[see it yourself]

“Make a store with our 2MM books, DVDs, graphic novels, and more.”
“Sell products your audience will love at any point of interest or engagement.”
“Aer.io’s Native Retail puts products you select on your site and into your social streams, both desktop & mobile.”

The Product:

Aer.io is a retail effort from Aerbook, and if you pop on over to the Aerbook side of their site, you’ll see options for authors and creators to upload and sell their own epub or PDF files.

Aerbook has been around since 2010, and while the Aer.io platform is ‘new’, this has been in the works for at least two years

4 September 2012 : PBS Media Shift : Aerbook Maker, Kwik Help E-Books Come Alive with Multimedia
January 2014 : Book Business Magazine : Aerbook Ebook Platform Introduces Publishers to Native Retail
14 March 2014 : Publisher’s Weekly : Aerbook Turns Social Media Into a Virtual Bookstore

“Over the years since I’ve been writing for PBS MediaShift I’ve looked to Aerbook founder Ron Martinez’s innovations for a peek into the future of publishing. I’m happy to report that his products have finally landed in the present, for everyone, not just the tech-adventurous. Aerbook began as a fixed-layout multimedia e-book creation tool with Aerbook Maker. Martinez then added the capability for authors to create social fliers that allow authors to send news of their book down the social stream where readers can sample and buy books directly from Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. The new Aer.io product (in beta) perfects this strategy and takes it to the next level to allow anyone to build a bookstore on your own website for fun and profit. With this ability to so easily build a bookstore I expect that many tech-savvy authors will create niche sites in order to promote their own titles.”
How Self-Publishing Services Blossomed in 2014, Carla King, Publisher’s Weekly, 31 December 2014

11 December 2014 : Ink, Bits, & Pixels [formerly The Digital Reader] : Gumroad Goes Where Aerbook Already Treads
19 January 2015 : Publishing Perspectives : Aer.io from Aerbook Lets You Curate Your Own Online Bookstore
12 February 2015 : press release : Morgan James to Preview and Directly Sell Print and e-Books on the Mobile, Social Web, and Enable Sales by Aer.io Retail Network
15 January 2015 : Publisher’s Weekly : S&S and Harper Grow Direct-to-Consumer Programs, “HarperCollins introduced a pilot program with e-book previews, and purchasing options, to social media users via Aerbook.”
26 January 2015 : Futurebook : ‘You are the destination’: Aerbook’s ‘native commerce’ for publishing

So What Is It?

For the customers purchasing books, Aer.io offers fulfillment via Ingram (for paper) and direct downloads for e-books — their FAQ for ebook purchasers points consumers to the Bluefire Reader (if they don’t already have a way to open the epub file) with additional instructions for Kindle & iBooks users.

[aside: files are amazingly agnostic; the Apple/Amazon trick is to fool you into staying within their respective platforms]

The actual purchase screen is simple and sparse (ready-made for mobile and smaller screens on phone and tablet) and rather straightforward. From a customer’s perspective, well, it’s not Amazon — but this is certainly on par with direct sales at nearly any other web site I’ve seen.

On the aspiring internet retailer side, Aer.io offers an web-based interface to easily add books, and even provides you with your own store on their site: mine looks like this – https://aerbook.com/store/The_Bookshop_at_RocketBomber

The store is embeddable, so you can easily add this to your blog (say, under a “store” tab or menu item) or — if you happen to have a subdomain available — you can drop a frame directly onto your own URL. Something like bookshop.rocketbomber.com.

Buy Now

Sales cards for books are also embeddable, and from the back-of-store side of your sales site, you can build widgets for individual titles. The embed code is probably optimized for something like Wordpress; as we can see to our right, if you drop it into some oddball CMS like the one running RocketBomber, we get wonky results that I’ll have to go in and correct manually.

Who is it for?

Aer.io makes it trivial to set up your own store. Really, it took me 15 minutes. 15 minutes — from not even having a sign-in and password to having a Aerbook store URL and 500 or so titles ready to purchase.

What Aer.io won’t provide are any customers.

If you have a book review site, or fan culture blog or podcast, or a news aggregation site with decent traffic, an Aer.io book store could be a great feature to add — maybe pitched as a service (“hey, here are the books we mentioned in the show this week”), maybe as a revenue source (I wouldn’t bank on it), or just to have.

