Monthly Archives: June 2011

Promoting the virtues of the Grand Rapids with a “lip dub”

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This commentator raises some good questions about the validity of “Best Cities” lists. But he then goes on to cite an example of why Grand Rapids is not a “dying city“:

A fantastic example of a community taking the negative by the horns and turning it into a community development opportunity comes from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Number 10 on the Newsweek list, Grand Rapids responded in creative kind with the world’s largest “lip dub” in May of 2011 (a lip dub is a continuously shot video of people lip synching to a song). The Grand Rapids lip dub involved over 5,000 people, and necessitated the closing of downtown for an entire day as the amazing video was shot. The project was produced by event guru Rob Bliss, the man behind a world-record-breaking zombie walk in Grand Rapids, as well as a 500-foot waterslide and 100,000 paper airplanes in downtown Grand Rapids over the past couple of years. Bliss brilliantly taps into the creativity and fun within his community to produce events that create immensely lovable moments that bind people to their place.

“We disagreed strongly (with Newsweek), and wanted to create a video that encompasses the passion and energy we all feel is growing exponentially, in this great city. We felt Don McLean’s “American Pie,” a song about death, was in the end, triumphant and filled to the brim with life and hope” said Rob Bliss, Director & Executive Producer of the event.

The lesson for cities everywhere is to expand their definitions of growth, progress, and of what success looks like to them. Using someone else’s yardstick usually leaves you coming up short and feeling like you failed. Creating your own success metrics is not cheating especially when you then challenge yourselves to meet and exceed those measures. Communities that look deeper will likely find surprising vitality and opportunities in unexpected places and perhaps change what the world believes about them and more importantly, what they believe about themselves.

I’m not sure that a “lip dub” is great evidence that a city is not dying. It does suggest some kind of “community spirit” and it is impressive to pull all of these people together and coordinate their efforts.

But I’ve always thought “community spirit” is kind of a vague term and often applies to a relatively small segment of the population. How can it be measured and included in an index? What exactly is community “passion” and “energy”? For example, Naperville claims to have a lot of community spirit and they have some projects to prove it: the Centennial Beach was a citizen’s project and opened in 1933 for the city’s centennial and the Riverwalk started as a citizen’s project for the city’s sesquicentennial. This may be remarkable compared to a lot of communities but how many people are truly regularly involved in community groups and civic efforts? Many communities claim to have such a spirit and I wonder whether this simply reflects the booster efforts of a select few. And how does “community spirit” correlate with factors like employment, crime, and amenities?

Seeing this list again of “dying cities” reminded me that this list could be the inverse of the “most affordable” lists that are occasionally printed. Affordability could be a major factor for people to move (though they often need a job) – but who wants to live in a “dying city?” I can see the pitch now: “We may be dying but we’re affordable!” (Or” You’ve been told we’re dying but we have lip-dub and we’re affordable!”)

The age of “neophilia”

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A new book cites a sociologist who says we are in a world of “neophilia”:

We are addicted to new products, say Botsman and Rogers. They cite Colin Campbell, a professor of sociology at the University of York, for the diagnosis – that we suffer from ‘neophilia,’ where novelty seeking is the new phenomenon. “Pre-modern societies tend to be suspicious of the novel. It is a feature of modernity that we are addicted to novelty.”

As a stark example of how obsolescence was built into our minds, the book traces the tale of how GM’s Alfred Sloan launched Chevrolet by convincing his team ‘to restyle the body covering of what was essentially a nine-year-old piece of technology under the banner of product innovation.’ The Chevrolet was a remarkable success and the idea of ‘perceived obsolescence’ and ‘change for change’s sake’ was born, the authors note.

“GM went so far as to define its strategy as choreographed cosmetic ‘upgrades’ to ‘Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied.’ In 1929, Charles Kettering, director of research for Sloan, wrote an article declaring, ‘The key to economic prosperity is the organised creation of dissatisfaction…’”

Of course, this obsolescence means more products are sold. It would be intriguing to be privy to some of the conversations corporations must have about particular products: “do we make it a little cheaper so the consumer has to buy a similar product sooner or do we aim for a higher reliability rating in Consumer Reports“? (Do the reliability rankings in Consumer Reports necessarily correspond with the longevity of products or how long consumers hold on to them?)

