#it’s about being disconnected from your roots and isolating yourself from a core part of your identity because it’s systematically rough

[watermelon-beachboy]

he’s an earth bender but he can only bend clay. anything else and hes FUCKED.

Yes the name changed again

[soovaryit]

I’ve been reflecting on self-care A LOT recently. I’ve also been reading a lot on it. Not so much the practical ‘how to take care of yourself’ part but the way in which the concept of self-care is written about and portrayed. Throughout the next year of university, my aim as Mental Health Liberation Coordinator is to hold self-care groups and events to explore the topic, share tips and ultimately give people a safe space to reflect on their feelings.

My reflection started with a piece I read by Kate Mccombs, entitled ‘5 Self Care Strategies that aren’t fucking mani-pedis’. It was more interesting than anything I’d read before on the topic and I loved the angry rejection of gendered, superficial acts of ‘care’. Don’t get me wrong, I love all things beauty and find them very therapeutic – but it’s not for everyone, and care like this is often rooted in gender normativity and materialism. The article also strayed from physical acts of care and went deeper – offering advice on how to sustain self-care practices rather than mask negative emotions with quick fixes. In my experience, it’s hard to strike a balance between physical and emotional self-care, and sometimes the pressure of ‘treating’ yourself or thinking yourself better can be exhausting in itself. I’ve also been thinking about how often it’s implicated that self-care should be practised alone – as ‘me time’ or when you’re having a bath, or in bed alone. In the past, I have definitely isolated myself through this kind of ‘care’ – often believing that I SHOULD enjoy being alone and forcing myself to do things for ‘me’ as if that is the only way to achieve happiness and self-esteem.

I absolutely treasure time alone, in a way that I never thought I would. Previously I had ended relationships because the anxiety I had about being alone was so strong that I felt I had to explore and conquer it. But what I’ve learnt from years of being single is that it’s okay to rely on people and it’s incredibly important to nurture your friendships. Those things sound so obvious, but when stuck in a relationship where I relied on that one person for everything, including my self-esteem and sanity, it was a significant realisation for me. So why shouldn't self-care be practised in a group?! Alone time is excellent, but if you start feeling isolated or disconnected from people, remember you’re a social creature and even when you don’t feel like it, connecting with someone could do you a lot of good. If you’re not feeling up to socialising but want some kind of human comfort, try spending time with someone close to you who will understand that you won’t be 100% yourself and do something nice and quiet together. Sometimes just having another person there, who knows what you’re going through, can make all the difference. And if a human isn’t available cats (and all animals) are amazing comforters. Even mine who regularly greets me by hissing (she loves me). Anyway – long story short I wanted to dedicate a few posts to my own self-care strategies that don’t cost a bomb and aren’t ableist or sexist (yay!). I’m always hesitant to be giving advice because anyone with health problems will know how irritating it can be to have the same stuff barked at you again and again by people who know nothing about your condition, but if even one person finds this helpful I will be pleased. 

·         Firstly - move. This one sounds basic af but I’m not talking about hard core exercise (trust me I’ve been given that advice enough to inherently resent it now). Sometimes when I’m in pain or feeling depressed I literally do not move for hours. I tell myself I need to rest and stay in bed which is completely right, but not moving at all can actually cause you to be in more physical pain and mean that your brain is getting no stimulation whatsoever. Now I simply try and make sure I move every half an hour – whether it’s getting up to make a cup of tea, hobbling to the shop for ice cream or just a walk around the park you know it will benefit you even if it doesn’t feel like it at the time. Also specifically to endo sufferers – my muscles get insanely tense when I lie down for long periods of time, which makes cramps and back pain sooOoo much worse. Simply doing a couple of basic yoga poses can improve the tension (even if I want to throw up after). Literally even just moving position every 10-20 minutes, if that’s all you can manage that’s fine!

·         Write about it. Another cliché! Soz. This one is easier said than done because I wouldn’t have dreamt of it a few years ago but since I wrote things down, I have felt better. Even if you literally feel nothing (pretty common with depression), try and describe the nothingness and make it into something tangible. It can help discover things you didn’t know you felt and stop feelings of depression and anxiety feeling all consuming. Also, it really helps pin down mood patterns and also prevents you from getting nostalgic about the past. When I have a bad spell I often think ‘This is the WORST I have ever felt. It has NEVER been as bad as this and I can’t see it getting any better.’ But obviously, I think this every time I have a bad spell. It passes, and I feel better, and the more I reflect on my feelings each time, the more evidence I have to help prove to myself next time that the feeling won’t last forever.

·         Stop shaming yourself. This is the thing that I STILL find the hardest. All I do is preach vulnerability, the importance of human connection and honesty with yourself and during bad spells (like right now), I tell myself I am pathetic. It’s mean and unnecessary and untrue but I do it. All the time. It’s a constant stream of negativity running through my brain that I am hardly even aware of. Every time I go through therapy, it stops for a couple of months and as soon as I hit a rough patch it’s back. The only thing that I’ve found helps with this is meditation. It has by no means stopped it but when you meditate you become much more aware of your own thoughts and that is what it’s about. I used to even shame myself WHILST meditating ‘I’m not good at this. I can’t stop thinking. Shut up brain. Give up.’ But just the act of sitting silently with your thoughts and trying to figure them out can be beneficial. Calm is an excellent app and has a lot of free sessions (or you can subscribe for more specific sessions that target self-esteem, anxiety etc).

·         Review your medication. I often get stuck in a rut with my prescriptions, taking them without a thought and assuming they’re at the correct dosages and they should be making me feel better. As we all know, this is often not the case. Every few months I visit my (regular) GP and we go through my medications to see what is better or worse. I was actually surprised when he first suggested this to me – no doctor had ever questioned the fact that I’ve been taking heavy medication since the age of 6 and was rarely noticing the effects that it had on me. Through this super simple conversation you can reflect on your physical and emotional health and adjust things if you need to. Or if everything seems to be working, it can give you a little boost to know that for now your symptoms are under control. As the random quote that I found on Google says - whatever soothes your soul. Try not to feel pressured to do certain things, or to be alone, or to enjoy being alone, or to go out and get drunk because everyone else is. Just do you. Gonna follow this post up with a list of cheap products that I use to chiiillll because why not. 

[architectnews]

"Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs?"

As cities become more cycling-friendly it's important not to forget about suburbia, says Aaron Betsky, as he shares what architects and urban planners could learn from a cycle through the suburbs on World Bicycle Day.

Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs? After a brief blip last decades, our cities are sprawling again. At the same time, suburbs and downtown areas are becoming more alike, with the former densifying into exurban villages and the latter filling with vertical versions of gated compounds and big box retail venues.

That also means that it is now easier to bicycle in suburbia: there are higher concentrations of destinations, and more and more suburbs are being designed to accommodate two-wheelers. The rapid rise of ebiking also makes it much easier for suburbanites to travel the larger distances and less uniform terrains they encounter outside of the downtown grid.

Riding a bicycle is the best way to experience a city.

For me, what is just as important is that bicycles are great tools for urban exploration. Sprawl is misunderstood and understudied by architects and designers, who generally live in downtown areas. That also means they are undesigned or, what is more often the case, designed badly: in ways that waste natural resources, that isolated us from each other, and that are ugly. I think we need to design better suburbs instead of just wishing them away, and one way to start is by understanding them better.

I have always felt that riding a bicycle is the best way to experience a city. On a bike, you move slower than in a car, bus, tram, or taxi. Cruising at ten to twenty kilometers an hour gives you a chance to immerse yourself in the sights, sounds, and smells of urbanity. With no barrier between you and all those sensory phenomena, they are all the more vivid.

Riding your bike through sprawl instead offers other insights and delights.

As you cruise down the streets and avenues, the city's spaces unfold continuously, giving you a sense of the rhythms and the chaotic coherence that makes the metropolis an environment that overwhelms, delights, and terrifies, all at the same time. Suburbia, on the other hand, is much more distended and has fewer variations, making it seem like a less likely candidate for two-wheeled dissection. I would argue that riding your bike through sprawl instead offers other insights and delights – not to mention making a tiny contribution to suburbia's original sin of car-dependent wastefulness.

In my case, I jump on my bike (a VanMoof Electric Assist, because, after all, the design of the tool is important) and head out from typical suburban development.  That swoosh through the pruned and controlled version of forests dotted with glades that are the sites of McMansions and lawns reminds you why suburbs are here in the first place: they give you the chance to be in nature with all mod cons.

It also makes you aware of how ugly the isolated houses are.

I have the sense of losing myself in the beauties of all those trees, bushes, and flowers, not to mentions birds, bees, deer and the occasional black bear. But after leaving an air-conditioned shelter I am still on a paved road. This is the great strength of suburbia and using the bicycle to experience this closeness to nature is important. However, it also makes you aware of how ugly the isolated houses are and how much they disconnect themselves from this setting. We need houses that are part of the landscape the owners are there to experience.

Along the way, there are other structures that reveal themselves: from my subdivision I climb up Nellie's Cave Road, named for the site of a Black settlement that was wiped out in land grabs by suburbanization. At the top of the ridge, a sign tells me that I am leaving the freedom of the county road to enter into Blacksburg, Virginia. House sites become smaller, the buildings are closer to the road, and the forest scragglier. As I descend into the town proper, a grid, sloping up the hill asserts its rhythm over my ride.

Riding on my bicycle reinforces for me the sense of how little we understand – and thus are able to design for – this particular form of loose, hopscotch urbanism.

What is most remarkable is the messy quality of the spaces. The houses are other structures are relatively small compared to the size of the lots, and lawn, sidewalk, side yard, rear yard, and unclaimed or undeveloped space blend into each other without any clear separation. The collage nature of sprawl makes itself eminently clear as I cruise by structures in every style and of every material and vegetation equally mixed up in their literal and historical roots.

Riding on my bicycle reinforces for me the sense of how little we understand –and thus are able to design for—this particular form of loose, hopscotch urbanism. It has the potential to be more connected and integrated into its setting, to be less wasteful and to be more socially connected. Frank Lloyd Wright understood this when he designed his Broadacre City more than a century ago, but few architects since then have tried to tackle this landscape.

This is sprawl at its worst, but also a sign of the realities of our economic system.

I cross Main Street, here a ribbon of concrete between parking lots serving strip malls on either side of the street. These are the monuments of suburbia: the Kroger's, clothing stores, and cinemas, all hiding behind the same facades carried out in hues of beige, gray, and brown. This is sprawl at its worst, but also a sign of the realities of our economic system. A society that relies on just-in-time inventory, the continual movement of goods, people, and information to minimize investment and maximize profits, and the emergence of warehouses and retail establishments as quasi-monuments is on display here. Could we do this better? Nobody I know has tried.

Main Street here is, as in so many other towns, a ridge street, and I could take it all the way through the little downtown to my destination my office at Virginia Tech, but I cross it and head past the elementary school and the subsidiary office clusters that tumble down the hill. The building blocks for a more connected suburbia are here, from the educational institutions that are now difficult to distinguish from the supermarkets to these trails. We need to design them as what they should be, not as the leftovers of a commercialized society.

The bicycle ride can reveal this history, now we just need to mark it with monuments and public spaces.

The trail snakes through the back of the University campus, revealing glimpses of both the playing fields that make use of what were once the fields were the indigenous people lived and animals roamed, and crops grew. I am now in the New River Valley, whose waters flow into the Ohio, the Mississippi, and then the Gulf Coast, while when I started, I was in the upper reaches of the Roanoke River, which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic. I am, in other words, in the Midwest, despite still being in Virginia, and expanses of fields and seem appropriate for that place. The bicycle ride can reveal this history, now we just need to mark it with monuments and public spaces that make that background come forward.

In the twenty minutes this trip has taken me, I have moved from following and conquering contours, cutting my way through a landscape of which I felt part, through the collage confusion of suburbia, past the big blocks of buildings and the open space of fields that form the commercial and institutional gathering points for this community, and into the largest collection of buildings that house the region's economic core. I am now in another place, where our business is to learn how to make such spaces.

The ride has strung them together into a continual line in which landscapes have flowed into each other.

None of these pieces has felt disconnected. The ride has strung them together into a continual line in which landscapes have flowed into each other, moving me from idyllic nature – albeit one once again stolen from Native Americans and later Black people, and controlled by hidden technology – to the abstraction of what humans beings do to design and control that nature. At the heart of the ride is space and form flowing into each other. Any attempt to control that seems useless to me.

It is making sense of that, learning from the movement, as first modernists such as the Futurists, Cubists, and Constructivist taught us a century ago, is what we should be doing, and the bicycle is as good a tool to start that process as any I know. Then we can design for a sprawl that is equitable, sustainable, and beautiful.

Main image is by Daniel Ramirez via Wikimedia Commons.