If you were a creator, author, or comicker and wanted to sell your own stuff, then you could certainly make use of Aerbooks to do so — in fact, that was part of the functionality before the Aer.io platform. Now you can also add other items (DVDs, for example) and maybe make a few bucks. The appeal for an author might be the speed with which a store can be set up — even if all you plan to sell is your own book.

When you add books to your store ‘inventory’, you also get to select the discount — though you can only cut so deep. If you attempt to go below the ‘minimum’ price (presumably, Ingram’s price on the physical book, or the publisher’s maximum discounted price, whichever applies) then the Aer.io store will automatically revert to that minimum. Discounting books also cuts into your margin (hey, just like ‘real’ retail) so if you were looking to Aer.io to make money, you won’t be able to cut too deep…

Buy Now

However, you can also apply a ‘negative discount’ — you set the price, so if you want to you can charge more. The example to our right, Midnight Madness (the worst movie I could think of, spur-of-the-moment) is currently marked up 100% in my little web store, because I don’t want you to buy it. If the goal of your web-shop is not to undercut Amazon, but instead to raise funds (say, for charity) then that functionality is built in too.

“Make a one-time donation of $50, and in addition to helping RocketBomber you’ll get a copy of this great book, too! Our fulfillment partner will take care of shipping, and charging your card, so all you have to do is click this link! Thanks for helping out!”

The Highlights:

The user interface is intuitive and (at least with the numbers using it in this beta) moves fast. I was able to plug in a few of my favorite publishers (Viz, Vertical, Yen Press, Dark Horse, Seven Seas, DMP — and yes, all those were in there) and the search quickly pulled up more manga than I expected. The boast of 2 Million titles quickly proves itself. Each individual product page has the social media buttons baked in — Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest — making sharing a two-click affair, for you or for any of your followers/readers who’d care to help.

Searches by title/author are perhaps the best way to find books to add; by title particularly for numbered series, by author for nearly anything else. Collections of books are also available (called ‘playlists’ by Aer.io — perhaps an artifact of some other application of this software) and you can either select some that are ready-made, or roll your own. Adding titles to a playlist is a little slower, as each title must be added individually, as opposed to the ‘select all’, ‘add selections’ options I gladly used when building the store.

There is also an ‘import your books from GoodReads’ option — with the ability to only include those you rated at 3, 4, and/or 5 stars. If you’ve already invested a chunk of time building your virtual bookshelves there, you can quickly flip that into a virtual book store.

Payments are handled by Stripe, as are pay-outs (assuming I ever get to that point) but there’s no need to fill out any of those forms to set up your login and store front. (only when, and if, you want to cash out your commissions. there’s a $10 minimum on payments)

[more on Stripe Marketplace – 5 June 2013 : Techcrunch : Stripe Makes It Easier For Marketplaces To Collect And Distribute Payments To Multiple Accounts]

As stated, it’s easy to get up and running. For a web admin or author looking to add just a few items with buy links to a sidebar, or a quick-and-dirty shop add-on, this will take a single afternoon.

The Drawbacks: (call it, ‘room for improvements’)

[And note: this is the beta version so of course any complaints should be seen in that light]

A larger shop will take time to build, and getting the frames/embeds to actually look good on your website/CMS across multiple browsers might take you several hours, depending on your particular platform and your familiarity with HTML/CSS and whatever scripting you’ll get into. It took me 40 minutes or so to drop a frame into The World’s Most Basic HTML File without the annoying double scroll bar, mostly because I don’t think I’ve ever used frames before. (It turns out, there is an easy solution but it will only work on modern browsers. No support for IE8. …that might actually be a feature)

Even with the seemingly huge selection of titles on Aer.io, I still quickly found gaps. The Gundam series, for example: I was only able to find 4 of 10 volumes of Gundam: The Origin, and volume 1 is incorrectly listed as volume 10. This is a weakness on the part of Ingram, I’d bet – the Aer.io site makes everything easier but still relies on the databases and item descriptions provided by their fulfillment partners.

Speaking of problems with databases, those 2 Million titles include the annoying straight-from-wikipedia print-on-demand books that clog a number of sites, including Amazon and B&N. I don’t suppose there is any way to exclude these — but the good news is that only you see them on the back end, when searching for inventory to add. These will not appear in your storefront unless you’ve specifically added them.

Only twice did I manage to make the interface ‘clunk’ — once because I managed to select a ‘custom field’ option that I don’t think was supposed to be visible, and again when I gave the search too much to chew on (I think) and then got impatient and tried to back out. Neither error was fatal, and easily fixed by going back to the right-hand menu and starting over.

