Category Archives: Places

Displaying human remains at museums

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Museums typically want to display historical items – but certain objects raise more concerns than others. One sociologist has highlighted how museums have reconsidered displaying human remains:

In a book published yesterday, Tiffany Jenkins, a sociologist, highlighted how uneasy museums are becoming when it comes to displaying human remains. Jenkins gave examples including the Museum of London, which removed bones showing the effects of rickets, and Manchester University Museum, which took the head of an iron-age human, Worsley Man, off display; in 2008, it briefly covered its mummies with sheets.

This can be a complicated issue. But I would guess that feelings regarding the display of human remains are a cultural phenomenon which differs from culture to culture. Typical American practices of dealing with remains (burial or cremation) differ from other cultures, both now and historically. And what is valid as museum material also is affected by cultural values and history.

How suburbs dealt with parking meters and related issues

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The Infrastructurist has a discussion of whether parking prices in the city should be raised in order to encourage less driving and therefore, less congestion.

While this may be an interesting argument, my research into several suburbs showed that they solved this problem without much argument back in the 1950s and 1960s. As suburban downtowns faced more competition from strip malls and large shopping centers, downtown business owners argued that city-owned parking meters were driving away customers. Why would a person go to the trouble of shopping in a suburban downtown when free parking was plentiful at shopping centers? Within a few years, these suburbs removed their parking meters in an effort to improve local business.The possible business gains far outweighed the possibility of some municipal revenues from the parking meters.

When I first encountered these debates, they seemed a bit strange – were people really avoiding suburban downtowns just because of some small parking fee? Even if downtown parking were free, it seems that suburban residents would (and did) tend to choose shopping centers anyway, for reasons that outweighed parking concerns. (Of course, there is a lot of complaining about finding close shopping spaces at the mall – but, at least those spots are free. However, one could make an argument that they are not free as the parking costs get passed along through the business rents and leases and to higher prices for consumers.)

I left reading about these debates thinking that the parking meters were a last straw that suburban downtowns tried desperately to grab at to attract shoppers. Ultimately, many suburban communities were unsuccessful and the parking meters played a limited role.

Las Vegas as foreclosure epicenter

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The news from Las Vegas does not seem to be improving:

The once-booming Las Vegas region has for 44 straight months led the United States in home foreclosures, and 80 percent of houses here are figuratively underwater — worth less than the debt owed on them.

A staggering 23.6 percent of Nevada mortgages are in some form of delinquency or foreclosure, significantly higher than the national average of 14 percent, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association.

It’s a confusing, devastating turn of events for a city that for two decades was the sterling example of an American boom town.

What is the future of Las Vegas? Unlike Rust Belt cities suffering from foreclosures (like Cleveland, Detroit, etc.), Las Vegas still has a large economic engine in the form of casinos. But now that the boom town era is over, I imagine city leaders and others would want to create a different kind of Las Vegas with more measured economic growth.

Is selling the naming rights to Chicago El stops annoying or cool because Apple is sponsoring a station?

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The Red Line El stop at North and Clybourn may soon be the Apple Red Line stop. It is not named that yet but there is plenty of Apple already in the station:

???There’s reason to be grateful to Apple for the metamorphosis of this patch of Chicago. Apple has not only built a store more stylish than anything nearby, it has invested close to $4 million in the North/Clybourn station.

It’s the equivalent of mowing the neighbor’s weedy lawn — and paying the neighbor to let you.

Outside, the station has clean new brick, big new windows and a sleek new look, partly 1940s and entirely 2010.

The inside isn’t stylish, but it’s improved. Someone has scrubbed the red concrete floors, brushed red paint on the old railings, tried to wipe the grime from the escalator stairs.

And the Apple name is everywhere, except out front.

From the moment you push through the turnstile, Apple ads as bright as searchlights beam at you. Down in the tunnel, all the other ads are gone.

Apple expressed interest in calling it the Apple Red Line stop. The CTA, which is exploring the possibility of selling naming rights to its stations, said Apple would get the right of first refusal for this one.

A further sign that corporate America is taking over or a clever revenue generating trick from the city of Chicago?

What cities are the most conducive to scientific research?

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A new study in Nature examines which cities are the best for scientific research. The article cites some different measures to get at things like output and quality. Here are some of the findings:

-The top cities for number of articles produced: “Tokyo, London, Beijing, the San Francisco Bay Area, Paris and New York.”

-The top cities based on quality of research (measured as average citations of articles): “Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, come out on top — attracting more than twice as many citations per paper as the global average. US cities dominate the quality table, with only Cambridge, UK, breaking into the top 10. Cities with the most improved relative quality in the past decade include Austin, Texas, and Singapore City — which has moved from 15% below average to 22% above it. Beijing, however, is below par in the quality stakes: its papers in the five-year period ending 2008 attracted 63% of the global average-citation rate.”

-According to a sociologist, the three factors that lead to more research: “freedom, funding, and lifestyle.”

