As I’ve been announcing for a few months already, today we’ve finally launched the St. Lawrence Market guide in collaboration with the PlanetEye team (in case you haven’t heard, that’s my day job). I learned a lot over the last year trying to figure out how to bring this project to life and I’m pretty happy with the results. There are many ideas flowing through my mind about the significance of this project, but I’ll limit this post to brag about the guide itself:
 St. Lawrence Market Guide How is it different from other city guides? Well for starters is not a city guide, it is a neighbourhood guide. You know that neglected urban molecule that often defines the character of its citizens but it is rarely given its credit.
- Curated content: the fact that we limited the scope of this guide to a very small section of the city, allowed us to be thorough in our research. If you are from Toronto, you’ll find that our features are carefully selected and represent the best this area has to offer. If you have never been to Toronto, you probably don’t need to look any further to organize a nice little stay in our city.
- Great photography: Yes, there are photos in every page and every map. Some of them we took while walking around the neighbourhood and others were organized photo-shoots with pros. All the photos are geolocated and can be expanded so they can be appreciated fully.
- Super useful maps: Every one of the sections in the guide features a couple of interactive maps: one with the features written about, and another with a larger collection of places. The maps are fully functional and will allow you to explore the area without ever worrying about “too much information”. The best part is that the maps are powered by some really cool technology that allow us to continuously update their content as new places appear and others close. You can expect this guide to remain current.
- Essentials: travelling is not only about finding a good hotel, a nice restaurant and a photo opportunity. We tried to include a small collection of essential services that every traveller has needed at least once while on the road. My favourite? Essentials/Working Spaces will show you several locations that provide reliable WiFi or will even allow you to rent a desk for a day.
- Sustainable, Livable: above it all, we wanted to portray in good light a neighbourhood that has transcended the daily routine that is so characteristic of large cities and has created an interesting vital energy that is obvious while walking its sidewalks and crossing paths with the locals. Everything within a few blocks so you don’t even need to worry about transportation in most cases.
If you’re considering travelling to Toronto on business or pleasure and plan to spend more than a couple of days in our city, I can assure you this guide has everything you need for a memorable travel experience. At the end of the trip you may even find yourself thinking “I could live here“.
I find a little bit ironic that Google released their new “Places” page at the same time that National Geographic Traveler celebrates their 25th anniversary with a collector’s edition featuring “50 Places of Lifetime“. My opinion in this matter is likely very biased as this is what I do for a living: try to figure out how to best convey the qualities that make a particular destination desirable to the traveler and build websites that attempt to organize such knowledge. But it is a very tough problem and the attempt from Google, while strategic is perfect proof of how far we are from capturing the essence of travel.
Call it the “curse of memorable places”: you’ve just spent a couple of weeks at what you believe has been the greatest journey of your lifetime only to come back and try to articulate into a “travel blog” how great it was or create a slideshow of your obviously less than stellar photography. Perhaps the only satisfaction that results from these failed attempts to convey the grandiosity of a trip is that your boring interpretation will keep this treasure safe from others “discovering” it.
This is exactly what it feels to browse through the amazing catalogue of places that Google has assembled from millions of random geolocated snippets of content: business listings, photos, videos, articles. The result is a fairly useful “Yellow Pages” of the world, unable to do justice to the qualities that have impregnated each of those places into our collective memory. It is unfortunate that Google’s blog post to announce their product says: “there are places we remember”, as we remember them too and they are not much like Google says they are.
But an even more worrisome trend is that many travel guides out there will end up looking very much like this “Place” pages: a collection of attractions depicted by a low-resolution thumbnail along with a 50-word summary. Clearly those travel guides are out of the race as there is a computer somewhere that can accomplish the same thing.
For the last little while I’ve been writing about our attempt to create a very special travel guide. One that falls short of covering every place on the planet, but that is able to capture the personality of very unique places, not by aggregating dozens of photos taken by different photographers, but carefully composing our interpretation of a place and tasking a great photographer to capture it with a hint of his own passion for the location. Perhaps avoiding factual information such as addresses, business hours and prices (as all of these are now just one query away) and crafting a narrative that makes the place a coherent part of a bigger story that dares you to make it your own.
