On Saturday, Dr. Pop was one of the lucky many, many thousands who attended Comic Con in San Diego, the mothers of all comic book conventions, now celebrated and berated for going all Hollywood.

I hadn’t had the honor since the 80s, when Gary and I were probably dating, he was maybe the only black guy there and one of the few who wasn’t sporting pointy ears. (No offense! Vulcans are cool.)

So if I sound like any kind of former hater, please accept my apology and evangelism. Comic Con ROCKS! Thanks for the pass, comrade husband and friendly comic company!

Getting there was half the fun….

I had a grand time, which started with the train ride from L.A. to San Diego, packed mostly with Comic-Con-ians. Lots of pleasant energy.

I rode down with a nice guy from an advertising firm and his charming-beyond-her-years 13 year old daughter. When I happened to mention that I was working on a board game, a gamer-type sitting across the aisle, offered, “The Battle for North Africa. No one has ever finished it.”  As I was taking that info in, he referred me to the guy sitting in back of me, and said to him,”Tom Baker, you’re Tom Baker, right?”  I had to look it up later to find out that Tom Baker was one of the various actors who played Dr. Who, and apparently this guy was doing a good job at the costume, colorful scarf and all.  (I’m soooo glad, I didn’t call the man Tom.)

Anyway, ersatz Tom Baker, in a very friendly and helpful way, explained Titan to me, a role-playing fantasy game, that apparently takes days, no, weeks to finish.  His companion interjected to make that precise point, “So a joke is, ‘How about a quick game of Titan’… get it? No such thing.” He elaborated so I could understand, that when two of the opposing forces in the game, lets say elves and dragons, have a battle, the other players have to go off and play something somewhere else, while elves and dragons take the time they need to settle whatever score elves and dragons tend to have.

I had briefly entered nerd heaven.  I’m so not worthy.  Yet.

Once or twice an Amish family of 5 or so walked up or down the aisle to everyone’s confusion.  Did they have the world’s most authentic costumes and demeanor? Or were they, like….Amish?

It was a fun trip down.

Feast for the eyes

From the train to a short trolley ride to the convention center, was handed the Comic Con special edition of the Onion — “How can you camp on that?” I asked, truly curious.  “Yeah, really.” was the response.

Once I hit the convention center I was greeted with some full-on pageantry of fellow attendees in fantastic costumes and supergraphics that I actually enjoyed looking at.  Here are some photos. (Now that I look at the photos again, I’m pretty sure those were real Amish folk on the train…)

most colorful superheros. and cutest.

Tom Strong. Science hero. Love the grey temples (like mine). Only he's over 100 years old...

Princess Leah street violinist. Her sign says "Save me from the Death Star"

Zombie dollar, tagline: "Hard Come. Easy Go." The man next to me remarked, "Isn't everything better with zombies?"

EVERYONE wanted their photo taken with She-Hulk

Pirates singing in the street. Chorus: "rape! kill! slaughter!" and something else vile. I forget.

Bellydancer and Manga Girl getting some java.

Next: Three Really Different Comic Con Panels

When I mention that I’m working on a game about urban planning, the first reaction I get is often “oh, you mean like SimCity?”

Not exactly. SimCity is the most well-known city planning game/toy of all time. It teaches a particular brand of city-planning knowledge. You, as the planner, allocate resources across a grid in a technocratic (possibly totalitarian) exercise. Evaluating SimCity as rhetoric, it is probably one of the more persuasive pieces of media on urban planning ever designed (how many people have learned biases about siting toxic facilities by playing this game?).

But what exactly is learned by playing Sim City?

Succeeding at Sim City (just like any other game) involves learning and mastering the rules of a system.

The rules in this case, happen to be models of how a real city might work. SimCity insofar as it is a winnable “game” is a series of interrelated hidden assumptions for the player to discover through trial and error. Does building more police precincts reduce crime and civil unrest? Yes, according to SimCity. Is a low-tax base critical to popular support, also yes!

Paul Starr has a great article about the Congressional Budget Office and the Simcitification of actual government here.

