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Great bit of guerilla activism in Prospect Heights, protesting the disastrous Atlantic Yards project (helmed by developer Bruce Ratner) which just broke ground earlier this month. [via Brownstoner]

Times to Remember, Places to Forget →

A wonderfully pithy Times Op-Ed from the New Year, on the homogenization of place. It grazes vapidity, but I think ultimately that’s part of its strength – makes makes a smart point simply. Give it a quick read.

When the industrial smoothing of our nation’s once-variegated edges has been fully accomplished, Americans may no longer need to gather at midnight on the last day of the year to yearn for their yesterdays, because wherever they are they will see the landscapes of their youths.

"If boulevards aren’t too wide, like 9 de Julio in Buenos Aires, they can serve to break the monotonous pattern of streets and blocks, let sunlight in, and function as a landmark (so you know where you are)."

—

There’s not much new in David Byrne’s Perfect City, a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed that nonetheless is worth the click-through for a peak into the Talking Heads’ - well, head.

I had never before heard of his idea of a boulevard being too wide, however, and I’m intrigued. I’m not familiar with 9 de Julio, but will have to go through my mind’s eye of this summer’s European travels and see if I have any educated opinions about boulevard/esplanade width.

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Make: Online : Bike accessory leaves a trail of chalk behind you. Pictured hipsters notwithstanding, I like the idea that a colorful remnant of bicycle use would help cyclists to assert a claim to the streets. Commuting with one of these is both performance and function, always an interesting combination.

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From the Week in Review (which Lauren and I are realizing is rather fluffy, if enjoyable), A Modest Proposal - Bikers, Take the High Road:

Next comes another species of biker, which I call the Really Cool Biker, because they are really cool — usually younger than the Lance Armstrong types, wearing skinny jeans and a windbreaker imprinted with, say, the name of a bar or a bowling alley, and riding a sleek, fixed-gear frame bike that I myself am too uncool to even adequately describe.

Now, as the Tour de France vs. the tourist melee is exploding, the Really Cool Bikers attempt to skirt the scrum of tourists, using the moment of chaos as an obstacle course, causing tourists to break like pheasants after a bad shot. The Really Cool Bikers speed silently around terrified bystanders, leaving a trail of bike-induced horror.

But it’s kind of fun to skirt the melee!

"Fairey has said that the real message behind his work is “Question everything.” I question the I.C.A. director Jill Medvedow’s claim, in the show’s catalogue, that Fairey pursues a “quest to challenge the status quo and disrupt our sense of complacency through his art.” What isn’t status quo about political rage? And have you met anyone not heavily medicated who strikes you as complacent lately? The retrospective is dated on arrival."

— Peter Schjedahl delivers a terse take-down of Shepherd Fairey’s work (the man, as if it needed to be said, behind the iconic Obama ‘HOPE’ poster). I appreciate the thesis that if it weren’t for the  faux-agitprop formlessness of Fairey’s style, that poster couldn’t have - like the candidate - meant so many things to so many people.

"If Cosby’s call-outs simply ended at that—a personal and communal creed—there’d be little to oppose. But Cosby often pits the rhetoric of personal responsibility against the legitimate claims of American citizens for their rights… His historical amnesia—his assertion that many of the problems that pervade black America are of a recent vintage—is simply wrong, as is his contention that today’s young African Americans are somehow weaker, that they’ve dropped the ball. And for all its positive energy, his language of uplift has its limitations."

— I don’t yet know what I think about this Atlantic piece on Bill Cosby’s conservative racial politicking of the last few years, but I’m glad I read it: ‘This Is How We Lost to the White Man’

Does Somerville have a prayer? If so, there’s a team to help →

Too big to succeed

In this July NYT op-ed, Columbia sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh argues that the only way to save HUD - and urban housing policy - is to tear the agency down and rebuild it with a different mix of programs and priorities. Perhaps with an eye towards walkability, accessible parks, and retail space?

Oh, sorry, I’m confusing Venkatesh’s article with HOPE VI. The parallel isn’t too hard to draw, and any conversation about the shortcomings of HUD - and the contestability of its interventions - inevitably involves HOPE VI, a fifteen year-old program to tear down the worst high-rise projects and rebuild them as new urbanist, mixed-income and mixed-use communities.

I read the piece last summer with some interest, but missed the vigorous discussion within the urban planning community. I’ve just discovered Randall Crane’s urban planning research, “essays on urban studies.” Crane* is the Vice Chair of UCLA’s esteemed urban planning program, and contacted Xavier De Souza Briggs at MIT for his reply, which included the following:

hope 6 plays out very differently from place to place. it isn’t fair to dismiss it as a mere give-away to developers or a program for displacement across the board. there are wonderful hope 6 developments, there are responsible and hardworking affordable housing developers delivering real innovation, and resident relocation improved in a number of cities after the flaws started to get documented a decade ago.

Having done a bit of research on HOPE VI at UEP, I was fascinated by this whole exchange, but am also well out of my depth here, so will leave interested parties to click-through to the professionals.

* Off topic, but according to Crane’s bio page, he was PhD advisor to Charisma Acey, who wrote the fantastic “Space vs. Race: A Historical Exploration of Spatial Injustice and Unequal Access to Water in Lagos, Nigeria,” which was published in last summer’s special issue of Critical Planning, focused on spatial justice. Her article, like many in that issue, helped form the practical foundation of my thesis.

Vignelli's simplified MTA map won't do, but in Boston we're supposed to make sense of a tangled square without even a hint of geographic relevance. Thank God for Google Maps. →