Scarier than McMansions: half-completed McMansions

Posted on by

In the middle of a slideshow about the “World’s Eeriest Abandoned Places” is an image of a South Florida neighborhood of half-completed McMansions. The description of Lehigh Acres (picture 7 of 8):

There’s something bluntly creepy about the abandoned exurbs of Florida. Forsaken construction sites, like the ones in the middle-class development of Lehigh Acres in Florida’s southwest, are filled with half-built McMansions, unkempt yards overtaken by alligators and snakes, and derelict cul de sacs that lead to nothing. Florida’s population is diminishing for the first time ever, and nowhere is the exodus felt stronger than here.

Before Halloween, I wrote about the trend of horror films using McMansions as scary settings. Perhaps abandoned sites are more in the genre of post-apocalyptic films…

Overall, I’m not sure why abandoned buildings are viewed as being so creepy. I wonder if this fear has increased with the prosperity of the Western world in recent decades. With so much money out there, it strikes us as very odd that a building would just be left behind and unused. Is there something horribly wrong with the building? Why wouldn’t someone want to preserve and reuse it? But, I assume this has happened plenty throughout human history. Think about the ruins of empires; what happened with all the structures the Romans built when their empire slowly collapsed over the centuries? Or what exactly happened to those Mayan cities in the jungle? I remember as a kid learning about the “Lost Colony” of Roanoke but this certainly happened with other explorer settlements like the Vikings in Greenland. Until recent history, abandoned buildings and settlements were probably more common and “normal.”

TV shows for teenagers show professors as “old, boring, white, and mean”

Posted on by

Here is how college professors are portrayed on television shows for teenagers: “old, boring, white, and mean.”

They may be fictional characters, but their small-screen images may affect students in big ways, says one researcher. Barbara F. Tobolowsky, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Texas at Arlington, found that television’s image of the professor is intimidating, uninterested, and generally old, boring, and white. She is scheduled to present a working paper on her research, “The Primetime Professoriate: Representations of Faculty on Television,” this week at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education…

While previous studies of television have focused on how much time students spend watching TV and not studying, Ms. Tobolowsky looked at the content of those television shows. In her study, Ms. Tobolowsky, who has a master’s degree in film history and criticism and who previously worked in the film industry, analyzed 10 shows that aired from 1998 to 2010 and were geared toward the 12-to-18-year-old demographic group in the Nielsen ratings.

Scrutinizing professors in those shows, she examined characters’ clothing and ways of talking, camera angles and background music, and a variety of other film nuances to break down how enthusiastic the faculty were and how they interacted with students, along with other criteria.

On the whole, she says, professors on the television shows tended to be relatively old, white, and traditional, wearing sweater-vests and sporting graying hair. Young, female, and minority professors on the shows tended to teach only at arts-oriented institutions or community colleges. Most were intimidating or, at the very least, distant, throwing a scare into characters like Matt on 7th Heaven, who worried he’d seem weak if he asked a question in class.

This study seems to suggest that shows for teenagers depict professors as the enemy. While not all teenagers love school, I wonder if this is part of a larger message on television and in movies that the learning part of school isn’t that important while the social aspects, think of the message in Mean Girls, is what really matters. Of course, there is a genre of movies that depicts heroic teachers but these are formulaic in their own ways.

It would be interesting to compare these depictions to how professors are portrayed on shows aimed at adults. I’m reminded of the TNT show Perception that features Eric McCormarck playing a neuroscientist at a Chicago area university. (Disclosure: I know about this show because I tend to catch a few minutes of its opening after watching Major Crimes which I watch because of The Closer.) The show tends to open in this way: McCormack is at the front of the classroom that is full of eager students who are hanging on his every word. At the side of the room is his trusty graduate student TA who occasionally chimes in. McCormack has scribbled all sorts of profound things on the board and then he ends class with a deep question or a witty joke. When the class ends, he quickly leaves the classroom and gets wrapped up in some fascinating case. Sound like a typical college classroom? While the professor here is depicted as a cool young guy, it is not exactly realistic to most college classrooms.

I realize what takes place day in and day out in a college classroom likely does not make scintillating television. Indeed, have you watched DVDs of The Great Courses? Yet, this doesn’t mean there isn’t something worthwhile going on in that classroom that doesn’t require severely stereotyping professors one way or the other depending on the audience.

Sunsets can beautify the suburbs and McMansions

Posted on by

I was amused to run into this Flickr/Instagram photograph of a beautiful sunset over a subdivision of suburban McMansions. The tag on the photo: “Suburbia has awesome sunsets too | #shareyoursunset #sky #McMansions.”