Aaron Betsky is director of Virginia Tech School of Architecture and Design and was president of the School of Architecture at Taliesin from 2017 to 2019. A critic of art, architecture, and design, Betsky is the author of over a dozen books on those subjects, including a forthcoming survey of modernism in architecture and design. Trained as an architect and in the humanities at Yale University, Betsky was previously director of the Cincinnati Art Museum (2006-2014) and the Netherlands Architecture Institute (2001-2006), and curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995-2001). In 2008, he directed the 11th Venice International Biennale of Architecture.

The post "Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs?" appeared first on Dezeen.

[ralphlayton]

Boosting and Deepening Engagement through Empathy in B2B Marketing

Empathy is more than a buzzword. It’s not a box to be checked, or an added finishing touch for content. If B2B marketers want to successfully engage human audiences and break free from the deluge of irrelevant messages swirling around today’s customers, empathy needs to be at the center of all strategic initiatives from start to finish.

What Does Empathy Mean in B2B Marketing?

Empathy is defined simply as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. But I’m not sure that characterization fully does it justice in the context of modern marketing. I rather like the way Zen Media CEO Shama Hyder described empathy in the better creative teamwork guide we helped our clients at monday.com put together: “Empathy is critical. It's much more than just having an understanding of what someone else's challenges might be. Part of it is that you have to give up being a control freak. As leaders, we should really look at the big picture and ask ourselves, is this necessary? Or is this just politicking, or someone trying to make it seem like it has to be done this way because it's the way they prefer?” Shama was speaking from the perspective of a business leader trying to get on the same page as their team, but it applies just as well to marketing endeavors. The critical first step in developing empathy is disconnecting from our own ingrained perceptions and assumptions. Only then can we truly understand and support the audiences we want to reach. Too often, empathy in marketing tends to be a bit narrow and self-centered (which is contradictory to the very concept itself). We often seek to understand only the challenges and pain points that drive interest in what we’re selling. Looking beyond this scope is necessary to build strong relationships founded on trust, especially now. “What you are creating, marketing and ultimately selling is but one piece of your customer’s life as a human on Earth. One very small piece,” said Mary Beech, principal at MRB Brand Consulting and former CMO of Kate Spade, in an AMA article on empathy in marketing. “And if we aren’t keeping in mind their full journey, including their emotional, mental, social and physical needs — as well as the challenges and joys they are facing — we cannot do our jobs well.” As Brian Solis wrote at Forbes recently, the need for empathetic customer experiences is greater than ever in the age of COVID-19 disruption. People have so much going on in their lives, and are facing so many unprecedented difficulties, that a myopic brand-centric focus is all the more untenable. “Traditional marketing will no longer have the same effect moving forward,” he argues. “If anything, it will negatively affect customer relationships rather than enhance them.” Agreed. So, let’s find a better way.

Engaging with True Empathy in the New Era of Marketing

Imagine if it was possible to sit down and have an in-depth conversation with each one of your customers and potential customers. You’d gain first-hand insight into their worldviews, their challenges, their hopes and dreams. Sadly, it’s not possible. You don’t have the time, nor do your customers. (Although I do recommend making a habit of engaging in direct, candid conversations with them when possible.) To make empathy scalable, marketers need to take advantage of all the tools at their disposal. This largely requires using data to connect the dots. “It’s critical for marketers to have a real-time 360 view and understanding of a customer’s full journey, at every stage, from discovery to engagement to retention and loyalty to advocacy,” Solis wrote at Forbes. Here are some suggestions for obtaining such a view: Use empathy-mapping. This practice, explained in a helpful primer from Nielsen Norman Group, involves creating a visualization of attitudes and behaviors to guide decision-making. Empathy-mapping originated in the world of UX design, but given how much user experience and customer experience now overlap, it’s becoming a powerful tool for marketers.

(Source: Nielsen Norman Group)

Coordinate and integrate your organizational efforts. Every customer-facing function in a company — marketing, sales, customer service — sees the customer from a different perspective. Seek ways to bring all these perspectives together into one centralized, holistic view. Per Solis: “Cross-functional collaboration is a mandate. As such, integration will become the new standard and will quickly become table stakes as every company rushes in this direction.” Tap into meaningful influencer relationships. Influencers can play a key role in empathetic marketing because they have relationships and perspectives extending beyond our brand ecosystems. If they align with your audience, influencers can bring unique insight and connect at deeper levels. Turning influencer engagements from mechanical to meaningful is essential to accomplishing this. Incidentally, Mr. Solis recently partnered with TopRank Marketing on the first-ever State of B2B Influencer Marketing report, in which our friend Ann Handley summarizes the impact quite well: “You could call yourself a good parent or a world-class marketer or an empathetic friend ... but any of those things would carry more weight coming from your child, customer, or BFF. So it is with integrating influencer content: It's a direct line to building trust and customer confidence.” Research and engage with topics that matter to your customers outside of their jobs. Given the connotations of B2B, it’s all too easy to isolate our customer research around what they do professionally. But these are human beings with lives outside of work. To drive powerful engagement, marketers should search for the cross-sections between their brand’s purpose and values, and what matters to their customers. A good example of this is found in the IBM THINK Blog, which is “dedicated to chronicling the fast-moving world of cognitive computing” and covers many important societal topics. (Recent focuses include a post on gender pronouns and a corporate environmental report.)

Examples of Empathetic B2B Marketing

Who’s getting it right and paving the way for a more empathy-driven approach to engaging B2B audiences? Here are a few examples:

My post on seven B2B brands that talk to consumers, not companies highlights several instances of an authentic and relatable human tone shining through.

It goes without saying that the video-conferencing service Zoom stumbled into a massive business opportunity with the dramatic pivot to remote work this year. The company could simply try to cash in and maximize that opportunity, but instead, they’re doubling down on building trust. Zoom’s CEO Eric S. Yuan recently wrote about his roots in China in articulating his organization’s support for this embattled region of the world, noting that Zoom is providing expanded features for free accounts and offering accessible resources and education. He also made the company’s tools free to K-12 schools (a potentially lucrative customer base) in March.

Seeing human faces brings an instantly relatable element to any B2B campaign. That’s why Microsoft’s Story Labs microsite, which frames some of the company’s initiatives and guiding principles around real people and their stories, is so effective.

Let Empathy Guide Your B2B Marketing Strategy

In order to walk in someone else’s shoes, you first need to untie and remove your own. Making empathy a core strategic pillar requires marketers to take a step back, disconnect from their ingrained perceptions and assumptions, and get fully in tune with the people they serve. Only then can we create the type of relevant and personalized experiences that drive deep and long-lasting brand engagement. For more tips that will help your business-oriented content strike notes of genuine empathy, read Josh Nite’s blog post on 5 Ways to Humanize B2B Marketing.  

The post Boosting and Deepening Engagement through Empathy in B2B Marketing appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

Boosting and Deepening Engagement through Empathy in B2B Marketing published first on yhttps://improfitninja.blogspot.com/

[samuelpboswell]

Boosting and Deepening Engagement through Empathy in B2B Marketing

Empathy is more than a buzzword. It’s not a box to be checked, or an added finishing touch for content. If B2B marketers want to successfully engage human audiences and break free from the deluge of irrelevant messages swirling around today’s customers, empathy needs to be at the center of all strategic initiatives from start to finish.

What Does Empathy Mean in B2B Marketing?

Empathy is defined simply as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. But I’m not sure that characterization fully does it justice in the context of modern marketing. I rather like the way Zen Media CEO Shama Hyder described empathy in the better creative teamwork guide we helped our clients at monday.com put together: “Empathy is critical. It's much more than just having an understanding of what someone else's challenges might be. Part of it is that you have to give up being a control freak. As leaders, we should really look at the big picture and ask ourselves, is this necessary? Or is this just politicking, or someone trying to make it seem like it has to be done this way because it's the way they prefer?” Shama was speaking from the perspective of a business leader trying to get on the same page as their team, but it applies just as well to marketing endeavors. The critical first step in developing empathy is disconnecting from our own ingrained perceptions and assumptions. Only then can we truly understand and support the audiences we want to reach. Too often, empathy in marketing tends to be a bit narrow and self-centered (which is contradictory to the very concept itself). We often seek to understand only the challenges and pain points that drive interest in what we’re selling. Looking beyond this scope is necessary to build strong relationships founded on trust, especially now. “What you are creating, marketing and ultimately selling is but one piece of your customer’s life as a human on Earth. One very small piece,” said Mary Beech, principal at MRB Brand Consulting and former CMO of Kate Spade, in an AMA article on empathy in marketing. “And if we aren’t keeping in mind their full journey, including their emotional, mental, social and physical needs — as well as the challenges and joys they are facing — we cannot do our jobs well.” As Brian Solis wrote at Forbes recently, the need for empathetic customer experiences is greater than ever in the age of COVID-19 disruption. People have so much going on in their lives, and are facing so many unprecedented difficulties, that a myopic brand-centric focus is all the more untenable. “Traditional marketing will no longer have the same effect moving forward,” he argues. “If anything, it will negatively affect customer relationships rather than enhance them.” Agreed. So, let’s find a better way.

Engaging with True Empathy in the New Era of Marketing

Imagine if it was possible to sit down and have an in-depth conversation with each one of your customers and potential customers. You’d gain first-hand insight into their worldviews, their challenges, their hopes and dreams. Sadly, it’s not possible. You don’t have the time, nor do your customers. (Although I do recommend making a habit of engaging in direct, candid conversations with them when possible.) To make empathy scalable, marketers need to take advantage of all the tools at their disposal. This largely requires using data to connect the dots. “It’s critical for marketers to have a real-time 360 view and understanding of a customer’s full journey, at every stage, from discovery to engagement to retention and loyalty to advocacy,” Solis wrote at Forbes. Here are some suggestions for obtaining such a view: Use empathy-mapping. This practice, explained in a helpful primer from Nielsen Norman Group, involves creating a visualization of attitudes and behaviors to guide decision-making. Empathy-mapping originated in the world of UX design, but given how much user experience and customer experience now overlap, it’s becoming a powerful tool for marketers.

(Source: Nielsen Norman Group)

Coordinate and integrate your organizational efforts. Every customer-facing function in a company — marketing, sales, customer service — sees the customer from a different perspective. Seek ways to bring all these perspectives together into one centralized, holistic view. Per Solis: “Cross-functional collaboration is a mandate. As such, integration will become the new standard and will quickly become table stakes as every company rushes in this direction.” Tap into meaningful influencer relationships. Influencers can play a key role in empathetic marketing because they have relationships and perspectives extending beyond our brand ecosystems. If they align with your audience, influencers can bring unique insight and connect at deeper levels. Turning influencer engagements from mechanical to meaningful is essential to accomplishing this. Incidentally, Mr. Solis recently partnered with TopRank Marketing on the first-ever State of B2B Influencer Marketing report, in which our friend Ann Handley summarizes the impact quite well: “You could call yourself a good parent or a world-class marketer or an empathetic friend ... but any of those things would carry more weight coming from your child, customer, or BFF. So it is with integrating influencer content: It's a direct line to building trust and customer confidence.” Research and engage with topics that matter to your customers outside of their jobs. Given the connotations of B2B, it’s all too easy to isolate our customer research around what they do professionally. But these are human beings with lives outside of work. To drive powerful engagement, marketers should search for the cross-sections between their brand’s purpose and values, and what matters to their customers. A good example of this is found in the IBM THINK Blog, which is “dedicated to chronicling the fast-moving world of cognitive computing” and covers many important societal topics. (Recent focuses include a post on gender pronouns and a corporate environmental report.)

Examples of Empathetic B2B Marketing

Who’s getting it right and paving the way for a more empathy-driven approach to engaging B2B audiences? Here are a few examples:

My post on seven B2B brands that talk to consumers, not companies highlights several instances of an authentic and relatable human tone shining through.

It goes without saying that the video-conferencing service Zoom stumbled into a massive business opportunity with the dramatic pivot to remote work this year. The company could simply try to cash in and maximize that opportunity, but instead, they’re doubling down on building trust. Zoom’s CEO Eric S. Yuan recently wrote about his roots in China in articulating his organization’s support for this embattled region of the world, noting that Zoom is providing expanded features for free accounts and offering accessible resources and education. He also made the company’s tools free to K-12 schools (a potentially lucrative customer base) in March.

Seeing human faces brings an instantly relatable element to any B2B campaign. That’s why Microsoft’s Story Labs microsite, which frames some of the company’s initiatives and guiding principles around real people and their stories, is so effective.

Let Empathy Guide Your B2B Marketing Strategy

In order to walk in someone else’s shoes, you first need to untie and remove your own. Making empathy a core strategic pillar requires marketers to take a step back, disconnect from their ingrained perceptions and assumptions, and get fully in tune with the people they serve. Only then can we create the type of relevant and personalized experiences that drive deep and long-lasting brand engagement. For more tips that will help your business-oriented content strike notes of genuine empathy, read Josh Nite’s blog post on 5 Ways to Humanize B2B Marketing.  

