cityofsound

New papers: the San Francisco Panorama etcetera

[Second part of a two-parter on the papers — read part one: The Papers]

Earlier this year I was in San Francisco, and found myself with an hour to kill at the ferry terminal, over a cold beer and the pleasingly tall and slender format of the San Francisco Chronicle. At first glance it seemed like a decent paper - interesting stories, well-designed. But in the self-styled 'digital capital' that is the Bay Area, and with the gloomy pronouncements about American newspapers in particular, it’s hard to believe its circulation is going anywhere but south.

A month or so later, I made sure I ordered another San Francisco newspaper, the San Francisco Panorama. This isn’t a daily newspaper, and probably won’t make it beyond issue one - but that’s on purpose. It’s a prototype of a newspaper, designed to demonstrate that such things are still viable. And it’s an extraordinary piece of work. 

In this core mission, it just about succeeds. It tries to demonstrate that it's possible to make a newspaper, and a local one at that, financially and creatively viable. Despite its leviathan form - which the creators are clear wouldn’t be sustainable - it easily conveys the creative possibilities in the format. Here, interestingly, it’s a hybrid, drawing much from the culture of the web as well as newspapers. And it’s beautifully designed, with a wonderful range. It feels utterly alive, and convincing, in this respect.

The Papers

A year or so ago my piece 'The Street As Platform' was kindly included in Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet, a smart one-off publication by Russell Davies and Ben Terrett.

The paper turned out to be a prototype of the fantastic Newspaper Club, one of the more interesting ventures to have emerged from 'the papernet'. Their model rather brilliantly combines a craft-led agenda — a kind of 'slow' approach informed by bespoke design as well as template-driven production — as well as a potentially scalable infrastructure for localised printing that piggy-backs on the installed base of the newspaper industry. 

Recently, the Newspaper Club team produced another entry into what may or may not be turning into the Things Our Friends ... series by creating a one-off publication for the SXSW conference, Things Our Friends Sent Us For Printing. Russell again kindly asked me to contribute something for this. So I did, choosing to write, and to write something about the physical and cultural infrastructure surrounding newspapers, as well as addressing these new physical artefacts emerging around 'the papernet' idea. It's reproduced here below.

It doesn't suggest one set of artefacts will replace the other — that so rarely happens — but there is admittedly a slightly melancholy note running through the opening series of memories, which also begins to explore the relationship between a city and its press. There's a lot more in that particular topic that I didn't get into here, but the importance of a good newspaper for a city surely cannot be underestimated (whether digital or physical or some fusion of both is another matter, and only hinted at). Hence my interest in the San Francisco Panorama, and I'll expand upon the three examples I refer to below in a subsequent post. But for now, congratulations to Newspaper Club — watch that space.

'49 Cities', by Work AC

A while ago I was asked to help write a short piece on 'future cities', no more specific than that. The context was Australia, but fairly free. I suggested we start it with the following passage:

— Fade in —

The city of the future is established initially with north-south and east-west axial streets, and the city is laid out as a grid. Each block is envisaged as a programmable slot and is mixed-use, containing apartments, houses, shops and workshops, creating a dense city core. Between the urbanised zone and the city boundaries is a buffer zone, and beyond lies agricultural lands. Urban amenities such as plumbing, reservoirs, drainage and sewers, pedestrian sidewalks and traffic calming measures are employed throughout the city, along with public amenities like markets, public baths and toilets, theatres and religious and governmental buildings. 

Socially, the city's population is actively engaged in public life, through sport, food and drink, and an outdoors '24/7' culture, but also political discussion. Active transport ensures a strong, healthy populace, almost all waste is recycled, and food production is localised and distributed throughout, orchards, vines and herb gardens integrated into living spaces. Light industrial production is also distributed throughout the city, and connected globally through trade networks. Global communications are at the centre of the city's success.

Housing is based upon the courtyard house model, with an average of 3.5 people living in a space featuring two private courtyards, one of which collects rainwater that feeds subterranean water tanks. Cooling is achieved through passive design, and heating through the inherent thermal properties of ceramics.

