- This week I write to you from the terrace of Strelka Institute in Moscow — a relatively new center for research in architecture, media, design and urbanism, and my extraordinarily generous hosts these last few days.
To be honest, I didn’t know quite what to expect from this, my first-ever visit to Russia. I did take a year of the language in college, but for all the worst reasons (a long-standing fascination with the Russian-based nadsat slang Anthony Burgess devised for A Clockwork Orange, coupled with the fact that all the prettiest girls at NYU seemed to be taking it), and as that was during the Late Chernenko and Early Gorbachev periods, any practical knowledge I might have absorbed would be long obsolete by now in any event.
My impressions of Russia in all the years since have been the same that any moderately well-mediated Westerner would have absorbed, especially if they’d read and reread Let’s Put The Future Behind Us a few too many times: Boris Yeltsin, drunk like an uncle and exultant on a tank. Regular guy Vladimir Putin, doing all the things regular guys do. Above all, Moscow as a glittering playground for gangster biznismen, swaggering oligarchs, and intimidating women who not merely ran to toweringly improbable heels and elaborate lingerie, but were topologists or statisticians into the bargain. Yes, certainly: Moscow as this…and as a grueling slog for everyone else not so fortunate.
So of course I said yes when Strelka’s organizers wrote to me, not much more than a month ago, and asked if I’d like to come speak about our approach to “smart city” development. It was more or less painless to tack these days onto my fifth (!) appearance at PICNIC, it’s an audience I’d never dreamed of being able to address, and it was a chance to lay down actual experience against all those increasingly hazy notions of Red Square, GUM and grandiose subways. And while, in all honesty, forty-eight hours on the ground isn’t nearly enough to confirm or deny any of these impressions, it’s been unforgettably vivid.
Strelka itself is nestled in the heart — one might say, is the heart — of a burgeoning “creative cluster” precinct on Balchug, the island in the Moscow River immediately opposite Red Square and the Kremlin. With its open-air lecture space, cozy bar, and cascade of wooden benches — designed by the same practice responsible for the recent and successful interventions in Gorky Park — it’s the epitome of a convivial platform for discussion and research, the kind of venue that would grace any city.
And yet there’s a detectable fortress mentality here, too. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the words “contemporary” and “modern” so often, out of so many mouths, in such a short period of time – descriptions of the Strelka community clearly meant as implicit contrast to the rest of the city, and perhaps to those who live in it. A concomitant is the palpable hunger on the part of the people here who Get It to connect to their counterparts elsewhere, to bask in what has to be the fairly unusual experience of shared understandings, perceptions and values.
The evident energy on the ground, at least in this corner of the Moscow scene, convinces me that there’s meaningful work to be done here, and maybe even a role for us in doing some of it. All the usual cautions still apply, but the desire I’m left with at the very end of my time here is for more, for more and deeper. The usual Urbanscale superthanks to Strelka’s Katya Trushina, Daria Syuzeva and Andrei Goncharov — a double helping for Andrei, actually, for suggesting my invitation in the first place.
- There’s so much to say about this year’s PICNIC Festival that it probably deserves its own fullscale post, but the pace of events sadly means I won’t be able to give it due consideration here.
What I definitely do want to call out, in the little time and space I have, is the extraordinary work organizer Kitty Leering and her team did in physically presenting the event this year. Faced with the realities of the economic downturn, and the consequent loss of the expansive Westergasfabriek venue the festival had used for the previous five years, the PICNIC team did just about the least-obvious and ballsiest thing I can think of: they decided to mount the event in an Archigram-esque Instant City built up from tents and containers and boats moored to the NDSM Wharf, a former shipyard and depot on the banks of the IJ.
Not only was this just about the most interesting possible environment in which to contemplate this year’s theme, “Future Cities,” but it demonstrates all the polderful resourcefulness, adaptation and literal create-ivity I associate with Dutch culture at its best. My main regret is that we couldn’t actually stay onsite as well, Burning Man-style (both because I think that would have been a fascinating experiment and because it sure as hell would have been more comfortable than the place we did stay, the wretched Mint Hotel).
Perhaps as a result of this, my own feeling is that this year’s PICNIC, while noticeably smaller, was also much denser with friendly faces and high-quality conversations. I want, particularly, to single out the work Juha van t’ Zelfde and Ben Hammersley put into hosting their anycitywhatever sessions-on-a-boat, which came together beautifully. Also on a boat, I had what certainly seemed like the beginnings of a fantastic inquiry into community, polity, new tools and self-organization with Jake Barton and Bonnie Shaw, shortsightedly and rather abruptly terminated by the third-party organizer the moment the boat returned to the dock, and just as we were getting into some tasty issues.
