#urbanologist

[brideofedoras]

special shout out to @urban-trek-thru-middle-earth and @billybutchersbabe for helping me with the definitions!

Reblog away and tag other Urbanologists, Urbanites and Urbabes!  

(not my images, just my edits)

[pallas-cat]

Defenders of Chinatown are sounding the alarm after much of the neighbourhood’s most historic block was sold to a developer with a reputation for renovictions.

Brandon Shiller and Jeremy Kornbluth recently acquired several properties on the northern part of the block bounded by de la Gauchetière, St-Urbain, Côté and Viger Sts.

If the block’s heritage buildings, which include the 1826 British and Canadian School at 1009 Côté St., were to be destroyed to make way for a massive real-estate development, “then it’s the end” for Chinatown, warned Jonathan Cha, a member of the Chinatown Working Group, whose volunteers have been meeting for about two years to chart a future for the district.

The group is calling for the area — the oldest urban neighbourhood outside Old Montreal — to be designated as a protected heritage district, like the old quarter.

“There’s an emergency right now and we need to use all the tools that we have to defend Chinatown,” warned Cha, a landscape architect, urbanologist and authority on Chinatown’s past.

“This is the moment and it might already be too late,” he added.

Designed by James O’Donnell, best remembered as the architect of Notre-Dame Basilica, the four-storey stone building on the corner of Côté and de la Gauchetière Sts. is Montreal’s oldest purpose-built school. It now serves as Wing’s noodle factory.

The developers also acquired an 1884 factory at 987-991 Côté St. that incorporates part of the former Free Presbyterian Church, built in 1848, as well as other buildings on the south side of de la Gauchetière, including an imposing stone house at No. 106 where the now-closed Orange Rouge restaurant was located.

Shiller and Kornbluth have been in the news over allegations of evictions and harassment of tenants. On Friday, about 100 demonstrators protested against evictions at the 90-unit Manoir Lafontaine apartment building at 3485 Papineau Ave. Residents of 3655 Ridgewood Ave. have also complained of being subjected to pressure to leave and deteriorating living conditions. The pair have been blamed for gentrification in Mile End, where a steep rent hike forced out the popular Le Cagibi café-restaurant in 2018.

Shiller did not return a call from the Montreal Gazette and Kornbluth’s answering machine did not accept messages.

Jean-Philippe Riopel, a tour guide who has lived in Chinatown for 11 years, learned that Shiller and Kornbluth had bought his building on Jan. 8.

“It really worried me,” said Riopel, 37, who has been deeply attached to the district since childhood when his father, a police officer who walked the beat in Chinatown, used to bring him along on trips to the neighbourhood. He has extensively researched the area’s history and has given tours there.

“Who would spend $20 million on buildings with three or four storeys?” asked Riopel, who fears the new owners may be planning a highrise project like the ones hemming in the southern gates to Chinatown on St-Laurent Blvd.

Documents show the developers bought four other properties on March 22, including the former school, which sold for $9.2 million. They contracted a $15-million mortgage on March 10.

The fact that the owners of the property use the business name 1000 St-Urbain Ltd, which is the address of a vacant lot, is ominous, Riopel said.

Last summer, while helping his neighbour plant a garden in the backyard, he unearthed several artifacts including glass bottles, an antique gun and stone foundations.

After Riopel and a friend, Élyse Lévesque, revealed the change of ownership on Facebook two weeks ago, city councillors Cathy Wong and Robert Beaudry, who sit on Montreal’s executive committee, sent an inspector to warn the owner not to undertake any major changes.

“We are worried,” Beaudry, the executive committee member responsible for housing and real estate, said in an interview.

“We are somewhat familiar with the practices of this developer,” he said. “No permit has been requested, but from all appearances it’s a strategy of buying up the whole site, which leads us to fear the worst.”

The controversy arises as other historic downtown buildings fall victim to highrise projects that preserve only facades or fragments of the previous structure. On Thursday, developer Brivia announced a 19-storey condo tower on the site of the 104-year-old Lowes Theatre that will eradicate the iconic venue but include “architectural reminders” in its design.