This short commentary can be tied to how suburbs are often portrayed. The suburbs are often caricatured as bland or ordered in a mass-produced way or messy places but rarely as beautiful. Even though the suburbs were originally intended to be a way to combine nature and residences (particularly compared to the dirty cities of the Industrial Revolution), this idea has been lost today. The newest subdivisions tend to be flat places where the existing trees and topography have been leveled for human residences. (However, it is interesting to look at older subdivisions, say those built in the two decades after World War II, and see their more mature trees. Are these neighborhoods now more beautiful simply due to the passage of time?)

This also goes beyond nature. Think of popular culture depictions of suburbs that tend to have a similar storyline: “this suburban family/street/community looks put together but once you dig below the surface, you find all sorts of flaws.” (This is not just limited to suburban stories.) Outside of home interiors (often the focus of magazines and television shows), where is there beauty in suburbs?

Yet, the sky is not completely obscured by suburban subdivisions so perhaps for just a few moments, the suburbs too can be a place where natural beauty is revealed.

Is James Bond’s social status diminished by product placement?

Posted on by

Product placement is rampant in Hollywood films and here is a look at what products James Bond is now selling:

Never mind the other products basking in the superspy’s aura, such as Sony mobile phones and Vaio laptop computers, Macallan single-malt Scotch, Honda cycles, Bollinger Champagne, Globe-Trotter suitcases, Crockett & Jones footwear, Walther guns, Aston Martin cars, Swarovski jewelry, Omega watches, OPI nail polish, Land Rovers and Range Rovers and all the rest.Some pay for the privilege, some make other arrangements. Some, like the new James Bond fragrance hawked by Procter & Gamble, aren’t in the film. But all told, sponsorship and other ancillary deals for “Skyfall” are said to have brought in $45 million, about a third of what it cost to produce the film, one of the best in the Bond series…

Today’s sophisticated media consumer expects to see brands in TV shows, movies and even video games, according to Tom Weeks, senior vice president at LiquidThread (formerly known as Starcom Entertainment), the branded entertainment and content development operation within Chicago’s Starcom MediaVest Group. But proper context — proper casting — is a must…

Caterpillar, which first tied up with 007 in 1999’s “The World is Not Enough,” hopes the “Skyfall” connection boosts brand awareness, particularly in emerging markets like China, which seems a manageable goal.

Perhaps this kind of brand integration is inevitable: brands are always looking for subtle and not-so-subtle ways to associate their products with being “cool.” And what could be better than Bond, an international spy who doesn’t have stuff at home but instead uses all sorts of gadgets all around the world?

But, I’m reminded of Naomi Klein’s arguments in No Logo about the increasing branding of our world. If Bond is so cool, why does he need to be so connected to brands? Isn’t Bond, like the rock ‘n’ roll stars of the 1960s who built their initial popularity on rebelling and not selling out, just selling out? If Bond has to shill for products, what hope is there for the rest of society? Something doesn’t connect here: Bond’s status is tied to the idea that he isn’t beholden to the trappings of life that hold back average people yet the newer movies are now suggesting he too is just another part of the capitalistic world. Thus, Bond is just another commodity who needs other commodities to be successful. His status is now less dependent on his character or his unique actions, but, like other commodities, is tied to the fate of other commodities.

The issues involved in solving the railroad traffic bottleneck in Chicago

Posted on by

The Chicago region is an important city for America’s railroad traffic but it is also a bottleneck:

Six of the nation’s seven biggest railroads pass through the city, a testament to Chicago’s economic might when the rail lines were laid from the 1800s on. Today, a quarter of all rail traffic in the nation touches Chicago. Nearly half of what is known as intermodal rail traffic, the big steel boxes that can be carried aboard ships, trains or trucks, roll by or through this city…

Now, federal, state, local and industry officials are completing the early stages of a $3.2 billion project to untangle Chicago’s rail system — not just for its residents, who suffer commuter train delays and long waits in their cars at grade crossings, but for the rest of the nation as well.

The program, called Create (an acronym for Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Efficiency Program), is intended to replace 25 rail intersections with overpasses and underpasses that will smooth the flow of traffic for the 1,300 freight and passenger trains that muscle through the city each day, and to separate tracks now shared by freight and passenger trains at critical spots. Fifty miles of new track will link yards and create a second east-west route across the city, building redundancy into the overburdened system.

Fourteen of the 70 projects have been completed so far, and 12 more are under way, including the $140 million “Englewood flyover,” or overpass.

