atlas(t)

to sprawl or not to sprawl

here's an interesting broadcast from To the Best of Our Knowledge from a few months ago.

(Listen to it here or click through below for more info)

TO SPRAWL OR NOT TO SPRAWL

Subdivisions. Industrial Parks. Strip Malls. Gridlock. Sprawl is socially unequal, environmentally irresponsible, and aesthetically ugly. Right? In this hour of To the Best Of Our Knowledge, we'll look at the costs and – YES – the benefits of suburban sprawl. Because maybe, just maybe, sprawl is a good thing.

SEGMENT 1: Joel Hirschhorn is the author of "Sprawl Kills: How Blandburbs. Steal Your Time, Health and Money." He obviously thinks urban sprawl is a terrible idea and tells Steve Paulson all the reasons why.

 SEGMENT 2: Robert Bruegmann makes the case for the opposite point of view in his book "Sprawl: A History." He says societies have always grown and ours looks the way it does because suburbs represent the way Americans like to live. Also, urban sprawl is a staggering problem in China as a result of the on-going Chinese industrial revolution. Photographer Edward Burtynsky traveled to China to document its "Manufactured Landscapes," and film-maker Jennifer Baichwal documented his trip in her film of the same name. Baichwal talks with Steve Paulson about the scale of China's ecological problems and the beauty of Burtynsky's images.

SEGMENT 3: Novelist Tom Perrotta reads from "Little Children" and "The Abstinence Teacher," and talks with Anne Strainchamps about life in the suburbs, where everything is nice, and nobody wants a pedophile to move into the neighborhood.

I'll definitely need to check out some of those books.

girlicious contestants' geography knowledge

i have to admit, dumb as it was, I watched The Pussycat Dolls Present Girlicious religiously.

Why that's a painful admission should be immediately apparent in this video.

It's not just the ignorance of young people who are mostly just out of high school and therefore should have those geography lessons they clearly never got still fresh in their minds. What bugs me the most about this is: these girls are invited onto this show, and held up as paragons of sexy girlhood, and given the ultimate prize of fame and minor-goddess status if they win. But their apparent lack of intelligence and educational achievement are considered not only fair game, but not at all an impediment to their being minor goddesses.

We can laugh at their ignorance without it at all impinging on our enjoyment of their ... er ... talents.

But then, if Hillary Clinton's campaign didn't make our society's overwhelming sexism clear, then how is anyone going to be able to see through this pretty blatant example?

map tattoos, part ii

Image above found here.

i clearly haven't been paying much attention.

In my my map tattoos post from April of 2006, I wrote that "Putting the map onto you, far from removing your control of its contents, actually intensifies your control of the map's contents by personalizing them, making them not just a part of your claim of identity, but an actual part of your body." Then I asked, if that was the case then why weren't there more map tattoos out there.

The answer is: there are.

First of all, the tattoo post was hands down this blog's most popular post evarrr, featuring as it did a colored map of the world on a model's ass ... clearly not a tattoo, but meant to look like one. For a while the photo of the world map on the woman's ass was turning up on the second page of google image search. There was a point, when my blog went into remission, that I was getting a thousand hits a day just from people google-image-searching "tattoos."

I hadn't know people were so hungry for tattoo ideas. I'm glad--for the thousandth time--that I don't have one.

Since then, folks have been sending me pointers--both by email and in comments--to their own map tattoos and I haven't even been noticing all that much. But clearly it's time to update, and post some of these images. And maybe look again at the analysis.

So this one, to the left, is the first one I was sent, about a year ago, by email. Not to be mean, but I wouldn't have known it was a map if the emailer hadn't told me. She also didn't specify what the map was of, just that she planned to wrap another map around it.

I hope she's well on her way to finding the right map tattoo, and hope that some of the images below will give her inspiration.

This one is via Strange Maps. The woman depicted, Britta Oelschlaeger, is "a fan of [her hometown of] Hannover’s football team and ... completely crazy about maps.”

In comments, Desiree "got this cool map tattoo done by Jim at River of Ink in Appleton." It's on her back. Apparently, her lower back. It's more old school than the butt tattoos, but then those probably aren't real tattoos.

Nick Benson of ottergoose.net got this done on vacation in Hawai'i

I've now got the 8 primary islands of Hawaii on display for anyone who lifts of my sleeve**. The three islands I've been to are shaded red. Assuming that I'll be back to visit the remaining islands (and need to get more of the islands filled in), I asked the artist which shade of red he used. The answer? Monthly red. How classy... at least it's easy to remember.