Former mayor Denis Coderre, who has announced another run for the mayoralty, has said he would sweep aside zoning regulations limiting the height of skyscrapers to the top of the cross on Mount Royal.

Dinu Bumbaru, policy director of Heritage Montreal, said the revelation of the land sale has been “an electroshock” on the need to protect the historic district.

“That it could be sterilized by being turned into a block of condos would be tragic,” he said.

Karen Cho, a documentary filmmaker with four generations of family ties to Chinatown, warned that highrise development would destroy its soul.

“If we save a facade and all the culture and people that live within that building get erased, what are we saving?” asked Cho, who is working on a documentary about the challenges facing Chinatowns across North America.

“A lot of Chinatowns look like that. They look like these Potemkin villages or ethnic Disneylands where it’s pagodas everywhere and these fancy Chinatown gates, but the entire culture and community of the place have been emptied out.”

Montreal’s Chinatown lost half of its territory to expropriation in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s and is down-at-the-heels after years of neglect, Cho noted.

“You put the pandemic on top of it, the restaurant closures and the stigmatization, and you really get this perfect storm for developers to come down and scoop up property,” she said.

Cha warned that destroying the historic neighbourhood would be a profound loss for all Montrealers, not just the Chinese community. Known as Près-de-ville in the 18th century, when it lay just outside the gates of the walled city, it became home to successive waves of immigrants.

“This is one of the oldest districts in Montreal, where the Irish, the Scottish, the French, the Jewish community, everyone was there,” he said.

“It’s not just old buildings that we want to preserve. We also want to preserve the cultural presence that we still have,” he added.

“You put up a condo tower, and then you bring in a McDonald’s and a Starbucks, and it becomes a place with no identity.”

[threadatl]

An urbanism reading/watching list for your solitude

During these long hours of being at home during the pandemic, let's fight our cabin fever by escaping into articles, films, and books about urbanism! We've got a few suggestions below, but please add your own in the comments.

THE CLASSICS:

"Downtown is for People" -- Jane Jacobs' 1958 essay gave the world a peek at what was to come three years later with the publication of her book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." The idea that downtowns could be people-centered places was fairly revolutionary in a time when car culture and suburban sprawl were taking a strong hold in the nation. https://fortune.com/…/downtown-is-for-people-fortune-class…/

"City Spaces, Human Places" (video) -- William H. Whyte was a contemporary of Jacobs and a fellow 'urbanologist'. His study of how people respond to the good & bad designs of public spaces has been very influential. His 1981 documentary "The social life of small urban spaces" continues to inspire, and you can watch part of it here: https://archive.org/details/CitySpacesHumanPlaces

HOW ATLANTA GOT TO BE WHAT IT IS:

"Sprawled Out in Atlanta" -- What happens when poverty spreads to a place that wasn’t built for poor people? Rebecca Burns covers the growth of poverty in Atlanta's suburbs, where people who can't afford to buy and maintain cars get trapped in places designed exclusively for driving. https://www.politico.com/…/05/sprawled-out-in-atlanta-106500

"Where It All Went Wrong: If only we could undo the MARTA Compromise of 1971" -- Fascinating and sobering account from Doug Monroe of how MARTA came to be, and why it ended up being a neutered version of its original vision for the region. https://www.atlantamagazine.com/…/marta-tsplost-transporta…/

"Atlanta's War on Density" -- The low-density spread of the Atlanta region, wherein homes are disconnected from destinations (and each other) at a scale navigable only by cars, was intentional and carefully designed by people who were irrationally biased against density. Joe Hurley's post about it is the kind of enlightenment Atlanta needs. https://www.atlantastudies.org/…/03/atlantas-war-on-density/

THE BLIGHT OF PARKING:

"Atlanta’s Parking Problem Revisited -- Another one from Joe Hurley, who explains why we have so many parking facilities blighting the landscape of Downtown Atlanta. It includes quotes from ThreadATL's Matthew Garbett, who's been known to have some thoughts on parking. https://www.atlantastudies.org/…/atlantas-parking-problem-…/

