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.

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.

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?

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.