A map released by the European Commission and the World Bank models the accessibility (and isolation) of various parts of the world. It’s a heat map that shows the travel time to major cities (here defined as 50,000 or more people). The oceans show shipping lane density. Via MAPS-L.

A few weeks ago my/our friend Michael Jones (yes, the brilliant pianist) shared a remarkable story of his innovative work integrating the arts and a sense of place into the unique World Cafés he hosts. I asked him to please write up his experiences so that others can learn from what he's doing, and this is what he sent:

Meetings Among the Many
A Dialogue on Community Wellbeing and The Significance of Place

"When every place looks the same- there is no such thing as place any longer."
James Howard Kunstler - Geography to Nowhere

Beginning the New Conversation 

Around the world a consensus is growing about the need for a more holistic and transparent way to measure societal progress, one that accounts for more than just the economic indicators such as GNP and takes into account the full range of concerns of the community

In the context of this global movement, in November 2008, leaders in health, culture, public administration, the aboriginal community, students and many others in the Simcoe Muskoka region north of Toronto, Canada met together at The Fern Resort for an historic occasion. Through the day they engaged in conversations as part of the pre-launch of the Canadian Index of Wellbeing, a new and transformational initiative founded by the Hon. Roy Romanow that will report on the wellbeing of all Canadians.

The introduction of music, art, time in nature, story-telling, seeded dialogue, small table conversations and personal reflection shifted the focus from strategic planning and priority setting to a more generative process that allowed time and space to come into the moment, to listen and to speak from the heart and to engage the questions that mattered most to their communities. In this respect the day offered a new and emergent model for what could be possible in future CIW - community partnerships and collaborations. 

At the heart of these collaborations is the commitment to bring together diverse members of the community in cross sector and multi-generational dialogues to inquire into the significance of place, arts and culture, identity and the other domains of the CIW. Through creating a  ‘conversation commons,’ communities will have the opportunity to imagine and reflect on questions that will influence the quality of their well being now and into the far future. For example;

• What are the places and spaces in our community where we experience the greatest sense of aliveness, vitality and significance?

• When we think about the relationship of our built environment, the health of our population and community well being - what really matters?

• To build the ground for our future, what do we want to conserve and what needs to change?

• What new story is possible with the Community Index for Wellbeing and what kind of leadership will be needed to bring this story into reality? 

All Place is Meeting

Sherry Lawson was our opening speaker. She is a highly regarded local native writer and storyteller.

To help us truly appreciate the significance our meeting for the day, I wanted to share a few words about how the story of place has been passed along in Sherry's community. This framing may bring to life the depth of conversations we shared together. In the narrative of her community  ‘all place is meeting’ - it is held in the mythology of Mnjikaning, the home of the Chippewa First Nations on the land where the conference was held and the place that Sherry calls home.

Mnjikaning means “ keepers of the fish fence” The fence or weirs, as they are also known, is located in the Narrows, a small channel that links two large lakes; Simcoe a broad bowl like and wind swept lake to the south and Couchiching a narrow, long, winding finger lake to the north. The Narrows is just a mile or so down along the shore from the site of our meeting.

For 5000 years the tribes traveled long distances to gather at The Narrows every winter and survived on the fish that were caught in the weirs there. It is where they met the first European settlers many of whom were suffering from physical, emotional and spiritual impoverishment and distress. For years the Indians helped restore them to health. Over centuries the story of meeting was carried not only as a bridge to unite the diversity of tribes and cultures - this story also animated their environment - carried along in the gentleness of the soil, the wind, the water, the light and the sky.

Their land is also a meeting place  - an ‘ecotone’ that marks the edge of the limestone plain and warm shallow lakes to the south with the deep granite cold trout lakes of the pre-Cambrian shield to the north.  Sherry's people learned to be masters of two worlds- to learn to hunt and fish and know intimately the complex ecology of each domain with its distinct fish, fauna, vegetation, and animal life.

So when Sherry introduced her story with the words  "Welcome! You are now on Indian land and need to learn in Indian ways " - it is this 5000 year story of meeting together that holds the ground of being of which she speaks.

As conference participants were invited to step outside in the natural environment for a time - to find a place of aliveness that attracted their interest and let it speak to them- much as Sherry in her introductory story of place let her ancestors speak to her through the gravestone - it was to engage this ancient story of meeting again. It is the perennial story that could be felt in the fresh warm breezes and waters of Lake Couchiching that early November afternoon. (Couchiching in Chippewa translates as the Lake of Many Winds)

For the communities that make up Simcoe Muskoka, the regional pre-launch of the Community Index for Well Being, it is also an invitation to listen again for Mnjikaning’s timeless story of the 'meetings among the many.' It is a reminder, and an invitation, to a way of being together that may serve as our new ground of being as well.

