Category Archives: Places

Viewing Main Street at Disneyland alongside its inspiration (Marceline, Missouri)

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A number of sociologists have in recent years written about spaces where there is an attempt to build in nostalgia, to recreate an atmosphere from the past but with new materials and design. One of the places to see this is in Disneyland’s Main Street, the opening part of the park where Walt Disney attempted to produce a copy (or an improvement?) of the typical small-town downtown.

The Chicago Tribune has a short photo essay where they show pictures from Disney’s Main Street alongside pictures from downtown Marceline, Missouri, the small town that Disney claimed influenced his later Main Street. While this just a limited set of pictures, seeing these images side by side does reveal some things:

1. Main Street in Marceline looks similar to the Main Streets of many small towns: brick buildings, a little bit drab (probably partially due to the fate of small towns since the era when Disney was in Marceline), some “old-time” features (such as the clock on the stand at the corner).

2. In comparison, Disneyland’s version really does seem “hyper-real”: it is much more colorful (or is that just the sun in southern California?), the buildings feature extra features (more architectural touches, more flash than just the plain brick), and there are crowds of people walking through. While the buildings of Marceline are more functional, the buildings at Disneyland are meant to entertain and invoke feelings (such as nostalgia and consumerism). Disneyland’s Main Street looks like a movie set whereas as Marceline looks like dull reality.

3. Perhaps we could make a case that Disney took his pre-teen experiences and translated them into his Disneyland Main Street. Perhaps to a pre-teen, Marceline’s downtown was the height of excitement: different goods being sold, people from around the town (and area) gathering together, new things to look at. A more cynical take would be that the Disney Main Street is a glamorous (or garish) pastiche of real downtowns where people cared less about entertainment and more about maintaining community.

Kotkin: election results “the smackdown of the creative class”

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Amongst pundits sifting through the election returns, I have only seen Joel Kotkin explore how votes broke down by broad location categories: cities vs. suburbs. Before the election, Kotkin suggested that both parties were fighting over middle-class suburbanites (and the Democrats were losing at this). Afterward, he continues this argument and suggests the creative class and bourgeois bohemians were overwhelmed by the middle-class, suburban vote:

More than anything, this election marked a shift in American class dynamics. In 2008 President Obama managed to win enough middle-class, suburban voters to win an impressive victory. This year, those same voters deserted, rejecting policies more geared to the “creative class” than mainstream America.

A term coined by urban guru Richard Florida, “the creative class” also covers what David Brooks more cunningly calls “bourgeois bohemians”–socially liberal, well-educated, predominately white, upper middle-class voters. They are clustered largely in expensive urban centers, along the coasts, around universities and high-tech regions. To this base, Obama can add the welfare dependents, virtually all African-Americans, and the well-organized legions of public employees…

But the real decider–to use George W. Bush’s unfortunate phrase–remains the much larger, more amorphous middle class. Given the economy of the past two years, the subsequent alienation of this group should pose no mystery. Suburban swing voters didn’t suddenly turn into racists or right-wing cranks. Instead they have seen, correctly, that Obama’s economic policy has to date worked to the advantage of others far more than themselves or their families. Until the Democrats and Obama can prove that they once again can serve the interests of these voters, they will continue to struggle to recapture the optimism so appropriate two years ago.

I would love to see some actual numbers on this. It seems like Richard Florida could post some maps like he has recently been doing on Atlantic.com that would correlate voting patterns with the presence of the creative class.

I wonder if Kotkin would suggest this is a continuation of the older “culture wars” idea (progressives vs. conservatives, religious vs. non-religious, etc.) or a new trend (the creative class vs. middle-class suburbanites).

More broadly, how big will the creative class in America grow to be? Is it possible, or even desirable, that a significant number of Americans become part of the creative class or the bourgeois bohemians?

Building the “aerotropolis”

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An article in the Boston Globe discusses a recently-coined phenomenon: the aerotropolis. This refers to the conglomeration of businesses and other uses that now tend to gather around important international airports:

Dulles is no longer an airport but an aerotropolis, a term coined by a University of North Carolina business professor. An aerotropolis is a city of the 21st century, built around a runway in roughly the same way that historic cities grew up around water or rail lines, with a close-in network of businesses, an outer loop of service industries, and suburbs full of homes.

Aerotropolises have emerged in places like the former no man’s zone between Dallas and Fort Worth, in suburban Atlanta, and around Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands, near Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague. They provide what John D. Kasarda, the UNC professor, calls “connectivity” to the global marketplace. International companies want to locate where their executives can step out their doors and be on another continent eight hours later. Firms producing the highest-value goods want to ship them to markets around the world. (“The Web won’t move a box,” Kasarda declares. “High-end products move by air.”) And businesses with tentacles around the globe want a place where all their people can fly in easily for meetings.

The story goes on to discuss how this did not come about around Logan Airport in Boston, primarily because of space issues. If space is indeed an important concern, this may be tricky to navigate – a city wants an airport relatively close to businesses and travelers can easily get downtown but at the same time, perhaps airports should be located further out as airports themselves require a good amount of land and if the aerotropolis is the goal, this takes up even more space.

