King Faisal Square in 1958. From Getty Images: http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/3378711/Hulton-Archive
Does the Amman Municipality and do Ammanis want that Amman’s downtown is turned into a a cheap-looking touristic area? Because that’s EXACTLY what is happening at an alarming speed.

I had breakfast at Hashem, the famous Hummous and Fuul restaurant yesterday and then went for a quick walk down Faisal Square. I can tell you: the way things are going in downtown Amman is scary.

First of all, there was a smell of sewage in several places. I know it’s summer and the heat causes sewage smells to leak out. But there is definitely something wrong with the sewage system. Also, the downtown sidewalks are totally grimy and the level of street cleaning is not great.

King Faisal Square in particular is currently at a very critical stage.

The current moment can be described as follows: the decline of downtown Amman has now reached its lowest point. Almost all good retailers are gone. Cheap stores have taken their place. A lot of things on the streets are in a state of disrepair and dirtiness.

At the same time, however, new commercial functions are moving in as downtown is gaining a new level of entertainment and tourism attractiveness. And there is an ambitious project by the Amman Municipality to rehabilitate Faisal Square.

It’s like we’re seeing the deepest decline and the beginnings of a revival at the same time.

Faisal Square was the first boulevard of Amman in the early 20th Century. It is where the young Hashemite State displayed its presence through military parades. It was where the Arab Bank choose to build its impressive Amman building in the 1950s. It is where the best shops and offices where. In short it is a street that deserves to to be revived and celebrated.

While I am hopeful that GAM’s revival project of the street will be well done, I am extremely worried about the new cafes/restaurant phenomenon that is spreading like wildfire in and near Faisal Square.

These are all imitations of the now-famous Jaffra cafe that opened some years ago opposite the old Post building.

While Jaffra itself was an interesting development, as it attracted people back to downtown (the pirated DVD shops where another factor, of course), it already had its own design and image problems. It clearly suffers from what some are calling the “Bab el 7ara” phenomenon. People opening cafes and restaurants in the old neighborhoods of Amman are totally misunderstanding the word “heritage”. Instead of celebrating the real URBAN heritage of Amman’s downtown, they make their restaurants look like something out of a village or like a fake version of old Damascus.

Just have a look at the design of this new restaurant on Faisal Square.

Brown wooden pergolas! Strange additions to the windows! Copper lanterns! Yellow stone facades stuck on the original buildings! There is even an image of Petra made in yellow stone!

I am sorry but this has NOTHIG to do with old Amman. The image created here is “touristy”, fake and cheaply done. Because of lack of guidance and followup, well-meaning entrepreneurs will simply replicate this model until Faisal Square all looks this. This is what is happening to Jordan’s historic boulevard!

It has to be said that this is hardly the fault of the restaurant owners who probably believe they are doing something beautiful and great. It is either the fault of the unclear regulations, or the lack of enforcement of regulations when these businesses apply for licensing. Dealing with these facts on the ground is tricky, as people have already spent money on these additions.

Mayor Maani is already aware of the same problem in Rainbow Street and something is being done about it. But now downtown Amman is in danger too.

A final word on the work that has started on rehabilitating Faisal Square. Sidewalks are being ripped open. Manholes are covered with wooden planks. Construction material and equipment is placed here and there. I’ve seen how mothers, children and the elderly are walking over the rubble of the sidewalk. It’s dangerous and dirty.

The contractor of this project should be required to work in a manner that is safe to pedestrians. This is also an active commercial street. The well being of shopkeepers and their shops needs to be taken into consideration too.

SYNTAX and Al-Balad Theater present:

“The New (Type)face of Amman”

German type-design rising star Yanone will be telling the story of his Amman typeface, created for the Amman Municipality’s “Amman Brand” project in collaboration with SYNTAX.

The result of this project is now “FF Amman”, a professional typeface marketed worldwide by FontShop, as one of largest bilingual font families ever.

Amman is probably the first Arab city to get its own typeface. The Amman typeface is now starting to appear all around Amman, on signs, posters and ads. It will become one of the city’s recognizable visual features.

If you’re a designer, design student, design and art lover or a Amman enthusiast, we’d love you to join us for an interesting presentation and discussion. Yanone will also preview the 15-minute film he has shot during his current visit to our city.

27 July, 2010
7-9 pm
Al-Balad Theater, Jabal Amman. You can find a map to Al Balad Theater here.
Entrance is free.

Facebook page of this event is here.

The Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts in Jabal Luweibdeh will host the exhibition “Open City: Refuge Urbanism” which is part of the 4th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam 2009-10 (IABR), opening today Sunday 18 July 2010, at 6 pm.