This is a massive infrastructure issue involving a whole region. Some of the issues involved (several of which are pointed out by the article):

1. Paying for all of this. How much should the railroad industry itself chip in for this? We’ve also seen some of these issues with passenger lines. For example, the STAR Line would provide a circumferential commuter line between Joliet and O’Hare Airport but it has been on the drawing board for years without funding. And there hasn’t exactly been immediate funding for high speed rail in the Midwest region.

2. Geography: railroad traffic bunches in the area southwest of Lake Michigan. There is one way around this that railroad companies have been using now for some years: push facilities further out from the city to take advantage of more space. For example, Union Pacific built an intermodal facility in Rochelle, Illinois roughly 80 miles west of Chicago’s Loop. Additionally, there are large shipping facilities southwest of the city near the intersection of I-80 and I-55 (see CenterPoint Intermodal Center, “the largest master-planned inland port in North America,” see Union Pacific’s facility here) which could lead to the construction of a new interstate.

3. Lots of at-grade crossings in the Chicago region. These cause traffic issues for trains and cars. Plus, numerous commentators have pointed out the safety issues. Even when these crossings are fixed, they take a lot of time, can involve acquiring and utilizing pieces of land,  and limit car and pedestrian options in the meantime.

4. Tracks that are also used by commuter trains.

5. Suburban communities generally don’t want more railroad traffic. This was illustrated by the fight several years ago over whether Canadian National should be able to purchase and then run more freight trains along the Elgin, Joliet, and Eastern tracks. The suburbs which would see a reduction in traffic because more trains would be routed around the city were in favor while those along the railroad line were not. Thus, local governments often get involved in negotiations with the railroads and they have their own interests.

6. A public which is generally unaware of the importance of railroad lines to the American economy. Yes, railroad traffic may sometimes be inconvenient and noisy but a tremendous amount of traffic is involved.

This could be a great opportunity for regional cooperation.

Quick Review: The Casual Vacancy and Back to Blood

Posted on by

I recently read two recently-published New York Times best sellers: The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling and Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe. Even though the books come from very different authors, one known for writing about a boy wizard and the other known for “new journalism” and tackling status, I thought the books had a lot in common. After a quick overview of each story, I discuss some of the similarities:

1. The Casual Vacancy is about English small-town life as the village of Pagford debates whether a nearby council estate (public housing project in American terms) should remain under their purview or should come under control of the nearby large city. The sudden death of a local council member alters the debate and different members of the community, from residents of the council estate, disaffected teenagers, and local business owners get involved in the decision. In the end, the battle doesn’t really turn out well for anyone involved.

2. Back to Blood is about multicultural Miami where different ethnic and social groups vie for control. The main story is about a Russian businessman turned art benefactor who is investigated by a beleaguered Cuban cop and WASP reporter. Others are caught up in this story including the black police chief, the Cuban mayor, a Cuban psychiatric nurse, and a pornography addiction psychiatrist. Similarly, no one really wins in the end.

3. Although set in very different places, the muted English countryside versus vibrant Miami (reflected to some degree by the writing styles, more conventional for Rowling, more in-your-face from Wolfe), there are common themes.

3a. Power and status. At the heart of these novels are characters vying for control. Of course, this looks different in different places: in Pagford, England, this means being a local council member or having a respectable job in the local community (say as a bakery owner or a doctor) while in Miami, this means the ability to own expensive clothes, cars, houses, and boats while also twisting people’s arms in the directions you want them to go. The characters in both books spend a lot of time worrying about their relative position and scheming about how to get to the top of the heap or how not to be buried completely by others (there is little room for middle ground).

3b. Sex. This is tied to power and status, but both books feature a lot of sexual activity. On one hand, it is presented as one of the rare moments when the characters aren’t solely consumed by the quest for power and yet, on the other hand, sex and who is having sex with whom and for what reason, is inevitably wrapped up in the naked grab for power and status.

3c. Characters alienated from society. Both books are full of characters who feel like they don’t fit in society, that they don’t know where they belong or aren’t able to achieve what they would really want to achieve. This comes across in some classic types: there are teenagers who feel like the adults around them are idiots and so they grasp at ways to make their own name. There are characters caught in the cogs of bureaucracy, particularly adults who are “successful” but don’t feel like it, who have some agency but are ultimately dependent on social and government institutions.

3d. Communities striving for goals but having difficulty overcoming the frailty of their human actors. Although the communities are quite different in size and aspirations (Miami striving to be a world-class city and Pagford striving to control more of its own destiny), their characters want them to be known and coherent places. They want their neighborhoods as well as their municipalities to be about something. Alas, both places are reliant on social actors that can’t overcome their own anxieties and hang-ups and this limits what the larger whole can become.

