6 PM, April 28, 2009

Urbanwriter is gone. That was a phase, you might say. So many of us wanted to be hip, or to write, whether right or wrong, to our friends, ourselves.

I’ll just come back to the electronic commons, a place proved by, and governed by, my host’s conditions. It’s less money that way.

Writing is a forced activity sometimes, and even as I squeeze these words out I know the tension that drives the writing. There is a paradox there; I write because I must, but I know the writing won’t reward the reading.

That’s a shame.

But with time, and effort, I hope that those of you who take the odd look will find something worthy of your time.

Moving on…

Well, www.urbanwriter.net/wordpress is up and running, and this will be the last post to this blog address.

I made use of the ‘Install4Free’ function at WordPress, which got WordPress installed at my domain, hosted by Bluehost.com. Then I struggled for hours with FTP programs, doo-hickeys, thingmabobs, widgets, lines of code, php whatzits, and a pile of other stuff that left me feeling absolutely drained. And nothing happening as far as transferring my ‘old’ entries (and comments) to the new site. Grrr.

Finally I figured out how to post at http://wordpress.org/support/topic/87563?replies=3#post-446308 and the moderator gave me a set of instructions that performed, in about one minute, what I had been struggling with all afternoon and evening.

Yes, I sent my heartfelt thanks.

And now, it is time to close this chapter. I won’t be moving from www.urbanwriter.net, I’m actually paying to be there, it’s mine – at least insofar as any virtual space belongs to anyone – and I hope to see your comments.

Thanks for reading.

Ah, technology

In any field of endeavour it is the tiny little bits of information that rule our lives, if we lack the ability to decode, decypher, decrypt the seemingly endless variants of language we are held hostage to our ignorance. And this is all brought to my attention, once again, by my ignorance of the technology that drives this blog, and every invisible bit of mechanical, electronic, optical, and code work that is ‘out of sight, out of mind.’

I want a real web address, one that is not a sub-directory on some company’s server, one that is mine to do with as a I see fit, within the limitations of legal requirements, good taste, social responsibility, and my own interests. So I got one.

www.urbanwriter.net

This blog will, with any luck, migrate there over the next few days. I say ‘with any luck’ because I am counting on the good graces of people at, or affiliated with, WordPress, who offer a free migration service for WordPress users. Meaning these people will install WordPress on ‘my’ website at no cost to me. Which, when I get the least bit involved, seem the best thing to do.

They require that I give them a bunch of information, seems reasonable to me, given that much of what they are going to do requires names and addresses and passwords. But for the Internet ignorant, the FTP foundlings, the ’support forum’ ignorant, is all Greek. Or even older, Assyrian perhaps.

I’m sure that when I know what I’m doing with this stuff it will all make sense. But much of it reminds me of my start on the Internet over a decade ago. Different programs, suppliers, manuals, support functionaries all used different terms for the same information. One program would call it ‘primary account,’ while another would call it ‘user identity,’ and this went on throughout every program on the machine. And every level of tech support.

And I’m sensitive to tech support; I’ve been fixing stuff for a long time and I appreciate that your amplifier absolutely has to be plugged into the wall outlet when you turn it on, or there will be no output. You have to have fuel, oil, air, spark, unless you’re driving a diesel. And then you can live without the spark. But automotive stuff has been around a long time, long enough for the terminology to become standardized, normalized, encoded virtually in our genes. And there are always hand signals when words fail us in some far away place where language doesn’t quite ‘translate’ when ’support’ is needed.

Just a couple weeks ago I had the opportunity to help an old acquaintance with his first-ever computer. And I had the opportunity to remember just how foreign, how totally ‘unintuitive,’ how weird most of the tools we use are, when we are novices. It was, in fact, humbling to have to remember how much I didn’t know, once upon a time.

And now, again, I am reminded how little I know.

Wish me luck getting www.urbanwriter.net up and running, learning those little bits as I go.

Urbanist, eh?

You know, the one thing I had looked forward to was the socially validated title that would have been the reward for the time/effort/money invested in the Masters in Urban Studies. I could have, without any hesitation, called myself an ‘urbanist.’ I would have been the beneficiary of a title; like some wretched newspaper mogul, I could, in effect, buy a title.

But, in the final analysis, I probably fare better than Lord Black of Crossharbour. For one thing, not having a Masters costs way less than a flaky title once reserved for some toadying lick-spittle. My sanity, my money, and my opportunities seem at least as broad without the official title as with. Although I don’t own a tux, unlike Lord Black who owns several I’m sure, and at least one will be in a lovely vertically-oriented black and white striped pattern, I still get invited to fancy places like the Vancouver Club. And, I have not had to sit and watch a roomful of mature adults labour for marks, with a prof who reads other people’s articles as lecture notes. And he read them without any attribution.

Opportunities seem to have multiplied in the last few days. New York is on the agenda for February, and there is an urban education san pareil for those so inclined. Walking from the Empire State Building, to Washington Heights, or Soho to Marcus Garvey Park, exposes any interested observer to an unbelievable range of human experience. The black Bentley silently idling at the curb, the driver’s elegantly gloved hands poised above the door handle, one walks to see sidewalk vendors selling ices, their muscled arms scraping each new sale into a paper cone. The same planet, same city, different worlds.
Remember to look up.

