Shots from the Block: Duquesne Brew House & Abolition Art Show

This past weekend I went on a walk around my neighborhood with a friend who lives on my block. She had messaged me asking if I had gone outside to take advantage of the abundant sunlight we were having that day. I had been inside grading all morning and was eager to take a break from working and to get some fresh air, so I suggested we take a stroll. We started out along Sarah Street, aimlessly meandering further into South Side without a clear destination. After a couple of blocks we spied an alluring landmark: a dramatic and historic-looking building facade that neither of us had noticed before.

As we approached the building we were able to discern markings that referred to the Duquesne Brewing Company, as well as the designations “Brew House” and “Stock House.” This structure had evidently once housed part of the brewery operations for the local Duquesne beer makers, and I surmised that the building had followed the same fate as many other postindustrial relics and disused churches in the area by being turned into condos. A banner on the side of the building advertising apartments seemed to confirm these suspicions, but we also noticed signs stating “Gallery Open,” so we investigated further.

What we learned is that the former Duquesne Brewery has indeed been renovated into residential properties, but the re-developed complex also includes a pronounced arts emphasis complete with a gallery space and artist residency initiatives. The arts initiatives are overseen by the Brew House Association, and the 2,700 sq. ft. gallery space hosts a regularly rotating roster of exhibitions.

The current exhibition is titled “Empathy is the Seed, Truth is the Water, Solidarity is the Bloomage.” This exhibition is organized by Let’s Get Free: The Women & Trans Prisoner Defense Committee as their fifth annual art show for abolition. Let’s Get Free describes their mission as follows:

“We are a group working to end perpetual punishment, build a pathway out of the prisons back to our communities through commutation reform, support successful possibilities for people formerly and currently incarcerated, and shift to a culture of transformative justice.”

The Empathy art show features “artists on both sides of the prison walls”:

“This year’s show features 34 artists in prison and 29 artists in solidarity expressing a range of media, from watercolor to cross stitch to sculpture. First-time participant Marilyn Dobrolenski submitted a beautiful piece entitled “Harmony,” which features a lush and verdant wetland scene with water lilies, done in acrylic paint. Marilyn turned 69 this year and is one of over 70 women serving a life sentence over the age of 65. #LetGrandmaGo”

It was an extremely powerful collection of works. We were able to learn more about some of the pieces through artist statements and accounts of the historical context, but the overall impact of the collection in conjunction with the appeals for humanity and social justice that permeate the exhibition was overwhelming. I was particularly glad to have met Etta, a Let’s Get Free member who was also acting as a gallery guide, and to learn about the array of advocacy, outreach, and education initiatives that the group is involved with.
The Empathy art show continues through December 19th. There will also be a Radical Art Market hosted at the Brew House on December 18th and 19th.

What began as an aimless afternoon stroll resulted in eye-opening discovery. It was wonderful to not only learn more about the historic sites in South Side, but also the robust arts and activism work taking place throughout Pittsburgh and right here in my own neighborhood.

Urban Communication: City Branding; Social Networks; Mapping and more

• David Crouch reports in the Guardian that Denmark wants to rebrand part of Sweden as "Greater Copenhagen":

A metropolis needs 4 – 5 million people to be “somebody” on the world stage, Tryding admits, and Copenhagen is the only city in the region whose name has international recognition. Many southern Swedes already treat Copenhagen as their cultural capital, he says, with all the attractions of a big city that is much more accessible than Stockholm. “At least we have the ‘greater’ part of Greater Copenhagen,” he consoles himself. “Without us they are only Copenhagen.”

Sweden’s main business newspaper, Dagens Industri, recently came out in support of the rebranding, noting southern Sweden’s economic weakness and declaring that Copenhagen could become “Skåne’s bridge to the world”. But it also struck a note of caution about the potential loss of regional identity.

• Stateside, Alex Schieferdecker at Urbanophile considers whether Minneapolis-St. Paul can rebrand itself as "the capital of the north":

It’s not clear that the Twin Cities and our hinterland are struggling because of our attachment to the boring Midwest and our reputation as the American manifestation of Hoth. [...] Of course, the problem here is that we’re dealing with a counterfactual. If Minneapolis-Saint Paul had a stronger identity, would we see the results in a better economy?

[...]