My sense is that PICNIC is going to continue to experiment with format and venue, but if the encounters I had this year were any indication, the event is only getting better at hosting insightful conversations on issues of genuine salience to our times. Thanks to Kitty, the indomitable Micky van Zeijl, and all the PICNIC volunteers for bringing this instant community into vivid life.
- In contrast to the hapless Mint, I hugely enjoyed my two-night stay at CitizenM Amsterdam City. While referring to it as a “budget” alternative stresses that word pretty hard, the innovative room was very, very far from the least comfortable I’ve ever stayed in, and I think I may well prefer it to ostensibly fancier alternatives. (I particularly enjoyed the enormous bed, and all in all the room concept made me feel like a latter-day, somewhat less hirsute Reyner Banham.)
The RFID-card-mediated, modular, Chinese-menu approach to service delivery, and particularly the room’s user-configurable elements (lighting, climatization, entertainment) made me feel like CitizenM comes the closest of any real-world entrant to actually achieving the kind of “programmable space” aims conceptual projects like Urbanode and MEGAHOUSE gesture at. A lot more to say about this, but sadly that too shall have to wait.
- A final PICNIC note: I also got a chance to play with LEEV Mobility’s innovative Mantys electric vehicle. Ignore all the gross golf-carty imagery on the site, because it’s a red herring: Mantys, or something very much like it, strikes me as having a serious role to play in the future urban mobility ecosystem of a place like New York.
Consider that UPS trucks (and their peers from FedEx, DHL et al.) contribute disproportionately to Manhattan’s congestion. They double-park, they block bus lanes, they flout the widest possible variety of extant traffic regulations, and they do so with impunity because these companies treat the fines their fleets incur as a cost of doing business. Worse still, from an environmental and sustainability perspective, is their tendency to idle — and worst of all is the fact that despite some very clever capacity-management software, from what drivers tell me it’s often simply not economic to wait until a truck is full until dispatching it on its route. All of those costs and “externalities” are therefore being generated by a truck that may well be delivering a surprisingly small number of packages.
But what if we limited the trucks’ role to ferrying full loads between regional distribution centers and a mesh of smaller local staging areas? And what if the firms accomplished actual delivery into the capillary network of destinations served by these staging areas via a light electric vehicle of some sort? This is where a Mantys equipped with an appropriate cargo rack would seem to make a fair amount of sense to me.
First, you’ve got to put thoughts of the Segway out of your mind. Having operated both, I can tell you that Mantys is a (much) less dorky experience; you steer by carving, and the necessity of investing even this marginal physical effort profoundly alters the kinesthetics of moving through urban space. There’s a rewarding connection between the way you move your body and the way the vehicle conveying that body moves in response that I’ve found missing from all too many electric prototypes. Simply put, steering a Mantys isn’t quite jamming a brakeless fixie through the churning streets of Paris, but it is a good deal of fun.
This quality of physical involvement also affords the Mantys operator with something else a bike does trivially but a delivery van can’t really hope to, which is the opportunity to pilot the thing with personal style, whether that’s expressed as overt flair or sprezzatura. And maybe it’s a stretch, but I can sure see that appealing to the population of twenty-somethings UPS relies upon to steer its delivery fleet. I’d almost go so far as to say there’s the makings of a win-win in there somewhere.
We’ve asked LEEV to ship us a Mantys evaluation unit, so we can begin putting together some concrete ideas of how such a vehicle might fit into the greater urban (trans)mobility schema, and you’ll be the first to know if anything comes of it.
- The morning of the day I left for Amsterdam and Moscow, we had a very exciting visit from Singapore’s Economic Development Board, discussing potential ways we might fit into their vision of Singapore as a “real-time smarter city.”
Despite what are probably some fairly obvious differences of emphasis and approach, their initiative struck me as a sound one, and what differences there are only imply to me that there are quite a few ways our insight might be helpful to them. I wouldn’t expect any earth-shattering announcements anytime soon, but we’re thrilled to have made the connection, and we’ll certainly be putting some effort into presenting them with some concrete value propositions.
- Logistics: Jeff’s been in Chicago, meeting with the inimitable John Tolva; J.D.’s still doing his thing remotely; and Mayo’s wrapping up his last few Eurocentric errands before arriving in NYC at the end of this week. With me winging my way back from Moscow, that’s left Leah with the con back at HQ. I’m thinking it’s gonna get a bit crowded when we’re all here at the top of next month. Much more, very soon.