And hope that the lights stay on. In the richest economy in the world, in one of the most populous cities in the country, the rate of power outages is a testament to the greed of unrestrained capitalism. Consolidated Edison is not the least bit worried about delivering electrical power, as a corporation they are solely interested in generating profit, and their shareholders like it that way. Or they like it that way until they are personally affected by the failures caused by shoddy, cost-cutting, maintenance of the power grid.

Ride the subway, talk to people, watch the cops, the drug dealers, the endless (or so it seems to an unarmed Canadian) number of people with guns. Cops, drug dealers, Customs agents, the zillion guys riding around in big, black, SUV’s, all the while protecting somebody really important. I suppose. Private security, public insecurity, all armed and dangerous. Talk to Albert, between pulls on a heavy-handled wine bottle.

All this is ‘being’ an urbanist. In the city that inspired Jane Jacobs I can trace a different path; a path, perhaps, informed by her work. But my own path need not quote Jacobs. I have no need of the re-assurance, or valorization, that referencing her work is supposed to confer on my work. For my work, my life, is not as an academician. My own internal urbanism, much removed I must add from being ‘urbane,’ is founded on a realization of my class consciousness, my intellect, my wide-ranging and eclectic interests.

This non-urbane urbanism draws on hundreds of books on various aspects of ‘the city,’ and all that goes within. It is an urbanism that draws, through good luck, on the opportunity to work with Karen Jamieson on a dance piece. It allows me to work, hopefully, with a wonderful playwright on a theatre piece.

I am free to examine the construction of bridges; they ’show, don’t tell,’ a lot about a city’s history, economics, connectedness with the world, a moment literally frozen in steel. Architecture interests me, and again, I’m free to focus on those very specific aspects that interest, beguile, annoy, frustrate, or alarm. Courthouses, CPTED , the often banal results of City requirements for ‘public amenity’ space in new or re-development all draw my critical attentions. And I can allow those attentions to go wherever I please.

The freedom of working outside the structures imposed by credentialism is already liberating,  and freeing in ways not explicitly anticipated. The freedom, and responsibility, of following my own muse seems somewhat akin to the glamourized ideals of ‘adulthood.’ I have the freedom to act as I please, constrained only by my desire to critically engage other individuals in/with the topics I choose.

Ultimately success is, in some way, marked by my ability to encourage others to to engage with the material I produce. People do not have to agree with what I say, or write, but they have to find the argument engaging enough to be worth the time required to read and reflect on what I have put out. Success is engagement.

If I am correct and people’s willingness to read what I write is a measure of success, then the reader confers the appellation ‘urbanist’ in ways beyond the Academy’s purview. And my ego is just involved enough to enjoy twisting the Academy’s collective nose.

Urbanist, eh?

Autodidacticism

An autodidact is a person self-taught in a field of interest, the field is irrelevant; the training is suspect, and the individual often lives with a continuous low-level anxiety of being ‘found out,’ of being determined to be lacking in some way important to the field of interest. Indeed, Pierre Bourdieu, who I have mentioned in earlier posts, makes this point explicitly in his book ‘Distinction,’ well worth reading. Worth reading even if you don’t like French theorists…

As someone who has spent much of my life as an autodidact Bourdieu’s words struck home, an insight that cut clear of the general level of academic theory that masquerades as knowledge in the academy. The failings of the autodidact are as often failings of omission, rather than commission – of not reading widely enough, of not engaging with critical works in a lively, timely, and active way – and thus, often, only re-affirming the position already established. Sounds very much like pundits, academic or otherwise, on any side of any issue.

But the realities of being an autodidact have been brought home again with my decision to withdraw from the Masters in Urban Studies at SFU. For while the title wouldn’t actually get me a coffee, the theory was that the degree would lend some small legitimacy to my comments on urban affairs in general. No ‘advanced’ degree, no legitimation.

But Jane Jacobs didn’t have an advanced degree. Nor do most politicians. Nor, I suspect, do most small business owners. Eric Hoffer, an influential American philosopher and writer, finished high school. I think. Plato, Socrates, Johnson (as in Boswell’s ‘Life of…”), and I suppose thousands more managed to engage their intellectual faculties to great effect without ever getting a ‘degee’ in general, let alone an advanced degree at a recognized institution.

This is not to say there is no value in the effort expended to gain the degree. What it is meant is that the social value of the degree, the intellectual value of the degree, and the ‘rent’ rendered to gain the degree do not necessarily reflect any broad-based ability to work outside the unbelievably narrow confines  of academic disciplinarity.

Jacobs is like the most widely read urbanist in history. She had an undergraduate degree. Thousands of academics have drawn on her work – they have referenced her in quotes, using her authority to stake knowledge claims for their own work – and they have probably had hundreds of thousands of undergraduates read ‘Death and Life of Great American Cities’ to establish in their students minds not only Jacob’s importance, but their own. How many academics, anywhere, can claim the breadth and depth of importance, that Jacobs achieved by writing a polemic as an interested amateur?

