‘The 2013 report focuses on cultural trends poised to break through in the year ahead. It’s designed to inspire anyone wanting to communicate more effectively across touch points.

While the impact of the Internet can be felt in nearly every aspect of consumer life, our focus revolves around its impact on the fabric of society—families, communities, business, education and civic life. This report presents key trends and macro themes that reveal deeper shifts in how people are making decisions and adopting new behaviors that affect how your brand is perceived. On every page is a glimpse of the turning tides that a rising generation of digital natives portends.

Our research yielded 13 break-through trends that open opportunities to build stronger bonds between people and brands: customer loyalty, knowledge transfer, digital rituals, media consumption and consumer expectations around a healthy planet. LitLamp’s consulting team spoke with experts including top researchers, pollsters, designers and creative technologists to better understand the implications; their representative comments are included.

The report wraps up with seven clearly stated ways to use the findings to advance your brand into the future. Progressive, motivated marketers should find inspiration on every page.’

13ThingsBreakingThrough.htm

ROTTERDAM, The Netherlands – Rotterdam/ Amsterdam- based urban planning firm, Stipo B.V., just released their new book ‘The City at Eye Level: Lessons for Street Plinths’ and will be available for free download or hard-­‐copy via website on 11 January 2013. The book, a collaborative effort of five editors and 43 professional contributors from the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, Demark, USA, UK and Germany, (including Samar Héchaimé of factors) delves deeply into the concepts, philosophy, and strategies behind planning the ground floors (“plinths”) of urban environments. Interviews, case studies, and first-­‐hand stories highlight important examples of best practices from cities in the Netherlands (in particular, Rotterdam) as well as Copenhagen, Antwerp, San Francisco, and else where.

This books shows that good plinths require a smart strategy supported by many players including the city, the owners, the renters and the users, and introduces a host of new vocabularly to help define this innovative planning strategy. A great city at eye level requires a strategy based on three domains: software (use, the experience, the functions), hardware (design of plinths, buildings, streetscapes, hybrid zones and principles of sustainability) and orgware (organisation of functions and portfolio maintenance). The 215-­ page book offers ideas, solutions and examples of the best ground floors and

ground-­‐level planning from cities across the world. The concluding chapter proposes 75 specific lessons for good plinths.

On 11 January, 2013, Stipo launched the book to the world in the city where it all started: Rotterdam. About 230 guests, including urban planners, entrepreneurs, housing associations, local civil servants, neighbours, and interested parties, all came together to celebrate. Hosted by several partners (EDBR, AIR, Deltametropool, Gemeente Rotterdam) the launch was open to the public and included a Plinth Safari for all guests-­‐-­‐parallel visits examining the best plinth planning practices in Rotterdam-­‐-­‐as well as a chance to meet a few of the book’s co-­‐authors who were also present for the evening. John Worthington, co-­‐ founder of DEGW and Director of The Academy of Urbanism in London, gave the keynote speech. He focused on how the book is relevant in an international context, in international cities.

The book is available through the publishing house Eburon and will be on bookshelves and Amazon.com in the coming weeks. It is also available for download at www.thecityateyelevel.com.

With all that I still believe whole heartedly in the communal modes of transport and have made many of my lifestyle choices around it and the flexibility it offers in terms of independent and sustainable mobility in a city. I do believe that it needs to constantly be enhanced and become more integrated and multimodal as well. I believe our roads, our city policies, and our way of life should become as car aversive as possible in order for us to build stronger communities and more greener ways of life for our children by regaining the interstitial spaces and the connective tissue of the city away from the car.

This week I attended one of the Street Talks that is organised by the Movement for liveable London in a conversation about what does the mode of transportation we take say about us. The conversation went around the gendrification of modes of transport, how biking is a majority of white men in London, how their attitude on the road is very much that of road warriors, how biking is also identified with a class that has already asserted its identity. Women and ethnic groups inhabiting London rarely find themselves on the bike for multiple and diverse reasons given. Yet moving away from that trend it was mentioned by one member of the audience that the Boris bikes, thanks to their sturdy and high design have allowed to a more relaxed, slow and elegant biking methodology that is more commuter than road warrior. You could hop on these bikes in a skirt and high heels and tackle the traffic easily from one point to another, well as long as you are in Central London. They also allow for a multimodal flexibility that allows you to bike in one direction and opt for a bus, or tube in a different direction in case weather changes or your mood and state of mind changes.

