Always Be Ready To Try an Old Experience

Do you get the feeling that too often, new experiences are inferior to old ones? That the hip novelty bandwagon goes too fast, and the new doesn't stay "new" as different newly-correct behaviors and products are forced upon us ...? 

One longs for Old Experience, like the practice of turning a blind eye to other people's habits, like accepting that the world is full of diverse opinion, and like getting Life Guidance from literary classics, not social media.

Thankfully we can still have that lovely Old Experience of turning a printed page. Of looking up a word in a printed dictionary. Of receiving written notes from friends, rather than pinging "notifications".

What about the old experience of physicality when not your smartphone but you yourself knew where you are on a landscape? And there on the landscape, you might see surviving woodland, or smell the scent of mown grass. You might even see some, an old-fashioned sweep of shimmering emerald lawn.

That's the delight of heritage neighbourhoods with Settler Architecture (home-y houses with flowery gardens settled on quiet streets, and pet cats roaming free). And there, is the old-fashioned certainty that you're not being spied on from every wall and roof-top by CCTV.

There's also that old-fashioned habit of people sticking to a gender, or if they choose to gender-blend they just quietly go ahead without a political song-and-dance as if we're all at an endless performance of "SOGI, the Musical".

One longs for an Old Experience of public clock towers and pay-phones, of land-lines, paper money, cheque-books, and parking meters and tip jars that take coins. Without coins, what will we throw into the wishing well when we make a wish? (How about our smartphones?) And what might we wish for? A Society For the Preservation of Old Ways would work well for some.

Anyone can try the Old Experiences that give relief from the downward drag of post-post-post modernity.

 JestJests  

Bulldozing Language in the Name of Urban Re-Development

What is "human-scaled design"? Not what it used to be. The connotations suggest something not massive. In terms of domestic architecture this would not mean a 46-storey building towering over any humans in the vicinity -- and containing "units" so micro you couldn't swing the proverbial cat in them (although there's room for cat-astrophe, design-wise). 

Downtown living in a commercial core is not human-scaled; it's business-scaled. (But then, maybe both renters and the units they live in are but commodities -- a renter simply a customer of the housing industry.)

What matters is that the language around this real estate "development" is dishonest. In the mid-sized west-coast city of Victoria, BC, the small downtown core once shelved off gradually into well-treed suburbia. The low-rise route leading out of downtown was christened "Antique Row" by advertisers and tourism promoters because most shops sold old furniture and collectables. 

Now that this heritage is being destroyed by growth and development and the shops replaced by towers, Antique Row is being re-christened, mendaciously, "Heritage Corridor" -- now that its heritage is being erased. 

The City pitches the coming 46-storey high-rise as a "sensitive and innovative response to the existing character" of the neighbourhood: the opposite of what it is. How can dense high-rise blocks of "units" with no parking replace rows of low shops and easy customer access and be called "human-scaled"? 

Neighbourhood history is being erased -- but that happens in growing cities. The worst destruction is to language. Describing things by words that mean the opposite is reprehensible dishonesty, not to mention illogical illiteracy. 

The foundations of language and communication are being bulldozed -- our heritage of reasoned speech, and not "sensitively". We live in a post-postmodern era when people in pursuit of real estate profit from overpopulation can apparently "innovate" new heritage, and if that sounds counter-intuitive to you, you're in the wrong "heritage corridor" in the race to urban uglification.