"The high cost of free parking" -- Vox created this short video in 2017 to explore the wisdom of Donald Shoup and his writings about parking's effect on cities. It's an accessible watch that you can share with anyone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Akm7ik-H_7U

MORE READING:

Above we've listed things that are available now online. For recommendations on books about urbanism, check out the ThreadATL Goodreads list. https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/219759-threadatl-books

(Top image: 1960s rendering of density envisioned around an early idea of the Five Points MARTA Station. Source: GSU Digital Collections)

[poealsobucky]

Me????? Watching a Karl Urban movie again?????? It’s more likely than you think!!!

[urban-trek-thru-middle-earth]

I’m reading the script for ‘The Bourne Supremacy’ right now, and lemme tell you, fellow Urbanologists, WE WERE FUCKING ROBBED.

[countingdropsofcolor]

Re: Almost Human being 'peak Karl Urban hotness'. Totes agree. It's the show that singlehandedly turned me into an Urbanologist :)

I really can’t put my finger on what show/movie it was that made me love him, but I’m thinking it was the Star Trek movies (I saw at least the first of those before I saw Almost Human). It just really hit me when I saw that gifset that every single image of him from Almost Human is perfection. He was totally killin’ it.

(Also, thank you for this message, Anon! I never get them, so I’m super happy right now :D )

[newstodayreader]

Football is destroying itself

Football is destroying itself

You’re likely familiar with the “broken windows” theory. It’s used by urbanologists to describe neighborhoods lost to blight because, from the start, smaller things, such as broken windows, went unattended. Football, at all levels, has surpassed its untreated broken windows stage. It is approaching free fall. And not a soul in charge with a net…. Source link

[galleryexit]

One of the delights of city strolling consists in the activity of poeticizing what we come across.  We invest in our power of imagination.  We try to attribute meaning to the changing phenomena around us.  At the urban waterfront, say, we enjoy watching the up-and-down movement of the waves. On sidewalks we turn to the window shops or to the people we are passing.  In her famous book, Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), the American urbanologist Jane Jacobs once called the sudden movements and changes of the life on the sidewalks “the art form of the city” and she likened it to dance.  It is, she said, an “intricate ballet”:  the “ballet of the good city sidewalk” is performed before our eyes. Especially in Asian cities such as Seoul, we take pleasure during the evening hours in the night lighting as a structuring element of the cityscape:  the red crosses of the churches, the neon lights of the shop windows and the skyscrapers.  It is not by chance that a video artist such as Nam Jun Paik grew up in Seoul.  Although I exemplified the poeticizing activity of city strolling by referring to viewing, we experience smell and sound while walking as well.  Composers like John Cage, Steve Reich, and Hans Werner Henze, among others, made use of the noises and rhythms of urban life.  Reich’s composition City Life (1995) testifies to this.  William Forsyte’s choreography of Alie/na(c)tion (1992) describes the nervous and disoriented ways people in the modern metropolis move and listen to popular political or spiritual leaders.  The sounds of, say, New York are made into an order as a melody, as repetition, as swelling.  Strolling through the city, we organize the shapes of the houses in their relation to the square or the park.  We hear the rattle and squeal of the trolley cars as background to our own position in urban space.  City strolling differs from the Zen of walking, since city strolling lacks the strict turn toward the internal world.  City strolling is concerned with the world around, of course, in its interaction with me as the moving body.

Heinz Paetzold, The Aesthetics of City Strolling

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Harrington’s book [The Other America] jolted a nation that then prided itself on its classlessness and even fretted about the spirit-sapping effects of “too much affluence.” He estimated that one quarter of the population lived in poverty—inner-city blacks, Appalachian whites, farm workers, and elderly Americans among them. We could no longer boast, as President Nixon had done in his “kitchen debate” with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow just three years earlier, about the splendors of American capitalism.