Wrap-up: final thoughts.

Aer.io is not a complete product but what is currently available is pretty damn amazing. If I all I needed was a way to sell a handful of books (say, my own output as an author) then this would be an excellent alternative to affiliate links, Amazon widgets, or even more convoluted work-arounds.

It’s not a way for every aspiring Bezos to launch an online bookstore, though. What you can assemble (in an afternoon) is suitably impressive but the UI, UX, and purchasing experience won’t match a dedicated internet sales site. But I doubt it is supposed to, at this phase.

As Aerbooks put the polish on this platform, I think we’ll see even more value to users (and the users’ customers). My own wish would be for even more book and DVD titles (and perhaps other products?) but that’s because as a one-time corporate ‘big box’ bookseller, I’m used to sitting atop an inventory system that has twelve million listings, not just two. The ‘social media’ side of the pitch makes for good press releases, but the integration isn’t quite as seemless as is currently promised — don’t think this adds ‘one click’ shopping to your tweets. Clicking the social media buttons is certainly easy enough, though (at worst, you’ll have to copy and paste some html, the same that Amazon affiliate links require).

I plan to continue playing around with the store and the widgets, and testing the limits. Indeed, I may have to go back to writing up book reviews, just so I have a place to put the links. :)

Aer.io is still in beta, so I expect a lot of ‘fixes’ will be put in place before there are public sign-ups. The core functionality here (the idea of a quick, seamless online store that any blogger or creator can implement) holds a lot of promise, though. I’d ask Aerbooks to work hard on the supply side, making more books available (and getting publishers and distributors to fix the online listing info!) while keeping this particular back-of-store interface and feature set largely intact — I found nothing in the beta that was ‘broken’.

If I’m doing this correctly, then somewhere below you should be seeing the cover for volume 1 of one of my all time favorite manga.

As promised (on twitter) I’ll be following up with a full write-up on the process, along with any impressions or opinions I form along the way. (I was just at a point where I kind-of immediately wanted to see if it worked)

Buy Now

image credits, left to right: Tim Hentoff, Flickr, Wikimedia Commons, Aldan-Sally, Flickr – Creative Commons licenses

Actually, pareidolia is more than that — it encompasses several phenomena, from seeing animals in cloud shapes to hearing ‘hidden messages’ on records played backwards. When presented with random or incomplete stimulus, our brains labor to find patterns or significance. So, we see faces in things that have no face. :)

(the broader term is apophenia, finding patterns in randomness, which also applies to the Gambler’s Fallacy, hindsight bias, and Russell Crowe’s portrayal of John Nash in A Beautiful Mind.)

Similarly, I think our brains are addicted to stories, and strain mightily to find a narrative even when presented with random (or contradicting) events. We want to identify a hero and a villain, we will find some side to root for, and we imagine that every course will have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There will be a conflict, a decisive outcome, and a happy ending (or a cathartic release after tragedy). We want to tell stories, and we’ll make them out of the flimsiest of figments, connecting dots and assigning roles as required — facts be damned.

We see this in journalism — and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Finding the story or through-line can help us make sense of new and unfamiliar information, and a well crafted narrative makes the end result more readable (or watchable, in the case of documentary film). Indeed, this is why one term used for journalistic output is story, and also why History is History. (actually the etymology there is reversed – we derived ‘story’ from Greek/Latin ‘historia’)

The problem comes with the constant, always-on, 24 hour news cycle of Cable TV, newswires, and internet feeds. We are presented with so much random stimulus, our brains are begging to see the story behind it all, even when there isn’t a ‘story’ per se.

If one already has a story in mind (say, that everything is the fault of Reptilian Aliens working in concert with the Ancient Bavarian Illuminati) then it is easy enough to bend whatever smaller stories you see on Cable News to fit that larger narrative (confirmation bias) — if you watch Fox News, they’ve already done that heavy lifting for you. (* disclaimer: I don’t know for a fact that Fox believes in aliens or illuminati, though I’ve seen enough old scaly white men as commentators and ‘experts’ on the network that I’ll spot them the reptiles.) Forcing events to fit the narrative is easy, especially if you don’t care about the actual facts.

##

Strangely enough, though, and worrisome for authors is that Readers so love story, if you don’t explicitly give them a story in your book (or other work) the audience is going to dock you points for it.