Jacobs was, relative to her time, an autodidact. She had no ‘training’ in urban planning. She had no training in statistics, sociology, anthropology, architecture, traffic, engineering, economics, or any of the other ‘disciplines’ that may have, just maybe, qualified her to take on Robert Moses, and American urban planning in general.

And, yes, I’d like my brain surgeon to have ‘accredited’ training. But I’d also like my fellow road users to have some training – they are far more likely to kill me than any surgeon. I like to know that the pilot in the 747 has some training, though I’d like to think she also has thousands of hours of experience as the ranking officer on the flight deck. And I’m really hoping my electrician is up-to-date on the electrical code. The difference in all these examples is that the training is practical, empirical, hands-on.

I recognize that most of these people can be autodidacts, though it is pretty tough I think to learn to fly the 747 pretty much on one’s own, and I suspect that the social stigma related to being an autodidact is diminished, if not totally removed. I know from personal experience that many people are amazed that I can ‘fix’ stuff, and that is almost entirely self-taught. How many bicycle 3-speed hubs did I have to work through before I felt I could repair virtually any of them, given available parts? But the critical thinking skills necessary for the ‘advanced’ degree are equally necessary to dismantle, diagnose, and re-assemble, virtually anything we try to repair – that’s why we need editors on occasion.

Perhaps the single most important perspective I gained while doing my undergraduate degree was that, in the end, the degree didn’t matter. But I had to have the degree, in hand, in order to have the authority to say so.

And, I think, if Jane Jacobs can do it, if Robert Hughes can do it (with no degree at all), if those thousands of individual, autodidactic, intellectually-minded individuals can do it, so can I.

A very trying day

People are vastly amusing; their foibles, predilections, prejudices, and joys can provide endless fodder for those around them. People is plural, individuals can be equally interesting, though as often as not they may be too close to our own position for comfort. And, when it is our own behaviour that is on display, we are wont to deny the broader experience – I am smarter, stronger, more depressed, angrier, hurt, or joyous than any other person in history.

So this is my look at a very trying day.

It is the beginning of classes for students enrolled in the SFU Masters in Urban Studies this evening. Up until half an hour ago I was scheduled to be there, enrolled in what appears to be an interesting course, taught by a competent professor, and probably sharing the room with equally intelligent students. But I had to make a decision, soon, and I decided that I was no longer going to be there this evening.

There are multiple, plausible, reasons for leaving. But I am reminded of a comment by a friend of my uncle’s, who served as a police officer in Vancouver for nearly a decade if my memory serves. When he decided to quit, and as I recall, he had damn good reason to quit, people he knew all wanted to know ‘why are you quitting?’ He was annoyed because no one asked him why he started. And my reasons for starting were at least as interesting as my reasons for quitting.

Once upon a time a Bachelor’s degree was virtually a guarantee of a ‘good’ job, one that probably included the corner office, a secretary (paid half as much, for twice as much work), and a level of cultural capital that made the effort worthwhile. All this was still true even in the early 1970s, though with the expansion of the ‘educated class,’ the writing was on the wall.

With thousands of newly minted BAs in the workforce, inflation set in, and soon enough a Masters was taking the social and workplace role once held by the baccalaureate. A perfect example of this is the level of qualification held by college instructors. When I started at Langara Community College in January 2000, I was exceptionally fortunate to have, as an instructor, Cynthia Flood. She held a BA, had started teaching sometime in the Dark Ages (probably the early or mid 1970s), and if my experience was indicative, was an excellent instructor.

Today’s new hires at Langara, who still teach the same stuff (essentially first and second year ‘transferable credits’), appear to all have PhDs. The shiny new PhDs are still teaching the same subjects, the same books, to the same students. But with so many PhDs in the job market, why hire someone who ‘only’ has an MA? Inflation hits far more in academia than mere marks.

After Humanities 101, written about elsewhere, I wanted a BA. I wanted to prove that I was not only intellectually capable, but that I could still focus on something long enough to see it to fruition, something that with depression was becoming a less, and less, familiar experience. And I did finish. Not on the ‘Dean’s List’ by any stretch, but missing the ‘first class average’ (80% if memory serves) by about one measly percent. And, unlike those students I knew who did get the ‘first class average,’ I didn’t work quite as hard as they did. I knew what I had to do to get 82% on a paper, 84% was an aberration, and in the entire 4 years only a couple papers were less than 80%. But tests! So, with lots of ‘good’ marks, tests sort of took the wind out of my sails.

And then what? You have the BA. But everyone has a BA. In at least one census tract in Ontario 35 or 36 % of residents have a BA. That is better than one in three people, which starts to make BAs look like belly-buttons, everyone has one.

And then I was broke, no job on the horizon, no money in hand. And I could always get a student loan for the Masters of my choice…

And SFU was promoting the Graduate Diploma in Urban Studies up the ladder to the Masters in Urban Studies.

And a marriage, of sorts, was born. I applied, wrote the obligatory letter explaining why I would be a good candidate for the program, had good enough marks to get in, and was accepted.

And the student loan came through.

Now, don’t think that this was a purely mercantilist move, it wasn’t then, and is only portrayed that way now for the effects of story telling. But, with money in hand, and a legitimized reason for reading every damn thing I could get my hands on about ‘urban’ stuff, I felt set.