Refuge Urbanism (Part of the Diwan Collaborative Research Network, directed by Philipp Misselwitz & Can Altay) is an exhibition is curated by Jordanian architectural historian and critic Rami Daher. It presents the result of research by urban experts and considers the impact of refuge urbanism on four regional metropolises; each guided by a specific thematic focus:

Amman: Neoliberal Urban Management (edited by Rami Daher)
Istanbul: Living in Voluntary and Involuntary Exclusion
(edited by Eda Ünlü-Yücesoy, Tansel Korkmaz, Yasar Adanalı, Philipp Misselwitz & Can Altay)
Beirut: Mapping Security (edited by Mona Fawaz, Ahmad Gharbieh, & Mona Harb)
Cairo: Resilience – City as Personal Practice (edited by Dina Shehayeb
& Shahira Issa)

Alongside the exhibition there will be a parallel workshop entitled “Refuge Urbanism” that will take place on Monday, July 19, 2010 between 6 & 9 pm at the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts and will feature short presentations by Philipp Misselwitz, Rami Daher, Bas Princen, Ahmad Abu Khalil, & Raghda Butros.

There will also be an independent exhibition curated by Can Altay and Philipp Misselwitz, entitled Bas Brincen: Five Cities Portfolio
The Exhibition will run through August 18, 2010.

For contact information check the National Gallery website.

Nothing like being able to start showing people what I’ve been immersed in the past few months! It’s been a crazy journey for the team at SYNTAX and Spring and it will only get crazier.

What was a sketchy idea a few months ago has turned into a full fledged project with a powerful vision: building the most comprehensive, dynamic and connected hub for entrepreneurship in the region, with world class standards and by a team in the region, for the region.

You’ll be hearing more about Wamda as it move closer to beta, then launch..

From the SYNTAX:CONTEXT blog:

Today, we get to lift the curtain, just a little bit, and start the launch process for one of the most interesting and challenging project we’ve ever worked on at SYNTAX. Together with our friends at Spring, we’ve been commissioned to build what hopefully will become the region’s most comprehensive, dynamic and interactive entrepreneurial hub. So today we can tell you: its name is Wamda and the “coming soon” page and cool little trailer is up.
The teams at SYNTAX and Spring, along with an army of freelancers and partner companies are still hard at work. The next step will be going into a private beta test phase, where a limited number of user will be allowed in to help iron out any issues.

If you want to be notified when Wamda officially goes live, head over for www.wamda.com and submit your email. If you want to participate as a private beta tester you can submit a request too.

In 1992, my mother planted a little Agave Americana in my parent’s farm in the Jordanian village Aluk, 25 km north of Amman. Over the years, this agave grew and grew to a degree where my parents started thinking of removing it. Agaves have very sharp spikes that can give you nasty pain and can be dangerous especially where children are playing. My parents always took care to trim the spikes so no one gets hurt.

But a few months ago, they noticed an asparagus-like stem growing from the center of the agave. It turns out that it was ready to go into bloom, which is truly an amazing phenomenon.

An agave only blooms once, then it dies, survived by numerous offspring plants which develop around it. This could take anywhere between one and two decades. Actually one of the names of this type of agave is “century plant” because it takes so long to bloom. All its life, the agave stores nutrients in its leaves in preparation for this sudden blooming process, which occurs at a crazy speed.

My parent’s agave developed a blooming stem which is over 11 meters high in just three months. This speedy growth sucks out all the nutrients from the plant which starts to shrivel.

I have never seen something like that! My parent told me about it but when I actually saw it last weekend I was shocked.

Needless to say my parents are extremely happy about this natural wonder occurring right in front of their house. Seeing such an amazing growth and blooming process after 18 years of planting something is certainly out of the ordinary.

And while it may be sad to see the original plant go, it is already replaced by a whole bed of offspring plants.

Here are some more pictures:

It sounds like an offer no true music lover in Arabia can refuse: Buy a very capable touch screen smartphone from Nokia and get access to an all-you-can-eat music library of 4 million tracks for free for 12 months. And you get to keep the music you download for ever too.
That, in a nutshell, is what Nokia is trying to do with the X6 and its groundbreaking Comes with Music service.

It’s a brilliant idea. Think about it. Arab consumers are still new to buying stuff online. Music piracy is the norm. Music sales, even on CDs or tapes was never really a lucrative business. Many people don’t have credit cards and other payment methods are hard to implement.

Nokia’s answer: create the Arab region’s biggest music store. Stock it with millions of tracks (of both Western and Arabic music) and make a deal with the music companies that ultimately bypasses payment mechanisms and piracy by making the access to the music simply part of buying a phone. And Arabs love new phones. Great!

The more geeky of us might point out that all this music is copy protected and can only be played on the phone and one designated PC. But does the average young person care? Most young consumers play their music on their phones anyway. If they have their music library on their laptops as well, that pretty much cover their needs.