The contrast between the pre-modern and modern world is interesting: we moderns are skeptical of tradition and conservatism. Does this mean “neophilia” is a product of the Enlightenment?

Solar and wind energy sprawl

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Here is a different kind of sprawl: in order to produce large amounts of electricity from solar and wind power, solar and wind installations will need a large amount of land:

But there’s the rub: while energy sources like sunlight and wind are free and naturally replenished, converting them into large quantities of electricity requires vast amounts of natural resources — most notably, land. Even a cursory look at these costs exposes the deep contradictions in the renewable energy movement…

The math is simple: to have 8,500 megawatts of solar capacity, California would need at least 23 projects the size of Ivanpah, covering about 129 square miles, an area more than five times as large as Manhattan. While there’s plenty of land in the Mojave, projects as big as Ivanpah raise environmental concerns. In April, the federal Bureau of Land Management ordered a halt to construction on part of the facility out of concern for the desert tortoise, which is protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Wind energy projects require even more land. The Roscoe wind farm in Texas, which has a capacity of 781.5 megawatts, covers about 154 square miles. Again, the math is straightforward: to have 8,500 megawatts of wind generation capacity, California would likely need to set aside an area equivalent to more than 70 Manhattans. Apart from the impact on the environment itself, few if any people could live on the land because of the noise (and the infrasound, which is inaudible to most humans but potentially harmful) produced by the turbines…

Not all environmentalists ignore renewable energy’s land requirements. The Nature Conservancy has coined the term “energy sprawl” to describe it. Unfortunately, energy sprawl is only one of the ways that renewable energy makes heavy demands on natural resources.

The commentator goes on to recommend using more nuclear and natural gas power as “have smaller footprints.” Is this claim of “sprawl” just a distraction to keep people away from these energy uses? Sprawl is not usually a word you want to be associated with. It implies the wasteful and haphazard use of land, typically referring to the American suburbs where cookie-cutter subdivisions, strip malls, and asphalt (roads and parking lots) have covered open land.

There is still American land that could be used as 5.6% of American land is developed (though farmland might be getting more expensive). What if these power plants were built on land that is already unusable or not arable? Of course, any kind of use would displace animal habitats and disrupt open space – there seem to be more stories these days about the ill effects of wind farms on both nearby animal and human life. But is open space or renewable energy more important? The real question here is whether the use of large amounts of land for green energy is a worthwhile tradeoff compared to other energy sources.

(The use of “a Manhattan” as a unit is interesting: I think it is supposed to represent a recognizable and decent sized chunk of land. We are told you would need “more than 70 Manhattans” to provide electricity for California. But compared to the vastness of the United States, this unit size is silly. Manhattan is 23 square miles so “More than 70 Manhattans” is at least 1,610 square miles. Rhode Island, “the nation’s yardstick,” has 1,045 square miles of land or about 1,500 square miles if you include water (according to the Census). If we roughly multiplied California’s needs times 8 (308 million total Americans divided by California’s roughly 37 million people), we would need about 13,500 square miles for green energy – this is a little bigger than Maryland as a whole. The US has 3.79 million square miles. So there would be room for this green energy (though you would then have to factor in transmission lines) somewhere in the United States.)

h/t Instapundit and The Volokh Conspiracy

The struggles of New Urbanist communities outside Indianapolis

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Several New Urbanist communities outside of Indianapolis are struggling to sell homes and fill commercial space:

The Village of WestClay was supposed to be a different kind of neighborhood — one that turned back the clock and led suburban living toward a more community-centered, urban lifestyle.

