atlas(t)

decolonized area rapid transit

the amazing poet, graphic designer, and cultural worker Kenji Liu (who is on the board of Kearny Street Workshop, where I work) just decolonized BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) with this map above, which he created by committee on Facebook. Click here to see the discussions (in comments) on version one, and here for version two.

Kenji has been involved in the Occupy Oakland movement for a while now. It was he who produced the meme-ing postcards about the central Oakland square, called Frank Ogawa Plaza, which Occupy Oakland renamed to "Oscar Grant Plaza" after the young man who was shot by a policeman while facedown on the ground, causing protests and riots in January 2009. His postcards pointed out that Frank Ogawa, a legislator, was also interned during WWII, and his being deposed from his post by Oscar Grant wasn't necessarily an example of historical justice.

Kenji's also producing a series of images, which you can see on his Facebook design page, relating more directly to the Occupy movement.

But you know me: it's the politically motivated toponymy that really gets my juices flowing. I know from experience to expect from Kenji this quality of political/cultural critique in the form of innovative art projects. But it's how OWS is getting the creative juices gushing all over the place that really tells me this movement has legs. I think urban toponymy and memorialization -- and especially the discussions that surround them -- are markers of a healthy, active, living polity. That is, a polity composed of engaged citizens, who are engaged with their environment in the broadest sense of the word: geographical, ecological, political, and cultural.

Kenji's map has also made clear to me something I hadn't thought of before: that OWS is a political movement that takes metonymy -- basically a system of geographical metaphors -- at utterly face value. Wall St -- the concept, as opposed to "Main Street" -- is the center of power. "Wall Street" the center of power is inaccessible to them. So protesters made the geographical location into a reverse metonym for "Wall Street" the banking industry, and occupied it. They can't access the center of power, so they occupy its physical symbol. This is why the locations of the various occupations are so important to both sides. And why a physical occupation is so important to the movement at this stage.

It's important for more than just this reason, of course. The failure of broad-based political movements over the past decade or so, and especially during wartime; the transferance of our base of cultural communications to the internet, and the attempt to organize people politically on the internet -- an only moderate success; and the accession of a new generation of young adults who have never engaged in political movements, have all made face-to-face, real-time, real-place politics exciting and essential.

And in the wake of the worst wave of defaults, repos, and evictions since the Great Depression, moral ownership of place is profoundly emotional. I haven't seen anyone considering this (although I'm sure many have) but for the first time since the colonization of North America, we have a generation reaching adulthood with a seriously questionable prospect of land ownership. In the same way that you see homeless people walking slowly across busy streets, forcing traffic to slow and stop for them, OWS is forcing a momentary ownership of public space by people who mostly don't own space.

More thinking needed on this.

But in any case, Kenji is still refining his map, so go visit the Facebook posting and contribute ideas!

mta.me

via Pireeni, this lovely map tracking trains in New York's subway system as they leave and course through the city. As each line crosses another, it "plucks" it like a string, and you hear a thoughtfully chaotic music. Subway art. Enjoy.

parag khanna world map

Just sticking my head above the parapet long enough to post this cool cool vid from TED of Indian American geopolitics dewd Parag Khanna talking about borders and the world map. Yay!

your entropy hand

i think I've found my new favorite blog (sorry Pruned!):

I've been working with Kaya Press (I'm doing publicity for them, freelance) an awesome, high-quality indie book press for Asian/Pacific Islander/API diaspora books. They published poet/novelist Sesshu Foster's first collection of poems, City Terrace Field Manual, an amazing work of landscape writing about the people and stories that inhabit a particular piece of L.A.

Sesshu's also been on my hit list for a long time because his second book was the novel Atomik Aztex, an alternate history which switched a Latino L.A. meatpacker back and forth between two parallel universes: this one, and one in which he was an Aztec prince in a world in which the Aztecs had beaten the conquistadores and ended up an atomic power. So up my alley.

Anyway, I didn't know Sesshu had a blog, but someone pointed it out to me recently. There I found this wonderful photo-poem of infrastructure entropy and imagination, titled "Sad America, who will hold your Entropy Hand?" Lovely.

I supposed someone could make a book or zine out of this, but then you'd have to fuss with permissions, and expenses, and stuff. I think this is exactly the sort of art/writing that blogs enable, and I want to see more more more! I kiss it!

Enjoy.

u.s. bicycle route system

just a quickie:

The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, working with The Adventure Cycling Association plus some other groups, have approved a plan for a nationwide network of bicycle routes.

