Category Archives: Places

Making art out of sprawl

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The Infrastructurist comments on a story about an artist who uses sprawl and suburbia as his subject. The Infrastructurist and the story commentator suggest these images are alienating and ultimately, tragic:

The suburbs are totally self-contained, labyrinthine, and generally terrifying. The Times describes them as “static, crystalline and inorganic. Indeed, some of these streets frame retirement communities: places to move to once you’ve already been what you’ve set out to be.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

I don’t think one has to see these images as tragic. A couple of possible defenses of such images (and the one The Infrastructurist has on the story is a good one):

1. These can be seen as very ordered places. Not ordered in the sense of traditional city grid ordered but they still have a logic. The streets may be more winding but these communities seem to be centered around retail centers or parks. They may even have their own kind of beauty.

2. If one already thinks sprawl is bad, then viewing these overhead shots may just be throwing fuel on the fire. However, these images can be read as the American manifestation of particular social and cultural values: individualism and privacy as built in single-family homes and suburban streets for our cars. In America, the particular expression of these values may be best exhibited in suburbs. There are other ways suburbs/sprawl could be structured to still support those values – or perhaps these commentators would suggest these values themselves should just be done away with. But that is not a problem with these images; it is an underlying issue with sprawl and suburbs.

Searching for good colleges in the suburbs

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Newsweek recently put together a list of desirable colleges. One of the lists is the “25 most desirable suburban schools.” A couple of questions:

1. Are there people who specifically search for a college because it is located in a suburb? I can see the appeal to many of applying to a college in a big city – but I doubt being located in a suburb tops many lists of what people are looking for in a college.

2. I would take issue with whether several of these schools are suburban schools. The University of Notre Dame? It may have its own address and zip code but it is basically surrounded by South Bend. The real suburbs of the area, a place like Granger, are miles away. The University of Virginia is located in Charlottesville, roughly 70 miles from Richmond. For these two cases, this is a very loose definition of a suburb.

Uno’s with America’s “worst pizza” – but it tastes good!

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Yahoo likes to run stories about the “worst foods” in different categories and an updated list examines pizza. The #1 worst pizza in America: Uno Chicago Grill Chicago Classic Deep Dish Pizza (Individual). Here is the nutritional information and the description of the pizza:

2,310 calories
162 g fat (54 g saturated fat)
4,920 mg sodium

Wait, wait, wait. This is a one-person pizza? Yup. All 2,310 calories are destined for one soon-to-be expanding belly. This pie has been a perennial pick for us over the past three years, and the reason is simple: No other personal pizza in the country even begins to approach these numbers. It breaks every single caloric recommendation on the books, and it does it under the guise of a must-have “classic” dish. With the country being plagued by obesity, Uno should have the decency to banish—or significantly improve—this dish.

I want to briefly discuss two arguments made in this description:

1. The author suggests Uno’s is being malicious by slapping the “classic” label on this pizza. The suggestion is that being labeled “classic” means people think it is a “must-have” and are essentially being duped into selecting this pizza.

2. Because obesity is a big problem, Uno’s “should have the decency” (perhaps “responsibility”?) to fix this dish.

Some thoughts on these two arguments:

1. The Uno’s pizza is a “classic.” Deep dish pizza is perhaps the best-known food of Chicago. Naming this food a “classic” is not a trick; it is part of the city’s culinary heritage. Should an unhealthy food item not be allowed to be called “classic”?

2. Perhaps the pizza could be made healthier – but I don’t think Uno’s would suggest it should be eaten at every meal. If you eat Uno’s pizza, it’s hard to eat much of it as it is quite filling. Compared to the other six worst pizzas on the list, Uno’s likely reaches the smallest market.

(Personal disclosure: perhaps I am overstating the arguments against and for the pizza. I like deep-dish Chicago pizza. I don’t eat it all that often but I have had Uno’s (or Due’s) many times and I enjoy the experience. However, in recent years, my deep-dish alliances have moved over to Giordano’s because their pizza tastes less heavy and at least appeared to me to have less grease than Uno’s version.)

