I know, I know, I haven’t written.
Today I listened to Fred Kent on CBC radio (welcome back CBC, we missed you). He is a member of the Project for Public Spaces, a group into urban revitalization and the building of communities. I encourage everyone to look at their website, which is very interesting as well as informative, and not dry at all: it is filled with lists of great and horrible spaces, as well as pictures of cities and their wonderful city life not only here in North America, but world wide.
Their idea is that cities, specially car-driven North American ones, should return to this livable and public life of town squares, markets and urban diversity (as exemplified by Kensington Market:
The areaÕs mixed uses have the streets occupied at all times of the day. Murals on shops and local stores, layers of posters, low-rise buildings and a central park space create an oasis within the city.
The mixed diversity of living spaces, independent restaurants, bars, clubs, grocery shops, coffee shops give the place a real local feel. There is a high level of neighbourhood involvement in issues surrounding Kensington market and have worked to maintain the local identity of the neighbourhood.
However, what if this applies not only to our physical space, but our mental or media based space as well. This struck me because I realized that I was listening to the radio, a medium which is slowly being eradicated (like market places or local shops): wiped out all together, or replaced with large, corporate, bland replacements of top-40 hits and sports stations (think the local mall).
I hate the term “Virtual Reality”–it reminds me of too many bad mid-90′s movies. However, our life in the media is somewhat of a “virtual space”. Small, independent booksellers are like little markets or stores, fighting against the large corporations for survival, and they give you some thing extra in that fight: a different perspective, where you can get thing you can’t get in the mainstream places. The web, originally a dynamic and bustling place, like a market place, which the PPS calls “the original meeting place”, is being dominated by government and corporate control, which is as we speak turning the web into a mall.
However, I think that the web will fare much better than the destruction of urban centres, or even of more traditional media like the radio. That is it costs nothing, or next to nothing, to start a website. And now, with the prices of hardware coming down, it costs nothing to start a web radio show–a podcast–and get it out to your listeners. Right now, it is just becoming cheap enough to produce video content, although I don’t think that video content is completely compatible with the way we interact with the internet, which is a whole other topic.
We can have this lively debate between healthy and organic spaces of information very easily: how much easier is it to make an socialist and anarchist website, then go through the rigour to make a physical anarchist bookstore, especially when it is the bank granting you a loan, the same bank you are looking to do away with.