Yet these questions, and a raising debate comparing Amsterdam to London, has taken me back to my years living in Amsterdam where I immediately adopted the biking lifestyle even though I had not biked since I was a teenager, as biking was considered a child’s mode of transport at the time. It was our way to conquer the town on our choppers that had 4 gears and were wonderful to take us up and down the hills in my town. So here I was, just moved to Amsterdam in my mid-twenties and I did what you do when you get to a new place, adopt its way of life and integrate to what makes that place what it is. In Amsterdam biking was definitely one of those qualities. So much so that by the time I was moving out of Amsterdam more than 5 years later I owned 3 bikes! 3 bikes? Why would be the question you ask, and of course my answer is for my visitors to be able to bike along with me around the lovely city. At the time bike sharing schemes were not available and you would need to rent a bike for the duration of your visit, so it was cheaper to just buy an extra bike and keep it in my storage unit, and then another! Who in London would dream of being able to store 3 bikes. Storing one bike is hard enough sometimes which makes the bike sharing scheme even more valuable to the public. Yet biking in Amsterdam was not a singular way of travelling around the city. If your route was too long, or if you just didn’t feel like it you could take your bike on the metro and then bike around the centre keeping biking more leisurely. At the time the Nederlands Spoorwegen also introduced your bike can travel for free if it was a foldable bike. If you had an unfoldable bike you would have to pay for it to travel on the train. Daily commuters would bike with one bike to the train station in their town and then have another bike at the other train station they normally arrive at in Amsterdam biking from there to their office. The foldable bike travel just brought in another more integrated way of commuting that travellers adopted very readily.

In Amsterdam it is so easy use biking as a mode of transportation because of the attitude on the road which goes to bikes first. A road that is more a bike road rather than a car road is automatically a pedestrian road. The car is forced to move at no more than 20 km/hr and everyone is aware of everyone else. The bikes are mostly more upright bikes making them commuter bikes rather than sports bikes. Children have biking integrated into their lives from a very early age whether on the plastic seats, on the tag along buggies or for a bit older children either sitting on the baggage rack, the bar handles or even standing on bars coming out of the back wheel behind their parents. They have such a sense of balance and  a sense of awareness of their environment that it not only makes them intrinsically bikers but it makes them more environmentally friendly as well since they are not isolated from the environment by a car carcass but completely immersed in it and its elements. These children would bike to school, to university, and then to work later on and would not consider using other modes of transport except if the distances are too long. Biking in Amsterdam and in Holland in general is not an isolated activity. Since the family would travel together each on their bikes they travel in pack and they are aware of the rest of the bikers on the road, they interact with them and cohabitant with them. In London biking is more of an insular and isolating activity. On your bike you don’t connect with any other and you surely do not communicate. Once you have put your helmet, your lycra and your high vis you put on your blinders and get moving. This feeling of safety on the road makes bike ridership equal in all demographic, in all enthnicities and in all genders in Holland as it is the Dutch way of life you adopt from a very young age if you are born there or as soon as you arrive there. It is part of the inburgering, it is a way of becoming part of the Dutch society.  I loved my oma bike so much it has been travelling and settling with me every city I have gone to. Unfortunately she has not been feeling at home in all these places and has been shying away, as have I, from gaining the road and taking on biking as a method of transportation in the same way I used to in Amsterdam, even though in my borough of Kensington my council has attempted to make her feel at home and keeping her warm by offering her a seat cover!

In the same way that visitors to Holland immediately take on the bikes as they want to experience the place the same way the locals do, the visitors in London have been quick to hop on the Boris bikes as it is to them the way the locals do, as well as it being such an accessible mode of transport in Central London. To those who have experienced the Velib in Paris and other bike sharing schemes around Europe, once they come to London the Boris bike is just the same.

During the Street Talks conversation one of the points raised was that the free buses for Seniors and under 18s has universalised access to bus transport and made it democratically accessible to those demographics. Since all carry the free bus pass there is no segregation of class associated to using the bus. It just becomes universal. It destigmatises bus usage and removes it from perceptions as being the cheap and dirty mode of transportation, but rather the democratic and the defacto mode of transportation. The argument was that once the under 18 group grows into adults they will continue using the bus and keep steering away from a more individualised mode of transport, such as cars, since this is a mode they have already adopted from a younger age. Much like the Dutch kids and their bikes. Yet another counter argument to that is that these kids are used to adopting a bus over a more active mode of transport such as bikes which makes them lazier and less physically active. The debate went around to argue, rightfully so, that the bus allows the pack to move together, that it was a more communal and universal way of travelling. That the bike is considered the poor way of travelling and that kids would want to travel together. Yet as I mentioned earlier, in Holland Dutch kids learn early on how to move in packs on bikes and to them it is just as much a communal mode of transport as the bus or the tram is.

If this is what the free bus pass has done to democratise the bus usage for the two user groups that are the most vulnerable in the city, the under 18 and the seniors, democratising movement and making the city more accessible to them what happens if we open up the city more to them? What happens if we make the bike sharing scheme free for those two user groups. It might actually get the streets to become as democratised as the buses and open up a more active way of moving around, well at least in central london. Or it might get the youth to use the bus to get to central london then shift to the bike as a more internal mode of transportation. This will surely get the youth to regain ownership of the city and it would create a stronger sense of connection that would make them protect it rather than destroy it.