The post Boosting and Deepening Engagement through Empathy in B2B Marketing appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

from The SEO Advantages https://www.toprankblog.com/2020/07/boosting-and-deepening-engagement-through-empathy-in-b2b-marketing/

[sarahburness]

He Left, But I Will Not Give Up On Myself

“I now see how owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do. “ ~Brené Brown

He just left our home.

After eighteen years together, fifteen of them being married, he left as we had planned, as we had gently and lovingly discussed.

We are on a break, a trial separation. What you hear about separation and divorce is all so achingly true. It feels like a death, a chasm where all the worst feelings imaginable pile in on you, where you can’t quite breathe right.

The pain is visceral—like someone sliced right through your core, the heartache deep enough to make the bones ache, the weariness that makes your head feel heavy and weighted, the primal twists in your gut that cannot be fully appreciated until they are forced upon you unexpectedly.

My eyes are completely dried out and sore, begging for a reprieve from the ocean of tears.

I did not see this coming. I wasn’t blindsided completely, as there have been whispers and ghosts of unpleasant truths that had been squashed down for years: all those inner, intimate workings of a marriage that didn’t always flow smoothly, undetectable to the outside world. The ebbs and flows, the dark thoughts that sprout up on a sleepless night, a human experience in all its shared, bumpy glory.

Through all that, there was purity and goodness, what makes a marriage so rewarding and rich: a deeply rooted friendship, strong as anything I have ever felt with someone in my life. I was connected, heard, understood.

I had a witness to my life’s journey in all its madness, monotony, and triumph. My person. My love. The person who got it without having to say a word. That steady presence even when we were physically apart. I felt secure and safe, and my feet were firmly planted on the ground.

So much time, so much history, so much togetherness feels like it has been wiped out in the span of a few months. It disappeared up in smoke with only the ashes to remain. I am untethered, rudderless, a sail desperately trying to right itself in the tempest.

There is no faultfinding, no hatred, just a crushing sadness with a generous dose of regret. Regret for all the times we didn’t tune into each other or communicate when things urgently needed to be said and handled with proper care. Care that would heal wounds instead of allowing them to fester.

Regret for retreating into our respective corners and hiding, survival skills carried over from tumultuous childhoods. We landed in the gray area of life where feelings subtly shift over time and don’t course correct in healthy ways.

That dreaded place where human emotions get murky, cloudy, and raw, allowing vulnerability and disconnect to cause you to do things you never thought you would. In turn, you make futile efforts for control when there is none. You don’t want to let go but you must. Your hands are too raw and bloody from the struggle to hang on for dear life. I know what it means to surrender now.

It is gone. I am unsure it will ever be back. If it comes back, I hope it is stronger and more lovingly powerful than before, impenetrable from any slings and arrows that may try to dent and poison it. We will nourish and nurture it to make it right, whole, solid—not let it wither away so easily on the vine.

I won’t mind the battle scars, as they will serve to remind me of what we can endure, how we cope, how we survive, and what loss really feels like in your soul. It will remind me to cherish the feeling of home, the safe haven of togetherness. We will mourn the death of our old marriage and pave a path for a new one that is healing, bright, and hopeful, permanently altered for the better.

Right now, I am alone, terrified, vulnerable, standing on the edge of an abyss. All I have is myself, and I have to believe that I am enough. My mantra is “I will get through this,” and I repeat it often. It comforts me sometimes.

I know there are things I didn’t want to acknowledge about myself: I became complacent, didn’t take full advantage of my days of freedom, chose the easy way out on many occasions, ignored my creative leanings, and became more dependent than I would ever care to admit.

I numbed myself with monotony, allowing seemingly benign things from the past to insidiously take root and work their way to the surface, infecting everything in its path.

Now it is all there, right in front of me, not so much taunting me but in my face, reminding me I have some work to do. Life lessons that need to be understood and imbibed to my core so I don’t keep repeating them. Not to put myself in such a place of insecurity ever again. I must own all of this, my part. Digest it painfully and slowly but knowing it will fortify me in the future.

Where will I be in six months, a year? How will this unfold? Will I make hugely gratifying changes that smooth everything over? Will he? Will I take this time to get back to myself? Will I be all too human and fail miserably? Will I numb myself yet again to all of this? Maybe. Maybe not. It is unknowable right now.

I know what I will be doing every day until the answers come. And they will come whether I like them or not. I will get up each morning. I will take care of my body and mind. I will shower, wash my hair, put on makeup, and get dressed.

I will face the days, whether they feel short and uneventful or impossibly long, full of loneliness, despair, and isolation. I will cry until I feel depleted and then cry again. I will not sleep well. My stomach will feel like someone is gripping it tightly in their fist.

But I will take long walks, and inhale clean, fresh air. I will try to eat well, be kind to myself, stay open, soft, and not wear bitterness like a mask or feel my chest constrict with impotent rage. I will remember that it is okay to be afraid. I will reach out to people when I need to and be alone when I need to.

I will try to laugh every day and remember all the good things I have. I will drink red wine and dance spontaneously to remind myself I am alive in this body. I will not give up on myself, though I will want to. I will not break even though I am fragile as fine china. I will throw many balls in the air and see if one lands on a treasured feeling of possibility.

I will let this exquisite pain be my greatest teacher. I will give it time—that magical elixir that taunts and teases on its own schedule. I will become the woman I know I am deep inside, even though she got lost along the way—the woman of my dreams, who is capable and strong. It has been eighteen years of building one life, and now I will begin building a new one.

The most important thing I have learned through this period of profound change is that you need to show up for yourself—always. To be your own champion and best friend. To know with absolute certainty that you are the only person you can count on in order to move forward and build the life of your dreams, with or without someone else. And knowing that is worth everything.

About Rachel McNamara

Rachel McNamara is a Registered Nurse and Certified Health Coach with a passion for all things related to wellness, health and fitness. She just purchased her first essential oil diffuser and is beyond excited. She is also obsessed with (in no particular order) skincare, Bravo TV, red wine and podcasts. Find her on Instagram at@rachelmcnamara8053 rmmhealth.net.

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The post He Left, But I Will Not Give Up On Myself appeared first on Tiny Buddha.

from Tiny Buddha https://tinybuddha.com/blog/he-left-but-i-will-not-give-up-on-myself/

[architectnews]

"Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs?"

As cities become more cycling-friendly it's important not to forget about suburbia, says Aaron Betsky, as he shares what architects and urban planners could learn from a cycle through the suburbs on World Bicycle Day.

Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs? After a brief blip last decades, our cities are sprawling again. At the same time, suburbs and downtown areas are becoming more alike, with the former densifying into exurban villages and the latter filling with vertical versions of gated compounds and big box retail venues.

That also means that it is now easier to bicycle in suburbia: there are higher concentrations of destinations, and more and more suburbs are being designed to accommodate two-wheelers. The rapid rise of ebiking also makes it much easier for suburbanites to travel the larger distances and less uniform terrains they encounter outside of the downtown grid.

Riding a bicycle is the best way to experience a city.

For me, what is just as important is that bicycles are great tools for urban exploration. Sprawl is misunderstood and understudied by architects and designers, who generally live in downtown areas. That also means they are undesigned or, what is more often the case, designed badly: in ways that waste natural resources, that isolated us from each other, and that are ugly. I think we need to design better suburbs instead of just wishing them away, and one way to start is by understanding them better.

I have always felt that riding a bicycle is the best way to experience a city. On a bike, you move slower than in a car, bus, tram, or taxi. Cruising at ten to twenty kilometers an hour gives you a chance to immerse yourself in the sights, sounds, and smells of urbanity. With no barrier between you and all those sensory phenomena, they are all the more vivid.

Riding your bike through sprawl instead offers other insights and delights.

As you cruise down the streets and avenues, the city's spaces unfold continuously, giving you a sense of the rhythms and the chaotic coherence that makes the metropolis an environment that overwhelms, delights, and terrifies, all at the same time. Suburbia, on the other hand, is much more distended and has fewer variations, making it seem like a less likely candidate for two-wheeled dissection. I would argue that riding your bike through sprawl instead offers other insights and delights – not to mention making a tiny contribution to suburbia's original sin of car-dependent wastefulness.

In my case, I jump on my bike (a VanMoof Electric Assist, because, after all, the design of the tool is important) and head out from typical suburban development.  That swoosh through the pruned and controlled version of forests dotted with glades that are the sites of McMansions and lawns reminds you why suburbs are here in the first place: they give you the chance to be in nature with all mod cons.

It also makes you aware of how ugly the isolated houses are.

I have the sense of losing myself in the beauties of all those trees, bushes, and flowers, not to mentions birds, bees, deer and the occasional black bear. But after leaving an air-conditioned shelter I am still on a paved road. This is the great strength of suburbia and using the bicycle to experience this closeness to nature is important. However, it also makes you aware of how ugly the isolated houses are and how much they disconnect themselves from this setting. We need houses that are part of the landscape the owners are there to experience.

Along the way, there are other structures that reveal themselves: from my subdivision I climb up Nellie's Cave Road, named for the site of a Black settlement that was wiped out in land grabs by suburbanization. At the top of the ridge, a sign tells me that I am leaving the freedom of the county road to enter into Blacksburg, Virginia. House sites become smaller, the buildings are closer to the road, and the forest scragglier. As I descend into the town proper, a grid, sloping up the hill asserts its rhythm over my ride.

Riding on my bicycle reinforces for me the sense of how little we understand – and thus are able to design for – this particular form of loose, hopscotch urbanism.

What is most remarkable is the messy quality of the spaces. The houses are other structures are relatively small compared to the size of the lots, and lawn, sidewalk, side yard, rear yard, and unclaimed or undeveloped space blend into each other without any clear separation. The collage nature of sprawl makes itself eminently clear as I cruise by structures in every style and of every material and vegetation equally mixed up in their literal and historical roots.

Riding on my bicycle reinforces for me the sense of how little we understand –and thus are able to design for—this particular form of loose, hopscotch urbanism. It has the potential to be more connected and integrated into its setting, to be less wasteful and to be more socially connected. Frank Lloyd Wright understood this when he designed his Broadacre City more than a century ago, but few architects since then have tried to tackle this landscape.

This is sprawl at its worst, but also a sign of the realities of our economic system.

I cross Main Street, here a ribbon of concrete between parking lots serving strip malls on either side of the street. These are the monuments of suburbia: the Kroger's, clothing stores, and cinemas, all hiding behind the same facades carried out in hues of beige, gray, and brown. This is sprawl at its worst, but also a sign of the realities of our economic system. A society that relies on just-in-time inventory, the continual movement of goods, people, and information to minimize investment and maximize profits, and the emergence of warehouses and retail establishments as quasi-monuments is on display here. Could we do this better? Nobody I know has tried.

Main Street here is, as in so many other towns, a ridge street, and I could take it all the way through the little downtown to my destination my office at Virginia Tech, but I cross it and head past the elementary school and the subsidiary office clusters that tumble down the hill. The building blocks for a more connected suburbia are here, from the educational institutions that are now difficult to distinguish from the supermarkets to these trails. We need to design them as what they should be, not as the leftovers of a commercialized society.

The bicycle ride can reveal this history, now we just need to mark it with monuments and public spaces.

The trail snakes through the back of the University campus, revealing glimpses of both the playing fields that make use of what were once the fields were the indigenous people lived and animals roamed, and crops grew. I am now in the New River Valley, whose waters flow into the Ohio, the Mississippi, and then the Gulf Coast, while when I started, I was in the upper reaches of the Roanoke River, which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic. I am, in other words, in the Midwest, despite still being in Virginia, and expanses of fields and seem appropriate for that place. The bicycle ride can reveal this history, now we just need to mark it with monuments and public spaces that make that background come forward.

In the twenty minutes this trip has taken me, I have moved from following and conquering contours, cutting my way through a landscape of which I felt part, through the collage confusion of suburbia, past the big blocks of buildings and the open space of fields that form the commercial and institutional gathering points for this community, and into the largest collection of buildings that house the region's economic core. I am now in another place, where our business is to learn how to make such spaces.

The ride has strung them together into a continual line in which landscapes have flowed into each other.

None of these pieces has felt disconnected. The ride has strung them together into a continual line in which landscapes have flowed into each other, moving me from idyllic nature – albeit one once again stolen from Native Americans and later Black people, and controlled by hidden technology – to the abstraction of what humans beings do to design and control that nature. At the heart of the ride is space and form flowing into each other. Any attempt to control that seems useless to me.

It is making sense of that, learning from the movement, as first modernists such as the Futurists, Cubists, and Constructivist taught us a century ago, is what we should be doing, and the bicycle is as good a tool to start that process as any I know. Then we can design for a sprawl that is equitable, sustainable, and beautiful.

Main image is by Daniel Ramirez via Wikimedia Commons.