The same brains that will quite happily invent a narrative to cover random, real-world events will not do the same for a half-assed, sloppily written book.

We love stories, good versus evil, beginning-middle-end, and plot — a plot evolving naturally from motives, consistent with character, and with consequences. If all you write is a collection of scenes but the main character doesn’t do anything (and also, by the end of the book, has shown no growth) then readers are going to be disappointed.

That’s not to say that you have to slavishly follow a Five Act Play plot structure and stick to tired tropes — nor that every book is going to be a Good vs Evil Grudgematch with young Hiro Protagonist always fighting Dread Lord Darkenskaery. We can play with the tropes, and surprise the reader. Anti-heroes are in this year. (Antiheroes are always ‘in’.) Every villain has a backstory, every hero can be a dick (and often is), the Princess can swear and kick ass and decipher the ancient runes no one else can read.

Indeed, our favorite parts of many stories are often the ways the author twisted expectations.

That said: readers will know when there isn’t a plot. They’ll scream. You can play with the tropes, but the cliches are old and hoary and still around for a reason.

We all love stories, so if you are a manufacturer of fiction, remember that your audience is skilled in finding them. Indeed, we’re hard-wired to connect dots and string scenes together — but we do that in the real world, where the amount of material to work with is literally seven billion lives, all of past history, the whole planet, and a galaxy beyond that. As a writer, you are working in a much smaller space and you only have what you brought in with you. If you want a reader to connect the dots, you need to paint all the dots — and maybe an arrow or two so readers know which direction to head toward.

If you want to, say, update your kitchen, or build an addition on the back of your house you have some options:

• A real do-it-yourself-er and general handy-type might need to call a plumber or electrician but otherwise is fine with doing the framing, hanging wallboard, hanging cabinets, setting tile, installing carpet, and all the finish work — not just plaster and paint, but wood trim, weatherstripping and caulk, maybe some wallpaper. And when all that is done, our intrepid homeowner also does their own interior decorating, furnishing the space to as-seen-on-TV standards buying salvage & fleamarket and doing their own refinishing on vintage and near-antique pieces.
• More realistically, you get on Google and read online reviews and ask around and you subcontract all that other crap out — you maybe take care of your own demolition (yeah! break stuff!) but you get the real professionals to come in and fix it. You end up juggling different schedules for weeks (or months) and dealing with multiple contractors (first the concrete pour, then the framing, exterior siding, interior walls, windows & doors, floors & finishes) and when it’s all done, you look at your newly-fattened credit card bills and sob — while sitting in the beautiful new addition to your home. bittersweet.
• You can cede even more control (and more money) in the process by hiring a general contractor — someone to take point on the job and juggle the various subcontractors for you. The drawback is that you’re paying costs plus fees (to the GC) but the tradeoff is that maybe you get to keep more of your sanity. Plus (and this is often a big plus) the General Contractor has done all this before, projects both bigger and more complicated than your little bathroom re-do or new screened porch.

The tradeoffs are obvious: you can keep control, and spend less money, while doing more of the work — or you can choose to spend money to solve problems and take a more hands-off approach.

As a writer who wants to ‘build’ a book (either from the bones of a draft or doing some small repairs on a mostly finished manuscript) you have the same options as our hypothetical homeowner: Do the work yourself, coordinate a bunch of subcontractors (free lancers) to get the work done, or maybe try to find a ‘book packager’ to work as your general contractor and bring the book to print.

Your fourth option is to sign a book deal with a publisher, but that’s not really your option – it’s theirs. (Getting an agent and landing a book deal would be a different analogy.) Let’s just assume for now that it’s your ‘house’ and you’re the one building it.

When dealing with home repairs and renovations most of us are clueless — unless and until we’ve done it a few times. But most homeowners know the general scope of what’s about to happen, and they’re willing to do a little research (months or even years of on-again-off-again plans) before they make any calls or write any checks. And because we live in houses, we have a pretty good idea of what the final space should look and feel like, even if we’ve never lifted a hammer or trowel before.

When writers have the same opportunity to ‘fix up’ a book, they often go the do-it-yourself route, underestimating the scope of the work and (perhaps) overestimating their own skills as self-editor. The primary reason to do this is of course the cost — either we begrudge the expense or we just don’t have the extra cash right now to pay a freelancer to do the work for us.

