The inaugural event of the Design Trust Council, "Gothamitis: Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Gopnik in Conversation" took place on May 2, 2007 in the Founders Room at the Museum of Modern Art.
Cultural phenomenon Malcolm Gladwell ( The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers) was joined by fellow New Yorker magazine writer Adam Gopnik ( Through the Children's Gate, Paris to the Moon), in a lively and provocative conversation entitled "Gothamitis." Keen observers of New York civic life, Gladwell and Gopnik approached the topic of "Gothamitis" -- what current development trends mean for the soul of our city -- from different perspectives.
Adam Gopnik:
" What we see is an enormous, increasingly enormous mono-cultural desert of sameness, with a Duane Reade on every block and a bank on every corner. When I walked out of my loft on Broome Street in 1983, I could have guaranteed with any direction I walked, I
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would find some new world. I would go into the Lower East Side and I would find an ethnic world, I would go towards the Village and I would find an older world of Bohemia. I went south and I would be in the new Bohemia of Tribeca. Everywhere I walked within 20 or 25 minutes, I could stumble on another world."
Malcolm Gladwell:
" If I had to guess what our streets would look like 10 years from now, I would say that this very process of increasing wealth, increasing social diversity, is going to drive a change in increased street level diversity, because to serve that kind of highly sophisticated heterogeneous population you need to do more than have a Washington Mutual that looks like every other one."
The entire conversation between Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Gopnik, along with audience questions, is now available as a podcast. Download the mp3 (116mb). Or, read the complete transcript (PDF, 2mb).
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