Aaron Betsky is director of Virginia Tech School of Architecture and Design and was president of the School of Architecture at Taliesin from 2017 to 2019. A critic of art, architecture, and design, Betsky is the author of over a dozen books on those subjects, including a forthcoming survey of modernism in architecture and design. Trained as an architect and in the humanities at Yale University, Betsky was previously director of the Cincinnati Art Museum (2006-2014) and the Netherlands Architecture Institute (2001-2006), and curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995-2001). In 2008, he directed the 11th Venice International Biennale of Architecture.

The post "Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs?" appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

"Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs?"

As cities become more cycling-friendly it's important not to forget about suburbia, says Aaron Betsky, as he shares what architects and urban planners could learn from a cycle through the suburbs on World Bicycle Day.

Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs? After a brief blip last decades, our cities are sprawling again. At the same time, suburbs and downtown areas are becoming more alike, with the former densifying into exurban villages and the latter filling with vertical versions of gated compounds and big box retail venues.

That also means that it is now easier to bicycle in suburbia: there are higher concentrations of destinations, and more and more suburbs are being designed to accommodate two-wheelers. The rapid rise of ebiking also makes it much easier for suburbanites to travel the larger distances and less uniform terrains they encounter outside of the downtown grid.

Riding a bicycle is the best way to experience a city.

For me, what is just as important is that bicycles are great tools for urban exploration. Sprawl is misunderstood and understudied by architects and designers, who generally live in downtown areas. That also means they are undesigned or, what is more often the case, designed badly: in ways that waste natural resources, that isolated us from each other, and that are ugly. I think we need to design better suburbs instead of just wishing them away, and one way to start is by understanding them better.

I have always felt that riding a bicycle is the best way to experience a city. On a bike, you move slower than in a car, bus, tram, or taxi. Cruising at ten to twenty kilometers an hour gives you a chance to immerse yourself in the sights, sounds, and smells of urbanity. With no barrier between you and all those sensory phenomena, they are all the more vivid.

Riding your bike through sprawl instead offers other insights and delights.

As you cruise down the streets and avenues, the city's spaces unfold continuously, giving you a sense of the rhythms and the chaotic coherence that makes the metropolis an environment that overwhelms, delights, and terrifies, all at the same time. Suburbia, on the other hand, is much more distended and has fewer variations, making it seem like a less likely candidate for two-wheeled dissection. I would argue that riding your bike through sprawl instead offers other insights and delights – not to mention making a tiny contribution to suburbia's original sin of car-dependent wastefulness.

In my case, I jump on my bike (a VanMoof Electric Assist, because, after all, the design of the tool is important) and head out from typical suburban development.  That swoosh through the pruned and controlled version of forests dotted with glades that are the sites of McMansions and lawns reminds you why suburbs are here in the first place: they give you the chance to be in nature with all mod cons.

It also makes you aware of how ugly the isolated houses are.

I have the sense of losing myself in the beauties of all those trees, bushes, and flowers, not to mentions birds, bees, deer and the occasional black bear. But after leaving an air-conditioned shelter I am still on a paved road. This is the great strength of suburbia and using the bicycle to experience this closeness to nature is important. However, it also makes you aware of how ugly the isolated houses are and how much they disconnect themselves from this setting. We need houses that are part of the landscape the owners are there to experience.

Along the way, there are other structures that reveal themselves: from my subdivision I climb up Nellie's Cave Road, named for the site of a Black settlement that was wiped out in land grabs by suburbanization. At the top of the ridge, a sign tells me that I am leaving the freedom of the county road to enter into Blacksburg, Virginia. House sites become smaller, the buildings are closer to the road, and the forest scragglier. As I descend into the town proper, a grid, sloping up the hill asserts its rhythm over my ride.

Riding on my bicycle reinforces for me the sense of how little we understand – and thus are able to design for – this particular form of loose, hopscotch urbanism.

What is most remarkable is the messy quality of the spaces. The houses are other structures are relatively small compared to the size of the lots, and lawn, sidewalk, side yard, rear yard, and unclaimed or undeveloped space blend into each other without any clear separation. The collage nature of sprawl makes itself eminently clear as I cruise by structures in every style and of every material and vegetation equally mixed up in their literal and historical roots.

Riding on my bicycle reinforces for me the sense of how little we understand –and thus are able to design for—this particular form of loose, hopscotch urbanism. It has the potential to be more connected and integrated into its setting, to be less wasteful and to be more socially connected. Frank Lloyd Wright understood this when he designed his Broadacre City more than a century ago, but few architects since then have tried to tackle this landscape.

This is sprawl at its worst, but also a sign of the realities of our economic system.

I cross Main Street, here a ribbon of concrete between parking lots serving strip malls on either side of the street. These are the monuments of suburbia: the Kroger's, clothing stores, and cinemas, all hiding behind the same facades carried out in hues of beige, gray, and brown. This is sprawl at its worst, but also a sign of the realities of our economic system. A society that relies on just-in-time inventory, the continual movement of goods, people, and information to minimize investment and maximize profits, and the emergence of warehouses and retail establishments as quasi-monuments is on display here. Could we do this better? Nobody I know has tried.

Main Street here is, as in so many other towns, a ridge street, and I could take it all the way through the little downtown to my destination my office at Virginia Tech, but I cross it and head past the elementary school and the subsidiary office clusters that tumble down the hill. The building blocks for a more connected suburbia are here, from the educational institutions that are now difficult to distinguish from the supermarkets to these trails. We need to design them as what they should be, not as the leftovers of a commercialized society.

The bicycle ride can reveal this history, now we just need to mark it with monuments and public spaces.

The trail snakes through the back of the University campus, revealing glimpses of both the playing fields that make use of what were once the fields were the indigenous people lived and animals roamed, and crops grew. I am now in the New River Valley, whose waters flow into the Ohio, the Mississippi, and then the Gulf Coast, while when I started, I was in the upper reaches of the Roanoke River, which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic. I am, in other words, in the Midwest, despite still being in Virginia, and expanses of fields and seem appropriate for that place. The bicycle ride can reveal this history, now we just need to mark it with monuments and public spaces that make that background come forward.

In the twenty minutes this trip has taken me, I have moved from following and conquering contours, cutting my way through a landscape of which I felt part, through the collage confusion of suburbia, past the big blocks of buildings and the open space of fields that form the commercial and institutional gathering points for this community, and into the largest collection of buildings that house the region's economic core. I am now in another place, where our business is to learn how to make such spaces.

The ride has strung them together into a continual line in which landscapes have flowed into each other.

None of these pieces has felt disconnected. The ride has strung them together into a continual line in which landscapes have flowed into each other, moving me from idyllic nature – albeit one once again stolen from Native Americans and later Black people, and controlled by hidden technology – to the abstraction of what humans beings do to design and control that nature. At the heart of the ride is space and form flowing into each other. Any attempt to control that seems useless to me.

It is making sense of that, learning from the movement, as first modernists such as the Futurists, Cubists, and Constructivist taught us a century ago, is what we should be doing, and the bicycle is as good a tool to start that process as any I know. Then we can design for a sprawl that is equitable, sustainable, and beautiful.

Main image is by Daniel Ramirez via Wikimedia Commons.

Aaron Betsky is director of Virginia Tech School of Architecture and Design and was president of the School of Architecture at Taliesin from 2017 to 2019. A critic of art, architecture, and design, Betsky is the author of over a dozen books on those subjects, including a forthcoming survey of modernism in architecture and design. Trained as an architect and in the humanities at Yale University, Betsky was previously director of the Cincinnati Art Museum (2006-2014) and the Netherlands Architecture Institute (2001-2006), and curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995-2001). In 2008, he directed the 11th Venice International Biennale of Architecture.

The post "Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs?" appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

"Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs?"

As cities become more cycling-friendly it's important not to forget about suburbia, says Aaron Betsky, as he shares what architects and urban planners could learn from a cycle through the suburbs on World Bicycle Day.

Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs? After a brief blip last decades, our cities are sprawling again. At the same time, suburbs and downtown areas are becoming more alike, with the former densifying into exurban villages and the latter filling with vertical versions of gated compounds and big box retail venues.

That also means that it is now easier to bicycle in suburbia: there are higher concentrations of destinations, and more and more suburbs are being designed to accommodate two-wheelers. The rapid rise of ebiking also makes it much easier for suburbanites to travel the larger distances and less uniform terrains they encounter outside of the downtown grid.

Riding a bicycle is the best way to experience a city.

For me, what is just as important is that bicycles are great tools for urban exploration. Sprawl is misunderstood and understudied by architects and designers, who generally live in downtown areas. That also means they are undesigned or, what is more often the case, designed badly: in ways that waste natural resources, that isolated us from each other, and that are ugly. I think we need to design better suburbs instead of just wishing them away, and one way to start is by understanding them better.

I have always felt that riding a bicycle is the best way to experience a city. On a bike, you move slower than in a car, bus, tram, or taxi. Cruising at ten to twenty kilometers an hour gives you a chance to immerse yourself in the sights, sounds, and smells of urbanity. With no barrier between you and all those sensory phenomena, they are all the more vivid.

Riding your bike through sprawl instead offers other insights and delights.

As you cruise down the streets and avenues, the city's spaces unfold continuously, giving you a sense of the rhythms and the chaotic coherence that makes the metropolis an environment that overwhelms, delights, and terrifies, all at the same time. Suburbia, on the other hand, is much more distended and has fewer variations, making it seem like a less likely candidate for two-wheeled dissection. I would argue that riding your bike through sprawl instead offers other insights and delights – not to mention making a tiny contribution to suburbia's original sin of car-dependent wastefulness.

In my case, I jump on my bike (a VanMoof Electric Assist, because, after all, the design of the tool is important) and head out from typical suburban development.  That swoosh through the pruned and controlled version of forests dotted with glades that are the sites of McMansions and lawns reminds you why suburbs are here in the first place: they give you the chance to be in nature with all mod cons.

It also makes you aware of how ugly the isolated houses are.

I have the sense of losing myself in the beauties of all those trees, bushes, and flowers, not to mentions birds, bees, deer and the occasional black bear. But after leaving an air-conditioned shelter I am still on a paved road. This is the great strength of suburbia and using the bicycle to experience this closeness to nature is important. However, it also makes you aware of how ugly the isolated houses are and how much they disconnect themselves from this setting. We need houses that are part of the landscape the owners are there to experience.

Along the way, there are other structures that reveal themselves: from my subdivision I climb up Nellie's Cave Road, named for the site of a Black settlement that was wiped out in land grabs by suburbanization. At the top of the ridge, a sign tells me that I am leaving the freedom of the county road to enter into Blacksburg, Virginia. House sites become smaller, the buildings are closer to the road, and the forest scragglier. As I descend into the town proper, a grid, sloping up the hill asserts its rhythm over my ride.

Riding on my bicycle reinforces for me the sense of how little we understand – and thus are able to design for – this particular form of loose, hopscotch urbanism.

What is most remarkable is the messy quality of the spaces. The houses are other structures are relatively small compared to the size of the lots, and lawn, sidewalk, side yard, rear yard, and unclaimed or undeveloped space blend into each other without any clear separation. The collage nature of sprawl makes itself eminently clear as I cruise by structures in every style and of every material and vegetation equally mixed up in their literal and historical roots.

Riding on my bicycle reinforces for me the sense of how little we understand –and thus are able to design for—this particular form of loose, hopscotch urbanism. It has the potential to be more connected and integrated into its setting, to be less wasteful and to be more socially connected. Frank Lloyd Wright understood this when he designed his Broadacre City more than a century ago, but few architects since then have tried to tackle this landscape.

This is sprawl at its worst, but also a sign of the realities of our economic system.

I cross Main Street, here a ribbon of concrete between parking lots serving strip malls on either side of the street. These are the monuments of suburbia: the Kroger's, clothing stores, and cinemas, all hiding behind the same facades carried out in hues of beige, gray, and brown. This is sprawl at its worst, but also a sign of the realities of our economic system. A society that relies on just-in-time inventory, the continual movement of goods, people, and information to minimize investment and maximize profits, and the emergence of warehouses and retail establishments as quasi-monuments is on display here. Could we do this better? Nobody I know has tried.

Main Street here is, as in so many other towns, a ridge street, and I could take it all the way through the little downtown to my destination my office at Virginia Tech, but I cross it and head past the elementary school and the subsidiary office clusters that tumble down the hill. The building blocks for a more connected suburbia are here, from the educational institutions that are now difficult to distinguish from the supermarkets to these trails. We need to design them as what they should be, not as the leftovers of a commercialized society.

The bicycle ride can reveal this history, now we just need to mark it with monuments and public spaces.

The trail snakes through the back of the University campus, revealing glimpses of both the playing fields that make use of what were once the fields were the indigenous people lived and animals roamed, and crops grew. I am now in the New River Valley, whose waters flow into the Ohio, the Mississippi, and then the Gulf Coast, while when I started, I was in the upper reaches of the Roanoke River, which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic. I am, in other words, in the Midwest, despite still being in Virginia, and expanses of fields and seem appropriate for that place. The bicycle ride can reveal this history, now we just need to mark it with monuments and public spaces that make that background come forward.

