an update from your urban geographer

A teaser for my poster-presentation at the upcoming Urban Ecologies conference. Read more below.

Dear readers,

This post finds my back in my home-town Toronto, after a relatively short, but very enriching period of time in Amsterdam. I have many (20ish) essays and observational posts about Amsterdam that will be coming out as a series over the summer. Time and space will bring my mind clarity, and I will be able to engage with the subject matter, explicitly as it relates to Toronto (as my point of view is inescapable, and Toronto is a very important point of comparison for my projects, past present future).

Last I spoke with you, I was curious about the 30 hour bus ride I was to be embarking on between Amsterdam and Rome.  Here are answers to some of those questions:

• Who will be the other passengers?

A combination of Italian folks, young budget travellers, and people from Ghana (!?). I was the only person who was on the bus all the way from Amsterdam to Rome.

• Will it be a double-decker bus?

It was not a double decker bus, to my chagrin. The view from the regular windows was nevertheless spectacular.

• How many towns will we be stopping in? For how long?

We stopped in Den Haag, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, a highway rest stop in Luxembourg, Metz, Nancy, Strasbourg, the border of Switzerland, Milan, Bologna, and Rome. I had never heard of Metz or Nancy, and I was happy to experience them honestly. The stops were long enough for me to get off the bus, and “be” in the places.

• Will we be driving under, or over the Swiss Alps?

A combination. Between the tunnels you are, indeed, nestled in the mountains.

• Will it be dark outside while we’re driving through the Alps?

The deepness of night began to fade slowly in the middle of the Alps. The outlines of the mountains against the increasingly blue sky was spectacular. Sun rise came, revealing the full blown mountain landscape. I was thrilled. After several months in the Netherlands, the landscape was incredibly novel, and I almost couldn’t process how small the villages looked, stunted by the mountain ranges behind them.

• Will Italy be hot?

It was hot. I also now understand the link between the font Times New Roman and the city of Rome.

• Will i know when i’m in a different country?

I didn’t sleep much, and watched each country become the other — marked by signs.

__________

I am excited to be back in Toronto. There is so much going on here, and its Tall-rontoness is not limited to the downtown core. In fact, I have not been south of Bloor St since my return, perhaps revealing the truth of the suburban nature of my life-paths here.

My suburban adventures most recently brought me to #NYC (also known as North York Centre). I am amazed by the hustle of this place. It is a real Place. There is energy, and it feels good. The city that is being built is of a wholly different nature than downtown Toronto. This is no-B.S., anti-nostalgic, 21st century urbanism. The scale is undeniably huge, but it is a city, nonetheless. The scale reminded me of Manitoba, and honesty. I think the heart and soul of present-day Toronto exists here, without any filers of nostalgia or envy induced by other cities. The question is, however, will the independent survive here? There have been essays written  before about the importance of preserving the non-chain retail that remains along Yonge Street. The pressure of rent must be spectacular – will there be any semblance of place-rooted business here in 10 years? Let’s hope area’s community groups are successful in their efforts.

Yonge and Sheppard – actually a nice place

This little store front doesn’t stand a chance to a proposed condo development. Or does it?

My time finds me now working on my presentation for the Urban Ecologies Conference next week. I have created a studio in the attic of my parents house, high in the canopy of Toronto’s special forest ecology. I am arguing that Toronto is in Carolinia, its bioregion, and that we need to include this in the story of the city to make it a better place. That’s the short-version. The longer is to come in a future post.

Until then,

Your Urban Geographer.

banner archive

Dear readers,

The Urban Geographer has been through a lot of development since its humble first post in January 2011. Since then, I have used this space as a platform for observations, theories, landscape architecture exercises and political activism, and am grateful for your readership and loyalty through the convoluted and through the clear.

I have detected a shift in the blog, toward a more focused and less rough approach to communicating ideas. I sense a wider audience emerging and an ability to use this blog as a tool and catalyst for greater projects.

I would like to formally mark this growth, this evolution and shift with a brand new banner!

The new banner is sleeker, more colourful and trendy. Yes, it’s still a skyline — easy and over used urban imagery — but, I’m just so gosh-darn attracted to it as a symbol of the urban. In the imageability of a city, the skyline is one of the most important symbols. This is especially true in my home-city of Toronto (Tall-ronto), which is experiencing the largest rate of highrise construction in North America.

