NPR update: Morning Edition for Monday, 03 December

Just wrapped my latest appearance on NPR, this time on emergent media distribution and promotion channels: Renée Montagne and I discuss Wes Anderson’s iTunes-only release of his short film Hotel Chevalier, Radiohead’s pathbreaking “In Rainbows,” ARGs, and as much about the revelatory potential of cross-media intertextuality as one can wedge into a five-minute slot.

You can listen when it airs on Morning Edition next Monday, the third of December, or check back here - I’ll update this post with a link when NPR throws the segment online.

(UPDATE: Here’s your link, hoss.)

“Urban Computing” launch/talk: Now with added Paulos!

A brief reminder of two upcoming events NYC urbcomp heads will definitely not want to miss:

- First, I pity the fool that’s elsewhere when our pals at The Living fire up the Van Alen the evening of 11 December, for the opening of their “Living City” installation. I hear the show will feature a fully functional, scaled-up version of the Living Glass responsive building membrane, which should be tremendously cool.

- And later that same week, please join Mark Shepard, Intel’s Eric Paulos and ys tly for the series launch/panel discussion for “Urban Computing and its Discontents” at the Architectural League - that’s the evening of 14 December. I’ve seen the pamphlet mocked up in PDF, and let me tell you, it’s pretty tasty. Come get your hardcopy live and in person, then join us for G&Ts and whatnot.

I look forward to seeing you at either - or, hey, why not both? - of the events.

Two walkshed questions

1. What is the furthest point to which you habitually walk?

2. What is the closest point to which you habitually drive or take public transportation, a taxi, or other conveyance?

Actual LOL line

“Masochism is the new black, and always has been.”
- good ol’ Jim Graham, in last year’s nonpareil Kingdom Come.

I cackled, anyway. Turned some heads in the departure lounge. All in a day’s work.

NPR again

Just a quick heads-up that I’m going into the studio tomorrow to tape another appearance on NPR’s Morning Edition with Steve Inskeep. We’re going to be talking about new distribution channels for film, the ever-blurrier boundary between “movie” and “game,” and ARGs and other relatively novel ways to promote film - I’ll let you know when the segment is scheduled to air, most likely sometime early next week.

That is all.

Ahhh, Swissformation

Frequent travelers will no doubt be familiar with the generic batch of inflight infographics passengers have been offered for the last eight or ten years now. You encounter the same deck on just about every airline, and by now you know their rhythm pretty well: the blue-green map with its three crude levels of zoom, alternating with the two or three factoid panels of airspeed, outside temperature, time at destination and so forth.

I had just been musing on my last trip that this particular cascade has probably started to look a bit dowdy, if not outright retro, to a generation accustomed to Google Maps and in-car GPS, when Swiss pulled a change-up on me this time around. Their new mapping presentation is much closer to the current state of the art, if not even just a touch ahead of the game, and it’s noticeably more engaging as a result.

I know, I know: it’s probably only “more engaging” if you’re the kind of mapgeek for whom this kind of thing is digital catnip. But dig: a smooth zoom from 1:5000 out to global, satellite imagery at the larger scales, finely-grained terrain modelling, flightpath indicator (for completed and projected vectors), pseudo-3D with nice shadowing, current location denoted by simulation-accurate model of the actual aircraft type, and background stars plotted by what I have every reason to believe are accurate ephemerides. The only thing that surprised me was that they hadn’t chosen to skin the aircraft icon with the appropriate livery - that seems like a gimme to me, given the availability of the resource files. This all cycled with another seeming gimme I’d only seen on ANA before, and that a good five years ago: the pilot’s-view camera.

Taken together, it was almost mesmerizing. Even though I think and write about this stuff all the time, there’s still something uncanny about the representations that emerge from the nexus of precise global positioning, highly granular terrain models and smooth realtime CGI. It definitely enhanced the cabin experience, which was otherwise sadly undermined by one of the most poorly designed business-class seats I’ve ever experienced. (Anyone over about five-eight is going to find themselves uncomfortably blockaded at full extension, and you can’t decouple back tilt from footrest elevation. It’s actually more comfortable to sit fairly close to upright.)

Oh, and a bizarre addition, too, there among the major maritime features and hazards to navigation plotted: the location and date of famous shipwrecks. All the greatest hits, really: Whydah, 1717. Titanic, 1912. Andrea Doria, 1956. Thresher, 1963. I can’t imagine why someone thought this was necessarily an appropriate note to strike in a presentation of inflight data, but perversely enough, I’m glad they did: it adds a certain sense of historical grounding to what might otherwise slip all too easily into the infinite now of slickly visualized data. Top marks all ’round.

