This is true for tourists and travelers, and acutely so for immigrants: while an issue is likely to be shunned by short-term visitors when they can simply avoid it, immigrants are bound to have to deal with it sooner or later.

One could think that language is the main barrier against the integration and adaptation of new inhabitants of a city. Indeed, it took me months, sometimes year, before I approached some institutions of Japanese life without a wince, and language was a large part of the problem. In the near decade that I spent there, I became rather comfortable and acquainted with things such as ordering stuff on the phone, explaining my situation to immigration officials, or going apartment hunting. Visit to Japanese doctors, however, remained to the end a puzzling, stressful and often degrading experience. After so many years, I don’t think the language barrier was the issue any more. The truth is, the doctor-patient relationship in Japan is horribly broken, or rather, it is so entirely alien to my cultural framework that I never quite learned to accept it.

After moving on my own to 4 large cities in the past 15-ish years, and visiting quite a few more, I can start to list a number of behavior patterns which say a lot about myself, obviously, but also about the urban systems. As a puzzled, stressed and curious newcomer, whether I quickly and fully embrace a system, or whether I avoid it for a long time is an interesting measure of how “usable” the system is.

Take public transportation for example. I have lived in Rouen, Paris, several cities in Japan, and Montreal – all with both a tram/metro system and bus system. In each case, being happier as a pedestrian than a driver (a much better way to discover a new city, incidentally) from day 1 I was taking the metro, walking around, hailing cabs on occasion. I never took a single bus in Rouen. I only ever took the bus twice in Paris, always because I was tagging along with a friend. In Japan, except for the bus that was the only way to get to my workplace, it took me months before I took buses to go around on a regular basis. Ditto for Montreal.

Why?

Set aside the easy explanation that in any country, the odds of ending up with a grumpy, mumbling bus driver is fairly high. You get wonderfully helpful bus drivers everywhere, too. I think the explanation goes deeper: the bus system in every city I know is broken, hardly usable, and we hardened urbanites only cope with it because we’re so used to it. Here are a few symptoms of the brokenness, which could be tackled fairly easily.

1. The bus system is inconsistent from place to place:How is one supposed to queue? Is one to get on the bus through a specific door? Does one have to pay when entering the bus, when arriving at destination, or at some point in between? These questions aren’t merely rhetorical, and most combinations of answers actually mirror the reality in one city or other.
2. The bus payment system is as complicated as it is hurried:Unlike the metro systems, where payment is generally made at a time reasonably disconnected from the ride itself, payment for the bus is often required just as one enters the carriage, or as one leaves. Ever had to wait (preferably, in the pouring rain) for a tourist to figure out how much and how to pay the ride before you could enter? Ever had to fumble in your pockets for the exact amount – in small coins – required to get on? And I am not even mentioning the many places with a variable bus fare.
3. The bus grid is hardly ever mapped:Even assuming that one city has a single public transportation system, and not, as is the case in e.g. Tokyo, a myriad of small-ish private transportation companies loosely connected throughout the urban network, it is rare to find an intelligible map of the bus network for the whole city.The mesh of bus routes and connections in most major cities is too large and intricate to be easily charted on a mid-sized map, yet this is the only map you are likely to get.
4. (not) Knowing where or when to get off is stressful:This used to be a consistent terror of mine when I used to start using buses in foreign countries: given that I often have no idea what the place I am going to looks like, how am I supposed to know when to get off? How am I supposed to know sufficiently early so that I press the button/pull the chord/holler at the driver early enough? And since the bus is not alway halting at stops unless it has to, I might entirely miss my stop and end up in the middle of nowhere.The Japanese bus system, for all its strange intricacies, has found a solution to this: a marquee screen in several locations in the bus display the current location and next stop, and a voice announces where the bus could stop next. The solution is indeed costlier than forcing grumpy drivers to grumble that information, but the ever-pragmatic Japanese companies have found a way to offset the cost: between stops, the pre-recorded voice will also spew “useful” (and paid for) information about some of the shops nearby.

Granted, contemporary technology for a first-world traveler will mitigate, or sometimes even void, such issues. Who cares if the transportation is hardly usable when one can research its tricks in advance, find out in real time when the next bus is supposed to pass or use a map application on a mobile device to calculate the best itinerary and follow one’s location at every moment?

