About five months ago I wrote the post “startup and the simple life” committing myself to bring some ideas, concepts, business plans and even a moderate budget on my next vacation.
My family and I have been in Mexico for the last four weeks, an unusually long vacation for us. Aside from some important family time in key moments of our lives, we’ve had the opportunity to visit this great country at what has clearly been its lowest point as a tourist destination in a very long time. The result has been a magnificent journey that has taken us from the essential beach destination to the magnificent and desolated landscapes of its mountain ranges, to remote and forgotten ghost towns in the process of being re-conquered by entrepreneurial ‘gringos’, to the most glamorous wilderness experiences.
But I also devoted time to put in motion a small idea that in less than four weeks has taken a live of its own and now has a chance to become a worthy enterprise, something I’ve started calling the Global Culture Tour. Here is the account of that little project.
The Global Culture Tour is a collective creative experiment to document special neighbourhoods around the world. Places that have found a way to balance the many attributes that I often write about in the blog. Our tag line is “Sustainable, Memorable, Livable travel experiences for global citizens”, so that should start giving you an idea of what destinations may qualify. It’s objective is to create an online guide that helps discerning travellers find ways to immerse themselves into these areas. Hyper-local by nature, these guides feature a destination using a strong editorial approach with a solid and coherent narrative, while showcasing beautiful, original photography that could be the envy of any other travel guide.
In the months preceding my trip, I started shaping the idea through a number of posts such as “reinventing tourism in mexico“, “I could live here” , “give up your urban devil“, “meaningful experiences“, “the quest for liveability” and “the greatest destination“. Feedback on these posts helped tremendously to orient the project and understand which areas generated the most interest. Clearly there was something appealing. One of the first things I did once the journey started was to organize the various ideas throughout these posts into a single Creative Brief that could be used to present to any person I would talk to. This was important as it helped me focus the project and helped me persuade people that I was serious about it.
Sustainable, Memorable, Livable travel experiences for global citizens:
Global Culture enables memorable travel experiences through the continuous exploration of regions that provide a culturally rich environment for the urbanite on a livability quest.
Such was the tag line of the Creative Brief and immediately became the tag line of this blog as well. A friend of mine had taken some of the key ideas and created a mood-board, sort of a visual guide for what we were trying to convey:
 Mood Board There were other discussions about the technical aspects of the project, but to be honest those were the simple ones. The very next day I arrived in Mexico City started listening to the Twitter conversation about Coyoacán (the place I had decided to feature) and photographers. It didn’t take long before I ran into a photographer featured in Flickr with several “interesting” photos of the area. Needless to say he jumped at the opportunity to meet to discuss the project. And with the amount of preparation I had done there was an immediate alignment of the minds. He even coined the term “Coyoacán Chronicles”. A week into my trip, I knew this was going to happen.
During those first days I also did a few walk-around photo-shoots to scout the area for interesting places to feature in our guide. I knew very little about pre-production, release forms, permits, etc. But asking people was enough to get up to speed. One of the first important shifts in the project happened after these scouting sessions. It was obvious the amount of preparation to do the photo-shoot in a single weekend was too much, almost impossible to arrange. I bet that’s why you see the large film crews parking on location for several days. We knew the effort would have to be spread over several weeks, managing to produce a few “scenes” each time. This was by no means a problem, because the plan was to publish this in some sort of a blog format. All we needed was to serialize the photo-shoots at the same pace that we would publish them. I was feeling a TV producer at this point.
Soon it became obvious that finding the right photographer was likely the most important accomplishment. Not only was he ready to shoot, but he used his own local contacts to recruit the other person in the team: a writer. Around this time we had a good idea of which locations we wanted to shoot, a time frame, the general structure of the posts, etc. I was puzzled by only one small problem: we couldn’t find any kind of accommodation in the area. Any serious travel guide would have to offer at least one good option and we didn’t have any.
Although many travel sites list several hotels in this area of the city, many of them are wrongly geolocated due to some duplicate street names. From a long list of possible hotels, we ended up finding only two that really were within the boundaries of our photo-shoot. Luckily one of them (La Cuija) was exactly the type of small hotel that we were looking for. Once we had debunked this mistery, we had almost everything under control. Almost.
I had decided to hire a professional model to aid during the photo-shoot to create lively scenes that would stand out when compared to the typical shot you find in travel guides. I had plenty of leads and referrals but couldn’t get any one of them to commit in the short time frame we had. One day, walking around the city, I ran into an old friend of mine and quickly gave him an account of the project. He was quick to offer some help as he had some connections in the show business. Two days later the casting call was answered and we found not a model, but an actress. That happened yesterday.
Tomorrow is my last day in the city and we are doing our first full photo-shoot. Just in time. In the next few days, I’ll post some of the first results from this project and will explain where this is going.
For many travellers one of the sacred rituals before leaving on a long trip is the search for good books that can be taken on the road as companions on those long rides across vast landscapes or lonely nights in foreign grounds.
Pointed out to students that good travel books, a la Farley & Grann, have themes (quest, identity, history), beyond “my summer vacation.”