But in another sense, it would be a missed opportunity to think of North as simply a marketing campaign. North could (should) be as much about placemaking as place branding. This may be a chance to set the course of the region in a deliberate way. The recent media coverage illustrates these dual objectives, because both Brinkley and Martucci capture important parts of what North is about. The aim is to reinvent the image of our cities and our region—and reinvent the cities and the region themselves.

• Minneapolis resident Jay Walljasper writes at the Project for Public Spaces about how to keep cold weather cities cool:

That’s a problem in an increasingly globalized economy and mobile society when investment, jobs, and young people have more opportunities than ever to roam the world. It’s tough for towns to thrive if people everywhere else think they’re frozen, lonesome tundras where everyone hibernates 3-5 months a year.

And this problem is becoming more acute as the Millennial Generation begins to take over from the Baby Boomers, who are retiring in droves. The Millennials are the first generation that reports they will choose a good place over a good job.

[...]

The Danish architect Jan Gehl, a worldwide authority on how to enliven cities by building great public spaces, notes, “Cultures and climates differ all over the world, but people are the same. They will gather in public if you give them a good place to do it.”

• Mike Isaac in the New York Times recently reported on tech startup Nextdoor, a social network designed to foster community among neighbors:

Nextdoor has slowly built a network of more than 53,000 microcommunities across the United States, all based on local neighborhood boundaries. Nextdoor restricts communication to only those people who live close to one another; users are required to verify their identity and home address upon signing up.

Consider Nextdoor a modern, more attractive version of a community email list service or Yahoo Groups, the popular message board. Users can post neighborhood news, offer items for sale, ask for help finding lost pets or organize a block party.

Nextdoor also works with about 650 local government agencies that can send out citywide alerts on things like utility shutdowns in specific areas, crime alerts or emergency-preparedness tips.

• Dale Mackey and the Daily Yonder writes about a Vermont-based social media platform that helps residents communicate with neighbors:

Front Porch Forum, a hyper-local social-media platform, is operating in 200 towns in Vermont, says founder Michael Wood-Lewis of Burlington. About a third of the residents in each of these communities are using the system, he said.

The forum serves as a place for people to share information, plan neighborhood gatherings, promote local businesses and connect with their neighbors.  But Wood-Lewis says there’s another benefit.

“There’s a somewhat hidden effect that turns out to be the most powerful: over time, people start to feel different about their community.  They start to feel more connected to their neighborhoods and in the loop about what’s going on.”

• The Art & Cartography blog details the Primark Berlin Projection Mapping project:

Dalziel + Pow have moved the play of light onto a physical map where they experiment with different narratives using the terrain of Berlin to abstract and segment their sense of movement. I like the idea that with this being an indoor permanent installation the growth and development of the narratives can evolve and change from the projection mapping unlike many projection mapping spectacles that are single events. It is exciting from a data visualisation point of view to see how they could experiment with this, ‘expect to see dynamic data and live online feeds added in the near future.’ (Dalziel and Pow, 2015).

Dynamic data could be live narratives from geotextual tweets, visual iconography of weather, real time data of subway, air or live visuals with imagery of scenery, architecture that are geotagged within the framed boundaries of the physical map then abstracting into their segments in a realtime collaborative cartophoto-montage.

• At Thinking City, Charles Critchell presents personal experiences with the London tube map:

To think that such a great city as London can be reduced to lines, points and colours is disconcerting, though look a little harder and you soon realise that for many Londoners this is London. Harry Beck, the Tube map’s architect, immortalised an icon below ground to rival those above, whilst the tube would go on to shape the suburbs that define the city as the vast, sprawling entity standing today.

I soon realised that Beck’s map was not only a tool which would enable me to navigate my way around the city, but a gateway to what could turn out to be some interesting experiences, a bit of fun, and who knew what else? Here are a few of those journeys.

• Brittni Brown at The City Fix writes about the power of maps for safer urban mobility:

Constantly evolving technologies like geographic information systems (GIS) are enabling both city planners and law enforcement agencies to better protect citizens. GIS is a powerful data collection and mapping program that allows users to visually represent and analyze detailed information. It has a wide range of applications, and has often been used to map crime in efforts to help law enforcement effectively utilize limited resources.

By combining different datasets into layers of map data, it is possible to overlay various kinds of information and reach surprising conclusions. For instance, by adding incident data from police records, it is possible to determine where and when certain types of crimes are occurring most frequently, and to respond accordingly. Doing so helps to make public transport both more efficient and safe.

