David Barrie

Residential real estate at Natick: Buy a shopping bag and live in it

Coming to a city near you: a new age of living over the shop.

These are residences being developed next to an out-of-town shopping mall in Natick, Massachusetts.

The New York Times reports that apartments at the 12-story development range in price from $425,000 to $1.6 million and are attracting new residents like Ms. Sandell who

said she had not planned to relocate from her 2,400-square-foot town house in Wayland, but she could not resist the chance to live in a downtown atmosphere yet still remain in the suburbs.

With easy access to  stores like Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus and Betsey Johnson, Ms Sandell and others are living what the realtors market as the lifestyle-center model of development

where upscale retailers, sit-down restaurants and condos are built around what looks like a city street....New residents see the development as the best of both worlds, with a downtown downstairs. “It’s like having the city come out to the suburbs,” Ms. Sandell said.

Just as people once lived next to docklands, factories or over the shop in Main Street, they can now occupy the Intersection Valhallah of the retail periphery.

This is the new infill between city and suburb. The final covering of 'the park in-between'. And I can guarantee you that wherever you are, it's coming your way soon. 

What the hell is happening in Red Hook?

This is a snatched image of a street corner in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

In a recent edition of New York magazine, Adam Sternbergh contributed an article with a tantalising opening line: What the hell is happening in Red Hook?

Just a year ago, the neighbourhood was a text book model of gentrification.

As reported by The Brooklyn Paper,

Last summer, anything seemed possible on Van Brunt Street. Big-time broker Barbara Corcoran had recently paid $1-million for one of the drag’s narrow, 19th-century buildings. Fairway foodies were stopping at the Old Pioneer for post-grocery beers, and every balmy evening brought another fancy-people caravan to eat small plates of costly, farm-raised food at 360 and the Good Fork.

But Red Hook's prospects have since changed. The Posh 360 store is closed. The Old Pioneer is closed. And a Time Out New York cover story entitled Red Hook Has Arrived: 27 Reasons to Go Now is just a distant dream.

In his article, Sternbergh reached for an answer as to what's going wrong in Red Hook. He blamed poor transportation, a short supply of housing stock and regular flooding of basements.

Geography professor Winifred Curran drew attention to a wider failure.

A lot of developers in Red Hook have gotten ahead of themselves by charging gentrified prices without providing any of the services the gentrifiers expect....People who can afford to spend a million dollars on an apartment want to be able to get to work in less than an hour and a half. They want a supermarket. They want a bank. And in my opinion, a lot of the redevelopment in Red Hook is not actually very nice.

In his piece, Sternbergh made a useful distinction between gentrifiers who sow the seeds of development of a place and harvesters who reap the rewards. And he suggested three ways in which gentrification can burn itself out.

One, an economic downturn douses people's ability or willingness to relocate. Two, the seeders, in search of cheap new space, get driven out of the city entirely. Three, the gap between what the seeders seek out and what the harvesters will accept becomes too wide for the cycle to continue.

Over the last decade, countless towns and cities in the U.K. have fought to differentiate their 'offer'.  Often what has followed is a hike in property values and glut of investments geared to 'value uplift'.

But how many of these places have put in the software of renewal without the essential hardware? The regeneration of public space, without improved train services?  New town squares without  a local skills revolution? Public art without new flood defences?

Sternbergh's article on Red Hook was entitled Embers of Gentrification.

How many other dying embers are there in the U.K. and United States, places that are supposed to have  gentrified and are dying - but whose fate is ignored by the wish-fulfillment of social, political and financial investors?

Photo courtesy of ...neene... on Flickr.
 

Princess Power

News just in from Hollywood!

Royalty offers an answer to problems of social mobility.

Disney are about to launch a Visa credit card to help you buy the latest sleepwear and housewares worthy of a Princess, from the line of goods they market out of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Belle and Enchanted, their latest fairy-tale romantic comedy.

The Princess line is worth $6bn annually - yes $6bn - and is becoming the most successful marketing venture ever, Newsweek reports.

So if you want to savor a dollop of Princess Power or scale up as a 'Destination Bride', check out the Princess line of wedding dresses that were launched earlier this year.

And while you're about it, don't forget those glass slippers.

Facebook is for nosey parkers

For those who have the Friend Wheel application on their Facebook page, this wheel is the equivalent of being in heaven.

Friend Wheel creates a visual representation of how all your Facebook Friends are connected. Each of your friends has a color and lines connect to the people they’re friends with also. What results is a colorful geometric looking wheel of all your friends connections.

But don't be deceived in to believing that the wheel represents interactive relationships.