Having just finished the first photo-shoot for the St. Lawrence Market in Toronto, I’m confident our story will be far more beautiful, entertaining and informative than what Google tells us about it.
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.
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.
Summer’s solstice, the longest day of the year seems to be a great day to sit in the backyard to read the usual weekly magazines and catch up on some writing. In a typical residential area in the middle of the city, my macbook detects almost a dozen different wireless networks including mine, of course. With a broadband connection and a high-end wireless router, there is no difference between what I can accomplish here or at the office on any given day. I’ll take the backyard every time I can.
Already in hackers & work culture I had discussed how the boundaries between professional and private live were blurred. First with a wave of mobile communication devices that made everyone accessible to attend business at any time of the day and now with ubiquitous wireless access points that are now converting everyone into a local nomad, pushing us away from our desks into third spaces, far more amenable and with a twist of social.
Connectivity seems to be an increasingly important factor when deciding where we are going to travel. After all, you wouldn’t want to be disconnected from twitter while travelling… or have to pass on a great project right in the middle of your trip. I’ll leave to other posts the discussion about entrepreneurial spirit, which may justify this obsession with being in the loop at all times.
In any case, knowing about what kind of connectivity you’ll get whether you are going to be away from the office for a few hours or a few days is now an essential factor in your decision process. While more and more destinations are offering wireless access (even for free), very few provide a good enough environment to support a productive work session. So that got me thinking on what are the “must-have” when it comes to connectivity?
We could talk about Wi-Fi, 3GS, EDGE, broadband, DSL, but there are far better forums for that kind of information if you are curious about the technology. Instead I propose the following test, a digital nomad test that expresses in simple human terms the quality of your connectivity:
- Price Voice: How much would it cost to make a 5 minute call to the top contact from your mobile phone? While most destinations would likely provide the means for your current mobile phone to roam, sometimes the fees involved are prohibitive.
- Price Data: Let’s assume you’re one of those modern workers who have achieved the goal of working only 4 hours a week. How much does it costs to be connected for those 4 hours on a given week?
- Delay to receive a message: in today’s hyper-connected world there is an implicit expectation that if you’re sent a message (email, instant messaging, Twitter, etc), you would respond within a reasonably short time frame. Of course, if you’re trying to save on your data plan because you’re roaming and you only connect once a day, you’re for all intents and purposes disconnected. So this attribute measures how long it will take before you’re able to get a message sent to you.
- Time to compose a 1000-words message: No, I’m not talking about how fast you type but to the misconception that you can be just as productive with your mobile than with a laptop or desktop computer. Let’s admit it, tiny keyboards are not built for typing long messages and when faced with the option we’ll likely postpone writing that long memo or document. So while we may fool ourselves into thinking that carrying a smart-phone is enough, sometimes we’ll have to wait until we’re in front of a computer to be productive.
- Time to download/watch a 15 minute video: This is the ultimate performance test in today’s world. With video demanding the most from your connectivity infrastructure, this will measure the overall quality of your network, end to end.
With this sort of standardized connectivity test, it would be easier for people to make decisions about how to remain connected when on the road. Is there any other dimension that needs to be measured?
In The Art of Travel, De Botton suggested there are no more places left to discover. With the overwhelming amount of information available on each and every major destination around the world it is likely that I could discover the major landmarks just as well from my computer than walking through them. Of course travellers will argue that first-hand experience is what matters, even if millions of people have had the same opportunity. While exploring the best reasons to travel I had emphasized the quest for the “experience”:
The tourist that never leaves the beaten path is likely only exposed to an esterile experience that has been washed out of all its original power.
One could argue that the splendour of any famous landmark is constantly diluted by the ongoing attack of mass tourism, misguided by a market saturated of travel guides that most of the times reference the same top 10 or 20 landmarks not to be missed, while telling us every snippet of knowledge that travellers must know about these places, cancelling every attempt to make that experience unique.