In the end, I’m tempted to write these off as the sort of themes one finds all the time in “serious adult literature,” the sort of books that peel back the facade of life and expose people for the vain creatures that they are. These are not uncommon themes in more modern books where there are no real heroes, most characters are just trying to get by, and authors revel in tackling sociological issues. But, I don’t think it is an accident that the two books cover similar ground. Power, sex, alienation, and communities striving for success are known issues in our 21st century world. Compared to movies, books like these offer more space to develop these themes and really expose the depths to which individuals and institutions have fallen. Stories like these can translate sociological themes into a medium that the public understands.

Yet, I can’t help but wish that both books had more redemptive endings. If power, sex, alienation, and community striving do make the world go round, how can this be tackled in a “right” way? Is there anyone or any social institution who can put us on the right path? In ways common to 21st century commentary, both of these books offer a bleak view of social life and not much hope for the future.

The houses of the James Bond actors differ from what the character Bond would own

Posted on by

I argued earlier this week James Bond is an international figure who doesn’t fit the sentimental idea of home. But here is a look at the homes of the actors who have played James Bond – and they seem to be more of the conventional movie star type of home. In other words, big Hollywood mansions. So it appears the actors who play Bond tend to have the kinds of homes that Bond himself would not want to be tied down to as he worked missions around the globe.

Using famous diagrams to explore the changes in urban planning

Posted on by

The San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association has put together a new exhibit that provides an overview of urban planning. See 10 of the diagrams and short descriptions here. Also, here is a quick overview of the exhibit:

The exhibition’s title – Grand Reductions – suggests the simple illustration’s power to encapsulate complex ideas. And for that reason the medium has always been suited to the city, an intricate organism that has been re-imagined (with satellite towns! in rural grids! in megaregions!) by generations of architects, planners and idealists. In the urban context, diagrams can be powerful precisely because they make weighty questions of land use and design digestible in a single sweep of the eye. But as Le Corbusier’s plan illustrates, they can also seductively oversimplify the problems of cities. These 10 diagrams have been tremendously influential – not always for the good.

“The diagram can cut both ways: It can either be a distillation in the best sense of really taking a very complex set of issues and providing us with a very elegant communication of the solution,” Grant says. “Or it can artificially simplify something that actually needs to be complex.”

Over the years, some of these drawings have perhaps been taken too literally, while others likely lie behind some of your favorite spots in your city. “Even if you don’t know the diagram,” Grant says, “you might know the places that the diagram inspired.” SPUR shared these images from the exhibition, which opened this week. If you happen to live in San Francisco, you can also visit the show in person at the SPUR Urban Center Gallery (654 Mission Street) through February (oh, and it’s free!).

Three things strike me when looking at these influential diagrams:

1. On one hand, these diagrams are very similar to maps. On the other hand, they involve a particular vision that can sometimes be hard to achieve with a two dimensional image. These diagrams provide particular perspectives but they go beyond just being maps because the creators (and perhaps some of the viewers) can see a bigger picture.

2. They indicate a more scientific or rational approach to putting together cities. Particularly in the last century, urban planning has become a professional field that involves theories along with specific training and methods. These diagrams involve a lot of straight lines, overhead views, and the idea that the proper placement of buildings, streets, and other features can lead to the right outcomes.

3. These diagrams are quite artistic. Do they qualify as art?

Why the interiors of model homes look better

Posted on by

Here are some tips to help your home look more like a model home:

Professional home stager and model home designer Katie Schafer of Chicago-based Dressed to Sell has a one-word explanation for why many new homes bear little resemblance to picture-perfect models: clutter…

Another common mistake, designers say, is assuming the furniture from your old place will fit effortlessly into your new scheme. Moving is a great time to get rid of pieces you no longer need while identifying new ones to enhance your space, said Mary Cook, president of Chicago-based Mary Cook Associates…

Cook’s upcoming book, “The Art of Space,” scheduled for publication in 2013, elaborates on those seven elements in detail. A biggie, she said, and one that most homeowners tend to overlook, is scale, the size of something, and proportion, its relationship to the things around it. Rooms that are too full — or too empty — just look wrong, she said…

Color is another element that well-decorated models employ wisely. While new homes are often delivered with white walls, a Mary Cook-designed model can have as many as 25 different paint colors. Thoughtful-yet-fearless use of color can add richness that makes a home feel warm and inviting.

In addition to color, model home designers are experts at mixing patterns and texture, said Helen Velas, president of Naperville-based Eleni Interiors. While the average homeowner isn’t likely to be as skilled, home-goods retailers have become good at bundling pieces together to help people get that custom-designed look, she said.

