good meal lousy coffee

These past three weeks I've had many great meals, in Bordeaux, Biarritz, Bilbao, Paris, Madrid, all followed by lousy coffee. Why is it...

A new revolution

The internet is changing the way people communicate. Well I didn't mean it so cliché. When two people met, they used to exchange their phone numbers -granted if they liked each other enough. Internet search engines, especially google, initiated the demise of this exchange. If you left without phone number, you could hope to find some information on that person by googling him / her -providing you have both names. But now, with the likes of myspace, asmallworld etc... exchanging phone numbers has become a reminiscence of the past. "Let's check eachother on myspace, what's your login name" is what people now say in parties throughout Europe. And it works. It's disinhibating in many ways. First, the fact that both people are aware of this mode of communication is a common ground, and usually a good start. Second, the absence of direct real time contact and absence of voice makes it much easier to approach the other person. Second, unlike the phone, this is a two step approach. A first invitation, which is considered as neutral, especially since many users focus on having the most virtual friends. If accepted, the other person sends a signal that shows mutual interest. May the virtual exchanges begin.

Prague is back

I just proved that distance is dead. just got called by a French guide book to do the 2007 Prague issue. The guy wanted me to live in Prague but since I'm living and working in Paris - I physically can't. Proved him there's no need and got the contract. so we're back in Prague...

some urban culture

Cities change. Differently, at different speeds and heading different paths. Their changes, more than their characteristics and current appearances, reflect the city's dynamics and evolving atmorsphere. Paris - a city in serach for a contemporary mark. The contemporary art exhibition at Grand Palais tries (without success) to express a progressive art culture in likes of London, Berlin, Cologne. Well, they get the art right but not setting. The fleche d'or has evolved from a bar with it's distinct parisian syndicalist and rebellious feel to a alterno-trendy hoping to be in London. Well they get the music right, but no the people. The places you to change to a state of unrecognizable. I'm not complaining about Paris. Prague - a city in search of what it's not; It's a matter of a few years before the liftestyle will be no different than that of Paris. Look at beast magazine, they compare the Paris' and Pragues with the Talinns and Warsaws. They're right but so wrong. Cities are not what they are but the impact of the all the smallest changes. They're the space flows -in networks and time.

taxis

It's interesting to analyse a city by its taxis. Not because they're so knowledgeable about thei town -at day or night, but because the taxi density tells a lot about the city : types of flows, wealthiness...
I need information so please, send it along :
This is what I've come up with.
London : 19 000 taxis, 1 taxi for 315 people
Paris : 15 000 taxis, 1 taxi for 166 people
Prague : 7 000 taxis, 1 taxi for 157 people
Dusseldorf : 1 350 taxis, 1 taxi for 555 people
Marseille : 1 200 taxis, 1 taxi for 667 people.

End of Marseille?

Ryanair announced today it was considering having Marseille its new hub, with up to 50 daily flights. I have to win a job to assess the impact because 50 new flights full of low cost travelers can unfortunately change a city.

no blog

For someone who wanted to start an interesting blogs on transport, networks and cities, I must say, I haven't been doing a good job. A friend told me the other day that blogs are for people who have nothing to do -implying that if you're busy, you're not writing blogs. Granted. So I guess that's my excuse : just working too much to even thing of writing a blog. But time isn't a problem -I obviously can spare a few minutes a day to speak about what's on my mind. No the problem is elsewhere but hahaha I haven't figured it out. Maybe you're just too much into your work to write about something different. Maybe you just rather have a coffee and put off the blog to the next day. See, I just have nothing interesting to say. So I'll stop now before it gets too boring. I'll make an effort next time. I promise. Maybe I just have to go to Marseille to relax a bit. Maybe.

It's all about flows after all

One week on in Paris and I just realised that I've been wrong this past month, thinking the place is strongest. I'm just not in Paris as a place but as a flow. Why ? Lifestyle. The workspace is international, intensive and non place-characteristic : I just happen to be physically accross from the Eifell Tower but could very well be working in Hong Kong, Jakarta or Kingston. The difference may be that there's no sea coming home from work. But then again, I've been coming home very late (he he he, working my head off) -so getting a cab home and hopping to bed is the same thing I'd to in these three other cities. My life is just a flow : made up of emails, intra-city movements, phone calls etc...

What appears like a logical point is then that flows and places interact depending on the lifestyle you lead. Where you are is what you choose. That's it.

Wow. working is hard !!

And chillin is easy !! That's it for now.

the pleasure of simple things

Sick and cold this morning, on my way to my first day at Booz Allen, I did manage to let go of a smile. The subway was running through the la Chapelle - Barbes overground rails with a view of Gare du Nord. Next to the Eurostar, Thalys and TGV, the Die Bahn night train from Berlin was pulling in. And that, was a great view and perhaps the best thing Paris can offer.