Postscript

If there is a parallel to the keepers of the fish fence in the non-native tradition it may be the stewardship of the commons – the plaza, the village green, the front porch are a few examples of the commons – a possibility space for chance encounters and meetings among strangers.  In recent years the community of Orillia has been host to The Orillia Commons, The Community Cultural Roundtable, The design of the new market/public square and a spacious light filled learning commons located in phase one of new satellite campus for Lakehead University… And the community of Mnjikaning/Rama has developed Casino Rama the most financially successful casino in Canada and a meeting place for visitors and entertainers from around the globe. 

………………………………………………………………………………………………

Many thanks to storyteller and author Sherry Lawson, our panel; Architect Paul Whelan, Dr Charles Gardner, Medical Officer of Health for Simcoe County and artist/ educator Joanna McEwen, Project Director Gary Mahan, Lynne Slotek, Project Director for the CIW and The Atkinson Charitable Foundation, The North Simcoe Muskoka CIW Working Group including; The Local Health Integration Network, United Way, The Simcoe Muskoka Public Health Unit, Barrie Community Health Center, Georgian College as well as the contributions of Saragrafix, Rowan Media, and Lauri Prest at Providence Care. And also a special thanks to Mark Douglas Biidaanakwad (Cloud Approaching) from whom I first heard the story of the keepers of the fish fence and to the World Café Community, which inspired the architecture for the day.

Michael Jones is a dialogue facilitator, leadership consultant, speaker, author and pianist/ composer. He was retained by the CIW national project director at the Atkinson Charitable Foundation and the Simcoe Muskoka CIW working group as the principle designer and creative facilitator for the pre-launch of the CIW at The Fern Resort near Orillia this past November. 

This item provided by World Cafe Community

Freud's strange essay of 1919, translated into English as "The Uncanny", casts a shadow longer than the length, or coherence, of the piece seems to promise. It opens with one of his disingenuous disclaimers: "Only rarely does the psychoanalyst feel impelled to engage in aesthetic investigations." Freud's cautioning reservation has been observed too infrequently by his followers; Freud himself, however, is a different matter. He was, or could be, a brilliant stylist, and his fascination with art, and with artists, was as powerful as his preoccupation with sex (he would claim that they are one and the same subject); certainly, it was a good deal more ambivalent.

The dichotomy of the famous statement "poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious - what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied" is characteristically misleading. The pursuit of a scientific status for psychoanalysis was more a bid for academic respectability than a true representation of its radical character, and in adopting the camouflage of a scientific dispassion, Freud muzzled the artist in himself. Some of his most delightful and generative papers - for example, the essays on Michelangelo's Moses and on Leonardo - which proceed under the cover of mere "aesthetic investigations" are flights of prodigiously inventive fancy, whose value lies not in any scientific analysis (by that standard they are quite deranged) but in the brilliant apprehension, and scintillating expression, of art's essential ambiguity.

"The Uncanny" explores this ambiguity. In English, to be canny is to be knowing, and thus "uncanny" has the sense of that which is outside our everyday knowledge or "ken". The word in German, unheimlich, means un-homely; as Freud goes on to explain, heimlich has a more fundamental meaning of hidden, secret or concealed. Thus the uncanny has something to do both with unknowing, and with the other side of knowing, or what is known; what the known conceals. That "un" is meat and drink to Freud because it indicates what is for him the nature of the unconscious: its Janus-like capacity to point in opposite directions. That which is most unsettling and perturbing is the other face of what is best known and closest to home.

Freud's essay recapitulates, and then debates, a 1906 paper by Ernst Jentsch (according to Freud the "unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature") which cites, as an example of uncanny effects, a story by the German writer ETA Hoffman called "The Sandman". In this tale a child becomes terrified at his nurse's description of the sandman, who will steal his eyes and carry him off to the moon. As a young man, he falls under the spell of a beautiful doll whose eyes have been put in place by a terrifying figure whom he takes - or mistakes - for the sand-man. The use of this story as one of Freud's case studies inspired the editors of The New Uncanny to offer a number of modern writers the chance to read Freud's essay and produce their own uncanny stories.

