifying land that doesn't belong to them, the gardeners often strike at night, planting daffodils and sunflower seeds by the light of the moon. This practice can sometimes lend a "shock and awe" effect, as the next morning passersby can experience a garden that literally popped up overnight! For particularly covert missions or hard-to-reach spaces, seed bombs (an organic "grenade" made of seeds and compost, often inserted into an empty egg shell) can be launched onto a plot of land. For those looking to get started, ace guerilla gardener Richard Reynolds is coming out with a how-to book, On Guerilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening Without Boundaries, later this month.

http://www.trendcentral.com/WebApps/App/SnapShots/Article.aspx?ArticleId=7356

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05.10.08 | connected

Jane's Walk

From All About Cities... This weekend volunteer neighborhood residents are offering guided tours of their communities to the public in a national celebration of the late Jane Jacobs and of cities.

As Jacobs said, to understand cities and to know what will work, “you’ve got to get out and walk.”

One U.S. city is participating -- Salt Lake. Participating cities in Canada include Vancouver, Winnipeg, Calgary, and Toronto,

What a really good idea.

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05.09.08 | innovative

It's Hard to Be Serious

Thoughts from designer Paula Scher at Serious Play...

My work is play. And I play as I design. The definition of play is engaging in a childlike endeavor. And gambling. I do both in my work.

Children are serious. Adults are solemn. Washington, D.C. is solemn. New York is serious. Attending an education conference is solemn. Taking a long walk to figure out how to rob Tiffany's is serious.

My career has taken me from Serious -> Solemn ->Hackneyed -> Dead.

But at several moments in my career, there have been times when I was able to recapture a sense of seriousness. The first came when I was asked to work on The Public Theater in New York.

"This is the job. There are no other jobs" was the feeling I had while working for the Public Theater. (Inspired by Paul Newman character's great and wonderful line from one of my fave movies, "The Verdict," "This is the case. There is no other case.")

For the Public Theater, I became the visual voice of a place for three years. Literally every scrap of paper I designed.

But when something serious becomes very popular, it is the kiss of death because everyone starts to copy it. It becomes solemn.

The best way to accomplish serious design is to be totally unqualified for the job. My moment came when architects started asking me to work with them on designing insides of theaters with environmental graphics. (And the results are fabulous.)

I was invited to design a logo for the North Side neighborhood in Pittsburgh. I thought a logo for a neighborhood was kind of creepy. A neighborhood needs a landmark, not a logo. So I turned the underpasses leading into the neighborhood into landmarks with designs.

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05.09.08 | remix

The New Covetables

Eames Demetrios spoke at Serous Play of the legacy of Charles and Ray Eames. Even though they made beautiful objects, they worried about our acquisitive nature. If status is defined as owning a new BMW, we are doomed to failure because we don't have the resources for everyone to acquire a BMW. They hoped instead for a new kind of status -- something they called "the new covetables."

For the new covetables, the coin of the realm would be effort, such as learning a language or learning to read a map. If I acquire a new language, such as Spanish, it does not diminish the value of of your acquisition of Spanish. In fact, my ability to speak Spanish may even make your ability to speak Spanish more valuable. And effort is available to all of us.

What a lovely thought.

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05.09.08 | remix

The World Is Such a Tasty Place

Speaking this morning at Serious Play, RISD’s President-elect John Maeda made a comment I love: “The world is such a tasty place.”

When conference host Chee Perlman asked John about his new role as president (and chief fundraiser) of RISD : “I grew up in a tofu factory in Seattle. I have a funny accent. And now I’m president of RISD. America?” at which point, John began to applaud. (echoes here of Barack Obama)

Chee also asked John why anyone should go to college. He replied, “I have no idea. I have to work on this.

“Going to college is not the last time you’re going to learn. There’s Google. Colleges need to encourage a lifestyle of learning forever.”

His goal now is to raise plenty of money for scholarships and make more free time for faculty and students to be more reflective. “The best creatives are free, who don’t live with constraints. And yet we are adding more, more, more requirements.”

