Complexcities

Chimps Advance; Humans Stuck in the Same Place

2007-02-23T09:04:00.000-08:00

I like this article from the Washington Post because the animal kingdom seems to advance all of the time. We, humans, just seem to be stuck at the top, and often unhappy about it.

Wondrous Happenings in the New Year

2007-01-02T19:57:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year, All! It's 2007 and perhaps it is the fresh and crisp new year, but I feel like blogging again today. Maybe it is all of the weird and wonderful news in today's paper:

1. Education Equals Longevity:

My friend Dan points out that at our rate -- since we've both been in school for quite a while now -- we should be off of the charts, according to this article.

2. Luck, Heroism, Altruism, All on the Subway:

Read about it here.

Nobel Peace and Literature Prizes Announced

2006-10-13T07:42:00.000-07:00

They announced the Nobel Literature Prize yesterday for Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish writer, and the Nobel Peace Prize for Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank for micro-finance. NYT articles on Pamuk and a summary of his work here, and the first AP article today on Yunus here, with certainly more to follow.

I have no quibbles with either prize: I think they're both well-deserved, timely, and trenchant choices by the Nobel Committee. It would be kind of nice if they could give an ironic 'booby Nobel' prize in war-mongering: I'm sure you will all have suggestions.

Pamuk is most recently and best-known for going on trial for 'insults to the Turkish state', or something as Orwellian-sounding as that, when he stated to a European newspaper that Turkey had never acknowledged the genocide of Armenians in 1915. This caused deserved but shrill outrage in the EU: I say deserved because this is clearly a litmus test for political expression, but I also say shrill because there are plenty of people in the EU and in its member countries who are looking for an excuse not to admit Turkey to the EU.

The work of Yunus and the Grameen Bank demonstrates a pragmatic and successful approach to development. The Grameen bank has now branched out into everything from cellphones to eye surgery. It also follows a nice and long Nobel trend of honoring non-state actors, who have pointed out, and done something about, issues of universal significance and moral urgency. You can see the complete list of Peace prize winners here.

Nobel Sweep, Continued but Not Likely to be Complete

2006-10-09T11:49:00.000-07:00

The sweep continues, with the Nobel Prize in Economics going to Edmund S. Phelps of Columbia University, for explaining the relationship between inflation and unemployment. NYT article here.

However, chances for the sweep are remote, with the prizes in literature and peace (!) coming up. The U.S. doesn't have a great track record in the Nobels in literature -- unless you count the fluke 1962 prize going to Steinbeck -- and the best (and most understated) thing I can say is that this is not the best year for our contributions to peace.

If you're interested, the Nobel Foundation has all of the Nobel Laureates listed here, with frequently touching and humble bios, speeches, and critical acclaim.

Prize-Winning Science

2006-10-06T10:43:00.000-07:00

This week, Americans swept the scientific Nobel Prizes -- in physics, chemistry, medicine -- for the first time since 1983. The prizes represent work done in the past, so don't necessarily represent the current state of science, but still, is a reminder of the success of American system of research universities.

Once, I had to suffer talking to an obnoxious Englishman at a work function, who was bragging about Europe's educational systems. I knew he was an idiot when he bragged about England's universities, which are a bit of a mess, really. I wish that I said, to be equally obnoxious: Europeans stamp out Nobel Prizes, we take them home. On a less obnoxious level, the diversity of our education system might seem chaotic, but it sure does produce some awfully good research.

Another nice story from the prizes this year: Roger Kornberg, a chemist at Stanford, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry forty-seven years after his father won the prize in medicine.

Best of all, the Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded yesterday!

The 2006 Ornithology Ig Nobel Prize went to a scientist who studied why woodpeckers do not get headaches, while the Medicine Prize was awarded to Dr. Francis Fesmire for his discovery that "digital rectal massage" is a sure cure for the hiccups. The recipient accepted his award wearing one latex glove. The real Nobel Prize Laureates in attendance waved at him with foam fingers. A demonstration of that invention was stopped just short of indecency.

Where (and What) Is Your Home?

2006-09-26T08:59:00.000-07:00

This article appeared on WorldChanging with slight modifications on September 25th, 2006.

I've been musing over the notion of home, because I actually went home this week, to western Massachusetts. I haven't figured out much, obviously, since I live in Seattle, Washington, yet consider home to be over 3,000 miles away. But then again, home is a fiercely individual concept: it's hard to articulate all the elements that make a 'home'; our location, and notion, of home may change over time; we may not live, or be able to live, for various reasons, at home; and how we are comfortable with the environment, people, and our place in the greater scheme of things, are all, I think, wrapped up in this notion of 'home'.

I muse a bit more about my home, and the concept of home in general, on the next page. Although many more brilliant writers have addressed the topic of home, then again, they didn't have blogs and commenting, so perhaps they don't matter! I'm kidding -- they do matter -- but they can't have the same kind of conversation that I'd like to have with you all.

What I'm really curious about is you, Oh Reader. Please write back and tell us about your homes. Where are you from? Where do you live now? Are they in the same place? If not, how often do you go 'home'? Does it still exist? How is it changing? Is it changing too fast, or too slow, for a brighter, greener future?

(jump)

My Home:

I'm from Amherst, which is a small college town in the Pioneer Valley in western Massachusetts, in the northeastern United States. The town is about an hour and a half to Boston and thre hours to New York. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, the population is about 35,000 residents, though estimates seem to vary wildly, because of the large number of students in the area. There are approximately 30,000 students in five colleges in the area. I was rather surprised to find that we have a Wikipedia entry, but you can also find out what is happening in town at the town's very own website.

I noticed a lot of things, since I've been gone for awhile. The maple tree in front of our house is now nearly four stories high, no matter that I can remember it back at ten feet tall. The whole town is overwhelmingly, lushly green, with vegetation spilling into the roads and streets near my home. Driving on a back road the other afternoon, I noticed a towering wall of clouds on the horizon on an otherwise clear day -- not a typical sight in New England, until I realized that it was evaporation off of the Connecticut River. Finally, we are at the beginning of fall in New England; despite the regular turning of the seasons, the changing colors of the autumn leaves never, ever fail to shock me. As the chlorophyll in the trees is slowly destroyed by the autumn's lower temperatures, for a few short weeks, all of the trees in New England are clothed in glorious, garish reds, oranges, and yellows.

There are also certain changes that I noticed that are less beautiful, too. The strip mall in the next town over continues to expand, with more than ten big boxes, all in a fat row. Behind my house, there's a subdivision on what used to be a farmer's field. My mom avoids the town center now, because of traffic congestion. There are a lot more SUVs than I remember, too.

Home & Environmentalism:

It seems to me that our (my) attachment to home has both positive and negative implications for environmentalism. I've written before about the long time scales in nature that we can barely perceive, and we regularly highlight in these pages how remote sensing has expanded our capability to envision and imagine our impact on the earth. At home, however, one has more opportunity to notice changes of all kinds -- environmental, economic, physical, social, aesthetic -- as part of everyday life. Changes seem to be more immediate, and the processes that change our environment may seem more in our control. We might be able to witness the changes in our gardens or local ecosystems. We may have time to go to our town meeting to protest zoning changes or new developments. At larger scales, candidates and issues may not always seem connected or relevant to our lives. Systems like schools and infrastructure are always hot-button local issues, because they affect people's children, streets, or businesses.

Of course, my attachment to home, and tradition, is not necessarily good. As time has passed, the town has certainly changed, but has it adapted enough? For example, my small town was once based on agriculture, but is now largely based on services. The town (and area) is still rather spread-out, and requires one to drive, mostly, to do anything at all. And whether or not I like it, my town remains certainly connected to larger scales. We didn't invent most of our ideas, our currency, our technology, our economic niche, or global warming, but all of those things will surely affect my town, as it will affect us all. (Unless we secede from the U.S., that is; I assure you that this has been discussed at the town meeting before).

Furthermore, even if we like our homes and the world is 'out there', the local scale is not always superior. This is what is frequently referred to in academia as 'the local trap': put simply, just because it's local, doesn't mean that it is good. Local agriculture and food, though it can be more tasty, can be much less efficient in production, which is no small concern in countries which don't produce enough food. Local farmers and homeowners can either be the best users, or worst abusers, of pesticides and chemicals. There are legitimate economies of scale, in food production, in infrastructure, and in energy production.

In social terms, also, the concept of home, and belonging to it, must accommodate both our attachments to places, and an expanding vision of universal citizenship, including awareness of the environment and human rights. In Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, David Harvey criticizes the emphatic focus of communitarian theories on local self-determination, something along the lines of, there are some small communities in Arizona and Utah in which homophobia, polygamy, and child brides are the norm. So, how do we reconcile our local attachments and universal ambitions?

Please Comment:

I'd like to know, where is your 'home'? Do you live there? How is it changing? Do you want it to change?

The Coast of Utopia

2006-09-18T06:02:00.000-07:00

Tom Stoppard has a trilogy of plays about the Russian Revolution, called the "The Coast of Utopia", opening at Lincoln Center in mid-October. I managed to get back to see one of the three plays in 2002, and it was kind of great, because it was at the National Theater in London, because the actors and atmosphere were freaking terrific, and because it captures a particular period of intellectual ferment and passion so well.

The plays do feel hugely uneven, but then again, so was the Russian Revolution! The charactization of ideas is largely based on Isiah Berlin's "Russian Thinkers", and I always thought that it would have been great to have read the book first and then to have seen the dramatization.

Anyway, the first play opens in New York on November 5th, and then the subsequent plays open in December and then January. As enthusiasm for the plays builds, so will the difficulty of getting tickets, so I really encourage you all to try to get tickets asap. I've always regretted not seeing more of them in London: one only needs to Google the name of the trilogy and read the ecstatic British reviews.

Atlanta blogs

2006-09-18T05:29:00.000-07:00

This post is essentially a blogroll of the sites that I like, dealing with all things Atlanta. I start with a short list, but I'll revise it periodically in the future [last updated 9/18/06].

- Atlantalarry
- Bloglanta

New Orleans: What's the Plan?

2006-09-18T02:28:00.000-07:00

This article originally appeared on WorldChanging.com, September 7th:

Or, to describe the situation more accurately, why isn't there a plan yet for New Orleans? Though we've posted about the great work done over the past year, and on the uneven overall state of recovery, urban planning has not proceeded -- it cannot proceed -- because there are so many unresolved questions about the future of New Orleans. Who gets to plan the new city? Who is being planned for? Can government, or the free market, build something as complex as a city? Meaning, if we rebuild it, will people come back? Or, is the city continuing a historic and inexorable decline?

This post has many more questions than answers, and none of them are intended to be merely rhetorical. As large, vague and unwieldy as these questions are, they're also worth looking at in closer detail, not only because this was an unprecedented catastrophe to befall a modern American city -- only Chicago and San Francisco seem to compare -- but because the situation in New Orleans also raises some hard questions for the practice of urban planning. The rebuilding of New Orleans -- hopefully, for the better -- will be the biggest story of this (my) generation of urban planners, and how we solve (or fail to solve) them now tells us something about the future of urban planning efforts both in New Orleans and elsewhere.

Footprints or Communities?: One of the chief planning questions for the city of New Orleans is the area of the future city, the so-called footprint on a map. How big will the city be? This question has surfaced repeatedly both in terms of physical planning and political reality, as reported in this Times-Picayune article:

[One] vision of the mayor's rebuilding commission [was] to shrink the developed area, the so-called footprint, of a city that now has 235,000 people but was originally developed to cater to a peak population of more than 630,000 in 1960. That idea failed essentially because Mayor Ray Nagin, then in a re-election battle, refused to support shrinking the city, a notion tantamount to political kryptonite in many neighborhoods that feared being bulldozed. Nagin's decision, or lack of one, sparked outrage among urban planners at a national level....

Echoing a point often made by the Urban Land Institute, a prominent planning association that crafted an early rebuilding blueprint, Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Oregon, said the city has failed a leadership test by refusing to shrink its developed area to match the realities of its shrunken population and flood control issues.... "I'm still looking for political leadership that is going to come clean with citizens and acknowledge that for the foreseeable future, it's going to be a smaller city," [American Planning Association Executive Director] Paul Farmer said.

Although most of the public and media seem to agree that Mayor Nagin has done little since winning a comeback re-election, calls for "leadership" fail to address the social realities that have resulted in the physical shape of the city. Namely, Katrina seemed particularly cruel and unjust, because the storm and subsequent flooding revealed that the low-lying land in New Orleans was extremely vulnerable to flooding; the cheapest land was inhabited largely by the poor; and therefore African-Americans were most vulnerable during the storm because they were most likely to be poor and segregated. The storm made one's race, class, and risk of dying brutally equivalent, and shockingly visible.

So, when planners talk about a smaller footprint, are they really talking about whether not to rebuild the African-American neighborhoods?. If those neighborhoods are not rebuilt, then are they really talking about moving people who are largely dispossessed, poor, and African-American? Does a smaller footprint and a smaller city mean that those people will go elsewhere? Is that in New Orleans, or out of New Orleans? Will those neighborhoods be preserved as communities -- wherever they end up -- or will they be dispersed? And, how will this be discussed? Will it be discussed at all? Which brings me to....

Is it a Just Planning Process?: Can the planning process in New Orleans ever be considered just, if it reflects the previous racial, social, and class divisions of the city? As I've been researching more about the city, I also asked a few friends, who are architects and planners working in and around New Orleans, what things that they felt were missing from the media coverage of the rebuilding effort.

A good friend from New Orleans, thought that what I -- and others -- are missing is the culture of government in New Orleans, where people expect the government to do nothing, or if it does anything at all, to do it with no great haste and unprecedented corruption. Another colleague said what is missing from press accounts is the level of racial distrust, the belief among poor African-American residents of New Orleans that nothing will be done fairly for them. She told me that without going there, one could not witness the legacy of distrust and suspicion among the residents, and how it quite literally colored their perception of the planning process. Finally, another colleague told me that the multiple planning processes are being run in haste, with not enough information being distributed to people, who have nowhere to meet, gather, organize, or communicate.

So, how can this miasma of distrust result in a just planning process.... or, is it just (another) planning process that masks existing power structures?

Is it Rebuilding or Redevelopment? The mayor of New Orleans has steadily maintained that all of the neighborhoods of New Orleans will be rebuilt because of a widespread economic boom and the power of the "free market". Most demographers, planners, developers, and business people, however, believe that the economic prospects for New Orleans are dimmer. Even before the storm, New Orleans already ranked third in poverty concentration, with a declining job and tax base.

Now that unprecedented sums of money are being pumped into New Orleans -- with much of the money going to individual homeowners and businesses -- can anyone predict what will happen to New Orleans? Will increasing amounts of economic activity lead to revitalization of the city, or will rebuilding the physical infrastructure do the trick?

The fairest thing to say, I think, is that we simply don't know what the future holds for New Orleans, because in many ways, we don't really know how to stimulate economic growth at the local level. The mechanics of economic development, whether through trade, technological change, social capital, or endogenous growth, is not well understood in theory or practice, particularly at the local level. We know that economic growth certainly won't occur if there isn't any housing, infrastructure, or insurance. However, the opposite is not necessarily true: we don't know if building any or all of these things are going to result in urban revitalization or economic growth.

So, if we rebuild the city as it was before, will it flourish? Will people return? Or, if we're redeveloping the city, what is our goal?

Why Has the Environmental Dimension Been So Quickly Forgotten? My last post mentioned that several environmental organizations released a report titled "One Year After Katrina: Louisiana Still a Sitting Duck" detailing the failure of the government and planners to address the continued erosion of New Orleans' wetlands that could have, and might still, protect the city from storm surges. However, the Times-Picayune mentioned that:

"Timed to coincide with the media attention on New Orleans as the region marks one year since Katrina made landfall, a news conference on Monday to release [the report] underscored how marginal the issue remains. Panelists from the environmental groups outnumbered reporters, and no national news outlets attended the event at the Jax Brewery in the French Quarter." (Times-Picayune)

It's not as if the phenomenon and consequences of storm surges are not well-understood: even before Katrina, a Scientific American article in 2001 detailed the effects of a hurricane on New Orleans, and many scientists had pointed out the dangers before the storm.

So, what is the role of positivist science in planning for the future, when the alarms are ignored? And, why have people forgotten so quickly the environmental causes of the original destruction?

New Orleans: What's Happening Now?

2006-09-18T02:25:00.000-07:00

This article originally appeared on WorldChanging, September 6th:

Over the past week, at the one year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, almost all of the world's major news outlets have been reporting on the progress of recovery, rebuilding, and healing. The words most often used to describe the progress of New Orleans seem to be "sporadic" and "uneven", so just to get a handle on what is and what is not happening, here's a brief summary of the major issues of the day in New Orleans, with a gallery of links at the bottom for more reading.

The return of residents to the city seems to have slowed, with continued uncertainty about where infrastructure, insurance, and funds will be available in New Orleans. Only half of the original population of the city has returned. The Wall Street Journal reports on the pace of the recovery effort, and how the lack of critical infrastructure is hampering the recovery and rebuilding. The article isn't free, but clearly identifies some of the major issues. The Brookings Institution, a think-tank focused on government, offers a list of indicators to monitor the post-Katrina rebuilding efforts and a survey of rebuilding efforts at the city, state, and federal levels. Many of the features below also discuss the state of rebuilding.

In addition to the other existing agencies, the Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA) was created by the Louisiana governor in October 2005 to coordinate planning and coordination of the recovery effort. Authorities like this -- such as the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation in the case of the World Trade Center attacks -- are often formed to focus on particular government projects, to channel federal and state funds, and often, to bypass normal government channels which are considered too slow. NPR has an interview with one of the board members, explaining its mission and priorities.

With no long-term plan in place one year after the storm, much has been made of the dueling teams of architects and planners working for various political and financial interests. The best summary is a recent Times-Picayune article. For those of you scoring at home, some of the agencies and organizations involved so far are the Urban Land Institute (ULI), a real-estate industry organization, and the mayor's own business-led Bring New Orleans Back (BNOB) commission, both of which suggested a smaller city footprint based on flood zones; separately, the City Council and the Greater New Orleans Foundation hired different consultants to work with each of the individual neighborhoods to draft their own plans; and finally, the Rockefeller Foundation awarded the Greater New Orleans Foundation (again) money to come up with a single plan, the Unified New Orleans Plan (UNOP). The chief issue seems to be how individual neighborhoods are allowed to plan for themselves; what areas receive infrastructure; and whether the individual or unified plan will qualify for federal rebuilding money. Fighting within the planning process, hopefully, will be resolved by a planning pact that was signed last Monday, also as reported by the Times-Picayune.

The multiple planning efforts -- and a general lack of enthusiasm for their results thus far -- also underscores how far apart individual and official perceptions of the planning process remain. Though it is easy to get absorbed in the various official efforts, the reality is that much of the public apparently remains confused, frustrated, and unable to participate fully in any planning process. A colleague working in New Orleans wrote the following to me:

"District planners are charged with coordinating the neighborhood plans to be folded into a city-wide plan -- by December. The process of selection [of consultants] was flawed.... the idea was to have an inclusive, community-based planning process.... [but] the entire election process was far from transparent. With only a few days to get information out to the public, two days of meetings in a city park (capacity of the room was probably about 300 people), and only a week to gather votes, it was far from inclusive and very confusing to the public" (their emphasis).

The deadline for planning to show results is rapidly approaching, because the federal government will begin (or at least, try to begin) disbursing money to individual homeowners for rebuilding, starting this month. In the absence of a coherent or sensible planning process, individual homeowners may vote where and how to rebuild with their feet, money and/or hammers, on an individual basis, and simply ignore a dysfunctional planning process. However, faced with a multitude of different programs and agencies -- such as Small Business Administration (SBA) grants, LRA, and FEMA money -- many individual homeowners remain confused and frustrated with the processes to obtain funds. The Times Picayune also reported on August 28 that the website for the "Road Home" grants was overwhelmed and was taken down because of technical problems.

One interesting aspect of the Katrina coverage is that the media has done a good job of highlighting the gap between the perception of individual homeowners, residents and workers, and that of government officials, because media articles have regularly alternated between human-interest stories at the individual level, and following the inner workings of government at the political level. Much of the original power of the Katrina story came from the incredible disconnect of city, state and federal government officials to the actual events (and suffering) on the ground, a tone and view that persists in the coverage of the rebuilding effort.

