Evolving Urban Attitudes Online

Attitudes towards cities have changed a lot in this past decade. I'm not sure when blogs started, but I know I started reading them in 2001. I know that because I remember I was starting to read Cincinnati Blog and Andrew Sullivan then; the first because of the April 2001 riots, and the latter because of 911 and the Iraq war.

Before that I was a pretty avid newspaper reader. And if you remember then, the back and forth discussion online was mostly in the comment section of the newspapers. And unfortunately the attitude there has not changed much. The comments' section in the Enquirer are overwhelmingly ignorant and bigoted. It is really discouraging to read them, especially if the article has something to do about crime, downtown or the deadly mix of crime downtown.

I didn't feel that there were many like-minded people out there. I never commented on sites as they seemed to be dominated by thoughtless screaming text, and so many people seemed to hate Cincinnati, black people, homeless people, and the most common refrain was "I'm so glad I left Cincinnati and moved to ...".

A few years later, in 2004, I found a site with many like minded souls: Urban Ohio. Not that the contributors there are all of the same political ilk (they aren't) but they all had a love of Midwestern cities. And at first I was a lurker but finally started minor contributions in 2005.

And pretty quickly after this more blogs started to appear that were urban oriented. And through this medium I found the comfort of similarly minded people. Sometimes when lots of bad things are happening in your neighborhood, it is such a relief to find people who are going through the same things.

I feel that the best blogs are micro focused on their city or even their neighborhood, and I love this aspect of the online experience. Today my RSS reader is full of dozens of high quality blogs talking about transit, rehabbing buildings, form-based codes, urbanism etc etc. I never have to resort to reading the Enquirer reader's comments anymore.

But most of this time, I would say that suburban sprawl continued to be seen as desirable and inevitable, especially in the Midwest. Only in the past two years, after some higher gas prices, and the home mortgage/credit crisis did the cracks in the suburban model become visible to a wider audience. And now, if I read an article about how much time or money is wasted on cars, I will find it reposted on many blogs before I even get a chance to write about it. So I kinda feel I am wasting my time focusing on that kind of general anti-sprawl stuff.

So I think it is time to refocus here; refocus on Downtown Cincinnati, and specifically on how families cope and sometimes thrive here. This is still not covered enough by others. Choosing to raise a family in OTR may still seen by many as dumb, but through this blog and through other social networking, I have found that there are hundreds of families like ours; thousands, depending on where you draw the circle. Many are in surrounding neighborhoods like Mt. Adams, Newport, Covington, Clifton, Northside etc.. and they are living their dreams out in this city, supporting the schools, coaching soccer, walking to the library, swimming in the pools, sledding in the parks, skating on Fountain Square, taking kids to the Symphony or to plays, riding bikes around town and generally living an enriching life while raising normal healthy kids.

So I am taking a hiatus from posting here for a little while, maybe until the end of the year or so. I want to take a little time to rethink the purpose here. I have a couple posts that are already written and scheduled to appear later this month. Also, the co-bloggers may post some stuff. I realize that the dominance of Twitter and Facebook have kinda taken the place of one of my original goals here, which was to meet new people. That works better on those social networking sites than in a blog. The blog is better suited to longer essays and more extensive photo postings. I'm not sure if 2 small posts a day is really worth it. It sometimes seems like one well-thought out post per week would be better. But if that is the case, maybe I need more collaborators or it will be too sparse. But either way, I'll be here, at this site, in some form or other.

Thursday Night Out

On rare occasions, I will hire a babysitter from Babysitease and take my lovely wife on a night out. Being the uncultured slob I am, instead of going to a nice restaurant or a movie, I treated my wife to a streetcar fundraiser. There were several hundred people there, and lots of positive energy.

But I am not a total dweeb and knew that we had to do something nicer. So we then headed down to Fountain Square. I think it says a lot now that when we are looking for some activity, we naturally gravitate to Fountain Square. Seems like there is always a crowd, and tonight was the biggest yet. It's not even the weekend yet.