Although dense, 69% of land use is green space, leaving 11% for infrastructure and 20% for built area. Of that built area, fully 52% is public space and 48% is housing. Of the green space, only 2% is devoted to parks as the other 98% is a productive landscape of urban agriculture, far more ubiquitous than the hemmed-in green spaces of the 20th century city. As citizens spend much of their time in this verdant space, dedicated parks feel less necessary.

The entire urban form is modular, flexible, and capable of being repeated across numerous contexts and locales. It has been tried and tested throughout much of the known world, each time iterated and refined through adaptation.

— Fade out —

In case you didn't already guess, the mention of "public baths" might be the give-away, for this is actually a description of the archetypal Roman city circa 500 BC—500 CE (drawn from the recent book '49 Cities'). Of course, the Roman city had more than a few flaws, particularly if you were a slave. And for even the healthiest, life expectancy was far lower than we'd accept today. Similarly, there are newer technologies that we should certainly take advantage of, such as renewable energy production, wireless connectivity, bicycles and of course the espresso machine. Yet it's surprising to consider how similar visions of contemporary urban planners - with their own versions of urban agriculture, active transport, walkable densification, courtyard housing with passive design, recycling, localised production, and so on - are to this Roman city from two millennia ago.

As stated, that introduction was adapted from the entry on the Roman city from the great collection 49 Cities, a compendium of utopian city projects linked to an exhibition at the Storefront for Art & Architecture in New York City, developed by local architects Work AC. 

14 Cities: City of Glasses

Part of the 14 Cities series:

'"The pervasive deployment of sunglasses and white headphones had become a feature of the urban experience in the early 2000s.

At first glance, citizens during the 2020s seemed to have much in common. The glasses seemed a little bulkier, and had apparently integrated the headphones, but otherwise the streets were still full of people wandering around cocooned within the frames of their glasses and immersed in their own soundscapes.

Yet on other side of the glass, Sydney in 2025 is quite different. In fact, there are so many Sydneys in 2025 as to render the idea of one Sydney ridiculous. The city is experienced as an immersive projection, with data overlaid onto the physical fabric to the extent that only the most desirable built elements remain visible at all. All other items are cloaked by the glasses, just as all urban noise is filtered by the headphones. These remove unwelcome noise whilst heightening others, all set against a soundtrack of music, displaced ambient sounds, and a stream of commentary from other users.

Investment in the visual design layers of physical structures had plummeted as people began to inhabit other spaces in these places, overlaying their own architectures.

And yet, a few had recently started wandering the streets unadorned, eyes wide open, ears cocked, experiencing what was left of the unmediated city ..."

Notes: This is somewhat ironic for someone who's been immersed in music and the urban experience for a long time. However, this is as much about the current hubbub around augmented reality — which I think is a little over-blown, even if the technology holds much promise — as it is about pervasive white Apple headphones. Either way, I'm interested in how we value the physical urban experience, which for me should not be exchanged for mediated or augmented experiences, even if we can heighten certain aspects of our appreciation via the latter. The title is a lame pun on Paul Auster's City of Glass that didn't really work.

14 Cities: City of Tillandsia

Part of the 14 Cities series:

"Floating low over the Blue Mountains, the city of Tillandsia is named after a very particular plant genus. 

Tillandsia — the plant — draws moisture and nutrients direct from the air itself (from dust, decaying leaves and insect matter), and so this air plant serves as both metaphor and native flora for the city.

Borne aloft on warm thermals rising around the Three Sisters, Tillandsia appears as a cloud of bubbles, its numerous sacs glowing with LED lighting and humming with activity. The bubbles are composed of ETFE and aerogel, the latter material lighter-than-air. Its gently twirling rotors are powered by solar energy harvested on the skin of the structures, and wind energy gathered by high-altitude kites. Thin guylines ascend into near-orbit above the floating city, also traced with arcs of lighting to warn nearby aircraft. At night, the structures look like a large cloud lit by internal lightning.

