Category: Urbanology

Nov 05 2010

Why I like things Italian: the coffee edition

This is the second in a irregular series of articles I plan to post about our trip to Italy this past summer. Although, you might notice, if you read them, that they are as much about urban life here in Vancouver as they are about what I saw and did in Italy. However, if you agree that one of the singular values of travel is what it teaches us about ourselves and where we’re from, then please read on.

In Italy a “coffee” is an espresso. They only call it “espresso” on their sandwich-boards in the most touristic areas. Otherwise, if you ask for “espresso” they might look at you with rolled eyes. They’re probably thinking “what do you *think* this big chrome machine on the counter is for?” That espresso won’t be expensive, either. It should only cost 80 or 90 eurocents as long as you stand up at the bar. If you sit down, particularly in tourist areas, it’ll cost twice as much or more.

An awful lot of North American writing about Italy and Italian coffee is along the lines of “the coffee is way better than what you get at home”, but if you live in Vancouver (or (probably) in the centre of most of the other progressive cities on this continent) your Italian espresso is quite possibly not the best coffee you’ve ever tasted or even close to it. I’m lucky to work in an area with some of the best coffee I’ve ever come across. Two or three of the coffee bars I can walk to from my office will reliably draw for me an espresso that’s better than anything else I’ve tasted.

But, that said, I can see where the travel writers get the idea that Italian coffee is so good.  Most of the coffee you can get in downtown Vancouver and which most people seem to be drinking just isn’t that good. The big coffee-chains use beans that are too bitter for a good espresso. I suppose they are optimized for heavy creamy lattes and from what I can tell, that’s what the overwhelming majority of customers order there. Many of the small independent cafe’s I’ve been to are, unfortunately, not turning out very good coffee either. I’ve heard it said that small local cafes are often “$250,000 qualifying- businesses” run by entrepreneur-class immigrants. They may well have a passion for business but not necessarily a passion for drawing a good espresso. I realize I’m tarring these folks with a broad brush but I don’t think the majority of them whose coffee I’ve tasted are dedicated to producing exquisite espresso, and it shows.

So, the coffee impression in Italy isn’t necessarily that it’s the best espresso but it is that very good espresso is not a hit-and-miss proposition and you can get it for cheap. And cheap anything is hard to come by in Italy.

There is also a strong cultural identity in Vancouver and Italy related to the design and atmosphere of cafes, but I’m going to discuss that in a future post about design.

Nov 01 2010

Streets of Rome, 2010

white-package

The White Package

Oct 20 2010

Photo comment of the day

orange-jackets

These tourists, on their way to see the library, I presume, are breaking two of my cardinal rules for not being marked from blocks away:

1. Don’t wear bright colours.

2. Don’t dress up in the same thing as your travelling partner.

Sep 08 2010

Why we can’t learn from Italy to fix our broken neighbourhood designs.

We went to Italy for almost a month. It was great. And tiring: the usual trying-to-fit-too-many-things-in kind of holiday. It’s kind of a crazy, crowded place. Even though it’s not necessarily a small country, it’s long-thinness makes it seemed crowded. The mountains running down the middle don’t exactly space things out. But, for whatever reason,  I respond to so many things Italian: coffee, motorbikes, roadies decked out full regalia, driving small cars on tight little roads. A very powerful thing for me is the very sleek Italian-moderne design ethic that so often is layered over the very old, medieval foundation of so much of their country. And last, but not least, so many of the Italian towns and neighbourhoods we toured had little town squares (piazzas) in the centre of their neighbourhoods.
Cathedral square, Orvieto

Cathedral square, Orvieto

I was reading La Bella Figura about how piazza’s are the centre of Italian public life and realized that there’s no where to go from our neighbourhood that’s part of my urban life. Will construction on Fraser street (at 39th or at 30th) help? Am I dreaming to think it would?  And even if it’s something useful there, a cafe that people gather at, it’s going to be on a busy street. It’s not that piazza’s are always quiet, they aren’t. They can also be clogged with cars. But they’re in the *centre* of the community. Our neighbourhood quandrants that are bounded by arterials mean that the gathering places are at the edges of the neighbourhood: on the arterials. This is an inherent problem, I’d say.