And speaking of Tall-ronto, you might have noticed that I’ve dropped the Montreal and Halifax skylines from the banner. This is not because these places are no longer important to me – they are. My heart remains in Halifax, my beginnings as an urbanist are firmly Montrealais — but my travels have brought me to many cities, and the lessons I’ve learnt from them are fundamentally incorporated into my approach as an Urban Geographer – so, to simplify things, I’ve chosen to focus on the Toronto skyline. It is, after all, as city of the now – and, not to mention, I will be returning there this June to present at the Urban Ecologies conference, and reckon I’ll be setting up some sort of a nest there for an undetermined period of time…

And, for the sake of history, let’s look at the evolution of the Urban Geographer banners:

The first banner (January, 2011) was a rough, pixelated and sloppy mashing of the Toronto and Montreal skylines – cities that then formed the basis of my urban experiences at that time.

The second banner (July, 2011) was a much more elegant, hand drawn skyline that also included Halifax, as I had just moved there for the first time.

Readers will be happy to know that the tagline of the blog “let’s read the city, together!” remains unchanged. The project of urban literacy remains central to the motivations of The Urban Geographer.

See also Banner Archive (July, 2011)

your urban geographer

see also ::::::::

on-repeat

I spend a lot of time, especially these days interning at the Pop-Up City, reading blogs about cities, planning, architecture and design.

This post is dedicated to those statements that I see constantly repeated in the urbanism blogosphere. They are repeated so much that they are taken for granted, and for fact.

I invite us to challenge the simplicity of a phrase used too much. We all rely on a certain economy of thought, but vagueness when it comes to argument is good to avoid. I know the blogosphere isn’t the place for thorough referencing and citation (I am also rely on these statements) but, let’s be active and look for a bigger story that could be behind these apparently pre-known ideas in urbanism.

zuid to noord: life in amsterdam

Readers,

Your Urban Geographer is now based in Amsterdam: living in and thinking about the vastly urbanized Netherlands. There is no wilderness in the Netherlands. Rural areas are carefully managed and occupy a small space between one city and another, especially in the Ranstad (the Dutch conurbation consisting of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, the Hague, Utrecht and the towns, suburbs and farms in between – they function as one huge city).

Beyond walking with my head up, alert and vibing, I will be up to a number of projects that might peak your interests in urban geography. They’ve certainly peaked mine.

❍ I am interning at Golfstromen, an urban design/marketing/creative firm based in Amsterdam Noord. They are the folks responsible for the blog the Pop-Up City, and I will be writing for them, and researching some projects. I also will, hopefully, design and implement some sort of “urban intervention” with a fellow intern and interaction designer. More on that later… For now, expect cross posting from the Pop-Up City about various projects, books and creative works that use urban space in some novel way.

❍ I am also, possibly, going to be “interning” with the Mobiators. Their Mobiation project involves a house that can fold-up into itself, becoming a small box. The Moby 1 is currently situated in a small park in Watergraafsmeer, a small suburb just outside of Amsterdam. The structure is lovely, equipped with large windows, an elevated bed, a wood stove, and three cute dogs. Calanne and Geert are inspiring, honest, and creative folk, who I look forward to helping out.

❍ Straight-vibing. Amsterdam is a beautiful, pleasant city. A lot of thought has gone into the design of this place, and I look forward to simply experiencing it. Dutch design may not be as efficient as German or Japanase, but it has a certain humanity to it, a cozy familiarity that is easy to get used to. I have already biked around a large part of this city, experiencing it at cycle-speed. I live in Rivierenbuurt in the Zuid (south), and must travel through the entire city to work in Amsterdam Noord, which is just across the IJ from Centraal Station. I have to take a quick ferry to get to North – and it is a whole different world up there. 10 minutes from bustling Central Amsterdam, it is quiet, rural-feeling, in a post industrial way. My internship is located in a building full of architects and designers, and I look forward to exploring the creative scene in Amsterdam from this vantage point. Biking through Rivierenbuurt is also quite lovely: it is built with an approchable grandiose-ness. Its monotonous form undulates gracefully as it repeats itself. It is best experienced by bike: slicing through the repetitive architecture creates a lovely swelling effect.