Tillandsia’s small but wealthy population has taken to the air, a stated attempt to ascend to a higher form of humanity, though they spend most of their time circling around the east coast of Australia they originally ascended from, where their plants can thrive and from where they can occasionally descend on small elevator pods, touching base with rural communities to exchange goods and services."

Notes: An idea which rather obviously grows out of the CLOUD project I was involved with, and some of Tomas Saraceno's ideas. The tillandsia genus is indeed known as aerophytes, or air plants. As with the Gold Coast floating city, though air-borne rather than water-borne, a fairly well-trodden path in terms of utopian urban visions. I'd love to see such a thing hovering around the Three Sisters, however.

14 Cities: Fractal City

Part of the 14 Cities series: 

"An output of the most stringently applied planning codes possible, the Fractal City comprises most of the new City of Newcastle, NSW, rebuilt after the Great Earthquake of 2019.

In a twist of fate, only the unloved CBD of the original city remained standing, and is still home to the thriving small business culture that had inhabited the near-derelict buildings before the earthquake. Yet most of the rest of the city could be redesigned from scratch.

With its previous zoning failures in mind, the City took the concept of the fractal, and applied it to a form-based code. This meant that no area was zoned as one function. No suburb was solely residential. No business district was solely commercial. The city could be read as a mixed-use development at every stage.

An individual apartment was often home to production as well as residential and leisure activities, due to the predominance of knowledge industries and new smart manufacturing. The apartment complex could also be read as a local aggregation of production, residential and leisure activities. Though the emphasis shifted from block to block, no one component did one thing only. Each block could be read as an aggregation of these apartments, and each suburb an aggregation of these blocks.

Thus the city has multiple focal points for work, rest and play. Each apartment is a CBD."

Notes: For me, the least successful of this series. Perhaps a bit too 'planning-geeky'. Although there's a core (though not exactly new) idea in there about a fractal approach to urban elements that would inherently defy crude zoning, it doesn't really come across.

14 Cities: City of Sonovac

From the 14 Cities series:

"Though some claim it is merely a frivolous architectural theme park without the attractions, others have declared it to be the most interesting urban experience in Australia. For Sonovac is a city designed with as much attention given to sound as is usually given to sight.

After the independently wealthy Lord Mayor of Hastings, Victoria, Gavin Stark, lost his sight in a freak boating accident and gained an interest in the ideas of Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa — who decried the ‘ocularcentric’ nature of most architecture — Stark has carefully reconfigured Hastings as “Sonovac, a city designed to heighten the senses”.

Stark’s council’s first move twas to ban traditional traffic from the city, instead favouring electric vehicles. The sound of these has been calibrated to be generated by particular locales: an array of pipa and guan strike up as you drive through the city’s small Chinatown. Elsewhere, sound designers have ‘primed’ the streets with latent compositions, which are then performed by the passing cars. All public art is sound art.

Three giant concrete ‘acoustic mirrors’ have been imported from Dungeness, UK, and sit on the promenade, amplifying the sounds of the ocean.

Streets are designed to muffle, cloak and dissemble industrial noise, through the careful use of materials and foliage, and the city has become home to a thriving music scene."

Notes: Almost a clichéd entry here, I know. City of Sound Bingo! "Pallasmaa; Ballard; oculacentric; acoustic mirrors; music scenes etc". This one, named after Ballard's short story, builds on too many previous entries to list coherently, but 'Cars b/w Are Friends Electric' on the sound of cities with electric cars lists most.

14 Cities: Slow City

Part of the 14 Cities series:

"Sometime after becoming Lord Mayor of Adelaide, Maggie Beer declared the city the first official ‘slow city’ in the southern hemisphere, moving Adelaide in line with a growing international movement comprising several cities in Tuscany and Provence, a few in Germany and Japan, and Portland, Oregon.

Though it initially seemed to concern restaurant ordinance and generous financial help for particular kinds of food production, it eventually became clear that Mayor Beer had more radical changes in mind.

Sidewalks became ‘widewalks’, with cars largely pushed to one side in favour of the active transport of walking and biking. Delivery networks were transformed by the use of smart technology augmenting a centuries-old infrastructure of handcarts and bicycles. Driving schoolchildren to school was banned in favour of ‘human buses’ of schoolkids walking together.