Clearly whoever named that color has never seen anyone's "monthlies."

Yoni, who is apparently more of the lingam sort, has the whole world on his forearm.

So much for the commenters. My previously rather disappointing google search for "map tattoo" turned up a much richer store this time, including the new ass map tattoo at the top of this post (which also appears to be fake. And what is it with ass tattoos on women?). Other treasures:

From the URL at the top of the guy's back, this appears to be a fake put together by a site specifically created to mashup funky tattoo images. But I could be wrong. If you have the time/inclination to dig, please correct me in comments.

Google image search picked up this much cooler, but equally fake looking, underground map here. Also no info.

Nebraska's Creighton University has a website where they posted a spread of students with tattoos. The very cool, seemingly small one above is from

Kevin Miles,
Arts & Sciences senior

How many tattoos?
A solid map of the world on the upper inside of his right forearm.
A compass and sun with the words “Adventure” and “Explore”.
Why get tattoos?
Had both tattoos done while in Thailand with his roommate two years ago. He loves to travel and wants to join the Peace Corps when he graduates.
Do people know you have tattoos?
Most people do since they are in pretty visible spots

Apparently, Napoleon's Australia pirate map tattoo sort of shows the extent of our trip. Whatever that means. This is creepily Pillow Bookish, in its visual invitation to peel it off when the wearer is dead.

And here's a more patriotic map of Australia.

Alejandro uses the three dimensional nature of his body (there's a back and a side!) to depict the world, in shiny shininess. If the shape weren't so familiar, it might look like a medical photo of a skin disease. (see also Kevin Miles.)

Tatiana's political map of Brazil is sexier, I think, and not because she's wearing a bikini under it.

But I think the pièce de résistance is this article about Brangelina, which tells us that not only does Ange have "over a dozen tattoos, including the geographical co-ordinates for all four of her children" (begging one to ask: geographic coordinates for what? Where they were born? Where they were jacked adopted from? Where they are right this second, Mrs. Weasley-style?) but this tattoo, depicted to the left, on Brad's broadening flank, is supposedly a diagram of the levees of New Orleans. The article sez:

Brad's unusual back tattoo comprises groupings of horizontal black lines, with bizarre boxed shapings below.

The strangest combination appears to be inspired by a map of the levees in New Orleans, which was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 when the systems failed.

More than 1,800 people died in the storm and during the rescue debacle which followed, mostly the poor, sick and disadvantaged. Costing around $81billion, it was also the costliest disaster in U.S. history.

Since Hurricane Katrina, Brad and Angelina have bought a home in the Louisiana city and the actor has been heavily involved in local building projects.

So, what about map tattoos and identity? Well, let's mention a few really obvious things first. Tattoos are by now pretty much universally accepted in the industrialized West, except in certain subcultures. So de rigueur are they, in fact, that the internet has helpfully provided us with multiple tattoo design sites and blogs (many of which provided the tattoo photos above) designed specifically to help people find tattoos they haven't already seen on everyone and their little brother.

Second: maps and mapping are really, really popular at the mo'. I'm not going to go into this right now. I'm planning a post on it later, when I've had the time to read some more of the books that have come out recently about mapping 'n' stuff. But it is; it's in the air, mapping. Third: in the past two years, Web 2.0 has gone from an industry catchphrase to an embarrassing anachronism, and everyone knows how to post pictures online now. So the above two obvious things might mean that we have a sudden spate of map tattoos, but it also might be that the people with map tattoos are just posting them now, where they weren't before.

And some of these, like the subway maps, which might be fake anyway, or the outline world maps, seem to have been chosen simply because they look cool ... or are cool, conceptually.

But then there are the travelers' tattoos, like the one of Hawai'i, or Australia, or the one of China in the original post, where the tattoo is a marker of the place one has been to. It's a way of claiming possession of the places you've been, a possession similar to Henry VIII's brother Arthur's boast the morning after his wedding night with Catherine of Aragon: "I've been to Spain." That's what the reddening of the Hawai'ian islands the traveler has been to reminds me of: hymen blood, not monthly. Interesting that the travelers' tattoos are all on men. The Hawai'i tattooed guy's girlfriend got a tattoo with a similar intent on the same trip ... of Hawai'ian flowers.

