9/24- 10/1 2014 Weekly Arts and Urbanism Roundup

Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh hires a bicycle director with a wealth of metro experience (Bike Pittsburgh)

Watch: A Wilkinsburg artist makes prints the old fashioned way (WESA Pittsburgh)

Google's presence in Pittsburgh and it's impact on local startups (Essential Pittsburgh)

Pittsburgh's lost steamboat exhibit @ The Heinz History Center (Pittsburgh City Paper)

Sharon, Pennsylvania

Sharon's third and final Waterfire festival this year draws thousands (The Sharon Herald)


Cleveland 

Is Northeast Ohio hurt by too much parking (and what can it do about it)? (Green City, Blue Lake)

Colorblind and rising. What's behind the success of Cleveland's Villa Angela-St. Joseph High School?  (Belt Magazine)

Debut NEOcycle Festival to bring cycling, fee concerts and lifestyle hub to Cleveland's Edgewater Park.

Akron

Rubber City Invasion| Huffington Post asks: Is Akron the Liverpool of the Midwest?  (ABC 5 TV)

Youngstown 

The Butler brings art to fill void in school (Vindy.com )

Legendary/ notorious former congressman, Jim Traficant, Jr. dies (Vindy.com)

Columbus

The Wexner shows masterpieces from the Leslie Wexner Collection including works by Picasso, Degas, Dubuffet , Giacometti, de Kooning and others

Cincinnati 

The 13th Mid-Point Music Festival in Cincinnati's Over The Rhine

Explore the Midpoint Music Festival

Detroit 

Dlectricity Nightime Festival of Art and Light comes back to Midtown.

Pennsylvania 

PA senate approves medical marijuana; future in the house uncertain (Pennsylvania Independent)

West Virginia and Appalachia 

General Braddock's road through the wilderness (Appalachian History)

Bon Appetit Appalachia gastro tourism site launches, highlighting local food festivals, restaurants, breweries and farms

Welcome to Appalachia- home of the original locavores (Takepart,com)

Could Appalachia become as famous for food as Tuscany or Provence? (Burg Entertainment Guide)

Other Urbanism News

Student attendance at college sports events drops dramatically

Thoughts on my neighborhood, post Ferguson (Urbanophile)

Building connectivity in suburbia  (Smart Growth for Conservatives)

Placemakers want to make sure they're heard at Habitat III conference (Next City)

Maryland suburbs embrace a new urbanism (Sacramento Bee)

Students paying extra for business skills they say they haven't learned on campus (The Hechinger Report)

Florida tries bike lanes on highway bridges (Streetsblog)

German court lifts ban on Uber ride service. (The New York Times)

What a park's design does to your brain (Next City)

Seattle to start fining people for wasting food  (Triple Pundit)

Italy to calculate cocaine sales as part of GDP

Restaurants offering incentives to diners who turn off electronic devices. (CBS New York)

Google and Microsoft are putting Rio's favelas on the map (The Atlantic/ Citylab)

For bee-friendly parks, head for the great unmown  (The Atlantic/ Citylab)

Bruges will cut traffic with an underground beer pipeline (Wired)

New law handcuffs restaurants in France (Reason)

NYPD captain and lieutenant arrested for drunk driving two hours apart (NY Post)

Art News

The International Center of Photography plans to leave Midtown Manhattan for The Bowery (The New York Times)

Satellite imagery shows extensive damage to Syria's world heritage sites. (Archaeology Magazine)

Emperor Augustus frescoes restored in Rome (Archaeology Magazine)

Pennsylvania's Longwood Gardens spending $90 million to update fountains. (The Art Newspaper)

Turner Prize show dominated by film and video art (BBC News)

EU mulls cadmium pigment ban.  (Hyperallergic)

Everyone love illustration art, but where does one see it?  (Huffington Post)

"Free art Fridays", a treasure hunt powered by instagram takes off in NYC (Artnet)

Is Norway an artist book paradise? (Hyperallergic)

A new documentary for forger who infiltrated America's art museums. (Hyperallergic)

Christies adds another 2% commission to sales that go over high sales estimate. (The Art Newspaper)

Massive Roman coin hoard unearthed in England (Archaeology Magazine)

The HillVille Looks At A Big Placemaking Trend: Downtown Skating Rinks

The HillVille, is a new project aimed at creating dialog among Appalachian cities. I'm really digging it's positive vibes.

Cities On the Rink: Ice Skating Designed for Downtown.

"Greenville, S.C. and Lexington, Ky., opened rinks this November for the first time. Knoxville’s Holidays on Ice has been in Market Square since the mid-2000s, and a rink opened in Pittsburgh’s PPG Place in 2001.

While ice-skating is quintessential wintery fun, it also represents a movement by city leaders toward creating public spaces that are active, engaging destinations even in the coldest months.