It was salsa night, and it was packed with people dancing and having a good time. There were some great dancers and the square was pulsating. I finally met Morris (who is an excellent dancer). I also figured out that I know Diana (the salsa guru) from when we were teenagers. We talked, and she convinced us to take lessons.

The dancing and closeness on the square, the sheer joy, reminded me of an axiom that Roxanne Qualls quoted in her talk Tuesday: public affection is an indicator of a successful public place.

While the dancers were still getting sweaty, wife and I headed over to Jean-Ro's for a single martini each. They were excellent. As we walked home, each block we got further from Fountain Square, the streets got quieter and emptier. When we got to our quiet block and went up to relieve the babysitter, she commented on how loud the neighborhood is. Ironic.

I guess it was loud to her, because we still have the windows open, and haven't closed up yet for air conditioning. But I like hearing everything that is going on outside. Murmurs, drizzle, tires on wet asphalt, a breaking bottle, whatever. It was a bit humid, but the nights have been pleasant with gentle breezes and occasional rain.

Fingers crossed that the sun be out tomorrow, so the kids can return to the pool.

Now Everyone Blogs

I recently came upon two people who you would never think would blog.

First a homeless guy in Nashville. I found him via our neighbor 12th and Republic.
Second, an Amish Farmer. I found him via our herdshare farmer.

I think we can now safely assert that blogging has reached every demographic.

Getting Information on Twitter

Do you twitter? If so, there are a number of local resources that you can follow on twitter for information. A couple of avid Cincinnati Twitterers (I refuse to use the term twiterati) have started to compile a list of local resources on Twitter.

The list includes local restaurants (@TaketheCakeCafe tweets their daily specials), local arts organizations (@cincyartmuseum tweets their upcoming exhibitions and lectures), sports teams (most of the ones I see seem to be managed by a third-party) and local media.

The activity can be pretty wide ranging. @Cincienquirer tweets heavily as news comes in. They also provide links to the stories on their web site. @CincyCAC, on the other hand, hasn't tweeted since November. Some just tweet the facts, while others (like @wlwt) have been know to inject a little personality into their tweets.

A lot of these organizations listen, as well. I remember tweeting after the election about how difficult it was to find easy tables of election results on the Enquirer site. Not long after I received a message from @cincienquirer asking how they could help.

So if you are on Twitter check out this list for some potentially good follows. If you aren't on Twitter, perhaps this will give you a reason to check it out. If you know any accounts that should be added to the list send a direct message to @RadioCarla and she will update her list.

World Builder

Interesting video with a "traditional" streetscape.

"Hacking" Google Streets

I am very intrigued by Google's street view. For those who don't know, Google sends specially outfitted cars around the country to take pictures from the street. Any street that has been captured can be viewed.

This has lead to some interesting finds on Google. One site compiled the Top Ten Moments Caught on Google Maps. When they came through our street, I missed the car but could determine the day because the in-laws were in town and it caught their car on the street.

But this is the coolest thing I found so far. There is a web site called Street With A View that documents the Google car coming through. In fact, the web site shares:

On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more...

So actually the #1 moment caught in the first link, was actually this staged event. If you watch the video you can see what a Google car looks like. It is nice to see a company like Google have a sense of humor about their product.

2 yr anniversary

This blog started two years ago with four January posts. Kind of inauspicious.

I am happy with the direction of the blog, and only hope to have more original writing, especially focusing on some individual families, and how they are coping with urban Cincinnati. I think as people get more comfortable with putting themselves out there for the public (like on Facebook), they will be more comfortable with their photos and stories online. I know that I am getting more comfortable, but it has taken a while for some of us stuck in our old ways.

I like blogs that have several posts a day. To that end, I am very happy to have some co-bloggers to keep things moving here, and I also like that we keep things pretty positive despite our differences. If you want anti-everything and divisiveness, then you have plenty of options elsewhere.

