Tag Archives: urban life

**** The New York Nobody Knows

Posted on by
Chinatown, New York

(photo: wikimedia.org)

By William B. Helmreich, a CUNY sociologist, who writes about his 6,000-mile walk along almost every block of New York’s five boroughs. He spends a lot of real estate talking about how that’s the only “real” way to see the city—no need to convince me! It’s a fascinating exploration of various themes, including gentrification, ethnicity, and community activity. The result is a kind of compendium of urban diversity, rather than the more usual portrait of individual neighborhoods. Absolutely fascinating.

The author is a genial-looking sort who is apparently game to talk to just about anyone about just about anything, especially their local community. He is perpetually impressed with the gumption of the people he meets, and his genuine curiosity prompts responses worthy of pondering.

Buying a bottle of water on a hot day from a young Hispanic street vendor, Helmreich asks, “How do you keep these bottles cold out here?” “Well, first I freeze them at home. That way they stay cold a long time.” “Where are you in school?” “I just graduated high school.” “What are you gonna do next?” “I’m going to Monroe College.” “For what?” “I’m going to be a rich businessman. It’s a great college.” New York spirit. Helmreich loves it, and so will you.

Related articles

Have an iOS 7.1 Device?

Posted on by
Stan Douglas, Circa 1948

Stan Douglas’s exquisitely rendered mystery (photo: docubase.mit.edu)

If you do, you can explore an art project/mystery tale entered in this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Circa 1948 is a 3-D film noir-inspired multimedia project by Canadian Stan Douglas, who set the work—which was meticulously rendered, not photographed—in two post-war Vancouver neighborhoods. The project lets the viewer to pursue the narrative, where “you’re sort of always in the middle.” Unlike a game, there is no externally defined goal; it’s an exploration of the case of a woman falsely accused of murdering her husband. A mystery, like life. It’s getting ***** on the iTunes app store.

Related articles

 

There Are No Children Here

Posted on by

By Alex Kotlowitz – This is an award-winning, almost 25-year-old book that I’ve wanted to read for a long time (thank you West Windsor Library book sale!), documenting living conditions in the Henry Horner Homes a now-demolished housing project of the notorious Chicago Housing Authority. It is credited with making a substantial contribution to reforms in public housing that have attempted to reduce the isolation of the poor, combat violence and drug abuse, and improve building maintenance and living conditions for those who remain in public housing. Chicago-based media impresario Oprah Winfrey produced a made-for-tv movie version in 1993.

The book focuses on one large family, particularly two young brothers, Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers, ages 10 and seven at the outset, and follows their lives for three years. While Kotlowitz says he didn’t start out with the goal of public housing reform, no one who read the book—then or now—can fail to be affected by how public systems have failed so many American children. A 2011 interview with Kotlowitz revisted his experience writing this book and the subsequent fates of Pharoah and Lafeyette.

This year’s Peabody Awards recognized coverage of the continued neglect of low-income teens in WBEZ (This American Life) radio documentaries about Chicago’s Harper High School (Part 1 and Part 2) and the PBS documentary about a Washington, D.C., high school, 180 Days: A Year Inside an American High School. But, as Chicago Public Radio’s Linda Lutton said, “I would trade every prize in the world for them to live in a different reality.”

Related articles

 

Enhanced by Zemanta

**** The Flamethrowers

Posted on by

I had the chance to hear the author read an extended excerpt from near the end of this book in mid-April 2015 and appreciated anew how strong the writing is. The Flamethrowers, was Kushner’s second novel. It, as well as her first, Telex from Cuba (2008), were finalists for the National Book Award. Kushner and poet John Yau read from their works as part of the reading series sponsored by Princeton University’s program in creative writing and Lewis Center for the Arts.

By Rachel Kushner – In many publications’ 2013 Top Ten lists, The Flamethrowers: A Novel starts strong, with the heroine testing her new-model Valera motorcycle and her nerve at the Bonneville Salt Flats. Coincidentally, she’s taken up with Sandro Valera, a sculptor of aluminum boxes in Manhattan, where she hopes photographs of her bike’s tracks across the flats will make her mark in the early 1970’s art world, too. This naive gal from Reno, Nevada, is always a couple of steps off pace, trying to hold her own among the older, jaded New York artists and hangers-on, and falls hopelessly behind when Sandro takes her to his wealthy family’s villa above Lake Como. There she encounters the really sharp social knives. Her interactions with Sandro’s mother are breathtaking. I won’t say more about plot, in case you decide to read it. Nice writing. Here’s a sample: “Roy Orbison’s voice entered the room like a floating silk ribbon . . . And the hair. Black as melted-down record vinyl.” (3/3)

Enhanced by Zemanta

Finding the Soul of the City

Posted on by

“The soul of a city can be found by talking a walk”—the premise and inspiration for generations of street photographers. In the February 2014 Metropolis, Jeff Speck, city planner, architect, and sustainable growth advocate writes about his book, Walkable City, claiming such visually rich environments are “better for your soul.”