Yet I find these tech solutions unsatisfying. I find them costly, lazy, unfair, providing only solutions for the rich tourist and the tech-savvy. They make me re-think my reaction to Adam Greenfield’s Read-Write Urbanism post, which at the time had me think “what’s the point of building connected, smart urban appliances when you can provide smart applications on mobile phones”. I may have been wrong – there is value in creating solutions for all, directly in the fabric of the city.

Indeed, there are quite a few solutions to the problems I noted above; some are already implemented in some urban transportation systems (for example, the display-and-speech info on the next stop in Japanese buses), others are mere ideas waiting to be developed. Let’s try to document these ideas and initiatives in comments below.

The whole spectacle is rather fascinating: the grunts, curses and shouting. How bricks and planks are neatly piled onto a shelf ingeniously sliding on a ladder. How the work area is protected from the occasional outbursts of bad weather that are bound to happen in the span of a few weeks.

Most enlightening is the realization that in order to add a new floor to a building, one mainly has to add a new roof.

I don’t want to stalk you, either, so knowing that you keep checking into a handful of places is not on my agenda. A few marketers may be very happy to know that, but do you really want them to know that you keep going to that lovely italian restaurant every tuesday before going to the movies?

I don’t care where you are right now, because I’m not there, and if I were, I’d want a smarter, less loud and noisy and crass way for the two of us to have a chance encounter. I don’t want to witness you flashing your underwear – repeatedly; but I do like the idea of a serendipity engine.

I want foursquare to be bought out and become semi-abandonware, and I want dopplr to thrive. Not the other way around.

Of course, I could write about my mother. She worked in the tough, male-driven industry of petro-chemistry. She mostly raised me alone, giving me a taste for culture, the arts, and science all at once; she taught me that nothing comes without hard work; I owe my odd sense of humour to her.

Of course, I could write about Stephanie, my wonderful life partner who not only inspires me, supports me through the most difficult choices, leads me with her vast experience, but also is an awfully talented and respected Web professional.

Of course I could write about some of my Web geeks friends who also happen to be women: Carine, Judy, Libby, Mia, and so many others.

And yet… I wish there were more. I wish there was one of my female teachers, or one of my female current co-workers, whom I could honestly call a role model, and I can’t. I do remember a couple of female physics teachers quite fondly (wait… were all my math teachers male?), and I love my female colleagues to bits, but every time I seriously think of the role models in my life, the statistics of a science/tech world ruled by men win.

Today I can only hope that boys in the following generation – the ones who probably don’t blog and might not know they can speak up for ALD this year – will, or do, have more female role models in their life, as teachers, co-workers, or peers.

Re-reading this review after watching Where the Wild Things Are makes me appreciate it even more. WtWTA is a honest and beautiful rendition of the joys and pain of being a child growing up. This is the movie children would make if they had a few million dollars and the talent of a Spike Jonze – instead of being usually limited to horrible crayon drawings.

Whether it is suitable for children is besides the point, the good question is whether adults can deal with it. Whether, as an adult, one is ready to open up to deep, old, primal pleasures and hurts. Wanting to be loved, wanting to be the center of attention, hating the awkward silence after a good joke, realising you are the bad guy in the story…

Life as an adult, too, is “all fun and games until someone gets hurt” – but we too often forget.

This reminded me of my recent reading of Beyond Culture by Edward T. Hall, where he argues that forcing pupils to stay still while being force-fed learning is counter to how our brain closely associates functions of problem solving to body movement:

The frontal part of the brain, the part where synthesis of thoughts and ideas as well as their expression takes place, is concerned in part with five surprisingly different but apparently related activities – perception, body movement, performance of planned action, memorizing, problem solving. Body movement! Who would have thought that body movement was related to problem solving? Can’t you just see old Miss Quinby telling Johnny, who is having trouble solving a problem in arithmetic, to stop fidgeting!

The past months have seen me navigating in many ends of the Web spectrum, from the academic to the commercial, from the purely technical to community or business facets. Each time I have been considered an expert, a senior, a veteran. Which, as far as the Web is concerned, I am. I also happen to be in my early thirties…

Yesterday I realised how humbling it is to meet people with decades of experience in their field. We the websmiths too often forget that being a senior after 3 years and a veteran after 10 years is an anomaly. Let us never forget how young the Web is.

No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world than men could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace.