One amusing demonstration of SimCity’s assumptions taken to their logical extremes Magnasanti, the project of architecture student Vincent Ocasla.

Ocasla spent four years(!) working out the logic of SimCity3000 and “beat” the game by maxing out the population. My favorite quote from Ocasia:

“Technically, no one is leaving or coming into the city. Population growth is stagnant. Sims don’t need to travel long distances, because their workplace is just within walking distance. In fact they do not even need to leave their own block. Wherever they go it’s like going to the same place.”

Some Magnasanti facts:

-Magnasanti has zero abandoned buildings.
-100% of all zoned structures are historical
-Zero water pollution
-Zero congestion
-No crime
-Utilities all done through neighbor deals
-Game completion date: 05/05/50,000
-Total population: 6,005,407

But I digress.

The fact that SimCity has an embedded logic that players must master in order to acheive their simulation goals isn’t surprising. In fact, this is in my mind, one of the main ways that games create learning environments.

In a game, you get to experience someone else’s assumptions as a complete system. The “learning” then comes from thinking about what those assumptions are and comparing them to your perception of reality and how you think that system *should* work. Game critic and designer Ian Bogost talks about this aspect of games using the visual metaphor of anamorphosis.

The difference between the image you expect to see and the one you do see, helps you to think about your own act of perception and creates the teachable moment.

I wouldn’t hope that playing a game would be a complete educational experience. Rather, playing a game provides the basis for a discussion about the outcomes of the game, and the game dynamics themselves. In what ways does this game approximate real-life? in what ways does it differ? What are the assumptions of the game, do they seem true or false? SimCity creates lots of these moments but doesn’t do much to build in spaces for reflection and critical thinking.

One of the assumptions inherent in a SimCity game is that cities are about balancing metrics and that if these metrics are balanced correctly, your city will grow (an interesting assumption). Players explore assumptions about how municipal budgeting works, what makes a city desirable, and how the parts of a city relate to one another (how does pollution relate to land value? how does land value relate to use? will people avoid living in an area with too many power lines?) but playing the game, if anything, naturalizes these assumptions as inherent city dynamics, and not as the product of human values.

To be fair, later versions of SimCity introduced petitioning residents who periodically ask for certain kinds of services or protest your actions, but these uppity city-dwellers are a kind of obstacle course – appeasing them helps you to remain popular enough to win re-election.

Gilda and I have set out to make a game about city planning that assumes that the act of planning is inherently political, involves stakeholders and competing values. It moves the desires of particular residents to center stage. Our game will still involve assumptions (lots of them!) about how a city works, but we hope to build these into a central, transparent part of the gameplay, affording the players opportunities to think about what “success” in something like a rezoning might mean to different parties. Instead of trying to build the perfect city, zoning is experienced as a negotiation between different interests (with some competing and some complementary goals).

Finally, here’s a link Vincent Ocasla’s YouTube Channel . His original video about Mangnasanti was removed from youtube, and that drama is referenced in comments on the site where you can see another video about building fictitious cyber mega-cities.

Up Next: Actually making a game.

Dr. Pop’s first event! In Chicago, a truly great city.

About 75 really diverse (and smart) people showed up at Decima Musa (a great old-school place in Pilsen) to see the inspiring documentary Bogotá Change and talk about the “fun theory” that:

1. takes a real thorny problem

2. applies collective creativity

3. makes problem-solving fun

Bogotá Change is about how two very different progressive mayors, Antanas Mockus, who recently pushed the presidential election into a run-off, and Enrique Peñalosa, who has become an international planners’ planner; and how they changed the social and physical dynamics of a city that, as a result of their intense commitment and effort, evolved from one of the more violent and dysfunctional places on the planet, to one that is held up as a model by urban planners around the world.

All in about a decade. A very short time in the metrics of change.

With respect to the anything-that-can-go-wrong-will-go-wrong rule of first events — the subtitles didn’t work! Tested and retested, but when it was showtime — no subtitles.

But our audience hung in there and were rewarded with a Q & A session with our favorite Colombian planners, Catalina Ortiz and Diego Silva (check out the Mathematician Mayors interview that Ryan did with those two before the film was released) and a great discussion with each other.