Mainstream media, you're doing a heck of a job.... except, perhaps, on environmental issues! One of the biggest stories about Katrina was the vivid interplay between environmental and social issues. What's happening, above all, with the wetlands and levee system? At Grist.org, Michael Grunwald reports that the levee system is being built again for Category 3 protection, and that the Corps are "studying Category 5 protection -- but instead of focusing on New Orleans, [the Corps] seems eager to dike most of coastal Louisiana, which would presumably destroy more wetlands and promote more floodplain development". Recently, as reported by the Times-Picayune, a number of environmental organizations released a report titled "One Year After Katrina: Louisiana Still a Sitting Duck" detailing the failure of the government and planners to address the continued erosion of New Orleans' wetlands that could have, and might still, protect the city from storm surges. However, the reporter goes onto note that:

"Timed to coincide with the media attention on New Orleans as the region marks one year since Katrina made landfall, a news conference on Monday to release [the report] underscored how marginal the issue remains. Panelists from the environmental groups outnumbered reporters, and no national news outlets attended the event at the Jax Brewery in the French Quarter." (Times-Picayune)

One important question that I'll comment more on in the future, is why has the environmental dimension of the Katrina catastrophe been so quickly forgotten? As for future hurricanes, hurricane season is being closely watched this year -- just Google "Ernesto", or check out NOAA's National Hurricane Center (NOAA NHC).

The psychological impact of the storm continues to be felt, with surveys reporting a surge in the number of mental issues among Katrina survivors, but with suicide rates flat. The legacy of the storm is also illustrated in the story of one local reporter.

More resources, including first-hand accounts, pictures, maps, and features are below:

Blogosphere on Hurricane Katrina:

Shakepeare's Sister has an extensive blogswarm, or round-up of blog links, for the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina (scroll down);
Coturnix offers a retrospective list of Katrina-related blog posts from the past year, both on his blog and others;
Flickr offers a big cluster of about 100,000 photographs tagged with "katrina";
Chris Mooney, New Orleans native and author of "The Republican War on Science", has an entry at the Huffington Post titled "Katrina, Science and Politics"; a personal recap of one-year after Katrina; and most of his more recent posts for scienceblogs.com also focus on Katrina and hurricanes;
Thoughts from Kansas has an appropriately thoughtful post on the role of science and politics in Katrina as well;
The World's Fair has a more unusual round-up of scientific research stimulated by Hurricane Katrina. There are several serious contenders for an Ig Nobel Prize here!
Both Stranger Fruit and Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge retain a sense of post-Katrina outrage at the incompetent response, which is a bit muted in the mainstream media, one year later.

News Media: Most major news outlets, both in the United States and abroad, have features on the impact of Katrina, one-year later:

The New Orleans newspaper, the Times-Picayune, reported rather heroically throughout Hurricane Katrina, winning two Pulitzer Prizes, and is perhaps the best local source of information at NOLA.com.
The New York Times has been running a series of articles called "Katrina Year", and offers the thoughtful, measured coverage that one expects from a national paper.
The Washington Post investigates why the cleanup and rebuilding has been so slow.
CNN.com's feature on Katrina has a fancy interactive map with pictures and updates on the progress of rebuilding.
National Public Radio, I think, has the most comprehensive feature, with a range of articles spanning from politics to personal stories, with web interactive pages on the population of New Orleans before and after the storm, a map showing the state of rebuilding, and above all, the power of radio to communicate in ways that mere pictures and words on a page cannot. What sticks with me the most sometimes are the haunting sounds of the people and places after the storm, and still before the rebuilding.

As for international media, I've been hoping to find rather different perspectives on Katrina, but all I came up with was rather typical reporting, probably because I'm only looking at English-language websites:

The BBC has a comprehensive, if typical, feature on Hurricane Katrina, one year later.
Al Jazeera reports on New Orleans' development dilemma. (I am fascinated by Al Jazeera on the web, if only because the English version is so... normal.)

Please suggest any pieces or links that you found intriguing, thoughtful, provocative, enraging, different, or whatever, below.

Do Global Sports Matter?

2006-08-29T13:24:00.000-07:00

This post first appeared on WorldChanging, August 28th, 2006:

Since going to my first World Cup this summer, I've been deeply conflicted about the meaning of sports, as sports this summer seem to have taken on all of the best and worst parts of an increasingly fast-moving, technological, competitive, and globalized society. What I'd like to examine today is, do sports have any role to play in building a global society?

As during previous World Cups, for the better part of June, I spent most of my waking hours thinking and reading about football. Much of the journalism written about the World Cup every four years always seems to belabor the point that the football teams somehow represent the 'characters' of the countries themselves. It certainly is a good opportunity to comment on the countries themselves, since much of the world seems to be so focused on the teams. For example, every game for the national team seemed to be an occasion for huge numbers of Germans to stop what they were doing, to cheer, to gather in public spaces and streets, and to wave the German flag: there was something surprising and great about being underneath the Cologne Döm with 30,000 German fans, singing an incredibly dorky football anthem: "Zum finale in Berlin!". The event itself seems to reveal some unexpected truths: just as many German journalists as foreign journalists seemed surprised by the level of interest in the national team, and the ubiquity of the German flag, and took it as a sign that Germany had moved on from a explicit fear of nationalism to a more benign national pride.

However, this time, the experience of going was actually quite different. Reading about the World Cup in previous years hadn't captured for me the experience of mixing that occurs between fans, and instead, what I found was that football, as a global sport, really does seem to transcend national boundaries. On any given day, in any given German city, you could see fans from around the world rooting for their own teams, for other countries' teams, and mingling pleasantly. In a first-round match between Togo and France, there was something incredibly bland and yet momentous about being in a stadium with 15,000 French fans singing "La Marseillaise" in Germany; but I got an even bigger thrill by watching the far-fewer Togolese fans, and most of the Germans in the stadium, good-naturedly root for Togo as the underdog in the match.

Before I get carried away with sports as a metaphor for global citizenship, however, it is also worth noticing, that since my trip earlier this summer, it has also been a rather disgraceful summer for sports. Even for those who like to read about sports, like myself, it has been difficult to keep track of the various scandals this summer.

Here's a brief summary of 2006's summer of sporting scandals. Some of the crucial later matches in the World Cup were marred by diving and brutish play. In the final match, the French hero Zinedine Zidane was sent off for 'head-butting' (really, assaulting) an Italian player, and the day after Italy's triumph, many of the leading Italian teams were indicted in a corruption scandal. As for other sports, they haven't been much better. The winner of the Tour de France, and leading track & field sprinters, have tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. If you're a fan of an American sport like (American) football, summer has seen a steady stream of athletes arrested for toting guns; and if you're a fan of an Commonwealth sport like cricket, then in the last week you have been subjected to the controversy over an Australian umpire's suspension of a game between England and Pakistan, with accusations of cheating, racism, and the umpire offering to resign in exchange for a payoff.)

Some observers have begun to tie these widespread scandals together as affecting all of sport. James Lawton, sportswriter for The Independent of London (not free), wrote earlier this week, "one by one the games we play are falling into disrepute... one by one they are inviting the big question: how long can sport, in its present form and morality, survive?". Across the globe, another sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, John Crumpacker, wrote a column titled "Who in the world can be a fan of this?".

The interesting thing is that many of these criticisms of sport do reflect many of our other concerns about the contradictions and conflicts inherent in an increasingly technological, globalized, competitive, and fast-moving society. Many of the ethical criticisms of sport could be applied to other topics that are more typically WorldChanging, such as global competition, values, and environmentalism.

Since I'm the conflicted one -- (I'm not sure if you care about sports as passionately as I do) -- I'll just present to you what I think are the positives and negatives of global sports:

(PLUS): People really, really care about sports, which may be the most perplexing fact for non-sports fans. If we simply look at facts and figures, then the global appeal of sports is hard to deny. The 2006 World Cup was watched by 5.9 billion people total, with about 93 million people watching each match on average, and 284 million people watching the final match (Reuters). The 2004 Olympics was watched by 3.9 billion people (unduplicated) in 220 countries, with the average viewer watching over twelve hours of Olympic coverage, according to the International Olympic Committee.

(MINUS): Why do we care so much about sports, and, are they in any sense, "important"? This is one question that I can't answer. For those interested in particularly Marxist or capitalist explanations, sports might seem to be truly the opiate of the masses. If you conclude that sports are merely the dumbed-down content that global media corporations are using to push advertising, and given the vast sums of money being spent on television and cable rights for sporting events, you are probably partially right, too.

(PLUS, mitigating): Sports do seem to be intrinsically popular. I am skeptical of the power of the media to push the popularity of sports, when the popularity of sports seems to be manifested at so many different levels, scales, and varieties. For example, the 1998 FIFA World Cup was broadcast free-to-air -- rather than on cable or paid broadcast -- and the 2006 FIFA World Cup was broadcast to a significant number of free-to-air partners. If anything, the mix of free-to-air and paid broadcasting indicates to me a wide variety of audiences and constituencies for sport. Even Al Jazeera has recently started sports coverage! On a less Marxist and more emotional level, in a 2000 profile on Salon.com, Roger Angell, the venerable New Yorker writer and famous baseball fan, has a wonderful and emotional explanation for why grown men and women care about sports.

(PLUS): Sports as global citizenship: Richard Giulianotti, a sociologist, argues in the edited book Sports and Human Rights in Global Society that "sport provides a potentially felicitous arena for sentimental education, as we encourage our fellow and future citizens to view other peoples as our fellow-players, team-mates and supporters." What I fiercely dislike about the typical American network coverage of the Olympics is their relentless effort to portray athletes from other countries as representatives of other countries in a kind of Disneyfied "It's a Small World After All" pageant. However, what I do like about the Olympics is that there are more countries and opportunities to see people who are from other countries. By putting people on the same playing field, they do provide a lens and a face for many to learn about other societies and cultures.

(MINUS): Global sporting events and human rights: The same authors find participation in global sporting events as enhanced opportunities for governments to surpress human rights, such as the rights of athletes in Soviet-era East Germany; athletes in Communist China; and the suppression of civil liberties and human rights of protesters at global sporting events.

(MINUS): Sports as intimately related to our conceptions of our bodies. 'Body criticism', particularly in academic critical theory in the 1990's, sought to identify the body as a fundamental point of resistance to global capitalism or technology -- in short, because we fundamentally care about what what we eat and whether we are healthy, this was thought to be a realm that could not be co-opted by the logic of capitalism or technology. Now, with all of the scandals that I have mentioned above -- particularly involved dizzying amounts of performance-enhancing drugs -- it is certainly difficult to subscribe to the romantic ideal of most athletes as just like you and me. Many modern athletes, through either systematic programs of talent evaluation or training regimens, technology, or diet, probably bear little resemblance to the amateur athlete.

(PLUS): Conflicting opinions about technology in the pursuit of performance. What is interesting to me is that we are profoundly conflicted in our pursuit of athletic excellence. On one hand, you could view the level of outrage over the use of drugs by athletes as profoundly hypocritical, because athletes have been driven to use enhancements by a winner-take-all mentality. On the other hand, I think one could view the criticism as an expression that people are unable to identify with athletes that they see as drug-enhanced machines. In short, I'm certainly worried by the revelations of drugs in sport, but what I'll be more worried about some day, is when there is no criticism.

(PLUS): The spirit of play. There is really no saying which team -- the most efficient (Germany), the most stylish (Brazil), the most athletic (perhaps, the U.S.) -- is going to win. It's why people watch the games, and then we try to draw meaning and conclusions from the result.

So, Readers, what do you think about sports? Are they great? Are they stupid? And why are they so important to so many people?

The Heat is a Happening

2006-08-07T18:16:00.000-07:00

This post first appeared on WorldChanging.com on August 7th, 2006:

Everyone's talking about the weather, so let me first give a bit of background. Much of the eastern United States, including New York, Chicago, and most of the East Coast, has been wilting under a heat wave this past week. This follows last week's heat wave in California that is now suspected of killing over 160 people; and that followed the much-publicized heat wave and blackout in New York two weeks ago that left "100,000 people in western Queens in muggy darkness last month". The website Think Progress further details the heat waves that have hit most parts of the United States already this summer, as well as the Czech Republic, Britain, and Germany, and immediately makes the connection to global warming.

Are heat waves on the rise in terms of frequency as a result of global warming? This always comes up in the media when heat waves (and hurricanes) strike. Though global warming is certainly occurring, climate scientists tend to stick to probability when talking about particular climate events. RealClimate.org -- my favorite climate website both because of its scientific authority and teaching excellence -- doesn't have a post on this subject yet, though I'd certainly appreciate one. Two widely reported articles from the AP and NBC cite a number of different scientific sources on the possible connections between heat waves and global warming. For those of you who want to browse global extremes and hazards at home (that is, Weather Channel types, you know who you are), you can check out the NOAA National Climate Data Center's (NCDC) page on global hazards and extremes.

Heat waves certainly seem to be rising in severity. As the Pew Center on Climate Change writes (in its typically bland manner), "well-publicized death tolls from heat waves in 1995, 1998, and 1999 have focused public attention on the effects of warmer temperatures on human health,", referring to the estimated number of deaths in Chicago (600), the southern United States (200), and the eastern United States (500), respectively. The greatest recent disaster, however, was the 2003 heat wave in Europe that is estimated to have killed nearly 15,000 people in France, and between 20,000 and 35,000 excess deaths over the entire continent.

Now, with all of that background in hand, what is interesting to me is what the heat is doing to people everywhere, and how it is changing how we think, talk, and react to the sheer, inescapable somatic experience of heat. We've already written about how we stand at a 'teaching moment' regarding global warming, with the success of "An Inconvenient Truth", Tom Brokaw's special on the Discovery Channel, and the cover of Time magazine. However, what's also really interesting are the myriad ways in which people have to reconsider their actions, lifestyles, and perceptions in the face of their physical discomfort.

A 'happening' in the classic art sense "juxtapos[es] a variety of aural and visual material in a non-representational manner, with the aim of moving the spectator at an unconscious rather than a rational level" (Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought). These heat waves juxtapose unfamiliar intellectual, social, and economic connections between energy use, cooling, comfort and safety; what makes them fascinating both in the media and at the water cooler (of course) is that it affects everyone in a region (or country) simultaneously, despite our best cooling technologies, and you get responses ranging all over the geographic and media map. For example, in the past week you had The Huffington Post reporting on strains on the entire U.S. power grid, Bloomberg and the BBC news reporting on soaring natural gas prices as result of air conditioner use in the U.S., and news outlets from Toronto to Sacramento to Philadelphia talking about urban heat island effects. The New York Times' recent reporting on the heat waves, and the responses to actual and possible blackouts, makes clear that city officials at the local level are taking seriously the risk of power grid failure posed by intense energy usage. There have even been viral e-mails and fast-spreading rumors about the heat.

Of course, though heat affects all of our social interactions, heat doesn't affect everyone the same way. Eric Klinenberg's 2002 book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, details how gaps in Chicago's infrastructure and social systems were exposed by the sudden impact of the heat wave (from an excellent interview with the author here):

The ethnic and racial differences in mortality are also significant for what they can teach us about urban life. The actual death tolls for African Americans and whites were almost identical, but those numbers are misleading. There are far more elderly whites than elderly African Americans in Chicago, and when the Chicago Public Health Department considered the age differences, they found that the black/white mortality ratio was 1.5 to 1.....

Another surprising fact that emerged is that Latinos, who represent about 25 percent of the city population and are disproportionately poor and sick, accounted for only 2 percent of the heat-related deaths. I wrote Heat Wave to make sense of these numbers—to show, for instance, why the Latino Little Village neighborhood had a much lower death rate than African American North Lawndale. Many Chicagoans attributed the disparate death patterns to the ethnic differences among blacks, Latinos, and whites—and local experts made much of the purported Latino "family values." But there's a social and spatial context that makes close family ties possible. Chicago's Latinos tend to live in neighborhoods with high population density, busy commercial life in the streets, and vibrant public spaces. Most of the African American neighborhoods with high heat wave death rates had been abandoned—by employers, stores, and residents—in recent decades. The social ecology of abandonment, dispersion, and decay makes systems of social support exceedingly difficult to sustain....

Chicago had such a high mortality rate because it is, as Mayor Daley quipped during the heat wave, the classic American city of extremes. It is a city of great opulence and of boundless optimism, but—as William Julius Wilson says—Chicago also suffers from an everyday "emergency in slow motion" that its leaders refuse to acknowledge. The heat wave was a particle accelerator for the city: It sped up and made visible the hazardous social conditions that are always present but difficult to perceive. Yes, the weather was extreme. But the deep sources of the tragedy were the everyday disasters that the city tolerates, takes for granted, or has officially forgotten.

Similarly, the 2003 heat wave in France triggered a debate about French social priorities and health care systems, causing the president and prime minister of France to blame, among other things, the 35-hour work week, the structure of the French health care system, and French families leaving behind the elderly on vacations.

And what kind of changes have come about? Well, New York City and other cities responded aggressively with first-responders and cooling centers this week. As for Paris, well, there's always the plage.

From Gaia to sprawl

2006-05-28T10:09:00.000-07:00

A rather puckish real estate article in today's New York Times:

"In 1991, eight researchers in dark blue Star Trek-style uniforms entered Biosphere 2 -- a vast terrarium in the Arizona desert north of Tucson -- hoping to spend two years inside without importing food, water, or even air. The goal was to see whether the sealed environment, considered a microcosm of the Earth's, could become self-sustaining.... As it turns out, the real science experiment was going on outside, as development conquered vast swaths of the Sonoran desert. The Biosphere, miles from nowhere when it was built in the 1980s, is now within the reach of a building boom streaking north from Tucson and south from Phoenix (and which some demographers say will eventually join the two cities, once 100 miles apart)."

Jane Jacobs Remembered

2006-04-26T22:30:00.000-07:00

Jane Jacobs, the activist and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, died Tuesday in Toronto, at age 89.

Right now I'm just reading a lot about her in a lot of news outlets that rarely cover notable urban planners -- with Jacobs' passing, it is debatable if any more such people exist -- and I'm working on longer posts about what her work has meant for urban planners over the past forty years; and her turn towards economics in recent years, but there is plenty of coverage right now of her death.

The full spectrum of obituaries is rather interesting, with many articles listed on Google News. Canadians proudly claim her as one of her own, with almost every major Canadian newspaper and network reporting often, including the front page of the Globe and Mail, extensive coverage and heartfelt gratitude from the Toronto Star, and CTV all reporting on her death. The New York Times obituary, though four pages long, is obnoxiously self-referential, in that every other paragraph seems to refer to the opinions of their architecture critics about Jacobs through the years, all of whom collectively seem rather small and foolish when compared to Jacobs. There are also long obituaries from the LA Times, Reuters, the Associated Press (via the Seattle Times), and the Financial Times.

The blogosphere has also taken note, with an excellent post on Gothamist offering extensive links; Curbed doing what it does best (or worst, really), a contest for the most "Jane Jacobs Block". An article on Grist calls for an re-appreciation of her by greens, but right now, there are only three short comments. A full list can be found via Technorati.

As for specialist magazines, Planetizen, the urban planning portal, offers a tribute here. City Comforts mostly notes other blog posts about her. IMHO, the best recent re-appraisal of Jacobs appeared in a presciently appreciative article by 2blowhards.com, with an extensive discussion, written on February 6, 2006.

Technorati Tags: cities, Jane Jacobs, New York, Urbanism, urban

An invisible present, an invisible place, an invisible blog

2006-04-20T09:11:00.000-07:00

Sorry not to have been blogging much this winter. It's been a long winter of work, and for a period of time, I didn't have a tremendous amount of new stuff to write about. My energies have also been dispersed between a number of nascent projects, and a few of them have internal blogs that have been sapping my energy to write publicly. Nonetheless, lately I've been brimming over with ideas, so I hope to get back up to speed soon.

Also, I have had a number of projects that completed. The report that I was writing for the Design Trust for Public Space, titled "Sustainable New York City", was issued in late January. You can find a nice .pdf copy here. I very pleased with the graphic design, and I hope that people find the ideas in it useful.

More recently, I wrote a guest post for WorldChanging, one of my favorite sustainability blogs, on April 19, 2006, titled "An invisible present, an invisible place". I've copied it below, and the archive copy is here.

Every day, we learn more about how we are changing the natural world, from the most intimate scales, such as the loss of unique species, to the most universal, such as climate change that will affect everyone, everything, and everywhere for hundreds of years. How can we possibly comprehend these changes in nature? As ecologists have written, we live in an invisible present, where natural processes and change occur over generations, and within invisible places, such as broader landscapes, ecosystems, and regions.

One way that we're learning about the rhythms and scales of the natural world is through the Long-Term Ecological Research Network (LTER), funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. Begun in the 1960s, the LTER network now comprises 26 research stations, each devoted to the long-term study of an ecologically-distinct area, such as lakes, deserts, cities, prairies, wetlands, and forests. An overview of the entire effort is here.

Each relatively large station, and coordination across the entire network, allows more than 1,800 scientists to study big ecosystems for long periods of time. Novel experiments include constructing over a hundred mini-prairies in central Minnesota to observe the importance of biodiversity to ecosystem health; monitoring one of the nation's fastest growing cities, Phoenix, and its surrounding desert ecosystem; finding connections between El Nino, plague, and prairie dog populations in New Mexico (plus prairie dog cam, here!); and observing lakes in Wisconsin to observe minute chemical changes over 25-year periods.

Part of the challenge of building a sustainable society will be to synchronize our perception and ourselves with the intrinsically different rhythms and scales that exist within nature. And what could be bigger than the LTER? As of November 2005, 32 countries on six continents have joined the International LTER network.