The real solution would have been the corner stores which were once scattered throughout neighbourhoods like mine. If those stores still existed, they could become neighbourhood centres with the simple addition of a cafe and a table on the side walk. But there’s an inherent problem with that, too: our Vancouver neighbourhoods are nowhere near as homogeneous as they once were. While this is a huge advantage for Vancouver as a whole, it’s a problem to sustain a little business that needs support from the whole neighbourhood. The fact that those folks who don’t respond to the kind of little store/cafe I’m imagining can hop in their car and take their business somewhere else is the solution to the lack of homogeneity but the death knell for small neighbourhood stores, especially when they aren’t on the main arterial streets. Which brings us back to the problem of sitting at a sidewalk cafe table on a busy street.  And, of course, the silence of my back deck is very restful and probably very good for all of us as an antidote to constant urban noise. So, you can imagine the complaining from adjacent neighbours if a little corner store put tables on the sidewalk and people sat there talking until 10pm on a summer night. This probably tends to push these activities out onto the arterial streets.
Which brings me right back to my problem of finding a way to “centre” a community with some kind of public (or semi-public) space. I just don’t know how we can do it with our current streetcar suburbs that make up almost all of Vancouver’s neighbourhoods. And if we can’t do it, it means we travel to different neighbourhoods for different needs and we become, in affect, Urban Nomads.
Feb 04 2010

What big events can do for us.

There’s been a lot of talk in these parts about how damaging and disastrous the Olympics are shaping up to be. Most of this talk seems to really be centred on the immediate problems of traffic, road closures, security threats (real and imagined), cost, and so on.  Holding the Olympics here required us to make a deal with an organization who’s ideas about democaracy and civic participation are, to be polite, considerably different than our own. I think the only way to tell whether the Olympics will really be worth it is to look at the whole idea of this kind of big event and what we can get out of it in the long term.

I grew up here in Vancouver before Expo 86 and I’ve learned some things about our economy, urban culture, and civic social life since then and how they differ between the late 70’s/early 80’s and now.
Vancouver was a very provincial city well into the 1980’s. Historically, the wealth we created was sent away in the form of profits for outside interests who controlled our economy. These interests were sometimes European but usually from Montreal and Toronto. You can contrast this with Chicago. Chicago is not much older than Vancouver but it was much more the centre of its own economy and therefore the wealth generated there stayed there. If you ever travel to Chicago, it shows. The art and architecture are both examples of a city that was able to, to some extent set the terms for its own future.

Vancouver culture and social life was a curious mix of old time pioneer excess and the constricted mores of the Presbetyrians who ran the place for most of the 20th century. While we had some successful cultural phases (mid-century modern architecture and late 70’s punk are two that come to mind), none of them were enough to create our own urban culture or change our economic or cultural position within Canada.

After Expo 86 we began to see ourselves as a post-industrial metropolis and we had some ‘world-city’ currency to capitalize on it. Although some of our most significant land and housing development since then has been carried out by national and international development countries, we’ve been able to dictate, at least to some extent, the form of that development in a way that helps us achieve some of the goals we’ve set for ourselves. “World city” is a misunderstood term but there is a reasonable stable academic understanding of it. By most measures, Vancouver is a 3rd tier world city. We’ll never be New York or Tokyo (1st tier) or even as important as Toronto (2nd) but expo 86 allowed us to be visible to others around the world on our own terms, not based on what Upper Canada thought we should be or be seen as.

Big events let us create an image of ourselves that we can purvey to outsiders. We can use a big event to define ourselves to the rest of the world. Image and perception are, in some ways, quite important. They are a way to tell people around the world what we think and what we stand for. These messages are not short term but are something we define over longer periods of time as we mature. These are not necessarily commercial messages, either. Both the short-term irritation of the Olympics (and having to deal with the authoritarian IOC) and the mid-term hassle of financing the Olympics (assuming the doom & gloom debt predictions are true) could well be worth the cost if we are able to use the attention and opportunity of this event to continue to build our own urban culture and economy in a way that we think works best for us.

This opportunity to communicate what we think our city is to the rest of the world is critical to Vancouver because we can not rely on our own nation to communicate our message our way. Essentialy, we never get an even break from our nation or the cultural & economic “empire” we live in if we rely on them to communicate to the world about us. The message will always be delivered on their terms and from their perspective. Canada’s messages to the world are intrinsically linked to Toronto’s vision of itself as Canada’s Primate City and any message they send about the rest of the country is conflicted by that vision. In addition, we are, an odd outpost on the edge of the American cultural and economic “empire” and their messages about us continually seem to reflect that.

Even the original history of British Columbia and Vancouver Island reflects this conflicted and inaccurate National imagery. The Hudson Bay Company (the original colonizer of Vancouver Island), under the Governorship of James Douglas was a surprisingly progressive entity that seemed to respect and, in some ways, promote the diversity of the early inhabitants (both colonial and native). This history is nothing like that of the colonialists who took over central and eastern canada and yet “national” histories of British Columbia do not seem to understand or convey this fact.

One obvious example of what can be acheived when we are able to disseminate our image of ourselves to the world is the ‘Vancouver model” of urban development which was the result of the aforementioned land and housing development carried out by international companies who were willing to adhere to, at the time, unique requirements for urban development in North America.