In the twenty minutes this trip has taken me, I have moved from following and conquering contours, cutting my way through a landscape of which I felt part, through the collage confusion of suburbia, past the big blocks of buildings and the open space of fields that form the commercial and institutional gathering points for this community, and into the largest collection of buildings that house the region's economic core. I am now in another place, where our business is to learn how to make such spaces.

The ride has strung them together into a continual line in which landscapes have flowed into each other.

None of these pieces has felt disconnected. The ride has strung them together into a continual line in which landscapes have flowed into each other, moving me from idyllic nature – albeit one once again stolen from Native Americans and later Black people, and controlled by hidden technology – to the abstraction of what humans beings do to design and control that nature. At the heart of the ride is space and form flowing into each other. Any attempt to control that seems useless to me.

It is making sense of that, learning from the movement, as first modernists such as the Futurists, Cubists, and Constructivist taught us a century ago, is what we should be doing, and the bicycle is as good a tool to start that process as any I know. Then we can design for a sprawl that is equitable, sustainable, and beautiful.

Main image is by Daniel Ramirez via Wikimedia Commons.

Aaron Betsky is director of Virginia Tech School of Architecture and Design and was president of the School of Architecture at Taliesin from 2017 to 2019. A critic of art, architecture, and design, Betsky is the author of over a dozen books on those subjects, including a forthcoming survey of modernism in architecture and design. Trained as an architect and in the humanities at Yale University, Betsky was previously director of the Cincinnati Art Museum (2006-2014) and the Netherlands Architecture Institute (2001-2006), and curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995-2001). In 2008, he directed the 11th Venice International Biennale of Architecture.

The post "Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs?" appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

"Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs?"

As cities become more cycling-friendly it's important not to forget about suburbia, says Aaron Betsky, as he shares what architects and urban planners could learn from a cycle through the suburbs on World Bicycle Day.

Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs? After a brief blip last decades, our cities are sprawling again. At the same time, suburbs and downtown areas are becoming more alike, with the former densifying into exurban villages and the latter filling with vertical versions of gated compounds and big box retail venues.

That also means that it is now easier to bicycle in suburbia: there are higher concentrations of destinations, and more and more suburbs are being designed to accommodate two-wheelers. The rapid rise of ebiking also makes it much easier for suburbanites to travel the larger distances and less uniform terrains they encounter outside of the downtown grid.

Riding a bicycle is the best way to experience a city.

For me, what is just as important is that bicycles are great tools for urban exploration. Sprawl is misunderstood and understudied by architects and designers, who generally live in downtown areas. That also means they are undesigned or, what is more often the case, designed badly: in ways that waste natural resources, that isolated us from each other, and that are ugly. I think we need to design better suburbs instead of just wishing them away, and one way to start is by understanding them better.

I have always felt that riding a bicycle is the best way to experience a city. On a bike, you move slower than in a car, bus, tram, or taxi. Cruising at ten to twenty kilometers an hour gives you a chance to immerse yourself in the sights, sounds, and smells of urbanity. With no barrier between you and all those sensory phenomena, they are all the more vivid.

Riding your bike through sprawl instead offers other insights and delights.

As you cruise down the streets and avenues, the city's spaces unfold continuously, giving you a sense of the rhythms and the chaotic coherence that makes the metropolis an environment that overwhelms, delights, and terrifies, all at the same time. Suburbia, on the other hand, is much more distended and has fewer variations, making it seem like a less likely candidate for two-wheeled dissection. I would argue that riding your bike through sprawl instead offers other insights and delights – not to mention making a tiny contribution to suburbia's original sin of car-dependent wastefulness.

In my case, I jump on my bike (a VanMoof Electric Assist, because, after all, the design of the tool is important) and head out from typical suburban development.  That swoosh through the pruned and controlled version of forests dotted with glades that are the sites of McMansions and lawns reminds you why suburbs are here in the first place: they give you the chance to be in nature with all mod cons.

It also makes you aware of how ugly the isolated houses are.

I have the sense of losing myself in the beauties of all those trees, bushes, and flowers, not to mentions birds, bees, deer and the occasional black bear. But after leaving an air-conditioned shelter I am still on a paved road. This is the great strength of suburbia and using the bicycle to experience this closeness to nature is important. However, it also makes you aware of how ugly the isolated houses are and how much they disconnect themselves from this setting. We need houses that are part of the landscape the owners are there to experience.

Along the way, there are other structures that reveal themselves: from my subdivision I climb up Nellie's Cave Road, named for the site of a Black settlement that was wiped out in land grabs by suburbanization. At the top of the ridge, a sign tells me that I am leaving the freedom of the county road to enter into Blacksburg, Virginia. House sites become smaller, the buildings are closer to the road, and the forest scragglier. As I descend into the town proper, a grid, sloping up the hill asserts its rhythm over my ride.

Riding on my bicycle reinforces for me the sense of how little we understand – and thus are able to design for – this particular form of loose, hopscotch urbanism.

What is most remarkable is the messy quality of the spaces. The houses are other structures are relatively small compared to the size of the lots, and lawn, sidewalk, side yard, rear yard, and unclaimed or undeveloped space blend into each other without any clear separation. The collage nature of sprawl makes itself eminently clear as I cruise by structures in every style and of every material and vegetation equally mixed up in their literal and historical roots.

Riding on my bicycle reinforces for me the sense of how little we understand –and thus are able to design for—this particular form of loose, hopscotch urbanism. It has the potential to be more connected and integrated into its setting, to be less wasteful and to be more socially connected. Frank Lloyd Wright understood this when he designed his Broadacre City more than a century ago, but few architects since then have tried to tackle this landscape.

This is sprawl at its worst, but also a sign of the realities of our economic system.

I cross Main Street, here a ribbon of concrete between parking lots serving strip malls on either side of the street. These are the monuments of suburbia: the Kroger's, clothing stores, and cinemas, all hiding behind the same facades carried out in hues of beige, gray, and brown. This is sprawl at its worst, but also a sign of the realities of our economic system. A society that relies on just-in-time inventory, the continual movement of goods, people, and information to minimize investment and maximize profits, and the emergence of warehouses and retail establishments as quasi-monuments is on display here. Could we do this better? Nobody I know has tried.

Main Street here is, as in so many other towns, a ridge street, and I could take it all the way through the little downtown to my destination my office at Virginia Tech, but I cross it and head past the elementary school and the subsidiary office clusters that tumble down the hill. The building blocks for a more connected suburbia are here, from the educational institutions that are now difficult to distinguish from the supermarkets to these trails. We need to design them as what they should be, not as the leftovers of a commercialized society.

The bicycle ride can reveal this history, now we just need to mark it with monuments and public spaces.

The trail snakes through the back of the University campus, revealing glimpses of both the playing fields that make use of what were once the fields were the indigenous people lived and animals roamed, and crops grew. I am now in the New River Valley, whose waters flow into the Ohio, the Mississippi, and then the Gulf Coast, while when I started, I was in the upper reaches of the Roanoke River, which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic. I am, in other words, in the Midwest, despite still being in Virginia, and expanses of fields and seem appropriate for that place. The bicycle ride can reveal this history, now we just need to mark it with monuments and public spaces that make that background come forward.

In the twenty minutes this trip has taken me, I have moved from following and conquering contours, cutting my way through a landscape of which I felt part, through the collage confusion of suburbia, past the big blocks of buildings and the open space of fields that form the commercial and institutional gathering points for this community, and into the largest collection of buildings that house the region's economic core. I am now in another place, where our business is to learn how to make such spaces.

The ride has strung them together into a continual line in which landscapes have flowed into each other.

None of these pieces has felt disconnected. The ride has strung them together into a continual line in which landscapes have flowed into each other, moving me from idyllic nature – albeit one once again stolen from Native Americans and later Black people, and controlled by hidden technology – to the abstraction of what humans beings do to design and control that nature. At the heart of the ride is space and form flowing into each other. Any attempt to control that seems useless to me.

It is making sense of that, learning from the movement, as first modernists such as the Futurists, Cubists, and Constructivist taught us a century ago, is what we should be doing, and the bicycle is as good a tool to start that process as any I know. Then we can design for a sprawl that is equitable, sustainable, and beautiful.

Main image is by Daniel Ramirez via Wikimedia Commons.

Aaron Betsky is director of Virginia Tech School of Architecture and Design and was president of the School of Architecture at Taliesin from 2017 to 2019. A critic of art, architecture, and design, Betsky is the author of over a dozen books on those subjects, including a forthcoming survey of modernism in architecture and design. Trained as an architect and in the humanities at Yale University, Betsky was previously director of the Cincinnati Art Museum (2006-2014) and the Netherlands Architecture Institute (2001-2006), and curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995-2001). In 2008, he directed the 11th Venice International Biennale of Architecture.

The post "Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs?" appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

"Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs?"

As cities become more cycling-friendly it's important not to forget about suburbia, says Aaron Betsky, as he shares what architects and urban planners could learn from a cycle through the suburbs on World Bicycle Day.

Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs? After a brief blip last decades, our cities are sprawling again. At the same time, suburbs and downtown areas are becoming more alike, with the former densifying into exurban villages and the latter filling with vertical versions of gated compounds and big box retail venues.

That also means that it is now easier to bicycle in suburbia: there are higher concentrations of destinations, and more and more suburbs are being designed to accommodate two-wheelers. The rapid rise of ebiking also makes it much easier for suburbanites to travel the larger distances and less uniform terrains they encounter outside of the downtown grid.

Riding a bicycle is the best way to experience a city.

For me, what is just as important is that bicycles are great tools for urban exploration. Sprawl is misunderstood and understudied by architects and designers, who generally live in downtown areas. That also means they are undesigned or, what is more often the case, designed badly: in ways that waste natural resources, that isolated us from each other, and that are ugly. I think we need to design better suburbs instead of just wishing them away, and one way to start is by understanding them better.

I have always felt that riding a bicycle is the best way to experience a city. On a bike, you move slower than in a car, bus, tram, or taxi. Cruising at ten to twenty kilometers an hour gives you a chance to immerse yourself in the sights, sounds, and smells of urbanity. With no barrier between you and all those sensory phenomena, they are all the more vivid.

Riding your bike through sprawl instead offers other insights and delights.

As you cruise down the streets and avenues, the city's spaces unfold continuously, giving you a sense of the rhythms and the chaotic coherence that makes the metropolis an environment that overwhelms, delights, and terrifies, all at the same time. Suburbia, on the other hand, is much more distended and has fewer variations, making it seem like a less likely candidate for two-wheeled dissection. I would argue that riding your bike through sprawl instead offers other insights and delights – not to mention making a tiny contribution to suburbia's original sin of car-dependent wastefulness.

In my case, I jump on my bike (a VanMoof Electric Assist, because, after all, the design of the tool is important) and head out from typical suburban development.  That swoosh through the pruned and controlled version of forests dotted with glades that are the sites of McMansions and lawns reminds you why suburbs are here in the first place: they give you the chance to be in nature with all mod cons.

It also makes you aware of how ugly the isolated houses are.

I have the sense of losing myself in the beauties of all those trees, bushes, and flowers, not to mentions birds, bees, deer and the occasional black bear. But after leaving an air-conditioned shelter I am still on a paved road. This is the great strength of suburbia and using the bicycle to experience this closeness to nature is important. However, it also makes you aware of how ugly the isolated houses are and how much they disconnect themselves from this setting. We need houses that are part of the landscape the owners are there to experience.

Along the way, there are other structures that reveal themselves: from my subdivision I climb up Nellie's Cave Road, named for the site of a Black settlement that was wiped out in land grabs by suburbanization. At the top of the ridge, a sign tells me that I am leaving the freedom of the county road to enter into Blacksburg, Virginia. House sites become smaller, the buildings are closer to the road, and the forest scragglier. As I descend into the town proper, a grid, sloping up the hill asserts its rhythm over my ride.

Riding on my bicycle reinforces for me the sense of how little we understand – and thus are able to design for – this particular form of loose, hopscotch urbanism.

What is most remarkable is the messy quality of the spaces. The houses are other structures are relatively small compared to the size of the lots, and lawn, sidewalk, side yard, rear yard, and unclaimed or undeveloped space blend into each other without any clear separation. The collage nature of sprawl makes itself eminently clear as I cruise by structures in every style and of every material and vegetation equally mixed up in their literal and historical roots.

Riding on my bicycle reinforces for me the sense of how little we understand –and thus are able to design for—this particular form of loose, hopscotch urbanism. It has the potential to be more connected and integrated into its setting, to be less wasteful and to be more socially connected. Frank Lloyd Wright understood this when he designed his Broadacre City more than a century ago, but few architects since then have tried to tackle this landscape.

This is sprawl at its worst, but also a sign of the realities of our economic system.