Posted on Twitter at 7:56 AM Jul 23rd from web
by Big World Magazine
I need recommendations for GOOD books that will keep me entertained during my 15 hours of travel to Berlin!
Posted on Twitter at 9:29 PM Jul 21st from TweetDeck by CharlestonVal
Help! Suggestions on good YA books that involve cross-country or cross-continent adventures? Bonus points for travel by train.
Posted on Twitter at 8:26 PM Jul 20th from TweetDeck by Whitney Miller
 Lapham's quarterly on Travel I’m finding Lapham’s quarterly anthology on travel a top candidate: it compiles a great number of timeless short pieces written by travellers without necessarily being a travel guide. As I told a friend a while ago, any anthology that can bring McLuhan, De Botton, etc to talk about travel has my attention. Its format is travel-friendly: compact without being a paperback, light, several short pieces great for the distracted traveller
But what I’m finding most interesting about its contents is that although every article provides an account about a trip or adventure, the narrative was written by literature heavyweights and since most of the journeys took place in lands unknown, centuries ago they could very well be completely fictitious and we wouldn’t know any better.
The common travel guide format values atttributes such as accuracy, objectivity, brevity, thoroughness and others proper of a reputable news journal. But the best travel guides are those that inspire and somehow the lack of a backbone across the narrative of a travel guide kills all opportunities to engage the reader on a long journey. Instead of the transactional nature of modern travel guides, with their emphasis on dollars, star-ratings, phone numbers, addresses and other silly lists, I want a travel guide that reads as an adventure, a believable story where the central character is the destination even though I can relate to the many characters that enrich its pages. Come to think about it, the actual destination may be the least relevant element as I’m sure would be willing to go far to become an actor in any good story. I want to read a travel story and be inspired to make it mine.
The following is an adaptation of the post by the same title appeared in el-oso.net, with a few of my own conclusions. In the original post “oso” explores some of the common patterns in the evolution of cities.
Chapter 1: Make-shift Slums
As Kevin Kelly rightly points out, “every city begins as a slum … a seasonal camp with free-wheeling make-shift expediency.” Cities are founded on economic opportunity, spontaneous slums, and lawless saloons. Eventually gender ratios equal out, churches move in, government takes shape, and urban planning is institutionalized.
Chapter 2: Hegemony Rules
During the transition from slum to civic center some social group usually takes power and dictates policy. It tends to be the ethnic majority though in the case of colonized countries that was almost never the case. In most cities in the United States power lied among the WASP community. Ethnic minorities were pushed out to the edges while the elite built Victorian homes around the downtown business districts and plazas.
Chapter 3: Suburbanization or scalability of the dream
This is the chapter that takes on different manifestations depending on the ethnic and class make-up of a city, but the basic concept is still generally applicable. During WWII in the United States there was an influx of black americans seeking work in urban centers. After WWII four developments (other than blatant racism) led to white flight from urban centers to suburban communities. First was population density. After the war soldiers returned home to urban centers, but those who moved in while they were gone also remained. Then there was the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, which began the process of desegregating the country’s public schools. White parents felt that their children would receive a lower level of education in a desegregated school, and so they moved to suburbs where neighborhoods and their schools were all white. Third, the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 enabled the workday commute from suburb to city center. Lastly, suburban developers had large returns to scale as they could purchase a single large plot of land and build hundreds or even thousands of nearly identical homes.
Chapter 4: Urban Gentrification
While the majority of white Americans from my generation grew up in mostly white suburban neighborhoods, our schools and public institutions became increasingly integrated and multicultural. Television and mass media brought the Cosby Show, The Jeffersons, Fresh Prince, and Family Matters into our living room. And then came hip-hop. All of a sudden there was nothing less cool than to have grown up in the suburbs. Young people from affluent suburbs moved into lower-income urban neighborhoods where they opened coffee shops, art galleries, and cocktail bars. Awkwardness and antagonism between the newly arrived affluent and the established lower-income population were inevitable. In the worst of cases property prices increased and low-income renters were forced to move out to other neighborhoods. However, there has also been an effort by young people across different classes in gentrified neighborhoods to shape a common aesthetic around hip-hop, indie rock, street art, and skateboarding.
Chapter 5: Back to the basics?
For a long time one of the ideas that persisted across many of my posts was that in the future all cities would share a common global culture. I wasn’t predicting the future as much as I was describing what I believe to be the advanced society in which I have the honour to live. With one of the most multicultural societies in the world, Toronto does well in integrating such diversity. But often times the protocol to coexists without incurring into cultural mishaps leaves us with a very superficial relationship. I sense that many more people would want to get closer and more integrated. While it is difficult to predict how cities will continue to evolve, I’m suggesting there is plenty of interest in creating spaces where the spirit of spontaneity, chaos and lawless goodness can favour a far more amenable environment, with smaller communities of people more open to experiment with their relationships. All we need to do is figure out what factors will promote such an environment.
A while ago I started to collect city rankings, but more than anything else I was creating the foundation for what would eventually be the greatest destination. If I’ve learned anything throughout this process is that no city can claim such honour. Depending on who you ask, each city will have a unique array of features and advantages that are hard to qualify, let alone compare. But more importantly, the city itself is such a large entity in our mostly urbanized world that trying to generalize any qualities may result in a gross generalization of certain attributes that would be better appreciated if we could localize them.