• I recently discovered the excellent Maps Mania blog, a rich resource for cartogrophiles and anyone interested in innovative mapping for data or creative expression. To offer just one example: last week they covered the 71 Square Miles map that represents Brooklyn through found trash:

Artist Jennifer Maravillas has been wandering around Brooklyn collecting trash from every neighborhood block. The result of all this litter-picking is a map of the borough made from all of the collected rubbish, called 71 Square Miles.

The finished 10 x 10 foot trash map of Brooklyn is on display at BRIC Arts until September 6th. However, if you can't make it to BRIC Arts, you can still explore the artwork on this Mapbox map. You can even search the map by address, so if you live in Brooklyn you can zoom in on the trash that was found nearest your home.

• You can view the 71 Square Miles map here.

Urban Communication: media infrastructure, neighborhood narratives, rhetoric & rebranding, and more

• In Urban Media Ecology news, several recent studies reported correlations between characteristics of the built environment and human health. A study from the University of Kansas (in my birthplace of Lawrence) found that "neighborhoods that motivate walking can stave off cognitive decline in older adults":

The researcher judged walkability using geographic information systems — essentially maps that measure and analyze spatial data.

“GIS data can tell us about roads, sidewalks, elevation, terrain, distances between locations and a variety of other pieces of information,” Watts said. “We then use a process called Space Syntax to measure these features, including the number of intersections, distances between places or connections between a person’s home and other possible destinations they might walk to. We’re also interested in how complicated a route is to get from one place to another. For example, is it a straight line from point A to point B, or does it require a lot of turns to get there?”

Watts said easy-to-walk communities resulted in better outcomes both for physical health—such as lower body mass and blood pressure—and cognition (such as better memory) in the 25 people with mild Alzheimer’s disease and 39 older adults without cognitive impairment she tracked. She believes that older adults, health care professionals, caregivers, architects and urban planners could benefit from the findings.

• Another research paper from researchers at multiple institutions "suggests that street design may have a larger impact on public health than previously thought":

By studying 24 California cities with an array of street design characteristics and their associated health data, the authors find that living in cities with high intersection density—a measure of compactness—significantly reduces the risk of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease. A full-grid street pattern also is a factor in lower risk of obesity, high blood pressure, and heart disease, as compared with full treelike patterns.

• At CityLab, Richard Florida posted a roundup of recent research studies on the health benefits afforded by walkable communities:

If walkability has long been an “ideal,” a recent slew of studies provide increasingly compelling evidence of the positive effects of walkable neighborhoods on everything from housing values to crime and health, to creativity and more democratic cities.

[...]

Walkability is no longer just an ideal. The evidence from a growing body of research shows that walkable neighborhoods not only raise housing prices but reduce crime, improve health, spur creativity, and encourage more civic engagement in our communities.

• Another CityLab article by Emily Von Hoffman looked at what architecture is doing to your brain:

I spoke with Dr. Julio Bermudez, the lead of a new study that uses fMRI to capture the effects of architecture on the brain. His team operates with the goal of using the scientific method to transform something opaque—the qualitative “phenomenologies of our built environment”—into neuroscientific observations that architects and city planners can deliberately design for. Bermudez and his team’s research question focuses on buildings and sites designed to elicit contemplation: They theorize that the presence of “contemplative architecture” in one’s environment may over time produce the same health benefits as traditional “internally induced” meditation, except with much less effort by the individual.

• As part of a directed study this semester, I've been studying the role of communication infrastructure in urban design, and particularly the parallel developments of mass media and the modern metropolis. Urban explorer Bradley Garrett recently wrote a piece for The Guardian about the massive infrastructure of underground London, including not just tube stations but communication infrastructure including Britain's deepest telephone exchange: 

The urban exploration crew I had worked with, the London Consolidation Crew or LCC, had long graduated from ruins and skyscrapers – it was the city in the city they were after, the secrets buried deep underground where the line between construction site and ruin is very thin indeed. The Kingsway Telephone Exchange was the crème de la crème, more coveted even than abandoned Tube stations or possibly even the forgotten Post Office railway we accessed in 2011.