I cross Main Street, here a ribbon of concrete between parking lots serving strip malls on either side of the street. These are the monuments of suburbia: the Kroger's, clothing stores, and cinemas, all hiding behind the same facades carried out in hues of beige, gray, and brown. This is sprawl at its worst, but also a sign of the realities of our economic system. A society that relies on just-in-time inventory, the continual movement of goods, people, and information to minimize investment and maximize profits, and the emergence of warehouses and retail establishments as quasi-monuments is on display here. Could we do this better? Nobody I know has tried.

Main Street here is, as in so many other towns, a ridge street, and I could take it all the way through the little downtown to my destination my office at Virginia Tech, but I cross it and head past the elementary school and the subsidiary office clusters that tumble down the hill. The building blocks for a more connected suburbia are here, from the educational institutions that are now difficult to distinguish from the supermarkets to these trails. We need to design them as what they should be, not as the leftovers of a commercialized society.

The bicycle ride can reveal this history, now we just need to mark it with monuments and public spaces.

The trail snakes through the back of the University campus, revealing glimpses of both the playing fields that make use of what were once the fields were the indigenous people lived and animals roamed, and crops grew. I am now in the New River Valley, whose waters flow into the Ohio, the Mississippi, and then the Gulf Coast, while when I started, I was in the upper reaches of the Roanoke River, which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic. I am, in other words, in the Midwest, despite still being in Virginia, and expanses of fields and seem appropriate for that place. The bicycle ride can reveal this history, now we just need to mark it with monuments and public spaces that make that background come forward.

In the twenty minutes this trip has taken me, I have moved from following and conquering contours, cutting my way through a landscape of which I felt part, through the collage confusion of suburbia, past the big blocks of buildings and the open space of fields that form the commercial and institutional gathering points for this community, and into the largest collection of buildings that house the region's economic core. I am now in another place, where our business is to learn how to make such spaces.

The ride has strung them together into a continual line in which landscapes have flowed into each other.

None of these pieces has felt disconnected. The ride has strung them together into a continual line in which landscapes have flowed into each other, moving me from idyllic nature – albeit one once again stolen from Native Americans and later Black people, and controlled by hidden technology – to the abstraction of what humans beings do to design and control that nature. At the heart of the ride is space and form flowing into each other. Any attempt to control that seems useless to me.

It is making sense of that, learning from the movement, as first modernists such as the Futurists, Cubists, and Constructivist taught us a century ago, is what we should be doing, and the bicycle is as good a tool to start that process as any I know. Then we can design for a sprawl that is equitable, sustainable, and beautiful.

Main image is by Daniel Ramirez via Wikimedia Commons.

Aaron Betsky is director of Virginia Tech School of Architecture and Design and was president of the School of Architecture at Taliesin from 2017 to 2019. A critic of art, architecture, and design, Betsky is the author of over a dozen books on those subjects, including a forthcoming survey of modernism in architecture and design. Trained as an architect and in the humanities at Yale University, Betsky was previously director of the Cincinnati Art Museum (2006-2014) and the Netherlands Architecture Institute (2001-2006), and curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995-2001). In 2008, he directed the 11th Venice International Biennale of Architecture.

The post "Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs?" appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

"Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs?"

As cities become more cycling-friendly it's important not to forget about suburbia, says Aaron Betsky, as he shares what architects and urban planners could learn from a cycle through the suburbs on World Bicycle Day.

Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs? After a brief blip last decades, our cities are sprawling again. At the same time, suburbs and downtown areas are becoming more alike, with the former densifying into exurban villages and the latter filling with vertical versions of gated compounds and big box retail venues.

That also means that it is now easier to bicycle in suburbia: there are higher concentrations of destinations, and more and more suburbs are being designed to accommodate two-wheelers. The rapid rise of ebiking also makes it much easier for suburbanites to travel the larger distances and less uniform terrains they encounter outside of the downtown grid.

Riding a bicycle is the best way to experience a city.

For me, what is just as important is that bicycles are great tools for urban exploration. Sprawl is misunderstood and understudied by architects and designers, who generally live in downtown areas. That also means they are undesigned or, what is more often the case, designed badly: in ways that waste natural resources, that isolated us from each other, and that are ugly. I think we need to design better suburbs instead of just wishing them away, and one way to start is by understanding them better.

I have always felt that riding a bicycle is the best way to experience a city. On a bike, you move slower than in a car, bus, tram, or taxi. Cruising at ten to twenty kilometers an hour gives you a chance to immerse yourself in the sights, sounds, and smells of urbanity. With no barrier between you and all those sensory phenomena, they are all the more vivid.

Riding your bike through sprawl instead offers other insights and delights.

As you cruise down the streets and avenues, the city's spaces unfold continuously, giving you a sense of the rhythms and the chaotic coherence that makes the metropolis an environment that overwhelms, delights, and terrifies, all at the same time. Suburbia, on the other hand, is much more distended and has fewer variations, making it seem like a less likely candidate for two-wheeled dissection. I would argue that riding your bike through sprawl instead offers other insights and delights – not to mention making a tiny contribution to suburbia's original sin of car-dependent wastefulness.

In my case, I jump on my bike (a VanMoof Electric Assist, because, after all, the design of the tool is important) and head out from typical suburban development.  That swoosh through the pruned and controlled version of forests dotted with glades that are the sites of McMansions and lawns reminds you why suburbs are here in the first place: they give you the chance to be in nature with all mod cons.

It also makes you aware of how ugly the isolated houses are.

I have the sense of losing myself in the beauties of all those trees, bushes, and flowers, not to mentions birds, bees, deer and the occasional black bear. But after leaving an air-conditioned shelter I am still on a paved road. This is the great strength of suburbia and using the bicycle to experience this closeness to nature is important. However, it also makes you aware of how ugly the isolated houses are and how much they disconnect themselves from this setting. We need houses that are part of the landscape the owners are there to experience.

Along the way, there are other structures that reveal themselves: from my subdivision I climb up Nellie's Cave Road, named for the site of a Black settlement that was wiped out in land grabs by suburbanization. At the top of the ridge, a sign tells me that I am leaving the freedom of the county road to enter into Blacksburg, Virginia. House sites become smaller, the buildings are closer to the road, and the forest scragglier. As I descend into the town proper, a grid, sloping up the hill asserts its rhythm over my ride.

Riding on my bicycle reinforces for me the sense of how little we understand – and thus are able to design for – this particular form of loose, hopscotch urbanism.

What is most remarkable is the messy quality of the spaces. The houses are other structures are relatively small compared to the size of the lots, and lawn, sidewalk, side yard, rear yard, and unclaimed or undeveloped space blend into each other without any clear separation. The collage nature of sprawl makes itself eminently clear as I cruise by structures in every style and of every material and vegetation equally mixed up in their literal and historical roots.

Riding on my bicycle reinforces for me the sense of how little we understand –and thus are able to design for—this particular form of loose, hopscotch urbanism. It has the potential to be more connected and integrated into its setting, to be less wasteful and to be more socially connected. Frank Lloyd Wright understood this when he designed his Broadacre City more than a century ago, but few architects since then have tried to tackle this landscape.

This is sprawl at its worst, but also a sign of the realities of our economic system.

I cross Main Street, here a ribbon of concrete between parking lots serving strip malls on either side of the street. These are the monuments of suburbia: the Kroger's, clothing stores, and cinemas, all hiding behind the same facades carried out in hues of beige, gray, and brown. This is sprawl at its worst, but also a sign of the realities of our economic system. A society that relies on just-in-time inventory, the continual movement of goods, people, and information to minimize investment and maximize profits, and the emergence of warehouses and retail establishments as quasi-monuments is on display here. Could we do this better? Nobody I know has tried.

Main Street here is, as in so many other towns, a ridge street, and I could take it all the way through the little downtown to my destination my office at Virginia Tech, but I cross it and head past the elementary school and the subsidiary office clusters that tumble down the hill. The building blocks for a more connected suburbia are here, from the educational institutions that are now difficult to distinguish from the supermarkets to these trails. We need to design them as what they should be, not as the leftovers of a commercialized society.

The bicycle ride can reveal this history, now we just need to mark it with monuments and public spaces.

The trail snakes through the back of the University campus, revealing glimpses of both the playing fields that make use of what were once the fields were the indigenous people lived and animals roamed, and crops grew. I am now in the New River Valley, whose waters flow into the Ohio, the Mississippi, and then the Gulf Coast, while when I started, I was in the upper reaches of the Roanoke River, which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic. I am, in other words, in the Midwest, despite still being in Virginia, and expanses of fields and seem appropriate for that place. The bicycle ride can reveal this history, now we just need to mark it with monuments and public spaces that make that background come forward.

In the twenty minutes this trip has taken me, I have moved from following and conquering contours, cutting my way through a landscape of which I felt part, through the collage confusion of suburbia, past the big blocks of buildings and the open space of fields that form the commercial and institutional gathering points for this community, and into the largest collection of buildings that house the region's economic core. I am now in another place, where our business is to learn how to make such spaces.

The ride has strung them together into a continual line in which landscapes have flowed into each other.

None of these pieces has felt disconnected. The ride has strung them together into a continual line in which landscapes have flowed into each other, moving me from idyllic nature – albeit one once again stolen from Native Americans and later Black people, and controlled by hidden technology – to the abstraction of what humans beings do to design and control that nature. At the heart of the ride is space and form flowing into each other. Any attempt to control that seems useless to me.

It is making sense of that, learning from the movement, as first modernists such as the Futurists, Cubists, and Constructivist taught us a century ago, is what we should be doing, and the bicycle is as good a tool to start that process as any I know. Then we can design for a sprawl that is equitable, sustainable, and beautiful.

Main image is by Daniel Ramirez via Wikimedia Commons.

Aaron Betsky is director of Virginia Tech School of Architecture and Design and was president of the School of Architecture at Taliesin from 2017 to 2019. A critic of art, architecture, and design, Betsky is the author of over a dozen books on those subjects, including a forthcoming survey of modernism in architecture and design. Trained as an architect and in the humanities at Yale University, Betsky was previously director of the Cincinnati Art Museum (2006-2014) and the Netherlands Architecture Institute (2001-2006), and curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995-2001). In 2008, he directed the 11th Venice International Biennale of Architecture.

The post "Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs?" appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

"Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs?"

As cities become more cycling-friendly it's important not to forget about suburbia, says Aaron Betsky, as he shares what architects and urban planners could learn from a cycle through the suburbs on World Bicycle Day.

Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs? After a brief blip last decades, our cities are sprawling again. At the same time, suburbs and downtown areas are becoming more alike, with the former densifying into exurban villages and the latter filling with vertical versions of gated compounds and big box retail venues.

That also means that it is now easier to bicycle in suburbia: there are higher concentrations of destinations, and more and more suburbs are being designed to accommodate two-wheelers. The rapid rise of ebiking also makes it much easier for suburbanites to travel the larger distances and less uniform terrains they encounter outside of the downtown grid.

Riding a bicycle is the best way to experience a city.

For me, what is just as important is that bicycles are great tools for urban exploration. Sprawl is misunderstood and understudied by architects and designers, who generally live in downtown areas. That also means they are undesigned or, what is more often the case, designed badly: in ways that waste natural resources, that isolated us from each other, and that are ugly. I think we need to design better suburbs instead of just wishing them away, and one way to start is by understanding them better.

I have always felt that riding a bicycle is the best way to experience a city. On a bike, you move slower than in a car, bus, tram, or taxi. Cruising at ten to twenty kilometers an hour gives you a chance to immerse yourself in the sights, sounds, and smells of urbanity. With no barrier between you and all those sensory phenomena, they are all the more vivid.

Riding your bike through sprawl instead offers other insights and delights.

As you cruise down the streets and avenues, the city's spaces unfold continuously, giving you a sense of the rhythms and the chaotic coherence that makes the metropolis an environment that overwhelms, delights, and terrifies, all at the same time. Suburbia, on the other hand, is much more distended and has fewer variations, making it seem like a less likely candidate for two-wheeled dissection. I would argue that riding your bike through sprawl instead offers other insights and delights – not to mention making a tiny contribution to suburbia's original sin of car-dependent wastefulness.

In my case, I jump on my bike (a VanMoof Electric Assist, because, after all, the design of the tool is important) and head out from typical suburban development.  That swoosh through the pruned and controlled version of forests dotted with glades that are the sites of McMansions and lawns reminds you why suburbs are here in the first place: they give you the chance to be in nature with all mod cons.

It also makes you aware of how ugly the isolated houses are.

I have the sense of losing myself in the beauties of all those trees, bushes, and flowers, not to mentions birds, bees, deer and the occasional black bear. But after leaving an air-conditioned shelter I am still on a paved road. This is the great strength of suburbia and using the bicycle to experience this closeness to nature is important. However, it also makes you aware of how ugly the isolated houses are and how much they disconnect themselves from this setting. We need houses that are part of the landscape the owners are there to experience.