Back in Paris

So this is it. Took the train (the horrible Saturday eurostar -the ones with families and their kids screaming or drunken brits going to the rubgby match) and two and a half hours later was propelled to a different world. It's horrible but I just can't see one positive thing about Paris right now. Maybe simply because it's where I'm from and I don't get the thrill of feeling different than the others and the novelty of discovery.

London - Paris. So close yet so far. Yep !! The question is whether you can really split your time between two (or more) places. Don't you belong in one or the other ? If you think of it, I think it's a tough call.

The power of locality

No matter how much I may argue in favour of the flow, international urban areas, long distance commmuting..., the place remains strongest. Being close to an area doesn't make you live there. On a global scale approach you are there. Access to the city's highlights are easy. a concert, show, restaurant, stroll in the park, museum, bar are just a short plane ride away. But you miss out on the micro level, without doubt, what constitutes the flavour of the place. What happens on a normal, uneventful day? You miss out on the peasure of walking up and down the same street every day, witnessing the changes, dropping by the same bar, grocery store, video store day after day and living in a local space of flows. Your neighbourhood becomes your city -and you leave out on all the global extravaganza ie. the stuff you would do if you were just a short plane ride away. Geography is stronger than ever and you can truly be at one place at a time only.

No matter how much I may argue in favor of the flow, international urban areas, long distance commmuting..., I am leaving London for Paris and that makes all the difference.

Distance : Death or Tyranny

I went to a conference "The Internet's gold age is over ?" last night hosted by the Economist and RSA. One speaker, Danny Meadows-Klue, in his overly marketised speach was referring to tyranny of distance, at least a dozne times (whether he knows it or not, sentence comes from George Blainey's 1966 book on Australian history).

The issue the conference didn't raise was whether the internet has contributed to the death of distance or whether it circumvates its tyranny.

premise of the space of flows

"The town is the correlate of the road. The town exists only as a function of circulation and circuits; it is a singular point on the circuits which create it and which it creates. It is defined by entries and exits; something must enter it and exit from it. It imposes a frequency. It effects a polarization of matter , inert, living or human; it causes the phylum, the flow, to pass through specific places, along horizontal lines. It is a phenomenon of transconsistency, a network, because it is fundamentally in contact with other towns"
Deleuze & Guattari, 1986

provincially global

The more I speak to the London international population (that is to say practically every londoner) the more I realize that they usually come from provincial towns / villages in their country and sidestepped their capital city for London (and some other global cities). Conversely, it is much less common to find people from major cities (Rome, Madrid, Paris, Berlin...) coming to London unless they've got high powered jobs they couldn't get in their cities -essentially in the advanced-production service firms.

I haven't quite figured out how to interpret and illustrate this but it definitely is interesting and worth some investigation. But I doubt I would be wrong to argue that apart from the alleged managerial elite, migration to global cities originate in provincial cities. It is a theory of extremes : reject where you came from by moving to the whole opposite. Or is it just that other major cities have enough to keep their inhabitants happy.

the flows of music

I usually focus my interests on transnational global flows but the other day a whole other type of flow struck me. It was at the Old Blue Last , where the bar was having a concert promoting a new independent rock magazine. A group from Liverpool came on stage and first thing they said to to get the crowds was "oh come on Shoreditch, we've heard so much about you". This is globally local. They're not talking about any prejudice they may have on London (like is the case in most instances) but about an east-end neibhourhood. They're not so much playing in London than in Shoreditch -and they associate the crowd to the neighbourhood. They were referring to a non spatial element, more human than geographic; a humanised neighbourhood characterized by a specific place in time. Interestinglty, are we in a space of places or of flows. Is Shoreditch made up of Shoreditch (like they say) or by people like themselves who make and change Shoreditch ?

Thankfully (for the group and for myself) the crowd was slightly more low key than your traditional Shoreditch folks. It was a micro locale in a space of flows.

"I don't like it, it's like instant food, you know"

Eva told me this over google chat -referring to instant messaging.
"Wow". I told her. "That's a cool sentence". I agree though I can't quite figure out what it really means and what the relation between chatting and instant food is -apart from the instant. But it is one of those sentences you remember.

Network security

So security / confidentiality is a big deals in companies.

That's why it isn't surprising that my floor is full of confidentiality bins; that you need a pass to go in and out of the toilets and in an out of the office -one reason for which we have to get up every few minutes to let someone in. OK. That's fine.