A couple courses. People asking me ‘why’ I’m there, some inside the program, some outside the program. Unlike my BA, which one just does ‘because,’ the Masters still seems somewhat optional – especially when one hits 50 – and my answers were always a little flip, a little too ‘off the cuff.’ And I started to refer to the program as my hobby – a relatively cheap hobby in the long run, and one with some social cachet – but my hobby nonetheless.

Almost everyone else in the room had ‘really good reasons’ to be there. Their employer was paying, or they would get a significant raise once the Masters had been officially conferred, or they could get job ‘X,’ rather than the tawdry job ‘Y’ they had right now. But they all had a really good reason for being there. And I just wanted to do it because cities interest me; the way buildings are built, the way communities within cities develop (or fail), the way cities compete with one another for resources, and the way cities allow competition within themselves all intrigue me, just because I’m curious about them.

But while some of my colleagues were curious, some were not. And, while some of the courses were good, some were not.

And, repeating the pedagogical errors taught in undergraduate schools, too many of the courses place high value on ‘group projects.’ I suppose that there is some argument for learning to work together, damn, I’ve heard a few of them, and I still don’t believe most of it. I missed kindergarten, I don’t play well with others, and I don’t like being responsible not only for my problems, but theirs as well.

After a group project in a senior-level undergraduate course was done, and the course marks posted, the prof asked me how I felt about the course in general, and the project in particular. I suggested that his salary, currently received, should be his maximum salary. His actual salary should be based on the productivity of his junior faculty colleagues – his income is dependent on the work produced by people over which he has no control. His response? That was the end of that version of group projects. And, I thought, that was the end of group projects for me as well.

But SFU’s Masters in Urban Studies has too many professors who, amongst other foibles, like to base a significant percentage of my mark, on the work done by other people. Or not done, as the case may be. And, I’m not actually ready to blame others for their lack of work, I’m terrified that their mark will be lowered by my errors of omission, or commission. The terror does me in.

I have nightmares, real, live, frighteningly vivid nightmares all centered around group projects. I sweat them when I’m asleep, and I sweat them when I’m awake, and they gnaw at my guts. I hate them.

And tonight’s class? Group projects. Depending on how you count, 40 to 50% of my final mark, based on group projects. And I hate them.

The thesis, when one gets there, is supposed to be an extended, intellectual, argument that is properly developed, supported, illustrated, presented and defended. Wonderful idea. No one but me seems to notice that it is, most emphatically, not a group project. The author is supposed to develop and present a body of work essentially on their own; in light of that, the continual imposition of ‘group projects’ seems of little pedagogical import.

Although all this came to a head today, in all honesty it has been building at least since the first week of July, when course registration opened.  I stalled as long as I could. I suffered through the agonies of nightmare, depression, angst hoping that if I was just positive enough, all would pass.

One would hope, and I did, that once the decision to leave the program had been made, a great mental weight would lift. Hopefully I would be freed of the weight of expectation, of anger, of fear. But that didn’t happen. Things will, I hope, lighten over the next few days.

I also hope that my ego will allow me to explain, in greater or lesser detail, to friends and acquaintances, what I’ve done, and why.

It has been a very trying day.

What does ‘to create’ mean?

As I have written here before I question the devaluation of ‘manual’ skills; I object at some visceral level to the unstated assumption that those who engage in manual work, for the sake of argument the making of ‘things,’ are incapable of reason. And don’t get all up in arms. Remember that what people learn, supposedly, in an ‘arts’ education, is the ability to reason.

The ability to reason is the rationale for an humanities degree.

If reasoning is the result of four years of education, then the implied truth is that only the educated are capable of reason. And, by and large, those who make ‘things’ are utterly devoid of those four years of education that would allow them to reason.

So, as wonderful a person as your tailor may be, she is incapable of ‘reasoning’ solely because she lacks the appropriate training. Your plumber, by default, can only ‘replace’ things because without the training that would allow him to rationally analyse the situation, he is unable to determine the root cause of the problem. And your automotive technician is likewise disabled.

All those poor, uneducated, slobs. Incapable of reason, they are denied full participation in society, and the educated will have to accept the responsibility of their welfare.

One of the difficulties I have with this proposition is the act of creation; the process actually whereby an individual (because I hate ‘group projects’) wants to make ’something.’ It might be a simple thing, fried eggs, not normally noted for the depth of intellectual rigor necessary to fulfill the process. Or it might be the design and construction of a house, a telescope (just check on the role of amateurs in astronomy sometime), a quilt.

All of these projects require endless decision making. Competing needs, desires, facilities all need to be weighed, and the appropriate actions taken so that the end result actually fulfills the original need.

But, as we have seen, the people who sully their hands in the physical creation of ‘things’ are regarded as, at best, slightly stupid by a society that wants to know first off what you ‘got’ your degree in. And why would anyone consign their children to a role held to be only slightly above bovine in modern society?

So there are any number of reasons to avoid the trades/crafts areas of the work-world.

A couple of readers suggested this article , by Jay Leno, and his appreciation of manual skills. While Leno’s article strikes close to the same target I aim at, there are a couple small matters to address.

