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Really enjoying your street level lumieres. This one is incredible. The shoes! The people! The music!

Thanks, Rupert! Yes, the music really added to this one, I think

Rupert seems to be the only one who comments regularly.

Just watched this again this morning.

What’s interesting is how not having sound causes you to have to really look. I’d still prefer sound. Blandlands style. But what struck me is the sheer variety of people. Young and old. Teenage too. And the seemingly impromptu band. It doesn’t look to me like an official parade. What was the occasion? I was trying to think of an event here in the U.S where you might see this variety of people. The best I could come up with is Michigan Avenue in Chicago, aka. the miracle mile or million dollar mile. What drives it is shopping and tourism which brings old people, middle age, families with strollers and little kids, teenagers and all types. Heck you might even see 8 old guys in a band for any number of reasons I can’t guess.

The differences are still there though. a) I don’t think we have as many old people, or their not as active as in your video.

b) You definitely wouldn’t see NEARLY as many bikes, and especially not ones heavily laden with goods which hints at the true difference between our two cultures. Bikes are used for truely common utilitarian purposes there.

I still think here in the U.S. that there is a taboo by most adults in particular about using a bicycle for commuting or utilitarian purposes. The most common bicycles are mountain bikes or cruisers… few fenders… VERY few baskets… few lights, fenders… in short bikes here are just not very well outfited for commuting on the whole. The hold a much more recreational role in our national mindset. It’s much like the U.S. taboos over sex. Untill it changes… and it is very much in the process of changing most people will fail to recognize the beauty and utility in bicycling for utilitarian purposes. While I don’t think many look down on it honestly… I do think that it’s thought of as something one does when their younger… college, highschool, gradeschool… something for kids and that cars and motorcycles are for adults. THe motorcycle too has made major inroads in america as an acceptable means of everyday transportation mostly thankful to Harley Davidson, and maybe a little to soaring gas prices. HOWEVER… what has made the harley acceptable is CLEARLY the culture of $20-30,000 machines… most middle age people would still seem to cling to a type of elitism, or trophy-ism rather then again… using the motorcycle for utilitarian purposes. Yes… they do end up commuting on these trophy bikes. You see it all the time. But the point is the motivation and tendency is for the most part motivated by a show of wealth and status.

What it all comes down to to be honest is… I wonder if bikes could be expensive enough if like the Harley a sort of status or elitest draw of high end bikes would change the cultural mindset we have toward bicycles. Indeed… it’s not like well off upper middle class don’t ride… the norms are changing all the time. They just do it on their 3000 - 5000 road bikes for purely recreational reasons.

What gives me hope for the evolution of this change in the bicycle’s status in american culture is huge inititatives in large cities like chicago such as critical mass, bicycle commuting month, a focus on making the city one of the most bicycle friendly cities int eh nation… a huge uninterupted lake front bicycle path (18+ miles) and the fact that these and the events associated with them are attracting more and more middle class families. There are even public “bicycle commuter” facilities now in chicago which include showers, lockers and secure bicycle locking facilities. Oh, and also you can take bicycles on buses (racks only hold two per bus though) and trains (subway and elevated) though rush hour is a blackout periods on trains.

The change all starts with younger professionals… who’s mindsets on bikes are set mostly when in high school and college… We’ll know we’ve succeeded though when there’s a vast middle age population who finds them acceptable. Though it is a symptom of something I very much don’t like… I especially think we’ll have succeeded when there’s a whole range of bicycle price points to support a sort of status culture within the bike world like in the motorcycle world. There must be $4000 commuters for the rich. I question why the U.S. culture clings to such obvious shows of status, but it does. I’m not sure wether it’s getting better or worse. Obviously it’s driven by our marketing and advertising culture. It’s almost a pure issue of conscious fashion. Very different in fact than $500 iphones or $300+ iPods. These things HAVE become status symbols yes… but Apple’s products are outside the norm rather than the norm. They are the Harley of the tech world… but this is extremely unusual in the tech world. Mostly… what drives technology is pure utility. Very few brands… blackberry’s, IBM thinkpads, apple iPod’s, Powerbooks / Macbooks, iPhones… and only a very few others have broken the mold to become items of status… and often only in VERY limited circles. Blackberry’s for instance are only sought after in the business and political world… hardly something that has widespread appeal. Same with IBM’s thinkpads and apple’s macbooks. It’s only in very limited markets these things become status. Even game systems like the Xbox, Wii, and Playstation have very much less than univeral appeal.