If I'm reading the Google Analytics report right, we steadily get 150 individual viewers a day and about 2,500 a month. Sometimes we will get close to 300 viewers in a day. For example the inaugural Lego posting got tons of views. (good job Mark). Once in a blue moon, we will have a post that gets tons of visits. This happened when I had the Huckabee Christmas card juxtaposed to the Obama Christmas card a year ago, and some with easily googleable titles continue to get daily hits like Graphs, Pie Charts and the Economy. But those are not the direction I want to go. I am more interested in the local, urban, Cincy family stuff, and will try to keep focused in that direction.

Thank you for visiting, and please comment. ...Or email if you want to co-blog.

Misc Links for a Slow Week

Save Our Land Save Our Towns

Free Public Transport

A farmer in Eaton

Local Painter, Greg Storer

Kate's Random Musings

Urban Reinventors

Edward Glaeser Harvard Prof on urbanism

Making things from found objects

Jake Mecklenborg's Cincy Transit Site:

Scans of interesting books

Public Schooling Blog

A place to buy vinyl records online.

Bedbugger article on Cincinnati

A neighbor of mine, of a younger generation, blogging about sneakers etc..

I didn't vote for Obama so that he could spend $960 Million on more highways!!!

Social Internet and the Urban Loneliness Myth

From New York Magazine:

...this idea that cities are bastions of lonely, despairing people is a myth,”

...Rather than driving people apart, large population centers pull them together, and as a rule tend to possess greater community virtues than smaller ones. This, even though cities are consistently, overwhelmingly, places where people are more likely to live on their own.

...our large brains didn’t evolve in order to do multivariable calculus or compose sonatas. They evolved in order to process social information—and hence to work collaboratively. “And if you look at any city,” he says, “you see that we have the capacity, as a species, to do so.

...Cities... are the ultimate expression of our humanity, the ultimate habitat in which to be ourselves...

...today’s city dwellers consistently rate as less lonely than their country cousins. “There’s a new sense of community in cities, an increase in social capital, an increase in trust, ...It all leads to less alienation.”

...Bowling Alone, a meticulous chronicle of scary numbers by Harvard public-policy expert Robert Putnam... showed that almost every measurable form of civic participation, from church attendance to union membership to bowling leagues, declined in the waning decades of the last century. ...Putnam focused too much on obsolescent activities and organizations (card-playing, the Elks); ... he gave short shrift to new, emerging forms of social capital, like Internet groups...

... loneliness isn’t about objective matters, like whether we live alone. It’s about subjective matters, like whether we feel alone.

... friends are the glue that binds cities together. In study after study, urban dwellers have a more substantial social network.

...cities, in which we have a large network of companions and a wide variety of activities to do with them, are better for marriages generally. ...new experiences, rather than repeated favorites, are the best way to keep romantic feelings alive in a marriage...

...urbanism has converged, to some extent, with another field of study: Internet use. It’s probably not an accident. Both cities and the Internet are at once highly atomized and elaborately connected ..

...“Online and offline life are inherently connected...They’re not separate worlds.”

...who wants to ride the subway alone?

Sweet Juniper

Interesting blog similar interests as this one, but out of Detroit. Posts consist of cute kids photos, vacant buildings, essays, coloring books, historic photos etc...

http://www.sweet-juniper.com/ It's worth checking out if you have the time.

Join this Blog

If anyone would like to have privleges to post on this blog, send an email to Mike@citykin.com and I will send you an invite. The only requirement would be that you be a parent and live in the city limits. Subject of posts should be somewhat relevant, but as you can see by my posts, almost everything is relevant.

Blog Blahs

I feel this blog has not been up to par lately. My readership, which steadily increased for a year or so, has plateaued and I have felt inhibited in my writing.

I just read a short list entitled, What Makes a Good Blog. I agree with the points and will take them to heart.