This new term also suggests that airports are more than just pieces of infrastructure or places where tourists come and go but rather are important nodes in urban business networks. But some other information might be helpful to better understand the aerotropolis: does the aerotropolis provide more or less benefits than businesses that gather around other modes of transportation (highways, rail lines, seaports)? How does the business generated around airports today compare to the business generated 20 years ago? Which industries in particular benefit from the aerotropolis? How much money do municipalities gain from the aerotropolis versus other land uses?

Translating this into some other terms in use, is this simply an edge city with an airport at its center?

h/t The Infrastructurist

Fighting over suburban character: Show-Me’s in Naperville

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One long-lasting idea about suburbs is that they are family-friendly places. So when a business comes to town that may not fit that image, some residents can become angered. Such is the case with a new restaurant that wants to move into Naperville:

Naperville residents will get a chance this week to formally voice their opinions about a controversial plan to open a restaurant called Show-Me’s, which opponents say will feature scantily clad waitresses who do not fit the city’s “family-friendly” image.

An open forum will be held during a Naperville Liquor Commission meeting Thursday.

But a group of about 30 people let their feelings be known during a demonstration Friday. Standing in front of the proposed site, they loudly chanted “Stop the show!” to passing cars.

The protesters have suggested this restaurant does not fit with the character of the community. The community’s mayor is on the record suggesting that he “thought it was a regular restaurant as far as I was concerned” and the clothing of the waitresses was “tastefully done.”

While this seems like just a small group of protesters, the question they raise is an interesting one: what exactly is a suburban community supposed to look like? What businesses and residents fit its image? As the mayor suggested, the proposed restaurant is not breaking any laws or rules so it would hard to reject their liquor license proposal. But necessarily following the rules or laws is not the concern of many suburbanites who have ideas about their ideal community. Local politicians have to account for (or at least acknowledge) these feelings and images even if the proposed business breaks no rules and brings in tax dollars.

(Additionally, it always interesting to read comments on stories about Naperville – it tends to bring out people who both intensely dislike and like the city.)

Suburbs and cities in the 2010 elections

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Joel Kotkin argues that suburbs are the primary battleground in the 2010 elections and Democrats are behind because they are trying to push urban strategies:

In America, the dominant geography continues to be suburbia – home to at least 60 percent of the population and probably more than that portion of the electorate. Roughly 220 congressional districts, or more than half the nation’s 435, are predominately suburban, according to a 2005 Congressional Quarterly study. This is likely to only increase in the next decade, as Millennials begin en masse to enter their 30s and move to the periphery.

Nationally, suburban approval for the Democrats has dropped to 39 percent this year, from 48 percent two years ago. Disapproval for President Barack Obama is also high — nearly 48 percent of suburbanites disapprove, compared to only 35 percent of urbanites. Even Obama’s strong support among minority suburbanites, a fast-growing group, has declined substantially.

Kotkin suggests two particular sets of ideas are behind this: suburbanites are not happy with the economic problems and Obama has pushed a more urban agenda (including suggesting that sprawl is not desirable).

Kotkin is on to something about a different political culture in suburbia. Numerous scholars have pointed this out: suburbs are not necessarily Republican but they do have unique concerns including not just keeping their homes but having them increase in values, desiring a more prosperous life for themselves and their children, keeping “threats” at bay, and limiting taxes. It can be tough to sell large changes to suburbanites when they feel that their money or resources are being taken away and used for other people. The political shift in America began in earnest in the 1960s as the growing number of suburbanites began to overwhelm concerns from other areas.

Though Kotkin suggests Obama has a more urban agenda, I think he hardly has strongly pushed for city life or city concerns. Even with the economic crisis, the primary focus has still be on the middle class (and perhaps some on the working class). Obama’s ideas about sprawl are not unusual, particularly among policymakers and academics. Perhaps voters tie Obama himself to the city with his Chicago mansion and seemingly strong ties to Chicago political operators?

But this shift toward the suburbs applies to both political parties: America is a suburban nation. And that suburbia is growing more and more diverse.

Sociology, among other disciplines, under review in Iran

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When I first saw the story a few days ago that the Iranian government wanted to review certain disciplines in Iranian universities, I wondered if sociology made the list. Indeed it did, among other academic fields of study:

Iranian Ministry of Science and Technology announced that 12 disciplines in the humanities will have to be revised before any further developments are approved in those fields.

Abolfazl Hassani, head of Education Development at the Ministry of Education, told reporters today that the fields of “law, human rights, women’s studies, economics, sociology, media, political science, philosophy, psychology, education, administration as well as cultural and artistic administration” are under review…

He added that the contents of these sciences as taught at present are not consistent with religious principles and are based on “Western culture.”

Hassani went on to say: “It is imperative that we revise the contents of these disciplines in view of our religious and indigenous ideology and principles.”

Why exactly are these disciplines under review? One guess is that these disciplines may be considered subversive in that they suggest ideas and values that don’t line up with the ideas and values of the Iranian government. This does seem to be the general nature of a lot of sociology: an interest in questioning why things are the way they are when they might be otherwise.

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?