A part of the expressed purpose of this "experiment" was to see how far Jentsch's list of attributes, quoted by Freud, would be matched in the efforts of the contemporary authors. One problem with this idea is that the list itself inevitably imposes a mould. The subjects covered by the stories in this collection do reflect some of the preoccupations quoted by Freud - dolls and automata, sleepwalking, doubles, eyes and blindness - but the trouble is we cannot know if this is a consequence of reading the essay or a confirmation of Jentsch and Freud's theories.

This would not matter if the effect, in many of the stories, were not of something too self-consciously predetermined and pinned down, an absence of the sudden hole in the middle of the story through which we fall, or through which the unexpected startlingly creeps or blasts. What characterises the most successful uncanny stories (Kipling's "They", for example, or Penelope Fitzgerald's "Desideratus") is not the subject matter but the sensibility of the writer which perceives, usually rather quietly, another order (or disorder) within the quotidian world, which often seems to emerge as a revelation as much to the writer as to the reader.

Many of these stories are accomplished; some, such as AS Byatt's horribly creepy doll story, or Frank Cottrell Boyce's unnerving moral tale about parental dereliction and the consequent attempts at material compensation, highly so. Adam Marek's sad little fable about the contagious effects of autism is touching. In each of these cases, the writers illustrate Freud's thesis that toys (in our age more technologically developed systems than dolls) act as the recipients of projections which are so powerful as to drain their subjects of life and animate the seemingly inanimate. This is the antithesis of the theme of the double. Either all things have their shadow opposite, or there is only so much vitality available to us and we squander it at our peril.

The other stories were waylaid by the lines laid down by the exercise and tended to confuse the scary or the spooky with the capacity to suggest fissures in the known universe which reveal undisclosed, and thus unnerving but not necessarily negative, aspects of nature - our own included. Only Hanif Kureishi's story of a man meeting his dead father had the deadpan, existentially elusive quality of the truly uncanny. This collection is a bold idea, but the uncanny should not be understood too easily, or grasped too firmly; and it is unlikely that it can be reproduced to commission.

• Salley Vickers's Where Three Roads Meet is published by Canongate. To order The New Uncanny for £7.95 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop

• Fiction

Those pissed off by the redrawn map of the Middle East may appreciate the implicit payback in the following. A Russian academic is ardently predicting that the U.S. will break apart from internal pressures in 2010, with six pieces falling under different spheres of influence, the Wall Street Journal reports, and Russian state media — no friend of the U.S. — is eating it up, giving Igor Panarin, who’s been making this prediction for a decade, lots and lots of screen time. Personally, I think the idea is risible, if not outright bonkers — even if the U.S. were to break apart in the near future, I don’t think it’d do it like this — but it’s interesting in a “how others see us” kind of way. Via all sorts of places, such as BLDGBLOG, Cartophilia, Gadling and io9.

I’ve been clearing out my old files, and I came across an article given to my a couple of years ago by walking activist Helen Riley: “Neighbourless Hoods“, by Paul Kingsnorth, first published in The Ecologist magazine.

This article puts its finger on an issue that I’ve been thinking about for a while, but which I’ve found hard to articulate: the loss of a sense of “place” in a lot of modern urban development (both suburban and downtown). So many new urban spaces are built and occupied in a way that could be anywhere. They don’t reflect the environment, building materials, history or culture of their specific location, and thus become dully generic. In the author’s words:

Put simply, the things that make our towns, villages, cities and landscapes different, distinctive or special are being eroded, and replaced by things that would be familiar anywhere. It is happening all over the country [Great Britain, but it applies in North America too] – you can probably see at least one example of it from where you’re sitting right now. The same chain stores in every high street, the same bricks in every new housing estate, the same signs on every road, and the same menu in every pub. 

The article is reasonably thoughtful about this issue, and aware of the need to accept change and avoid nostalgia. New developments can reflect a sense of place, if they try — for example by relating to their immediate environment, shaping buildings and landscape to deal with specific local weather conditions, or using local materials. And a sense of place can evolve in any area — there are multiple examples across Toronto where unexceptional locations have taken on an identity, for example as a focus for a specific culture such as the “Indian Bazaar” on Gerrard East. People are becoming more aware of the issue, as the recent trend towards eating locally-produced food demostrates. There’s no way to dictate a sense of place, but there are many possible ways to make it easier for one to emerge, and to nurture it when it does. It’s worth thinking about.

Photo by Sam Javanrouh.