In the future, we may look at the current campaign to make Vancouver the “Greenest City” as another example of this successful city-building. Only time will tell if this will have the same impact as “Vancouverism” or whether it will be something else that comes along in the next few years.

There is one last, very important, reason that we need a big event to help us communicate with the world. Our “Vancouver Experiment” in urban development isn’t finished and we need continue to travel our own path to solve the remaining problems.

The basic North American land-development model is based on cheap land and a low overall metropolitan population. The result is a housing system based on single-family dwellings and a transportation system based on the private car. We’re at a mid-point in the evolution to a better urban model which should make us a better city for the future. Our better urban model should help us withstand the end of oil, allow us to build an inclusive, safe, peaceful urban culture, and attract economic activity that lets us pay the bills. But we’re suffering from the fact that we’re not finished. We don’t yet have enough well-functioning urban neighbourhoods so housing is way too expensive. We aren’t the most expensive city in the continent but our current housing stock isn’t sufficient with these current land values. We need to continue to “urbanize” our inner suburbs (which includes much of the City of Vancouver) so that there is housing and community for all. Our Metropolitan population itself is now too large for our low overall housing density so our transportation system doesn’t function properly. This is exacerbated by our land characteristics (our buildable land is hemmed-in by water, mountains, and the border) so relying on car travel from the suburbs creates too many choke points and the suburban density does not support mass transit.

We have to keep going to make sure that the benefits of ‘Vancouverism’ are available to everyone who’s here and the only way we’ve been able so far to do that is to get our message out to the rest of the world so that we can ensure that our terms of engagement with the rest of the world, whether cultural, economic, or social, are based on our values.

Jan 31 2010

The Propaganda War is heating up

Wow. The Olympics Propaganda war is in full swing.

On one side this: From the Guardian.

And on the other, this : From the NY Times

Jan 04 2010

Amazing richmond

It’s amazing but little old “ditchmond” actually has real bike lanes with a little curb between the cars and the bikes and a smooth transition from roadway to bike lane and back. this all on their prime street: No. 3 Road. Why couldn’t Vancouver do this on Cambie instead of the minimal painted lanes they just put in?

Nov 25 2009

What’s bugging me about the Canada Line

I’ve been riding transit more than usual this fall and it’s been mostly the “Canada Line” subway from Oakridge to Georgia St. and back with occasional stops at most of the stations along the way. It’s a bit of love/hate thing. They’re “real” metro cars, I suppose. Reasonably comparable to the cars on the new line in Munich, for example. There’s been lots of talk. Everyone says it’s scandalous that the station platforms are too short so they can’t expand but that’s a red herring. Modern train systems can run with very short intervals between trains. That’s how they’ll up the capacity.

No, it’s not the short trains, it’s the crappy, cheap, unfriendly station designs that basically say, “you aren’t worth spending the money on”. Look at this metro station in Lisbon. Now *that* is what metro stations are supposed to look like. Lisbon, in little old poor-cousin-of-Europe Portugal can build grand metro stations that tell the passengers that they’re worth something. Us? No, we get the cheapest possible small cramped station with the least possible exits, several of them with no adequate bus transfer zones and no alternate exits on the other side of the street (even though there are *emergency* exits on the far side, but no exits that people can actually use).

To top it off, translink had the brilliant idea of re-routing the busses from South Delta and White Rock so they dump all their passengers onto the Canada line at rush hour. Brilliant, the service is immediately full without  attracting any new transit riders and no cars have been taken off the street. Thanks, BC Liberals, for ramming this through!

Oct 22 2009

No iPhone. No cell phone of any kind.

I just handed back my iphone. It belonged to work and I changed jobs and I don’t get to keep it. So, now I’m without a cell phone for the 1st time in ten years. Will I survive?

I’m not sure. However, when I got the iphone in June I kept my old cell number by porting it to a voip provider who have very cheap, pay-as-you-go rates. This provider has a feature that emails me everytime someone calls and leaves a voice mail and, in fact, the email contains the voicemail as an attachment.

So, I’ve carried a wifi-enabled handheld device for years. In fact, at the moment I’ve just re-commissioned my old Palm Lifedrive and that device can usually connect in a wifi cafe and see the emails. Whether it can listen to the attachments, I’m not sure, but there’s also a voip app for the lifedrive which lets me actally make calls. But at the moment the lifedrive microphone isn’t working well and the audio from my calls is inaudible.

Anyway, there’s more work to do on this front and who knows, if I get this all sorted, maybe I won’t need no stinking cell phone!

Oct 10 2009

Dogs: the great urban glue

Dogs make friends