Every Picture Tells a Story

Walking is certainly a better way to get a closeup look at the life going on around you. He illustrates that point with scenes of timeless urbanism captured by some of the giants of the street photography genre—Gary Winograd, Lee Friedlander, Vivian Maier, and others. The daily activities that animate city streets produce layered insights about both places and people. In a vital urban scene, “the presence of difference”—in ethnicity, race, class, income level, occupation—suggest endless story possibilities.

These images may require a second, even a third look, but it is clear why such photographs are often used as writing prompts.  What’s going on between those two? What are they looking at? What are they thinking? Why did he wear that?

 

Walkable ≠ Happy

Canadian journalist Charles Montgomery’s book, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Though Urban Design, agrees that walkability may be a component of a healthy city, but alone it cannot make a city a happy one. A more complex set of elements contributes to people’s assessment of their own well-being. Photographers have captured these factors, too:

  1. elbow room (“People like their space”)—think about how kids tag every graffiti-friendly surface, it’s a way of claiming something distinctly, if momentarily, theirs; or consider the “reserved” parking place
  2. green space—and not just the occasional pocket park, but big swaths of it worthy of Frederick Law Olmsted, connected in continuous corridors, perhaps helping to explain the runaway popularity of the High Line, and
  3. economic justice. In other words, a city cannot be happy when a large segment of its population is much poorer than the rest.

Quality of life may be high in great, high-status cities, but that “does not translate into feelings of well-being . . . where social stratification creates a culture of status anxiety.”  Those tensions, too, are evident in photographs of many urban streetscapes.

walkability, streetscapes, urban life, High LineMore:

  • Jeff Speck’s TED talk on the walkable city.
  • The 10 U.S. cities having the most people who walk to work.
  • How cities are trying to become more walkable.
  • What’s the “Walk Score” for your address (U.S., Canada, and Australia)? Moving? Find walkable places to live.  My neighborhood’s Walk Score is 35, compared to New York City’s 88.
  • Many of Vivian Maier’s works can be seen on the Artsy website’s Vivian Maier page.

Assessing Blight

Posted on by
Detroit, my long-ago home town, “is one of those taxing places that require you to have an opinion about them,” says Paul Clemins in the New York Times.

Numerous recent books, films, and photo essays have tried to shape and inform those opinions, and I’ve covered a number of them on this website, from the ruin porn phenomenon, to the Heidelberg Project, to the threat to the Detroit Institute of Arts. The plot-thread of of this once-great city was allowed to unravel until the American automotive dream drove right out of town. City lots filled with abandoned homes, the wrecked shells of once-beautiful buildings, suitable for nothing more than desolate parking lots.

A story by Monica Davey in the Times this week describes yet another effort to get a handle on the devastation. A central office is collecting information and photos of every abandoned and dilapidated building in the city, recorded by teams outfitted with computer tablets. The comprehensive database they are compiling will be ready this spring and is expected to help city leaders decide what to try to save and what to demolish.

Former Mayor Dave Bing suggested shrinking the city to a core that could be maintained, instead of continuing to provide city services to blocks with only one or two standing, habitable houses. But even people residing on empty streets that look like farmland—and in some areas actually are being farmed—don’t want to give up their homes. Some officials say demolishing the worst buildings might cost $1 billion, while a public-private effort called the Detroit Blight Authority has begun an aggressive demolition campaign, clearing lots that will become . . . . ? Enough human drama here for scores more books and films.

On the list of LA Times finalists for 2013’s best current issues books is Detroit native and journalist Charlie LeDuff’s Detroit: An American Autopsy. It tells the history of a city, but more important, the stories of the people struggling in it. In his review, Clemins says, “Many city supporters [and a nascent creative class is among them] will object to the ‘autopsy’ in the subtitle, though it’s not the suggestion of civic death that rankles. Rather, it’s the suggestion of the surgically precise.” As the teams of surveyors roaming the streets who are in a sense conducting that autopsy can attest, decay is a messy business.