It looks as if we may have inadvertently designed this storm ourselves.

Animation by University of Delaware’s College of Earth, Ocean and Environment

The above video by a Berliner complains about Berlin’s influx of hipsters, addressing them directly in its conclusion:

“Please stop to face your neighbourhood… it matters if you try to live in Neukölln or whether you just live your imported party here. Just because the fucked up free market economy expects us, for example, to satisfy your wishes because you have the money and the power (at least afterwards) even though you refuse to believe in this fact now because you prefer to feel poor.. but that’s not the truth and you know that.” The video’s observations echo this critique of hipster culture.

The Guardian takes a different view, blaming Berlin’s skyrocketing living costs and rapid gentrification not on hipsters or artists, but on a world financial crisis that caused those with capital to invest in property rather than in the stock market. It’s all in the title: “Berlin’s housing bubble and the backlash against hipster tourists:
Skyrocketing housing costs in Berlin can’t be blamed on an influx of ‘foreigners’, but are in fact fuelled by the global financial crisis.”

I think both analyses contain some truth. They’re concurrent and not unrelated problems. On the hipster side it points to some problems with the whole creative class/creative city argument, but haranguing hipsters into better behaviour is no solution. The solution would be structural, a rights-based approach to housing policy. The Guardian writer concludes,”these are no natural forces. They can be kept in check with the right policies, like a cap on rents or laws against property speculation. Decent, affordable housing is a basic right, for locals as well as for international students, artists and layabouts.”

It is good to actually see housing actually being considered a human right in the press; the rights-based approach is mentioned far too seldom in the media let alone among policy-makers who have mostly been sucked into believing that private enterprise can fix the housing unaffordability problem. It can’t, and it won’t.

On the gentrification side, look at this critique of what’s happening to neighbourhoods in San Francisco and New York (High Line). Or hey, anything happening in Vancouver, a world capital of property-as-investment rather than property-as-shelter.

Most of the photos here were taken by a friend of mine, Canadian filmmaker Velcrow Ripper, at Occupy Wall Street. Reproduced here with permission. See his whole gallery of Occupy Wall Street photos.

I would like to nominate the protest sign—all the protest signs of this year’s worldwide uprisings, in general—as the pre-eminent design object of 2011. Most newsworthy, most useful, most creative, and it gives “mass-produced” a new meaning.

Vancouver begins its own Occupy protest on October 15, in solidarity as well as in protest against the wealth divide here at home. The gap between rich and poor in Canada is at its historic widest, and it’s nowhere wider than in British Columbia where more than a decade of rightwing policies and cuts have produced, among other tragedies, the worst child poverty rate in the country, and by a wide margin. Accelerating corporate ownership of our political process creates problems here too. Even if Canada’s greater regulation of banking has saved us from some of the catastrophes facing the US, the rapidly widening income gap means we are heading for trouble.

Those who mock or dismiss Occupy Wall Street—if anyone is still doing that—will probably regret it later.

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
- Mahatma Gandhi

More reading:

Mark Ruffalo, The Guardian: We are the 99 percent
Paul Krugman, New York Times, Panic of the Plutocrats
Naomi Klein, The Nation, Occupy Wall Street: The Most Important Thing in the World Now
Chris Hedges, Truthdig, Why the Elites are in Trouble
Douglas Rushkoff, CNN, Think Occupy Wall St. is a phase? You don’t get it
Tristan Markle, The Mainlander, #OccupyVancouver? Look to Hong Kong housing activists for inspiration
Joe Romm, ThinkProgress, The Other 99% of Us Can’t Buy Our Way Out of the Impending Global Ponzi Scheme Collapse

Below, by an unknown phographer, a shot of a US veteran at the protest. (Please tell me if you know who shot this.) Sign should win a prize for best ever use of black electrical tape. “2nd time I’ve fought for my country – 1st time I’ve known my enemy.”

And from CNN‘s article ”Think Occupy Wall St. is a phase? You don’t get it”:

Update: a new photo of the sign at top, which now seems to be going viral:

(All photos here are of New York. Photos of Vancouver to be appended later.)