On the other hand I believe there needs to be a more interconnection between the different modes of transportation especially in London, as we need different types of transportation for different things but we would like to have the ease of one mode of payment. In Shanghai you can use your transportation car to pay for bus, metro, taxi or ferry. It was mostly very handy as you could shift easily from metro to taxi. Buses there were not very comprehensible if you could not read mandarin so you would rarely find any of us expats on the buses. But metro was a wonderful, clean and organised way of getting around the city. What was interesting in the design of the Shanghai metro is that most of the stations were also interconnected with other facets of your life. Many of the metro stops were under shopping centres which integrated grocery shopping, food courts, department stores, clothing shopping etc. This really brought together the things you needed during your daily life. As you come back from the office, at your stop you would be able get your groceries, or do some shopping as you are heading home. There was talk of that during the design of the new West entrance of Kings Cross which I visited today only to find almost the same chain stores that are in St Pancras, M&S, Boots, Paperchase, Pret A Manger… and a few other food outlets and clothes outlets. The design is nice and airy, but i would not call the station a place for the community to get together, nor would I call it a place for your lifestyle needs. The seating areas on the ground floor are so few and tucked on the side next to the escalators, which in terms of flow I do understand the need to keeping flow open but they could have created a more town square feeling along the sides. The restaurants are mainly on the mezzanine where it turns out the seating area is actually a public seating area, but that is not apparent if you are downstairs and you are not going to go up if you don’t plan on buying food, which means the mezzanine is more used by the restaurant patrons rather than by the general public. The same comments apply to the future design of the front entrance of Kings Cross. The plan there is to strip down the 1970s expansion, taking it back to the original brick facade, which is beautiful, but leaving us with a large plaza that barely has any shading, sheltering from the elements, natural shading by trees, or seating areas, eliminating what could be a wonderful town square and instead reinforcing the transience of the Kings Cross area. If you want to develop the whole neighbourhood and make it more community based, you need to give the community a more open space to commune, not obliterate it and encourage them to just keep moving on!

I do believe that we need to start looking at the design of our transportation hubs in a way that fits more the way we life and want to live. Humans are adaptable, will adapt to a place and make the best of what it offer, but that does not mean it functions properly for their needs. The transportation hubs that we have today isolate us from the city and isolate the city from our modes of transportation as if they were two separate things. The modes of transport that are on the ground level are the ones that are the most integrated with our city like the trams and the buses, yet they are the ones that we avoid as they also get stuck in traffic and take ages to get us to where we want to go. What if we start designing our stations and our transportation hubs that integrates our lives more, that integrates our cities more, that spills more into our cities and allow our cities to spill more into it, whether it is underground, overground, trains or planes? Can you imagine how different the feel of the place would become? What if we began re-centring  our lives, living and working in close proximities? We would stop creating zones that have no street life and that are empty after 6pm or in the weekend like the City in London or the Loop in Chicago. We would stop spending so much time commuting and we would be so much less frustrated and stressed during the day. We would start reconnecting with the places we live and we re-become part of communities. Our children would regain the streets and would connect with the communities they live in. They would understand how their communities function on all levels, cultural, economic and societal. We would recommune around the new town square which could just as well be the extension of our local multimodal transportation hub.

When we travel we always want to experience the local food as a way of getting literally getting a taste of where we are. We call that experiencing the authenticity. The more adventurous of us want to go off the beaten track and try out the restaurants were the locals hang out. By doing so we get to savour a regional flair that tell us stories beyond what we read in the sponsored tourist books. It is even better when we get invited to someone’s home to taste the cooking served at that a particular family table. This not only gives us a taste of the culture of the country in general but also the flavours specific to that small microcosm that is more intimate and personal.

We have seen a lot of shows on the television that highlight that experience of  hidden culinary treasures while travelling to new countries. Take an example Anthony Bourdain’s no reservations. It makes you want to go savouring your way around the planet, exploring unexplored territories and share lives through food.

In most cultures there is a reflection of your acceptance into its midst and home when you are invited to share a meal.

When we first move out of our parent’s homes and go off to live the adventure filled life of a student, it is food whose cost we cut the most. Yet we learn the art of cheap eats and cheap levels. We live by an austerity that somewhat joyous and glorious.  We share our dime concoctions with our friends in these feast like events that were equivalent in our minds to Roman feasts, where boxed wine and laughter were abundant and discussions and plans grandiose. After all it is all a part of what is going to lead us to change the world…

Nevertheless austerity is not only something we enjoy as a glorious and romantic part of getting to adulthood. Austerity and hunger is experience massively around the world by people that can’t find enough to feed themselves and their families. This is not a problem suffered only by faceless sub-Saharan populations with whom we have no connection nor relation. This problem is felt by people around us, in the inner cities and in the suburbs of our big first world cities. Many a child and their parents goes hungry and cold to bed, whether it is in war torn countries or in major world cities.