But when I notice that I could get access to the calendar / inbox of the company's most senior executives (through a simple Outlook manipulation) I didn't understand the confidentiality standards. For this reason, I won't state what company this is, but believe, accessing emails and calendars is a big deal...much bigger than letting a stranger in our bathrooms.

Eurostars and Eurocities

I borrowed this title from Alan Favell's (UCLA) essay on professional mobilities to London. I picked up a friend the other day at Waterloo. It was Friday night, the week's last eurostar from Paris to London. I first noticed that it was probably the first time I wait for someone from a long distance journey (although we could argue it's short distnace -but that's not the point). More importantly, I was moved by the people and international interconnections. There were quite a few french couples in the lot, with one of them working in London, the other probably studying in Paris. One couple moved me whereas the other depressed me. The latter were two young French, the guy looked like an ambitious young jerk keeping his girlfriend in Paris for comfort. No signs of happiness when they saw each other, no hugging or kissing, only a "ca va?" "et toi". There were also friends, waiting to party all week end (I was one of those)and family reunions. But the international flows and connections were fascinating. And similarly to Favell's conclusions, I start to wonder : has distance really disappeared and can London and Paris be considered one same functional area ? Yes for some (that alleged 'managerial elite'), but no way for most of us. Just go and witness the eurostar terminal.

blogs and girlfriends entangled in flows

So I'm in London and my girlfriend, a poor little czech girl (studying biology very hard) is in Prague. We are lucky to see each other relatively frequently (isn't London the capital of eastern Europea after all) and skype has made international communication costless. Despite all this, Eva (that's her name) comes on this blog -though, as a "prague-6 czech girl" she doesn't place networks and flows high on her interest list. Instead, she feels she accesses some kind of diary she wouldn't have otherwise. As much as the telephone-email-chat-videoconferencing-low cost airlines have contributed to shrinking distances, blogs apparently do so in a different, indirect way. And as I hope Eva will be happy to read this blog, I will wait anxiously for her comment.

Ok. Back to work and creating the London's Road Asset Inventory Management System.

glocalization and whirly gig

Glocalization, a much used words thesedays which refers to (1)
the contested restructuring of the institutional level from the national scale both
upwards to supra-national or global scales and downwards to the scale of the
individual body or the local, urban or regional configurations and (2) the
strategies of global localisation of key forms of industrial, service and financial
capital (Swyngedouw, 2004) is applicable in all circumstances.

Whirl-y-gig is a once a month 'hippy communicty rave'party in Hackney, east London (291 Hackney Road). It symbolizes glocalisation. Whil-y-gig brings together a global community to a local event. It takes place in a very local area of the world's greatest global city. The theme and atmosphoere is globally relaxed all the more thanks to the local edge. People travel from far away to spend a whirl-y-gig event. There's nothing quite like it, in London and elsewhere, and that's what makes it the best glocalised gig (www.whirl-y-gig.org.uk)

email flows (2)

To support yesterday's blogs. It's only 4 in the afternoon and no less than 14 emails have already gone through to organize dinner tonight with a bunch of friends. Has email made any decision process so complex ?

email flows and decision

I've just invited a friend to spend the week end in London. Looking back at my emails, I notice it's taken 10 email correspondences (five emails each) to invite her.

Any simple decision involves a surprising amount of email exchanges (my average is 10-12) be it deciding where to go for dinner. No time to think about the sociological reasons for such reasons but I believe (from personal experience) that email, in the workplace at least, are a sort of entertainment, a mini-break from your activities -and thus the more emails you exchange (saying nothing), the better you may feel.

Marseille

Marseille is my beloved city. Everything -not the least its global local atomsphere appeals to me. It's probably the most eastern [Europe} of wester european cities, yet maintains an elaborate cosmopolitan western fee. Ryanair and EasyJet recently announced new flights from Dublin, Glasgow and Liverpool, in addition to the daily flight to London. We all know what happened when these airlines and other LCC started flying to Prague, Riga, Bratislava... stag parties and british weekenders.

Let's just hope Marseille will resist the invasions and remain the rough and authentic city I love. This is also why although in favor of low cost terminals, deep inside me I rejected Marseille's mp2 and if asked to work on it, would most probably refuse.

The social aspect of global mobility

Adrian Favell wrote a very interesting article (published on GaWc website http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/rb/rb150.html) on London-bound european mobility, contrasting with the contemporary economic geography of globalization. "Rarely is any kind of human face given to these macro-level transactions and data-sets" he writes. He argues that in spite of London's global reach and global city status, it reatins national specifics and requirements and many of the middle class profession migrants have trouble adapting fully.