WiFi at Fountain Square

I have a new G3 Iphone. It was a gift from my dear wife, and I have been figuring out how it works for the past 3 weeks. One thing that drives me crazy is that I can go all over this city and access the internet and check my mail. All over the city except one location and that is Fountain Square and the one or two blocks around it.

For some reason, if I try to check email while at the square, I am automatically diverted to a Cincinnati Bell WiFi site that wants credit card info to get service. If I walk two blocks to the north, I resume regular service. I get regular service in Clifton, Avondale, North Avondale, West End, all over except Fountain Square.

Now despite being a uber-blogger, I really don't research or completely understand how the G3 or WiFi works. All I know is that I cannot check my email or browse a website on Fountain Square, but I can all over the rest of the city.

Am I doing something wrong, or are the Corporate Overlords screwing me? Seems like FS would be a key place to offer free WiFi.

Promotion for a Disney movie "Bolt" on The Square Saturday:

 

Gin Sitcoms and Free Time

Kind of interesting take on the development of interractive media vs the TV.:

...Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before--free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

...only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.
...
People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

...This is something that people in the media world don't understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

Visual Lingual

A neighbor of ours has a great post today about choosing her environment. I definitely feel affinity for her decision process. My life, where I live and how, is made from innumerable small steps and everyday decisions. It was not planned out in advance, but the result is pretty good. Read her post.

Buzzfeed

Traffic on this site skyrocketed over the past few days, and it appears to be generated by a site called Buzzfeed, that has linked to the Obama vs. Huckabee Christmas card post. Weird.

I guess I'll be reading Buzzfeed more, they seem to know the good sites.

Localvore or Locavore

I recently read, that the word Locavore, was voted the best new word or 2007. I think the origination of the term is "eating food that is grown locally". I agree with that sentiment, but also try to support local hardware stores and shops too.

However, it is definitely possible to go over-board with this sentiment. For example, we bought a car a few years ago, partially because the dealer is within walking distance.

....we should have read Consumer Reports first.

Anyway, I would like to coin a new word: Locablog.

1,000 Visitors

In September, I put a counter on this site (Google Analytics), and today I passed 1,000 unique viewers. There have been 2,400 total visits and 4,300 pageviews. I think 1,000 viewers in 3 months, is pretty good for a site that is ultra-local and non-political.

In September I usually had 30 unique viewers per day. A few days ago, I had 130 in one day. My highest traffic day is typically Monday, the lowest Sunday.

Of course there are more readers on the days when the posts are interesting, not just filler. And I have more than just visitors. I have gotten to know a few people in-person or via email through contact at this site, and that is pretty neat too.

I don't see other bloggers post about their traffic much at all. Is it bad manners or something?

Virtual Neighbors Support Real Neighborhood

Here is a mind-expanding excerpt from a book about the intersection between virtual neighborhoods and good local neighborhoods. There are some good observations here. Consider the quote below:

A tenet of modernist planning was that cities didn’t matter any more, that communications technology ... rendered them useless and inefficient. Of course, the opposite has proved true. As technology has lowered the barriers between places, the differences between them have become accentuated. At least at a global scale, when ideas and capital flow freely, they tend to dry up in some places and pool in others—as in New York. But the influence of communication technology is beginning to have an impact at the neighborhood scale as well. Jacobs wrote that “word does not move around where public characters and sidewalk life are lacking.” Now it does. There are the people paused at the top of the subway stairs, occupying two spaces at once, one physical, one virtual. And in neighborhoods around the country—this one in particular—community online message boards and blogs are thriving, entirely in parallel with news passed stoop to stoop.
...
If the physical form of a neighborhood is conducive to community, so is its virtual form.

Interesting thesis, but is it true? I defintely think that a city with good physical form helps foster community. And I understand that virtual communities are more active in vibrant neighborhoods or ones in transistion or with many stresses. For example, people may go online to organize block watches or to organize to save the local pool.