Urbanism + Typography: The Fun Side of City Branding

I'm a tad besotted with the CitID project, which has received some recent coverage via the New Yorker and Fast Company, among other sites. An initiative of design firm Norwegian Ink, CitID invites designers to create logos for their cities that are superior to your run-of-the-mill, dry, tidy and often completely uninventive tourism efforts. (Torontonians may recall the hub-bub around the uncanny similarities between the Toronto Unlimited campaign and the Bahamas tourism design.)

Not everything submitted to the site will make your socks go up and down, but when designers get it right, the results are lovely. On the one hand, CitID represents a sound argument for more user-generated logo creation, an opportunity that too many organizations and companies deny themselves. On the other, it offers a breath of fresh air to those of us who spend too much time amid theory about how corporate branding is turning our urban surrounds into soulless, interchangeable yawnscapes. Maybe we only need to look out the window to learn that, actually.

In any event, as of today, there is still ZERO representation of any Canadian cities, so Canuck graphic designers, you know what you have to do. Toronto, Montreal, Sudbury, Halifax, Vancouver, Regina... none of these places is going to logo-ize themselves... at least not well.

(Both images courtesy of CitID.)

And Another Overdue Mention...

Last spring, I co-edited an anthology on the cinematic representation of my hometown (and current home) with the inimitable Steve Gravestock, TIFF's Associate Director of Canadian Programming.

Toronto on Film was published by TIFF and distributed by Wilfrid Laurier University Press (by Indiana University Press outside of Canada). Click here for a link to the WLUP site.

You can read a review of the anthology in the Spring 2010 volume of Cineaste.

It was my first scholarly editing stab, both trial by fire and incredibly rewarding. The collection features essays by critic Geoff Pevere and scholars including Brenda Longfellow, Wyndham Wise and Justin D. Edwards, as well as contributions by TIFF's in-house experts Steve Gravestock, Piers Handling and Matthew Hays, tracing the evolution of the industry here, the eventual obsession with/necessity for role-playing as other cities (license-plating, as Geoffrey Nowell-Smith once referred to it) and, as of late, it's return to some semblance of... itself.

Overdue Mention...

Back in the summer, a chapter of mine - first ever to be published - finally saw the light of day after a many-year wait and valiant efforts by the editors to see the project to completion. The anthology is called Moving Pictures/Stopping Places: Hotels and Motels on Film, and was published in July of last year by Lexington Books.


My chapter, written concurrently with the formative stages of my dissertation work, is ponderously titled "Just an Anonymous Room: Cinematic Hotels and Motels as Mnemonic Purgatories." (Honestly... what was I thinking?) The approach is reflective of my (then less-developed) fascination with the intersection of space/spatialization and narrative in filmmaking, analyzing such spaces as "paradigmatic zones of transit and homelessness." I look at Leaving Las Vegas, Memento, The Business of Strangers, Tape, Century Hotel, Chelsea Walls, The Tesseract, Dirty Pretty Things and 2046 and deconstruct the functions of the hotel/motel space in support of the narratives' creation of purgatorial spaces.

Mercifully, I think the chapter held up over the years and the anthology overall contains some great, vigorous analytical writing.

The book is available on Amazon and other online sellers, and hopefully at many local and campus libraries.

Forget Urbanism....

... I want to run away and live here... a planned "luxury house" in Kokopo, Papua New Ginea. Wow.
(Be sure to click through all the images.)

Photo via World Architecture News.

Bikeopolis: Eat more cake, ride more bike.

It's Bike Month in Toronto. First, here's a quick link to an article on Torontoist about the city's first-ever bicycle parking station, which opens today. Considered in relation to yesterday's heated council debates over more Toronto bike lanes (or, as the plan's gas-loving detractors put it, the city's "war on cars"), we find citizens of TO to be pretty preoccupied with bicyc-ular issues this week. And that is certainly a good thing!

And speaking of bicycles and good things, today is the start of the 2009 Tour de Dufflet.... Pastry-loving pedal-pushers can cycle to any of the three Dufflet pastry locations (787 Queen St. W., 2638 Yonge St., or 1917 Queen. St. E.) to register for the "Tour." They then then must hit the other two Dufflet locations to have their passport stamped, all on the same day. They will be rewarded with treats at every location, and be entered in a grand prize draw. (Admittedly, I'm not sure what the grand prize is, but even if it's a Dufflet cupcake, it'd be good to win.) The tour goes until June 25.

Lastly, if this post inspires anyone to cycle it up in TO, here is a link to the city's various maps showing trails, bike lanes, etc.

Stop, Collaborate and Blossom?

Just a quick peek at some street-art interventions by American artist Mark Jenkins: plain ol' urban street signs turned into flowers. Yes, sometimes it's just that simple.

On the more conceptual side, Jenkins was also responsible for "The Last Graffiti Artist" which builds a little murder mystery into the the act of painting a gorgeous street mural.

Excision - The Anti-Photographic Art of Richard Galpin

Just made an amazing find via Life Without Buildings: artist Richard Galpin destroys photographs in a way that is not only beautiful, but also shockingly revealing about both the geometric chaos of the urban scene and the inextricable two-dimensionality of the photographic medium.


Galpin takes a scalpel to a large-scale photograph of a (typically) urban scene, excising clutter and exposing the fundamental geometric configurations that lie in the abstracted plane. In essence, he takes a two-dimensional representation of an urban space and somehow makes it even more two-dimensional, reducing it to an assemblage of shapes without even the impression of dimension, other than that which is to be suggested by the angular configurations that function in the same spatial/representational manner as an M.C. Escher rendering.

Click here for a time-lapse video (no sound, BYOSoundtrack) of his painstaking working method.

So, a question: in "tidying up" the landscapes in this manner, or distilling them down to component patterns, Galpin simultaneously makes them more orderly but also more disorienting. What might that suggest for our relationship to order, or simplicity, versus depth and detail when it comes to the urban landscape?

(Image: "Cluster XXX Angelosopolis" via http://www.richardgalpin.co.uk/)