More new ideas should be following soon.

Online Flipping in Real Estate

2006-03-13T08:48:00.000-08:00

Apparently people are now even flipping real estate online, sight unseen. Article from the New York Times here

(via NPR, via Slashdot)

Freedoms

2006-01-06T08:57:00.000-08:00

A disturbing story in the New York Times today about how Microsoft shut down the site of a Chinese blogger after complaints from the Chinese government.

"The decision is the latest in a series of measures in which some of America's biggest technology companies have cooperated with the Chinese authorities to censor Web sites and curb dissent or free speech online as they seek access to China's booming Internet marketplace.... Microsoft drew criticism last summer when it was discovered that its blog tool in China was designed to filter words like 'democracy' and 'human rights' from blog titles. The company said Thursday that it must 'comply with global and local laws.'"

Also, it's not just Microsoft; there is plenty of scorn to go around. This follows an on-going discussion about Microsoft's (and other technology companies like Yahoo! and Google) complicity in helping the Chinese government to limit free speech. The Vice-President of the European Commission actually has a blog and commented on the behavior of American companies last summer here. The best way to learn about the issue is to follow an ongoing debate between Robert Scoble, Microsoft's official "technology evangelist", and Rebecca MacKinnon here, and most recently, here.

This subject departs from my usual commentary on cities, but because it's a new year, and because I'm starting a few new blogs, I want to stop and think about my freedom to comment at all. Freedom, it's a much-abused word these days, particularly when our government and president have repeatedly use it as a pretext to deprive us of it. But we should not be distracted by Orwellian double-speak into forgetting that freedom of expression is certainly a value worth having, and fighting for, for everyone.

Also, as a Chinese-American, I certainly don't buy the argument that the Chinese government in any way shape or form reflects the lack of desire for the Chinese people for freedom of expression. Although the idea of universal human rights is relatively new -- only taking shape in the last fifty years -- the power of the idea stems from the fact that they are considered -- no, have been proven to be -- universally appealing and necessary.

Cities and Water (and Beer and French Fries)

2005-11-24T16:51:00.000-08:00

One can scarcely write enough about the importance of water to cities. Water is obviously critical for drinking, agriculture, sanitary sewage, washing, plus a whole host of industrial processes; yet somehow, as I've read more about the subject over the past year, I've had the nagging feeling that somehow we don't properly appreciate, or imagine, what the consequences of water mismanagement are.

Hurricane Katrina obviously provided an object lesson in the ability of water to wipe out an entire city. Two articles, one on television and one on the radio, recently brought home more pictures of devastation in a way that reading text cannot. A 60 Minutes article on Katrina last week showed the complete destruction of the neighborhoods, using an effective gimmick: they hired a cherry picker to lift the camera 60 feet into the air, and as far as you can see, the houses and neighborhoods are destroyed. This NPR article (in audio, text and images) gives a haunting sense of what it's like to be in the still-empty city.

If you find it, as I do, difficult to imagine that a city's water supplies could be jeopardized -- wouldn't we just adapt and adjust? -- then there's this news (IHT, LA Times) just in from China: the entire city of Harbin (population 4 million) is having its water supply shut-off due to potential water contamination with toxic benzene:

(International Herald Tribune) BEIJING, Nov. 24 - The Chinese government's decision to cut potentially contaminated supplies of fresh water to a major city has highlighted the threat that industrial pollution poses to public health and economic development across the nation.

Almost four million people in Harbin in northeastern China are expected to be without running water until late Saturday after a chemical plant explosion on Nov. 13 contaminated the upper reaches of the nearby Songhua River with toxic benzene.

A 50-mile stretch of the river carrying the benzene reached Harbin this morning, Shi Zhongxin, director of the city's water bureau, said on state television, according to the Associated Press. The contaminated water was expected to take 40 hours to make its way through the city.... The airport and railroad stations were reported Wednesday to be jammed as residents tried to leave.

The Financial Times reports that this may have consequences beyond the immediate shortage, including contamination of the food chain, the Telegraph (UK) details some of the health effects of benzene.

The strangest aspect of this is that some of the immediate reports on the Web were on the implications for beer and french fry production.

[Update: Water has been restored to Harbin. A few more details have emerged about why details about the toxic chemical spill emerged so late, and what steps the Chinese government took (and didn't take) to restore water service. Also, the Chinese government issued a rare public apology to the Russian government, because the river flows into China towards the town of Khabarovsk:

NYT, Nov. 27th: The Harbin disaster began with a Nov. 13 explosion at the chemical plant in Jilin, a city about 120 miles southeast. Five people were killed and 10,000 evacuated.

But it was only last week that the government announced that the Songhua had been poisoned with 100 tons of benzene. The spill is possibly the biggest ever of the chemical, a potentially cancer-causing compound used in making detergents and plastics.

State media have criticized local officials for reacting too slowly and failing to tell the public the truth in a timely manner. Environmentalists have said the government failed to prepare for such a disaster and questioned the decision to allow construction of a plant handling such dangerous materials near important water supplies.

AP summary here, New York Times article here, and BBC article here].

Technorati Tags: China, cities, Katrina, New Orleans, urban, water, wetlands

A Retrospective View of New York

2005-11-20T22:41:00.000-08:00

A neat article in the New York Times about a series of articles in 1955, envisioning what New York would look like in... 2005! I hope that they consider continuing this theme.

All of the urban visions and pronouncements are quite plain, really -- when what I was really hoping for was something quaintly futuristic -- though it gives me pause to think about whether anyone could have, or can, really envision the New York City of today, that is Internet-enabled, cell-phone-toting, immigrant-filled, gridlocked by cars yet still serviced by the same decaying infrastructure, with low crime yet frayed neighborhood character. Most of all, I'm curious, were people as obsessed by real estate and education as they are now?

New York City: Bloomberg Wins Big

2005-11-18T20:31:00.000-08:00

New York City re-elected Mayor Michael Bloomberg over his Democratic challenger Freddy Ferrer, the former Bronx Borough President, about a week and a half ago. FYI, in the spirit of full disclosure, I used to work in the Bloomberg New York City government, but these are really just observations of the media.

I don't feel bad blogging about it well after the fact, because though the election just ended last week, the election seems like it has been over for months. Ferrer never seemed to find his footing against Bloomberg, who turned most of his potential disadvantages into advantages:

his relatively colorless public persona came to signify his competence at governing;

his inexperience in government was billed as an antidote for those things that we dislike most about our politicians and politics;

his willingness to use his fortune both in strategic philanthropy and to buy (oops, I meant) to win the election never became a handicap;

his initial opportunistic switch from registered Democrat to Republican candidate played well in a Democratic town (even better than his newfound appreciation of the Yankees after being a lifelong Red Sox fan);

all in all, the past four years were roundly considered a relief after the histrionic and divisive Giuliani era.

Upon reflection, I find myself offering all of these snarky caveats, not because Bloomberg is a bad mayor, but because by the manner of his election. It is true that he is a well-meaning public servant, since he could otherwise retreat to a pretty good life without all of the hassle; and it is true that he governs competently and efficiently. The democratic process, however, is poorly served by the basically unlimited sums of money that he spent on the election -- estimated at $74 million -- and by the fact that no one really discussed the fact that this wealth translates into privileged speech in the public realm.

If this sounds too academic, make no mistake about it, everything about Bloomberg's campaign was enabled by his immense wealth, which resulted in less debate and less real dialogue (though this was aided by Ferrer's lack of ability to engage in dialogue, either).

Though I don't miss election campaign drama for it's own sake, I think that there is real value in the process of the debate, and real value in being able to identify with your politician's values and community. Elections are one of the chief arenas for both politicians and electorates to build this rapport. I don't mean simply the politics of personal identification, but I mean the process by which communities and leaders begin to talk about what matters to them, what messages resonate, and what goals are worthy of focus in the upcoming term. Sure, it can be -- and is often -- blithely stated that money influences politics, but if that is a fact of life, then it certainly is a disappointing one. Belief in democracy requires one to work against this cynical certainty.

So, in the absence of any real suspense, most of the articles have focused on the significance of Bloomberg's large margin of victory, and particularly what it says about New York City after just about everything: post-Giuliani, post-September 11th, and post-racial politics:

The best article I've seen is by Greg Sargent in the online edition of the American Prospect, which finds hope in Bloomberg's "smart-government liberalism", yet the article also (quite fairly) analyzes the issue of Bloomberg's wealth, and differing media coverage of Bloomberg and Ferrer. These questions should have been asked during the campaign, and discussed more widely, but the issues seem to have met with resignation and indifference more than anything else.

There's an interesting article from the New York Times about how the Bloomberg campaign developed new profiles of the electorate, including Fearful and Anxious New Yorkers (FANS), middle-class moderates of all races ("Middle Middles"), cultural liberals, and so on. Kevin Sheeky, City Hall spokesman, spins it as a path for "future candidates to communicate with voters on something other than race- or religion-based formulas". One of the main points of the article, though, is that it takes a mere $10 million to create;

Many articles on the most expensive city election on history, with Bloomberg spending roughly $70 million. An article from the New York Times on Nov. 4th, based on campaign filings, put his spending at close to the $74 million spent in 2001 (NYT, restricted access). For a final tallied vote of 723,635 votes (NYT), that's more than $100 per vote. (New York Times, Yahoo!).

The weakness of Fernando Ferrer as a candidate (NYT). I'm surprised to find some good commentary that I agree with from the Wall Street Journal (it's not free), by one of the editors of City Journal, which explains well the palpable disconnect between the local Democratic party and the vast Democratic electorate.

Mayor as an outsider: Otis White has a nice piece at Governing about the trend towards mayors elected from outside politics, including some other highly regarded current mayors, like Atlanta's Shirley Franklin, Denver's John Hickenlooper, and others.

So, what comes next? This news analysis from the New York Times, released on election night -- and clearly prepared well in advance -- speculates on what Mayor Bloomberg is going to do this newfound political capital.

This week, Bloomberg already appointed some of his top officials to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, in an effort to shake up the Ground Zero rebuilding effort (NYT).

Sadly, one of the things that Bloomberg has already rejected is congestion pricing (NYT, New York Observer). (Sorry, Green Economics, I liked your spirit.)

Technorati Tags: cities, New York, urban

Atlanta Re-Branded

2005-11-14T19:51:00.000-08:00

A story on NPR about the "re-branding" of Atlanta, which harnesses hip-hop to promote Atlanta in a rather funky song called "The ATL" -- plus you can hear blues and symphonic versions of their song!

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has an article about the reaction to it here. It could be spreading like wildfire, for all I know. I have to doubt, however, Mayor Shirley Franklin's assertion that the song will play equally to youth and international global corporations.

Technorati Tags: Atlanta, cities, hip-hop, marketing, urban

Paris is Burning

2005-11-14T18:01:00.000-08:00

I begin this post as I used to start letters -- when I used to write them -- by apologizing for my absence. I've been more than a little bit preoccupied by economics and statistics lately -- doing homework again is quite a shock -- but lately I've found a little bit of time to think about the insistence on, or persistence of, real cities and local issues. In particular, I've been reading a lot about Paris lately.

The latest coverage seems to indicate that the riots in Paris are slowly ebbing (NYT). Nonetheless, the coverage in Europe must be searingly intense, if only because most European countries seem to have relatively large and distinct Muslim communities. The Washington Post has a good roundup of world opinion here, and in particular, a summary article titled "Europe Wonders 'Could It Happen Here?'").

As an American living in Europe, I always thought that the common cultural heritage of the European countries outweighed any differences between their more recent efforts towards the oft-stated goal of 'integration'. Despite their efforts, all of those countries closely identify citizenship with national identity. Until they figure out a model that allows assimilation -- independent of, at the very least, ethnic identity -- it is hard not to imagine this kind of anger and frustration.

French President Jacque Chirac, in his first speech since the outbreak of riots, spoke to this as an "identity crisis" at the heart of French society (here) (though one can't imagine him navigating such a contentious issue very well. I doubt that the man who cited English food as a reason not to have the Olympics in London is not going to be able to come up with anything deep). One can't help but think that this is the third consecutive blow to French identity and confidence this year, following the failure to win the 2012 Olympics, and the 'no' vote on the European Union.

There's good English-language coverage of the French riots at the BBC and the Guardian. The Christian Science Monitor examines the roots of the riots here. These urban riots, of course, also remind me of the American failures to integrate African-American migrants from the South into cities like Detroit, Los Angeles and Newark (which I've written about before, here).

Technorati Tags: cities, Europe, immigration, Paris, politics, regeneration, urban

UN-Habitat "Jam"

2005-11-09T05:14:00.000-08:00

Hi all, I was recently alerted to the upcoming online event, that I thought you might all be interested in. You can join in, it's free, and could be interesting.

From December 1-3, the Habitat JAM online event (here) will bring tens of thousands of people around the world together to discuss and debate some of the most urgent and controversial issues that face our rapidly urbanizing planet. The Government of Canada, in partnership with IBM and UN-HABITAT, is sponsoring this 72-hour online event as part of the preparations for the third session of the World Urban Forum, which is being held June 19-23, 2006 in Vancouver, Canada.

There are six topics to be discussed in the Habitat JAM based on the themes chosen for the third session of the World Urban Forum. The JAM forum
topics are:
* Improving the Lives of People Living in Slums
* Sustainable Access to Water in Our Cities
* Environmental Sustainability in Our Cities
* Finance and Governance in Our Cities
* Safety and Security in Our Cities
* Humanity: The Future of Our Cities

The event itself raises some interesting questions about social organization outside of physical spaces. IBM seems to have used this mode of online organizing in its own strategic planning, which is described more broadly (if not in detail) here.

More later.

Blog Ambition + Temporary Hiatus

2005-10-14T09:01:00.000-07:00

I've just taken an inadvertent one month hiatus from blogging, which is likely to become a bit longer. I've moved to Seattle, and have been completely sucked into life here, between having to find my way around, find my way to things, and just starting school in urban planning. So, it's unlikely that I will get to post much this fall.

My plan for this blog is to work more on updating its structure this fall. I'd like to move it to a separate domain address -- I'll keep you updated. Also, I'd like to add the nifty features that I've seen on other blogs, including:

photographs
photographs
photographs
e-mail sign-up for updates
a more thorough and updated blog roll
categories for posts
calendar, and forward/back buttons

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, and please keep this blog in mind later in the fall. If you'd like to contact me, my e-mail address is to the right hand side.

New Orleans: A Natural or Manmade Disaster?

2005-09-06T13:03:00.000-07:00

Natural disasters like hurricanes do not seem to be, at first glance, of our own doing. Much of the shock of the event, I think, has been connected to the fumbled response and helplessness of the people left behind in the city. However, now that the shock of Hurricane Katrina is passing -- at least for everyone watching -- there seem to be a lot of thoughtful articles on the complex interaction between the city of New Orleans, its infrastructure, and the alteration of the natural geography of the area.

Flood Control Systems
The most obvious feature of New Orleans is that it lies below sea level, nominally defended by a complex system of levees, dikes, and canals. For those playing catch-up on the news, there is a nice general introduction at the Guardian. There are also excellent interactive graphics, updated daily, at the New York Times and Washington Post. The New York Times also recounts how the system and city came to exist in its precarious location last week, surveys a variety of flood control and flood protection systems, mostly in Europe, and follows scientists as they study the effects of the storm.

A lot of the infrastructure that ultimately failed was built in the name of flood control, but because water shapes our daily lives so powerfully, the Army Corps of Engineers' role as a water management agency has become more complex. There is a lucid description of the Army Corps' history at CounterPunch (though I find this article concludes oddly when abruptly turns from history into current politics). Beyond the immediate outcry over the Bush administration's diversion of funding of flood control projects, what should the role of the Army Corps be? There are a couple of National Academy reports on the Corps' role here. Maybe it's a bit early, but the next logical question to me is: what's the long-term future of this system?

Natural Protection from Storms
Storm systems such as hurricanes gain strength in the open ocean. The Guardian has a nice interactive graphic on how hurricanes are formed here. The Wall Street Journal science writer points out that many aspects of the storm damage are human-caused here:

More than a million acres -- 1,900 square miles -- of Louisiana's coastal wetlands have been lost to development and flood controls since the 1930s, along with barrier islands and stands of coastal forest. Louisiana continues to lose about 25 square miles of coastal area each year. These natural barriers could have absorbed some energy and water from Katrina's storm surge and mitigated the hurricane's force; studies estimate that storm surges rise by about a foot for each square mile of wetlands lost.

The Worldwatch Institute also finds that economic losses continue to increase with the frequency of extreme weather events:

In 2004, weather-related disasters caused nearly $105 billion in economic losses (in 2003 dollars)—almost twice the total in 2003. Roughly 12,000 weather-related disasters since 1980 have caused just over 618,200 fatalities and cost a total of 1.3 trillion. Average annual economic losses from such events have risen from $26 billion in the 1980s to $67 billion over the last decade. Average annual fatalities due to weather, meanwhile, jumped from 22,000 in the 1980s to 33,000 in the 1990s.

The state of Louisiana and the federal government came up with a coastal restoration and protection plan in 1998 called Coast 2050, which restores and/or mimics the functioning of the natural ecosystems that previously protected the shore (though perhaps not beachfront properties). The Louisiana Coastal Area Ecosystem Restoration Project has a lot of statistics and maps on the economic and ecological value of the coast. There is a comprehensive look at coastal restoration from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration here. The question, is of course, how to pay for it, and the state and federal government were wrangling over the plan as recently as last week before the storm here.

Extreme Weather Events
RealClimate addresses whether hurricanes and global warming are connected directly here. Grist has already started covering the coverage of climate change and Katrina here, with a number of well-known science journalists pitching in their views. WorldChanging is angry, feisty, and declares Katrina to be both a watershed and harbinger of things to come here:

This tragedy was no "Act of God" -- some utterly unforeseen tragedy about which nothing could be done. This was a completely predictable (indeed, predicted) unnatural disaster. For years, scientists and engineers have been warning of the danger New Orleans was in. For years, nothing was done.... We also know that Katrina was just a foretaste of what we should expect in the coming years. We are changing the weather with the pollution we spew from tailpipes and smokestacks, and the bill for that irresponsibility is starting to come due.

Technorati Tags: cities, ecosystems, New Orleans, wetlands

Watching New Orleans Dissolve

2005-08-31T19:42:00.000-07:00

We're all watching New Orleans dissolve right now, first under the rain and wind of Hurricane Katrina; second, when the levee broke and flooded the entire city; and third, in the heat and water and dissolution of social bonds. It's awfully hard to watch.

1. The Weather: The magnitude of the physical forces hitting New Orleans is rather mind-boggling in this satellite image of Katrina from the European Space Agency. The NASA Earth Observatory has images here. There is a terrific list of more web maps and satellite images of Katrina in the Map Room.

2. The News: Google News has 6,150 stories about New Orleans and Katrina. Boing Boing has a partial list of New Orleans blogs and webcams here. Nola.com has a lot of coverage on New Orleans, and a weblog of stories from the disaster.

Most of the articles, like this one, seem disbelieving that this happened to a city, let alone to New Orleans. Looting seems to have begun quickly, and the newscasts I watched tonight all focused on the desperation of people unable to obtain basic food, water, medical attention, or fuel. Transportation in and out of the city is paralyzed by water.

All of the networks and newspapers are there. I usually find the appearance of news reporters in natural disasters kind of ridiculous, since they're dressed in fresh-yet-adventuous cargo pants and military-loop shirts, generally trying to elicit stories from those in dire straits. There are more substantial differences, though, between mainstream media and blogs. Blogs don't seem to have taken up this topic yet, as this is the first day that it is really starting to unfold, and I doubt if anyone is at the scene to record the disaster first hand. Salon and Daily Kos are already out with a comment linking the hurricane flooding with diverted FEMA money for Iraq here.

3. Science: Scientists do seem relatively prescient this time, in particular a Scientific American article in 2001, detailing the effects of a hurricane on New Orleans. It begins:

Drowning New Orleans
A major hurricane could swamp New Orleans under 20 feet of water, killing thousands. Human activities along the Mississippi River have dramatically increased the risk, and now only massive reengineering of southeastern Louisiana can save the city.... New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen. The city lies below sea level, in a bowl bordered by levees that fend off Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi River to the south and west. And because of a damning confluence of factors, the city is sinking further, putting it at increasing flood risk after even minor storms. The low-lying Mississippi Delta, which buffers the city from the gulf, is also rapidly disappearing. A year from now another 25 to 30 square miles of delta marsh--an area the size of Manhattan--will have vanished. An acre disappears every 24 minutes. Each loss gives a storm surge a clearer path to wash over the delta and pour into the bowl, trapping one million people inside and another million in surrounding communities. Extensive evacuation would be impossible because the surging water would cut off the few escape routes. Scientists at Louisiana State University (L.S.U.), who have modeled hundreds of possible storm tracks on advanced computers, predict that more than 100,000 people could die.