The first is easy. Jay Leno has buckets of cash. Buckets. And he likes to spend some of that cash on cars, some of it on accurate restorations of vehicles to ‘as new’ condition, and some of it on exceedingly well done creative re-interpretations of the original – think really high-end hot-rods. To give Leno credit, he is willing to spend money on his hobby. I expect that he demands quality results for that money, but he, unlike many, is prepared to spend. And having buckets of cash gives him lots to spend.

The second, and somewhat more difficult idea, is that of ‘cultural capital,’ which again Jay Leno has. Cultural capital bestows upon its bearer forms of power similar to those of cash, but often in ways not immediately obvious to the viewer – whether buyer or seller in the marketplace of ideas. But, to keep it simple, if we assume that Jay Leno has cultural capital, it makes his proclamations worthy. And that worthiness must be examined for its truth claims.

If Jay Leno says good machinists are great people, and wonderful to have, it means that they are great and wonderful if you can afford to have them. As hobbyists go Leno is special, he not only can afford, but does afford. And that alters his relationship with the ‘idea’ of the creative, critical thinking, machinist.

But if you are struggling to get your three kids through school, you’re driving a beat up old Holden V-8 with bald tires, and you still believe that your kids will do better in the workplace lottery than you, I suggest your first advice is to ‘get an education.’

Buying in to the accepted wisdom, fostered by baby-boomers in most of the developed world, that an education (meaning four years of university) is the only way to become a rational thinker (and therefore employable) it is unlikely that parents are going to tell their daughter to become a plumber. She might make way more money as a plumber, but she won’t be half as acceptable as an elementary school teacher.

Hey, just as an aside; ever notice that you have to go to an accredited ‘education training facility’ to teach kids in elementary or secondary school, but any fool with a PhD can teach at the university level? Without any proof, or practice necessarily, in the classroom.

So, those that make ‘things’ tend not to be educated in the ‘university’ sense of the word. And that means that the things they create are not accorded the same value as those things designed, perhaps, by people accounted as being capable of critical examination and analysis. So, what happens when people with ‘education’ create?

Well, some of what they create reflects the nature of the institution they attended. Some learn to parse sentences, probably in English. Others learn to parse ‘lines,’ perhaps in ‘C,’ or ‘C++.’ Some we call ‘writers,’ some we call ‘computer geeks,’ or if we are feeling particularly warm and fuzzy, IT staff.

Others will, perhaps, sit at a computer and draw buildings. Those people we call architects. Some people will sit in front of their computer and draw (?) the scenes and characters for any variety of computer games/images/movies. I don’t know what those people are called. Others will sit with like-minded people and plot and scheme various political or financial plots. Those people we call stock-brokers, politicians, and worse.

The difficulty is that most of these people need the uneducated masses to translate their words, drawings, computer code, stock deals, and various political schemes into real, tangible, results.  Without the masses, wherever they may be located geographically, to actually produce the required end result, the only thing that has been produced is intellectual property. Perhaps.

Intellectual property is a wonderful idea. I actually make a small part of my living from writing. But without the people who, in multiple steps, transform my written work in to a product that other people are willing to pay for, the intellectual property part of the deal is actually pretty insignificant.

So who actually creates? What does it mean to create something?

Does the customer create, by creating a demand for something, like Jay Leno’s need for car parts otherwise unavailable? Does the machinist create the part, in response to a vaguely formulated need expressed by the customer? Does an engineer, or draughts-person, create the piece by acting as an interlocutor between the customer’s needs, and the machinists abilities? And, what role does cultural capital play, in the valuation not only of the ‘thing’ made, but in the customers role in wanting it?

These things we purport to value we often fail to support. We think manual skill is great, but we are unprepared to actually pay for it. We all want our gun/camera/car/boat/suit/bicycle/personal water craft/stereo/computer/microwave to be repairable – that is, ultimately what we are asking for – but we are unprepared to actually pay someone else what we expect to get paid for our own work. And that is only part of the difference between Jay Leno and most hobbyists.

Leno is prepared to pay others for the skills they exhibit in the intellectual, and physical, creation of something he wants. In this particular role, Leno is lending cultural capital to the idea of the ability to create, but I don’t think it is enough. The need for others to create is not strong enough amongst us; we want, but are unprepared to acknowledge the value of creation for our interests.

We are not the creators we are looking for, unfortunately.

Fascist, Facade, Fa-cadist

I want to make this absolutely, entirely, unequivocally, clear. I do not share the contemporary concern with ‘facadism,’ I do not condemn it, I do not condone it. I share the urban environment with it, as I share that environment with other ‘movements’ as they occur – part of the natural life cycle of cities.

For those of you who are unaware of the term, or the reality, ‘facadism’ is the somewhat derogatory term applied to the process of building renovation that merely maintains the original street frontage/elevation while completely destroying, and building a new structure behind the mask of tradition and history.

Vancouver is currently undergoing a real estate boom that rivals, as a percentage of ‘change,’ anything in the City’s history. In terms of ‘absolute,’ inflation-adjusted dollars, the current spending spree is probably well ahead of any period of boosterism-driven development on record.