Several of the experts also caution that cities shouldn’t just throw money at research in the expectation that this will lead to significant wealth generated for the city.

I wonder how much of a role historical factors play in this. Once a city acquires a reputation for prestigious universities and research (think: Boston), how quickly could it lose its status if drastic things started to take place (such as the bankruptcy of Harvard and MIT)? It seems like certain cities gain a reputation or character and that character becomes an inertia that continues to attract new research facilities and scientists.

Thinking about gentrification and preserving neighborhoods

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Megan McArdle discusses gentrification and whether “hip” (my term) or diverse urban neighborhoods can remain that way.

In reality, most neighborhoods (urban or suburban) change over time. This can happen quite rapidly in urban neighborhoods: new people move and businesses move in or out and places can be transformed in a decade or two. Gentrifying neighborhoods are always teetering on an edge where they recently were poorer but are now hip but soon could be more stodgy middle- to upper-class enclaves. It is probably rare that neighborhoods can stay in a perpetual state of gentrification because there are numerous forces pushing a neighborhood one way or another.

I wonder if arguments about wanting to preserve diverse urban neighborhoods are not that different from suburban NIMBY arguments. In each case, people who have moved into the neighborhood see something they like: perhaps good schools in the suburbs, a “hip” and diverse scene in the urban neighborhood. But then the goal can become to freeze that neighborhood in time, to resist outside forces, to try to keep the neighborhood in the state in which it was originally found. The mindset can be “I found this neighborhood and I don’t want anyone else to come in and change it from what I fell in love with.” In both contexts, this is difficult to do: time passes, the people in the neighborhood change, outside forces influence the neighborhood, and so on.

Perhaps one way to get around these sort of arguments is to suggest that the act of moving into a neighborhood (by a resident or a business) is an act with consequences: moving in necessarily contributes to changing the neighborhood. By living in a neighborhood and interacting with residents and others, the new member of the community helps push the neighborhood in a new direction. Whether this new direction is good or bad, moral or immoral, is another issue.

h/t Instapundit

The night(s) at the museum

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I still think this sounds like a cool way to spend a month:

The Museum of Science and Industry’s first live-in resident moved into her temporary home today equipped with an all-access pass allowing her to explore every nook and cranny.

Kate McGroarty, winner of the institution’s “Month at the Museum” contest settled into her personal, glass-enclosed exhibit and private living quarters this morning. She will live there through Nov. 18.

A couple of reasons why this sounds appealing to me:

1. I’ve always enjoyed this museum. There would be a lot to get acquainted with. I could probably look at the large model train set-up for hours. Can she spend a night in the old German submarine?

2. It would be fascinating to watch the people who come through.

3. I know this isn’t the goal of her month but does this inch us closer to a Truman Show-like reality? Could people actually become part of a museum’s exhibits?

Large but empty developments in China

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The New York Times reports on a large development recently constructed outside of Ordos, a city in northern China with about 1.5 million people. In an area that is planned to house 300,000, there are currently very few residents:

City leaders, cheered on by aggressive developers, had hoped to turn Ordos into a Chinese version of Dubai — transforming vast plots of the arid, Mongolian steppe into a thriving metropolis. They even invested over $1 billion in their visionary project.

But four years after the city government was transplanted to Kangbashi, and with tens of thousands of houses and dozens of office buildings now completed, the 12-square-mile area has been derided in the state-run newspaper China Daily as a “ghost town” monument to excess and misplaced optimism.

As China’s roaring economy fuels a wild construction boom around the country, critics cite places like Kangbashi as proof of a speculative real estate bubble they warn will eventually pop — sending shock waves through the banking system of a country that for the last two years has been the prime engine of global growth.

I wonder what it would be like to drive through such a large developed area that is basically empty. Such an experience would easily provide a context for a dystopian film. But in this case, the people haven’t been driven off by some odd disease or monster – it is the more prosaic, yet perhaps more potent, issue of economic trouble.

h/t The Infrastructurist

Mapping poverty rates by county across the US

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A story about the recently released figures regarding poverty in the United States includes a nice map from Mint.com that show poverty rates by county. The map shows higher rates of poverty in Louisiana, Mississippi, some parts of Texas and New Mexico, Appalachia, some of the middle parts of the southern Atlantic states, and some pockets in the upper Great Plains.

This map shows the proportion of residents who are living in poverty; while the national rate is now about 1 in 7 Americans is under the poverty line, 25% or more of residents in these locations live in poverty. Many of these counties are more rural counties. The map would look different if it were mapping the absolute number of people living in poverty – then you might see a shift toward some larger metropolitan areas.

While areas of concentrated poverty in the city get a lot of attention, what is going on in some of these more rural areas? How did poverty rates shift over the last couple of decades in these locations?

New Urbanists explain side effects of sprawl

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Two New Urbanists, Andres Duany and Jeff Speck, argue that sprawl contributes to two more issues that some might not think of: climate change and rising health-care costs (obesity and car crashes).

h/t The Infrastructurist