John says he is asked if he is going to take RISD into the future. He confidently answers, “I want to bring the future back to RISD. The question is not how to make the world more technological. The question is how to make the world more humane.”

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05.09.08 | innovative

San Jose's Environmental Incubator #1

The Environmental Business Cluster of San Jose, CA, received the National Business Incubation Association’s 2008 Incubator of the Year award this week at NBIA’s 22nd International Conference on Business Incubation in San Antonio, TX. The award is NBIA’s most prestigious honor, recognizing overall excellence in business incubation, and is awarded to the nation’s top incubator.

Since its inception in 1994, the incubator has helped 145 companies commercialize environmental technology and create clean-tech jobs. In partnership with the City of San Jose and San Jose State University, the EBC has become the largest private clean-energy commercialization center in the United States for start-up companies. A recent UK study of 110 clean energy commercialization centers around the world over a two year period ranked the Environmental Business Cluster #1 in the number of technologies successfully commercialized.

The National Business Incubation Association is the world's leading organization advancing business incubation and entrepreneurship. NBIA estimates that in 2005 alone, North American incubators assisted more than 27,000 start-up companies that provided full-time employment for more than 100,000 workers and generated annual revenue of more than $17 billion. Approximately 5,000 business incubators operate world-wide. www.nbia.org

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05.08.08

Products for the megalopolis of tomorrow

Big business is setting its sights on future markets and interestingly cities are the defining setting being used to envision those future markets and worlds.

Peugeot has launched its latest design competition in which “young designers are invited to imagine a Peugeot for the megalopolis of tomorrow. This concept car will be designed for use in the center of the great urban cities of the future, while embracing the key values of the 21st century.”

It is also heartening that not only are economic efficiency and environmental considerations central to the design criteria, but also ‘social harmony’ and ‘interactive mobility’.
More here.

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05.08.08 | innovative

Google's New Tools

Facilitation, cartooning, brainstorming are new techniques being used at Google to design the user experience. And that is a sea change, according to Irene Au, director of User Experience at the company.

"Unless you write code, it's hard to get any kind of credibility," she told the audience at Serious Play. "Google is skeptical of people who are cartoony and wave their hands."

But more and more people at Google are using these new techniques. She said that today field work is less likely to end up in a report and more likely to end up as clustered post-it notes on a wall.

(Sounds like our office at CEOs for Cities. We keep looking for more wall space.)

(One more weird idea: We actually saw a film earlier where notes were made on disposable white suits that meeting participants wore. They hang up their suits between meetings, so they always know where to find their notes.)

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05.08.08 | connected

Global Google

70% of Google's traffic comes from outside the U.S, according to Irene Au, User Experience Design Director at Google. She is speaking now at Serious Play.

She is describing Google's field research in India and other countries and the dramatically different needs the people there have. (How do you design Google Maps in a nation where the streets have no names?)

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05.08.08

Cleveland Making Headlines as Design Hub

The burgeoning Cleveland Design District, headed up, in part, by our colleague Ned Hill at Cleveland State University was the topic of a feature in I.D. (International Design) magazine in April.

Building on the region's large number of consumer products companies, Ned teamed up with Daniel Cuffaro, head of the industrial design department at the Cleveland Institute of Art, to "create a full-service design district that they hope will transform downtown Cleveland into the new hub of American product development."

Read the Q&A in I.D. here.

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05.08.08 | distinctive

Elizabeth Diller Talks at Serious Play

Just heard Elizabeth Diller, Diller Scofidio + Renfro at Serious Play. Elizabeth
is concerned with architectures of the environment and atmosphere. The first project she showed is a new outdoor space for smokers that envelopes smokers in a tall cone that encloses their smoke. When they light up, a smoke detector is activated, which in turn activates an internet web site connected to all the other "smoking cones" in the city. The firm plans to install the first system of cones in Amsterdam this fall.