One of the problems with the pace of change is the difficulty that citizens have in maintaining personal contact with the newly developed spaces. Towers that spring from former brownfield sites may make the required concessions to public amenity space, but the towers themselves deny the humanity of the occupants, and of the passers by on the streets below. And, when sites such as Concord Pacific’s development along False Creek, and the ‘Yaletown’ area in particular, are overseen by one company (and their associated architects, ‘vision,’ budgets, and choices in market segment) all the buildings tend to come out looking virtually identical.

Now, I have to admit, these buildings are not quite as soulless as Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, or various representative bits of Soviet-era housing in the worker’s paradise. But the architectural responses to the kalidescope of demands have been reduced to a minimum, an architectural monoculture.

Some developers, and in some areas of the city, have tried to make money in other ways. And, remember, along with ego, money is a (the) driving force here. When money is the driving force, success is relatively easy to calculate. Money returned less money invested equals profit.

Granted some of the returns may not appear on the ledger directly, such as density transfers, but they will show up, eventually.

Vancouver often grants a sympathetic view to ’sensitive’ redevelopment, particularly in the Gastown area, the City’s oldest commercial zone. Indeed, much of the building stock is heritage listed, at one level or another, and may include certain restrictions with respect to height, FSR (floor/space ratio, a measure of the building area/lot area), and conformity to design guidelines relevant to the area.

And this helps give rise to ‘facadism.’ The retention of the original street-wall, complete with architectural detail ’as built’ lends a sense of visual and cultural continuity to the street frontage; and helps to maintain a sense of scale that reflects human action/interaction both in the buildings and outside on the public street.

Very often the buildings are allowed a vertical addition, sometimes of one or two stories, with a set-back that hides much of the vertical addition from the street-level viewer. The developer wants this additional space to maximize profit, the City may gain tax revenue, and there is an argument that the additional space benefits the local business/residential community with a greater pool of people.

And the buildings are often exemplary in the attention to detail; rooftop green-spaces, geothermal heating systems, and other contemporary details complement the century-old visage that graces the street. The ‘new’ building has a full complement of modern services, of up-to-date amenities, of positive changes to construction methodologies.

The anti-facadists, in their fascistic navel-gazing decry the ‘lie’ that the public sees. They maintain that this new building is, in some sense, a misrepresentation. They complain that a perfectly good, old, building has been destroyed for the nominal profit available through the redevelopment/rebuilding process. They squawk about the loss of heritage detail in the interiors; the loss of old tile floors, the loss (though often reclaimed by specialist recyclers) of old timber, brick, and stone. And they complain that it is new.

But the anti-facadist fascists, in their own ideological verve, have never had to replace all the plumbing in a hundred-year-old building. They have never actually done the math to determine the cost of up-grading, up-dating, up-coding every single system in an old building to reflect the demands not only of modern city codes, but the even-more insistent needs and demands of modern consumers of space. And the actual consumers of space, those corporations and individuals that pay the final tab, want ‘new.’

The romance of old buildings disappears in the middle of a Vancouver winter, when your staff expects heat, and gets instead the banging and gurgling of old heating systems. Original elevators, if the building had elevators, were tiny. You had best be on very good terms with anyone else using the cage. New elevators are bigger, faster, and (possibly) safer. And if they aren’t qualitatively safer, at least you can talk to the ‘operator’ if things get jammed up.

People forget that when most of the building stock in Vancouver was built, or at least the buildings where ‘facadism’ is an issue, electricity ran light bulbs, elevators, and not much more. It certainly didn’t drive recirculating hot-water heating systems. And I don’t hear any clamouring for what is euphemistically termed ‘gravity feed’ hot water heating, which depends on the temperature gradient (and hence specific gravity difference) between hot water and cold to drive the circulation throughout the entire system.

I know of at least one building in the Downtown East Side that is six stories high, still has that gravity system, and the top floor is, shall we say, a little less than comfortably warm in the middle of winter. But the heating system is genuine, it is an antique, and it should be where the anti-facadists huddle while bemoaning the more up-to-date technologies they so fervently disavow.

After you up-grade the heating system there are a couple of other areas of concern. The electrical service. We now expect duplex receptacles every few feet of linear wall surface. We expect to be able to plug in a hair dryer, toaster, microwave, computer, adding machine, general and spot lighting, and a variety of other electrical loads without ever being inconvenienced by something so tawdry as a breaker tripping. Or, perhaps, the nay-sayers would prefer screw-in fuses?

What about the vast array of other, hidden, details? What about high-speed internet cabling? What about security system wiring? Do we just run all this stuff along the base boards, in an attempt to cut the installation costs? What about floors that are not level, rooms that are not square, renovations done by any number of incompentents over the pre-existing life of the building. What about the leaking skylights, or light-wells, as applicable? What about the dry-rot in any, endless, variety of hidden spaces?

My suspicion is that the vast majority of anti-facadists are taking a small amount of architectural knowledge, mostly ‘theoretical,’ drawing on various anti-humanist ‘post-’ positions to generate an inadequate, and perhaps juvenile, Arcadian view of architectural perfection – something the buildings in question never aspired to, let alone reached.

They have fond memories of some quaint detail in an old building, like the memories we have of the first place we lived without ‘adult’ supervision – it was great at the time, but we would never consider putting up with it now.