I feel fortunate to have these two ways of experiencing this city: the fancy design and marketing world of Golfstromen, and the anti-capitalist, DIY ethos of the Mobiators.

I look forward to sharing my thoughts about Amsterdam with you, readers, formally through the Pop-Up City, and informally through posts on the Urban Geographer.

sackville highway sign

DISCLAIMER::::THIS MAY NOT HAPPEN

Exciting news, dear readers!

All this while, as your Urban Geographer, I’ve been thinkin’ bout the urban landscape – it turns out I’ve been shaping the urban landscape too!

That’s right, loyal followers. I am excited to announce that in a to-be-determined future date, my photo will become Sackville, New Brunsick’s highway sign!

The highway sign currently looks like this (credit to google street view, as usual)  :::::::::::::::::::::

And will soon be transformed to this image, featured below (in low res), originally appearing in a post from last summer. The photo’s rights-to-use have been formally purchased by the Town of Sackville.

The photo is of bright August day in 2011, when Sackville’s main thoroughfare, Bridge Street was transformed to indie-rock paradise by the annual SappyFest. On a journalistic bend for an upcoming Spacing Atlantic article, I climbed the roof of Tidewater books for this sweet-summer aerial view.

I am grateful that the Town of Sackville got in touch with me to use the image – my respect to this special place deepens, my connection to it expands. I am also thoroughly happy to be an official, paid-Urban Geographer, and take with that the great responsibility it brings.

See you on the highway!

the QaRt abides

Several months ago, your Urban Geographer culture jammed his way through the streets and bathroom-stalls of Tall-ronto, QaRt coding  his and all his friends’ faces wherever and anywhere.

Some thoughts since then:

QR codes are on the wane — I think. Already there is technology that allows one to scan an image, any image, and that is enough to link online, to a website. We’re there already, folks — one step closer to the Internet-Reality, a total World-Wide-Web-geography, heading toward a future where the city blends into the internet, without anyone even realizin’… yet the QR code persists as an icon of these transitional days. Perhaps we aren’t ready to accept that anything, everything? might somehow trigger the internet. Another case of cultural inertia. Perhaps those black and white pixels are a source of comfort in this time of great transformation — they keep it real, somehow, contained — it’s okay, because only the old fashioned pixelated thing will lead us to the internet — the internet is kept at bay, right?

Another thought:

QR codes seem to be incredibly popular in Toronto, but not in other cities. Case in point: Halifax. Another one? NYC including Brooklyn.

Well, those are the only cities I’ve been to since my 2012 Toronto-times.

But it does indeed seem odd that not even New York would have QR-fever. It looks like we’ve got e a place-specific technology fetish, and readers, I’m not at all surprised with where it’s located. What with Toronto being the city of Now — the economic frontier of the Western World — it’s no longer  that old 20th century maxim, “I’m headin’ West baby” only the fresh new “I’m goin’ West but no further than Tall-ronto” kind of economy frontier. It only makes sense that such a current technology, you know, the one that links physical reality with the internet could be squarely found in the gridded streets of T-o-r-o-n-t-o.

Also!

The internet has leaked several QaRt Code spottings my way. They’ve come my way by way of my formal online social networks which leads me to the conclusion that many people have snapped photos of  (or simply talked about) those devilish smiling pixelated faces and shared them with their friends. 

Here are some of the spottin’s I’ve spotted:

From facebook:

And another, from facebook:

And here’s one… from Twitter !

 

 

 

And one more… from Facebook

 

 

 

 

(Leading photo is from my brother’s facebook…)

 

 

this new internet-geography

…  scan it to see what I mean …

there’s something to be said

// There’s something to be said,

 

about a geographer who loses his map //

site stats

A fascinating part of having a blog is vibing on all the obscure places far and near visitors have come from. With tools such as Google Analytics, the fine grain of detail in the information regarding who is coming to my site, from where, and for how long is amazing.

Thank you world, for visiting the urban geographer!

Site stats from statcounter.com show urban geographer readers in clusters in the eastern seaboard and north and west Europe – precisely the places I write about most.