Bixi is the new community bike service here in Montreal. Lots of brewhaha around launchtime, but to me, the really annoying shortcoming of the system so far was not being able to check the status of stations on the go.

According to a message I read on the facebook group for bixi a few weeks ago, there is “no plan to provide an API, iphone app or mobile access to the map of bixi stations”. That’s rather silly, knowing that the users will want to know, in real time and on the go, whether they can get or return a bike nearby.

I’m too lazy to build a real iphone app over the week-end, but I wanted to prove that it doesn’t cost tens of thousands of dollars to provide bixi users mobile access to the status of the stations.

30 minutes and about as many lines of python later, I had a working hack to include a map of all stations in google earth, google maps or the map application on my iphone.

iPhone Instructions

Here’s how to use it on the iphone (or networked iPod Touch):

Disclaimer: I built this using only publicly available data – not a public, official API, though. If the powers-that-be at bixi decide they don’t like it, or change the way they organise their data, or any other silly move, I’ll have to pull the plug on this little hack. In the meantime, I intend to use it and provide it for free. Enjoy.

One of the things I heard most often in recent talks was “the problem is we stopped caring”. I would almost agree with it it if didn’t remind me so much of the 80-years-old pianist who tried to teach me a couple of decades ago, but mostly managed to bore me with recurrent tales of how “things were better before”.

Have we stopped caring? This question brings back a memory of a work teleconference that happened a few years ago.

With 50-ish people of different cultures and backgrounds on the call, one of my colleagues (let’s call him Charles) made a rather rude, sexually connotated joke – a joke that would have passed quite well in his native France, perhaps, but made a few people, including one US female colleague (let’s call her, em, Julie) rather puzzled and mad. Julie wants to tell Charles off for his crude joke, but diplomatically asks – still on the call with 50 on the line – for a private conversation afterward. Charles replies “I don’t care”, making Julie even more aggravated.

What Charles actually wanted to say was “I don’t mind”, i.e. “OK, I’m not sure why you are upset at the joke but let’s talk as tolerant, intelligent people”. But for a non-native speaker of English, “I don’t mind” was just a slip of the tongue away from “I don’t care”…

Every time I hear one of the genial minds at TED lament “we have stopped caring” I can’t help remembering that incident. Surely, we have stopped minding. The past century, I want to believe, has made us humans much more tolerant: too many wars have flipped most of us away from xenophobia, large middle classes away from class hatred, globalization away from racism. Tolerance, which originally means “the ability to endure pain” has become an unquestioned virtue of our liberal-democratic societies.

We definitely have stopped minding, but have we stopped caring? In societies where not being upset at alien concepts or behavior, in cities where somehow the notion of community has been lost for the the protection of our sanity in a crowded environment, the line between tolerance and indifference is indeed thin. Has our (western, mostly) society made a collective, unconscious slip of the tongue from “I don’t mind” to “I don’t care”? Perhaps, but I’d like some proof that this isn’t just the old grumpy person in us complaining that “good old times” were better.

The “Renaissance Man” is an archetype personified by the likes of Leonardo Da Vinci: artists, craftsmen, engineers; polymaths, often polyglots. Men of the renaissance were exemplary to the people of our time, we who are often struggling with varied interests and skills in an education and professional context that often rewards extreme specialisation.

I already knew of extraordinary women of the renaissance. Catherine de’ Medici, for instance, was educated, intelligent, rich and powerful beyond the reach of any other man or woman of her time. Yet I would not call her a “Renaissance Woman”, for little of her known history points towards achievements in the arts and science. Undoubtedly Catherine was a patron to the arts and versed in the science of politics, but a worthy counterpart to Leonardo or Gallileo she was not. Neither was Anna Maria van Schurman, Isabel de Castilla or other great women of that age: none of them seem to ever get anywhere near science.

Hypatia as imagined by Raffaello Sanzio

I actually found one of the best examples of a Renaissance Woman in the age which the Renaissance was mimicking and rediscovering. Born around 350 AD, Hypatia of Alexandria was a scholar, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer. Said to have been instrumental in the development of the hydrometer and the astrolabe, she ran her own school of philosophy, acted as one of the last librarians of Alexandria, and exerted immense political power over the region.