The building at left is by Gehry. Shot is taken from the Highline promenade. I’m not normally a fan of Gehry but this grouping of buildings is quite attractive and when I saw its complementary surfaces I was struck by how seldom (never) Vancouver achieves this.

Thanks to property speculation in Vancouver, up to 60% of condos in the new downtown towers are unoccupied. This statistic is based on the assessment of realtors selling in the area. These condos are bought only for investment purposes, most often by foreign buyers but also by local real estate speculators. The condo towers in question are, as a result, increasingly built for pure, cynical get-rich-quick business motives rather than out of real housing needs and certainly not out of architectural ambition. Not surprisingly the towers reflect their crassly transactional origin in their design—as tall as possible, as many units as possible, and built to a spec design rather than designed by an architect. Hang the cost of a real architect; spend more on marketing than on architectural design: this is what is increasingly referred to in Vancouver as marketecture. These generic, personalityless, utterly interchangeable buildings are not built for living in as much as they are just tiny boxes for parking money in. And it shows.

In New York, on the other hand, you see evidence—in both older and newer buildings—of architectural and design quality. It’s as if people actually care about their city, and buildings seem constructed for a market that desires beauty and that plans to actually live in the building. But New York’s political economy is different than ours, of course. It has a long history of a diversified, locally-grounded economy. BC on the other hand has always been a pioneer, banana republic-style resource extraction economy. We build nothing from the raw resources, but rather just ship them out: logs, minerals, fish, lumber, pot. We never developed a tradition of making things. Instead we quickly built a flashy, architecturally-derivative paean to our quickly-begotten pirate loot. “By Sea, Land, and Air We Prosper”—that’s the motto of the City of Vancouver. A topic for another day is the connection between far-right economics and resource extraction.

Here is just a small sample of visually interesting buildings seen mostly in Lower Manhattan. Like them or not—and they’re not all perfect by any means—they evidence more care, design skill and creativity than the developer-designed mediocrity sprouting up all over Vancouver. Much of the current opposition to highrises has to do with the fact that these bland, cynical, tall-for-profit monstrosities are inimical to neighbourhoods. They bring a weird silent soullessness to every neighbourhood they’re plonked in. As architect Bing Thom pointed out recently, the housing stock downtown is utterly distorted by these economics—it’s designed for zero children and zero schools, it encourages only temporary inhabitation by people desperate to get into the real estate market, there’s no pleasurable pedestrian activity around them, and they’re simply unsustainable if what you want is a real city. And we’ll be stuck with this hulking mediocrity forever. Or until it’s underwater.

Certainly, comparing New York and Vancouver is comparing apples and oranges. New York sprang up before the invention of the car, it has an abundance of dense (and often not overly tall) housing, a history of rent control, excellent transit, and it enjoyed the kind of settlement pattern and diverse local industry that produces a workable layout and a natural form of density. That is New York’s pre-existing advantage. Vancouver was born of a succession of gold rushes (gold, fish, lumber, minerals… now real estate, drugs) and wears this political economy on its sleeve.

Many of these shots were taken from the Highline, the extremely successful and already beloved elevated park/promenade made from New York’s disused elevated train line. Which was reminiscent of the viaducts in Vancouver. On a warm September night the Highline was packed with people enjoying the view of the city amongst plantings of native grasses and plants.

I was there by accident. These people were not.

Apparently it’s “anything goes” in fashion right now, but that’s been true for a while. Anyway, it’s never really “anything goes” – there are always those weird, arbitrarily-imposed rules. But it does feel like a confusing, shifting mishmash right now. Like the economy.

New York’s new High Line park may be semi-private, but lawn chairs in the middle of a pedestrianized, five-block stretch of Broadway that includes Times Square are absolutely free. 

They say by the end of the summer the chairs will be replaced by permanent seating fixtures about which there are already complaints. In the meantime, Times Square is half post-apocalyptic sci-fi and half peaceful sit-in. A positive view on the new pedestrian mall is here.