This item provided by Spacing Toronto • understanding the urban landscape

We’ve brought you the most popular stories of 2008, and you voted on your favorites. Now we’d like to highlight some more under-the-radar Inhabitat stories from 2008 that you may have missed - the editors’ favorites. As avid followers of sustainable design, our Inhabitat editors were amazed at the wealth of green design developments that the past year brought. Now with 2008 coming to a close, we’d like to reflect upon some of our favorite stories from the past year. It’s always exciting to discover an incredible new project or hear about an inspired new approach to green design. From the awe-inspiring, to the innovative, to the funny, and just-plain-weird, read on for our editor’s favorite stories of 2008…

JiLL’S PICK: April Fools Day Post - The New Gehry Residence
(Fun with photoshop!)

BETH’S PICK: Life Preservers for Polar Bears On Sinking Arctic Ice

MIKE’S PICK: The New Green California Academy of Sciences Unveiled

OLIVIA’S PICK: Recycled Subway Cars Turned into Studios in London

JORGE’S PICK: Foster Designs House for his Biggest Clients Ever: Elephants!

ABIGAIL’S PICK: THE FARM PROJECT by Mike Meiré for Dornbracht

EVELYN’S PICK: Jumeira Gardens: A Super-City Within Dubai

DRUMROLL PLEASE … Here at Inhabitat we feel lucky to have such a dedicated and enthusiastic reader base, so when we revealed Inhabitat’s Top 10 Most Popular Green Design Stories of 2008 earlier this week we wanted to give you the chance to weigh in vote for your favorite stories. Well, the results are in, and we’re excited to reveal our readers’ choice top posts of 2008! Read on to see the results…

The Boston Globe’s Drake Bennett takes a look back at the year in maps; I spoke to Drake a while back about potential items for this article, some of which made it into the final product. Highlights include local stories, CNN’s “magic wall,” Mark Newman’s election cartograms, and Cassini’s mapping of Titan. Via All Points Blog.

Helen Walsh, Liverpool It was the sight of Liverpool's Georgian Quarter one evening a ' then a working red-light district a ' that caused me to move back to Liverpool and write the novel, Brass.

This item provided by Aberystwyth, United Kingdom News

The Brad Pitt-narrated PBS series e² ( “the Economies of being Environmentally conscious”) has several episodes about urban design and planning. For a general introduction to walkable, transit-oriented design and planning, I recommend the episode “Portland: A Sense of Place.” It focuses on the city’s rail transit and aerial tram, the Pearl District redevelopment, and the quality of life that can result from downtown revitalization with good urban design.

Even better is the episode “Seoul: The Stream of Consciousness” which focuses on Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon Restoration Project. This was a major freeway in the heart of the city that was torn down and replaced with a linear park and recreated running stream. The best thing about this episode is the sense of hope and renewal for the city that is conveyed by the residents’ pride in their new park.

These episodes are beautifully produced, not wonky at all, and will certainly hold anybody’s attention. The episodes can be viewed at www.e2-series.com. Click on “Webcasts” and scroll down to the episode titles. They are also available on DVD.

At the series’ home page, there are short, supplementary podcasts that go into greater detail about each episode. The podcast for “Portland: A Sense of Place” features a concise explanation of walkable urban design by Peter Calthorpe, an accomplished planner and architect. The podcasts can be viewed online or downloaded. There are also teachers’ guides available with short background essays and links to more information.

Other e² programs that focus on urban design include:

• Melbourne Reborn — Revised zoning in downtown Melbourne and the economic and cultural revitalization that resulted from it
• London: The Price of Traffic — Congestion charging for vehicles entering London and the city’s focus on pedestrian space and transit
• Bogotá: Building a Sustainable City — The transformation of the city’s public transport system, civic spaces, and several other planning experiments to improve the quality of life
• Aadaptive Reuse in the Netherlands — The redevelopment of Amsterdam’s abandoned dockyards into a mixed use, walkable district called Borneo Sporenburg

These episodes are available online or will be available by January 6, 2009.

There is another program available about the Cheonggyecheon which is much more geared to construction nerds. It is the Discovery Channel’s Man-Made Marvels: Seoul Searching [412 Mb .wmv]. It goes into much detail about demolition, archeology, engineering details, etc. The stream itself is essentially an artificial water feature, a simulacrum of what was destroyed by bad planning many decades ago. Fascinating stuff.

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Is there something amiss with Boston's Faneuil Hall, Ben Thompson's 1976 project that originated the concept of the "festival marketplace"? After all, it just won an AIA award for having "stood the test of time:"

The award is called the Twenty-five Year Award. It goes to only one American building each year. The building must be at least 25 years old, and it must have "stood the test of time" in the words of the sponsor, the American Institute of Architects. In other words, it must have proved to be an architectural classic. I don't think any prize is more highly valued by architects.