Speaking of Ryan….Ryan MC’d and co-hosted the event with the thoughtful crew from The Public Square, a community forum program of the Illinois Humanities Council.

We ended with the hilarious music video from Iceland’s BEST party (which recently won 6 seats on the Reykjavik City Council).

Planning a similar event (with functioning subtitles) for L.A. soon.

This week I read in the paper that the Los Angeles City Council was awarding $18 million to finish a project that has been a redevelopment site in my neighborhood for years. The goal? To build a Costco. Then to build a Costco with a Home Depot on top. Then when both of those pulled out, to build a Lowe’s home improvement store, which is a lot like a Home Depot.

And that same week I received an email from the Los Angeles Public Library (News You Can Use) with their new schedule consisting of shorter hours and no longer being open on Sundays and Mondays.

Libraries in my mind, are the last of the great public sector products. They are safe spaces for children, for homeless, for women, for families, and for the curious of all stripes — not to mention they are full of books. And they are free. You can stay there as long as you like. All day if you want. They are peaceful.

And as the public sector has crumbled around them, many libraries have stepped up to fill the gap. Last year I read a headline that was something like “Head Librarian Bans Shushing,” for an article about Chicago, I believe, where the head librarian acknowledged their last-public-sector-standing-role and explained “We are the last community centers. People need to talk. We can’t tell them to be quiet any more.”

Although I don’t generally follow architecture awards, which tend to favor the male divas of that profession, I am excited to see that this year’s European Prize for Urban Public Space, is shared, with one of the two winners being the inventive Open Air Library in Magdeburg, Germany that was created by the residents themselves, built out of the debris of a demolished building, and is open 24/7 for people to enjoy the space and borrow books.

The partner winner is an Opera/Ballet house in Oslo, Norway that includes a ramp up to the roof which serves as a public plaza.

It is still not too late.  Maybe our neighborhood Lowe’s can support a public plaza on its roof (instead of parking) or a public library at its base.  Or something else that engages the idea of a public in exchange for our hard-pressed public investment.  Something of value besides shopping.

Community space!

As I stumbled back home late one Friday night after many hours of travel to get from a tiny town in Southern France to London’s own Tower Hamlets, people busy painting a line along the pavement and doing various other things made it hard to get my roller bag past them. I was not pleased, but I woke up to this:

The London Festival of Architecture brought the University of Innsbruck’s Walk the Line project, and the weekend was full of activities, games, food (I suppose it was too much to hope for it as a Johnny Cash reference). The statue of Gladstone in front of the old church looked happier with his blue scarf.

None of that was for me sadly, I was exhausted and had one hell of a deadline coming up. But the idea was interesting, changing how people use public spaces and form community with the simple use of some paint and some props.

I think, however, that the aftermath was even more interesting, because for a few days the props were left, the hosts were absent, and my neighbors were left to do with the space and the props as they would. Of course, I was still on deadline, so I just saw it as I walked to and fro work and school. But this was after all just a student project, a taste of what this space could be with just a tiny bit of investment.

They took everything away, and my own pictures came just a few days late to capture the small magic – so I have borrowed some photos from Loopzilla, who has made them available for just this purpose.  And you can read a short story about the effort on Diamond Geezer.

But let’s take the Seating Furniture for example:

They had made innovative little tables out of plywood with holes in the middle to fit down over the bollards, and painted tree stumps blue for people to use as seats.  And all kinds of different people used them, from big burly guys to the guys who worked in the little shops to families to teenagers. The same way they used the “dinner at eight” station with a more traditional table and chairs. It made me happy to see a whole family sitting down there on a warm summer evening eating a meal.

Now I have no idea what this was supposed to be exactly, it’s the wrong shape and size for hopscotch…

And I don’t think anyone is much celebrating the olympics around here, but kids seem to like to play on it. They play in the “official” games area as well, with balls and stones where the tic-tac-toe board was painted (noughts and crosses anyone?) that once had x’s and o’s. And loads of different people used the “theatre” (just another bunch of blue tree stumps) as another place to sit and chat in the shade. These things very visually created more opportunity for my neighbors to come together in ways they wouldn’t usually do, and spend time in an otherwise rather unwelcoming space that most just travel through, apart from the hordes of teenage boys in the afternoons and evenings, and the chatty crowd in front of the bookies.