Dana Souza, parks and recreation director for the city of Greenville, said Ice on Main, a 3,200 square foot rink surrounded by a hotel, city hall, offices and restaurants, is indicative of the city’s values."

ArtPrize Boosts It's Juried Prize: Is That a Good Thing?

Michigan's ArtPrize is an event that right off the bat combined creative placemaking, art, economic development and public interaction in ways that excited me.

Likewise, in spite of it's success,(and the fact it's not in NY or LA) the art establishment has mostly ignored or tried to look down on it. "Oh My God, they really voted a non ironic religious piece the top award!"

For better or worse, Artprize is tipping the scale away from public voting and more towards "expert jurors".

From Hyperallergic

The top public vote award will be a little smaller next year, $200,000 instead of the $250,000 offered this year, but the organization is adding a brand new juried award of $100,000, which puts it in the same monetary league at the Hugo Boss Prize (also $100,000) and considerably more than the Turner Prize with its £25,000 award (roughly $39,000).

Some facts about ArtPrize 2011:

-1,582 artists from 39 countries and 43 US states took part

-The participating artists installed their work at 164 venues in a three-square-mile district in Grand Rapids

-38,000 registered voters submitted 383,000 total votes for the public prize

-Smartphones increased voting 62%

Artprize 2011 Timelapse from Michael Cook on Vimeo.

Michigan Focuses Economic Policy Around "Placemaking"

Rust Wire writes about the new broad consensus, developing in Michigan towards what urban planners now call, placemaking.

After reading a number of stories and blog posts about this, it's still not exactly certain what the term means-beyond respect for place and quality of life. Looking at Michigan's previous policies makes the change clear.

The earlier attitude, could be summed up as, anything for jobs. In 1981, The city of Detroit, evicted thousands of residents, destroyed the bulk of a neighborhood and handed the land over to GM for construction of a new car plant.

"At first glance the project seemed brilliant. In 1979, the old Dodge Main plant in Hamtramck had closed and that city lost $1.7 million in tax revenue. Hamtramck was happy to join in the deal. But there were obstacles in Detroit -- 1,300 homes, 140 businesses, six churches and one hospital lay in the path of the proposed plant.

The neighborhood adjacent to Hamtramck's southern border was, like Hamtramck, home to Poles as well as Albanians, Yugoslavs, Blacks, Yemenis and Filipinos. But some families had been there for generations, since the influx of Polish workers to the auto plants in the 1920s and '30s, and even before. Some of the first Polish settlements in the city in the 1870s had been in this area. It was the home of the original St. Mary's College and Polish Seminary at the corner of St. Aubin and Forest. It was the original location for the International Institute. St John the Evangelist Catholic Parish had been founded there in the 1890s, Immaculate Conception Parish in 1918."

The same attitude went for highway construction, where few power players cried when eggs needed to be cracked in the name of progress. People moving and endless new construction always was sold as growth, even though the state's population was in a long steady decline. The people who found where they lived, unpleasant would stay cause they had jobs-and the fancy pants, over educated, complainers could just leave.

The huge car companies these policies were built around proved less stable than expected and the new dynamic firms needed the over educated, creative types who found Michigan so gross. A depleted tax base, also meant that growth at any cost was no longer a financial option.

From Model D

The state of Michigan, for example, is focusing on placemaking initiatives as part of its economic development strategy. "Economic development and community development are two sides of the same coin," said Gov. Rick Snyder in a special message to the Michigan Legislature last winter. "A community without place amenities will have a difficult time attracting and retaining talented workers and entrepreneurs, or being attractive to business."

Kent’s son, PPS Vice President Ethan Kent, said placemaking is striking a chord in the current economy because it’s resourceful and builds on a city’s existing assets. And the placemaking philosophy requires extensive public buy-in upfront, so officials can stand on safer ground politically. "Building convention centers and using tax incentives to attract big corporations or new business isn’t working," Ethan said.

Instead, placemaking emphasizes smaller, inexpensive improvements: Adirondack chairs to watch the sunset on the Buffalo waterfront, or temporary incubator retailers with lower overhead costs. At Gabriel’s Wharf in London, for example, a set design company created colorful facades on concrete garages, and then worked with artists to convert them into studios where they could sell their work. The fast-working set designers finished the job in three months. Rather than developers spending money on a costly master design, the tenants themselves provided the vibrancy to make the area compelling for visitors. The scheme was designed to pay for itself in four years.

Strangely, the new embrace of the small, incremental improvements and livable, walkable neighborhoods has attracted strong support from across the political spectrum, columnists, The Department of Transportation, Michigan State University and Michigan's Governor.

This widespread attitude is new, and pretty rare across the country. It will be interesting to see if it lasts and how things start to play out.

Article on The Project For Public Spaces Website