To get the job done, we can also borrow against the ‘equity’ in the book: trading rights or revenues to get the book into salable condition, either with a small publisher or a digital-only publisher. There are risks, of course, but no money is required up front* and the other option, keeping the manuscript in a drawer for who knows how many more years with no potential for readers or sales at all — well, we all know how that would work out.

* …goes without saying: if a publisher asks for money it’s likely a ‘vanity press’ or some similar scam. caveat emptor.

To authors, all I can do is caution you to think things through. It might not be a bad idea to get some professionals to help — even the most die-hard DIY weekend-warrior will hire an electrician or plumber. And instead of trading equity in the book, maybe think of editing and production like any other household and/or life expense, and find some other way to pay the money out of pocket to get the work done. Be a smart book owner: do your research, consider your options, treat the pros you hire to work on your book the same as a contractor who works on your home (i.e. with respect, with open communication about scope of work and expectations, with a clear outline for when the work is complete and when payments will be made). (There isn’t a Yelp for online freelancers—that I know of—but as the market grows, maybe there will be? Never be afraid to ask for references or a portfolio …or to ask other writers for recommendations.)

Just like a major change to your home, you’re going to have to live with the results for a long time, maybe the rest of your life.

Good Morning.

I’m in a backlog-clearing-mode so this is going to be a much longer link dump carefully curated set of thought-provoking articles. All of these would normally post under the Cities and Citizens tag — urban planning and development being one of my more prominent ‘hobby’ interests.

[No diary entry for this post, but there is a book recommendation this week — somewhere down there, after all the links.]

“Restaurants are the leading force behind reclaimed waterfronts and regenerating neighborhoods, and are a key component of mixed-use development and urban retail. When a part of the city puts itself on the map, it’s often because of a wave of trendy eateries have opened there.”
Restaurants Really Can Determine the Fate of Cities and Neighborhoods, Anthony Flint, 22 July 2014, Citylab [citylab.com]

“But Tennessee is one of 20 states with laws on the books that pose barriers to community broadband efforts—laws that in many cases were pushed by cable and telecom industry lobbyists. Thanks to Tennessee state law, EPB is prohibited from offering internet and video services to any areas outside its service area.
“EPB is asking the federal government to use its authority to preempt that state law, so that it can bring its service to the underserved, largely rural areas surrounding Chattanooga. Wilson made a simultaneous filing Thursday. “
Two Cities Asked the FCC to Bypass State Laws Banning Municipal Fiber Internet, Sam Gustin, 24 July 2014, Motherboard [motherboard.vice.com]

“Some say that cities are on the rise, and suburbs are declining. I don’t think it is that simple. Rather, the new dream is based on the idea of ‘Place.’ When you go to a community with layers of history, with charm and character, where many people gather, you react emotionally and psychologically. That feeling, which everybody has experienced, is known as ‘sense of place.’ That sense has value. After six or seven decades of sprawl, many people seek it. Whether they get it in a central city, small city, suburb, or small town doesn’t matter.”
Why ‘place’ is the new American dream, Robert Steuteville, 1 Aug 2014, Better Cities & Towns [bettercities.net]

“Over the past few years, I’ve read a lot of articles and blog posts proclaiming that cities are back: that millenials want to drive less and live in cities, and that suburbs as we know them may even be dying.
“I agree that many consumers demand more walkable development, both in cities and in suburbs. But even in relatively prosperous, safe cities, the political obstacles to meeting this demand are enormous.”
Mission Accomplished? Not Yet, Michael Lewyn, 5 August 2014, Planetizen [planetizen.com]

“Almost all movement in a major city now begins with a phone. Mobile apps and interfaces help people do everything from sort through route options to locate an approaching bus or hail a taxi or for-hire vehicle. While cities and transportation regulators have released data and encouraged innovation through contests and hackathons, no U.S. city has aggressively pursued development of an integrated app that enables users to plan, book, and pay for trips across multiple travel modes. Instead, it’s the likes of Uber and Google Maps and CityMapper and RideScout that have demonstrated what is possible, and controlled the movement market to date.”
The Most Important Transportation Innovation of the Decade Is the Smartphone, Eric Goldwyn, 4 September 2014, Citylab [citylab.com]