With Blur Building, built for the Swiss Expo 2002 on Lake Neuchatel, the firm made weather. "It was not about space or closure," Elizabeth explained. "We just wanted to screw around with your expectations and the dominance of vision. "

At Blur, the firm built a water bar that sold water from all over world. The idea was to "drink the architecture." The firm extended its interest in water in a project in Finland where they filled pockets of frozen lake with different waters of the world. The result was branded waters on lake, hoping to entice viewers to re-evaluate fundamental elements .

A new project, also with water as its focus, is for the Venice Biennale. The firm is taking two Venice icons -- venetian water and espresso -- and combining them. They will pull water out of the canals, purify it, then turn it into espresso.

Another of the firm's projects, New York's High Line , is now under construction. It is a space of recreation returned from its industrial beginnings on the West Side of Manhattan. Elizabeth credited Joel Sternfel's powerful photographs of the HIgh Line in its abandoned state with stirring interest in saving it. (Guiliani’s last official act as mayor was to demolish the High Line.)

The design challenge has been how not to destroy the micro-environments that emerged on the HIgh Line over the years, thanks to wind and seed that may have been dumped from train cars. The firm has chosen pavers that will allow the landscape to continue its growth. Although they are having to strip the land down to a concrete tub, it is being replanted and Elizabeth expects it to be flourishing again in five years.

One of the design challenges has been to accommodate anticipated cultural activities while maintaining the natural. Does the natural trump the cultural? She is still wrestling with the question.

What was once an eyesore, the High Line is now igniting new development. ("We liked the strange, pathetic atmosphere that was there.") In fact, it has been proclaimed the new "it" neighborhood in NYC, with 50 new projects underway.

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05.08.08

Fresh produce grown where it's needed most

Great New York Times article here about urban farmers using the city as both the farm and the market.

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05.05.08 | connected

Start Thinking the Impossible

From The Observer comes this..."Given that Zimbabwe has for a long time been staging a drama before a worldwide audience, it's amazing that anyone felt it necessary to mount an arts festival. But someone did 10 years ago, and the Harare International Festival of the Arts (HIFA) has been running ever since. Perhaps when the world is looking in your direction and counting down to economic and civil collapse, the only thing to do is to build a giant stage and start thinking the impossible.

"This week audiences have been flooding into Harare for the annual six-day event, and the capital has been engulfed in a refreshingly bright and effervescent carnival atmosphere."

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05.05.08

Unlikely Interns

We already know Baby Boomers are returning to cities, but who knew they would start going after internships? Check out this New York Times article.

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05.04.08 | remix

Could the Power of Eds and Meds Be Waning?

A number of cities have conveniently relied on eds and meds to generate jobs growth. Business Week famously reported in September '06 that the only jobs growth the U.S. had experienced was in the medical field. And both industries are widely assumed to be “anchored” in place. These are jobs that “can’t” leave. You can just hear urban leaders breathing a sigh of relief.

But both industries also rely heavily on public funding. What if the funding dries up or declines precipitously? It is certainly not beyond the realm of possibility. Just read Tom Friedman’s column in today’s NYT.

But another possibility is that students and patients head to cheaper countries to get what they want. Medical tourism has been growing. And the photos in this month’s Fast Company of Bumrungrad International in Bangkok make the prospect much more real (and appealing), even to those not pinched for medical money. Bumrungrad now attracts 430,000 overseas patients a year – “the high school cafeteria person, the independent businessman, the doctor, the lawyer” who “can’t afford to pay $1,200 for insurance every month.” (I know the feeling. For my healthy 58 year-old husband, I pay right at $1000 a month, and the plan benefits are far from generous.) They go because prices are 90% off the going rate in the U.S.

Is this globalization’s next frontier? And if so, what is the next chapter in the creation of American jobs?

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05.03.08 | innovative

Another Reason Proximity Matters

How does Google fuel its innovation factory. CEO Eric Schmidt tells Business Week that the biggest obstacles to innovation at Google is the sheer number of offices the company has.

"A problem that we face now is that we have people in multiple sites. It's a problem that everybody faces, but we're going to face it bad. We have, like, 50 locations," Schmidt told Business Week.