The student's blacked-in world map is explained by his wanting to travel and join the Peace Corps. In this case, the map is a promise made to himself, to possess the world through travel. There's an added element here, embodied in the Peace Corps ideal, of the pending "citizen of the world," or the nascent member of the "international community," that group of geographically and nationally unmoored "experts" whose job is to make one part of the world intelligible to the other, but not necessarily vice versa. (I won't go into it now, but having grown up on the fringes of the "international community," I have isshooz.)

So it's all the more interesting to analyze Brangelina's tattoos about their children. Brad apparently has a tattoo of a blessing to celebrate Maddox's existence: not the child's name, not his birthdate or symbolic words or numbers, but a Buddhist blessing in Sanskrit. Pitt saves the possessive tattooing of names and dates for Ange alone, with a tat of her birthdate in Khmer. The womb raider, on the other hand---already widely reviled for laying claim to countries and cultures by adopting their children---doubles this notion back on itself, by making geographical coordinates symbolize her children (rather than something more individual, like a name or a birthdate), and then laying claim to the whole---nations, cultures, geographical place, and children---by tattooing these coordinates on her body.

And the "New Orleans" tat seems to be a fairly benign identity tattoo, a symbol trailing behind the Jolie-Pitts' purchase of a NOLA house. If it's actually what the media says it is, it's a mild protest of a historical wrong; turning New Orleans and its levees into a metonym for the Katrina disaster, and associating Pitt with both the protest, and the amelioration efforts. It's not him taking over a location to associate himself with it, it's him taking over a metonym to mark himself a good guy.

There's more to say about all of this, but I'm tapped for now. Maybe I'll check in on map tattoos again.

austin kleon's maps of fictional worlds

austin Kleon has a nifty post about maps of fictional worlds ... primarily made by the authors themselves.

My undergrad thesis argued that world-building wasn’t just for fantasy and sci-fi writers—every tale has a setting, every tale creates a world in the reader’s mind—and it explored ways that drawing that world (visual thinking!) can lead to better fiction.

Some of my favorite “lit’ry” books are accompanied by maps.

I've talked before on this subject and have nothing new to say at this time, but check out the post for images and links to other maps, especially in Kleon's previous posts, and in the comments section.

Via Gwenda.

Happy Birthday, Walter Gropius!

i don't know if google is way too cool, or if it's the new Absolut vodka, but I found out that today is Walter Gropius' 125th birthday by seeing this googlogo (above).

I associate Gropius with all my atlas(t)y stuff, because the first time I learned about him was when I was a bus tour guide in Berlin and had to mention the Bauhaus Museum as we passed it near the canal bordering the Tiergarten--which building was, itself, designed by Gropius.

(Only a short stretch away was the site where Rosa Luxembourg's body was found in the canal months after her assassination, and in another direction the site in the Tiergarten where Karl Liebknecht was shot as well. I love that these were all contemporaries whose significance is siloed. And Berlin is just chockablock full of historically charged sites.)

The museum/archive is depicted below.

more "squaw" renamings

we already knew this! It's in the title of the Monmonier book! Neverthelessons, here's a quote:

Moves to eliminate the term "squaw" from names of geographical sites are accelerating because of protests that the term is offensive.

The U.S. Board on Geographic Names has renamed 16 valleys, creeks and other sites so far this year. Pending proposals mean 2008 should see more changes than any year in a decade, the board says.

...

Valerie Fast Horse, a council member with the Coeur d'Alene Tribe of Idaho, Montana and Washington, says the usual translation of "squaw" is a profane term for female genitalia. It's so offensive in her tribe, she says, that members refer to it as "the 'S' word."

"They should translate the names into English and see how fast they get changed," she says.

That's what I'm sayin'. Of course, there's always some clown who doesn't get it:

"It irritated me," says Cody McDonald, a Judith Basin County commissioner. "When these things were named a hundred years ago, they didn't mean to offend anybody. … And it's a waste of time. Everybody's still going to call it 'Squaw Coulee.' "

Which is to say, he and his buddies are still gonna call it "Squaw Coulee," even after no one knows what "Squaw Coulee" is, just like that old lady in Berlin who gets into taxicabs and orders the drivers to take her to Adolf-Hitler-Platz.

And yeah, I'm sure the good ol' boys who named the peak "Squaw Tit" didn't mean to offend anybody, either.