So now that it’s gone, what are the lessons learned?

• You can do an immense amount of good with very little money. Stroudley Walk could clearly become a vibrant enjoyable place, and I applaud the student’s imagination and effort. You’d think planners would have figured this out by now.

• DO set up seating areas. Do NOT set up seating areas without providing bins. Or trash cans. Depending which continent you’re in. Or people will no longer like the seating areas.

• It’s always good know a bit more about the community when planning. If they’d spent much time here they surely would have thought of painting a football (soccer) pitch where the boys are always playing. And maybe had some better games? Like chess boards? A giant backgammon board? How cool would that have been? Maybe added some Bangladeshi artwork and made people’s smiles even bigger?

• It’s a bit crap to come into a community and do a project like this, and then take most of it away though I’m sure the Council didn’t want to have to deal with it. But the next bright-eyed students with an idea will wonder why the residents are a bit jaded and blame them for not being open and participatory. These projects should always be connected to the actual and real, as there are currently what seem to be rather terribly generic plans to redevelop the walk. This would have been an amazing way to test out things before they became permanent, and I could not think of a better way to start people thinking creatively about what they want from their neighborhood plaza and how they could actually use it. If the Council cared to ask them in a way that actually invited creativity and enjoyable participation.

Everyone agrees that Chicago Public Schools have to change. Yet there are fierce disagreements over what kinds of changes must be made, who should lead that change, and how it should be administered. At the helm of the warring parties are Karen Lewis, the new president of the Chicago Teacher’s Union, and Ron Huberman, the CEO of CPS installed by Chicago’s Mayor Daley.

These two opposing leaders are fighting a serious battle, one that will determine the extent to which public schools remain publicly owned and operated. It is a fight with tremendous implications, ranging from the future of charter schools in the City of Chicago, to how success is defined and evaluated.

In the backdrop of this battle, there is another struggle going on in Chicago Public Schools. This is the fight to protect the life of Chicago Public School students. As a recent New York Times article identified, 218 CPS students were shot in the last school year, and 258 the year before. The article, provocatively titled “Graduation Is the Goal, Staying Alive Is the Prize,” highlights efforts to improve the safety of simply attending public school. They focus on an unfolding intervention strategy which targets the most “at-risk” students and connects them with adult mentors and support services. Created by CEO Huberman, a former police officer, this $60 million intervention is also geared to strengthening communications between the police and school administrators. While this intervention brings in deeply needed resources, the police dimension of the program strengthens a disciplinary approach that relies heavily on law enforcement to run daily operations at schools.

The school-police partnership has gotten more intense in recent years, so much so that several high schools now have their own police station outlets established within their walls. Many grassroots leaders and youth are critical of the over-reliance on police to change school culture. They assert that bringing police into public schools feeds the school-to-prison pipeline, and that it distracts from what the real goal should be – training students, parents, and teachers to be a part of the solution. Many officers within the Chicago Police Department also see working in schools as a distraction from other priorities, and believe that schools should maintain responsibility for the safety of their students.

As an alternative to bringing more cops into schools, organizations like Blocks Together and the Community Justice for Youth Institute are busy building new approaches to shaping school culture. Through their persistent organizing efforts and creative visioning, the youth council at Blocks Together recently got the head of Safety and Security at CPS to pilot a new program for security guards, one that would train them in the methods and values of restorative justice. Blocks Together organizer Ana Mercado says the program will train security guards “to approach situations as problem-solvers and mentors instead of mini-cops. The Restorative Justice philosophy, which is already being used in peer jury and peace circle programs all over CPS, can help them go through that transformation.”