Along with Saxony in Fishers and Avon’s Village of Turner Trace, this model of “New Urbanism” offered a home where you could leave the family car parked in the garage, trading your big backyard and high fence for a front porch and neighbors you really got to know…

It’s the stores and restaurants, though, that have lagged. About 65 percent of 275,000 square feet of planned commercial space has opened. Clustered together like a traditional downtown, the businesses at the center of the neighborhood have struggled the most…

Nationally, retail has proven to be the hardest part to build, said John Norquist, president of the Congress for the New Urbanism. The Chicago-based think tank advocates New Urbanism as the future of development.

I remember reading about how this also seemed to happen in Celebration, Florida (see Celebration, U.S.A.). Many businesses are unwilling to build or open a location without an already-existing residential base that provides a steady source of customers. But if you are trying to put the New Urbanist pieces together, provide a community with residences within an easy walk of stores and other amenities, you need some businesses to be there from the beginning to help sell the homes. Couldn’t these new developments offer special low prices to businesses for a few years as an incentive?

The suggestion at the end of the article is that these problems could be avoided if New Urbanist principles were applied in cities or denser areas, not in newly-constructed New Urbanist developments plopped in suburbia. We’ll have to see what happens in the lean economic times of today and perhaps more prosperous years in the future.

Facebook loses users in the US, UK – what does it mean?

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Facebook has had a meteoric rise – but there are some signs that the growth is slowing:

Fearing for their privacy or perhaps just bored with using the site, 100,000 Britons are said to have deactivated their accounts last month.

And Facebook fatigue seems to be catching. Six million logged off for good in the U.S. too, figures show.

Worldwide, the rate of growth has slowed for a second month in a row – and as it aims to reach its goal of one billion active users, Facebook is having to rely on developing countries to boost its numbers…

‘By the time Facebook reaches around 50 per cent of the total population in a given country, growth generally slows to a halt,’ [Eric Eldon] explained.

This article is rife with speculation: users could be upset with privacy, people could be fatigued or bored with Facebook, etc. Here are a few of these scenarios with my own thoughts:

1. There are only so many people in the world who will use Facebook anyway. It requires using the Internet consistently, whether this is by computer or some mobile device. While it may be “normal” for the younger generations (though the user rate is not 100% here either), it is used less by older generations (even though there has been growth among these sectors). I wonder what sort of saturation point Facebook itself predicted.

1a. Is it really a big deal if Facebook’s growth is now concentrated in developing countries? Is this really any different than many other American companies?

1b. Perhaps we have entered Facebook’s “mature” stage where they can no longer coast based on word-of-mouth and spectacular growth and now need to fight for new users. How long until we see Facebook TV ads trying to entice new users?

2. The article suggests the novelty of Facebook might be wearing off. Perhaps it doesn’t have enough new features – even though the changes in recent years have induced much hand-wringing, it really hasn’t changed that much. Perhaps it has too many people on there and is no longer exclusive enough – this point was driven home by The Social Network as the Winklevoss’ started with a plan to capitalize on the exclusivity of Harvard.

2a. I wonder if Facebook itself is happy with the progress it has made. On one hand, it could generate a lot of money based on targeted advertising. On the other hand, there is some evidence that Zuckerberg wishes it was much more open than it is now. Even though there are no more networks, many people are still tied to friends and acquaintances and don’t wander too far beyond this. How do you connect these newer users around the world to established users or would this be a no-go among users?

2b. The day-to-day novelty of the product should consist of what one’s friends add to the site. Without interesting status updates, pictures, news, and more, what else draws users? Farmville? Making a “friend” connection is one thing – but this is not too interesting if neither side adds new information. So beyond vanity, how can users be provoked to add more?

3. I don’t really buy the privacy argument. Some people are concerned but they are concerned about privacy in a lot of other places as well. If people were really worried about privacy, there would be a lot of things that they wouldn’t do on the Internet, let alone Facebook.

4. Perhaps some people are interested in the story of Facebook losing steam. After all, a narrative where Facebook keeps rising might not be that interesting. How long until we see more stories about competitors to Facebook, like Twitter in the US, or Orkut elsewhere?

5. These numbers regarding the loss of users have no context: how do they compare to similar figures from previous time periods? Is this an increase in the number of users who have left? Certainly, not all users have continued with Facebook after joining.