In our aspirations we always think of the first sign of wealth is when we have plenty and more, when we can throw away. We aspire to become a throw away culture.  We consume without retention and the first sign of our ability to consume is the abundance of food.

The other day I was at the Imperial War Museum in London and there is section in  the museum about the austerity measure with food and rations during WWII. It is not anything that is unusual, nor was it an exceptional measure that the British government followed. Of course what is always amazing is the sense of inventiveness that immerges during these times to keep a sense of culture and taste alive. With the little rations of food supplies how can you change the recipe of pudding to still feed the whole family and try not to sacrifice on the taste. How can  you become entrepreneurial and barter with your neighbour with what they have that you need and vice versa. How can you save by growing your own food. It was a way of thinking and a way of life that was adopted by everyone and survived even a few years after the war.

Today we have lost touch with that sense of urgency that had emerged during the war. We have also lost touch with where our food comes from. Our children have no connection with the earth as a source if their food and thus have no qualms on throwing away without understanding the repercussion of every thrown morsel and discarded scrap. In our sense of getting over the austerity we wanted our children to never feel the want and did not teach them the value of that abundance.

There has been a rise to green movements with varied degrees of involvement, from the policy driven to the militant who live what they preach.

Nevertheless sustainable thinking and way of life only works with an interconnection and an understanding of the cycle from the source to the end, and how it related to us, to our lives. We can’t get active about something that doesn’t touch us directly.

Mobilisation and austerity measures in WWII worked because the causes and effects were felt by every person in the United Kingdom. I am not romanticising the effects and saying everyone became diligent and did not try to profit of the situation. Profiteering is something you will see in every situation unfortunately.

In order for us to see a change in tide in relation to sustainable living and sustainable development we need to have to feel a threat to our ways of life and especially to our food. We also need to feel a direct cause and effect for us to perform changes to our life and make them sustainable. Of course the best ways to perform changes in society are to go through the children. We have seen its adverse effects on how political movements have been able to really take hold when they targeted the children and the young. We also have seen its positive effects when children were mobilised to help bring in a greener way of life into the home in places like Curitiba in Brazil.

For example having markets all over the city, closer to where we live rather than destinations to the urban initiated organic militants, is a way to help children and young people connect with food and its source. The food experience is an interconnected sensory and sensual experience. It takes us over and immerses us. If it is seen as just sustenance might as well just distribute protein pills to everyone. But our taste buds would protest. They would have us have craving and would water just at the thought of something that we know tastes good.  These markets would spread the smell of raw foods and would connect it with the smell of the earth. As a child my favourite smell is that of the earth after the first rain of autumn. You could smell how alive earth is. You could feel it breathe. You could see it crawl with little animals. You see their trail lace over the brown fresh earth. And you could gather these little animals so that you could help your grandmother transform them into dinner. For me those snails are still probably some of the tastiest meals I have had. Same held true to every salad and every cake make out of the fruits and vegetables grown in my grandmother’s garden. She gave me my first lessons in cooking and showed me how it is about flair even in time of austerity.

Understanding that cycle what we need to understand how to help our planet not only survive but flourish in the future. Having our children experience and engage in it is a legacy we give them to the future. It should be the battle that mobilises all of us in a way that is intrinsic to our daily lives. It should not be something so hard for us to do that we just don’t do it. But in order to do it is should matter. It should make us do it. It should engage us like our grandmother and great grandmothers were engaged and mobilized without thinking of themselves as militants. This is what they HAD to do for US.

Food should be part of the education and the culture. There used to be home economics in schools which has now been removed. Home economics would teach us the basic logic of the economics of the home and how to make it sustainable. It allowed us to understand the connections with the food and the sustenance. It allowed us to bring in the creative solutions to solve the problems we might encounter in the home. I not only believe we should bring back home economics into the schools but I also believe cooking classes should be brought into the schools. It allows our children to understand the connectivity of raw food, its sources and the food that we have at the dinner table. But it also allows them to understand chemistry, physics and math in the most practical manner same as they are doing in the charter schools with the forensic experiments.

What if all those manicured lawns are also transformed into urban agriculture land. What if you could actually smell food growing closer to where you lived rather than having to have a trip to the countryside to connect with nature. What if the facilities and options to grow small plants were integrated into our flats and homes and onto the roofs of our buildings. What if we really created all these suspended gardens that made the fame of Babylon. Not only will we be more connected to the food we eat but literally we will be closer to the oxygen we breathe.

What if the austerity measures that the government was enforcing due to the economical downturn actually leads us to a richer life of health and abundance since it will teach us to be reconnected with the sources of our food and sustenance….