Along the way, there are other structures that reveal themselves: from my subdivision I climb up Nellie's Cave Road, named for the site of a Black settlement that was wiped out in land grabs by suburbanization. At the top of the ridge, a sign tells me that I am leaving the freedom of the county road to enter into Blacksburg, Virginia. House sites become smaller, the buildings are closer to the road, and the forest scragglier. As I descend into the town proper, a grid, sloping up the hill asserts its rhythm over my ride.

Riding on my bicycle reinforces for me the sense of how little we understand – and thus are able to design for – this particular form of loose, hopscotch urbanism.

What is most remarkable is the messy quality of the spaces. The houses are other structures are relatively small compared to the size of the lots, and lawn, sidewalk, side yard, rear yard, and unclaimed or undeveloped space blend into each other without any clear separation. The collage nature of sprawl makes itself eminently clear as I cruise by structures in every style and of every material and vegetation equally mixed up in their literal and historical roots.

Riding on my bicycle reinforces for me the sense of how little we understand –and thus are able to design for—this particular form of loose, hopscotch urbanism. It has the potential to be more connected and integrated into its setting, to be less wasteful and to be more socially connected. Frank Lloyd Wright understood this when he designed his Broadacre City more than a century ago, but few architects since then have tried to tackle this landscape.

This is sprawl at its worst, but also a sign of the realities of our economic system.

I cross Main Street, here a ribbon of concrete between parking lots serving strip malls on either side of the street. These are the monuments of suburbia: the Kroger's, clothing stores, and cinemas, all hiding behind the same facades carried out in hues of beige, gray, and brown. This is sprawl at its worst, but also a sign of the realities of our economic system. A society that relies on just-in-time inventory, the continual movement of goods, people, and information to minimize investment and maximize profits, and the emergence of warehouses and retail establishments as quasi-monuments is on display here. Could we do this better? Nobody I know has tried.

Main Street here is, as in so many other towns, a ridge street, and I could take it all the way through the little downtown to my destination my office at Virginia Tech, but I cross it and head past the elementary school and the subsidiary office clusters that tumble down the hill. The building blocks for a more connected suburbia are here, from the educational institutions that are now difficult to distinguish from the supermarkets to these trails. We need to design them as what they should be, not as the leftovers of a commercialized society.

The bicycle ride can reveal this history, now we just need to mark it with monuments and public spaces.

The trail snakes through the back of the University campus, revealing glimpses of both the playing fields that make use of what were once the fields were the indigenous people lived and animals roamed, and crops grew. I am now in the New River Valley, whose waters flow into the Ohio, the Mississippi, and then the Gulf Coast, while when I started, I was in the upper reaches of the Roanoke River, which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic. I am, in other words, in the Midwest, despite still being in Virginia, and expanses of fields and seem appropriate for that place. The bicycle ride can reveal this history, now we just need to mark it with monuments and public spaces that make that background come forward.

In the twenty minutes this trip has taken me, I have moved from following and conquering contours, cutting my way through a landscape of which I felt part, through the collage confusion of suburbia, past the big blocks of buildings and the open space of fields that form the commercial and institutional gathering points for this community, and into the largest collection of buildings that house the region's economic core. I am now in another place, where our business is to learn how to make such spaces.

The ride has strung them together into a continual line in which landscapes have flowed into each other.

None of these pieces has felt disconnected. The ride has strung them together into a continual line in which landscapes have flowed into each other, moving me from idyllic nature – albeit one once again stolen from Native Americans and later Black people, and controlled by hidden technology – to the abstraction of what humans beings do to design and control that nature. At the heart of the ride is space and form flowing into each other. Any attempt to control that seems useless to me.

It is making sense of that, learning from the movement, as first modernists such as the Futurists, Cubists, and Constructivist taught us a century ago, is what we should be doing, and the bicycle is as good a tool to start that process as any I know. Then we can design for a sprawl that is equitable, sustainable, and beautiful.

Main image is by Daniel Ramirez via Wikimedia Commons.

Aaron Betsky is director of Virginia Tech School of Architecture and Design and was president of the School of Architecture at Taliesin from 2017 to 2019. A critic of art, architecture, and design, Betsky is the author of over a dozen books on those subjects, including a forthcoming survey of modernism in architecture and design. Trained as an architect and in the humanities at Yale University, Betsky was previously director of the Cincinnati Art Museum (2006-2014) and the Netherlands Architecture Institute (2001-2006), and curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995-2001). In 2008, he directed the 11th Venice International Biennale of Architecture.

The post "Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs?" appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

"Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs?"

As cities become more cycling-friendly it's important not to forget about suburbia, says Aaron Betsky, as he shares what archicts and urban planners could learn from a cycle through the suburbs on World Bicycle Day.

Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs? After a brief blip last decades, our cities are sprawling again. At the same time, suburbs and downtown areas are becoming more alike, with the former densifying into exurban villages and the latter filling with vertical versions of gated compounds and big box retail venues.

That also means that it is now easier to bicycle in suburbia: there are higher concentrations of destinations, and more and more suburbs are being designed to accommodate two-wheelers. The rapid rise of ebiking also makes it much easier for suburbanites to travel the larger distances and less uniform terrains they encounter outside of the downtown grid.

Riding a bicycle is the best way to experience a city.

For me, what is just as important is that bicycles are great tools for urban exploration. Sprawl is misunderstood and understudied by architects and designers, who generally live in downtown areas. That also means they are undesigned or, what is more often the case, designed badly: in ways that waste natural resources, that isolated us from each other, and that are ugly. I think we need to design better suburbs instead of just wishing them away, and one way to start is by understanding them better.

I have always felt that riding a bicycle is the best way to experience a city. On a bike, you move slower than in a car, bus, tram, or taxi. Cruising at ten to twenty kilometers an hour gives you a chance to immerse yourself in the sights, sounds, and smells of urbanity. With no barrier between you and all those sensory phenomena, they are all the more vivid.

Riding your bike through sprawl instead offers other insights and delights.

As you cruise down the streets and avenues, the city's spaces unfold continuously, giving you a sense of the rhythms and the chaotic coherence that makes the metropolis an environment that overwhelms, delights, and terrifies, all at the same time. Suburbia, on the other hand, is much more distended and has fewer variations, making it seem like a less likely candidate for two-wheeled dissection. I would argue that riding your bike through sprawl instead offers other insights and delights – not to mention making a tiny contribution to suburbia's original sin of car-dependent wastefulness.

In my case, I jump on my bike (a VanMoof Electric Assist, because, after all, the design of the tool is important) and head out from typical suburban development.  That swoosh through the pruned and controlled version of forests dotted with glades that are the sites of McMansions and lawns reminds you why suburbs are here in the first place: they give you the chance to be in nature with all mod cons.

It also makes you aware of how ugly the isolated houses are.

I have the sense of losing myself in the beauties of all those trees, bushes, and flowers, not to mentions birds, bees, deer and the occasional black bear. But after leaving an air-conditioned shelter I am still on a paved road. This is the great strength of suburbia and using the bicycle to experience this closeness to nature is important. However, it also makes you aware of how ugly the isolated houses are and how much they disconnect themselves from this setting. We need houses that are part of the landscape the owners are there to experience.

Along the way, there are other structures that reveal themselves: from my subdivision I climb up Nellie's Cave Road, named for the site of a Black settlement that was wiped out in land grabs by suburbanization. At the top of the ridge, a sign tells me that I am leaving the freedom of the county road to enter into Blacksburg, Virginia. House sites become smaller, the buildings are closer to the road, and the forest scragglier. As I descend into the town proper, a grid, sloping up the hill asserts its rhythm over my ride.

Riding on my bicycle reinforces for me the sense of how little we understand – and thus are able to design for – this particular form of loose, hopscotch urbanism.

What is most remarkable is the messy quality of the spaces. The houses are other structures are relatively small compared to the size of the lots, and lawn, sidewalk, side yard, rear yard, and unclaimed or undeveloped space blend into each other without any clear separation. The collage nature of sprawl makes itself eminently clear as I cruise by structures in every style and of every material and vegetation equally mixed up in their literal and historical roots.

Riding on my bicycle reinforces for me the sense of how little we understand –and thus are able to design for—this particular form of loose, hopscotch urbanism. It has the potential to be more connected and integrated into its setting, to be less wasteful and to be more socially connected. Frank Lloyd Wright understood this when he designed his Broadacre City more than a century ago, but few architects since then have tried to tackle this landscape.

This is sprawl at its worst, but also a sign of the realities of our economic system.

I cross Main Street, here a ribbon of concrete between parking lots serving strip malls on either side of the street. These are the monuments of suburbia: the Kroger's, clothing stores, and cinemas, all hiding behind the same facades carried out in hues of beige, gray, and brown. This is sprawl at its worst, but also a sign of the realities of our economic system. A society that relies on just-in-time inventory, the continual movement of goods, people, and information to minimize investment and maximize profits, and the emergence of warehouses and retail establishments as quasi-monuments is on display here. Could we do this better? Nobody I know has tried.

Main Street here is, as in so many other towns, a ridge street, and I could take it all the way through the little downtown to my destination my office at Virginia Tech, but I cross it and head past the elementary school and the subsidiary office clusters that tumble down the hill. The building blocks for a more connected suburbia are here, from the educational institutions that are now difficult to distinguish from the supermarkets to these trails. We need to design them as what they should be, not as the leftovers of a commercialized society.

The bicycle ride can reveal this history, now we just need to mark it with monuments and public spaces.

The trail snakes through the back of the University campus, revealing glimpses of both the playing fields that make use of what were once the fields were the indigenous people lived and animals roamed, and crops grew. I am now in the New River Valley, whose waters flow into the Ohio, the Mississippi, and then the Gulf Coast, while when I started, I was in the upper reaches of the Roanoke River, which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic. I am, in other words, in the Midwest, despite still being in Virginia, and expanses of fields and seem appropriate for that place. The bicycle ride can reveal this history, now we just need to mark it with monuments and public spaces that make that background come forward.

In the twenty minutes this trip has taken me, I have moved from following and conquering contours, cutting my way through a landscape of which I felt part, through the collage confusion of suburbia, past the big blocks of buildings and the open space of fields that form the commercial and institutional gathering points for this community, and into the largest collection of buildings that house the region's economic core. I am now in another place, where our business is to learn how to make such spaces.

The ride has strung them together into a continual line in which landscapes have flowed into each other.

None of these pieces has felt disconnected. The ride has strung them together into a continual line in which landscapes have flowed into each other, moving me from idyllic nature – albeit one once again stolen from Native Americans and later Black people, and controlled by hidden technology – to the abstraction of what humans beings do to design and control that nature. At the heart of the ride is space and form flowing into each other. Any attempt to control that seems useless to me.

It is making sense of that, learning from the movement, as first modernists such as the Futurists, Cubists, and Constructivist taught us a century ago, is what we should be doing, and the bicycle is as good a tool to start that process as any I know. Then we can design for a sprawl that is equitable, sustainable, and beautiful.

Main image is by Daniel Ramirez via Wikimedia Commons.

Aaron Betsky is director of Virginia Tech School of Architecture and Design and was president of the School of Architecture at Taliesin from 2017 to 2019. A critic of art, architecture, and design, Betsky is the author of over a dozen books on those subjects, including a forthcoming survey of modernism in architecture and design. Trained as an architect and in the humanities at Yale University, Betsky was previously director of the Cincinnati Art Museum (2006-2014) and the Netherlands Architecture Institute (2001-2006), and curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995-2001). In 2008, he directed the 11th Venice International Biennale of Architecture.

The post "Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs?" appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

"Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs?"

As cities become more cycling-friendly it's important not to forget about suburbia, says Aaron Betsky, as he shares what archicts and urban planners could learn from a cycle through the suburbs on World Bicycle Day.

Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs? After a brief blip last decades, our cities are sprawling again. At the same time, suburbs and downtown areas are becoming more alike, with the former densifying into exurban villages and the latter filling with vertical versions of gated compounds and big box retail venues.

That also means that it is now easier to bicycle in suburbia: there are higher concentrations of destinations, and more and more suburbs are being designed to accommodate two-wheelers. The rapid rise of ebiking also makes it much easier for suburbanites to travel the larger distances and less uniform terrains they encounter outside of the downtown grid.

Riding a bicycle is the best way to experience a city.

For me, what is just as important is that bicycles are great tools for urban exploration. Sprawl is misunderstood and understudied by architects and designers, who generally live in downtown areas. That also means they are undesigned or, what is more often the case, designed badly: in ways that waste natural resources, that isolated us from each other, and that are ugly. I think we need to design better suburbs instead of just wishing them away, and one way to start is by understanding them better.

I have always felt that riding a bicycle is the best way to experience a city. On a bike, you move slower than in a car, bus, tram, or taxi. Cruising at ten to twenty kilometers an hour gives you a chance to immerse yourself in the sights, sounds, and smells of urbanity. With no barrier between you and all those sensory phenomena, they are all the more vivid.