But the fascist anti-facadists want me to put up with their ideologically perfect building. It maintains the original facade, while maintaining all that is wrong with the building in terms of today’s wants, needs, and expectations.

And I disagree, fervently.

Out on a limb

Well, this is a tough one.

Class.

Sounds like glass. Breaks like glass as well, along clearly defined fault lines, and under predictable conditions; the ‘energy of fracture’ revealed along economic, social, cultural, ethnic/racial, educational, and other markers of human social worth.

Francis, a Malaysian acquaintance <http://fh2o.blogspot.com/> has written quite interesting and pointed posts on people who fit in entirely different places in Malaysian society than himself. He writes about people he encounters with respect, integrity, and a certain humility. And those qualities make his writing special.

When putting pen to paper, or typing furiously on a computer keyboard, Francis is aware of the economic and social gulf that exists between himself, and the people he writes about. He realizes that these people will probably never have the opportunity to read the words written about them, they may not be able to read English, they may have no idea how to connect to the internet, and they may not even know they have been the subject of public attention. And that separates Francis from those he writes about.

But I’m interested in what separates his readers from the people he writes about. I’m interested in the people that Mike Davis (Planet of Slums, City of Quartz, and several others) writes about. I’m quite often interested in the ’subjects’ of writer’s work. But I’m far more interested in the relationships between the readers of the work, and the ’subjects.’

In ‘Planet of Slums’ Mike Davis’s focus is on the unbelievable degradation in which several tens of millions of people, predominantly though not solely in the equatorial or sub-equatorial world, live in – often over generations. In a world a century and a half further on, we are seeing, again, and again, the recreation of ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England,’ by Friedrich Engels (1845).

But one could argue that Engels’ was a world different than ours. We argue that we are more technically advanced, more concerned with ‘efficiency,’ more aware of the health dangers of urban overcrowding, deprivation, and degradation than any society before our time. You could argue that, I can’t.

Engels’ world existed about 161 years ago. It was the most technically advanced ‘world’ of its time. A very few years before Engels’ book, Darwin publishes ‘The Voyage of the HMS Beagle.’ In 1841 Edgar Allan Poe publishes ‘Murder in the Rue Morgue,’ the first modern detective story, and in 1843 writes the first mystery story – ‘The Gold Bug’ – as we know them now. The first ‘fax’ machine was demonstrated in England by Alexander Bain. And these are mere snippets of a world undergoing, perhaps, an unprecedented acceleration in the production of knowledge, technical, scientific, and social.

This was not, as some of my student acquaintances believed, a period only dimly removed from the caves at Lascaux.

Engels was simultaneously drawn to the plight of the urban misery of the working class, and revolted by it, and his work may still be the best descriptions of unbelievable filth, working, and living conditions written. Though I’ll entertain suggestions on that statement.

Now, one hundred and sixty-one years later, Mike Davis is trying to draw our attention from the fate of today’s urban underclasses in the developed world (of which he has written well and often) to the plight of those tens of millions of people outside of London, Paris, Tokyo, Milan, New York, Vancouver. And that is where I get interested again.

Mike Davis, like any writer, has to engage his audience. The ‘writer’ needs to tease, to cajole, to interest, inform, and to illuminate a world that is uncomfortably different from the world his readers actually inhabit. Not one single resident of a shanty town in South Africa is likely to read this blog, let alone Davis’ ‘Planet of Slums.’ Nor are residents of slums in Manila, China, India, Malaysia, or any other nation likely to read, or to have even heard of, Mike Davis.

So the target audience is comfortably middle-class, well-educated, literate, socially-engaged, and isolated from the bloody grim realities of life on well under US $1/daily.

Hell, in Vancouver, even the poorest on welfare get more than US $1 a day! Actually, they get an astounding US $5 (after the ‘rental allowance’ of Cdn $325 is subtracted from the initial Cdn $510/month), to live in some of the most expensive places (particularly when compared by the square foot) in Canada. But, I digress.

How do people who have probably never gone hungry imagine digging through garbage for something to eat? How do people, living in houses with several bathrooms, conjure up an image of literally walking through shit in the street? And, apart from those who insist on living in ‘Hurricane Alley,’ or the tornado belt in the US, or riverine flood plains anywhere, think about the odds of having your house disappear in flood, fire, or earthquake?

My guess is that the vast majority of readers, whether of Engels, or Davis, or hundreds of others,  are spectators in a consumer society. While comfortable in their condo, or sitting on beach, or reading in the bath they are removed, viscerally, from the grinding realities that the authors work to portray.

These readers are the people on whose behalf downtown business associations hire private security, to protect the Disneyfied presentation of retail consumer goods. The people reading about the slum dwellers are engaged in a form of pornography: only slightly removed from the televised disaster-porn of the last tsunami, or the cover of ‘The National Enquirer,’ these people are protected by class from the realities of those they read about.

Like my post regarding the ‘World Urban Forum, and why I’m not there,’ http://citylover.wordpress.com/tag/urban/ these people are functionally, socially, and culturally insulated from the actual, lived, reality that is the subject at hand.