Museums also have a big role to play in all of this. Take the example of the exhibit on the mobilisation and the austerity of WWII. This could accompanied by interactive experiments and courses that teach us how our grandmothers and their mothers used their imagination and got through the though time while trying not to sacrifice on health. It could teach us how to prepare food. It could teach us about our tastes and culture through food. How it has been preserved or dissipated through the ages. It could teach us the meaning of truly being a community since cooking with someone and eating with them is not something you do with just anyone. You will not invite a stranger to your table to your kitchen, and if you do that person will not be a stranger for long.

Museums are the soft power to our cities and to our countries. They have the power to shape perceptions and ideas. To influence and leave a mark. They are an immersive and engulfing experience that works passively at educating and forming points of views. Museums have the power to engage our emotions like very few places can, and the more they enthral us the more lasting their mark is going to be on us.

As cities go London is very well positioned with a wide-ranging arsenal of such soft power, from the public to the privately run. London holds a treasure in its midst that makes other cities envious. Nevertheless the perception and reaction to these treasures is as mixed and diverse as there are people giving their opinion. To some Londoners these museums are part of their past, their school day memories, and they have not been there since the field trips they have been dragged into by the educational institution they belong to. To other Londoners museums are where you go when you have visitors and otherwise they are places you avoid. Then there are those who have children and are grateful to having the museums that have free general admission as they provide easy and cheap grounds to entertain their toddlers, which in a way is commendable as these toddlers will hopefully grow up with an appreciation of culture, science etc and of shared heritages. To a few it is a constant inspiring destination that allows us to remember the power of dreams, with the unequivocal enchantment that we have such wealth under our fingertips (of course there might be a debate on who has the right to these treasures but this is a different discussion). To the visitors these museums are part of the checklist of things to do in London, and their experiences vary from the ticking of a check next to a list entry to the loss of oneself in a world and subject they are passionate about.

Regardless of what we think of the museums we have to admit that at least in London there is a democratisation to the access to such culture and such wealth, which is definitely something unusual globally.

Yet we are confined to interact with these jewels in only three different touch points. The first touch point is the physical location, the museum itself. The edifice that holds within its walls whatever wonders it has been bestowed upon it to collect, preserve, study and highlight. The second touch point is a virtual one, usually a website, sometimes some twitter accounts maybe a blog and similar web presences. The third touch point is usually an educational presence, a team that collaborates with the local educational institutions to take the museum into schools and bring the schools into the museums.
In my experience with museums and visiting a multitude of them, there are none as engaging and exciting as the museums that are targeting children such as the ‘Science Museum’ in London, the ‘Museum of Science and Industry’ in Chicago, ‘le Palais de la découverte’ in Paris and a slew of similar organizations and institutions. These museums are immersive, and fun. They teach you without lecturing. They put you in the middle of a situation and depending on the choices you make you might get different outcomes, which are clarified, for ease of understanding. You are part of the exhibit, and it does not sit detached and at a distance from you. These institutions are so beloved by their visitors that they take care of them while they are interacting with them. It is not because they are sturdy, because in some of these museums you have exhibits showcasing things as fragile live butterflies. It is because that engagement warrants a sense of respect even from the most rowdy of visitors. The curators and directors of these institutions have understood the power of fuelling the imagination and how that is done through an emotional attachment and a physical engagement. And mostly through fun.

The other day I was on the tube and there was a group of young girls, they were a troupe of brownies, in the same car as me. Their sense of excitement was so palpable. They had their backpacks and knapsacks and they were ready for an adventure. They were counting the stops and negotiating what their plans for the night are going to be. They were so captivating that they enticed the whole car into a conversation, something very rare in the tube in London or any public transport around the world for that matter. It turns out that these girls were heading to a night of camping at the Science Museum. How exhilarating! It is not a novel idea. I know many museums that have such an endeavours and they are always so exciting for the participants.
By the time the troupe had alighted you could feel a sense of common envy. I am sure we were all thinking that we wished we were part of that troupe.
What is interested about that incident is that these girls have offered unintentionally the fourth touch point to the museum, one that the museums have not harnessed its power properly yet. That touch point is the city and its inhabitants. It had infiltrated the living space of the urbanites and had absorbed them into its world even for a brief moment. Many museums as I mentioned do have such events, but mostly the parents drive their children to the museum or they go on a private bus to the museum especially when coming from a suburban area. The fact that these visitors were on the tube made the journey and the engagement with the other people along the way part of the adventure, and it brought the adventure to others who were not even planning on experiencing it. They also inadvertently became the ambassadors making us all want to go and experience the museum one more time.

The museums and the planes of the cities they inhabit should engage more with each other. Of course museums advertise their upcoming events. Some bring out a piece onto the streetscape outside the museum to lure people in. In some instances like in Paris metro stations ‘Louvre’ and ‘Arts et Metiers’, among others, the museum is brought into the public transport to create and interconnection between the museum, the ground plane, the street level, the underground level and those zapping through it on the metro. These work as momentary attention grabbers that don’t leave too much impact.