The age of discovery is over. Every corner of our planet has been documented ad nauseam… or has it? The availability of super detailed guides and maps for every city in the world would certainly give us this illusion. But I bet that for every map which highlights 10 “points of interest”, there are another 10 not so interesting. And yet, I believe these are the places that will increasingly attract the independent traveller. The key to their rise will be their ability to offer new and unique experiences that may not include master art or landmark architecture, but showcase the modus vivendi of little known micro-regions and their people.
You probably remember that little neighbourhood in a foreign city that after an easy stroll made you comment “I could live here”. Some people will qualify them as charming and others will think of them as hip. I’ll venture a generalization and suggest that they’ve moved away from the pragmatism that governs every aspect of modern life and have found a way to decorate themselves with elements that seem superfluous or even luxurious. What sells us is the fact that their inhabitants have been able to transcend the mundane. Where are they? Well, that is where the discovery starts.
Just a few days ago I published a photo of Coyoacán in Mexico City, a wealthy neighbourhood in the south of the city that is often cited in travel guides. Most people will settle for visiting the main square, which is where all the action takes place. What few people have discovered is that just a couple hundred meters away there is a little public garden surrounded by cobblestone streets where the pace of life seems to slow down. I used to walk through these streets almost every day without giving credit to their splendour. The arrhythmic sound of shoes walking on stone was clearly heard in a city that is otherwise obnoxiously loud. I’m sure a few people have said they could live there. And yet the reviews found on the web about this corner of the city are sparse and uninviting.
Recognizing that the charm of these streets on their own is not sufficient to create a full experience and elaborating on the need to reinvent tourism, I suggest a well orchestrated effort is required to bundle all the various elements that will attract the visitor. In the same way that top hotels create an entire experience around their brand, these micro-regions need to be organized so visitors can immerse themselves into the perfect life-style balance achieved after centuries of fine tuning.
Travelling to Mexico in the wake of one of the worst tourism declines in recent memory, has been an eery experience: the occasional masked traveller, the non-existent line ups to check-in and a 319 with perhaps 20 passengers. But it isn’t the feeling of crossing some imaginary boundary to a forbidden land or the fear of catching some untamed virus awaiting at the arrival lounge. What makes this trip so uneasy is the realization that the millions of people that are not flying today may not be coming back to Mexico for a really long time.
Whether failures in policy-making, mass-hysteria, international press or just some random genetic mutation are to blame for the stampede the fact is that loosing its tourism edge, Mexico is posed for very dark times ahead. Suffice to know that its tourism industry is second only to oil.
In the midst of such a downturn the entire sector will have to rethink how it positions itself to re-engage with travellers. Yes, Mexico has a privileged geography and has exploited it through the continuous development of its traditional hubs, usually beach destinations flocked by charters full of travellers that prepaid the entire experience back home. I believe those days are over, not because those people will no longer consider Mexico as an alternative and will gradually rediscover its benefits, but because there are far too many options outside of Mexico where the exact same experience is available: blue waters, white sand, palm trees, cheap drinks and lots of sun. The quintessential beach vacation. As people are forced to try other options, they will find them and will have no problem in evaluating their loyalties.
Hopefully the prospects of such a decline will reenergize the sector and open the doors for a new generation of travel ventures that will restore the reputation of Mexico as a prime destination, not only a beach destination but a complex one that spans world-class historic sites, charming colonial towns as well as a very diverse range of cultures that cover its varied geography.
I’m sure the government is already planning how to spend millions of dollars on marketing its way to normal levels and all the major hotel chains are calculating how low they can go to compensate. But what is really needed is a grass-root movement that looks at each corner of the country as a potential magnet for a new kind of tourist: the kind that won’t run after the cheapest room, the kind that puts its heart into researching a trip for months because she knows it will be a life-changing experience. The eco-traveller that understands what kind of impact she can effect on a place, both physically and morally. The equivalent to the agro-tourism that has shifted attention to the Italian country. Reinventing tourism in Mexico will require the participation of people beyond the industry. I’m certain everyone will have something to say as we’ve all been to Mexico at least once. Haven’t we?
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