“However improbable it might have seemed twenty, five, or even two years ago, Detroit could well be on the verge of a major turnaround that could make it one of the biggest success stories in urban America over the next decade. Yes, that goes against conventional wisdom: The standard narrative for Detroit has been about a bankrupt, vacant, decaying, post-industrial wasteland; an environmental, social and economic disaster. Detroit has been the quintessential ‘shrinking city,’ the poster child for everything that has gone wrong with the post-industrial Midwest.
“(I never did buy the ‘shrinking’ part, by the way. What really happened was a hollowing out, as central-city residents fled for the suburbs. The population of metropolitan Detroit has actually been close to stable over the past few decades due to suburban growth offsetting inner city losses. But there has been a lot of truth to the rest of the story.)”
Is it time to change the narrative about Detroit?, Kaid Benfield, 8 Sep 2014, Better Cities & Towns [bettercities.net]

“Former Indianapolis Mayor Bill Hudnut used to like to say that ‘you can’t be a suburb of nowhere.’ This is the oft-repeated notion has been a rallying cry for investments to revitalize downtowns in America for three decades or so now. The idea being that you can’t have a smoking hole in your region where your downtown is supposed to be. This created a mental based on a donut. You can’t let downtown become an empty hole.”
…
“In this model, the old donut is inverted. What used to be the ring of health – the outer areas of the city and the inner suburban regions – are now struggling. Whereas the downtown is in pretty good shape, and the newer suburban areas are booming.”
…
“We’ve got three decades of experience in downtown revitalization, but much less in dealing with this newer challenge zone. I’ve said that suburban revitalization may prove to be the big 21st century ‘urban’ challenge. This is where it is happening in many cases. These areas have an inferior housing stock (often small post-war worker cottages or ranches), sometimes poor basic infrastructure, and are sometimes independent municipalities that, like Ferguson, MO, are often overlooked unless something really bad happens. Unlike the major downtown, they are often ‘out of sight, out of mind’ for most regional movers and shakers.”
The New Donut, Aaron M. Renn, 14 September 2014, Urbanophile [urbanophile.com]

“The transportation futures of these cities will largely be defined by whether these new efforts pan out or fall flat. Before elected officials and transportation authorities in these cities look too far ahead, they might be wise to glance back. During the past 50 years, citizens in Houston, Atlanta, and Los Angeles rejected transit plans only to see elements of those same plans re-emerge in today’s growing systems. By delaying the development of mass transit within their most densely populated corridors, in some cases for decades, all three cities missed opportunities to expand mobility, contributing to many of the problems they face today.”
What Old Transit Maps Can Teach Us About a City’s Future, Kyle Shelton, 10 October 2014, Citylab [citylab.com]

“One of the myths of Detroit is that it’s a frontier town — wide open, and a place where anyone can make a mark. Like a lot of frontiers, though, fences have already been laid, even if you can’t see them. Much of the downtown that is south of Adams Street is owned by Dan Gilbert. Gilbert made his fortune by starting Rock Financial, an internet-based mortgage company. He sold it to Intuit in 1999, at the peak of the first dot-com boom, for $532 million, and then, after the bubble burst, bought it back for $55 million. By then Intuit had renamed it Quicken Loans, which it’s still called today.”
…
“Walking around downtown during business hours, you get the feeling that someone has assembled a collection of young white men in v-neck sweaters and stylish eyeglasses and scattered them over the urban street grid. That someone would be Dan Gilbert.”
Behind every crumbling downtown is a billionaire who wants to save it, Heather Smith, 7 October 2014, Grist [grist.org]
via Can Billionaires Revitalize Decayed Downtowns?, Philip Rojc, 17 October 2014, Planetizen [planetizen.com]

Gentrification:

“These dismissals, which focus on gentrification as culture, ignore that Lee’s was a critique of the racist allocation of resources. Black communities whose complaints about poor schools and city services go unheeded find these complaints are readily addressed when wealthier, whiter people move in. Meanwhile, long-time locals are treated as contagions on the landscape, targeted by police for annoying the new arrivals.
“Gentrifiers focus on aesthetics, not people. Because people, to them, are aesthetics.
“Proponents of gentrification will vouch for its benevolence by noting it “cleaned up the neighbourhood”. This is often code for a literal white-washing. The problems that existed in the neighbourhood – poverty, lack of opportunity, struggling populations denied city services – did not go away. They were simply priced out to a new location.”
The peril of hipster economics, Sarah Kendzior, 28 May 2014, Aljazeera America [aljazeera.com]