It’s is RARE exception that something like the iPod breaks through this limited appeal to become an object of universal appeal… and all to often that appeal is short lived. In fact… apple is very much coming to the end of it with the ipod. This is exactly the product cycle of the Sony Walkman before it. I personally realized the iPod had started to come to the end of it’s reign when my Aunt showed me her $15 mp3 player she picked up at general department store. I plugged it into my computer, put a $14 1 gig FlashSD card on it filled it up with music and proceeded to marvel at how awesome-ly it worked. I wanted one immeidately. That is when I realized the mp3 player market is being RE-commoditized and the monetary justification for a $300+ iPod is being VERY rapidly going to collapse. Apple will hence forth be required to very very rapidly drop their price on the iPod despite adding new features like the touch screem and more and more PDA like support. It will be hard for them to evade this price point competition. They definined the genre… the rules to the game… now it may be impossible for them to excape it as low cost manufacturers gobble up marketshare and profits. Surely they can stave it off for a little while by continually adding new features… but HONESTLY… adding more PDA like, video and photo features ISN’T going to cut it. Not when all most people want is an mp3 player. Like the Sony Walkman which I remember so acutely as a $300 product… the prices will drop like crazy from here out until can buy a $15 casset player of a $15 cd player. And hence we come to the iPhone… the iPhone truely does “bust the genre”, because it’s not an iPod… it’s a PHONE. I suspect the iPhone may catch on in a whole new way the iPod couldn’t… indeed it potentially has MUCH widerspread appeal. The sales of iPhones could truely make the sales of iPods look like childs play. This despite the fact that the phone market is theoretically more competitive.

Anyway… it may seem like I’m rambling, but I am in fact searching for patterns. I think as I write and I enjoy it.

The pattern you may see loosely emerging here is we need genre busting technology… a bit of status to change cultural norms. Before apple came out with the ipod, portable music players were FAR from being universal… even in the most progressive urban markets… the commuters. The iPod exploded the market and changed cultural norms. Today when you walk down the street in chicago at 8am or 5pm on a weekday you’ll find an extremely high percentage of white earbuds pop out at you. Where personal music players used to be the domain of kids, college students and at most young professionals you are now as apt to see a executive walking to his Mercedes wearing an iPod as a college kid riding a bicycle.

And there is the connection… the trend is for alternative forms of transportation. The two most interesting to me are bikes and public transportation like trains. The cultural mindset are rapidly changing. In fact in some places like NY and chicago the train has already succeeded wildly and that success is spreading to other cities. How long it will be until our nation once again supports a successful and competitive national train transit system again (instead of just a flailing un-compeitive… government supported Amtrak) I don’t know. BUT… in chicago both the “city transit” the subway & elevated train… and the “city-suburban” aka. the Metra train system in chicago is already a *phenominal* success. In fact… I think Chicago’s system competes with any in the world. This IS however the RARE exception in U.S. cities and it’s success and those of others like it could take my lifetime to grow like a patchwork quilt connecting cities with high speed rail until we have a nationwide rail system again. And MAYBE… just MAYBE… nationwide rail is a false god. Maybe nation wide transportation is not the thing that rail does best.. Maybe it’s primary utility IS daily commuters and inter-city transpertation. Maybe there will never be an acceptable New York to LA alternative to plane transport. But already the train is pushing once again to become king. The New Tork to Washington D.C. line for example competes very favorably with air transport. And maybe this is key… we have to remember, the U.S. is not europe. Our cities and towns were mostly laid out in the era of the car unlike many european cities. Our DNA has hence been encoded differently. It’s not only that the bicycle is taboo… an issue purely of fashion… there is also practicle reason why bicycles are slow to catch on… it’s only in the last 10-15 years that the U.S. has begun to rediscover it’s urban centers… both big cities like Chicago… small cities like Alberque New Mexico, and small towns. The 1960’s, 70’s, 80’s and even the early 90’s was VERY hard on these places economicly. Obviously due in part to the car, but also other economic factors. It is only now as we rediscover these more traditional europeanesque… or simply older world constructs… i.e. NOT suburbs… that trains and bicycles once again become viable means of transport. In chicago when you see what is now known as the “Ogilvy Transport Station” a purely “city-suburban” rail hub in downtown chicago you realize that the train has once again regained it’s former glory. It is a truely wonderful, busy and exciting place.