The conversation that was triggered on that tube car is what museums should strive to achieve it they would like to have a more lasting impact on the fourth plane of engagement. This fuelling of the imagination will would remain with us longer and make us dream much more readily. That conversation should be followed then through inside the walls of the museum to engage us and immerse us like it does with the children, allowing us to understand how what is being exhibited affects and forms our world and how we can use it to instigate positive change within our world. It should grab us so intensely that we live through that immersive experience and come out of it wanting and yearning for more, or maybe the opposite, which is being so turned off by something that we are willing to make the effort to change it.

The average viewer will be bombarded with a million message every instant, from billboards to moving screen images to architecture to every type of message and communication we receive. The environments we live in have become highly branded with messages flying at us from every perceived direction that it has become more difficult to communicate. The competition has become extremely fierce.

To counter that attention seeking modern environment, the urbanite takes more and more refuge in isolation. This has become apparent in the amount of people walking the streets with headphones in their ears, a focused determined look and an impenetrable bubble around them.

We walk more and more with music, or podcasts or some other sound that we pump into our ears including phone conversation with people who are not present within our physical realm. We forget to let the street and our environment talk to us. We thus are telling people and the city to stay away and not approach us. Trust me I know it is well warranted sometimes. You surely would like to avoid the chatterbox who sees you as a perfect target to rant about their problems hoping to save on the price of a session at their psychiatrist. But most often than not by retreating into our bubble we miss out on some interesting interaction between us and the city, between us and a passer by or even between us and someone we know that we did not notice was around us. It is true that most urban environments are not conducive to that interaction really but you can find a stage anywhere. For example one of my favourite urban parks is Bryant Park. The way this park has grown throughout the years has turned it  into a wonderfully engaging and engaged urban open space. Every time I go to New York I try to spend an afternoon there at least. I head there with my lunch, and a book. Two activities to which this park is so perfectly suited. The central core is open, on one side you have the New York Library and all around you have the high rises of mid manhattan. From those high-rises the scale shifts around the periphery of the park with a layer of trees and shrubbery where you have more intimate enclosed spaced that reopen towards the center. That center is where one night a week in the summer new yorkers converge with their picnic baskets to come and watch a classic movie. On any other time of the day you can take over these wood and steel green cafe chairs and tables and have yourself a quiet reflective time…. or so i always think. It never turns out to be the case. Every time, inevitably, I end up approaching or being approached by a stranger with whom i engage in a conversation about the book in either in our hands or something we overheard the other say in a conversation, maybe even an earlier phone conversation. That conversation most of the time pulls in other people in the vicinity and before we know it our little green cafe chair and table are moved around and we create an outdoor living space. If I am sitting in that same park with my headphones on I am sending a clear message to people sitting around me to stay away. What a pity that is since it would make me miss those wonderful conversations with strangers.

The urban environment used to be experienced through the dialogue that happened between its street level and its skyline. The buildings, which are individual symbolic expression of its inhabitants, are also pieces of the whole skyline. They communicate with each other like individual letters do in a text. Each is a self standing symbol, but the linguistic articulation between them and their negative spaces creates the text or the whole story. So we don’t only see a building alone but also how it is in harmony or clash with its surrounding.

Their street façade has always been more of the window through which you could read the identity of the building or the space, the canvas upon which the brand gets painted.

Theoretically it still works that way. This is why we still rely on that street level to be the space where the brand mainly unfolds and plays itself urbanely. We still work on branding those environments through architecture, interiors, communicative graphics, etc.

Yet we are becoming less effective that we used to be. As communicators we are having more trouble reaching into that self imposed isolation within the urban landscape. The disjunction between voyeur and the object of voyeurism has become so that we are not catching his attention long enough to want to make him come out of the cocoon. We walk the streets without even noticing the differences and the discrepancies of the places and spaces around us. It takes something that screams at us, like a glass box of the Apple store for us to take notice.

