Behold Chatype, a font and innovative urban renewal project seeking to rebrand the one-time dynamo of Dixie.

In a classic post-industrial Americana tale, Chattanooga lost its choo choo for a time. But a new font is renewing its thunder.

It all started in a coffee shop in 2011. Typeface designers Robbie de Villiers and Jeremy Dooley (two of the some 300 professional typeface designers on the planet) happened to sit next to one another one day and mused over their mutual longing to create a typeface for the fourth largest city in Tennessee. Why? Because they felt Chattanooga’s rich past and promising future warranted a font of its own.

During the 1960s, what was once known as the dynamo of Dixie – a railroad, industrial and manufacturing hub, also the site of the Coca Cola’s first bottling site – became better known as the filthiest city in America.

Chattanooga has since cleaned up its act (New Orleans, Philadelphia and Los Angeles are now dominating the grime) and is winning back its population. Between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, Chattanooga quadrupled its growth rate. Moreover, the riverfront has been redeveloped, clean tech has moved in, the greenies are taking over, and an artist relocation project has spurred a creative revolution. Chatype, meanwhile, a geometric slab serif font, is initiating typographical one.

Dooley and de Villiers developed Chatype after consulting with a local historian to incorporate influences from Chattanooga’s past. The result is a blend of modern and industrial influences, with a historic slant.

The font includes a stencil variant, “a nod to the local design scene and a nod to industry,” brand consultant Jonathan Mansfied explained to Fast Co. Design. Also included in the kit are alternative characters that include elements of Cherokee letterforms (Chattanooga itself takes its name from the Cherokee word “Lookout Mountain”).

Now Dooley, de Villiers – along with DJ Trischler and Jonathan Mansfield of D+J Brand Consulting – are working with the city and individuals to incorporate the font into park signage, municipal projects, the Visitors Bureau website, the city seal and more.

Instead of relying strictly on grants and funds from local government, they are working on a community buy-in campaign via Kickstarter. The team has surpassed its goal of $10,000 from 241 backers.

Chattanoogans: expect to see Chatype in a bike lane near you.

Images: Chatype.com

The post Can a Font Renew Chattanooga’s Choo Choo? appeared first on EcoSalon.

Australians turn to artists to help with urban blight.

Consider colonized Williamsburg, not the Commonwealth one in Virginia but the gentrified and rarified one rife with models and brunching. A few decades ago, no one but the artist would venture there, drawn by the affordable convenience of massive swathes of abandoned industrial space. It was very much artist vs. the city. Eventually commercial and nonprofit development groups took note, and sought to replicate the formula in cities like St. Louis, Detroit and Cleveland.

The formula being: artists are natural born leaders in rescuing decentralized cities from blight, even transforming them into the next hot place to call home.

Each of the aforementioned cities has succeeded in turning their industrialized wastelands around, to a varying extent. Now, our comrades down under are attempting the same.

Australia is a very big place.

And 89% of its population lives in an urban area making it one of the most urbanized countries in the world.

But the nation of 22 million+ has been steadily creeping towards an urban crisis. An over reliance on cars, economic growth bolstered by highway construction, and shortsighted solutions that are threatening a number of their cities and towns.

A spirited editorial compared Australian sprawl to a cancerous growth on one hand, to America, on the other.

“As the colony sprawls outward, consuming resources and despoiling its environment, the inner core deteriorates. This is the route taken by many older American cities…whose cores were ghetto-ised by policies of sprawl favouring automobile and oil industries.”

Fair enough.

“Why this willful denial by Australians?” the editorial continues. “Partly it might be a consequence of our historical ‘escape’ from crowded and often terrible urban conditions in Europe. Like Americans, the promise of wide open virgin lands, seemingly allowing endless expansion and a quarter acre for everyone appeared feasible and was built into a persuasive cult. But it was never true, never sustainable.”

America holds that truth to be self-evident.

As such, social enterprise group Renew Australia is seeking to bolster their city cores by pairing up artists with abandoned commercial spaces in Newcastle, Adelaide and Townsville.

Working under the premise that cities “play an integral part in bringing together diverse communities, offering an alternative to unsustainable urban sprawl and providing a real sense of public space,” they find short and long-term solutions for vacant and abandoned properties until they become viable businesses or are redeveloped.

Started in Newcastle by writer, broadcaster and arts festival director Marcus Westbury in 2008, the program bills itself as “a permanent structure for temporary things.”

Renew has since gone national, a pairing that grants property owners, caretakers and the downtown another opportunity to become cool again.

Images: Brian Costelloe; NASA; Winter for Elbows; Renew Australia; ZeHawk

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With Park(ing) Day just around the corner, it seems timely to write about the latest thing to hit the streets of Manhattan: a pop up cafe.

Sponsored by two neighboring eateries – Bombay and Fika – and the New York City Department of Transportation, the pop up cafe is composed of a wooden platform that houses 14 tables and 50 chairs. An attempt at solving the problem of cramped sidewalks which don’t leave much room for outdoor seating, the pop up cafe is part foodie attraction and part public space improvement. In fact, Bombay and Fika don’t offer table service, and anyone who wants to take advantage of the space is allowed to take a seat.

Taking the place of several parking spaces, the outdoor seating doesn’t conflict with the sidewalk traffic, and it’s a project that the DOT is more than happy to support. “Every time we put down just an orange barrel, people just materialize out of nowhere,” said Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan to Streetsblog. “If you build it, they will sit.”

The cafe is all part of DOT’s attempt to make the Big Apple more livable and street-friendly. It has not only expanded its bike lanes, but also announced plans to create two pedestrian plazas on 5th Avenue and Broadway.

The pop up cafe will be removed later this year, but according to Sadik-Khan, if the DOT deems this project a success, there very well may be more of them next spring, which would mean many more creative uses of public space, therefore improving the life of anyone that works or lives in Manhattan.

Image: DNA Info

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’s column at EcoSalon, Foodie Underground. Each week, Anna will be taking a look at something new and different that’s taking place in the underground food movement, from supper clubs to mini markets to culinary avant garde.

The post Foodie Underground: Parking Spaces Turned Pop Up Cafe appeared first on EcoSalon.

Mention Detroit and most people will immediately think about the auto industry or music. Not many would think urban farmland. But that’s exactly what Hantz Group, a Michigan-based financial group, is thinking.

The group has been putting together an ambitious and creative plan to turn large acres of underutilized and vacant inner city land into farmland featuring a mixture of cash crops, ornamental gardens and riding trails.

The Hantz Group, with their Hantz Farms subsidiary, hopes to begin with a 70-acre purchase on the city’s east side, an area that was selected due to its low population density of between zero and nine residents per acre. Working with researchers from Michigan State University, Hantz Farms will determine which crops would be suitable for the land, aiming wherever possible to plant edible crops. Land that has been degraded through industrial use, however, will only be planted with non-edible crops such as Christmas trees.

Ultimately, the Hantz Group is looking at turning up to 10,000 acres of inner city Detroit into urban farmland. In a city riddled with real estate dereliction and economic woes, large scale urban gardens may be just the thing to help get Detroit back in the fast lane.

Image: LHOON

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