Kingsway was originally built as a second world war air-raid shelter under Chancery Lane. These deep level shelters were, at one time, connected to the Tube and citizens would have undoubtedly taken refuge here during Luftwaffe bombing runs. In 1949 the tunnels were sold to the General Post Office where they became the termination for the first submarine transatlantic phone cable – the £120m TAT1 project. The system, meant to protect the vital connective tissue of the city in the event of terror-from-the-air (including nuclear attack), stretched for miles. It only had three surface entrances and contained a bar for workers on their off-hours, rumoured to be the deepest in the UK at 60m below the street. Although the government employed a host of people to maintain the tunnels, Kingsway was a spatial secret of state - part a trio of the most secure and sensitive telephone exchanges in Britain, along with the Anchor Exchange in Birmingham and the Guardian Exchange in Manchester.

• These photos of subterranean communication infrastructure contrast with images of above ground cables covering the urban landscape, as featured in this io9 post, "photos from the days when thousands of cables crowded the skies":

Before most cables ran underground, all electrical, telephone and telegraph wires were suspended from high poles, creating strange and crowded streetscapes. Here are some typical views of late-19th century Boston, New York, Stockholm, and other wire-filled cities.

Wires over New York, 1887, via Retronaut, retrieved from <http://tinyurl.com/kb9dns2>

• Joseph Stromberg at Vox recently wrote about the "forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of 'jaywalking'":

Auto campaigners lobbied police to publicly shame transgressors by whistling or shouting at them — and even carrying women back to the sidewalk — instead of quietly reprimanding or fining them. They staged safety campaigns in which actors dressed in 19th century garb, or as clowns, were hired to cross the street illegally, signifying that the practice was outdated and foolish. In a 1924 New York safety campaign, a clown was marched in front of a slow-moving Model T and rammed repeatedly.

This strategy also explains the name that was given to crossing illegally on foot: jaywalking. During this era, the word "jay" meant something like "rube" or "hick" — a person from the sticks, who didn't know how to behave in a city. So pro-auto groups promoted use of the word "jay walker" as someone who didn't know how to walk in a city, threatening public safety.

• William Eric Rinehart at Sweet Talk asks: Did a change in rhetoric give rise to cities?

Between the mega-village and the cities that came later lies the formation of the state. Ultimately, this is the world of stratification buttressed through religion. With it came the creation of differing social groups and distinctions based upon rank or property. Yet, the acceptance of social specialization required a new view of the world, a new rhetoric in the McCloskeyian sense. And once that jump was made, benefits followed. Clustered people allowed for more trade and specialization of work, leading to more wealth, prestige and better equipped armies. While still a brutal world, cities had the potential for stability, but it came at the expense of radical equality.

• Matt Stroud at The Verge recently wrote about the dream and the myth of the paperless city in Chicago:

But you can’t just flip a switch to reverse paper systems in place for hundreds of years, can you? Adobe first released its Portable Document Format nearly 20 years ago, yet many private companies, nonprofit organizations, libraries, law firms, courts — and yes, major city governments such as Chicago’s — have yet to embrace a world reliant on PDFs and devoid of paper records. Mayor Emanuel has agreed to change that. Or at least to try. In 2011, he announced plans to spend $20 million on efficiency improvements including changes to make the city less reliant on paper.

Will Mayor Rahm Emanuel change the way governments deal with paper? Or is the road toward a “completely paperless” government a long way off?

• At URBACT, Stefan Höffken and Chris Haller consider urban planning and the multi-dimensional communication era:

"Because urban planning has always been based on the gathering and exchange of information and – as a democratic process – on communication between different stakeholders, a change in the method of communication has a significant impact on decision-making throughout the process"

[...]

The quote at the beginning of this post was taken out of a paper by Stefan Höffken and Chris Haller, who set out to research how new medias were used for urban planning matters. They are refering to geographer Manuel Castells’ and Clay Shirky‘s work to describe the change from uni-dimentional communication towards a many-to-many exchange sphere that, so Shirky, is on the verge of becoming ubiquitous. Höffken and Haller provide interesting insights in how different tools can serve certain goals and complement each-other by surveying urban projects and institutions or civil society mobilizations on urban matters as different as Tulsa municipality and the Mediaspree campaign in Berlin.