The plane where that urbanite breaks his isolation has become the screen, whether it is the television, the computer screen, the movie theater, the pad or especially the smart phone. In the case of the television, we go home and immerse ourselves in the reality of the shows where the brands and then their environments suddenly become our own, and we identify with them as if we belonged to or they were part of our daily lives. For example, the Idol series. It had started as a televised talent show in the UK. Now it has become such a strong phenomenon that it has now gone global, with shows in being made all over the world. When we choose to watch the show we know that we are joined by a million other viewers. Thus the characteristics of community, space and environment get redefined. The community is now dispersed and unconfined by a location, even though it is still somehow defined by time and idea. But we also know that we can safely assume that when we get to the office the next morning will be able to strike a conversation with one or several colleagues about the happenings of yesterday’s show. Thus the community gets extended to beyond the time of the show’s showing, joining like minded individuals in a new manner that has transcended the traditional sense of the meeting, and allows us to get out of isolation every once in a while. What also happens is that people get together, gathered by a community created around someone else’s life, whether fictional or real. I personally have been marginal to those shows. But every morning after the air of Idol, or Project Runway or any of these reality/ competition shows people around me would be talking about it, about what this competitor… Oh My Goodness what were they thinking, singing country on American Idol… that is soooo daring and did you see what she was wearing? And of course that poor thing falling flat on his face as he was dancing… now THAT was what cost him the competition. But i would vote for him. The culmination of all that was the Susanne Boyle phenomenon. An obscure talent who did not have the looks or the presence to be a performer came an wowed the world through one song. All of a sudden everyone identified with Susanne, everyone routed for her, everyone cried tears of joy for her. Everyone, everywhere, around the world. Even those who did not watch the show their space was invaded by it, at least for a few days.

The space where we truly allow ourselves to come out is the virtual communities on the computer screen. Where we go to a virtual community, for example Facebook, we are there intentionally to communicate. We choose to whom we want to talk to, even if they are strangers, by virtue of a selection process that allows us to narrow from a few million to a few hundred… We can browse, chat and create virtual communities that create a network with time being the common bond.

On some websites we can create our own avatars and live alternate lives.

In our real physical world it is not that different, we continuously make choices, even though we do not have an elimination listing system, we do go through the same process but in a different manner. So the interaction between us and the people around us are more defined by the space and time continuum.

That confinement has gone a step further with the smartphones and pad where you can have apps allowing you to ‘check-in’ and where others within your network would be able to know your location and either meet up with you or give you recommendations. Or the apps that allow you to know who in your vicinity would be a potential good suit, or a potential adventure and allows you to connect with them virtually and then physically. Those apps confine us to a pre-set number or characteristics that bind our experience to what the app defines as ‘ours’. Our role of reading the space and scanning through faces and places become minimized to the app we hold in our hands and our ability to read it and use it. It removes the element of play and the unknown, restricting our experiences and our potential experiences while enhancing and reinforcing the ones we know and have experienced before.

Thus the city and the urban landscape have to contend with a very tough competition. The old dilemma raise by Victor Hugo in ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ about the advent of the Guttenberg press is back. ‘Ceci tuera cela, le livre tuera l’edifice’ (this will kill that, the book will kill the edifice).

‘Ceci tuera cela’ was a declaration of the loss of legibility of the architecture due to the spread of the books, thanks to the modern printing press. It was also about the fear of the clergy of loosing power over the masses, since up till then they alone had the power of knowledge and choice given by the book, and the architectural edifice was a manifestation of that power over the population. It was majestic, it towered over the population showing then that through religion they could gain the vertical connection to God and to the heavens. The edifice also offered the gathering space for the community, where they get united to be guided by the choice. The fear of the clergy was that knowledge through the book would offer the population choices, thus diminishing their power, and that the book would create isolation dispersing the masses and again diminishing their power.

Yet architecture never really lost its legibility. It simply acquired a new set of linguistic symbols through which it communicated. It was a language that was alive, changing and timeless at the same time. It reflected the zeitgeist (the spirit of the age). So when we see a certain type of architecture, we can tell what period it was built in as well as what is the message it is trying to convey to us.

The architecture has always been part of a branded expression, that speaks about identity. From the pharaonic pyramids, the temple, the church, the mosque, to the corporate edifice, even passing through residential and vernacular architecture. It is the stamp of identity of a certain group. It helped foster a sense of identity, of belonging, of attachment, a belief, and even sometimes a sense of structure and hierarchy through which norms were set and accountability was determined.

The brand expression was not only in the exteriors but it included the interior and the environment with every piece of it communicating whether iconoclastically or architectonically. In our modern architecture we have not shifted away from that paradigm.

The architecture was never killed by the book, its methods have shifted and altered, but it always finds a way to reinvent itself as communication tool. The book was nothing but an extension of the space to when you are not present in it, especially when it came to religion where the argument originated from. It created a virtual world build through imagination. But it did not have the same power the screen has these days since reading the book was still an individual endeavor.

Architecture is about the community and the connection with the other, while the books are about isolation and refuge.

Will our modern day isolation methods’ impact prove to be similar to those that have been felt by the book, an extension of the physical world, or will it prove to create something completely different where it becomes a alternate world? Will the physical world need redefinition in terms of its paradigm and its messaging in order to keep its stature as a major message giver? It should be able to compete with the Sim-Cities and the Second-Lives out there where people can go live their alternative lives and have more choices. Will this duality and dichotomy redefine our architectural and urban expression? Will it create a new architectonic language that has a different way of expressing, spaces, function, loyalty, power or any of the other expressions architecture and space are so adept at making? In some cases like in China it has. A lot of people there live dual lives, the shown and the hidden. They splurge on what others can see to give the impression of wealth, as well as conformity. Yet in the confines of their homes it is a different story, and on the ‘chinese Facebook’ and qq it is an even more different landscape. They lives lives that are non conforming the requirements of tradition and culture. When trying to communicate to the chinese consumer one has to know on which plane they need to be and how to communicate through it which has been a struggle western, designers, architects and communicators have been facing.