Via Racialicious.

 

jane jacobs on discrimination

the effective breaking down of residential discrimination outside a slum, and the less dramatic self-diversification within an unslumming slum, proceed concurrently. If America has now, in the case of Negroes, reached an effective halt in this process and in general entered a stage of arrested development -- a thought I find both highly improbable and quite intolerable -- then it may be that Negro slums cannot effectively unslum in the fashion demonstrated by slums formed by other ethnic populations and population mixtures. In this case, the damage to our cities might be the least of our worries; unslumming is a by-product of other kinds of vigor and other forms of economic and social change.

When an area has unslummed, it is easy to forget how bad it once was and how helpless both the area and its population were thought to be. ... As in the case of other slums, overcoming of discrimination outside the slum, and unslumming within the slum, must proceed concurrently. Neither can wait for the accomplishment of the other. Every relaxation of discrimination outside can help unslumming within. Progress in unslumming within helps outside. The two go together.

The inherent resources necessary for unslumming -- advancement and self-diversification in a population -- demonstrably exist among colored people, including the colored people who are in slums or who have passed through slums, as strikingly as these resources exist among white people. In a way the proved and obvious possession of these resources is more striking among the colored, because they emerge in spite of disproportionate obstacles against their emergence. Indeed, because of the very facts that colored populations advance, self-diversify, and have too much spirit to like ghettos, our inner cities have already lost far more of the Negro middle class than they can afford to lose.

I think inner cities will go on losing too much of the Negro middle class almost as fast as it forms until, in actual fact, the choice of remaining there no longer means, for a colored person, an implied acceptance of ghetto citizenship and status. In short, unslumming is at the very least directly -- as well as indirectly -- inhibited by discrimination.

        --- Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

thoughts on jane jacobs three: outdoor living rooms

since I read this NYT article (via Pruned) it has gone behind a firewall, but the upshot is that a new movement is seeing architects assisting communities in building low-cost "living room" furniture in public spaces, if for no other reason, to offer people a place to sit.

These tend to congregate around bus stops.

The idea began several years ago in Oakland, where community organizers and residents got together to improve places where neighbors tended to congregate — the corner store, outside the barbershop — amid a decidedly downtrodden environment.

“The idea was to enable low-income communities to create their own social spaces and improve their neighborhoods without bringing on gentrification,” said Steve Rasmussen Cancian, the landscape architect who helped introduce the living rooms.

With the help of residents, simple pieces of furniture were erected here and there around Oakland, giving bits of cheerful life to corners where there was little to look at. Mr. Rasmussen Cancian then imported the idea to Los Angeles, on a corner where drug dealers and prostitutes did business near a Y.M.C.A. used by families.

At the same time, Central City Neighborhood Partners, a nonprofit group that focuses on low-income families here, surveyed residents in the city’s center about their transportation needs. At the top of the list was a well-maintained place to wait for buses, which, according to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, are boarded citywide an average of 1.2 million times a week. Thus the marriage of community living rooms and bus stops.

One advantage of doing it this way is cutting through red tape, and another is the cost: “A simple pocket park takes a half-million dollars and takes two to three years to build, while a living room takes as little as a month and between $5,000 and $15,000.”

And WWJJD? She might say that this is an interesting experiment in creating community street surveillance. You give people a place to congregate and suddenly, there are people outside to people-watch. You give people a place to sit down, and suddenly, there's a place from which to people watch, in neighborhoods where there aren't many good vantage points to view the street.

I don't imagine that this one effort will solve all of L.A.'s--or Oakland's--problems, but in conversation with efforts to build more street-friendly residences and mixed-use zoning, this could be good.

It's not the same as park-building, but it's closer to effective park-building than street-building. Or maybe you could say it's half-way between the two: creating small spaces on streets that function somewhat like small parks and integrate into street diversity.

It's not surprising that this movement arose in Oakland. Oakland has a number of parks like the one above near my house, shoved into strange unbuilt little triangles of intersections. The one above is what Jacobs would call a successful transient park, a good gathering place for the homeless or jobless, but not pleasant for nearby residents, who never use it. This is because, as you can sort of tell from the photo, there are no buildings at all near it, much less mixed-use residences and shops.