In places like Wicker Park, and perhaps also Lincoln Park you also see a tremendous flourishing of bicycle commuter culture. However we still have a long, long way to go before we reach some sort of balanced transportation culture.

In summary… the problems facing this desired balanced transportation culture are two-fold. 1) taboo/fashion/status and the cultural mindset 2) practical issues.

I guess what I’m waiting for is that iPod Aha! moment… or that iPhone Aha! moment. Or the Apple Macintosh Aha! moment. The segway was a false profit… of course noone but a few ridiculous investors and inventors really thought it was going to reshape cities. It may yet have a place in the modern urban future, but it’s time is not now. I think the next Aha! product will be an EV (electronic vehicle), or a “smart car”, or hydrogen powered car or something of that sort. It will enter the market as a smaller light weight mid range daily commuter. My prediction is it will be half to 2/3 the size of your average car… indeed this is already happening in europe… it has only to carch on here.

In the country infact gas and electric golf carts have already widely caught on. Bicycles and motorcycles I think will grow… but for practical reasons they will lag behind european and western cities for cultural and practical reasons in the U.S…. particularly because suburbs are so not so friendly to these and other types of pedestrian transport. Meanwhile what’s generally called “light rail” though I don’t know why… these “inner city” and “city-suburb” systems will explode country wide in efficiency and popularity. And huge growth will happen in high speed “itra-city” or “city-city” lines between major metropolitan areas. Cities of ALL sizes… particularly of note small towns…. will continue to regain their former glory… on the whole they DO have a LONG way to go to regain that glory… the average city is still a tiny fraction of it’s former population.

My only fear now is if this accelerates to rapidly we may see widespread collapse of suburban areas… this has primarily to do with their sole dependance on cars. If gasoline prices rise to high… and as cities and urban areas gain more momentum there is a tiny chance the suburban infrastructures could collapse. However that risk is small and alternative transport means are strugling to meet that need very aggressively already. Air transport is secure in it’s seat as king of long range transport and will regain it’s 9/11 economic falterings. Though the train may very slowly eat away at air transport’s shorter wave commuter routes air transport will gain wider appeal and greater efficiency at longer routes of 500+ miles, though rapid advances in rail speed make this an upredictible area.

Urban planning and architecture are merely a hobby of mine. They are I think a direct parrellel to what is central to what I do… information architecture. The architecture of a thing dictates how we connect with each other and who we are. Put in it’s most commonly quoted terms… the medium is the message. It does not matter wether that medium is Television, Radio, the Newspaper, the internet, or meat space cars, planes, trains and bicycles. The same theory applies. The medium is the message.

When I see something as simple as a video like this of people on the street… or that of the Coppenhagen library you posted… I see what the relatively young american towns and cities could grow up to be. How new more *human scale* and potentially more “sustainable” (the modern euphamism for efficient + healthy) living. It is only by looking outside our immediate cultural trappings and broadening our horizons that we can coninually gain perspective and insight on the human condition. It is not emperical. It very nature is to defie all quanitative and qualatative study… though it should not stop us from trying. In fact we should always be trying. 90% of what keeps this world moving forward and not destroying itself is simply open mindedness and capacity for understanding. There is as much to be gained by the study of U.S. cities as their is European cities… in the study of modern societies and cultures as there is the study of indeginous cultures…. there are no better than or worse than’s there are only alternatives… or at the very least circumstances. In terms of infant mortality, healthcare and other base needs so called 3rd world or developing countries are progressing far faster and better on the whole than the European countries and other so called first world nations.

What it all comes down to is this… the global conversation… the constant emigration of people, culture and ideas. The “mixing pot theory” is what keeps progress happening. The internet has expanded on that human capacity exponentially… and it’s all there to see in a 30second long video clip on a blog.

I’m fond of saying you can measure how good a bar is by the diversity of your clientel… but it’s also true of all manner of places and spaces both real world and virtual.

Morning.

That was fun… p.s. warning… not proofread. Purely stream of conscious… I hope it’s not to bad.

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Aww… I just found this blog too! Well best of luck with the projects.I’m thinking about doing the same thing very soon….