State officials and bicycle enthusiasts are stitching together more than 50,000 miles of pedal-friendly pavement to form a vast network of bicycle routes connecting byways, cities and off-road trails in a system like the one created for cars and trucks more than half a century ago.

Working from a bewildering tangle of existing roads, planners mapped a web of corridors where the national bicycle system should go. They considered traffic volume, terrain, amenities and ways to link together lightly traveled byways, secondary roads, urban trails and already established transcontinental bicycle routes.

How. Cool. Is. That?

I must be getting old. I really wanna BIKE these routes. Who's with me?

three gorges dam

speaking of Edward Burtynsky, a video on YouTube of a talk he gave that's on Manufactured Landscapes turned me on to the scale of change caused by the Three Gorges Dam in China.

Here's the clip:

Here's a good summary of the project:

Here's an animation showing the changes the dam has made to the landscape:

Here's a clip in Chinese with a lot of information about the dam, much of which is self explanatory, if you don't speak Chinese. There are some rah-rah shots of the dam, and some animations of how the dam was built:

What fascinates me the most is the underwater cities. Sure, the buildings were destroyed to as not to interfere with ships, but there must be some lower levels of high rises, and some one and two-story buildings they didn't bother smashing. It would be great if someone went down there in ten or twenty years to photograph what happened to the landscape down there.

In fact, I should find out if there are underwater villages in other areas that have been photographed many years later.

mass transit in america

via Wikimedia Commons, this map of the Tokyo subway.

I have a t-shirt with this image on it, boughten from Urban Outfitters. Yes, as I've said before, mapfascination is zeitgeisty. I'm not even sure if I should bother writing a post about it.

This is an oblique lead-in to a brief post pointing you to a good article by Katharine Mieszkowski in Salon (does she ever write bad articles?) called "Who Says Americans Won't Ride Mass Transit?"

The thrust of the article is that gas prices are driving Americans back to mass transit, but governments are simultaneously cutting funding. So the new/old transit riders are not merely encountering the overcrowding that would result from an influx of new riders into existing schedules, but are actually joining at a time when lines and service are being cut.

It's a story being repeated across the country -- a story with a grim irony. California, under the Schwarzenegger administration, has embraced ambitious goals to fight global warming, pledging to bring greenhouse gas emissions down to 1990 levels by 2020. But you wouldn't know it from how the state is treating transit. Transportation is the No. 1 source of global warming pollution in the state, and it's the fastest-growing source, yet the state budget recently signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature raids $1.7 billion from transit funding.

"They're diverting the money from transit and keeping highways whole," says Tom Radulovich, a BART director and executive director of Livable City, a nonprofit group that promotes sustainable transportation. "There's been a big shift to transit as people are trying to avoid high gas prices. But we're taking billions of dollars away from transit, and investing billions in highways."

Mieszkowski calls the attitude of "'When you're allocating money for transit, nobody ever asks how crowded buses are'" a "persistent hangover of America's romance with the car." But I'd call it a date rape, not a romance. Naturally, I'm one of those misanthropic liberals who sees conspiracy everywhere, but it doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to recognize the persistence of the automobile industry's lobby against withdrawing money from public transit and putting it into highways at a time when any fool can see the writing on the wall. What else would you call a situation where the public is actually asking to put away their cars and ride the bus, and the government still won't step up?

Seriously? Vote for Obama.

things to do in panama city

i've been in Panama for almost two weeks now, on vacation, and posting about it over at atlas(t): galleon trade edition, where this is cross-posted. And I've been looking around since I got to Panama, but the internet has failed me: I haven't been able to find any blog posts telling me what to do in Panama City.

So in the interests of public service--I is a good netizen--here's a wrap-up of what I've been doing in Panama City since I got here: the good, the bad, the don't-bother, and the WTF? (I'm probably going to be too lazy to give you links to these resources, though, so deal with it. XO.)

To wit:

• Decameron Resort: this is a Pacific-side beach resort about an hour and half's drive west (i.e. up the isthmus towards North America) from Panama City. If you're spending any time in Panama, do go to the beach! Remember, this is an isthmus with beachfront on both the Caribbean and the Pacific. I can't find anything wrong with that scenario.

Decameron is decent, if resorty. The rooms are tile-floored and very clean; the restaurants aren't any good, but the food is abundant, self-serve, and included in the price; the beaches are spectacular, very clean, very comfortable, and not at all crowded (by my Californian estimation; my Panamanian cousin found the place very crowded.) There are: palm-frond shade structures on the high-tide line every few feet or so, with lounge chairs; a swimming pool that runs the length of the 2K-long beach, which draws off the kiddies and parents, leaving the beach to the less shrieky patrons; bars every 500 feet serving fruity drinks (also included in the price); a beach massage cabana; plus horseback-riding, jet-skiing, sailing, etc. etc. etc.