Choice is the key word here. For the corporate world, which in a way equates the clergy at the time of Hugo, there will be a necessity to overcome the stance it has long taken an imposing its values upon its consumer and shift to making the consumer part of the process by giving them more choices. Maybe if the physical environment offered choices that were parallel to the avatars, and the control-alt-delete, the disconnect between the screen and the 3D world would be bridged. Choice that might actually lead us to a more flat and democratic architectural expression. A different type of space that has a capacity to transcend its own physicality and break the traditional social norms.

The moment you arrive to that place you immediately start defining that place, that entity, that brand. It is defined through the interpretation of cues you get from it, through the previously acquired knowledge and through all the previous places and brands you have encountered. That moment of definition with a city of course takes much longer than trying to define a building, a brand experience or a more contained public area. A city is layers. It divulges itself slowly, progressively with the experiences which one acquires. Each of us understands these layers through the framework that is familiar to them, easy for them to understand. Thus creating an individual painting that this experience represents. Collectively becoming an awe striking mosaic of colours and experiences.

But these experiences are not flat nor are they two dimensional. They are sensory and sensual. It is a complete emersion of all the sense that help define that experience. This experience can alter with the proportion of senses involved every time you go through that experience and how differently they get engaged at each time.

I personally experience a city through sound and music. With a multitude of notes which creates a unique harmony. Even through its definition this harmony changes with the vagrant moods.

New York runs to the tunes of improv jazz.. blended with the songs of troubadour singers like tom waits and leonard cohen
the metro chugs rhythmically, over, every, section, of, the, rails chug, chug, chug… punctuating the thoughts, penetrating the core, merging with your own heart. then comes the beeping of the trucks. non constant beep rising stringent above all others. the opening and closing of storefronts. the calling out of vendors in the village market. the chatter of people. people constantly talking, humming. through that comes a laugh. loud. contagious. short. new yorks sound is fueled by the sounds of people. of its people. a unique blend of everyone from around the world. New York speak is a mixture of all languages and accents and dialects. the surprise comes when nature joins the melody and a chirping sound of a bird takes over the space in little pocket parks. or the buzzing of the fireflies in the twilight of central park. or the seagulls screeching around the edges of the island.

Paris on the other hand is more melodious. paris sounds like the accordion that is so ubiquitous along its Seine. Paris sounds of Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel. Blend that with Aznavour and Brassens. Add a bit of Renaud, Goldman, Johnny, Pagny, Zaza etc etc etc. maybe summing it up Paris sounds like the restos du coeur. The brain child of Coluche has basically embodied the sound of Paris. It is distinctive and it is blended. When you are walking along the streets, into the small alleys and hidden paths, you don’t walk, but you glide, you float swept by the harmony and the melody. It is mute but it makes you sing. It makes you dance with the ambulances, with their distinctive sirens, counting the steps of your valse musette, and with the accordionists, violinists, cellists in the metro and the edge of the Seine.

Going to the old world of the middle east we head to Cairo where the sound is very very different. The sound of Cairo is punctuated five times a day by the call to prayer of the Mouazzins. Even though that is a call you hear in every muslim city around the world, the Mouazzins of Cairo are very distinctive. It is intense, it is personal. It is monotonous. It is penetrating. In one of the most inhabited cities of the world this call to prayer sounds more akin to a personal conversation between the Mouazzin and God. If you listen you can hear the answer in the moments, in the seconds of silence. This is actually the same characteristic you have of all the sounds of Cairo. They sound like individual conversations, call, songs that blend together in a uniform idiosyncratic conversation between the city and it’s inhabitants. It is a thick sound that is feels immersive, permeating. Cairo is not only about the religious harmonies. It’s vernacular sounds are just as omnipresent and engaging. The sounds of the flukas on the nile blaring pop music and neon light. the call of vendors. the honking. the incessant honking and cursing in the dense traffic. Even the honking is linguistic, with significance to each type of honk. the sound of the souks, the clicking of tea glasses….Om Kolthom and Abel Haleem, Amr Diab and many other embody the sound of Cairo. It is a sound that is melancholic, sad, languorous, yet energetic, old and makes you want to move your hips, strengthen your step as you walk to the steps of a balady, local peasant dance.

Each city has a sound. Each city has a voice in which it expresses itself. It is a interspersion of all different tones and notes unique to a city, it is one of its defining factors. Sometimes it misses a beat. Sometimes it raises it’s voice in protest. Most of the time it sings in celebration of life.