Here is an exerpt -and one of the best paragraphs written on the subject.
"The image of effortless, frictionless mobility given to us by theorists of globalization, and portrayed in the stylized übermenschen of global yuppie magazines such as Wallpaper , gives way here to a very different image: of average middle class Europeans, aware of the benefits and freedoms that mobility has bestowed, but struggling to get by in a global city that cannot satisfy all of their cosmopolitan hopes and aspirations. It turns out – as with ‘flexibility' in the new post-industrial economy (Sennett 1998) – that it is not such an easy thing to build a complete, fulfilled life out of ‘mobility': there are costs as well as benefits to free movement. The lives of the Eurostars are extraordinary precisely because it is not easy to opt out of the standard social trajectories offered to middle class children in European nation-state-societies. Thus, they remain, for all their numbers, the exception in a generally immobile Europe. European residents of London are having an impact on the city, and do embody one important facet of its current internationalisation. Yet their experiences also remind us that global mobility is much easier in theory than in practice; and that even in the most of global of cities, not everyone feels as much at home as everyone else"

idiom

A big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond. Think of it sometime; it's one of those idioms that rightfully applies to every situation in life. It's all a questoin of scales.

why distance is dead

It struck me the other day. I had lunch with a London commuter who lives around Norwhich, about 1 1/2 north of London on the train from Liverpool Street. What was his closest international airport (excluding Stansted of course) : not LHR, but Schipol !! Shows you that networks and flows have always replaced distance -and this, in contrary to what I usually demonstrate, is not a contemporary phenomenon only ! At all times, and because of the constraints of physical geography, accessibility has superseded distance : what London commuter flies from Schipol.

locally global vs globally local

If all is network and flows , it's all scales, hubs & spokes, globals and locals. It struck to me in a London bar the other day : the main difference between, say, London and Prague is that the former is made up of local global elements (brick lane may appear local but it's embedded in a global environment); Prague is global (think blind eye) but within a local environment. A few drinks later, I noticed this association applies to everything. Think of work : a local job in a global environment (working for TfL in London) or a global job locally (Booz Allen Hamilton in Paris -considering Paris is local vs London is global). Anyway, expect to read more local global / global local since they are the fundamental elements of thet network economy analysis.

Prague underground - London overground

I've been working on an alternative guide to Prague and recently moved to London to conceive the alternative guide to... London. As a global city, it doesn't take long before something gets spotted by VICE magazine. The next week, a city intern banker checks it out, speaks about it to his boss. Before you know it TimeOut runs an article on it; the following Friday, that place has become the place to go to for all city-like londoners. So nothing alternative then? The other side of a global city is movements, flows and changes. New things spot up constantly. The difference is indeed alternative shelf-life, but more apparent a simple opposition between underground and overground. Consider the Akropolis (Prague) and 1001 (Brick Lane, London) : same style and vibe. One's underground, the other's overground

why are urban regions contiguous

It's very unfortunate but it sometimes feel the academic world remains ages behind. At a conference last week, I was struck by Sir Peter Hall's "functional urban regions" (FURs). Although Castell's 'space of flows', Saksien's 'global cities' and Taylors' 'world city network' had its share of attention during his speech, these theories are not included in evaluating FURs. Why are FURs contiguous ? Aren't there as many commuters between London and Brussels as London and the South East ? How about NY-LON ? The answer appears rather simple and disapointing : lack of data on air / rail flows, hence on long distance business commuting. It's time academics nd the transport industry share knowledge so we can truly be in a space of flows.

urban and rural

Geographers, spatial economists and political philosphers have opposed urban (the city) and rural (the country) for centuries. Karl Marx, Ferdinand Tonnies, Max Weber, Georg Simmel have all contributed to the rural-urban debate, often associated with the center / perihpery contrast.

In the current world network economy, where 'spaces of flows' have replaced 'spaces of places' (Castells), the urban/rural opposition is outdated. Cities are processes, evaluated by their relations with others, in a space of flows. These incoming and outgoing flows (physcial and virtual) make up the city. The country however remains a place, where local production feeds its inhabitants who remain in their designated territories.

We've created a world where urban is a different referential than rural.

From Kiev to Bangkok

Aerosvit with a Thai aiways codeshare flies direct from Kiev to Bangkok ! Amazing route. I wonder what the customer base is.

Paris becomes a world city

It's about time. For the first time in history Paris has a decent night public transport service, "le noctilien". Even though it's a great step for Paris (let's hope nightlife will follow), it doesn't compare with NY's 24 subway, London's ubiquitus night buses or Berlin's night S-bahn. There are now 35 night bus lines and 5 transfer hubs in Paris (corresponding to the major train stations + Chatelet), running from 1 to 5. It replaces the 8-lines running hourly from congested Chatelet. Go to noctilien.fr for more info. Now, the challenge is to find a bar that closes after 2. Good luck