Behind the viewer in this view is a Greyhound station, that bringer of blight; and the center of the park is not merely shaded, but obscured by trees, making any rational person want to avoid it. And further, the park is relatively large, making you feel like you have a distance to traverse to get through it. I always have to think whether I'd prefer to walk through or around it.

On the other hand, there's this one, a mere ten blocks away, near my friend's house:

I visited my friend last weekend during the hot weather, and this park seemed to be bristling with naked arms and legs. Mostly teens and young people, but also some older people were hanging out in tank tops and shorts, drawn together although there wasn't enough shade to cover all of them. The younger people, particularly the men, spilled out into the street to the left, hanging out there, and crossing back and forth frequently between the park and the convenience store that is just outside of our view on the left.

As you can see this park is tiny, just the triangle created by the intersection of two grid streets and a larger avenue that cuts diagonally across the grid. Mixed-use residences overlook the park on two sides: on the left, where your view is cut off, and before you to the left. On the right, across the big blvd (San Pablo) is a higher project which, though farther away, also can see farther and also overlooks the park.

I was late to a party but I really wanted to stop (at a "safe" distance, of course) and watch the goings on in the park because it was so interesting. It's the first such park I've seen in Oakland, although there are fairly frequent triangles in the streets, and many filled with parks.

They need both the mixed-use surroundings, the small, overseeable size, and, as pointed out above, furniture for people to sit on.

I love how my eyes are seeing things Jacobsly.

blog nirvana map

this is an old one from a year ago when I stopped blogging here completely. Jumping off an earlier post mapping the route to blog nirvana, this Valleywag blogger mapped out which blogs have gotten close, or reached it (boingboing). I'd comment, but it's pretty self-explanatory.

thoughts on jane jacobs two: atlantic yards

i posted nearly two years ago about an article by Brooklynite Jonathan Lethem protesting the planned development Atlantic Yards, which requires the clearing of existing residences using eminent domain. A court fifth amendment challenge to the developer was not upheld and building is underway.

At the time I couldn't figure out the rights and wrongs of the situation--although later that summer I visited my cousin who lives in Park Slope, and she told me that the same developer had created a less ambitious project in a nearby part of Brooklyn which had degraded the neighborhood and gotten no business, and ended up costing the city a great deal.

But after reading Death and Life I now have the framework to definitively hate Atlantic Yards.

Apparently, I'm not the only one who thought this way.

Karrie Jacobs (no relation) posted nearly two years ago in metropolismag.com about how her reading of Jacobs affected her view of the Atlantic Yards project. Her criticisms of the project based on Jacobs are as follows:

I don’t know whether Jacobs, circa 1959, would approve or disapprove of Ratner, circa 2006, but her take on the project would likely be a bit more nuanced than the simple declaration “too big.” In certain ways the Ratner plan, with its arena, density, and mixture of residential and office uses is influenced—albeit indirectly—by her thinking. The project’s substantial number of “affordable” housing units adds to its overall heterogeneity. On the other hand, a huge project by one developer and one architect cannot be diverse, and it’s possible that Jacobs would have reacted to Gehry’s irregular forms much as she reacted to Googie-style coffee shops: “virtual sameness trying, by dint of exhibitionism, to appear unique and different.”

The biggest drawback to Atlantic Yards, according to my reading of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is that it will be constructed atop a rail yard that currently separates the neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Prospect Heights. The new development is unlikely to knit together those two neighborhoods; instead, lacking the cross-streets that Jacobs thought were key to urban vitality, it will exacerbate the division, generating more of what she termed “border vacuums.”

But she goes on to point out, quite rationally, that

Admittedly I could be the one misreading Jacobs—cherry-picking her book for the ideas that support my own penchant for density, diversity, and complexity—but it’s clear from the book’s final chapter, “The Kind of Problem a City Is,” that she was arguing above all against reductive thinking.

... The mistake made by Jacobs’s detractors and acolytes alike is to regard her as a champion of stasis—to believe she was advocating the world’s cities be built as simulacra of the West Village circa 1960. Admirers and opponents have routinely taken her arguments for complexity and turned them into formulas. But the book I just read was an inspiration to move forward without losing sight that cities are powerful, dynamic, ever-changing entities made up of myriad gestures big and small.

I'll be visiting the area next week and intend to go check out the site. Stay tuned.

*****Update 5/3/08

Turns out, Karrie Jacobs has a blog and she just posted about Atlantic Yards recently. Plus, Saint JJ is all over her blog.