At Fenger High School, on Chicago’s far Southeast Side, an innovative program involving the Community Justice for Youth Institute integrates peace circles, public art, and personal genealogy. This program has helped to catalyze a school culture rooted in knowledge of self and right relationships with others. The school that survived the lethal beating of its former student Derrion Albert last year, Fenger has been moving from tragedy to transformation. With the support of the principal, youth and community leaders have been trained in non-violent approaches to conflict resolution, have looked into their family histories, and have represented their stories through a vast mural project. When things get tense among the students today, students have been known to stop by the principal’s office asking for a circle, and there is serious talk of creating a “peace room” in the school.

Initiatives like the campaign led by Blocks Together and the training support by the Community Justice for Youth Institute are helping to plant the seeds for more system-wide changes. They help to show how a greater number of stakeholders can get involved in peacemaking efforts, and how school police stations can be replaced with peace rooms. Yet efforts like these are only as stable as the schools where they take root. While CPS leadership determines which schools stay open and how they are evaluated, students will continue to balance the quest for survival with the quest for academic excellence. As powerful teachers, politicians, and business leaders fight over the schools system’s future, they must do so in a way that honors the real potential for peaceful schools, and the overwhelming need to involve students and parents in the shaping of their own destinies.

No doubt I’m the last cat who should be writing about public space.  I mean here at home in Los Angeles I rarely think about public space and congregating in same.  That is, I do congregate occasionally, I just don’t go out of my way to do it.  Because mostly I’m in my car going to and fro – and when I get to my destination, it’s rarely to a park.  I have nothing against open spaces, I like open spaces and certainly L.A., particularly our urban areas of the city, that are green poor – though this is not the only way in which gathering spaces are manifested in this city.

Lord knows people have meetings, write screenplays or work on the Great American Novel on their laptops (or playing World of Warcraft with who knows who all else online) at many a Starbuck’s or Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in this considerable town.  Maybe somebody has tracked this, but I’ve yet to see or hear about a sinewy barrista kicking somebody out for staying too long in their coffee shop.  But then, it seems these folks now and then buy a coffee, frappachino and/or bottle of water to keep the static down.

My gym, which the lovely and talented Dr. Pop pays for – as one has to have perks in this line of work – is an L.A. Fitness housed in a former Montgomery Ward department store in a mall on La Cienega near the 10 Freeway.  Okay, so already it’s not a public space, but bear with me a moment.  Given this is ethnically rich L.A. and the geography of where the gym is (located in between several distinct neighborhoods), this facility gets a cross section of its inhabitants from young sleek-muscled tatted ballers wearing just the right shoes for their hops to, what I presume to be, orthodox Jewish woman in sweat gear that includes long stretch skirts, sweat pants under that and coverings for their head.  Admittedly, you don’t generally find representatives of these two groups awaiting their respective turns at the preacher curl machine, gabbing about the latest episode of Rookie Blue.

But there are people I’ve met at the gym who I wouldn’t have encountered elsewhere. We do converse, albeit briefly, as we stop and chat with each other during our workouts.  One guy, Paul, I used to run into at the local Von’s, and another dude, a gym rat named Mike who works to daily, befriended me on Facebook.  On the gym’s enclosed basketball court, various sorts of dudes have met up in pick-up games, and there is conversing in the locker room afterward on matters more than blocked shots.  You know, guy bonding.

The L.A. Parks and Recreation Department oversees the Muscle Beach “pit” in Venice and access to the weights is free.  Though this is primarily a self-selecting crowd of body builders, could be there’s some lessons the groups (who are examples, the Neighborhood Land Trust?) putting together public and private monies to create mini Green Acres could learn from the gym model.

It’s not too hard to imagine proscribed areas designed to foster community engagement where you could have anchored benches and seats, small built-in block tables for chess or domino games, a book booth like what’s been done in Huntington Park where books can be left and obtained for free, and a donated weight machine or two. To let people know this is a gathering space for all, there could be scheduled times when writers and poets would be around to do a reading from their work to help generate interest.

Now I’d show up for something like that.

More than any other city I’ve been to, Berlin is the closest thing in my mind to what a city “built for the people” looks like.