Staging can go a long way to helping make a sale. However, I’ve always been struck by the unreal image model homes present. The lived reality of an average American home includes clutter, probably some non-perfect furniture, and maybe some clashing colors and patterns. It involves residents and family members moving around, appropriating spaces for their own use, and being comfortable. We know this from our experiences so why would we fall for the “staged” home?

I wonder how much of this has to do with presenting an aspirational image. Think of the average cluttered home: how many residents would be willing to show that off to strangers without cleaning up(though after going through a number of for-sale homes a few years ago, there was a higher percentage of people doing this than I would have imagined)? Or think of the common image of a home: in advertisements, new homes, movies, art, magazines, etc., homes look put together. That is what we think it is supposed to look like. I remember reading about a company that had started including people in their staged homes; this added a special touch in helping people imagine themselves in the home. And this all ties into the larger American Dream image of the “perfect home.”

When one suburban mayor gets upset with a neighboring suburban mayor

Posted on by

Interactions between suburbs can get interesting, particularly if a business opens with which two suburbs would like to be associated:

All that having been said, some things still stick in your craw. Some things keep happening again and again, and every single time they make you see red, and the sense of frustration just lingers. I was chatting with David Harding at the rededication of Kiwanis Park by the Warrenville Park District when he mentioned that he got an invitation to the grand opening of a new business on Weaver Parkway in Cantera, and the special guest of honor to cut the ribbon was George Pradel, the Mayor of Naperville. David was annoyed by this, as he knew I would be, and he was kind enough to email to me the information later. Sure enough, the Mayor of Naperville was welcoming a new business to Warrenville and the Mayor of  Warrenville had not even been invited to the event!

As you might imagine, as your Mayor, this kind of stuff really bugs me. It seems to be localized, and principally affects businesses in Cantera on our border with Naperville. Warrenville’s Cantera development is first class, so naturally businesses find it attractive and locate there. But, for marketing purposes, the Naperville name carries more weight, so people do their best to play up the Naperville connection and minimize the Warrenville address. I have seen hotel shuttle busses for Warrenville hotels with “Naperville/Warrenville” featured prominently on their sides. Of course, I think that should be “Warrenville/Naperville”, and it sets me off every time I see one, but I get it.  Business is about positioning for maximum success. You can’t blame a business, especially given current conditions, for trying to leverage, what is to them, every marketing advantage. And, bottom line, what is most important to the community is that our businesses prosper and stay around for a long time. If they find it necessary to fudge things a little to appear to be in what they see as a more lucrative market, I suppose that is a small price to pay.

But this new business still got a letter from me. I can assure you it was a respectful and polite statement that we were disappointed that they apparently didn’t feel it was inappropriate to invite the Mayor of another community to cut their ribbon as they opened their new business here in Warrenville, and a reminder that Warrenville is proud of who we are and we hope they are as happy to be here as we are to have them here. Thankfully, each time I have to write one of these letters, Ana talks me back from the edge, and proves to be a most prudent editor.

I won’t tell you the name of this latest new business. I’m sure they meant no disrespect, and that they are good folks. Also, I don’t think it would be a good idea if a couple hundred angry Warrenville citizens arrived at their front door some evening with blazing torches held high, bearing buckets of hot tar and sacks of feathers, loudly inviting them to relocate to the community that they apparently prefer with an offer of help to do so, although I must confess, this image is appealing. No, Warrenville will take the high road, as we always try to do. That’s who we are. Besides, what goes around comes around. Just the other day, I passed a shuttle belonging to a Naperville hotel that had “Chicago/Naperville” prominently featured on its sides.

I found this amusing. But, there are some deeper issues here:

1. Naperville is the big, successful suburb. Not only does it have lots of people, a vibrant downtown, and good schools,it has done so in large part because of a thriving business community that has provided a lot of good jobs. Warrenville, on the other hand, is a smaller community of over 13,000 people that has less wealth and prestige.

2. Warrenville finally incorporated in the 1960s to be able to control some nearby land and not have it all fall into the hands of Naperville.

3. It does seem a bit odd for the business to invite the mayor of Naperville and not the suburb in which it actually located. If they wanted to be attached to the idea of Naperville, why not actually locate in Naperville? There has to be a good reason they located in Warrenville.

4. I’m not sure what the mayor of Warrenville achieved in this statement to the public. That he is willing to stick up for Warrenville? That Warrenville deserves some attention as well? Warrenville is not going to become Naperville and would probably say it doesn’t want to…so what purpose does this serve?