The best programming team is a 'telephone call' which is two people, you and I, programming together. The second-best programming team is, everybody fits into a single room. All other variants are bad. "

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05.03.08 | connected

The Post-American World

Still in Liverpool and surfing blogs tonight, I ran across Business Week's Bruce Nussbaum's review of Fareed Zakaria's new book, The Post-American World.

Here is a portion of what he wrote:

"What Fareed does in his new book is show this diffusion of power and authority is taking place around the world, as the US declines and "the rise of the rest," as he puts it, occurs. He argues that the era of the US as 'hegemon,' the center of of an economic/political/social/cultural system, is over...

"When the US was the overwhelming power, everyone else had to learn American culture. The big change in the 21st century is now the US has to learn everyone else's culture. It needs to share power, build coalitions, create legitimacy, in order to lead and prosper. It has to stop being the Voice of Authority and learn to Curate a Global Conversation--or many of them."

Attending a conference dominated by Europeans during the past few days, I am reminded of how much we have to learn. The language may be English, but the cultures are decidedly different.

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05.01.08 | innovative

The Problem of Homogeneity

Don't talk about diversity. Talk about the problem of homogeneity.

That's the advice from a fabulous presenter, Susanne Justesen, at today's Intercultural Cities Conference. Although her research and consulting work has been primarily with large companies (Lego, Cisco, Nokia, are just a few), her work had direct application to cities attempting to tap the capabilities of their cities for innovation as well as those working to get "professionals" to think beyond their specialty.

Susanne defines difference as "a unique set of perspectives, skills and abilities" that each of us brings through our multiple identities (in my case, boomer, white, female, Southerner, writer, researcher, entrepreneur, questioner, etc.). She calls these "knowledge domains." The job of a innovation leader is to tap individuals to bring new knowledge to the group, since innovation is all about combining new domains of knowledge in new and valuable ways.

Innovating with diversity requires active listening to draw out differences that can be leveraged. It doesn't happen without intention and legitimizing the differences people have.

Susanne uses a nice diagram that I can only describe here. After asking participants to note their own perspectives, skills and abilities, she then maps them like so: the overlapping domains of knowledge are placed in a center circle. Those that are somewhat overlapping (some have them, some don't) are placed in an outer circle. And finally, those domains that are unique to a single person are placed in yet a third and larger circle. Even in groups that know each other well, the range of domains in the outer circle generally come as a surprise.

She warns us not to talk in terms of what we like and what we don't like, since that represents the whole of ourselves and is a painful target of criticism. She urges instead that we contribute from our domains, since we can speak at one moment as, say, a mother, but in the next as a planner.

Susanne makes a strong and practical case for diversity as a major contributor to innovation. And she gives practical advice on how to use diversity productively.

Very, very nice presentation.

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05.01.08 | connected

Interculturalism: Moved by Public Space

Observations from the morning session in Liverpool from the Intercultural Cities Conference...

Five very good presentations and no time for questions. That is the problem of too many conferences. Where are the timekeepers?

Nonetheless, here are the ideas from the first two presentations that intrigued me that I hope to find time to follow on with panelists this afternoon…

The civic is made out of the work of overcoming difference without weaponry. - Saskia Sassen

We must be able to invent new instruments to deal with difference and in their making we will be inventing the new civic. - Sassen

Concerns about national security and national unity have merged into one and spawned the question of who belongs? - Ash Amin

It is unrealistic to expect us to “know our neighbor” and much more so to “love our neighbor.” The best we can hope for is “thrown togetherness” or “tacit publicness.” Chess between strangers in public spaces is a good example of this and it produces “studied trust.” If we want to deal with interculturalism productively, it is critical to repopulate public spaces.” Bazaars and community gardens are examples. Urbanism with a light touch is called for. Urban conviviality should be the ambition rather than the necessity of empathy. There are simply limits to how much interpersonal contact we can expect. - Amin

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05.01.08 | connected

Racial Disparity in Death Sentences

From Tuesday's New York Times, this article examines the statistics of death sentences in Harris County, Texas. Definitely worth a look.

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