East Berlin, that is. The ex-West Berlin is completely different, more typical of big western capitals with imposing, super-symmetrical, grey buildings standing starkly next to hyper-modern architecture, big monuments and chain stores strewn about large avenues that take hours to traverse – with many cars on the road and few people on the streets. The whole thing feels a bit cold and impersonal and during working hours, a bit like a giant German ghost town.

The East on the other hand is living. Its chaotic.  There is graffiti absolutely everywhere, everywhere everywhere. Paint chips off of buildings, plants grow off ledges of buildings, people whiz by on bikes and smoke in cafes, a constant stream of people occupy the streets:  talking, lounging, cooking food, playing football.

The wall might as well still be there – many, in fact would like it to be.

It’s always animated and with no mandatory closing hours for bars and clubs and a subway that never stops, the night literally goes on forever. Days in Berlin flow into one giant never-ending exploration of  the city, of conversations with strangers and meetings with friends. My kind of city.

I was recently in Berlin at the same time as the world-cup quarter final qualifying games between Germany and England, a big deal for the country I was visiting, and of course, for my desperate, cringing “Come on mates!” new country of residence.

I started out watching the game in one part of the East and left at half time to meet friends in another part for the second half. By the time I got out of the subway, the game had already started and I was desperate to find a place to catch the rest of the game, friends or no friends. The game was good, the tension palpable as I was now running through the streets looking for a place to watch, 10 minutes into the second half, a solemn German commentator’s voice streaming out of windows. Finally, in the distance off a street on the right, a huge crowd of people stood, blocking all traffic and talking animatedly, occasionally clapping and cheering. I ran towards the crowd to what I was imagining to be a big square with a large screen (typical in European cities for the World Cup) and was happily surprised to find a group of several hundred people huddled around a few small TVs that residents had set on their window sills for all to watch. Couches and armchairs were strewn around the street along with beer crates flipped over and used as chairs, the whole street blocked off and taken over by enthusiastic viewers and children playing in the street. It was fantastic.

This is a typical scene in Berlin. The first time I went to the city, I walked by an abandoned construction site, in between two tall brick buildings – probably the site of a demolished building – a crane lay idle in the middle and couches were strewn around the field, people tanning, talking in this old furniture, probably recycled from homes, or picked up on the side of roads, a DJ spinning further away in the field. A bar across the road had turned the site into an impromptu lounge for people to enjoy their beers in the sun.

In this sense, Berlin stands in stark opposition to the progressively more restrictive rules on public space, on who has the right to use it and for what it is to be used, which we can witness in most Western cities, and particularly in the States. I’m thinking of Los Angeles or New York City for example, where streets are sanitized and “cleaned up” of everything considered dirty, disorderly or dangerous (youth, punks, homeless people, street musicians, street vendors, etc.) – all the things that makes cities not clean, controlled suburbs that many take refuge in and which is why many city-dwellers including myself love and chose to live in cities in the first place.

These “sanitization” projects are generally accompanied by tightened security measures to prevent people from “loitering” too long or homeless people from hanging around, as well as the construction of new developments and lofts and the implementation of chain stores which out-compete local business, to cater for a new generation of yuppies, businessmen and tourists. (See: Downtown Los Angeles or Hollywood, for example and Villaraigosa’s plans for redeveloping Downtown LA as well as his Safer Cities Initiative, which effectively creates a police zone in an area with a large homeless population largely African American.) In effect we end up with places that look more like “Disneyland” than any real city, places rendered without soul, where people are treated as mindless consumers and where anything unorganized or chaotic is not allowed. Everything has a place and a purpose that the law is around to make sure you follow these rules.

Berlin flips the bird to these evolutions a lot of our cities are taking as well as those contemporary western ideals of what city-centres and public spaces should look like, and perhaps can allow for a conversation on what we, as people, not as corporations or politicians, want our cities to look like, how we want to live and work and use our public space.

Berlin is important to remind us that we still own the streets and that we must reclaim our space as individuals in other spaces. Cities are about people, about exchange, about human expression and confrontation. Here’s to cities which allow for creativity and improvisation. The best part of cities is after all is their disorder.