The Marketplace is unlike most winners of this award in that it isn't a new building. The architect, the late Benjamin Thompson, conceived the idea. He renovated three blocks of old warehouses, built originally in 1826, into a new kind of shopping complex that he dubbed a "festival marketplace."

...In its press release, the American Institute of Architects sings of the Marketplace in very up-to-date language. It's called "a great model of vital environmental principles" and praised for "creating a high-density urban environment where people can work, shop, play, and enjoy life as pedestrians."

View Larger Map

Above, Faneuil Hall in context.

Boston Globe architectural critic Robert Campbell wonders if the festival is over, given not only the turnover in Faneuil Hall's retail mix, but also its changing relationship to the greater city. What was conceived as a creative re-purposing of historic buildings to house the public realm while bolstering local identity has awkwardly morphed into something else:

I can't help wondering whether what we're hearing in all this is the tolling bells of an era that is ending....[Faneuil Hall] opened back in the bicentennial year of 1976, in a very different era. Public life, street life, was moribund in Boston. So dead were the streets that few thought the Marketplace would succeed. Boston bankers refused to lend until Mayor Kevin White twisted their arms.

But the Marketplace was a huge and instant hit, drawing more visitors in its first year than Disneyland. It had arrived, it turned out, at exactly the right moment. A generation of people who had moved to the suburbs or grown up in them, and who tended to think of the city as dangerous and alien, found in the Marketplace a magic door into a cleaned-up, safe, dramatized version of city life. I called it "a halfway house for recovering suburbanites." People, it turned out, were starved for the experience of city life, even a slightly ersatz experience.

Ironically, its success may have spurred its demise. Its manipulation of what's local and historic enabled residents to see their surroundings in new ways. Elsewhere, other Thompson projects had the same effect:

After Boston, festival marketplaces popped up everywhere, most of them done by Thompson himself with his developer, James Rouse. American downtowns and waterfronts began to come back. But there's a hidden twist in this. Once Boston, or any other city, achieved a revival, it no longer needed its festival marketplace. With shops and bars and restaurants everywhere, as they are now here, the Marketplace ceases to be a unique destination. Today, Faneuil Hall Marketplace is largely a tourist mecca. Bostonians go elsewhere.

I can vouch for that. When I lived in Boston, I rarely went there.

Campbell touches on the possible preservation of Faneuil Hall and other sites like it across the country, such as South Street Seaport in New York. But he notes that any preservation--or even just a sympathetic renovation--is unlikely. The retail numbers don't look the same:

Many of the Marketplace stores are national chain outlets now, although these were banned in 1976. Nothing about these chains speaks of Boston, a value Thompson felt strongly about. The Marketplace was in part a victim of its own success, or you could say a victim of the economic ambitions of its owners. They charged higher rents that drove away the local merchants who once gave the place its character.

Is Faneuil Hall Marketplace ripe for another reinvention, just as it was reinvented in 1976? Will someone appear who is as timely and inventive as Ben Thompson? Is the festival marketplace concept now dead?

It would be interesting to brainstorm ways that places like Faneuil Hall could be reinvented, especially given a surge of interest in local craft and food markets nationwide, the popularity of online micro-retail alternatives like Etsy, and today's bleak economic climate (maybe not so dissimilar from the one that spawned the original concept). Perhaps future redesigns of the tired festival marketplace concept are less architectural and more economic. Maybe it becomes a set of webfronts. What do you think?

For those of you closely following emerging trend of green modern gingerbread houses this holiday season, here is another fabulous ginger design– but this time, mod-style. A collaboration between Liz Bruwin, a furniture designer and her brother-in-law, Kevin Marx, an architect, this gingerbread house is meant to fill the void of modern ginger-architecture out there. (Is there a void? Because after covering three other gingermod houses in the past few weeks, we’re not so sure about that.) Nevertheless, this one is sure sweet-looking. Complete with sugar glazed windows, sugar grass and a beautiful gum-stick chimney, this minimalist design is sure give MK a run for her money.

The Christian Science Monitor looks at four “offbeat” atlases, all published in 2008: two rather pricey atlases of architecture; The Art Atlas, which “explores how inspiring new art forms have traveled, from the cave drawings of ancient Europe and Egypt to contemporary digital art”; and an atlas for children entitled The Most Fantastic Atlas of the Whole Wide World. Via Here Be Dragons.

• Buy The Art Atlas at Amazon.com
• Buy Atlas of Vernacular Architecture of the World at Amazon.com
• Buy The Phaidon Atlas of 21st Century World Architecture at Amazon.com
• Buy The Most Fantastic Atlas of the Whole Wide World at Amazon.com