Did I mention that because of low season (it's rainy season so we got a storm every afternoon) we paid $110 per night, everything included (except the activities)? Insane. This is really relaxing and very silly, but so worth it if you need a vacay.

• Panama Viejo: the ruins of the old Spanish city. I didn't go with my family so I didn't get the run-down on what's what here. If you like ruins, these are majestic. But go with a tour guide, because otherwise, you'll go, look, and then want to go home again.

• Casco Viejo: not to be confused with Panama Viejo, this is the old town, not ruins, still functional. Apparently, it looks like Havana, and is the part that's being heavily, outrageously reconditioned and gentrified. Naturally, the streets are a warren and it's hard to find your way around, but there are a lot of sights here, so take a day or two for this part of town. And bring your camera.
  
  • The Presidential Palace is here, administrative center and intended residence of the president ('though the sitting prez doesn't live here). We got to tour because my cousin knows someone, but most people don't get to. It's pretty cool, if you get a chance, and if you don't, swing by anyway to stick your head in the gate. The place is called the Heron Palace--because of a couple of historical herons given as gifts--and it's guarded, they tell us though I'm not sure if they're there as guards or decoration, by a couple of humongous, live grey herons. Worth seeing but don't poke at them. They peck.
  • Cultural Institute is the government agency for managing museums and such. They have a small gallery of Panamanian art in a repurposed jailhouse, but it was between exhibitions when we swung by, so we didn't get to see it.
  •  There's shaved ice in the courtyard in front of the Cultural Institute. Get the limon flavor with condensed milk and malt. Yummy!
  • The State Theater is here and I wasn't terribly impressed. It's loudly decorated, like all state theaters. If you get a chance to see a performance here, though, go. Apparently, they do folk art performances and such. In fact, we saw part of a rehearsal of one here.
  • Church of the Golden Altar. Big tourist destination. As with everything, only go if you have a tour guide who can really explain what you're looking at. We didn't so all I did was take some pictures of an ornate altar that meant little to me.
  • Museum of the Inter-oceanic Canal is a terrific museum. You'll need two hours here at least. However, it's all in Spanish so if you don't speak it, and you don't have enough Latin, French, and native intelligence to figure stuff out, bring a tour guide or leave it alone. This is probably the closest Panama has to a museum of history.
  • I couldn't find the Museum of Religious Art! Most people simply didn't know where it was, and the directions I got from people who supposedly did, were bad. If you really want to see this, ask a proper tour guide.
  • Shopping: there are curio and crafts shops here. These are a bit more upscale than elsewhere, and more expensive, but you can still bargain, and if you want really good quality stuff, go here. I'm really glad I did because this was the only area I was able to find the really beautiful baskets, the high-quality version of the cheap-ass baskets you see everywhere and say to yourself, "Why would anyone buy stuff like that?"
  • Eating: there are a lot of restaurants around here to have lunch, catering to visitors. It's easy to find something decent to eat here so plan on having lunch.

• Mi Pueblito: this is a weird sort of amusement park, where an early 20th Century Afro-antillean village is simulated. It was open today, but just barely. I don't know if there are normally supposed to be people wandering around acting like villagers, but it was deserted today. I got there just in time for it to rain like crazy, trapping me in one of the buildings. There are crafts shops there, but nothing very good. I also only went to part of it. I couldn't make it across the street in the rain to the other part. Not recommended, unless you can find out that there's more to the experience than this. Maybe don't go on a Monday afternoon during rainy season.
  

• Mercado de Buhonerias Y Artesanias: this place is a warren of small kiosks selling traditional crafts and souvenirs. These are the cheap versions, so don't expect very high quality stuff. But this is where you buy gifts for friends. I'd recommend you buy the molas here, the colorful cloth patterns sewn out of several layers of cotton, leather sandals, framed butterflies (if you like that sort of thing) and shirts and purses. There are also a lot of really cheap and tacky souvenir-type stuff, if you like that.

Come prepared to bargain. This stuff isn't worth much so decide what you want to pay for it and work up to that. Don't budge off of your price. If you do your job right, they'll get more than the stuff is worth and you'll pay less than you expected to. Everybody wins. Maybe bring along a native to bargain for you, if you can.