“Urban scholars rail against the process of gentrification and its destruction of working-class communities. We read about the waves of gentrifiers and the kinds of cafes, boutiques and new amenities that they bring. We express worry to our peers that the city is going to become a bastion of elitism or a generic suburb stripped of diversity. Often, we treat gentrification as a contemporary form of urban class and racial warfare (Smith, 1996). As urbanists, however, we increasingly notice an elephant sitting in the academic corner: many (dare we say most — ‘mainstream’ and critical) urbanists are gentrifiers themselves. As Brown-Saracino (2010: 356) suggests, ‘many of us have firsthand experience with gentrification’. But what difference has this made on our research? Very little. We have created an artificial distance in our analysis because we do not examine our own relationship to the data.”
A Gentrifier? Who, Me?, Aaron M. Renn, 24 July 2014, Urbanophile [urbanophile.com]

“[T]he billion dollar question for economic developers and planning agencies throughout the United States: is urban revitalization of neighborhoods possible without the subsequent gentrification and displacement of current residents?
“Jared Green asks this important question in a recent post on the American Society of Landscape Architect’s blog, The Dirt. The most recent wave of “urban revitalization” that began in the 1990s to increase wealth in cities is noted by supporters as benefiting everyone, while critics are increasingly calling these initiatives gentrification.”
Is Urban Revitalization Possible Without Displacement and Gentrification?, Maayan Dembo, 18 October 2014, Planetizen [planetizen.com]

Atlanta – for better or for worse, my home town:

“However, despite some areas being ripe for development, much of the growth around the airport has been piecemeal, failing to leverage the airport as an economic engine, or to seamlessly connect to the airport or welcome visitors to a world-class city and region. Local residents and workers desperately seek a higher quality of life, better access to transportation options and more livable communities. Complicating the area’s development is the fact that three counties and several municipalities including Atlanta, Hapeville, College Park, East Point and Forest Park all have strong, and often competing, interests in regard to airport-area growth.”
Atlanta’s untapped potential for creating a thriving aerotropolis, Garrett Hyer, 16 July 2014, Better Cities & Towns [bettercities.net]

“‘People have been looking at these parking lots for decades wondering why they were just sitting there,’ says Amanda Rhein, senior director of transit-oriented development at MARTA. ‘It’s clear there’s a significant amount of in-town resurgence, based on the development that’s happening here, and the majority of it is within close proximity of our stations. So this is really just MARTA finally participating in that activity.’”
The Atlanta Transit Agency’s Big Plan to Convert Parking Lots into Housing, Eric Jaffe, 21 July 2014, Citylab [citylab.com]

“The highly-anticipated plan to turn Bellwood Quarry into Westside Reservoir Park, a proposed 350-acre greenspace in northwest Atlanta, has been in the works for the past eight years. Once it’s built – whenever that happens – it’s envisioned to include a 45-acre reservoir, fields for activities, and a clear view of Atlanta’s skyline. And one city councilman wants to add another amenity to that list: a new civic center.
“Earlier this week, Atlanta City Councilman Michael Julian Bond introduced a resolution asking Mayor Kasim Reed to consider replacing the Boisfeuillet Jones Atlanta Civic Center, the 47-year-old city-owned arts and entertainment venue in Old Fourth Ward that’s likely to be sold and redeveloped, with a new facility adjacent to Bellwood Quarry.”
Should Atlanta’s next civic center be built near Bellwood Quarry?, Max Blau, 24 July 2014, Creative Loafing [clatl.com]

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Today’s Book Recommendation comes to us via a blurb at Better Cities & Towns:

“We drew inspiration from places as diverse as Detroit, Baroda, Marquette, Flint, Grand Rapids and Traverse City in an effort to chronicle the amazing work that is already underway and provide a blueprint for others moving forward. We believe that the book is equally important for those outside of Michigan as it is for those who reside in the Great Lakes State.”

Economics of Place: The Art of Building Great Communities, from the Michigan Municipal League, 20 September 2014, paperback, isbn 9781929923007

From the publisher’s website:
“This book goes beyond placemaking as a concept, to offer real-world examples of economic drivers and agents of social and cultural change in Michigan’s own backyard. They represent some of the many place-based catalysts that can spark the kind of transformational changes that reinvent and revitalize a community, with tangible payoffs in terms of livability, social and cultural enrichment, and economic development. But most of all, they show us that placemaking is an art not a science, and displays itself in as many shapes, sizes and colors as a community can imagine.”

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