Urban ethnographer = “pretty much a good street reporter with a PhD”?

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A Baltimore journalist describes Elijah Anderson’s career:

Elijah Anderson, who might be the nation’s leading people-watcher, has spent most of the last 30 years observing human beings of all colors and ethnicities mixing it up in public spaces — Philadelphia’s, mainly — and of late he mostly likes what he sees.

He’s found whites, blacks and immigrants from all over the world shopping shoulder to shoulder in Reading Terminal Market and equally stunning diversity in Philly’s Rittenhouse Square. Attention must be paid, Mr. Anderson says. As segregated as Americans are in terms of where we live, the great melting that occurs in public spaces is a phenomenon of consequence. We might be suspicious of each other on streets, but there are important places where diverse people come together and, for the most part, practice getting along. These “cosmopolitan canopies,” as Mr. Anderson calls them, give us a glimpse of post-racial America.

Mr. Anderson, a sociologist who has been on the faculty of two Ivy League universities, calls himself an urban ethnographer, which is pretty much a good street reporter with a PhD. He’s interviewed Philadelphians in their neighborhoods, homes, bars and workplaces to figure out how they live and what they think. He was in Baltimore last week with copies of “The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life,” his latest book on urban social dynamics.

The journalist describes Anderson in two ways: he “might be the nation’s leading people-watcher” and “an urban ethnographer, which is pretty much a good street reporter with a PhD.” Neither of these seem to be particularly complementary. The first suggests that anyone can do what Anderson does – indeed, people watching is a pastime of many people. The second suggests urban ethnographers do what any good reporter would do by observing and interacting with people in neighborhoods.

I think both of these descriptions shortchange ethnography. To start, ethnography is a process that requires practice and particular skills. It is not enough to show up and start talking to people or sit and watch. It often involves participant observation, taking part in the practices of the people you are studying. Second, the goal of ethnography is to return to theories, sociological or otherwise. Ethnography should not end with description but connect to and provide insights regarding a broader body of knowledge.

Perhaps this journalist was providing his thoughts about Anderson’s latest book (see my review here) through his description of ethnography.

The continued rise of the American suburbs

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A short piece in the New York Times discusses the continued trend toward the suburbs:

Still, for all the buzzy talk of knowledge industry synergy and urban appeal, census figures show that UBS’s return would be bucking the demographic trends rather than reflecting them and that the suburbs, however unloved by tastemakers and academics, remain where the growth is.

Joel Kotkin , a writer who specializes in demographic issues, says that the 2010 census figures show that during the past decade just 8.6 percent of the population growth in metropolitan areas with more than a million people took place in city cores. The rest took place in the suburbs, which are home to more than 6 in 10 Americans.

The 8.6 percent is even lower than in the 1990s when the figure was 15.1 percent. New York City did better than the national average, getting 29 percent of the growth in the metropolitan area, but that was down from 46 percent in the 1990s. Of the 51 metropolitan areas with more than 1 million residents, only three — Boston, Providence, and Oklahoma City — saw their core cities grow faster than their suburbs. And the growth is hardly the mono-dimensional suburbia of hoary stereotype.

In 1970 nearly 95 percent of suburbanites were white, Mr. Kotkin writes. Now minorities constitute over 27 percent of the nation’s suburbanites.

Several questions could be raised:

1. Kotkin’s figures show the rise of suburbs. Others have suggested Kotkin’s figures disguise the real divide between inner-ring and outer-ring suburbs. These inner-ring areas are suburban but also are more city like with higher densities and city issues (infrastructure, crime, aging housing, etc.).

2. Sociologist Herbert Gans, author of the classic The Levittowners, is cited saying that people are still moving to the suburbs because they are cheaper. This seems a bit simplistic: some suburban homes may be cheaper, particularly on the edge of suburban development, but homeowners end up paying more in transportation costs, commuting, and governmental bodies subsidize sprawl by paying for highways (and giving less to mass transit). The real question is what would happen if the costs of urban and suburban living were similar and people knew this – would they still choose the suburbs? I think they would, particularly for cultural reasons such as chasing the American Dream and looking for safe, well-educated neighborhoods for their kids.