This a somewhat sketchy area, so take a taxi and have the taxi wait for you while you're there. Give yourself an hour or two and don't go on a Sunday, since most of the kiosks are closed then. Also, don't bring a wallet and be sure any purses or bags you bring have nothing valuable in them. Bring your cash in a pocket that buttons or put it in your jeans hip pocket where you can keep track of it. This place is close and crowded and full of pick-pockets, although, again, if you go on a Sunday, you'll be unmolested.

• Diablo Rosso: a hipster contemporary art gallery, cafe, and DIY clothing 'n' stuff shop. I posted about it here. If you want to connect to the young and cosmo, this might be the place to do it. In the San Francisco neighborhood.

• Calle Uruguay: my young cousin took me there during the day when there was nothing going on, but this is the nightlife capital. Along two or three square blocks there are more nightclubs than you can shake a booty at. I didn't go there the night my cousins went out (too tired), but you can find live and canned music. Just get in a taxi and tell them where you want to go. They all know it.

• Gaucho's: also on Calle Uruguay, it's the only really good restaurant I ate at in Panama City. Argentinian cuisine, fantastic steaks and very good Panamanian ceviche. A little pricey, but worth it.

• Radisson Decapolis Spa: apparently the only good spa in the city. I'm going for a massage with my cousin today. I'll report back later. ETA: fabulous. It's small, but really nice and relaxing. Get the deep tissue massage, though, because I got the "relaxing" Swedish and it was, well, relaxing, but they didn't dig into the knots. Give yourself a package deal (around $130 for a massage and facial or wrap, which includes sauna, steam room, whirlpool) and bring a bathing suit so you can go outside to the pool afterwards (inside is nekkid).
  

• Amador Causeway: a causeway built to connect several small islands out in Panama Bay and to serve as a breakwater at the head of the Canal so that the Canal opening doesn't ever need to be dredged. There's a restaurant out there called Mi Ranchito, which isn't fantastic, but has the best view, ever. Do lunch there. Then, in future years, you can visit the Frank Gehry-designed Museum of Biodiversity, which is still under construction right now. Also a good place to take a walk ... early in the morning or late at night.

• Partial Transit of the Panama Canal: this trip takes most of the day and I'd really only recommend it for people who are fascinated by the canal, and/or who have really fun company to go with. You take a bus from the causeway about 40 minutes up to a launch, ride down the canal through the Pedro Miguel lock, Lake Gatun, and the Miraflores Locks, and then finish up back where you started on the causeway. It's expensive (about $100), and rather boring, and very crowded. There's a lot of waiting around--waiting for the bus to take off, waiting for the boat to take off, waiting at the locks--and a lot of the canal is not very interesting to look at: just an unbroken wall of jungle. Also, the locks are much more interesting to observe from land, except for the going up and down inside the locks part. You get on the bus at 9 or 9:30 and get back to the causeway around 3:30.

If you don't want to do this--and I wouldn't recommend it to most people--I'd definitely recommend driving to the Miraflores Locks on land, and spending half a day there. There's a good, and comprehensive, museum at the locks in English and Spanish, where you can easily kill an hour or two. There's also a restaurant there that overlooks one set of locks, and you can get great pictures and video of the way the locks work and the ships that go through them. I'd recommend going in the morning, viewing the museum, having lunch there, and then taking your pics of the locks. This is really all you need of the canal.

If you really want to get on the canal, I'd recommend getting a group of people together--through a travel agent, maybe?--and renting a private trip through the canal with a tour guide, if possible.

• Canal Zone: again, get a tour guide or a taxi driver and drive up to the canal zone area near the city. Not a lot of USians have been to an actual US colony, so here's your chance (assuming you aren't so politically situated that you think the entire country is a US colony. There's an argument to be made for that). I was surprised how much the place looked like the Presidio in San Francisco, although I suppose I shouldn't have been. You don't need to spend much time there, just drive through and get a glimpse of what US imperialism looks like. There's also a school there where some Panamanian students staged a protest in 1964, insisting on raising a Panamanian flag alongside the US flag. They started a riot that lasted several days and spread throughout the Zone, and four people were killed, but it was a milestone along the way to true Panamanian self-determination.

• Day Trips: talk to travel agents and tour guides about these. I didn't do any day trips but there's a rainforest about 45 minutes away where you can fly through the canopy and see monkeys and toucans. There's also an Indian tribe on the Chagres River you can canoe to who show you around their village.

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.

maglev train

Via Scott Westerfeld I came upon this video about a Japanese maglev train in testing phase. This is one of those emerging transportation technologies that gets my undies into a bunch. Nothing more to say here.