Real Climate addressed the hurricane season this year before it began, after last year's four hurricanes hitting Florida. Global warming is topical here, even if it sounds Pollyannish, flooding of coastal zones is going to be a bigger effect than anyone realizes. As a recent report on the potential effects of global warming on New York City stated:

"Within the next 100 years, global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions may cause worldwide rates of sea level rise to increase 2 to 5 times over present rates within the next 100 years. Low-lying areas and coastal wetlands would be inundated, beach erosion would intensify, and storm flooding would become more frequent. The effects of regional sea-level rise, and associated coastal hazards, including storm floods and beach erosion, have been examined as part of the MetroEast Coast region climate change assessment....

Moreover,

"Climate change will affect people in cities multidimensionally. Heightened frequencies of storm-surges will damage major infrastructure juxtaposed to already threatened coastal wetlands; health impacts cannot be separated from the impacts of augmented heatwaves on energy demand. Finally, since global cities are major sites of international capital and labor flows, climate change impacts may not be limited by a city’s boundaries. For example, a major climate-related disruption of the New York Stock Exchange would have reverberating impacts on global financial markets."

This sounds like exactly what is happening with disruption to oil production, resulting in $70 oil. Again from Scientific American:

As if the risk to human lives weren't enough, the potential drowning of New Orleans has serious economic and environmental consequences as well. Louisiana's coast produces one third of the country's seafood, one fifth of its oil and one quarter of its natural gas. It harbors 40 percent of the nation's coastal wetlands and provides wintering grounds for 70 percent of its migratory waterfowl. Facilities on the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge constitute the nation's largest port.

4. What Comes Next? Part of the problem seems to be the sheer density of people in any city -- even a small one like New Orleans -- and they couldn't even get everyone out before the storm, let alone now. I do admire Texas, though, for welcoming in an entire urban population. What happens next? Cities rebuild. The Van Alen Institute in New York had a handy exhibition on how cities rebuild after disasters, two years after September 11th.

Technorati Tags: cities, New Orleans

Things that I'll Miss in New York City, Part 2; and there's Less in Seattle

2005-08-31T18:13:00.000-07:00

OK, my last post about "things that I will miss in New York City" got a little out of hand before lunchtime, but I actually vacated New York yesterday! Now, since I'm on the move for the next few weeks, I think I'll finish that thought, at least as a way of looking forward to settling in a new place:

2. Movies: The phrase "opens today in New York and LA" says it all. I do like the feeling of watching a movie on the very first day that it opens in the U.S., in New York, there's a certain energy and enthusiasm, bordering on smug self-satisfaction -- after all, you're seeing it first! For example, on the very first night that the "The Two Towers" opened, the kid next to me was wearing chainmail and a helmet.

You also can't beat the sheer number of independent and repertory movie theaters, like the Film Forum, the Angelika, and the Landmark Sunshine -- and that's just on Houston Street! Also, I'd be willing to venture that New York has the largest population of people discussing "The Aristocrats" and "2046" right now -- how can these movies be on everyone's lips elsewhere, if they're not even showing? NetFlix, I know that you are loved equally in the boondocks and boomtowns, but it's just not the same as being in the dark with strangers.

Of course, to be fair, there are some downsides to movie-viewing in New York: First, $10. Second, $0.75 on top of that.

3. Not Driving: I'm kind of tired of the subway, but then again, when you compare it to driving everywhere everyday, well, it is starting to look pretty good. Escaping out of the city through Penn Station and Grand Central is surprisingly easy, if you have somewhere to go on the other end. Here's hoping for good bike and bus riding in Seattle.

4. Walking-Talking-Eating-Drinking: I am usually loath to equate density with urban vitality, partly because I find that professional urban planners do this some or all of the time. (When I do, then I at least like to make a graph or chart.) However, I will succumb to this abstract love for one moment, to describe what I think of as a quintessentially New York day, when the sheer density of city lends itself to an long day of walking, talking, eating and drinking. Everyone with friends and a cellphone has probably had that perfect day in New York that is composed entirely of near-seamless connections between multiple times, activities, and friendship, where your early brunch becomes a walk together to the subway stop; which is then joined by a group walking in the park; followed by a quick cup of coffee; interspersed with dropping into a museum for an hour; meeting a friend for a movie; meeting with a random group for a late dinner; ending up at a party; and then you doing it all over again. My favorite days were one just long stream of activities, going from one friend to the next, with the city neighborhoods scrolling by, like a cheesy but wonderful montage of New York film cliches. Sigh.

5. More, more, more: I have always found that tired old Samuel Johnson quote -- "when a man tired of London, he is tired of life" -- a bit depressing, because I used to live in London, and I got tired of it. However, there is a truth about big city life in that quote, because if big cities do contain a multitude of experiences, they also contain more of it than anywhere else. New York always promises more, really, as much as you can want. More of everything: more to see, more to do, more to see differently, so much so that one's entire life can be devoted to just being a New Yorker, devoted to learning about and synchronizing with the city. For longtime city residents, it's both a sprint and a marathon, through a succession of neighborhoods, jobs, lovers, associations, times, events, and phases of life.

Since I've always moved to successively larger cities in my life, I've never moved to a place where there is less. I'm hoping that I move to Seattle and find it.... just right. Goodbye, New York City.

Technorati Tags: cities, New York

Things that I'll Miss in New York City

2005-08-29T08:48:00.000-07:00

Moving is a rather frantic time. The most self-reflection that I usually do during a move is to wonder if I should keep this, if I should have bought that (ever), or how to get something back to a friend: in the end, it all goes out the door, one way or another. Right now I'm trying to finish my last project in New York, but I thought I should jot down a few thoughts at least about the things that I'll miss after five years in New York.

1. Food -- when I think back on all of my past loves and lives in New York, what I really think about is.... food.

My friend describes New York as a 'dining culture', which I think is correct but overly formal. Food really is, though, both the highlight and backdrop for a lot of one's life here, between working and running to and fro, and because it is a culture always striving towards personal customization and novelty, a great deal of time and energy is spent on picking the right place to eat and meet. Half of my friends, I've made because we hit it off in deciding where to eat.

So, I'll miss those long subway rides on food pilgrimages to the outer boroughs, such as the Kebab Cafe, Sripriphai, and Pearson's (now in Manhattan). I'll miss the frisson of eating with celebrties at Nobu, the ridiculous luxury of the $40 burger at DB Bistro, though my favorite experience still remains wildly splurging on a personal yet echt-Japanese meal at Sugiyama. I'll miss that slight thrill when you walk into a booked restaurant and they seat you anyway, as I have gotten away with many times at Lupa. I'll miss the weird food crazes that seem to come and go, like barbeque (that's 'cue to you), bubble tea, and cream puffs. I'll miss my favorite burger and beer bars, like Henry's, the Old Town Bar and Island Burgers, because they provided thousands of good, red-meat calories, pints of good beer, and a comfy home away from home. I'll miss the days that I just feel like going ethnic, and the trips to Kum Gung San, New Green Bo or Una Pizza Napoletana.

Sometimes, there are just those places that you wonder if they're worth the wait, like Tomoe sushi (the picture says it all), or worth the quirkiness, like Shopsin's in the Village -- but I'm pretty sure that I'll miss them, too. I'll miss snacks before a movie at the Film Forum at 'ino, brunch at Good, and odd-hour meals at Veselka. I will miss watching the snow fall from inside the Neue Gallerie cafe in winter, watching the sunset at the 79th Street Boat Basin in summer, or afternoon drinks, or tea and cake at the New Leaf Cafe in fall and spring.

Most of all, I'll remember the dinners with friends, dinners with dates, and dinners by myself. What I'll really miss here are the little moments of Proust that get sprinkled throughout life, when food overwhelms whatever else you were thinking about, and of really noticing it for the first time, and remembering that moment later.

(When I started this post, it was going to be about New York and not just food, but I got carried away by food. And now I'm hungry. More later).

Technorati Tags: cities, New York

Not quite random, but not quite organized, either

2005-08-16T16:08:00.000-07:00

I've been rather busy lately, finishing up work in New York and planning my move to Seattle, so I haven't had time to note a few interesting articles and a few thoughts:

1. The NYT visits the new green roof being installed at Silvercup Studios (August 10)

2. Also, David Brooks of the NYT extols the virtues of cultural geography. It seems like bad career advice, since the kids who take his advice are likely to become Marxist urban planners, but aside from his twerpy apologies for all things conservative, David Brooks does manage to write some offbeat and interesting stuff. (August 10)

3. Blaine Harden of the Washington Post goes to Los Angeles and examines the paradox of high-density sprawl. (August 11)

4. The new president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was not involved in the 1979 embassy hostage taking, but he is.... a traffic planner! The only comment I've seen on this appeared offline in the August 11th New York Review of Books: "Ahmadinejad is a professor at Tehran's University of Science and Technology, but his special subject, traffic planning does not promise imaginative leadership." Perhaps unfair, but amusing. Iranian bloggers have already expressed their despair at the result here, but hopefully he can apply "traffic calming" to calming Americans, Europeans, and Israelis all terrified at the prospect of an Iranian nuclear bomb (but seriously, some of my best friends are traffic planners).

5. Mayor Michael Bloomberg disses Chinese food, stirring ethnic passions (August 14)

6. Again, sprawl: the NYT finds that America is growing fast (August 15)

More later.

Technorati Tags: cities, sprawl, urban

Departing New York, Arriving in Seattle

2005-08-08T06:31:00.000-07:00

Haven't posted much since returning from vacation, since I am frantically finishing up work here in New York.... and preparing to move out to Seattle!

As the actual date of moving approaches, I'm starting to realize that it will be a big move in many ways. I'm moving out to Seattle to go to graduate school -- in urban planning, of course -- but I'm also moving for a number of other reasons. As you all can probably tell, I have a growing interest in environmental issues, and Seattle seems like a fertile place for interesting work. Also, I've lived most of my life on the East Coast, and spent the past eight years in big cities, ten if you count Boston, and I wonder if the West Coast is indeed more open and less conservative.

There apparently is a rather one-sided web rivalry between Seattle and New York of some sort, but I'm just happy to try something new. Maybe I'll write about what I'll miss in New York next time, but here are five more reasons, in no particular order, of why I'm looking forward to Seattle:

1. Food: I hear the quality of the vegetables, food and seafood in Seattle is great. For the past eight years, I've been eating out, eating at my desk, and shopping in grocery stores that have bad to mediocre (and usually expensive) produce. Returning to my small hometown, I can pull over at the side of the road and buy produce straight from the farmer -- it's not necessarily organic or particularly fancy --- it's just that one realizes that the process that brings produce to cities has already sorted out all of the good stuff. However, I hear that Seattle has great produce, and I am really excited to cook again.

1a. Food, Part 2: Even if I do lapse into eating out again, I hear Seattle has really good food. The New York Times and Chowhound say so, as if they're inciting or inviting me to leave.

2. Bicycling: I rode the subway this morning to get to work. Later, I will have to ride the subway back. I once loved subways. Enough said.

3. Voluntary Simplicity: I've been studying garbage in New York, which is gross.... and also a completely engrossing topic. However, in New York, the city actually hires consultants to produce reports, usually hundreds of pages long, to explain why they can't try new things, like recycle more, why waste prevention can't be quantified, and so on. I've been intrigued by reports that mention Seattle, and King County, are actually engaged in programs to reduce people's consumption, or to do more with less. How great is that?

3a. Voluntary Simplicity, Part 2: I am moving to Seattle with very few things, since I realized that the only things that I have that I like are my computer, a few clothes and my books. I got rid of all my furniture. Purging feels good.

4. The Ocean: OK, I concede that New York is on the ocean, it's just not the cleanest one. Even if I and others are always touting the improving water quality of New York Harbor, I'm curious about the Pacific Ocean and the islands. Also, as much as I advocate for kayaking on the Hudson, I have to admit that it's not the cleanest water or the best kayaking experience, since the kayaks are limited to a small area to avoid being struck by gigantic garbage barges. I'm not kidding.... and I hear that Seattle has great kayaking.

5. Things to Read, and Hopefully, Write: Lots of things that I've been reading lately that I like from Seattle. I mention Grist magazine often here, for grim political news leavened with humor, City Comforts is always looking around there, and some of WorldChanging's writers are also based there. Over vacation I started reading Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and started wondering how he became quite so geeky, and.... ambitious. It's great! I'd explain what it's about, but the three books are 944, 816 and 892 pages long, respectively, so you can read reviews here. So, I'm hoping that the writing is in the water in Seattle.

Technorati Tags: cities, New York, Seattle

European Vacation

2005-07-21T02:10:00.000-07:00

It's been a long (and great) month of vacation, and I am inching my way slowly back to New York. I went almost two weeks without checking e-mail -- OK, it was only nine days, though this must be close to a personal best for the last decade or so. I even did my reading in books, a rather refreshing experience. I also actively tried not to think about cities much -- at least in an analytical way -- and recalled how much I like hiking, art, and food.

A number of interesting things happened when I was away -- sometimes when one returns from vacation, one feels the obligation to "catch up" (though at the moment, I don't). Old news to everyone else, that will surely provoke future commentary:

1. New London vs. Kelo, Supreme Court decision on eminent domain.
2. Interesting plane chat on the way to London with a computer scientist, chatting about the applications of agent-based modelling to urban systems.
3. London's surprise win for the 2012 Olympics; disappointment for Paris; New York's unexpectedly poor showing.
4. Bombing of the London Underground

More generally, despite my best efforts to be on vacation, it's hard not to muse about cities while walking through London, Madrid, Barcelona, and others. I'll have to decide if I have anything interesting to say on this blog about them. Blogging seems to have a minimum speed limit -- somehow, languid thoughts about topics that aren't in constant motion don't seem appropriate either.

Gone for Vacation

2005-06-21T06:14:00.000-07:00

I'm on vacation, starting tomorrow until the end of July.

I could say that I will try to post from the road, but I've spent the last day or so trying to leave everything else behind -- including work, bills, and personal electronic devices -- so it seems appropriate to try to leave this blog behind for the month. When I return, I should have pictures!

"Batman Begins" and "Sin City"

2005-06-18T08:31:00.000-07:00

(WARNING: This blog posting contains spoilers for both movies! However, you should know that Sin City sucked, really sucked badly).

Just saw Batman Begins last night, which more than amply fulfilled my summer-action-movie cravings. Going out on a limb, I am a little uneasy because I found the movie particularly, deeply profound in its depiction of the city and its super-hero.

In the story, the city -- Gotham, of course -- is recast as the legacy of the Wayne family, and their struggles against evil in all of its forms. There is a scene when Bruce Wayne's father gestures out of the window of the subway, talks about the family's responsibility to the city, and how the family built the city's infrastructure -- a spindly monorail topped by grimy New York subway cars, circa 1980 -- to unite the people of Gotham. Alfred, the butler, frequently reminds Bruce Wayne of how his parents fought to save the city, and how their deaths rekindled the spirit of “the good people” of Gotham. Bruce Wayne's love interest, Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes) is embroiled and endangered in the grimy city, yet all of her gestures and speeches are to the people of the city, and to the hope and spirit of the city itself.

Evil, of course, is also represented by the city in its squalor and filth. Though the CGI rendering shines a bit too brightly through clouds of steam, it is a different kind of dystopian vision of the city than in Blade Runner. That movie by Ridley Scott depicted the city as a place of Frankenstein-like technology run amok; instead, Batman Begins shows the city as a kind of shantytown that mocks our original ambitions for city life, and is instead weighted down under decaying infrastructure, aging buildings and a core rottenness of human spirit. Liam Neeson, who plays a great villain, for once -- instead of a hammy hero -- delivers two great speeches identifying Gotham as the very embodiment of grotesque excess, and that cities themselves must be destroyed. “Every time a civilization reaches excess, the League of Shadows emerges,” he says, and then quietly and powerfully delivers one of the best and most over-the-top lines of the movie: “We sacked Rome. We spread the Black Death. We burned London to the ground”. He goes on, in a super-villanous way, to recap and plausibly explain the struggles of our cities in this century: “Now the weapons are more sophisticated.... we tried to use economics to destroy Gotham.... but people like your parents stood in our way”. Batman replies, “there are still good people in Gotham,” but even his reply acknowledges that the city has somehow subsumed and enslaved them, and that the worst elements have come to rule the city.

Tom Wilkinson (“In the Bedroom”) turns in a small but spectacular performance as the mob boss, and restrains Bruce Wayne's desire for vengeance by threatening holds most dear. “Kid,” he says to a young Bruce, waving a gun in his face, “you haven't thought this through.” He says to this effect: “Power is knowing how to hurt you. Your lady friend at the DA's office, that old butler you have,” listing Bruce Wayne's remaining emotional connections, “they might get hurt.” Emotional ties and communities are what criminals use to threaten and ensnare the good people.

The web of infrastructure in the city again takes on particular meaning as the means of transmission of disease. The villain, the Scarecrow, disguised as a psychiatrist -- though the wire-rimmed glasses certainly give him away as a villain -- uses the insane asylum as his lair, and by breaking into the decrepit water mains, is able to infect the entire city. The climactic battle scene between the villains and Batman is a race to save the city's infrastructure, and to prevent it from exploding and harming the citizens, by unleashing chemicals in the water supply, but more importantly, their own madness.

Depictions of the city in the movie come to symbolize and reify Bruce Wayne's fears and struggle. In a theme that is brilliantly translated from the original comic book by Frank Miller, Gotham City is the ecosystem in which the Batman arises. Has there ever been a more fitting hero and his city? Batman's Gotham City is filthy, rainy, shrouded in grey night, while Superman's Metropolis is filled with clean, muscular buildings and light-filled avenues. Batman doesn't have superpowers: instead, he is a human being, and though equipped with weaponry and a costume, his struggles are all internal and his impact is symbolic. He plans to revive the spirit of the inhabitants, and strike fear in the hearts of criminals through theatricality, deception, symbols and legend, all things which bind us together in the city.

Caryn James, the New York Times critic, has an interesting article on the Manichean representation of good and evil in both Star Wars and Batman Begins.

In comparison, Sin City, though slavishly and faithfully copied from another Frank Miller graphic novel, was relatively boring. The city is stunningly drawn as a dark, mysterious, unfamiliar place. There is certainly corruption there -- in the police, in the Church, in the government, and certainly in the inhabitants -- but none of the characters are ever given the kind of story or background that gives Batman Begins its narrative richness. Sex -- in the form of thong-wearing prostitutes, naked parole officers, brightly-lit, golden-haired Jessica Alba as a stripper -- are all supposed to indicate something about the inhabitants, but whatever point the directors were trying to make founders under its own garishness.

Technorati Tags: art, cities, movies, urban

Senate Energy Bill

2005-06-17T07:14:00.000-07:00

After blogging on the House energy bill a couple of months ago, I noticed that the Senate energy bill narrowly passed a bill with a renewable portfolio standard (RPS) yesterday, 52-48. Plus, the Finance Committee passed a $14 billion tax incentive package for energy efficiency and alternative fuels. However, the Senate rejected a bill 53-47 that would have required us to reduce our oil imports by 40 percent over the next 20 years. Articles in the Washington Post, and in the New York Times here and here, today summarizing the debate, or at least the rehearsed quotes of the various leaders from each party. Knowledge Problem, the energetic economist, has a short post on ethanol.

Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) offers a predictable criticism of the idea of a federal energy policy as an intrusion into states' rights: “It imposes a one-size-fits-all mandate on the whole country”. I suppose that he thinks that we're fighting a war in Iraq as individual states, also. Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) throws in the obligatory, hoary gas-tank analogy: “The Bush administration is running on empty when it comes to our nation's energy policy,” though I like his follow-up: “As long as America's energy needs are tied to the interests and profits of oil cartels, we have no control over our future.” Nobody, and I mean nobody, likes a cartel.

Senator Bill Frist (R-TN) makes some weirdly mocking comments about the Segway: “I envisioned everybody this summer or next year traveling with their little Segways - two or three piled on each one - going out to the Nationals' games.” This was his prepared quote presumably about the impact of the energy bill on transportation, and seems in keeping with his political personality, which is generally humorless, controlled, and generally off-topic, as in a “I'm-trying-too-hard-to-indicate-my-dislike-for-liberals” way. His unnatural, contortionist efforts to play to the conservative base, if not so dull, would be amusing -- do you think he keeps his Princeton and Harvard degrees in the closet?