Learning about race from the South

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The Christian Science Monitor has a story about seven lessons that can be learned about race from the South. Here is the list: “recognize how far we’ve come,” “talk about race like a Southerner,” (#3 is not listed in a heading but is something like “see the benefits of frequent interaction between blacks and whites”), “Blacks love Southern opportunity,” “don’t stereotype whites,” “segregation by any other name…,” and “keep moving forward.”

One thing that caught my attention: #6 discusses segregation in the North, a region which supposedly has been more favorable to blacks. Several academics dispute this notion:

“The concept of Southern exceptionalism has obscured a lot of American history and a lot of Southern history, and it’s time to put that to rest and understand how deeply interrelated America and the South is, and how much the two have always resembled each other,” says Larry Griffin, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and author of “The South as an American Problem.” “For decades and decades, the South’s legacy has been the basic trope that permitted white Americans [to excuse] themselves from all racial guilt and project it to the American South.”

A group of historians – including Mr. Sokol and the University of Michigan’s Matt Lassiter – are revisiting how the North and South diverged after the Civil War. One of Mr. Lassiter’s findings is that Northern segregation happened largely by the same kind of government decrees that enshrined segregation in the South.

“The North has been a freer place, in some ways a better place [for blacks], but on the level of spatial segregation, structural inequalities, and poverty, [the North] is no better than the South and is, in many cases, worse,” says Sokol.

Sociologist James Loewen has also tackled this subject in Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. Loewen found that in the North between 1890 and 1940, blacks were forced out of many communities, often by informal “sundown laws” that required them to be out of a community by sundown or suffer the consequences.

An interesting article in a country that has difficulty discussing race and dealing with the consequences of a racialized society.

Listing the “coolest suburbs worth a visit”

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Critiques of suburbs have often included the charge that they are boring. But perhaps this stereotype is cracking: Travel+Leisure provides a list of the “coolest suburbs worth a visit.” A few things seem to unite these communities: they have “cool” cultural attractions (and some have drawn the attention of celebrities) and have a uniqueness or character that sets them apart from the “typical” suburb.

While I don’t suspect that suburban tourism will soon explode, this is a reminder that there is a lot of interesting things to see and do in suburbs. And if more and more visitors and tourists do head to the suburbs, I’m sure the communities will be happy to see them.

Polluting power plants and municipal boundaries

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Many people do not want to live near facilities like power plants, sewage treatment plants, and landfills. However, if the facility is outside municipal boundaries, there may be little citizens can do. The Chicago Tribune presents a classic example – a power plant emitting heavy pollution that draws less attention because it is just outside Chicago city limits:

From a plane, it would be easy to think one of the nation’s dirtiest power plants is within the Chicago city limits.

But the aging State Line Power Station, a major contributor to the city’s chronically dirty air, sits just a few hundred feet over the state border in Indiana, leaving it largely unnoticed and untouched during a decades-long effort to transform the Chicago area’s smog-choked history.

Protesters regularly march in front of two other coal-fired power plants in Pilsen and Little Village, demanding an end to noxious pollution that wafts into the Chicago neighborhoods. Federal and state prosecutors are suing the owner of the plants to force significant cuts in smog- and soot-forming emissions.

Yet a Tribune analysis reveals that the State Line plant, built along Lake Michigan by ComEd in 1929 and bought by Virginia-based Dominion Resources in 2002, is far dirtier than either of the Chicago plants. It emits more lung-damaging nitrogen oxide than the Pilsen and Little Village plants combined, and churns more sulfur dioxide and toxic mercury into the air than either plant.

The article goes on to say that there are efforts to force this plant to clean up. Considering the attention these kinds of plants tend to draw when located in more populated areas, its interesting that this one has received less notice than other facilities.

A note: this plant can be seen easily from the Chicago Skyway.

New Urbanist plans for Waco, Texas

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New Urbanist ideas about mixed-use neighborhoods are often appealing to municipalities: they suggest one can design and produce vibrant, diverse, and walkable communities. Waco, Texas, which according to a member of the Greater Waco Chamber is perceived by many as “Texas’ largest bathroom break,” has hired a firm to develop such plans.