Riding your bike through sprawl instead offers other insights and delights.

As you cruise down the streets and avenues, the city's spaces unfold continuously, giving you a sense of the rhythms and the chaotic coherence that makes the metropolis an environment that overwhelms, delights, and terrifies, all at the same time. Suburbia, on the other hand, is much more distended and has fewer variations, making it seem like a less likely candidate for two-wheeled dissection. I would argue that riding your bike through sprawl instead offers other insights and delights – not to mention making a tiny contribution to suburbia's original sin of car-dependent wastefulness.

In my case, I jump on my bike (a VanMoof Electric Assist, because, after all, the design of the tool is important) and head out from typical suburban development.  That swoosh through the pruned and controlled version of forests dotted with glades that are the sites of McMansions and lawns reminds you why suburbs are here in the first place: they give you the chance to be in nature with all mod cons.

It also makes you aware of how ugly the isolated houses are.

I have the sense of losing myself in the beauties of all those trees, bushes, and flowers, not to mentions birds, bees, deer and the occasional black bear. But after leaving an air-conditioned shelter I am still on a paved road. This is the great strength of suburbia and using the bicycle to experience this closeness to nature is important. However, it also makes you aware of how ugly the isolated houses are and how much they disconnect themselves from this setting. We need houses that are part of the landscape the owners are there to experience.

Along the way, there are other structures that reveal themselves: from my subdivision I climb up Nellie's Cave Road, named for the site of a Black settlement that was wiped out in land grabs by suburbanization. At the top of the ridge, a sign tells me that I am leaving the freedom of the county road to enter into Blacksburg, Virginia. House sites become smaller, the buildings are closer to the road, and the forest scragglier. As I descend into the town proper, a grid, sloping up the hill asserts its rhythm over my ride.

Riding on my bicycle reinforces for me the sense of how little we understand – and thus are able to design for – this particular form of loose, hopscotch urbanism.

What is most remarkable is the messy quality of the spaces. The houses are other structures are relatively small compared to the size of the lots, and lawn, sidewalk, side yard, rear yard, and unclaimed or undeveloped space blend into each other without any clear separation. The collage nature of sprawl makes itself eminently clear as I cruise by structures in every style and of every material and vegetation equally mixed up in their literal and historical roots.

Riding on my bicycle reinforces for me the sense of how little we understand –and thus are able to design for—this particular form of loose, hopscotch urbanism. It has the potential to be more connected and integrated into its setting, to be less wasteful and to be more socially connected. Frank Lloyd Wright understood this when he designed his Broadacre City more than a century ago, but few architects since then have tried to tackle this landscape.

This is sprawl at its worst, but also a sign of the realities of our economic system.

I cross Main Street, here a ribbon of concrete between parking lots serving strip malls on either side of the street. These are the monuments of suburbia: the Kroger's, clothing stores, and cinemas, all hiding behind the same facades carried out in hues of beige, gray, and brown. This is sprawl at its worst, but also a sign of the realities of our economic system. A society that relies on just-in-time inventory, the continual movement of goods, people, and information to minimize investment and maximize profits, and the emergence of warehouses and retail establishments as quasi-monuments is on display here. Could we do this better? Nobody I know has tried.

Main Street here is, as in so many other towns, a ridge street, and I could take it all the way through the little downtown to my destination my office at Virginia Tech, but I cross it and head past the elementary school and the subsidiary office clusters that tumble down the hill. The building blocks for a more connected suburbia are here, from the educational institutions that are now difficult to distinguish from the supermarkets to these trails. We need to design them as what they should be, not as the leftovers of a commercialized society.

The bicycle ride can reveal this history, now we just need to mark it with monuments and public spaces.

The trail snakes through the back of the University campus, revealing glimpses of both the playing fields that make use of what were once the fields were the indigenous people lived and animals roamed, and crops grew. I am now in the New River Valley, whose waters flow into the Ohio, the Mississippi, and then the Gulf Coast, while when I started, I was in the upper reaches of the Roanoke River, which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic. I am, in other words, in the Midwest, despite still being in Virginia, and expanses of fields and seem appropriate for that place. The bicycle ride can reveal this history, now we just need to mark it with monuments and public spaces that make that background come forward.

In the twenty minutes this trip has taken me, I have moved from following and conquering contours, cutting my way through a landscape of which I felt part, through the collage confusion of suburbia, past the big blocks of buildings and the open space of fields that form the commercial and institutional gathering points for this community, and into the largest collection of buildings that house the region's economic core. I am now in another place, where our business is to learn how to make such spaces.

The ride has strung them together into a continual line in which landscapes have flowed into each other.

None of these pieces has felt disconnected. The ride has strung them together into a continual line in which landscapes have flowed into each other, moving me from idyllic nature – albeit one once again stolen from Native Americans and later Black people, and controlled by hidden technology – to the abstraction of what humans beings do to design and control that nature. At the heart of the ride is space and form flowing into each other. Any attempt to control that seems useless to me.

It is making sense of that, learning from the movement, as first modernists such as the Futurists, Cubists, and Constructivist taught us a century ago, is what we should be doing, and the bicycle is as good a tool to start that process as any I know. Then we can design for a sprawl that is equitable, sustainable, and beautiful.

Main image is by Daniel Ramirez via Wikimedia Commons.

Aaron Betsky is director of Virginia Tech School of Architecture and Design and was president of the School of Architecture at Taliesin from 2017 to 2019. A critic of art, architecture, and design, Betsky is the author of over a dozen books on those subjects, including a forthcoming survey of modernism in architecture and design. Trained as an architect and in the humanities at Yale University, Betsky was previously director of the Cincinnati Art Museum (2006-2014) and the Netherlands Architecture Institute (2001-2006), and curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995-2001). In 2008, he directed the 11th Venice International Biennale of Architecture.

The post "Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs?" appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

"Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs?"

As cities become more cycling-friendly it's important not to forget about suburbia, says Aaron Betsky, as he shares what archicts and urban planners could learn from a cycle through the suburbs on World Bicycle Day.

Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs? After a brief blip last decades, our cities are sprawling again. At the same time, suburbs and downtown areas are becoming more alike, with the former densifying into exurban villages and the latter filling with vertical versions of gated compounds and big box retail venues.

That also means that it is now easier to bicycle in suburbia: there are higher concentrations of destinations, and more and more suburbs are being designed to accommodate two-wheelers. The rapid rise of ebiking also makes it much easier for suburbanites to travel the larger distances and less uniform terrains they encounter outside of the downtown grid.

Riding a bicycle is the best way to experience a city.

For me, what is just as important is that bicycles are great tools for urban exploration. Sprawl is misunderstood and understudied by architects and designers, who generally live in downtown areas. That also means they are undesigned or, what is more often the case, designed badly: in ways that waste natural resources, that isolated us from each other, and that are ugly. I think we need to design better suburbs instead of just wishing them away, and one way to start is by understanding them better.

I have always felt that riding a bicycle is the best way to experience a city. On a bike, you move slower than in a car, bus, tram, or taxi. Cruising at ten to twenty kilometers an hour gives you a chance to immerse yourself in the sights, sounds, and smells of urbanity. With no barrier between you and all those sensory phenomena, they are all the more vivid.

Riding your bike through sprawl instead offers other insights and delights.

As you cruise down the streets and avenues, the city's spaces unfold continuously, giving you a sense of the rhythms and the chaotic coherence that makes the metropolis an environment that overwhelms, delights, and terrifies, all at the same time. Suburbia, on the other hand, is much more distended and has fewer variations, making it seem like a less likely candidate for two-wheeled dissection. I would argue that riding your bike through sprawl instead offers other insights and delights – not to mention making a tiny contribution to suburbia's original sin of car-dependent wastefulness.

In my case, I jump on my bike (a VanMoof Electric Assist, because, after all, the design of the tool is important) and head out from typical suburban development.  That swoosh through the pruned and controlled version of forests dotted with glades that are the sites of McMansions and lawns reminds you why suburbs are here in the first place: they give you the chance to be in nature with all mod cons.

It also makes you aware of how ugly the isolated houses are.

I have the sense of losing myself in the beauties of all those trees, bushes, and flowers, not to mentions birds, bees, deer and the occasional black bear. But after leaving an air-conditioned shelter I am still on a paved road. This is the great strength of suburbia and using the bicycle to experience this closeness to nature is important. However, it also makes you aware of how ugly the isolated houses are and how much they disconnect themselves from this setting. We need houses that are part of the landscape the owners are there to experience.

Along the way, there are other structures that reveal themselves: from my subdivision I climb up Nellie's Cave Road, named for the site of a Black settlement that was wiped out in land grabs by suburbanization. At the top of the ridge, a sign tells me that I am leaving the freedom of the county road to enter into Blacksburg, Virginia. House sites become smaller, the buildings are closer to the road, and the forest scragglier. As I descend into the town proper, a grid, sloping up the hill asserts its rhythm over my ride.

Riding on my bicycle reinforces for me the sense of how little we understand – and thus are able to design for – this particular form of loose, hopscotch urbanism.

What is most remarkable is the messy quality of the spaces. The houses are other structures are relatively small compared to the size of the lots, and lawn, sidewalk, side yard, rear yard, and unclaimed or undeveloped space blend into each other without any clear separation. The collage nature of sprawl makes itself eminently clear as I cruise by structures in every style and of every material and vegetation equally mixed up in their literal and historical roots.

Riding on my bicycle reinforces for me the sense of how little we understand –and thus are able to design for—this particular form of loose, hopscotch urbanism. It has the potential to be more connected and integrated into its setting, to be less wasteful and to be more socially connected. Frank Lloyd Wright understood this when he designed his Broadacre City more than a century ago, but few architects since then have tried to tackle this landscape.

This is sprawl at its worst, but also a sign of the realities of our economic system.

I cross Main Street, here a ribbon of concrete between parking lots serving strip malls on either side of the street. These are the monuments of suburbia: the Kroger's, clothing stores, and cinemas, all hiding behind the same facades carried out in hues of beige, gray, and brown. This is sprawl at its worst, but also a sign of the realities of our economic system. A society that relies on just-in-time inventory, the continual movement of goods, people, and information to minimize investment and maximize profits, and the emergence of warehouses and retail establishments as quasi-monuments is on display here. Could we do this better? Nobody I know has tried.

Main Street here is, as in so many other towns, a ridge street, and I could take it all the way through the little downtown to my destination my office at Virginia Tech, but I cross it and head past the elementary school and the subsidiary office clusters that tumble down the hill. The building blocks for a more connected suburbia are here, from the educational institutions that are now difficult to distinguish from the supermarkets to these trails. We need to design them as what they should be, not as the leftovers of a commercialized society.

The bicycle ride can reveal this history, now we just need to mark it with monuments and public spaces.

The trail snakes through the back of the University campus, revealing glimpses of both the playing fields that make use of what were once the fields were the indigenous people lived and animals roamed, and crops grew. I am now in the New River Valley, whose waters flow into the Ohio, the Mississippi, and then the Gulf Coast, while when I started, I was in the upper reaches of the Roanoke River, which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic. I am, in other words, in the Midwest, despite still being in Virginia, and expanses of fields and seem appropriate for that place. The bicycle ride can reveal this history, now we just need to mark it with monuments and public spaces that make that background come forward.

In the twenty minutes this trip has taken me, I have moved from following and conquering contours, cutting my way through a landscape of which I felt part, through the collage confusion of suburbia, past the big blocks of buildings and the open space of fields that form the commercial and institutional gathering points for this community, and into the largest collection of buildings that house the region's economic core. I am now in another place, where our business is to learn how to make such spaces.

The ride has strung them together into a continual line in which landscapes have flowed into each other.

None of these pieces has felt disconnected. The ride has strung them together into a continual line in which landscapes have flowed into each other, moving me from idyllic nature – albeit one once again stolen from Native Americans and later Black people, and controlled by hidden technology – to the abstraction of what humans beings do to design and control that nature. At the heart of the ride is space and form flowing into each other. Any attempt to control that seems useless to me.

It is making sense of that, learning from the movement, as first modernists such as the Futurists, Cubists, and Constructivist taught us a century ago, is what we should be doing, and the bicycle is as good a tool to start that process as any I know. Then we can design for a sprawl that is equitable, sustainable, and beautiful.

Main image is by Daniel Ramirez via Wikimedia Commons.

Aaron Betsky is director of Virginia Tech School of Architecture and Design and was president of the School of Architecture at Taliesin from 2017 to 2019. A critic of art, architecture, and design, Betsky is the author of over a dozen books on those subjects, including a forthcoming survey of modernism in architecture and design. Trained as an architect and in the humanities at Yale University, Betsky was previously director of the Cincinnati Art Museum (2006-2014) and the Netherlands Architecture Institute (2001-2006), and curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995-2001). In 2008, he directed the 11th Venice International Biennale of Architecture.

The post "Bicycles are making our cities better, but what about our suburbs?" appeared first on Dezeen.