3. The article cites data that says Millennials are more interested in living in the suburbs than their parents. This may be the case though what exactly these suburbs look like is unclear: exurbs full of McMansions or denser, walkable suburban communities?

“Missionary work” selling new mixed-income neighborhoods in Chicago

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In the 1990s, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Chicago Housing Authority, and the City of Chicago developed plans to tear down the public housing high-rises in Chicago and replace them with new mixed-income neighborhoods that would include units for public housing residents as well as market-rate units. Recently, it has been difficult to sell some of these units and the neighborhoods:

“Every single Plan for Transformation (community) is in exactly the same predicament,” said Ziegenhagen, vice president of operations. “They’re looking at their pro forma and they’re looking at a huge loss. The lenders have been more willing to work things out with these developments because they invested in them knowing they were really community development, and we were all assaulted by the same economic development.”…

Even in the good times, Williams said, buyers in a development like Oakwood Shores, on the site of the former Ida B. Wells housing complex, had to be what he calls “trailblazers.”

Now, those trailblazers aren’t happy because the price cuts of 25 to 35 percent have negated their equity, while their property tax bills have increased. Newer buyers need to be trailblazers who are much better educated about just what it is they are buying into at a Plan for Transformation community, Williams said…

“If you believe in real estate, you just have to believe that you keep building a neighborhood. Otherwise, you’ll continue to have a decline in the values of the existing neighborhood. These transformation sites are hard work,” Williams said. “This is missionary work. I didn’t start out thinking this is missionary work, but that’s what I think I’m doing now.

Some of this is certainly due to a depressed housing market. However, this also sounds like it is part of the growing pains of these new mixed-income neighborhoods: even though the units might be on in desirable locations, particularly at the Cabrini-Green site, some homebuyers might be turned off by the idea of living near public housing residents or being part of a newly-formed neighborhood and having to be “trailblazers.”

It will be interesting to see down the road whether this is just a blip in the development of these neighborhoods which were supposed to be transformational or whether they hint at deeper issues that are exacerbated by this economic crisis. I assume time will help take away some of the stigma of these neighborhoods, particularly their historic connection to notorious public housing projects, but this will still be a process.

Applying evolutionary biology to the city

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Biologist David Sloan Wilson has taken an interest in better understanding Binghamtom, New York. His lens: evolutionary biology.

Differences in prosociality, Wilson thought, should produce measurable outcomes — if not in reproductive success, perhaps in happiness, crime rates, neighbourhood tidiness or even the degree of community feeling expressed in the density of holiday decorations. “I really wanted to see a map of altruism,” he says. “I saw it in my mind.” And with a frisson of excitement, he realized that his models and experiments offered clues about how to intervene, how to structure real-world groups to favour prosociality. “Now is the implementation phase.” Evolutionary theory, Wilson decided, will improve life in Binghamton…

Binghamton is hard to love. Established in the early nineteenth century, it has long relied on big industry for its identity and prosperity — early on through the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company and then through IBM, which was founded in the area. But the manufacturers mostly decamped in the 1990s, and since then the city has taken on an aimless, shabby air. Dollar stores and coin-operated laundries fill the gaps between dilapidated Victorian houses and massive brick-and-stone churches. A Gallup poll in March 2011 listed Binghamton as one of the five US cities least liked by its residents. “It is a town that knows it is badly in need of a revival,” says Wilson. Even its motto, ‘Restoring the pride’, speaks of a city clinging to its past and ashamed of its present…

So Wilson decided to see whether he could raise up the prosocial valleys by creating conditions in which cooperation becomes a winning strategy — in effect, hacking the process of cultural evolution. He set about this largely by instituting friendly competitions between groups. His first idea was a park-design project, in which neighbourhoods were invited to compete for park-improvement funds by creating the best plan.