The goals of the city sound ambitious:

Waco’s plan is bold for a city that’s been without a vibrant downtown for about half a century, much of it destroyed by a 1953 tornado. The city wants half the growth projected by 2050 to locate downtown and have 100,000 people living there…

The consensus: develop the banks of the Brazos River, attract the young and empty-nesters from Baylor University’s growing student body and faculty, and highlight tourist attractions (Waco Mammoth Site archeological dig, Dr Pepper Museum and replica of the drugstore where the soft drink was invented, an 1870 suspension bridge over the Brazos, Texas Ranger Hall of Fame & Museum).

If they build it, will people come to downtown Waco?

h/t The Infrastructurist

Rubble clearance in Haiti proceeds at a slow pace

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Eight months after a 7.0 earthquake devastated Haiti, most of the rubble in Port-au-Prince has still not been removed:

By some estimates, the quake left about 33 million cubic yards of debris in Port-au-Prince — more than seven times the amount of concrete used to build the Hoover Dam. So far, only about 2 percent has been cleared, which means the city looks pretty much as it did a month after the Jan. 12 quake.

Government officials and outside aid groups say rubble removal is the priority before Haiti can rebuild. But the reasons why so little has been cleared are complex. And frustrating.

Heavy equipment has to be shipped in by sea. Dump trucks have difficulty navigating narrow and mountainous dirt roads. An abysmal records system makes it hard for the government to determine who owns a dilapidated property. And there are few sites on which to dump the rubble, which often contains human remains.

Also, no single person in the Haitian government has been declared in charge of the rubble, prompting foreign nongovernmental organizations to take on the task themselves. The groups are often forced to fight for a small pool of available money and contracts — which in turn means the work is done piecemeal, with little coordination.

This is a reminder that while large disasters such as this often prompt quick and widespread relief efforts, these efforts may be needed for long periods of time. After the initial needs are taken care of (water, food, medical care, etc.), there is often even more work to do in order to rebuild.

The opening of the NFL season last week provided another reminder of this in New Orleans. While that city has made some progress, there is still a long way to go and the necessity of these efforts often receive little attention from broader society.

h/t Infrastructurist

Japan’s difficulty in tracking people over 100 years old

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Japan is known for having a high life expectancy: according to 2008 public data, the world’s life expectancy is 69, the US’s is 78, and Japan’s is 83. With this higher life expectancy, Japan has a large number of centenarians, people who are over 100 years old. But there is a problem: the Japanese government has had problems keeping track of this population group.

More than 230,000 Japanese citizens listed in government records as at least 100 years old can’t be found and may have died long ago, according to a government survey released Friday.

In August, the Justice Ministry ordered a review of records that found about 77,000 people who would be at least 120, and 884 people who would be 150 or older. The head count followed a flurry of reports about how elderly people are falling through the cracks in Japan as its population ages rapidly and family ties weaken.

In all, the survey of family registration records nationwide found that 234,354 centenarians were still listed as alive, but their whereabouts were unknown, the ministry said.

While this could be chalked up as simply a bureaucratic problem, the news story suggests these findings line up with concerns about how the elderly are treated in Japan. This then could be a larger issue that concerns social and family relationships and the fabric of Japanese society.

Considering what Daley built

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Blair Kamin, the architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, offers his thoughts about the building and design accomplishments of Mayor Daley.

Indeed, Daley’s long tenure–and his unchallenged grip on power–allowed him to take urban design risks that other mayors, nervously contemplating the next election, would be too timid to try.

That boldness is reflected in the long and generally distinguished litany of public works carried out under Daley. The list is surely highlighted by his greatest triumph, Millennium Park (above, Daley, in sunglasses, touring the park when it opened in 2004), which turned an eyesore of exposed commuter rail lines at the foot of Michigan Avenue into a showcase of contemporary art and architecture.

The link between political power and the ability to promote/push for riskier projects is a good insight. Many public and private projects get caught up in local controversies and without powerful politicians who are sure of their jobs, such controversies can derail many a project. While Kamin later acknowledges that Daley made his share of mistakes, his building legacy is fairly impressive.