Hypatia’s extraordinary character, knowledge and freedom have inspired many romanticized accounts of her life. According to legend “she moved about freely, driving her own chariot, contrary to the norm for women’s public behavior”, and the Suda, the collected history of Byzantine Greece, tells how she rebuffed a suitor by showing him an unglamorous pile of rags stained during her periods.

It is because of her death, however, that she is still so well known today. Caught in a political feud between the imperial power and rising christianity, she perished at the hands of an angry christian mob in one of the most gruesome deaths since Hector’s fate at the hands of Achilles: dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her with tiles.* After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them. (dixit the Ecclesiastical History).

Her death in the midst of political and religious conflict, unfortunately, makes it difficult to know truth from fiction. To Voltaire and the deists of the 18th century, she was the “most beautiful, most vertuous, most learned, and every way accomplish’d lady”, as John Toland wrote. To others, she was “A most Impudent School-Mistress of Alexandria.”

This detour through history provided me an unexpected clue in understanding why the Renaissance had produced so few “Renaissance Women” that we would still know of them today. A biography of Hypatia by John, Bishop of Nikiu, reads: there appeared in Alexandria a female philosopher, a pagan named Hypatia, and she was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through (her) Satanic wiles.

The terms used are strangely reminiscent of another age, that of witch hunts. Our collective psyche would generally place those shameful, dark times during the middle age, and I had to double check that my hunch was correct: coincidentally, witch hunts happened during the exact same period as the civilised renaissance, between the 15th and 18th century AD. If Renaissance men dabbling in engineering and alchemy were considered the pinnacle of civilisation while their female equivalents got burnt at the stake, is it surprising that we have no history of smart women of arts and science during that period?

My only problem is that I don’t need their plastic bags. In the past years I’ve trained myself to always go groceries-shopping with a couple of large cotton bags, thus trying not to waste plastic just to carry carrots and crumpets for a few blocks. My cash-register experience generally consists of an awkward dance, both trying not to be rude at the cashier but be fast enough to grab my veggies before they get shoved in bags by the Polyethylene Pam of the day.

A few weeks ago, my shopping basket included a rather voluminous pack of kitchen towels, the kind that would definitely not fit in my usual bags, and that I would simply lug home in my arms.

Aware of an opportunity to show his talent, the packing kid grabbed the pack, squeezed it with great pains into a plastic bag, and since it stuck out in an odd fashion, proceeded to use another three bags to make handles. A true work of art. A totally useless work of art: as I noticed, the pack of paper towels already came with a flimsy, but adequate, handle.

What would I tell the kid? Thank him for his zeal or tell him off for wasting his life all the way to the landfill? I smiled and left, nagged all the way home by the thought that this is what it’s like to put one’s heart into an utterly pointless, harmful even, task. Did he even realise it? Would I, in his place? Would I, if I were working in a job or industry that caused more harm than good, walk away or put all my heart into useless masterpieces?

The middle class no longer felt satisfied with mere time off, no longer wanted to go pile up in countryside camps or popular beaches. The middle class wanted more. The middle class longed for luxury.

Whoever invented the concept of “Luxury for all” probably had a finger or two in the invention of travel as a unique, glamorous experience. YOU can walk hand in hand with your tanned beloved on a desert, pristine beach. YOU can witness the same mystical sight of the adventurers of old: sunrise over Angkor Wat; sunset in Macchu Pichu. YOU will get all that with VIP treatment. YOU… and a few other thousands, too.

We the middle class believed in this story. All VIPs, all special, all travellers. We believed in the prose of Paradise in travel brochures, we believed in glossy pictures of palm trees. And yet, travel does not happen. Layovers do. Airport security that treats you, by default, like a criminal. “remove shoes, belts, and put any liquids in a plastic bag”. Whether you queue like cattle at check-in, during boarding, or pay extra for the real VIP service of faster service and impersonal lounges, travel does not happen. You leave a nondescript, “international” airport, spend hours hurled in a black buzzing box through the troposphere, and end in another, eerily similar, nondescript, “international” airport.

How can air travel, the most glamorous thing in the world, be so miserable? Or maybe air travel never existed. If there are some people thinking that man never went on the moon and that it was all fabricated, why isn’t there anyone questioning the sham of air travel, wondering if we’re travelling at all? The travel, I was told long ago, is in the journey, not the destination. Not in fancy hotels where everyone speaks perfect English and you get an iPod to bring with you to the gym. Not in third-world streets where kids have long learned the art of putting rich tourists ill at ease, feeling guilty of their gross wealth and waistband.