But Engels and Davis are engaged on another project as well. Both authors are offering an indictment not only of a ‘foreign’ middle class, but of an extremely powerful ‘local’ middle class as well. One of the discussions I overheard while the WUF was on in Vancouver was concerned with the local (in this case Ghanaian) middle class gaining access to housing intended for the poor; through political connections, ‘business as usual,’ graft, corruption, and human venality class won the day. Again and again Davis offers criticism of the ‘usual suspects,’ The World Bank, powerful foreign-aid lobbies, neo-conservative forces. But, every time he accuses the ‘rich and powerful’ foreign interests, he also shines a light on the local middle and upper classes as being guilty parties in the continuation and worsening of the conditions of slum dwellers around the world.

And our local middle-class readers?

I suspect that they will read the books, think thoughts, and then with every available grace, engage that which is theirs by right. They won’t think of not flying to Hawaii, Florida, the Mexican Riviera, New York, London, Paris, Tokyo. They won’t think of not buying a holiday/retirement property that not long ago was unsecured land, squatted on by a generation or more of local inhabitants. They won’t take the time to inquire exactly how our foreign aid money is spent, nor will they ask the Swiss (for instance, I’m sure there are others equally blind to the source(s) of wealth) just how did all that money get stripped out of a country whose annual GDP is equal to the bank deposit of some newly-retired klepto-politico. They won’t do these things because it is difficult. And may reveal awkward, and difficult, truths.

Some of those truths are revealed in the class perogitives that are truly cross-cultural. The well-heeled, the well-educated, know that they are worth more than others. That’s just the way it is. And the well-heeled ‘over there’ share much in common with the ‘well heeled’ over here. The handbags, the cars, the watches, the medical treatment that one flies somewhere to obtain, the airline tickets to the same destinations all reveal the commonality of class expectation, nearly world wide.

Our middle class has many of the same class-interests as their middle class. And, as long as that is the truth, well, one can observe, but taste dictates a modesty and delicacy that proscribes such untoward behaviour. I mean, one mustn’t interfere.

Class has its prerogatives, and its obligations, remember.

And that’s where I go out on a limb.

My thinking, my keep

I was a machinist, once. Then a bicycle builder, mechanic, rider. There were other loves to be sure; kayaking, then rowing. Once in a while running seemed to be the thing to do. Jobs, most of which I didn’t like, and even if I did like them, I certainly didn’t want to keep doing them.

Humanities 101, at UBC. A great thing. I did an undergraduate degree, in four years, finishing when I was 48.

I started a Masters, which I’ll continue, so degree in hand (and a couple dollars) I’ll be able to get a coffee.

Right now I have a great job. I fix stuff, primarily gross building systems, that other people in their madness, destroy. I build, and rebuild, walls, doors, locks, plumbing, electrical, security, and a vast array of other systems. The hours are great. The money is not too bad.

And then I start thinking about machinery, machine tools in particular, again.

Ever meet a real addict? The person who can rationalize whatever their addiction is, to whoever is around, at any time or place? They make jumping off of bridges, with a parachute, sound almost reasonable. To the real addict it doesn’t matter if you understand, they just want you to agree.

A lathe, and a milling machine, would be useful. I could make widgets. Or heat-treat some stuff. Or use the DRO (digital read-out) for laying out bolt circles. But I’d have to get some CAD (computer assisted drawing (or design)) software, and learn to use that as well. And it would have to be three-phase, because 3 phase machinery vibrates less, which makes accurate work more readily practical. And I’d need some space. Grade level, you know, makes getting the stuff inside easier.

But I’d need some extra stuff to, you know, to make stuff. This machine, that machine, and at the end of the day, you know, I’d have something tangible in my hand, to show for my labours.

Nuts.

Almost certainly a formula for frustration, anxiety, collapse.

I kid myself that this stuff would ‘only have to pay for itself,’ I try to rationalize. That lightens the load a bit. But there is so much of it to get. And there is so much of it to store, to care for, to keep warm, and dry, and safe.

A blog I read regularly http://duncanmargetts.com/blog/ shares some of my views on life, though certainly not all; nor do I share all Duncan’s views, but he is almost always an interesting read. He thinks about stuff, primarily ‘more’ stuff, and makes reference to Epicurus. Philosophy, from the ancient Greeks, to blogs about cities and stuff.

But Epicurus wanted to be satisfied, not sated, and in my particular case I’m headed not even for ’sated,’ but, ultimately, dissatisfaction. Because the promise held out in machinery is false; the dreams of realization through multiple-start threads, bearing fits, and accurate work are phantasms.

Oh, I can do the work. I can even do the work on machinery less accurate than the end result. But the promise held out is one of tangible, physical, ‘real’ work at the end of the day.

And in these types of dreams, the end of that day never comes. It’s always tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, but never now.

But, fixing stuff, as it comes, fulfills a dream. There is a tangible result at the end of the day; the building still stands, the security cameras still see, the staff have one more room in which to bed down some lost and lonely soul, and I know that I have done the best I can with what is at hand.

And the making of something from scratch?

I do that here. I sit down, with only the vaguest notion of what I’m going to say, and if at the end you’re still reading, I must have created something.

So, tomorrow, I’ll fix stuff. And, I’ll enjoy fixing it as well as I can, under the circumstances. And I’ll continue to write, here, and once in a while, in search of money.

And I know I can make my pen pay its keep.