At the same time that it delivered its gut punch, The Other America also offered a view of poverty that seemed designed to comfort the already comfortable. The poor were different from the rest of us, it argued, radically different, and not just in the sense that they were deprived, disadvantaged, poorly housed, or poorly fed. They felt different, too, thought differently, and pursued lifestyles characterized by shortsightedness and intemperance. As Harrington wrote, “There is… a language of the poor, a psychology of the poor, a worldview of the poor. To be impoverished is to be an internal alien, to grow up in a culture that is radically different from the one that dominates the society.”

Harrington did such a good job of making the poor seem “other” that when I read his book in 1963, I did not recognize my own forbears and extended family in it. All right, some of them did lead disorderly lives by middle class standards, involving drinking, brawling, and out-of-wedlock babies. But they were also hardworking and in some cases fiercely ambitious—qualities that Harrington seemed to reserve for the economically privileged.

According to him, what distinguished the poor was their unique “culture of poverty,” a concept he borrowed from anthropologist Oscar Lewis, who had derived it from his study of Mexican slum-dwellers. The culture of poverty gave The Other America a trendy academic twist, but it also gave the book a conflicted double message: “We”— the always presumptively affluent readers—needed to find some way to help the poor, but we also needed to understand that there was something wrong with them, something that could not be cured by a straightforward redistribution of wealth. Think of the earnest liberal who encounters a panhandler, is moved to pity by the man’s obvious destitution, but refrains from offering a quarter—since the hobo might, after all, spend the money on booze.

In his defense, Harrington did not mean that poverty was caused by what he called the “twisted” proclivities of the poor. But he certainly opened the floodgates to that interpretation. In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan—a sometime-liberal and one of Harrington’s drinking companions at the famed White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village—blamed inner-city poverty on what he saw as the shaky structure of the “Negro family,” clearing the way for decades of victim-blaming. A few years after The Moynihan Report, Harvard urbanologist Edward C. Banfield, who was to go on to serve as an advisor to Ronald Reagan, felt free to claim that:

“The lower-class individual lives from moment to moment… Impulse governs his behavior… He is therefore radically improvident: whatever he cannot consume immediately he considers valueless… [He] has a feeble, attenuated sense of self.”

In the “hardest cases,” Banfield opined, the poor might need to be cared for in “semi-institutions… and to accept a certain amount of surveillance and supervision from a semi-social-worker-semi-policeman.”

By the Reagan era, the “culture of poverty” had become a cornerstone of conservative ideology: poverty was caused, not by low wages or a lack of jobs, but by bad attitudes and faulty lifestyles. The poor were dissolute, promiscuous, prone to addiction and crime, unable to “defer gratification,” or possibly even set an alarm clock. The last thing they could be trusted with was money. In fact, Charles Murray argued in his 1984 book Losing Ground, any attempt to help the poor with their material circumstances would only have the unexpected consequence of deepening their depravity.

So it was in a spirit of righteousness and even compassion that Democrats and Republicans joined together to reconfigure social programs to cure, not poverty, but the “culture of poverty.” In 1996, the Clinton administration enacted the “One Strike” rule banning anyone who committed a felony from public housing. A few months later, welfare was replaced by Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), which in its current form makes cash assistance available only to those who have jobs or are able to participate in government-imposed “workfare.”

In a further nod to “culture of poverty” theory, the original welfare reform bill appropriated $250 million over five years for “chastity training” for poor single mothers. (This bill, it should be pointed out, was signed by Bill Clinton.)” - Barbara Ehrenreich, “Rediscovering Poverty: How we cured the “culture of poverty” but not culture itself.” Guernica, March 15, 2012.

[chloehayward03-blog]

To URBANOLOGIST,

No matter how long we talk, call,ft the moment you leave I miss you When I say goodbye I wish you’d fight for the conversation not to stop. The endless amount of things you do to make me happy. All the LOVE you give to me, I'm sorry I can’t return the favour I do love you, trust me I do that’s not the problem the problem is the distance between us. I know people always say distance means nothing when someone means everything but this won’t last there’s other people out there. I’m sorry for everything - I love you xx

[interpretationsofculture]

Urbanologists are turning to the natural world to solve city problems. 