There's an interesting reference in the NYT article about Senator Robert Byrd's (D-WV) calling attention to a “Government Accountability Office [GAO] study that characterized the nation's energy policy as a vast assortment of uncoordinated programs with few clear ways to measure their effectiveness” (NYT). The abstract of the report can be found here, with links to the entire report in pdf format. The report describes the huge number of policies:

“Over 150 energy-related program activities and 11 tax preferences address eight major energy activity areas: (1) energy supply, (2) energy's impact on the environment and health, (3) low-income energy consumer assistance, (4) basic energy science research, (5) energy delivery infrastructure, (6) energy conservation, (7) energy assurance and physical security, and (8) energy market competition and education. At least 18 federal agencies, from the Department of Energy (DOE) to the Department of Health and Human Services, have energy-related activities.... ”

“While DOE reports that most of the 2001 NEP [National Energy Policy, May 2001] report recommendations are implemented, it is difficult to independently assess the status of efforts made to implement these recommendations because of limited information and the open-ended nature of some of the recommendations themselves. For example, the NEP report recommended the development of energy educational programs, including possible legislation to create education programs funded by the energy industry. However, DOE's January 2005 status report on NEP implementation provided only an overview of federal energy education efforts and made no mention of possible legislation to create such programs. In addition, some of the recommendations are open-ended and lack a specific, measurable goal, which makes it difficult to assess progress. Without a specific, measurable goal, it can be difficult to understand how and to what extent activities are helping to fulfill a recommendation.”

This is actually something I find myself thinking about quite a bit: how do we get government to meet its goals? Somebody said something to me terrific a few weeks ago, and I find myself thinking about how to implement the point of it:

“We know that government agencies can hit their environmental targets when they want to.... but how do we get them to want to do it all of the time?”

I can't get out of my head the importance of clear principles and strategies for translating government intentions into action, and asking myself, what are the simple, easy-to-make and easy-to-communicate arguments about energy, or about environmental issues in general? For energy, good places to start are energy security, energy efficiency, and global warming.

Picking and Moving to Green Cities

2005-06-14T11:17:00.000-07:00

Another ranking of green cities came out last week at GristMill and SustainLane. Also, Reader's Digest has a list of the 50 cleanest and dirtiest cities in the U.S. (I know: Reader's Digest has a website?) These complement other lists at Sperling's Best Places and others, that tell you the best cities by schools, dating, number of hospitals, etc.

I wonder if these lists are for people to choose where to live, or for cities to compete: there's some value in both, I suppose. Of course, Americans might be the only people to choose where to live on the basis of abstract rankings, since we move so frequently (and far). The U.S. Census issued a report analyzing our geographical mobility, titled straightforwardly enough: “Geographical Mobility” here. From 1999 to 2000, 43.4 million Americans moved out of a total population of 281.4 million, or 15% of the population. 20% of these movers, or 3% of the total population, moved to a different state entirely; and 20% move to a new county in the same state, which given the size of U.S. states could be near or far. In comparison, the U.K. has very low rates of geographical mobility: in a given year, about 10% of households move house, with only 1% moving between regions (and those regions are small to start with).

Why do we move so much? The U.S. Census issued another report addressing this titled “Why People Move”, that can be found here. The top reasons for moving between March 1999 and March 2000 are summarized in the survey:

New/better house/apartment (19%)
“Other family” reasons (13%)
“Other housing” reasons (12%)
To own home/not rent (12%)
New job/job transfer (10%)
To establish own household (7%)
Changes in marital status (6%)
Cheaper housing (6%)
Better neighborhood/less crime (4%)

Of these, which are specifically green? I would argue that reasons #1 (better house), #3 (“other housing”, and #9 (“better neighborhood”) plausibly all having something to do with greenness and quality of life. The majority of decisions, though, seem to be clearly real-estate driven (52% total), followed by family (26%) and work (16%). That order... it's pathetic!

Re-Examining Gentrification

2005-06-11T09:00:00.000-07:00

Lots of articles and studies popping up challenging perceptions of gentrification earlier this year, so I thought I would just summarize a few of them. USAToday (for once) publishes a useful summary of the issue and new studies.

One of the first studies questioning the process of gentrification -- at least in terms of spatial displacement -- was by Duke University economist Jacob Vigdor. His 2001 paper, “Does Gentrification Harm the Poor?” (only available through Project Muse) studied changing neighborhoods in Boston and actually found that living in a gentrifying neighborhood made it less likely for a poor resident to move. Recent work by Columbia University urban planner Lance Freeman, in his 2005 paper “Displacement or Succession? Residential Mobility in Gentrifying Neighborhoods”, found the same result in New York and in other cities, in a national study, published in Urban Affairs Review (again, paid access only). Here are press releases, interviews, and a student paper article about his work. Freeman, with his colleague Frank Braconi, also builds on an earlier study by the non-profit Citizens Housing and Planning Council. The earlier study used the New York City Housing Vacancy Survey to survey movers on their reasons for moving, and again found no evidence of increased displacement of low-income tenants during the real estate boom of the 1990s.

There is of course, always a frenzy over real estate prices in New York, and to some extent, everyone feels priced out of New York. However, the last couple of weeks takes the prize: real estate is on the cover of the New Yorker, New York magazine, and in the New York Times. Gotham Gazette publishes a useful summary here.

Finally, a lot of discussion about gentrification is really about perceptions of spatial, urban, and community change. 2blowhards.com had a terrific posting about the origins of the term “gentrification” last fall, here, stimulating a really good set of comments and replies. Douglas Massey, a Princeton sociologist, has comments for both Vigdor and his critics, also in Project Muse here.

Technorati Tags: cities, economics, gentrification, urban

What are the Most Effective Energy Efficiency Policies?

2005-06-10T22:26:00.000-07:00

The Energy Information Administration (EIA), an independent statistical and analytical agency in the U.S. Department of Energy, released a report this week titled “Assessment of Selected Energy Efficiency Policies” (in pdf format here). The new report responds to a request from Senator Byron L. Dorgan (D-ND) requesting a quantitative analysis of the impacts of various energy efficiency policies.

Energy models, like the EIA's, give us a comprehensive view of how energy supply and demand, economic activity, and technology all interact. This model comes to some interesting conclusions, because it can forecast the effects of various policies and predict impacts to GDP. This is important because when our president actually admits that global warming is occurring, he still justifies his lack of action as “protecting the economy”. This, even though our economy is threatened by our dependence on foreign oil, even though our economic competitors (Europe, Japan, and China) are already moving forward on this issue, and even though new industries and technologies are likely to be developed with or without U.S. participation.

If we were to do something, however, EIA's forecast shows that the impacts of selected energy efficiency policies are relatively moderate, both to the economy and the atmosphere:

Macroeconomic impacts: The economic impacts of energy efficiency policies are relatively low. Based on case 1 and case 2 -- see the policies included on page 5 -- the losses in productivity are either $445 billion (0.14 percent of potential GDP) or $864 billion (0.27 percent of potential GDP) between 2006 to 2025. However, this doesn't take into account reduced energy prices because of reduced demands for energy, which could offset or mitigate these costs in productivity.

Carbon emissions: Reductions in carbon dioxide emissions are moderate. The various policies analyzed by the EIA taken together only reduce our overall emissions by 3.5% in case 1, to 8.3% in case 2 from 2006 to 2025. In comparison, the original target for the United States in the Kyoto protocols -- unfortunately never approved by the U.S. Senate and eventually abolished in Bush's first term -- calls for a 7% decrease over 1990 emissions levels. In comparison, we are already 13.4% above 1990 levels in 2003, based on EIA figures here, so even the many policies included in this EIA analysis will not get us to the original targets of the Kyoto protocol. (Good thing we never agreed to it! -- just kidding)

A comprehensive and integrated model also indicates the relative effectiveness of individual policies on our total energy demand. From 2006 to 2025, we are expected to use 2,379.4 quadrillion BTUs, where a quadrillion Btu is equal to 470 thousand barrels of oil every day for a year (yep, that's a lot of oil). If we examine the effects of individual energy policies, we find that:

Cars: Reforming car fuel economy test procedures, or the CAFE standards, to eliminate the difference between stated fuel economy values and the lower mileages realized in actual driving conditions, reduces our consumption by about 20.6 quadrillion BTUs, or just 0.87% decrease (though this is 9.68 million barrels of oil).

Buildings: Revising commercial building codes to improve energy efficiency only reduces our demand by 5.1 quad BTUs, or just a 0.21% decrease! Revising residential building codes similarly only reduces our demand by 0.09%!

Ceiling fans: I have no idea why, but new efficiency standards for ceiling fans generate the most savings among all building appliances evaluated -- minus 2.7 quad BTUs or 0.11% of our total energy consumption -- more than including air conditioners, refrigerators, furnace fans, or hot-burning torchiere lamps. I suspect that this includes HVAC systems, and new standards lead to proper sizing and therefore more efficient heating and cooling systems.

The study also finds that tax incentives for various technologies such as combined heat and power (CHP) and new buildings and shells are relatively ineffective.

Though the results of energy models have to be taken with a grain of salt -- and many barrels of oil -- my take-home conclusion is that we need more (and more effective) energy efficiency policies!

Technorati Tags: economics, energy, environment

Manufacturing, Economics & Cities

2005-06-04T23:39:00.000-07:00

After Daniel's recent postings (in Spanish here, in English here) about his weekend here in New York, and decrying my comments about manufacturing in New York, and sprawl elsewhere, I think it's worth discussing the reasons for the decline of the manufacturing sector in New York and other cities, and more in general, the direction of economic processes in cities, and how cities respond to economic change.

We tend to think of New York City as a financial capital rather than a manufacturing city, and this first impression is, for the most part, correct. Even in the relatively early days of American capitalism and urban development, New York City rapidly established itself as a capital of finance and trading relative to Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. However, manufacturing and industrial uses -- in particular, port trading functions -- were an important part of New York's development. A walk through downtown today takes you through New York's manufacturing past, passing, in turn:

the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, the tragedy that helped to define the industrial labor movement;
the industrial warehouses of Soho and TriBeca, that once housed factories, goods and commodities, were actually once called 'Hell's Hundred Acres' because of the neighborhood's propensity towards fire (history here), and are now converted to decidedly upscale lofts and boutiques;
the former (and still present) sweatshops and factories of Chinatown; and
the formerly working, now disused, waterfront of the Lower East Side.

These are all the spaces left over from New York's early industrial past. Since then, manufacturing has largely moved out of Manhattan, first to the outer boroughs, and in many cases, departing New York entirely. The New York City Economic Development Corporation's Economic Snapshot reports here that there are only 114,000 manufacturing jobs in New York, out of a total private employment of 3.0 million, or roughly 3 percent of the city's total employment. In comparison, the national average manufacturing employment is just a little over 10% in the Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly employment report (here).

In general, the best analyses of the manufacturing sector generally come from government agencies including the U.S. Congressional Budget Office (specific analysis of the decline of the manufacturing sector is here) and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (historical facts and figures here). A “powerful new tool” that would be neat if it worked (it won't work for me) is the Location Quotient Calculator, that calculates sector and industry breakdowns by U.S. total, states, counties, and metropolitan areas.

The best specific analysis I've seen of the manufacturing situation in New York is from Jonathan Bowles, director of the Center for an Urban Future, an excellent, liberal, economic development thinktank. In his 2003 testimony to the City Council, and the excellent report, “Engine Failure”, I think Bowles' approach to, and points about, manufacturing are generally correct when he says:

“I’m not here today to convince you that manufacturing is the answer to the city’s economic problems or that it will be one of New York’s leading growth industries in the future. But I do strongly believe that with better public policies, the city could be doing a much better job of retaining manufacturers, enabling existing industrial firms to grow within the five boroughs and cultivating new start-ups in niche areas ranging from ethnic food production to high-end furniture making....”

“Make no mistake; the manufacturing sector has suffered significant job losses nationwide as companies have increasingly shifted production to less expensive factories overseas. But few cities have fared as badly as New York....”

“New York can no longer afford to write off industries like manufacturing and wholesale trade.... manufacturing and wholesale trade need to be one part of a new, more comprehensive economic development strategy -- one that seeks to diversify the local economy, create a better climate for entrepreneurs and growing firms, tap natural assets like the city’s growing immigrant population, and use more of the city’s geography.”

So, if I gave Daniel the impression that I am against manufacturing in all of New York, then I probably overstated the case. There are good arguments for specialized niche manufacturing and start-up businesses as important components of high-growth economies, and the “Engine Failure” report, when I read it a couple of years ago, seemed to have a lot of them. Cities such as Chicago and San Francisco seem to have had success with planned or protected industrial zones (Pratt Institute has a summary here) and I won't quibble with that.

I do maintain, however, that given Manhattan's centrality to the city, that manufacturing is probably not an appropriate activity for the island, and besides, most manufacturing today already exists in the outer boroughs. This wrinkle, however, I think is at the heart of Daniel's objections to my statement that manufacturing has no future in Manhattan, which is less of an analytical argument rather than an emotional one. I don't say this to be patronizing, it is just that (for those of you who know me) I am a bit less sympathetic to emotion than analysis. Daniel writes:

“I’m afraid that he is only going to be right if we understand the market as the force with priority, as the legitimate and just organizer of our lives. In principle he would oppose state interventions and promotes individual agency, or the market to configure our surroundings. Personally the long hands of the market and the state equally shake me. In an ideal and pure market, would other civic and social institutions be subject to relocation? Temples, libraries, health centers, recreational areas… What is the hierarchy, the selection of the regulated, protected, elements?”

“Let's imagine for an instant that Chinatown will disappear like this and only traces and memories will be left. This is the consolidation that is beginning to take place in Washington DC. In a future message I hope to be able to tell in detail its twisted history. It is sufficient to say here that there is an aesthetic regulation that forces to maintain in the area Chinese elements, bilingual signs even on the new Irish taverns. But there is no regulation that guarantees that the Chinese quarter will be, precisely that, Chinese. It is simple to invest in urban make up.”

There are two things going on here. Daniel objects to the demand-driven model of spatial location -- that is, the highest value activity gets to locate where it wants to -- and that the cultural character of places like Chinatown will be lost in time. In the case of manufacturing in particular, I think it is right and legitimate that we think of it as an economic activity, and as such, it is not entirely inappropriate to me that it will eventually pass from Manhattan. My three main arguments for this are the dynamic patterns of urban change in space and time; environmental desires connected to wealth and development; and outright competition from other countries.

First, the passage of industries and communities over space and time is an entirely normal process in cities. As the history article above pointed out, Soho was originally residential, and in the past one hundred years has gone from residential to industrial to slum to residential and retail. Why particular industries and communities aggregate in specific areas -- i.e. the process of spatial agglomeration -- is neither a well-understood nor uniform process, but it is certainly not a static process. The city is in fact a site of dynamic and successive relocation, and the uses and users of places in cities always change! If we were to 'preserve' the character, say, of the East End of London, what would we be preserving, exactly? Would it be the original Victorian slum and manufacturing uses, the subsequent waves of Jewish immigrants at the turn of the century, or the Asian immigrants who have replaced them?

Daniel's question as to whether or not civic or social institutions should also move, I think, is meant to be slightly absurd, in saying that the market should have no bearing on the location of our cultural capital, but this too is a fundamental feature of urban change. For example, one of the major landowners in most American cities is the Catholic Church, and churches have been closing and converting to other uses for years, as a result of declining church attendance, a process further accelerated by the church's disposition of land in the wake of multiple and systemic sexual abuse scandals. Nonetheless, I don't think this occurs because of the market, which is Daniel's fundamental objection -- rather it is the inevitable outcome of long-term social change.

Second, to get back to manufacturing, is that we have an overall declining need for it, and we are less willing to tolerate its environmental costs than before. Most societies when they reach a particular level of development begin to value environmental goods such as clean air and water more highly, and manufacturing clearly has negative impacts on the local environment.

(Of course, to criticize the over-extension of my own criticism, the 'free-market environmentalist' stance is somewhat hypocritical because I don't think that there is any proof that people value global ecological health particularly highly, yet -- they just want the pollution away from their local environment. Pollution then just becomes a more distant externality that people choose to ignore. So, when the English talk about their vast increases in air quality, I think they are ignoring the obvious fact that they have basically just exported their dirty manufacturing processes, and imported fossil fuels that are cleaner than the original coal they were using. I don't have a problem with the fact that this is all in exchange for service jobs).

Third, whether we like it or not, we live in a world of competition. Any American or European who opposes this should seriously consider whether or not what they are willing to give up for the alternative, because we are not, emphatically not guaranteed to be wealthier than the rest of humanity. All of Thomas Friedman's recent columns in the New York Times, such as this one, “Racing to the Top” -- and whether or not you like his easily digestible and overly repeated phrases like the 'world is flat' -- boil down to the fact that there are roughly four to five billion relatively poor people around the globe who are willing, and waiting, to take a chance to earn their way out of poverty. So, how, exactly, does anyone think that we are going to hang onto manufacturing jobs in this country? Does someone want to suggest an alternative to developing higher and faster, if only to preserve our relative economic status? And though I won't argue that the process is painless, the developed world isn't switching to service jobs because globalization, free trade or “markets” are being imposed on them, rather, it is because economic concepts such as competitive advantage and increasing productivity really do exist and do take place. I am struck by the virtual unanimous opinion on this subject among economists and development experts on this subject: the left-wing economist Angry Bear wrote rather eloquently on globalization recently.

OK, despite my highly structured criticism, I will tell you where I believe that Daniel is asking the right question -- but I don't know the answer, and don't who knows the answer. Contrary to Daniel's impression -- that I probably give when I usually give my usual contrary opinions -- though I do believe that capitalism and transparency are extremely productive and in fact necessary in the short term, I don't believe that unfettered economic growth, or individual agency, is ultimately going to lead us to where we want to be. The direction of economic growth, and all of the effects associated with it, are not as clear as they are usually made out to be, and I think Daniel is right to ask where we are heading as a society when capitalism promotes, and indeed fetishizes, individual agency and desires. This is a question that I often ask myself as I consider what the state of grace that we repeatedly refer to as “sustainability” might look like.

I found myself reading two articles this weekend that spoke precisely to this sentiment. In Pankaj Mishra's review of William Pfaff's new book on violence and utopia in the May 26th New York Review of Books, he writes about Pfaff's skepticism about the notion of progress:

“Pfaff notes that despite the ample evidence against them provided by the barbarisms of the twentieth century, 'naive and desiccated versions of the theory of historical progress provide a vocabulary in which the declaration of governments are still phrased, editorials written, and a good deal of the routine work of the academy is conducted'. This may be because what he calls 'the myth of secular salvation' had 'generally replaced religion in Western high culture' in the nineteenth century. Certainly the current version of this myth -- that democracy, free enterprise, globalization, and technology will save humanity from violence and chaos -- is now commonplace among powerful elites around the world, invisibly shaping the prejudices and assumptions that an average issue of The Economist, or a column by Thomas Friedman, contains. But as Pfaff put it in Condemned to Freedom,

'A faith that the free play of market forces will eventually end in Good is, in fact, more 'absurd' than religious belief, for there, at least, there is a presumption of an intelligent Agent Who writes straight with His crooked lines'”.

Or, as David Orr writes in The Nature of Design, a really rather terrific book:

“The unfolding problems of human ecology are not solvable by repeating old mistakes in new and more sophisticated and powerful ways. We need a deeper change of the kind Albert Einstein had in mind when he said that the same manner of thought that created problems could not solve them (quoted in McDonough and Braungart, 1998, Cradle to Cradle, p. 92)”

So, again, the question for all of us is, what kind of lives, cities, economics, and earth, do we ultimately want to have? And if manufacturing isn't the answer -- I don't think it is -- what is?

Technorati Tags: cities, economics, urban, urban planning

Science & the Public

2005-06-03T21:30:00.000-07:00

One particularly interesting aspect of the Nature feature on the avian bird flu is that it has a fictionalized account of the onset of a global flu pandemic here. I find this interesting because there seems to be a growing interest, particularly among scientists, in alternative channels and forms of communication. I think that scientists themselves have begun to realize that the traditional models of scientific communication are not working, because of politics, commercialization, and fractured public discourse.

For example, in the last part of her series on climate change, Elizabeth Kolbert contrasts the state of discourse in the political sphere about global warming:

“Senator [James Inhofe], who has called global warming 'the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,' went on to argue that this important new evidence was being suppressed by 'alarmists' who view anthropogenic warming as 'an article of religious faith.' One of the authorities that Inhofe repeatedly cited in support of his claims was the fiction writer Michael Crichton”,

to the unanimous opinion within the scientific community,

“In legitimate scientific circles, it is virtually impossible to find evidence of disagreement over the fundamentals of global warming.... out of a study of the more than nine hundred articles on climate change published in refereed journals between 1993 and 2003 and subsequently made available on a leading research database.... not a single article disputed the premise that anthropogenic warming is under way.”

There is a building level of frustration about how issues such as evolution and climate change are discussed in public, as evidenced by the formation of groups like Scientists and Engineers for Change, or the increasing willingness of Nobel Prize winners to speak out about economics, stem cells, or science policy, or Scientific American's hilarious new editorial policy.

Nature's willingness to run a fictionalized, though rigorously researched, account of a possible pandemic is another step towards a growing openness to thinking about how we communicate about science, whether through scenario planning and challenges that focuses on policy outcomes, such as the U.N. Millenium Goals; or countless academic re-arrangements towards interdisciplinary outcomes, like the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes (CSPO) at Arizona State University, or Center for Science and Technology Policy in Colorado ; or in collective blogs, meant to bring these issues directly to the public, such as RealClimate.org, Prometheus or Resilience Science, or the Becker-Posner blog, all written by distinguished academic authors.