Every Sunday and holiday, about 80 miles of the main streets of Bogota are blocked off from cars for most of the day so that bicyclists, runners, skaters, and pedestrians can take over the streets.  The ciclovias are used by about 2 million people – about 30% of the population and are surrounded by other events on park stages – concerts, yoga and aerobic instructions, and other performances.

And now, Los Angeles, the least likely suspect, whose endless concrete and streets have been the butt of urban critique for devoting most of the public space in the city to cars instead of people is on the verge of launching its own – CicLAvia – an event to be held on September 12 if all goes as planned.

“L.A. doesn’t have enough public space…of the largest cities in the U.S., L.A. is the most park-poor,” says Aaron Paley, CicLAvia advocate, in a video on Kickstarter, the social entrepreneur venture capital network. (What could be more Do-It-Together?  Venture capital from anyone who can give $1 a more).

“But we do have these fantastic streets.  And the streets already belong to us.  And by turning the streets over to the people on a Sunday we create temporary parks overnight without any large investment.”

Aaron is a professional animator of public spaces and runs a company that is, ironically, called CARS (Community Arts Resources).  He makes festivals, events, and turns concrete in L.A. into places where people dance, and, sing and play together.  He’s a friend and we were Stanton Fellows together (a great program that helps social entrepreneurs create their own project – sorry, only in L.A.).  He was researching and investigating and noodling about a new idea for public space, ended up in Bogota, and came back as a ciclovia evangelist.

Aaron isn’t the only one who sees so much potential in L.A. and that so much is to be learned from the cities of the south.  He joined an existing team of ciclovangelists – dedicated people who love the city and bicycles enough to work really hard to produce the therapy that is necessary for  them to get along better.

How great is that?  I personally can’t wait.  I’ve been biking so much more lately, inspired by my own rage against the machine (as in BP) but even more by  CicLAvia’s positive vision of what is possible.

As far as I’m concerned, anything that makes public space in  L.A. more pedestrian, more bike-friendly, more prone to (good) surprises, spontaneous art and social interaction is good medicine for our city’s fierce inequality.  Not to mention that bicycling is fun.

All of this  is is why I’ve responded to CicLAvia’s shout-out for support on Kickstarter with a $ contribution.  And I invite you to do the same.

I know sometimes its hard to get moving without a song, so enjoy this music video love song to a bike by the delightfully nerdy helmet-headed Grave Architects, complete with some kind of British ciclovia going on.

more on CARS: www.carsla.net

more on CicLAvia: ciclavia.wordpress.com

Last month I wrote a post about Iceland’s economic (and political) meltdown which resulted from swapping out a successful fishing economy with a short-lived reign as the Wall Street of Western Europe – complete with U.S.-style excess and exploding financial bubble.

And now there’s something new.

Last month, Jon Gnarr, Iceland’s most popular comedian’s, and his Best Party won 34.7 per cent of the Reykjavik municipal election, and along with that, six of the 15 city council seats.

Gnarr is now the Mayor of Reykjavik, where two-thirds of Iceland’s population of about 300,000 reside.

The Best Party, whose leaders largely consist of punk rockers who promote an “anarcho- surreal” politics, was initially created as a satire.

But the people of Reykjavik voted for the the parody over business-as-usual as one way to vent their anger against Iceland’s ruling elite just two months after an official report accused the government and regulators of “extreme negligence” in the run-up to the crisis.

The 2,000 page report was read aloud by 45 actors from beginning to end 24 hours a day for about 6 days at the Reykjavik City Theater.

Here is the Best Party’s campaign video, an Icelandic cover of Tina Turner’s Simply the Best, with party members singing their little hearts out. Gnarr sings as well, and shouts out his platform that includes things like free towels at the swimming pools, a polar bear for the zoo, and other stuff that involves words like Seltjarnarnes and Hljomskalagardurnin that I don’t understand.

If you are as intrigued by Iceland’s recent events as I am, check out the promo trailer for You Are Here, “a play ripped straight from the reality of Iceland” by experimental theater company Mindgroup which was performed at the Reykjavik City Theater.

Can’t wait to see what happens next.