“Nature holds the secret to planning sustainable new urban areas and retrofitting existing ones”

#ioc2020 #kgb #cosmopolitainforests #recycle #sustainable

[brideofedoras]

Need help with a definition

I’m such a nerd...  I’m already planning a fanfiction author themed Christmas tree (my brain works really weird when I’m supposed to be updating my WIPs...) and will be making decoupage ornaments with aesthetics for writing and the aesthetics for my fics.  I’m all about themed Christmas trees (my daughter thinks I’m crazy for putting up 5 or more trees throughout the house but my cats absolutely love it).

Anyway, I’m going to create an aesthetic for “URBANOLOGIST” but I need help coming up with a definition.  A while back I’d seen a post (I think I shared it, too) about Urbanologists.  

@urban-trek-thru-middle-earth, @billybutchersbabe

please tag other Urbanologists too!  

[thewul]

KTGY Architecture + Planning, Hope on Alvarado, an excellent execution of a hotel built with shipping containers. That is why the direction of the whole project goes to them.

It has to be planned from the start and executed flawlessly. This is an atmosphere representative of the residential district, the yellow district which houses buildings. 

Whereas the green belt houses individual units for mixed use. Villas but also restaurants, offices, stores and hotels.

We can already list all of the projects that we have seen as preferred architects for the project, to do more of the same. The direction of the green belt goes to Playze here below.

To sum up the city is a collaborative work involving many different architects, urbanologists and landscape artists and brands to deliver together, to enrich each others work through shared experience.

[stigmography]

πολεολογία Μετά τη λήξη του Πολέμου, ο Παγκόσμιος Οργανισμός Ανασυγκρότησης διόρισε τους καλύτερους επιζώντες γλωσσολόγους, συγγραφείς και ιστορικούς, ώστε να φέρουν εις πέρας το δύσκολο έργο της αναγέννησης των ρημαγμένων πόλεων του Κόσμου. Επιπλέον, ευέλικτα σχήματα θεωρητικών γραφειοκρατών εκπόνησαν τις λίστες προτεραιότητας για τον προγραμματισμό της εξέλιξης των εργασιών.

Τη δική μας πόλη επισκέφτηκε -χρόνια αργότερα, αφού η κατάταξη δεν μας είχε ευνοήσει- ένας νεο-ρομαντικός πολεολόγος. Ξεκίνησε από το παλαιό Χορωδείο, όπου για μήνες έψαλε αδιάκοπα τροπάρια αναστύλωσης των ερειπίων του. Το φθινόπωρο, η φωνή του αποδήμησε σα χελιδόνι, μα το έργο του ολοκληρώθηκε δίνοντας στέγη στα μουγκρίσματά μας. Κι αν δεν μας είχαν κόψει τις γλώσσες, θα λέγαμε ευχαριστώ…

---

urbanology After the end of the War, the World Reconstruction Agency used the best alive linguists, writers and historians to carry out the difficult regeneration of the ruined cities of the world. Right before, flexible technocratic theorists had produced priority lists for more effective monitoring.

A year later and according to our bad ranking, our city was visited by a neo-romantic urbanologist. He began with the old Glee Conservatory, which he was striving to revive from its ruins. In autumn, his voice flew away like a martin, but his oeuvre was accomplished and gave a shelter to our mumbles. And if they had not cut our tongues off, we would have told him “thank you”...

[brideofedoras]

My blog is practically dedicated to rhis gorgeous Kiwi god. And I absolutely LOVE seeing Karl content on my dashboard. Keep it up, fellow Urbanologists! 💖💖💖

For the anon who complained about all my Karl Urban content…

[iantrottier]

Urbanologist, city-planner and walkability advocate @JeffSpeckAICP joins @wynwoodradio Aug 2. Tune in and redesign your urban landscape. #urbanoutfitters #urbanphotography #urbanorganicgardener #urbandecay #urbanplanning #harvard #boston #newyork #sanfrancisco #losangeles #miami #eugene #oxford @miamibeachnews #walkability #jeffspeck