Local

Gothamist points to an article that looks at how cityslickers who are turning their city into farmland. We wrote about Hipster Farmers who were leaving the city to set up farms, but the Times looks at the growth of allotments and the redevelopment of vacant lots into arable land:

John Ameroso, a Cornell Cooperative Extension agent who has worked with local farmers and gardeners for 32 years, said that when he first suggested urban farm stands in the early 1990s, city environmental officials dismissed the idea. “ ‘Oh, you could never grow enough stuff with the urban markets,’ ” he said he was told. ‘ “That can’t be done. You have to have farmers.’ ”

But local officials have come around.

Holly Leicht, an associate assistant commissioner at the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, helped provide two half-acre parcels of city land last year. One became Hands and Hearts and the other is in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Brooklyn.

The Red Hook farm began in 2003 when the Parks Department gave the youth group Added Value permission to use an abandoned three-acre asphalt ball field. The group started with two raised beds, built a hoop house where it could start seeds, then laid down an acre of compost two feet deep on top of the asphalt. Last year the young farmers sold more than $25,000 in goods.

Urban agriculture has been an even larger undertaking in other cities, particularly those with weaker real estate markets and a declining population.

NY Times

Tyler Brûlé ends the May 08 issue of his Monocle magazine with an interesting observation piece on the meaning of local products. With the rebirth of locally-made businesses, he wonders if consumers are going to begin to wonder why they’re paying premium prices for products that are made cheaply in Asia and whether these consumers will continue to buy into a brands that leverage national heritage if all their production is outsourced elsewhere.

From Melbourne to Gothenburg to Minneapolis, retailers of everything from vegetables to fine knitwear are surveying the landscape, speaking to consumers and responding accordingly. When these businesses venture out into the wholesale market to purchase goods they’re disillusioned by rails filled with expensive, shoddily stitched garments made in countries with dirt-cheap labour costs and questionable employment laws. They’re unimpressed by porcelain companies that still sell their Swedishness but manufacture in Thailand. They’re worried that there’s no respect for finish or detail and that some of the world’s most respected premium brands (many gobbled up by dim private equity firms all working to the same, short-term strategies) have squandered everything in order to improve their margins while unwittingly offloading the real intellectual property - the painters, pattern makers, seamstresses and master carpenters.

I once asked the owner of a major Italian luxury goods house if she felt she was duping her consumers by playing up her brand’s Italian heritage while quietly manufacturing in China. She responded by saying she was creating jobs in China and that customers no longer cared where things were made and didn’t think about things like “mark-up”. I then asked her why, if she was so proud of her job creation in Shenzhen, wasn’t she proudly promoting this fact on her hangtags and labels? At this point the interview was brought to an abrupt close.

Few companies want to confront the follow-up question. Other than price, what’s the difference when both an original and a fake are cut, stitched, glued and bolted together in China, Vietnam and other low-wage markets? Is it really justifiable to get angry with consumers for opting for a fake when the mark-up for an original is extortionate and there’s no real difference in quality or the working conditions for the people that made the items?

Monocle

As we’ve mentioned in the past, Japan’s population is aging and will continue to get much older going forward.  This has led to some rather interesting counter-aging trends, including the continued development of advanced robotics to aid workforce productivity and the rising popularity of collagen-based consumer products. We can now add IV drip cafes to this list:

Tenteki10, located in the swank area of Ebisu, Tokyo, offers customers a walk-in service that features IV drips starting at 2,000 yen ($20). The service is meant to provide a skin care boost, act as an anti-aging remedy and alleviate stress and exhaustion. Administered by on-site nurses, this could be the perfect way for hypochondriac, futurist, medical fetishists (yes, that is a real sub-culture) to get their fix in one shot.

Tenteki10

Kolektib - a Manila-based consultancy - is organizing its first “Wicked Problems Mindstorm” on May 17th. Rather than grappling with a specific client task or discussing a certain business-related theme, this event will deal with problem solving for the public community. The mindstorm will be open to the public and will be very collaborative in nature. Open source non-profit consulting if you will. This is what’s written on Kolektib’s invitation:

Wicked Problems - They are persistent problems that plague our local communities: Trash cans that no one seems to want to use. Steel flyover railings that are stolen in the night. Bunches of ugly black power and telephone cables. Stray cats. Let’s choose one. Let’s talk about it. And let’s find realistic, actionable and innovative solutions. Join the first Kolektib Mindstorm.

A little background on that bit about steel railing theft: the market for scrap metal is booming in Manila since China can’t seem to get enough of it. With perpetually high income inequality (a majority are at the wrong end of it) and now a struggling economy due to high food prices to boot, many have resorted to stealing public property metal like street signs, manhole covers and steel highway railings for badly needed extra earnings.