Now do something about those seats.

Off to Leuven

I’ll be in Belgium for the next few days, wearing asymmetrical clothes and drinking Trappist ales. Catch you on the flipside.

Dumb urbanist idea #761: The Equalizer

Way back in 2004, I had this to say about the “privately owned public spaces” that dot New York City as a result of its 1961 Zoning Resolution, “all those interstitial spaces in Manhattan created when a real-estate developer has had to offer a public accommodation as a condition of being permitted development rights or floor-area bonuses: a plaza or a garden, a shaded alcove or even a simple bench”:

Most such spaces, it is true, are little more than unloved, non-revenue-generating voids in the cityscape, and treated as such by all; relatively few are understood as public amenities capable of spinning off benefits beyond the mere financial. But it’s hard to overstate how important it is to the life of a city to have copious amounts (and types) of space in which you can sit for free, unhassled by rentacop and barista alike, whether you’re there to enjoy a brown-bag lunch, write urban haiku, or simply watch the traffic go by.

I still believe that. But the fact is, the pace of vertical development being what it is hereabouts, Manhattan is replete with such spaces. Maybe we simply don’t need any more. But as it happens, there’s something else that developers might be able to provide that we do require, fairly acutely.

So I wanted to offer an idea I’ve been kicking around of late, a modification to the standard arrangement that might actually return to the island something much more useful to its future than yet another pocket park.

On the one hand, this idea is so stupidly simple that I can’t believe nobody’s proposed such a trade-off before, and on the other, what with my research skills being what they are, I’m not able to scare up any evidence that such a measure has in fact been mooted by anyone. (My more knowledgeable readers are invited to leave evidence of “prior art” in comments, as I simply cannot wrap my head around the idea that nobody’s had this brainstorm before, or one very much like it.) At any rate, here it is:

For every floor of commercial development permitted in excess of the ordinary statutory maximum, the developer must provide n,000 sq ft of affordable housing within one kilometer of the site of the proposed variance.

I’m obviously neither an attorney nor a housing-rights activist, so I’m sure the language could use some adjustment. It’s also true that what the measure is aiming to achieve hinges much too delicately on the precise definition of “affordable” - I can imagine the hyperpolitical, gloves-off wrangling even now. But there’s the gist of the idea: you get to build your corporate megashaft, and in return the city gets not merely housing options for people that would otherwise be forced to flee, but entire high-density mixed-use districts.

Is such an idea prima facie untenable (you’ll pardon the pun) in the current, developer-friendly climate? Oh, assuredly so. But only in the same way that other urban-improvement measures were once dismissed as unthinkable, impractical or uneconomic, from mandatory curbcuts to segregated bikeways. If we want this kind of thing badly enough to organize and agitate for it, it’s within reach.

Stated most nakedly: wouldn’t affordable housing, within walking distance of the jobs themselves, beat another few dozen wind-tunnel parklets all to hell? Or is that too sensible an idea by far to ever take wing?

Weak signals: But tell me how you really feel

Translator’s note: Chinaderas is the nomenclature assigned [in Mexican Spanish] to imported goods from China, usually those that are knock-offs or replicas of other branded commodities…from direct word play with the word chingaderas: chinga, the Mexican Spanish word for “fuck,” “to fuck” or “fucking” + deras, roughly meaning “things,” thus “fucking things.” And adding China into the wordplay comes off as “fucking Chinese things.”

- From Alfonso Hernández, “Tepito: A barrio of artisans in light of global piracy,” in Superflex’s 2006 Self-organisation/Counter-economic strategies.

The Hudson Yards hustle

Don’t look now, it’s happening again: as at Ground Zero, starchitecture is being deployed on the far West Side to camouflage an outright hijacking of space that rightfully belongs to the public sphere.

Sadly, each of the Hudson Yards plans in contention falls far short of what the city deserves, and a few of them are outright disgraceful. And what’s worse is that it’s hard to even imagine at this point how circumstances might be improved.

Never mind, for a second, the stringent boundary conditions imposed on architecture by the Realpolitik of contemporary development - on floor plates by revenue-maximizing algorithms, on building envelopes and entrances by the mandates of “security.” We can take those as givens. Even so, is it so much to ask that architects try to imagine buildings and spaces that serve the public even as they satisfy developers’ pecuniary requirements?

No, wait, never mind: forget I asked. I’m not that naïve, and neither are you.