But since we’re hopelessly lost in this quest for our ideal place, I thought a great place to restart the quest is the latest attempt from Monocle magazine to design the perfect city block. As it seems now a tradition, along with their Quality of Life index, they also look closer and generalize what they’ve learned through the process of ranking cities to put together a theory of “smart urban living”. Without trying to discredit the effort (I really think they are onto something), the article falls to easily into common clichés such as wind turbines, urban farming, community greenhouses, rooftop entertainment and falls short of getting into a serious exploration of the most powerful element to transform our cities: a lively, dense, diverse neighbourhood with progressive minds ready to adapt as new technologies and ideas becoming affordable. In my opinion, more than building we need to explore our cities to find those neighbourhoods that are almost at the brink of a creative explosion, just waiting for the right people to converge and turn them into the ideal urban quarters.
What are the attributes that would make a neighbourhood such a candidate? I expect this will turn into a debate, but here a summary of arguments I’ve put forward over the last three years (in no particular order):
- Hyper-connected: both in the virtual and living realms, it must provide the infrastructure to keep its dwellers engaged with other people across the city and around the globe.
- Sustainable: as with any self-organizing entity, it must optimize resources for its survival, learning to reduce dependency on external sources. This could very well apply to energy efficiency, local food supplies or even its ability to foster the innovation necessary to sustain a thriving culture.
- Evolving: opposing any attempts to characterize the area with a limited number of attributes or features, a great neighbourhood is a living entity with an ongoing narrative that can only be understood by its actors and can only be fully appreciated by being part of such narrative.
- Diverse: not only in the variety of its people, but in its ability to bring these people together into a single meeting point. You should feel like every day is an opportunity to meet a different person from whom you will learn something new.
- Acoustic: as in acoustic medium, where the space becomes a medium that excels at enabling cultural transfer by virtue of the evolved traditions of its participants, advanced mechanisms enabled by technology to propagate information and a rich mix of sources that can be used and reused for many different purposes.
- Unique: even though we may one day discover the perfect recipe for a great neighbourhood, I bet we will continue to be amazed by their variety. A signature lifestyle should be a good hint that you’ve got a good thing going in this place.
- Livable: a great destination should make you feel like you’ve arrived somewhere and not like you’re in transit as an spectator. Its ability for calling on people to settle should be of utmost importance.
How is that for eligibility criteria to become the greatest destination? Can you nominate any area in your city? I’ll continue to explore this theme as we pack our bags and start our Global Culture tour in a quest to find a collection of the best hoods around.
Hiring travel writers with a passion for discovering destinations, plenty of travel experience, able to work independently, equipped with computer and digital camera and with sound knowledge of a foreign language
This is how a typical job posting would look like. You'll read it, get excited about the fact that you've found your calling, dream about all those exotic and glamorous cities you'll visit and then you'll realize it's impossible to make a living out of it. At least that is what appears to be the case if all you want to do is write.
Found on Twitter: Good writing will soon become ubiquitous. Professional writers will soon become rare. (via @scrawledinwax)
What is important to understand is that in the age of "user generated content" everyone feels entitled to write and give an opinion on absolutely everything. Personally I'm not sure how soon GOOD writing will become ubiquitous but if the popular saying is to be trusted it will take about one million words for the average user to become a good writer. At a pace of 100 words per rant and assuming one per day it will take a couple of decades to get there.
However, professional writing and in particular professional travel writing is being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of words that floods the medium, diluting the value of the few words that have been crafted as opposed to just hammered on a keyboard. So how is a good travel writer supposed to make a living?
Someone jokingly said "become an editor". What I'm about to suggest is a variant that those specialized in travel may prefer: become a "destination editor".
Find your little corner of the world, some largely unknown region and assume it as your own. Settle there (even better if you already live there) and get to know the people, their culture, the things that make them proud and figure out why other people need to know this area. Then set up your Travel 2.0 shop, recruit eager locals to do what they already do: write lots of words, take lots of pictures, participate in lots of online forums. Once you get some momentum it's time to do your part. Craft an incredibly unique story that becomes the backbone for all those little snippets of loose content. In a way think of yourself as an anthology editor whose job is to orchestrate the ongoing story of that little, micro region of the world.
In acoustic medium, I had ventured some ideas about what type of medium we were creating through a culture of participation. Somehow I believe a great travel story fits perfectly into this type of medium.
If this sounds like something to get excited about, I may be hiring travel writers after all. Leave a comment. Stay tuned.
Courtesy Vince Alongi @ Flickr
You just arrived to your destination. First walk out of your quarters to explore the neighbourhood and this traditional fruit shop is the first thing to get your attention. More than a convenient shop for your immediate cravings it is an icon of the type of neighbourhood to [...]
Thanks to all the conversations that have made this possible. A revamped Global Culture site gets closer to reality as we get a first draft of our new Creative Brief and start to move content around to give it a purpose.
Here is are some relevant fragments from the document:
Global Culture enables memorable experiences through [...]
|
|
Recent Comments