With less than 100 days before the start of the Olympics in China, the whole country and especially Beijing is gearing up for an eventful summer. To chronicle the run-up to the 2008 Games, Siok Siok Tan and her students at the Beijing Film Academy have created a film examining the lives of Beijing’s citizens. “Boomtown Beijing” is showing world-wide, with proceeds being donated to the Library Project.

Check out the trailer for Boomtown Beijing:

[via OneManBandwidth]

Interesting thoughts from Nick Currie’s blog, playing off a Vito Acconci rant about the changing concepts of cities and locality: He proposes that being in the physical space of a city becomes less relevant when you can have all of the information and idea-resources at your fingertips with a computer.

“A computer makes a city seem almost unnecessary,” Acconci says. “If you can have all the information in front of you on a computer, do you need the actual city? The notions of a city now don’t seem as separate from notions of “suburb” and notions of “rural” as they used to. “City” is seen to be spreading… maybe a city starts to be more portable. If you can carry all the information from a city, does that mean you carry the city with you rather than you go into a city? Do you carry your own city, does each person now have the possibility of carrying a portable city rather than installing himself or herself in an actual city?”

Currie also questions what local really means. When it’s possible to create your own mix and match “bubble existence” out of whatever culture or mico-tribe you best fit in with (either online, or in a physical space), the notions of a cohesive local neighborhood culture begins to fall apart.

Because of globalisation, immigration, computers, your “local experience” can now consist entirely of foreigners. Most of my local business encounters in Neukolln are with Turks, most of my socialisation with Japanese. The cut-rate atomic German city I live in half the time has been cut-and-pasted, sliced and diced, filtered and fixed, almost as much as the bit-rate digital city I live in the other half.

and from the blog’s comments:

I feel like the music scene I’m part of is a lot more a “virtual” scene than one based in any city. Half of us spend the majority of their time on the road, but we all know each other and collaborate and play shows with each other and keep track of each other online. It’s exactly what the concept of a music scene has always been except without the common locality.

What does this mean for society if everyone starts living this kind of collage life? Although this distributed living can be good for the bubble culture itself, I’m wondering if it hurts the stability of the physical local culture?

Click Opera:Portable, personal and composite, fine. But “local”, what does that mean?

Internet radio station ByteFM started earlier this year in Germany. Based in an old Bunker in Hamburg, ByteFM surprised us with its completely ad-free program. The project is currently funded by donations and their main sponsor Panasonic, who are getting endorsement on ByteFM’s webpage and their online radio player.

ByteFM aims to provide a high quality musical broadcast, put together and moderated by professional journalists - not hobbyists. Instead of the same old hit-rotation or classic tunes, their station stands offers valuable interviews and background information on music and its makers, small venues and huge clubs within Germany and elsewhere.

ByteFM

Wired points us to a Gawker-Stalker type site called Seattle Notables that’s based in Seattle. Where the former maps the spottings of famous people by regular New Yorkers, the latter maps spottings of not-so-regular people by regular Seattle residents. It’s not exactly a frequently updated site but it’s a reminder about this theme of personal celebrity.

“We don’t have many celebrities here,” says McLeod, co-owner of Seattle’s McLeod Residence art gallery.

The site follows characters like Slats, the Duct Tape Guy and The Button Wearing Bus Expert. And ok, they do also follow Seattle’s solo celeb, Bill Gates. The site says:

We are celebrating the notables of Seattle – the people that fill our local stories with heroes, scapegoats, nemeses, and friends. This is an experiment put on by McLeod Residence.

Seattle Notables

Keen readers may have spotted that we’ve been featuring reports about the future decline of the suburbs for a few months now, and now Business Week picks up the theme and interviews author James Kunstler about how the end of the ‘automobile age’ will also damage the communities it helped to build. Kunstler sats that major instabilities in the system will change the way we produce food, the way we conduct commerce, and the way we move around:

What about biofuels?
We will use all of them, probably. But we will be greatly disappointed by what they can do for us. We certainly aren’t going to run Wal-Mart, Disney World and the highway system on any combination of solar, wind, nuclear, ethanol, biodiesel, or used french-fry oil.

Isn’t it a bit radical to declare game over for Wal-Mart?
It is part and parcel of the suburban predicament. How long can they maintain their warehouse-on-wheels as the price of motor fuels goes up?

How will the U.S. have to adapt?
Virtually anything organized on a grand scale is liable to fall into trouble—government, finance, corporate enterprise, agribusiness, schools. Our gigantic metroplex cities will prove to be inconsistent with the energy diet of our future. I think our smaller cities and towns will be reactivated. We are going to be a far less affluent society.

Business Week: Good-Bye, Cheap Oil. So Long, Suburbia?