[Update 6/8/05: The New York Times reports that a senior Bush administration official, who previously led the oil industry against limits on greenhouse gas emissions, was allowed to edit administration reports to downplay links between emissions and climate change. The article states,

.... critics said that while all administrations routinely vetted government reports, scientific content in such reports should be reviewed by scientists. Climate experts and representatives of environmental groups, when shown examples of the revisions, said they illustrated the significant if largely invisible influence of Mr. Cooney and other White House officials with ties to energy industries that have long fought greenhouse-gas restrictions.]

Technorati Tags: science

Disease and Public Health in Cities

2005-06-03T21:26:00.000-07:00

This week's copy of Nature, via Resilience Science, has a special feature highlighting the threat of a global avian bird flu pandemic. There also seems to be a steady drumbeat of articles in the media about the possibility of a pandemic, such as in this Washington Post article. I really like immediate issues like this where science and politics meet, where the natural world pushes back into the human world, and that certainly requires a “reality-based” solution. Similarly, this also reminds me to continue my list of environmental concerns in cities, and I have been meaning to write about the huge topic of disease, public health, and cities.

Disease, and the fear of it, has evolved with cities. One of the fundamental themes of the literature of cities is the nature of proximity and connection, and disease frequently indicates to us the subsequent dangers of gathering in cities. The Bible seems to smite every city with plague, notably Sodom and Gomorrah, the “cities on the plain” of the Canaanites, and what many consider to be the very first cities, in the Levant. Whether the Bible is fundamentally anti-urban is an interesting question, that better-qualified religious scholars have addressed here, but there are many other examples of disease in cities. Arnold Weinstein writes about this so well in his passionate and excellent book, and articulates this theme terrifically in his lectures on the city (offered here), that I will simply quote him:

“Private illness makes its fateful itinerary to collective disaster and plague, writing large the mystery of human connection/infection and the crucial social mechanisms enlisted to save the community. Once again, Sophocles' Oedipus (among other works) comes to the fore, this time as the master plot for how a community copes with catastrophe. The apparent backdrop of the Greek play, plague -- people dying like flies in Thebes, the Oracle's tracing of the scourge to a concealed murder -- provokes a central question that recurs throughout history: who is responsible for the epidemic? The great Sophoclean theme of illicit connection, at once political and sexual -- a man kills his father the king, sleeps with his mother the queen -- is also understood bacterially. Of course, Sophocles was no epidemiologist, but his account of mass deaths intrigues us because it turns on the key issue of secrets, both erotic and communal, and thus tells us (in the way literature tells us things) that the story of plague is a shockingly broad, social story, a revelatory story that thrusts the culture's connections, both licit and illicit, into full view.”

“The Sophoclean story of a city or culture threatened with plague -- with apocalypse -- is replayed throughout history. In narratives by Daniel Dafoe and Charles Dickens we see London under siege, and these stories echo strangely still today, evoking for us what it might well have looked like, had we been citizens of Thebes, of Sodom or Gomorrah, of Dresden or Hiroshima or Grozny, or what it could look like in the wake of bioterrorism, with its threats of anthrax and smallpox and other toxins.”

“The very word 'plague' has -- or used to have -- a yesteryear ring to it, an archaic condition located either in the past or in underdeveloped societies where medicine has not made the advances we take for granted in the West. But we are increasingly aware that mass disease and lethal infection cannot be ruled out of modern life. For just this reason my chapter closes with several stunning works of the twentieth century: Albert Camus's allegorical novel, The Plague; Ingmar Bergman's ground-breaking film of 1956, The Seventh Seal; and Tony Kushner's epochal play about AIDS, Angels in America. All of these works face up to apocalypse, but they use the specter of mass death to posit human connection -- the mysterious bonds of love -- as civilization's most precious legacy” (A Scream Goes Through the House, introduction)

Disease can also be understood as the simple biological consequence of our decision to gather in cities. Many books in recent years have described the potential consequences of new and terrifying transmitted dieases in cities, as comprehensively described in The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett, luridly pictured in The Hot Zone by Richard Preston, or recently connected to environmental change, as in Six Modern Plagues by Mark Jerome Walters. My favorite among these books is certainly Laurie Garrett's book, which despite its rather sensational title, manages to be simultaneously both well-researched and passionate, dryly humorous and sometimes simply outraged at human stupidity. In her chapter titled “Microbe Magnets”, she writes:

“Cities afforded the microorganisms a range of opportunities unavailable in rural settings. The more Homo Sapiens per square mile, the more ways a microorganism could pass from one hapless human to another. People would pass the agent to other people in hundreds of ways every minute of every day as they touched or breathed upon one another, prepared food, defecated or urinated into bodies of water with multiple uses, traveled to distant places taking the microbes with them, built centers for sexual activity that allowed microbes to exploit another method of transmission, produced prodigious quantities of waste that could serve as food for rodent and insect vectors, damned rivers and unwittingly left cisterns of rain water about to create breeding pools for disease-carrying mosquitoes, and often responded to epidemics in hysterical ways that ended up assisting the persistent microbes.... Cities, in short, were microbe heavens, or, as British biochemist John Cairns put it, 'graveyards of mankind'. The most devastating scourges of the past attained horrific proportions only when the microbes reached urban centers, where population density instantaneously magnified any minor contagion that might have originated in the provinces. And microbes successfully exploited the new urban ecologies to create altogether novel disease threats” (page 235)

Garrett then goes on to detail disease in the cities of ancient Egypt, Greece, the Roman Empire, China, India, including typhus, the plague, smallpox, pneumonic plague, leprosy, tuberculosis, and syphilis. Pandemics caused by bubonic or pneumatic plague struck Europe in the 14th century, with catastrophic results:

“Rumors of the Asian scourge preceded its arrival in Europe, and it was said that India, China and Asia Minor were literally covered with dead bodies. The Chinese population plummeted from 123 million in 1200 to 65 million in 1393, probably due to the plague and the famine that followed.... As the plague made its way across Europe and North Africa, each city anticipated its arrival and tried by a variety of means to protect itself.... outright slaughter of tens of thousands of Jews and alleged devil worshippers were staged. The city of Strasbourg alone savagely slew 16,000 of its Jewish residents, blaming them for spreading the Black Death.”

“The daily death rates were staggering: 400 in Avignon; 800 in Paris; for Pisa, 500; Vienna buried or burned 600 bodies per day; and Givry, France, 1,500 daily. By the end, London, with a pre-plague population of 60,000, had lost 35,000. Half of Hamburg's and two-thirds of Bremen's populations perished. Most historians believe that at least one-third of Europe's total human population (20 to 30 million people) died of the plague between 1346 and 1350. The highest per capita losses were consistently in the cities” (page 238)

Our fascination with the catastrophic effects of disease continues right up today, whether in books like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, which makes an argument for the pivotal effects of germs on the course of human history; to “28 Days Later”, a movie that profoundly transcends its zombie movie origins with its depiction of fundamental relationships gone awry, either between ourselves and our origins (the apes); society and the uses of technology; the terror of connection with strangers; and the loneliness of cities when social bonds are broken. There is also the always shocking vision of a city burning (in this case, Manchester). There is a intriguing review of the movie by Harold Varmus, a Nobel Prize laureate in medicine, here.

Urban planning, of course, has its roots in public health. London for most of its history killed a substantial fraction of its inhabitants, a figure astonishingly (and inevitably) offset by continued in-migration and urbanization. The impact of disease in Industrial Revolution cities can be found in this account. The Anglo-American school of urban planning arose out of Victorian concerns with public health, and the earliest heroes of urban planning were in fact, not urban planners. Dr. John Snow stopped the cholera epidemic of London of 1854, when he located the source of the epidemic with the help of maps and plotting (in a famous example of graphical thinking, recounted by Edward Tufte). When the authorities removed the handle of the Broad Street pump, Snow simultaneously stopped the means of transmission (by infected water) and settled the medical argument over the causes of cholera infection. Sir Joseph Bazalgette is credited with saving more lives and shaping the city more than any other person, with the construction of the Albert and Victorian Embankments, that for the first time provided the city with a functioning sewer system.

Contemporary urban planners are still quite interested in the links between urban form and health, in particular with a recent interest in obesity. A good contemporary summary of public health information in U.S. cities is in the Gotham Gazette here. A particularly interesting body of work is the U.N./World Health Organization's Healthy Cities movement, with many local projects and initiatives underway.

Technorati Tags: cities, environment, science, sustainability, urban

They're Shocked, Absolutely Shocked!

2005-06-03T19:42:00.000-07:00

News, both outrageous and ridiculous, reported by the BBC and Reuters today:

“Serbian President Boris Tadic has appeared on TV to express deep shock over a gruesome video showing Serbian soldiers killing Bosnian Muslims.... [it] begins with a Serbian Orthodox priest blessing paramilitaries before they go into battle. It ends with what appears to be the same paramilitaries shooting badly beaten civilians prisoners in the back with machine guns..... The killers are wearing the uniforms of a unit known as the Scorpions, which prosecutors say fell under the command of the Serbian interior ministry.”

“Nonetheless, only one newspaper carried the story of the video on its front page on Thursday..... a survey last week suggested that only half the Serbian population believe the Srebrenica massacre actually took place.... the same survey suggested that two-thirds of the public believe Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic are heroes.” (my italics; BBC, June 3, 2005)

News like this is outrageous because it shows how everyday people, in this case Serbians, can remain distant from genocide and ethnic cleansing carried by their government. News like this seems ridiculous because it seems impossible to me that the public did not know what was happening -- if they were ignorant, they chose to be so. When we are all confronted with tangible evidence such as this, atrocities made visible -- in a homemade video -- horrifying events like this make belief in ethical progress, or innate human sympathy, seem utterly absurd.

I'm So Bored of the U.S.A., and Sprawl, Too

2005-05-28T16:24:00.000-07:00

“I'm so bored of the U... S.... A..... but what can I do?” -- The Clash

I'm at the end of a slow week at work, and I'm having a hard time mustering immediate passion or enthusiasm for discussing, defining or analyzing anything with rigor. However, I do feel up to the task of casually kicking around loaded terms that signify much more complex issues. For example, take sprawl. Sprawl is arguably the most visible issue in urban planning today, fiercely debated both by professionals and the general public in almost every city across the United States, so I should have a readily-available opinion or view on this -- or should I?

What is sprawl, exactly? Sprawl is a popular coinage because it richly evokes a kind of slouchy gigantism: one imagines development and growth to an abnormally large size, and all of the unintended consequences, tragic and common. However sprawl is defined, I think people emotionally object to it on two levels, with regards to particular individual concerns, and then the collective impacts on the landscape.

Multiple negative impacts on “quality of life” -- another debatable term -- are attributed to sprawl, including social isolation, as in the dependence of children and elderly on automobiles; poor human health, as in debates about obesity; energy consequences, as in our profligate use of cars and fossil fuels; environmental consequences, such as the destruction of habitat and open space; economic problems of scale, such as traffic congestion; or mistaken social priorities, represented by the vulgarity of mansion homes and endless strip malls. Sprawl is a convenient organizing theme for a lot of groups generally opposed to each of these consequences.

I don't disagree with any of these concerns, but I'm generally not receptive to each of these individual, separate arguments either, if only because each piecemeal fails to capture the underlying direction of a complex phenomenon. Plus, none of these arguments to me really explains or changes the single overriding reason why people continue to choose to move to suburbs. It isn't that complicated why sprawl grows in the New York City metro region, or others. People have a preference for space, mostly in the form of single, inexpensive, detached houses, and to some extent, they feel that they have more connection with nature in the suburbs than they do in dense central cities. This goes beyond culture, as the U.S. Census shows, it holds true for every ethnic and demographic group in most every region of the U.S..

Sprawl also carries a lot of cultural baggage as the successor term to suburbia. Academic criticism of the suburbs has been rightfully criticized in turn for focusing entirely on suburbia's supposed conformity and homogeneity. Despite the occasional explorer who actually went to the suburbs, and found it to be not that bad -- starting with Herbert Gans' “The Levittowners” in 1967, to the “Celebration Chronicles” -- arguments against suburbia are rapidly eroding for two reasons. First, the majority of people live in the suburbs now, period. Second, the same demographic forces that drive cities -- immigration, migration, economic restructuring -- all are manifested in changes in the suburbs as well.

Sprawl in the collective sense is a successor to, but not the same as, megalopolis -- the phrase and title that French geographer Jean Gottman used in the 1960s to describe the densely urbanized area stretching from Boston to Washington -- because we think of sprawl as particularly afflicting cities outside of the Northeast, though it certainly affects the Northeast as well. Urban sprawl also seems to be a particularly American problem in the way that megacities are not -- though New York and Los Angeles are certainly among the biggest cities in the world, we don't necessarily have the same problems as most of the other megacities dotted throughout the rest of the world. We don't have teeming masses of rural peasants packed into rapidly urbanizing cities: instead, we think that our problem is that our urban populations are spreading out too much.

Two more phrases that are personal bugbears: density and smart growth. Though density has been shown to have numerous benefits in how we plan and build cities -- making the jobs of urban planners at least easier -- we also have to acknowledge that people don't necessarily want to live in dense environments, and that in the United States, we have more space than almost any other comparable country in the world, that enables us to live at vastly lower densities. Finally, what's so smart about growth? That phrase always strikes me as a sop to those who cannot conceive of a world without growth. This is why I write so often about environmental limits -- there has to be a point where we stop, and the sooner that we realize this, the sooner that we can shape our institutions, desires, and selves.

There is a real contradiction between what we want individually, and what we can have collectively. The question is, does the fetishization of the terms sprawl, density and smart growth help us bridge this gap, or find new answers?

Technorati Tags: cities, environment, sprawl, urban, urban planning

Do We Have an Urban Agenda? No.

2005-05-21T07:45:00.000-07:00

Interesting commentary by City Comforts on sustainablog's disappointment in the major political blogs to report either well or consistently on the environment, sustainability, and the built environment.

On a related matter, I have been meaning to blog on the lack of commentary on urban issues. One of my recent entries was titled "Can Cities Affect Global Warming and Sustainability?", and I answered this question quite literally: "Yes." However, if I had to answer the question of whether we (as a society) have an urban agenda, the answer is resoundingly and depressingly, "No".

The issue of an urban agenda, and vision, has fallen off our collective consciousness, and in the media, since the 1970s. If you look back at any number of books or articles, the late 1960s and 1970s were two decades of intense anxiety and concern about the future of American cities, whether the issue was governance, finances, race, poverty, or urban renewal.

The haunting, sobering, shorthand phrase that we use to describe that era -- 'as the cities burned' -- evokes the numerous urban riots of the 1960s, including the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965, and the Newark and Detroit riots of 1967, and the rioting following the 1977 blackout in New York City. One only has to recall the names of the American mayors at the time to evoke their heroic efforts to hold their cities together. Remember Kevin White, the mayor of Boston, enlisting the help of the one-and-only James Brown to broadcast on the radio in 1968, to help quell the violence after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.? (A description and video are available here.) Or how about John Lindsay, the patrician mayor of New York, touring urban ghettoes in the hot summers?

The great scholarship of cities also seems to have come and gone with the 1960s. Remember Pat Moynihan before he was a senator? He was once a young, upstart Harvard professor featured on the cover of Time magazine as an "Urbanologist", in a special issue titled "The Embattled Cities". The cover is wonderful and the issue can be browsed here. Reading Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford today, I find it inspiring and wonderful that discourse about cities reached such a high level that the two of them could battle it out for the National Book Award (with Mumford's The City in History winning it in 1962) -- and sad, because our discussions about cities peaked more than forty years ago.

A current urban agenda, in my mind, would be: first, developing political, social and economic systems that value the building and preservation of cities; and second, a consistent set of goals, frameworks, or viewpoints about how we achieve this. The former is the fault of wider social forces and desires, the latter, the fault of the professionals and scholars of urban life.

The political issues we read about everyday are, in my mind, always eventually filtered into the built environment, whether it is in the form of trade disputes, a lousy transportation bill, a lousy energy bill, Supreme Court rulings on property rights, the elimination of community development block grants from the new federal budget, or so on.

However, physical environments, including human-built environments and natural ecosystems change relatively slowly at timescales that humans have a hard time perceiving, reacting to, or even understanding. This problem is amplified further by all forms of media (including blogs), which tend to react to discrete events at increasingly shorter timescales. I do really like reading particular blogs about cities, and City Comforts' political commentary is well aided by sharp eyes. (In fact, I wrote so a few days ago here).

I respectfully have to argue with even the experts -- whether bloggers, journalists, scholars, i.e. those professionals with specialized knowledge, as identifed by Sucher -- that we lack fundamental and consistent insights into how we understand cities, such as the interaction between social forces, economics, and psychological experience. Let's consider that hoary topic, sprawl: in the past hundred years, urban planning has gone from concerns about tenements, light and air, to streetcar suburbs, to at-grade crossings in cities, to suburbs, to sprawl, to smart growth.

What's our vision for a good, just, and sustainable city? Do we really know? How should it work? And once we've figured it out, how do we make people sensitive to the changes and continuous forces that shape their environments?

Technorati Tags: cities, politics, sustainability, urban

TrackBack Added

2005-05-21T06:02:00.000-07:00

I have been meaning to add TrackBack to this blog for awhile, and using the automatic installation at Haloscan, commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

I am bummed, though, that your comments, O Loyal Reader, keep on getting wiped out as I relentlessly upgrade my systems. If you'd like to post your comments again, I would be grateful, because I am still eager to get more comments, feedback and complaints. Hopefully adding TrackBack will help with this in the long run.

For the unwashed, uninitiated masses -- including myself -- Wikipedia has a good article defining TrackBack.

Climate Change Impacts on Specific Cities

2005-05-20T22:19:00.000-07:00

Via the always excellent Worldchanging.com, the good find of a link to a Columbia website that predicts the local effects of climate change specifically on New York City, including:

The Regional Impacts category is split into five sections: projected changes; major consequences; coastal impacts; transportation effects; and economic impacts. Each section is filled with charts and graphs, laying out the sobering details about what the New York metropolitan region can expect to face over the next century. Special attention is paid to the effects of flooding, unsurprising given the rising sea level projections (potentially over 11 inches by 2020).

In the bibliography of the Columbia website, there are three other websites listed predicting the local effects of climate change on Miami, Boston, and London.

Technorati tags: cities, urban, global warming, environment

Architectural Entertainments

2005-05-18T14:41:00.000-07:00

Just because it is too good to be true, Donald Trump offers his vision for the World Trade Center site here. The best line in this article, far and away, is that "Trump mentioned that he will draw attention to the proposal during this week's live airing of 'The Apprentice'."

Also, don't be like me -- I missed Frank Gehry's appearance on the Simpsons! An excellent account via Veritas et Venustas here.

Urban Explorations

2005-05-18T14:38:00.000-07:00

One of my high-priority tasks is to add photos to this blog, to "liven it" up a bit. Now that it's nice outside, I need to get out and take some pictures! Another way that I have been meaning to make my musings more relevant to cities is to write about specific places and issues, though being one person, it is going to be hard to cover a city in any depth, in the way that other websites manage to.

Of course, being a blog not concerned with competition, I can just refer you to those more comprehensive blogs and websites about cities. I've mentioned Gothamist before, and I always like the tone and range of interests there. That site has branched out to other cities, such as Bostonist, Londonist, LAist, though I find the new additions less compelling -- either the sites and stories are less interesting, or maybe I just care less about those cities.

There is a wide range of sites interested in urban issues, if only because those issues range so widely. There is Gridskipper, the urban travel guide that tries a little too hard to be sexy, to the real estate blogs like Triple Mint and Curbed, which probably just are sexy for most people, if only because real estate is what most people in New York fantasize about and fetishize (they need to get out more, too).

For urban planning, there are the broad standard portals, like Cyburbia and Planetizen, which could certainly benefit from an infusion of sexiness. I like better the voices of Atlanta Larry and City Comforts, which always manage to sound ruminative, thoughtful, and still interesting. I also find those blogs less compulsive about "dominating" the discourse or addressing everything: they're just two people with sharp eyes and pens.

There are a lot of blogs about architecture, which I try to avoid for the same reasons why I avoid architecture magazines, they tend to trade in gossip, hagiography, architecture porn, and advertisements for building materials. Metropolis Magazine is good, though it used to be better written, back when they were in tabloid format. If you want to go to the dark side, there is Gutter, a newly founded offshoot of Curbed, which by offering "ill-mannered commentary on the architectural arts," seems prepared not to be taken seriously. One of the better blogs about cities written by an architect is Veritas et Venustas -- his writing is more thoughtful than snobby, which is what I usually associate with classical architecture and the bow-tie crowd.

Most of all, I like the truly weird and wonderful sites devoted to "what the hell?" in cities. I am very fond of the urban exploration webring, "focussing on the art of urban exploration: touring storm drains, abandoned buildings, rooftops, transit tunnels, college steam tunnels and other off-limits locations". A good place to start is Infiltration, which describes itself as "the zine about places you're not supposed to go to." Other places to see where people shouldn't be going are Urbanized, Industrial New York, and Drains of My City, "a frequently-updated website whose focus includes drains, buildings, tunnels, bridges, and any other place I can get into."