Architecturally, Adelaide has begun to explore the use of wood and paper in construction, building up to nine stories with cross-laminated solid timber panels, and in low-rise with reinforced paper/cardboard structures designed by ‘designer-in-residence’ Shigeru Ban, meaning structures could be repaired, replaced and reconfigured by hand, and by residents. The city began to coalesce around walkable spaces, withdrawing from its outer edges.

However, quince paste is still the largest export commodity."

Notes: Although I like much of the 'slow movement', it could also do with a little gentle teasing from time to time. NB. Although Maggie Beer is featured here, due to her relationship with Adelaide — which seemed the right city for this — I find Stephanie Alexander far more inspiring. Meanwhile, delivery via pushbikes, 'human buses' for schoolkids, and adaptive architecture by Shigeru Ban (notwithstanding Australia's fierce climate) should all be pursued, I think.

14 Cities: Walled City

Part of the 14 Cities series:

"From his observation tower, Mark looked across the expanses of waste treatment plants stretching into the distance. To his left he could see the marshlands responsible for cleaning the city’s waste water. He couldn’t look directly to his right, due to the glare from the seven kilometre-wide solar power plant that lay off the northern perimeter of the city’s walls. 

He put his rifle down, leaning it against the thick wooden walls of the tower. Slowly unpeeling a shrivelled dwarf banana, Mark cast a glance back towards the interior of the walled city, over the bamboo roofs bleached white by the sun, the arrays of twirling vertical axis wind turbines and a handful of satellite dishes and radio masts.

The Walled City of Wollongong had been built around the Kembla Grange Golf Course after the water riots of 2048 had left the city largely in ruins.

Mark had been part of a group of no more than one hundred citizens that decided to build a “genuinely sustainable city”, a city that controlled its population in line with its resources, that controlled its resources in line with what naturally-occurring energy it could harvest and whose waste it could process, that could see its own footprint directly by limiting the city’s size by that of the 400 hectares of land required to support it.

Mark quickly picked up the rifle. He thought he’d seen a flash of movement in the marshland ..."

Notes: Another in narrative form, this one centred on extrapolating the idea around 'footprints' and 'resilience', reading between the lines of the more illogical, fevered conclusions around sustainable cities. There is occasionally talk of cities restricting their population to their 'natural, sustainable size' - one wonders how this is to be done, exactly?

14 Cities: Star City

Part of the 14 Cities series: 

"The ‘Macau of the South’, Star City emerged from the ruins of the deadly Sydney casino fire in 2014. Still assumed to be arson committed by the disgruntled local residents of Pyrmont and Ultimo, upset at the casino’s impact on local traffic, business and architecture, Star City had been burnt to the ground and lay in ruins for some months.

While another local theory that the fire was an insurance scam also cannot be disproved, the casino had outgrown its Pyrmont location and had been looking for an excuse to move.

Yet no-one expected the scale of the move, just as no-one in Queensland expected the state government’s continuing pursuit of businesses from south of the border to extend to donating both Moreton Island and North Stradbroke Island to the now-Chinese-owned gambling chain.

Linked by high-speed rail bridges to Brisbane Airport and with its own landing strip terra-formed off the eastern edge of the islands welcoming visitors from Indonesia, Malyasia and China, Star City offers thrill-seekers a unique combination of risk and comfort, faux-classical architecture and vast strips of white sand beaches.

An incoming visitor population of 10,000 augments the 25,000 permanent residents that live across both islands, principally in the 15 high-rise towers known as the ‘Stars of the Star City’ for the late-night light-show that can be seen from Brisbane."

Notes: I'm absolutely no fan of 'organised gambling' and its ruinous impact on Australian lives, as you can probably tell, which is hardly helped by getting the tram past the actual Star City twice a day. Equally, the positioning of the casino in the centre of Brisbane, in its former treasury building no less, never mind the massive Crown Casino complex in the centre of Melbourne, indicates the prominence they have in the development of Australian cities. Whether one would go so far as to destroy the pristine sands of Stradbroke Island is another matter ...