So how does this work in practice. For the past two months I’ve been living with a Nokia X6 review unit and I had the chance to test the Comes with Music service. The minute the phone landed on my desk I activated the Nokia music store account. After a bit of poking around the various OVI interfaces I had access to my millions of tracks. I immediately downloaded a couple of albums over wifi and everything worked fine.

Browsing and buying music on the X6 relatively small screen is the best of experiences. And given the rather unfriendly nature of the mobile interface (more about that later) I decided to try the service on a computer, using the Nokia music player application (their equivalent of iTunes).

Being a Mac user with an ancient PowerBook which doesn’t run windows, I had to go use my kids’ Mac Mini in Windows mode to install the Nokia music player. There, it was easier to browse and buy music. And I can tell you this: faced with an all-you-can-eat music store sent me on a crazy downloading spree. Now, I am not a Nancy Agram, Tamer Husni or even Fairouz fan. So I bypassed all the Arabic music selection (which I understand is the largest around) and went straight to my rather obscure musical interests, downloading one album after the other of Kraftwerk and even exploring music by Tangerine Dream and the likes. Amazing.

So the music store part of this deal is very interesting. I still have my misgivings regarding the DRM protection. But I sort of accept it as part of this all-you-can-eat deal.

But what about the phone? Would the X6 be my phone of choice? Sadly, my answer is a no.

A wooden spoon

I was somewhat excited about the phone knowing it is Nokia’s first capacitive touchscreen device (which means you don’t need to use your fingernails or a stylus to use it). The X6 also has a decent 5 Megpixel camera. But in the end it is Symbian and Nokia apparent total disregard for user-friendliness and usability which drags this device down to the ground.

Much has been written about Symbian lately. Even Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia’s new mobile division chief had to admit that Symbian has problems. I mean when someone like Ricky Cadden, the self proclaimed symbian guru turns his back on the platform and goes Android, then there’s no doubt that Nokia’s position has been greatly compromised.

At every touchpoint of the device experience, Symbian has let me down. Almost everything about Symbian is clunky. The way it manages WiFi and cellular data connection, the way it installs apps, the way you configure email, the way you use the browser, everything seems incoherent and difficult. The interface of the OVI store and services doesn’t help either. And Nokia’s desktop software has exactly the same problems.

It’s a shame really. The last Nokia device to excite me was the N900 running Nokia’s Maemo OS. Now that Nokia decided to merge its platform efforts with that of Intel to produce the MeeGo platform, even Maemo’s excitement has dissipated as Nokia’s fans await the new creation. And that at time when Apple marches from one success to the other, Android gaining strength with amazingly powerful devices and Blackberry still growing all over the world.

I know that the X6 is not a “flagship” device for Nokia. But even my wife’s three year old first generation iPhone has a better user experience (including the music buying experience).

Nokia as a company is now the anti-Apple. Nokia places a massive emphasis on being locally relevant. It has brought GPS mapping to the Middle East. It created the first amazing music store in the region and even figured out a way to bring it to this difficult market. Apple just sit in California and don’t give a damn about this region. You can’t even buy music from the iTunes music store with a Jordanian credit card for example (you can only buy apps). But Nokia is also the anti-Apple when it come to user experience. Three years into the iPhone age and Nokia still can’t produce a smooth experience. It’s actually hard to believe.

Personally, I will not continue using Symbian. I will go for an iPhone4 or an Android phone as soon as I can. But if you’re a hardcore music fan and don’t care so much about Symbian’s user experience, then the X6 and the Comes with Music service is worth exploring.

Nokia has promised to come out with more devices that include its comes with music service. On the horizon is also the new symbian^3 which will run the Nokia N8. So we will continue to see incremental improvements in Nokia’s devices. But the company has to come up with something profoundly more interesting if it wants to stay in the smartphone game, increasingly dominated by Apple, HTC, Google, Blackberry and co.

Can someone please explain this to me: brands and slogans that totally loose their edge when introduced into Arab markets.

Here are three examples:

I bought this shaving cream the other day. The tagline/product identifier say “Cool Kick” in English. The Arabic translates into “Cool Touch”. Oh how soft and nice!

Arab men can’t take a kick.. They can only handle a touch..

One of my favorites: The “For Dummies” series in Arabic. Clearly an Arab person can never be a dummy. No, no. At “worst” he/she is a “beginner”. So the whole “For Dummies” brand, which is funny, becomes the boring “For Beginners”. Hmmm.

And now my favorite..

The popular weight loss show “The Biggest Loser”. I mean how do you translate this into Arabic?

Brilliant idea: let’s call it “The Biggest Winner”..

What?? The whole point is to LOSE wait. But no.. let’s reverse the whole meaning!

Arab politeness? Respect? Oversensitivity? Swollen ego?

What is going on here?