In a recent paper on the dilemmas of marketing in an age of social networking, Professor John Deighton of the Harvard Business School and Leora Kornfeld of the Mobile MUSE Consortium draw attention to research carried out by the guru of web page usability Jakob Nielson.

Nielson suggests that 1% of web interactivity is truly communal, 9% is instrumental (using a community for some temporary advantage) and 90% is watching others being communal.

In other words, web interactivity and by implication digital platforms that support it are about voyeurism, not social exchange.

Nielson's numbers says it's romance to think of networks like Facebook as platforms for participation.

Facebookers know this. In fact, if we're honest, that's why we love it.

It's simply another knowledge tool.

Or the digital, mass observational equivalent of Mark Lewis' camera in the movie Peeping Tom.

Urban farming: put that pomegranate juice to one side

This is a map of an 'edible' town in the North of England.

It was created by architects Bohn and Viljoen as part of an initiative called Dott07, a year of design projects in the North East of England devoted to examining and visioning a sustainable region and supported by the Design Council and One NorthEast.

The map proposes a landscape plan for Middlesbrough that integrates productive, urban agricultural landscape in to the future strategic planning of the town. The spatial vision is built on where local people grew food as part of an urban agriculture project that I led there.

This month's Blueprint design magazine calls the idea of urban farming deeply dotty.

The magazine extols the virtues of globalised food production as a route to cheaper, affordable food and denies the value of home-grown food as a route to sustainable communities and economies.

Saying no to blueberries, editor Vicky Richardson writes, is all about gesture...

Just like putting a windmill on your roof, buying local food, or better still growing your own, shows that you are being responsible and 'doing your bit'.

O.K.

So what's the answer to global food price inflation, food shortages, the need for new controls and forthcoming water shortages?

Should we just not bother to respond to the fact that in developed countries, it takes ten calories worth of energy from fossil fuels - in the form of fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation and transportation fuel - to get one calorie back in the form of food?

I guess one answer is to go to the food hall at the swanky Harvey Nichols department store, marvel at how well stocked it is, buy a $4 turnip and take it home carefully wrapped in a Missoni scarf.

But maybe another is to develop ways in which we can cultivate secure and sustainable local food supply chains and create business models that make it affordable both in terms of cash and carbon.

I don't much like worthy wisdom - but perhaps this is one to put the pomegranate juice aside for?

Marriage by Yves St Laurent

Is this a dress or a phallus?

Something gorgeous and warm? Or a crotched, hellish “cocoon” of knitted wool?

If you know what it is, the answer tunes up.

It's a wedding dress designed by Yves St Laurent in 1965 and inspired by Russian Babushka dolls.

A costume based on the design featured recently in a brilliant new work by choreographer Michael Clark. 

At the start of I Do - a dance set to Stravinsky's Les Noces - a figure of the Bride emerges from a Russian doll, wearing a knitted poncho and headpiece based on St Laurent's original design.

The Bride attends her wedding, almost immobilised by her dress.

Weird, shocking, the effect is somewhere between trussed-up, mummified toy, limbless white phallus and  a chic, crotched satire on an English High Court judge.

On the night of the performance, I was reminded me of Crass' Berkertex Bribe:

The object unsoiled is packed ready and waiting,
For the moment of truth in this spiritual mating.
The object unsoiled is packed ready and waiting,
To be owned, to be cherished, to be fucked for the naming. 

....

You can pack them away with the rest of your lies.
Your painted mask of ugly perfection,
The ring on your finger, the sign of protection,
Is the rape on page 3, is the soldiers obsession,
How well you've been caught to support your oppression.

Photograph by Fouli Elia.

Fire down below

This is a Google Earth image of recent fires burning in the Amazon.

In the latest edition of the New York Review of Books, environmental scientist John Terborgh reviews the fate of the rainforest and draws attention to the impact of unforeseen events like fire.

Drawing on research by Carlos Peres and William Laurence, Terborgh  outlines how a tropical forest burns.

It's a process that's a useful primer on how human, not just natural systems mess up - how the damage of a first event may be invisible but the seeds of destruction have been sown.

To put it another way, how someone or something may have fuc*d up - but you'd never know it.

The first time a tropical forest burns, the damage can hardly be detected from above because the destruction is largely confined to saplings and small trees whose crowns lie below the canopy.

But the subsequent presence of large numbers of dead trees greatly increases the fuel available to stoke the next fire.

Consequently, second fires burn hotter and more destructively, killing large trees as well as practically all smaller ones. And, of course, second fires generate even more fuel for the third fire....

After that, the land once occupied by forest fills with coarse shrubs and grasses that become flammable every dry season.