Now, you can either read more, get out more, or else crawl down a drainpipe (with friends of course).

Technorati tags: cities and urban

Green Guide's Top Ten Green Cities in the U.S.

2005-05-18T08:42:00.000-07:00

Via folks at Greenbiz.com, a reference to the Green Guide, which has just put together a list of the top 10 green cities in the U.S. It's a nice list with a clear rationale:

We [The Green Guide] sought out good water- and air-quality, efficient use of resources, renewable energy leadership, accessible and reliable public transportation, and green building practices. We also looked for parks and greenbelts and access to locally-grown fresh food through farmers' markets and community supported agriculture groups. Finally, we included affordability in our green criteria, since the health benefits, public parks, and other amenities of living in a greener city need to be available to more than just the wealthy.

Cheers for college towns (3 out of ten), the underrated Midwest (2 out of ten), and the Pacific Northwest (2 out of ten). Jeers for the Northeast and South -- no cities, though Boston and Athens, GA are runners-up (and college towns, too). Only one big city makes the list (Chicago). It's too bad that American cities don't compete in anything except sports and crime statistics!

Technorati tags: cities, environment, urban

Technorati Tags: cities, environment, urban

Lessons from the Dinosaurs

2005-05-17T10:57:00.000-07:00

Today I read an interesting blurb from an interview from a scientist working at the American Museum of Natural History museum's new exhibit on dinosaurs. (Gothamist, as always, is excited about the exhibit). He was asked, as I am sure he is in every interview, about the recent recovery of dinosaur DNA, and whether this could lead to "a Jurassic Park-type scenario" (see note below). Anyway, the scientist used an excellent metaphor to explain the possibility of recreating a dinosaur from its DNA. He said something to this effect:

Imagine if someone chopped up one hundred copies of War and Peace, and you had to try to recreate a single copy from the pieces. If the novel was chopped up into individual letters, it would be impossible. If it was chopped up into paragraphs, you have a chance to recreate the novel, using the overlaps.

I thought this was a good, simple metaphor to think about DNA as the physical set of instructions for all life. This also got me to thinking: if we chopped up a city, what would be the code to put it back together again?

I've been putting off writing about cities as systems for awhile now, if only because cities form systems of so many different things, including and not limited to: humans, animals, diseases, plants, water, social structures, trade, economic systems, religion, migration..... the list is almost infinite, and the set of things I know about is decidedly finite. However, one has to start somewhere and some time. I think I'll finish my list of environmental challenges first.

Until then, I suggest you all read The Complete's Idiot Guide to Decoding Your Genes.

[Note: Dinosaur scientists -- or, as they're properly known, paleontologists -- must get sick of hearing about that crappy book written by Michael Crichton. No, I mean the one about dinosaurs. On the other hand, in the movie they got to see their life's work animated in mind-boggling detail, devouring Jeff Goldblum no less. That's a pretty fair trade-off, if you ask me. Not all paleontologists can be that bothered, either, since one of them wrote the inevitable book, titled The Science of Jurassic Park, or How to Build a Dinosaur.]

Ecotopias, New, Old and Different

2005-05-15T17:14:00.000-07:00

Via GristMill and Planetizen, a thirtieth anniversary review of Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia. Wikipedia also has a short and useful summary of the book. How popular was this book? Seattle Weekly, in a lengthy interview with the author, states that it sold over a million copies in nine languages. The same page also shows the same cover as my battered old copy, with the monorail crossing the rainbow. (Ecotopia is an urban planner's paradise!)

I remember when I first picked up a copy at a used book store in high school. As a description of an alternative future, it fit in well with the other science fiction books on my shelf. However, nothing in the book required any extraordinary leap of scientific imagination, either in the workings of the universe or of humanity. Though the book does imagine social structures designed to curb the innately greedy or destructive tendencies of humanity, it doesn't require (or supply) any fundamental insights into human behavior, or why humans exploit the environment.

Kim Stanley Robinson is another writer of alternative future novels. A good summary of his work is here. His alternative futures range through history and space, from his most recent novel, The Years of Rice and Salt, which imagines Europe (even more) thoroughly decimated by the Black Death in the 14th century, and the flowering of medieval Islam and Buddhism; to the Mars trilogy, which imagines the terraforming and colonization of Mars; to his first novels, which envision three alternative visions for the development of Orange County, ranging from post-nuclear apocalypse survival, to a city shaped by greed and exploitation (the "O.C." comes to mind), to another vision of Californian ecotopia (the one I've read).

All of these books, like the original Utopia by Sir Thomas More, are all equally alluring, powerful, and flat, because they sketch the workings of alternative worlds, rather than the inhabitants within. Maybe creating an alternative world is already hard enough, without giving the characters any additional emotions. Another possibility is that the people we know, and care about, are the people who are faced with the same challenges that we face everyday -- and once we remove these challenges by describing an alternative history, we remove their connection to our emotional reality. Or perhaps we're still waiting for the writer who is skillful enough to depict characters that we can empathize with, a writer who can depict the people we know, but within the circumstances of an alternative future.

Technorati tags: cities, environment, politics, books

Can Cities Affect Global Warming and Sustainability?

2005-05-15T08:59:00.000-07:00

After my recent post on global warming and cities, I was chatting with someone in a meeting the other day about New York City's need for a policy on global warming -- which does not currently exist -- and they replied,

“It would be ridiculous for New York City to have a policy on global warming -- New York isn't going to go out and fix the global warming problem by itself!”.

This conversation was particularly topical to my life both inside and outside of this blog, because this week New York City signed up to the Kyoto Protocols! Why this is not a front-page article, I don't know. This article in the New York Times profiles the other 131 mayors across the country that have signed their cities up to attempt to meet the Kyoto protocols on greenhouse gas emissions. One of the verifying sentences in the article from a global warming expert, however, goes unchallenged:

Nathan Mantua, assistant director of the Center for Science in the Earth System at the University of Washington, which estimates the impact of global warming on the Northwest, said the coalition's efforts were laudable, but probably of limited global impact. “It is clearly a politically significant step in the right direction,” Dr. Mantua said. “It may be an environmentally significant step for air quality in the cities that are going to do this, but for the global warming problem it is a baby step.”

I find both quotes wrong but interesting. Let's stay with the example of New York City, and just to supply some facts for argument, today I'll focus simply on economics. New York City is a powerhouse of economic production, and therefore also consumption of goods, services, energy and resources; and the City of New York -- the municipal government -- has a huge ability to shape that market through regulation and innovation.

New York City's Economic Power

New York City has considerable economic power among nations. New York City itself accounts for 4.6% of the United State's gross domestic product (GDP). If New York City was a separate nation, it would be the thirteenth (13th) largest nation in the world, with a gross metro product (GMP) of $461 billion, only smaller than the G-8 countries and most of the BRIC nations (Brazil, India and China), but still larger than Russia, South Korea, the Netherlands and Australia. In fact, five U.S. cities rank among the top 25 nations, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and Washington, DC.

Comparing New York City within the United States, if New York City was a state, only four states in the U.S. would have larger gross state products (GSPs) -- California, Texas, Florida, and Illinois -- and New York City is still more productive than the rest of New York state. New Haven, CT, (GMP of $80B) and Pittsburgh, PA (GMP $84B) are on par with the state of Nevada (GSP $82B). Taken together, metro areas in the U.S. account for nearly 85% of all employment, labor income and gross domestic product. (National and state figures from the 2002 U.S. Conference of Mayors, full report is here.)

New York City is also one of the dominant nodes of a global system of cities. The April 18th, 2005 issue of Fortune again reports that New York State and City are home to more of the Fortune 500 (54 companies) and Fortune 1000 (90 companies) than any other state or city. Finally, I haven't found figures yet, but I would be willing to wager that a substantial portion of the world's capital is headquartered or managed from New York City. These two academic projects at Loughborough University and the Brookings Institution, respectively, study the relationship between globalization and cities, and the role of international centers of finance in controlling the world economy.

City of New York's Regulatory and Innovative Power

The municipal government itself is a huge consumer of goods and services within the area. According to the Independent Budget Office of the City of New York, the latest budget presented by the mayor projects roughly $52-56 billion in expenditures, roughly 10% of the New York City's GMP. The vast majority of those expenditures will be in the New York City area. According to the City of New York's Energy Task Force (an excellent document in itself, found here):

“The City of New York owns more than 2,500 major building assets, containing over 200 million square feet, and leases an additional 22 million square feet of space. These facilities are utilized by twenty different City agencies and range from brand new schools to the landmarked City Hall, courts, police precincts, correctional facilities, homeless shelters, hospitals, and recreation centers in parks. The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) is managed independently of the City and is the largest public housing agency in the nation. Its 181,000 dwelling units in 346 developments are located in 2,724 residential buildings.

In all, New York City, excluding NYCHA, holds more than 5,000 electricity accounts.... Together, the City of New York and NYCHA use more than 10% of the total energy consumed in the entire City. By expanding and improving their efforts to deploy distributed resources, City agencies can significantly reduce electric demand and energy usage in the City; reduce the burden on taxpayers; and have a distinct, if indirect, influence over practices in the private community in such areas as design, construction, operation, and energy policy choices.”

As an example of that last point, the City of New York can specify how buildings are built through its building codes. See the NYC Department of Design and Construction's Office of Sustainable Design here. Less direct, but certainly important ways that New York affects the development of buildings is through its byzantine system of property taxes and functional zoning.

Finally, the city's role as the provider of basic environmental necessities such as clean water, clear air, trash hauling and infrastructure is so obvious as almost to be forgotten. There are, however, numerous opportunities to improve the quality and character of the infrastructure that we all take for granted, and implicitly, opportunities to improve the overall environmental impacts of cities.

Conclusions

Cities, especially New York, have an enormous ability to alter the environment -- as I've shown above -- but I do acknowledge the fundamental and difficult question of how we shape cities. Cities are both a product of, and a fundamental driver of, human and social systems. So how do we begin to move them towards sustainability when (a) as I wrote in a previous post, we don't know what sustainability is? and (b) cities seem to be embedded within everything else about our society and way of life?

One way to “get started on sustainability”, however, is to take stock of our capabilities to create the world and life that we desire. Hence my affection for the blog title WorldChanging.com, and hence my interest in cities. Cities are an immediate and tangible scale at which we can see how we can create and shape our interactions with the built environment, the natural environment, government, economics, society and ideas -- in short, cities are a microcosm of how we choose to live. So this blog bounces back and forth between spelling out the forces shaping cities, and how searching out how we can shape cities to shape the world in which we live.

Technorati Tags: cities, environment, global warming, politics, urban

Global Warming and Cities

2005-05-04T12:50:00.000-07:00

The second installment of Elizabeth Kolbert's series on climate change is available on the New Yorker website. I'm very curious about Elizabeth Kolbert now, since her articles are excellently written, and in particular, manage to bring together completely disparate scientific debates about ecological change and social collapse, climate modelling, and paleoclimatology. There is also an interview with her on the New Yorker website here. Plus, I like the fact that the title of her most recent book, The Prophet of Love ironically refers to Rudy Giuliani. A Gotham Gazette interview about her last book appears here.

I'm happy to make global warming the first concern among other environmental concerns in cities, if only because of its likely catastrophic effects. National Geographic has a nice feature section that details the the current effects of global warming on the earth, as well as many emerging and previously unexpected consequences. The Pew Center on Global Climate Change, an excellent source of comprehensive global warming information, also prepared a specific report last year on the observed effects of climate change in the U.S..

Disruption of the earth's weather, climate, ecosystems, and food will certainly affect all aspects of human society, but particularly immediate and onerous consequences for cities include:

1. Rising sea levels: The melting of the Greenland ice sheet would drastically raise sea levels, swamping the coastal cities that house a majority of the world's population. Look at this terrifying (and great) animation of the effects of rising sea level on Florida and other regions of the United States and world, courtesy of the University of Arizona Geosciences laboratory. Even the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sketches out some fairly dire impacts on coastal zones. A conference on the impacts of global climate change on transportation and infrastructure also features a number of papers on regional impacts here, including first the flooding of, and then the subsequent alteration of transportation patterns.

2. Extreme weather events: Weather, as the short-term state of the atmosphere, is not the same as climate, the long-term patterns of weather and precipitation in the atmosphere. This distinction is lost in particular in awful articles like this one from the Fox network from last fall, that points to the relatively cool summer of 2004 as proof against the existence of global warming. A fairer and more balanced assessment of the effects of climate change on hurricane frequency -- such as the likelihood of the four hurricanes that struck Florida last year -- can be found here. Computer models of local climate have predicted increased temperatures and precipitation, though as far as I know, not frequency. Another good review article on this particular subject is Goldenberg et al., "The Recent Increase in Atlantic Hurricane Activity: Causes and Implications", Science 2001 293: 474-479.

Though a major hurricane hasn't yet struck Miami -- at least for the near future in which it is not underwater -- people in both finance and science have started to calculate and visualize what the prospective impacts might be. Another good source to consider the likely direct financial impacts of global climate change on cities is the insurance industry. As noted in a discussion group here:

Anyone interested in the truth on the issue of climate change might be interested in looking at the reports from the reinsurance company Swiss Re. For years, this 140 year old Swiss insurance company has had scientists studying climate change and other human-caused risks to our environment.... go to their website and do a search for "climate change". There are 90 reports listed. Everything is from the financial risk point of view of a conservative insurance company.

3. Disease: As ecosystems are disrupted by climate change, this will also shift disease vectors and ranges, as described in articles by Paul Epstein, a Harvard Medical School researcher, in this article in the Encyclopedia of Energy and in this article in Scientific American. Disease has always been a fundamental concern in cities, which I will be writing about next week.

Finally, I feel compelled to mention sources to help combat skepticism about global warming in the media, which is heavily distorted by industry funding. The May/June issue of Mother Jones featured an article on the funding of global climate change skepticism by Exxon Mobil here, including the author of the article from FoxNews above, Stephen Milloy ($90,000). Another good sources is Ross Gelbspan's The Heat is Online, an extension of his book The Heat is On, about industry-funded disinformation in the media.

[Update 5/20/05: A new article here on storms and climate change on Realclimate.org, and a new post on this website to links predicting impacts of climate change on cities.]

I Made a List!

2005-05-01T08:38:00.000-07:00

I've recently resolved to make this blog clearer and more accessible. I will make an occasional effort to refocus this blog on how we understand the systems and forces that shape cities. Of course, cities have everything to do with everything, and so there will be relatively long stretches of posts that are concerned with a particular topic. This past month, and year, I've been hashing out my thoughts on how cities interact with the environment.

I did write a post last week on whether or not we should establish environmental priorities at all, and for the sake of clarity and discussion, I decided to make a Top Ten list. Since lists are made for checking, I'm also hoping to provoke an outcry about any omissions. Everyone should have a pet environmental issue! Here's my list:

Top Ten List: Environmental Priorities in Cities

Critical concerns:
1. Global warming
2. Disease and public health
3. Crime and security

Operational goals:
4. Equity
5. Limits to consumption
6. Integrated planning processes

Physical needs:
7. Water quality
8. Materials
9. Transportation
10. Air quality

I will annotate each of these entries in the future, but let me explain the structure of my selections a bit further. This list would also probably change substantially depending on what country, profession, institution or class you belong to. This is also more of an argument about cities in general (today), rather than about any particular city (yet). Different economies, geographies or histories all lead to different cities, but for our purposes we can discuss features common to most cities, such as the scale of municipal government, economies, technology & infrastructure, and culture. This preliminary list loosely groups urban environmental concerns according to their criticality, that is, critical limits that fundamentally threaten their existence, operational goals or concerns -- that is, what are we planning cities for? -- and, finally, the specific physical needs of people in cities.

One could argue that to conduct urban planning at all, we must decide what we're planning for. However, in my humble yet frustrated opinion, this is precisely what we lack: a timeless vision for what the sustainable city might look like, how it might function, and how it might be both resilient and open to inevitable change.

For those of you looking for alternative global lists, the World Resources Institute wrote a report on the Urban Environment in 1996-7, portions of which are available online, and the World Bank wrote an urban environmental strategy paper in 2001, available here in pdf format.

For lists specific to particular cities, the NRDC put out a New York list on last week on Earth Day. The EPA has a specific urban environmental program for Boston, Hartford and Providence here. There is a Los Angeles list of urban environmental priorities by Progressive LA, and Seattle spells out their sustainability priorities here.

House Energy Bill

2005-04-28T10:53:00.000-07:00

The House energy bill recently passed 249-183, and affects virtually every aspect of the economy, so it seems worth discussing its potential impacts. Summary articles from the LA Times and the NY Times are here and here. Plus, I am heartened to see that President Bush, in response to my blog entry yesterday, addressed the topic of rising energy prices, and will be holding a press conference tonight.

[Sure I'm joking, but I find it occasionally preposterous that I am writing about what's on his mind. Maybe because he's the most powerful man in the world. Sigh. Anyway.]

The energy bill, the Energy Policy Act of 2005, is supposed to be virtually the same bill as the one passed by the House in 2003, and which died in the Senate. For some reason, I was feeling very inquisitive yesterday, and decided to go to the sources. When I read the text of the remarks by the White House press secretary Scott McClellan, I noticed that he actually mentioned energy efficiency and renewable sources:

And the President, in his remarks, will highlight four essential steps that have really formed the foundation of his comprehensive plan to promote greater energy independence. We need to use new technology to increase domestic production, to create new sources of energy, to expand conservation and energy efficiency, and to work with other nations to make sure they are taking advantage of new technology to reduce their own demand.

Imagine my surprise! I couldn't quite tell what exactly he was spinning with this bold statement, so instead of automatically jumping to the conclusion that Scott McClellan is a slimy partisan hack, I decided to research exactly what these energy efficiency measures are, and how do they stack up?

Through the magic of the Internet, and the Thomas database, one can go to the energy bill text itself, aka H.R.6EH, including links to the Congressional Budget Office cost estimates for the energy bill (H.R. 1640). I quickly realized, however, that the 1,037-page bill is unfathomable and that the 26-page CBO analysis is merely impenetrable, if only because the line items never tell the whole story.

I did ask a good friend of mine, an energy analyst in DC, where to look for analyses, and he wrote:

as for the house bill, i don't think there's actually very much substantive on renewables in there... can't say too much about the house bill -- apart from that it is really lame.

So. If anyone has suggestions for more detailed analyses of the current House energy bill, I would welcome some pointers.

For more of other people's opinions, Knowledge Problem contains a link to a BusinessWeek summary of the energy bill, plus the Washington Post's editorial from April 21st. Also, here are the links for editorials from the New York Times, Boston Globe and the LA Times. The NRDC pans the bill. Even the right-wing Cato Institute, however, pans the bill.

As mentioned in previous posts, there are a number of broad, bipartisan coalitions emerging around the issue of energy independence, including SetAmericaFree; the Energy Future Coalition, which includes both former Clinton and Bush White House officials; and the National Commission on Energy Policy, which is getting some excellent attention from a range of newspapers.

In the end, though, I didn't feel so bad about my inconclusive primary research, when I remembered that Scott McClellan actually is indeed a slimy partisan hack.

Environmental Improvement Is Continuous. Is Economic Growth, Too?

2005-04-28T07:50:00.000-07:00

I've just started reading Cool Companies by Joseph Romm (Island Press, 1999), a former deputy secretary at the Department of Energy. I'm only on page 12, but already the book rattles off an overwhelming number of both case and comprehensive studies. The point of the book is also very clear: to convince companies that it is to their financial benefit to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

One sentence struck me in particular: Environmental improvement is continuous. This observation comes from Dow Chemical's sustained and successful track record in pollution prevention over the past 20 years, as well as his experiences at the Department of Energy in the 1990s. As Romm writes,

You may believe that your company "did energy conservation" in the late 1970s or early 1980s, or that you've captured all the "low-hanging fruit", the "obvious" energy-saving investments with the quickest payback or highest rate of return... the entire notion that low-hanging fruit is easily exhausted turns out to be a myth.

I really like this observation for three reasons:

First, "low-hanging fruit" is a stupid and over-used term in business, and deserves to be eradicated.

Second, discussing environmental improvement as a continuous, ongoing, and non-terminal processes questions assumptions about growth and goals. Herman Daly wrote Towards a Steady-State Economy in 1973 ridiculing "growthmania". More recently, Amartya Sen, the 1998 Nobel Prize winner in economics, has argued persuasively for the expansion of human capability -- including basic political, environmental and social rights -- that both integrate with, and enhance, economic growth and development. What is the point of economic growth, if it does not enhance our lives? Though we in the developed world clearly benefit from economic growth, in terms of longevity, material possessions, and relative freedom from catastrophe, now what? What are we growing towards?