• Emily Badger at the Washington Post reports that Uber is offering cities an olive branch in the form of their customers' trip data:

The company plans to partner first with Boston, sharing quarterly anonymized trip-level data with the city in a model that Uber says will become its national data-sharing policy. The data will include date, time, distance traveled and origin and destination locations for individual trips, identified only by zip code tabulation area to preserve privacy. Once held by cities, this information will be open to records requests, meaning that the public (and researchers) will have access to it, too.

Such data could help cities keep tabs on Uber and, for example, which neighborhoods the company is serving. Uber says, though, that it's primarily offering the data so that cities can better understand themselves.

A redesigned Los Angeles parking sign, retrieved from <http://tinyurl.com/nu5tr2z>

• Rosie Cima at priceonomics recently wrote about a designer's war on misleading parking signs:

Sylianteng first tried to redesign parking signs when she was living in LA and applying to grad school, in a project she called “To Park or Not to Park.” She reduced the usual jumble of signs and regulations to a single, holistic panel, which looked a lot like a Google Calendar – it was a grid of days of the week, broken into hours. The blocks of time when a parking spot was valid she shaded green, the blocks of time it was invalid she shaded red. She also simplified the rules she illustrated, working off the principle that people would much rather adhere to an overly restrictive regulation than get a parking ticket.

[...]

Her prototypes provoked a lot of commentary, discussion, and praise. She used this feedback to improve her designs. She printed out new prototypes, and taped those up. The feedback validated some of her central assumptions, among them: (1) a lot of current parking signs were very confusing, and (2) people didn’t care why they could or couldn’t park somewhere, they just didn’t want to be ticketed.

• At Tropics of Meta, South El Monte Arts Posse posted about mapping community narratives in El Monte and South El Monte:

The writing of social history needs to keep in mind the motivations and individual agency of the people participating in events as they happen. In interview after interview, people were aware of the larger structural forces, and yet made choices and actions in contradiction to expectations. Again and again we spoke with people who beat the odds, who pushed back against racism, and took it upon themselves to change circumstances and in many cases succeeded.

• Arwa Mahdawi at The Guardian reports on neighborhood rebranding in London:

Similar semantic shifts are being attempted, with varying degrees of success, throughout the rest of London. Intrepid developers have discovered “Tyburnia”, an undervalued stretch of real estate between Paddington Station and Hyde Park. Meanwhile, the “Knowledge Quarter” is an attempt to rid King’s Cross of its association with prostitution by emphasising the new preponderance of cerebral institutions there. You could call it “brain-washing”. The Knowledge Quarter, incidentally, is one of 21 “Quarters” in London; there are also a dozen or so new “Villages”. Neighbourhood rebranding is often the linguistic leg of gentrification and, as such, follows a predictable pattern: “Villages” assert their legitimacy by emphasising community, while “Quarters” lend a gravitas to whatever noun they follow. Both have a cleansing effect on the associations that came before them.

• At NextCity, Nathan C. Martin considers why art, not Google, could revolutionize WiFi:

Remember a few years ago when television went digital and everyone had to get adapters or new TV sets? When that happened, what once were television channels became simply channels, a bulk of empty bandwidth that could host any variety of transmission. The Federal Communications Commission named it Super WiFi. The policies to regulate it are yet to be written, and a chorus is imploring the FCC to leave a large part of the spectrum open, or “unlicensed,” instead of auctioning it off. Those advocates tend to refer to the spectrum in spatial terms — a group of Stanford University economists likened the spectrum to a public park, a resource everyone should have access to. Mary Ellen Carroll speaks of it similarly. “It’s like public land,” she says. “It’s like Yosemite.”

• Finally, Emanuel Maiberg at Motherboard looks at homelessness in SimCity, and whether it is a bug or feature:

SimCity's homeless people are represented as yellow, two-dimensional, ungendered figures with bags in tow. Their presence makes SimCity residents unhappy, and reduces land value. Like many other players, Bittanti discovered the online discussions when he was searching for a way to deal with them.

At first, players wondered if they were having so much problems with the homeless in their cities because of a bug in the game. Like many of 2014's big-budget games that launched in broken or barely-functional states, SimCity originally would only work if players connected to EA's servers, which repeatedly crashed under the load of players. It seemed possible that the homeless problem in SimCity was simply a mistake.

"Has anyone figured out a easy way to handle the homeless ruining those beautiful parks you spend so much money on?" asks one player on EA' site. "Create jobs, either through zoning or upgrading road density near industry, that helped me a lot," another player suggests.