In this sense there is more travelling being done when anyone decides to walk their city across – East to West, South to North, whichever way makes sense. There is a departure, a destination, cityscape slowly offering itself to our gaze, much to discover, many to meet. Paradoxically, I learned: the faster you go, the less you travel.

Sometimes I wonder if current crises may not be an opportunity to redefine travel. Ditch those silly palm trees where to many seek lonely shade and lovely enlightenment: it’s just too expensive, burns up too much oil to get there anyway, and no-one ever returned from there a happier person. Not so far, not so fast. Bring back the journey.

Bus stops are far more interesting and useful places to have art than in museums.

Banksy – Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall

I would love to side with Banksy here. He has a point: art at a bus stop has a mathematically greater chance of touching more people than would a museum (minus perhaps the millions-a-year ilk of the Louvre). The bus stop also shelters a lot of people with a potential to be inspired by art – unlike the jaded artgoer, already taught that art is important and thus seen chin-stroking in front of a Rothko.

Put a Rothko under plexiglas at a bus stop: no-one will even bat an eyelash at it. Not even the aforementioned chin-stroker, who doesn’t necessarily have the right sensitivity to appreciate or recognise the painting. Education and a conviction that art matters is not enough. Neither will the non-artsy bus-goers.

Not convinced? Ask Joshua Bell, thought to be the best violinist of our age, about his little gig in a Washington Metro station: “In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run — for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.” Bell was out of his context, a masterpiece without a frame.

This story is getting old now – almost two years old as I write this, but it has been gnawing at a side of my mind on a regular basis. Was it enlightening, or full of self-righteous bias? I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Neither did the authors of the article themselves, concluding (with Kant and with panache) that there wasn’t much to be inferred from their small study on humanity. Bell just was out of context, a masterpiece without a frame.

What reminded me of the Josh Bell story was my reading of an essay by Antoni Tàpies called “Nothing is Paltry”. Tàpies, painter and thinker, thinks that we have lost the ability to look, and that perhaps there is something to be learned in the Japanese mystique around sacred, beautiful arteftacts shown only on special occasions, with a solemn ritual that ensures it is given proper attention. Context matters. The frame matters.

Is the bus stop a proper frame for some art? It probably depends on the art. Just as Rothko would be shunned at the bus stop, Banksy’s provocations would be obscenely out of place in between impressionist paintings (or actually… why not?).

Does all this reflection point, eventually, towards museums as guarantors of “proper” presentation? keeping us, the alien “visitors”, appropriately far from art, close enough for awe, distant enough for veneration.

Museums too often don’t “get it” and stay stuck in their ideological dualism of the curator and visitor. Too often galleries fail to invent any scheme to save us from the drabness of the “four white walls”. And I hate the “four white walls” with as much passion as I embrace attempts to showcase art in smart, enchanting narrative spaces. Museums and galleries have either not enough money, or not enough imagination to reinvent themselves. But if Tàpies is right, if the little study on humanity done by the Washington Post teaches us anything, it is that we are not quite rid of galleries and museums yet.

Back then, we had pen-pals from England. They had a different language, a different upbringing, a different culture. They had a meal called “tea” and swear words that our America-influenced TV didn’t even know of. They were but a hundred kilometres away, and yet so alien to our adolescent eyes.

There was no clear reason why we were made into such culturally permeable youth. In the 1980s and early 1990s, “Globalisation” wasn’t even a fashionable term yet, and the concept of a “grand tour” of Europe as a way to perfect the education of the well-off was a thing of the past under our longitudes. Post world-wars European nations just happened to try to stick together for a change, and teaching kids to talk with their neighbours carried some hope of a lasting peace. To our parents’ generation, it just seemed like a good idea at the time, just like speaking mostly Spanish to my (French) best friend in high schools just sounded fun.

Fast forward a decade or two, and I’d ended up living on three distinct continents. And with a generation scattered around the globe, with friends from Oslo to Buenos Aires, from New York to Shanghai, I share a recurring dream. Not a month passes without hearing about that dream, or having it myself: living in one big house with all my friends, my family, all my loved ones.

There is no such place, and yet I have seen it, again and again. In dreams.