Fires then become a permanent feature of a transformed ecology and defeat the prospects for recovering the forest.

World 8, Level 4

Super Mario Brothers: The Lost Levels is the new edition of the blockbuster video game.

It has been called one of the most difficult games of all time and reviewed by Slate writer Chris Suellentrop in the same breath as....err...Citizen Kane.

To save you several weeks time out, I'm posting  a video clip of the game from start to finish.

Try to watch it in continuous real-time. It's impossible - and does weird things to your head.

If you ever thought that by playing Super Mario, you were going on a journey, forget it. The clip shows that if it weren't for points and levels, Mario-world would be a narrative-less desert.

Then, savor the music. It's fantastic! The chiptune should be irritating. In fact, it is irritating. But it has all of the familiarity of mother's milk. (In fact, come to think of it, there must be a generation of people who listened to Mario or Donkey Kong in the womb, rather than Little House on the Prairie or Wagner's Ring.)

Finally if like me you never reached the end of a Mario game, thanks to You Tube user  yoshi44566 (via Gawker) for posting the clip and getting us there.

Because it shows that after playing the game for days/weeks, breaking up with girlfriends, suffering repetitive strain and forgetting the power of speech, success is crowned with the following lines:

Peace is paved
with kingdom saved
Hurrah to Mario
Our only Hero
This ends your trip
Of a Long Friendship

Friendship? With an "Okey dokey!", "Woohoo!", "Let's a-go!" Italian plumber? Isn't this a bit disappointing?

Could grandpa come back as curly kale?

For all those interested in 'authentic' food experiences, put those good-looking, soiled organic carrots to one side and escape to the highlands of Oceania.

In the late 1960s, anthropologist Francoise Panoff carried out fieldwork in East New Britain, Papua New Guinea, among the Longueinga tribe. (Her research is published here - subscription required.)

Panoff was interested in tribal rites associated with food and noticed the practical, as well as supernatural approach the Longueinga took to growing produce - especially a tropical plant called taro.

When a child or old person died, it was customary to bury him (or her) in a garden site, known to produce a crop of high quality. Three or four years later, the plot was cleared and taro planted. It is probable that the soul of the dead person is supposed to send back to the garden the soul of his (or her) taro, while what remains of his or her body will help the crop to grow.

Now think for a moment about how much fertilizer we use - over 90 million tonnes in 2006. Spare a thought for our obsession with cleanliness and  kitchen surfaces. And then take note of another observation by Panoff in her research:

It is significant that when clearing the bush the gardeners had to take a meal in the garden and that coconut meat (an equivalent of pig flesh) had to accompany the staple.

This triggers all sorts of stuff around modern food culture, 'gastro-morality'  and the role (or not) of agriculture in sustainable cities.

There is a supernatural magic associated with food that the developed world doesn't have: it's either been lost or filled with sentiment.

If food security and urban agriculture are the coming issues, when's someone going to suggest growing produce in cemeteries, not just off-cuts of urban land or cute 'kitchen gardens'?

And while we're in a magic place, could grandpa come back as curly kale?

Image: courtesy of kahunapulej via the Net.

Designer Ecology

The cover of this month's edition of  The Ecologist hard sells an article entitled UGLY: Modern Culture in Crisis.

Inside the magazine, staff and contributors suggest a list of things that they find ugly:

The world gets uglier and uglier, as Alice would have said.....even if we don't like to think of them, the ugly things in our world do effect us. Our list is...an emotional response to an emotional question: what do you find ugly in this world?

I don't know the woman photographed above - I've just pulled her image off the net.

But rather than a patent slave to fashion, is she in fact an ecologist?

Because if she were to think the following were 'ugly' -

Frowns
Cheese strings
I-pods
Intensive farming
Diminishing childhoods
'Weedkiller wine'
Junk mail
Motorway services
Sexist ads
Media misrepresentation
Reality television
Politics

- she'd start to tick many of the ecologically-minded boxes and apparent belief system of Zac Goldsmith and his crew.

In other words, her arm may be weighed down by a Chanel hand-bag but her head: that's full of nouveau-grunge.

My point: The Ecologist magazine's list is yet more evidence of environmentalism becoming infused or confused with suburban morality and upper class shock.

Throw in to the list of  uglies 'job's going abroad' or 'people on drugs' and you're approaching the reformist politics of Ross Perot.

And add just four more ugly things and you'd need to call immediately for two Nurofen and a glass of Pellegrino, like comedienne Catherine Tate's Aga Saga Woman.

The anarchy of Black Flag has become Vanity Fayre.