Third, continuous improvement is a fundamentally optimistic message, and gives technologically-minded environmentalists (including myself) a reason to get up in the morning. Environmentalists discuss often whether we have sufficiently large imaginations to envision catastrophic environmental failure -- Bill McKibben, as always, argues well for our need to envision global warming in its enormity here -- at the same time, I would argue that we lack imagination at the opposite end of the spectrum, as well. Though we can all visualize what a utopian, self-contained, agricultural community looks like, I would also settle for something short of that and closer to the reality in which we live: being able to imagine multinational companies like Dow Chemical adopting a mantra of continuous environmental improvement (who would've thunk it?).

Jonathan Rose, of the Rose Companies, refers to building livelihoods, rather than jobs. Similarly, I've never liked the term "sustainability", because it is implies a kind of static, frozen goal. Sustainability as a continuous activity, however, I can understand, or at least start doing something.

Global Warming and Nothing Else

2005-04-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

This week, the New Yorker begins running a series of articles by Elizabeth Kolbert on global warming, which fits in nicely with the fact that I have been recently re-examining my priorities among environmental issues. Given the amount of scientific evidence supporting the likely catastrophic effects of global warming -- including changes to the earth's temperature, climate, and biosphere -- can one say that global warming is the one, only and over-riding issue of importance?

The natural question, I suppose, is whether one must actually choose or prioritize global warming over other environmental issues. This presumption, in my mind, is among the underlying flaws of the so-called Copenhagen Consensus, which seeks to establish the relative economic value of particular environmental projects. First, as much as I agree with the need for the reduction of diseases and malnutrition (#1 and #2) and improvements in governance and corruption (#9), the assumption of the fungibility of environmental problems and economic solutions ignores the potentially catastrophic effects of environmental change. Even if climate mitigation measures are relatively expensive, this says nothing about the absolute or critical changes that will be wrought in society and nature if the earth's climate changes. Second, many of the problems identified by the Consensus are linked, particularly in the developing world, such as disease, malnutrition, and sanitation. Furthermore, in both the developing and developed world, the Consensus fails to address the fundamental question of the limits to consumption and growth. Higher levels of population, consumption, and wealth all lead to higher energy use -- and if we are indeed approaching a critical limit in the earth's ability to support our use of energy -- then we must learn how to control our voracious appetite for just about everything, and in particular, energy.

At first glance, the thorny questions include:

Nuclear power
Use of petroleum products in agriculture
Further development of the developing world

At this point, it is also worthwhile to consider how energy could be simultaneously a front-burner topic -- revel in the pun! -- yet curiously, for there to be so little public debate about our collective energy needs as a nation or society. It is also necessary to question our complacency, or acceptance, of the Bush administration's unwillingness, and implicit failure, to address the problem in any meaningful way. The energy bill passed by the House last week was passed in the name of lower energy prices. As Thomas Friedman has recently pointed out in a series of editorials in the New York Times, there is rising support for doing something about our profligate energy consumption, which could unite those concerned about national security and global warming: that is, virtually everyone.

Ecological Economics in the Economist

2005-04-23T05:22:00.000-07:00

As much as specific blogs and particular websites have started to shape our collective intake of news, events and perspectives, it is always gratifying to notice when the mainstream media writes an article precisely about one's interests. The leader and the feature article provide an excellent overview of the potential of market-based forces for environmental change.

It is good to see the Economist put its best foot forward -- I assume for Earth Day -- and to advocate "free-market environmentalism". One obvious problem with an absolute definition of sustainability is its all-encompassing nature, and different sectors of the environment, economy and society will certainly all require different solutions.

Sustainability: the Journal & the Journey

2005-04-23T05:03:00.000-07:00

WorldChanging.com has a comprehensive post today on the new open journal titled "Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy", a much-needed forum for discussing exactly what sustainability is, and might become. The first issue features a lead editorial by E.O. Wilson, plus an article on the "Role of Local Ecological Knowledge in Sustainable Urban Planning: Perspectives from Finland".

I am glad that WorldChanging is such a sharp-eyed resource, and posted this; I am glad that the journal exists; and I am even glad that there is some sustainable urban planning going on in Finland!

At the same time, being a relatively goal-oriented person -- OK, let's admit it, absolutely goal-oriented person -- I am easily frustrated by hard-to-define problems, and achieving sustainability is probably the mother-of-all-definitional problems. It is hard not to succumb to a general feeling of panic about the state of the environment, but to maintain a useful sense of urgency, and therefore agency. Occasionally I have the fanciful wish that we could be (already) collectively engaged in the implementation of sustainability -- whatever it might be.

A Peak in Peak Oil Titles

2005-04-14T19:21:00.000-07:00

The meteoric rise in oil prices over the past year has led to renewed discussion of "peak oil", or as it is known among geologists, "Hubbert's Peak".

What many of the books written this year on the subject certainly share is a common desire for the least mysterious titles possible, including The End of Oil and Hubbert's Peak, with the literal yet ominous subtitles, "On the Edge of a Perilous New World" and "The Impending World Oil Shortage", respectively. The title of another book, Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil mixes a dim metaphor with a historical yet redundant assertion. At least James Howard Kunstler went through the trouble to give his new book an actual title, though he tries a bit too hard to coin a catchphrase for the impending peak oil era: he names the era, and his book, The Long Emergency, a title which evokes something between the highly contrived television series "24", Clan of the Cave Bear, and an after-school special. You can also read excerpts in the recent issue of Rolling Stone.

Of course, the blogosphere has its own notable contributions to the peak oil discussion. One of the few titles I actually like is Rob McMillan's Peak Oil Optimist. An article purportedly by an "anonymous oil industry insider" in Energy Bulletin in February spread like wildfire across the web across various environmental expert blogs, in part because of its mix of unverifiable facts and the ranting tone of one seriously unhappy oil dude at the bar.

I generally prefer the less alarming titles put out by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), including the plain but clear document titled "Long Term World Oil Supply Scenarios". The subtitle -- "The Future is Neither as Bleak or Rosy as Some Assert" -- manages to take issue with everybody else, while promising real factual analysis. That's my kind of title!

Why are titles important? Isn't this, I am sure the various authors would respond, a truly frivolous point to be making when this could be the end of civilization as we know it?.

Well, without rehashing the whole debate about the "Death of Environmentalism" (ably summarized by Grist), there is something to be said about the attitude of these doom-reinforcing, gloom-peddling titles. Oil is a finite resource, to be certain, and therefore there will come a day when we reach a point of peak production capability, followed by an inexorable decline. However, what titles like this don't do is to add anything to the actual debate about how to control our consumption of oil, or even what it means for us, as a society, to be unable to control our use of resources.

Though I suspect I agree with the overall intention of the authors, at the same time, the various alarm- (and hackle-) raising titles of their books are as much as function of the market as our appetite for oil. I question whether the year's past rise in oil prices is actually connected to any growing widespread appreciation of peak oil, or whether the opposite is true: the rise in oil prices has spawned numerous books on peak oil. The OPEC embargo and recession of the Seventies kicked off a decade of high energy consciousness, which were immediately followed by the Eighties and Nineties, and when oil prices went low, so did our consciousness about energy issues.

There is a larger debate to be had about what kind of society, or market, allows the unfettered consumption of resources without any consideration of the future. The true essence of sustainability, I think, concerns a presently absent comprehension of the earth and the resources that sustain our existence on this planet. The authors have all chosen oil as their subject because it is connected to our daily lives, but does this make global warming, losses in biodiversity, or substantial modification of the earth any less important?

These are also precisely the issues that we may feel able to ignore because they occur beyond lifetimes, or because we implicitly envision an earth that is framed entirely by the needs of humans. It is either almost quaint -- or else downright alarming, where we started -- to think that Bill McKibben wrote about this a full ten (!) years ago in The End of Nature. I think his point then, as now, is still valid: we certainly will have lost something when we have eliminated nature, or what it means to be wild, or that which is outside of humanity for its own sake. The question is, how do we start this discussion?

Modelling Cities

2005-04-14T15:30:00.000-07:00

Interesting videos via WorldChanging.com, showing a computerized system developed in Germany, with the rather tortuous acronym of ARTHUR (standing for Augmented Round Table for ArcHitecture and URban planning -- yuck). Though the acronym is wretched, the idea of developing real-time visualization models for cities is compelling.

The immediate question, of course, is whether or not these visualization models are connected to formal models that predict any of the flows out of actual land-uses, such as pedestrian or traffic behavior, or pollution flows. Though there is numerous evidence regarding the influence of physical form on human behavior, I am inherently skeptical of any "grand-unified theory" that can predict human behavior within an environment as complex as the city.

I've written before about space syntax, a theory that tries to explain too much. There is also a rich tradition in computer modeling of urban environments. The history of SimCity is detailed in my friend Daniel's paper "A city is not a toy", published by the London School of Economics. Other contemporary urban modeling efforts include UrbanSim, which is being developed at the University of Washington.

More academic reviews of models of urban growth can be found in a number of papers, including:

Allen, P. and Sanglier, M., 1978, "Dynamic models of urban growth". Journal of Social and Biological Structures, 1:265-280.

Berling-Wolff, S., and Wu, J., 2004, "Urban growth models: a historical review". Ecological Research, 19:119-129.

I also found an excellent list of annotated links about agent-based modeling.

Urban Universities

2005-04-03T07:33:00.000-07:00

Lots of articles yesterday on the positive impacts that urban universities have on their surroundings, including an award for the University of North Carolina and Otis White's April 1st column titled "City Planning 101".

Longer articles have been appearing in the big newspapers as well, particularly for major urban universities like Yale, Harvard, Columbia and Berkeley. After years of poor town-gown relations between Yale University and New Haven, the university out of necessity was one of the firsdt to embark on a series of direct and indirect programs to revitalize its immediate surroundings, titled the "Yale-New Haven Initiative". Though the effectiveness, and intent of the initiative have been questioned, New Haven is finally benefitting from population influx and rising real estate prices.

This impact of Harvard University on Boston is also an ongoing topic in the Boston Globe, given the university's major plans for expansion into the Allston neighborhood in Boston. There is also a terrific article in the Gotham Gazette about the overall impact and state of universities in New York.

Columbia's Manhattanville expansion is particularly controversial given their desire to use New York City's powers of eminent domain to acquire properties for the university, a private entity. Articles have been appearing over the past year or so, including in the New York Times, with the seemingly ubiquitous Norman Siegel representing another New York neighborhood against the use of eminent domain.

The University of California at Berkeley, a hotbed of Sixties-protest, has recently found itself (again) on the defensive, this time against the City of Berkeley's opposition to their long-range expansion plan. A summary of the history of their plans for expansion by a Berkeley faculty member, and Oakland resident, appears here.

These university expansion plans also illuminate the particular role of universities within cities. As one of the oldest and most persistent institutions in Western society, urban universities physically concentrate the intellectual activity and institutionalized knowledge associated with the growth (and rationale) for cities.

Many universities and cities also highlight the role of the academic sector in local economic development. The National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges has a survey of economic impacts here, eight universities have documented their economic impact to Boston here, impact of the University of Texas system on Texas is reported here and here, and the celebrated University of California system is analyzed here.

(Unfortunately, I haven't found any economic impact studies not released by the public affairs offices of universities. However, before we get all excited about research bias, we have to ask ourselves who would actually be able study this issue if not for higher education).

The impact of universities to economic development can be broken down geographically and socially. At first glance, the benefits of research universities would appear to be their ability to attract national and private sector research funding to targeted local areas, and the spin-off benefits of these funds. Of course, the primary mission of universities has always been to produce highly educated individuals, and this is thought again to be a highly desirable feature to attract more young, highly educated professionals.

Universities themselves also exert significant impacts on the growth and development of cities. Columbia and NYU are among the largest landowners and employers in New York City, and have always been controversial neighbors, either recently or in the past.

Another interesting question would be the impact of universities to ex-urban or rural areas. I suspect that one could examine the development of areas like Davis, California; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Austin, Texas; Eugene, Oregon; Madison, Wisconsin; flourishing small cities all.

Blogs In vs. Blogs About Cities

2005-03-31T16:28:00.000-08:00

So far I've focused on my creative (or trendy) impulse to write a blog about urban planning, but lately I've been wondering if there's actually any demand for a blog about urban issues. I searched around and came up with a wider range of blogs than I might have guessed, including the apparent obsession of a young Chicago industrial designer, Fueled by Coffee, ranging to a website extolling "free-market environmentalism".

There is of course also a distinction to be made between blogs about cities, and blogging in cities. If I put in a search for the blogs of young, hyper-self-aware urban dwellers, I'd probably have search results coming out of my ears.

There are a number of interesting urban blog nodes that I need to investigate, including Beyond Brilliance, Beyond Stupidity, a title which summarizes my feelings exactly about the state of urban planning. Well, at least the second part. As I find more interesting blogs, they'll appear on the right-hand column of links, and I'll probably use this space to comment.

I've also been considering the question of what a blog can do, that other more traditional forms of media can't do. At the moment, I think of this blog as a filter for the disparate kinds of articles on the Internet relevant to cities.

Devolution

2005-03-26T15:28:00.000-08:00

Of course, one has to recognize that my positivist interest in science as a tool for understanding cities occurs within a background of increasing hostility to science, and evolution in particular.

The New York Times had this article last week about some IMAX theater chains refusing to show movies titled "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea", "Galapagos", or "Cosmic Voyage" because of their depictions of the origins of humanity or the universe.

Science & the City

2005-03-26T15:25:00.000-08:00

One could plausibly argue that science is both everywhere and nowhere in the city, depending on how one thinks of the city itself. Without getting into an overly detailed debate (with myself) about the character of scientific inquiry -- that will follow shortly -- let me make some general observations about the general nature of science and technology in the twentieth century.

The greatest successes of science of the 20th century occurred in physics and biology, respectively. Physics altered our fundamental perception of the universe, including the relationship of energy, matter and space-time, and biology altered our conception of ourselves as a species, and as a species among other species. At the beginning of the 21st century, it is indisputable that there is no aspect of human life that is unchanged by science and technology.

Though cities have always been crucial incubators and beneficiaries of advances in science and technology, particularly in the case of agriculture, it is not always clear where science and technology interact with the city, if only because the city appears to be a product of human, rather than natural, processes. Cities are artifacts of human intentions and systems, and as such, seem to be independent of otherwise fundamentally natural processes, such as the weather, geology, or geography.

As different as cities appear today, what is it about cities and city life that is recognizable throughout these scientific revolutions and technological changes? How can we encourage the qualities of city life, that is, urbane living? And how can science -- ranging from the natural to the social sciences -- help us do this?

The Conferencegoer

2005-03-26T07:38:00.000-08:00

Recently I was invited to a swish conference on cities here in New York, and since it was a very nice invitation for a guy like me, off I went. Though big names in the field were there, I generally find the purpose of conferences often somewhat disappointing. Presenters generally promote themselves, and the hurried conversations at the coffee breaks are what I imagine speed dating feels like.

Also, I have a love-hate relationship with my career studying cities. On one hand, this blog and my other blogs exist because I'm interested generally in cities and city life, but on the other hand, this blog also also exists because I find the state of thinking in the field often disappointing. Despite a lot of writing in fields ranging from architecture to economics, there seems to be a general lack of creativity, vitality and rigorous thinking in the scholarship addressing cities.

(O Reader, I hope you feel similarly rather than offended, unless you're one of the people I am now going to go on and offend).

Let me illustrate my point with an anecdote. The afternoon began with a hot young architect giving a slick presentation on the quality of spaces inside terminals and airports. The pictures are nice, but like most architects, he crafted an entire presentation about his own buildings, showing them as the inevitable outcome of trends in modern society. Oh please.

Even more deadly dull, however, are the public advocates all sitting in a row, a long line of New York grandees who basically form the city's urban planning establishment, droning on at length about the same projects that they have been talking about for the past twenty years. I'm not kidding. All of these advocates claim that despite the public's natural and overwhelming support, they haven't been able to find the minimum $20 billion they need to be able to do anything at all. There is a lot of murmuring and rueful commenting on the collective inadequacies of the public, politicians, and the federal government.

Then, something amazing happened, in that common sense asserted itself. Someone in the back row stood up, identified himself as a consultant in developing countries, and he said to all of these collective wise men (and one woman) that

"the amounts of money that you are talking about are obscene. The cities I work in have a fraction of the money that you're talking about, and still accomplish more with guts, creativity and ingenuity".

This gets a sustained round of almost delirious applause, if only because it suddenly seems obvious to talk perhaps about why if you fail for the first twenty years, one might try a different tack. Then, the mayor of Bogota, Columbia says to the assembled New York grandees,

"I would like to videotape this proceeding, and all of the things that you have just said, and show it throughout the Third World. When people hear the amounts of money that you are talking about, they would not know whether to laugh or cry, but it would be entertaining".

Or something along these lines. Turning to the young architect, he says, "To me, the point of transportation planning is not to get people to spend more time in airports and terminals. All of the places that you show, they seem unpleasant. I hate being in airports". This gets another round of sustained laughter and terrific applause.

Without being too cinematic about it, the most amazing thing then to happen was that the sun really started shining into this conference room, and onto the heads of the dumbfounded New York planning community. The symbolism was much too obvious, but it was a really, really great moment.

Why Blog?

2005-03-26T07:26:00.000-08:00

Before I start writing on "cities and everything in them", it seems appropriate to meditate for at least a moment on this community, this hallowed ground, this blogspot. In terms of blogs, I would guess that I am fairly late to the party, but still probably on the trailing edge of early adoption, in the sense that not every grandmother has a blog quite yet. Let me retrace my incipient interest in blogs (leading to this one).

Around 2000-1, like everyone else in the world, I thought about starting a website. Not like everyone else, though, I thought about starting one devoted to my idiosyncratic interests in cities. Unfortunately, since I wasn't really interested in making money, and since I didn't have a wife who collected Pez dispensers (as did the founder of Ebay), there wasn't much stimulation to act on this.

I also once dated a web diarist, who had been writing her diary on the web since college in the mid-90's, making it one of the longer-running web diaries. I liked her stories about the community of people and friends that she had developed, but it seemed to require a lot of web experience and technology (or at least friends equipped with this). Sometimes, when we were talking, she would tell me stories that I had already read before on the Internet. This was slightly weird. Most importantly, however, I myself don't have much use for putting my personal thoughts and life on the web. It is the Internet, for godsakes! In general, I'm not fascinated by a lot of personal web blogs, which seem to me variously either overly ironic, confessional, self-aware, self-conscious, self-absorbed and/or just plain boring. (By the way, this is not a comment on my ex-girlfriend's web blog -- but I have to think about whether she might read it -- see?)

Last fall, the main news outlets seemed wildly interested in political blogs, which despite their informal tone and up-to-the-minute news-breaking, simply didn't interest me very much at the time. I was rapidly fatigued by the amount of election coverage, as I am during most presidential elections, and I usually end up trying to limit my intake of articles, if only because there are significant diminishing returns in learning, and because half of the articles are about a candidate who makes me angry, anyway. Also, I like my news filtered and edited, thank you, and I don't live in fear of the hegemony of the mainstream media. (Maybe I should be, but then again, it is rapidly eroding anyway) Mostly, however, as much as I like the idea of writing something light like wonkette.com, I find it hard to make time consistently for websites that are mostly style.

One particular development that really interested me over the last winter, though, was chatting with a friend of a friend at a birthday party, as we were talking about the news, or weather, or whatever, when he mentioned that he only reads "right-wing blogs and economics blogs". I was mildly interested (and amused) by his justification for this, that "blogs are interesting because they're written largely by experts in the field, and not stupid journalists". Though our subsequent conversation went downhill, this was actually kind of refreshing, and also reminded me of something I noticed in the Wall Street Journal online. It had begun to host occasionally well-known economics weblog writers, such as ArgMax or else Knowledge Problem. After looking at them, I thought that here were two blogs that I'd like to read more often, that were well-written, frequently-read, and connected to other interesting sites. Also, I kept on coming across interesting blogs on environmental issues, such as Sustainablog, Worldchanging.org or GristMill.

I did have, however, a technology problem with the time involved in blog surfing and reading. Most mornings I barely got through the New York Times, and despite my interest in reading the Guardian, Boston Globe, Washington Post or LA Times, there is no way that you can really get any work done by starting your day by trying to read five papers thoughtfully everyday. Luckily, finding a good RSS newsreader such as NetNewsWire has really changed idle surfing back to the more conscious act of reading.

I've also been consciously trying to expand my reading over the past few years, and now it seems like there is a galaxy of blogs on every topic, ranging from politics to food to travel to sex (many, too many blogs here), to gadgets to computers, and finally (finally!) to a reason to read Wired magazine. Technology seems to have advanced to the point where any fool (like me) can start a blog, using any number of tools.

The final step taking me to this blog is a recent career change to teaching and writing. As I sit down to write longer pieces, I've become very conscious of the fact that good thinking requires active reflection. Writing consistently is an old-fashioned way to engage in reflection, even as this new technology evolves towards instantaneous publication. It's an experiment, for now.

Welcome to my new blog. I hope you like it, and I would welcome any comments.