But Wilson soon found out that field experiments in real cities can take on lives of their own: different neighbourhoods couldn’t get their acts together on the same schedule, so the competition aspect largely disappeared. Instead, he is now working on turning multiple park ideas into reality. The dog park is one. Another is Sunflower Park, the most advanced project to date, but still a sad, mainly empty lot surrounded by a chain-link fence. Children don’t spend a lot of time playing here. Undaunted, Wilson is raising funds and laying plans for a relaxing community space flush with trees and amenities. “In a year,” he says, “we will serve you a hot dog from the pavilion.”

The rest of the article describes how Wilson acts more like a social scientist, taking surveys, making observations, interacting with residents, trying to understand local religious congregations. Some of this discussion is amusing as it rehashes debates about how close researchers should get to research subjects – social scientists would describe it as participant observation.

This reminds me of some of the work of early sociologists such as Herbert Spencer and the Chicago School who based at least some of their ideas on biological principles. Spencer viewed society as being like an organism and the Chicago School viewed competition for space as a primary driver of urban development and action. But evolutionary thinking has generally faded away in sociology (outside of sociobiology). Could sociologists, and urban sociologists, again view evolutionary principles as a boon for the field or simply a distraction from the better work that is going on in the field? Wilson is also interested in the topics of altruism and prosociality, topics that have attracted the attention of more sociologists in recent years. It would be interesting to hear what happens when Wilson comes to some conclusions about social and city life and then presents them to social scientists.

Replicating New York’s High Line

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New York City’s High Line, a park created out of old elevated railroad structures, has proven quite popular with visitors and with urban commentators. But can it be replicated in other places?

This week the second section of New York’s iconic High Line park opened with almost as much fanfare as the first section got when it opened in June 2009 and drew 2 million visitors in its first 10 months.

What makes the High Line so unique as an urban park is that it rises 30 feet above the street on a 1930s elevated freight line that was slated for destruction after the last train ran on it in 1980. Only the action of neighborhood community groups, committed to preservation of what they regarded as a local landmark, saved the High Line.

High Line concepts are being considered for other cities across the country. And well they should. For the message the High Line sends is: Treat your urban ruins carefully. They may be more valuable than you think.

The difficulty with trying to apply the High Line concept to other cities, as the architectural historian Witold Rybczynski recently observed, is that few cities have New York’s density. The High Line could not, for example, work in an old, industrial area people avoid, or in a neighborhood in which it towered over one- and two-story homes.

The density argument is that this works because there is a large nearby population. Visitors from elsewhere, other neighborhoods of the city or suburbanites or tourists, can also come but the park is sustained by daily visits from nearby residents. Urban amenities from parks to museums to public spaces need a steady population of visitors just to survive, let alone thrive. Just because they are unique or interesting is not a guarantee that visitors will come.

But there is another angle to this as well. In the case of the High Line, we need to hear more about how the neighborhood and the city help make this possible: what is it about this particular social setting that creates an environment where this park can succeed? Witold Rybcynzski makes this argument:

The High Line may be a landscaping project, but a good part of its success is due to its architectural setting, which, like the 12th Arrondissement, is crowded with interesting old and new buildings. The park courses through the meatpacking district and Chelsea, heavily populated, high-energy residential neighborhoods. Very few American cities — and Manhattan is the densest urban area in the country — can offer the same combination of history and density.

Rybcynzski concludes by suggesting that this idea will end up becoming another “failed urban design strateg[y].”

So other cities could move in a couple of directions after this:

1. Try to build their own “High Line” anyway. Since this has gotten so much popular attention, someone is bound to try it. (Outside of Chicago, how many cities have existing elevated railroad structures?)

2. Look to develop their own unique repurposed structure(s). This would likely take different forms in different places but has the advantage of working with existing structures and the existing character of the community.

There must be other cities that have done something like this but how many of them are public spaces? I was thinking of several repurposed museum spaces, like the Tate Modern in London which was a former power station and the Museum of Science and Industry which dates back to the 1893 Columbian Exposition, but these require admission.