Chimps Advance; Humans Stuck in the Same Place

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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?

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?

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

(via NPR, via Slashdot)

Freedoms

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)

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

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

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