Category Archives: Sociology

The cultural contributions of Chicago right now

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In an editorial, the Chicago Tribune highlights current cultural contributions from the city in which they operate:

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Flyover is a fabulous new $40 million attraction at Navy Pier that used sophisticated drones to create an experience landing somewhere between an IMAX movie and a virtual roller-coaster. It makes you feel l as if you are flying like a bird over Sweet Home Chicago and thus experiencing it anew. The ride-movie hybrid, created here by Pursuit, part of the Arizona-based Viad Corp., has been doing boffo business and was just added to the lineup at the company’s Las Vegas operation. That means international tourists headed to Sin City now can visit Chicago, at least virtually. The beauty of Chicago also is coming to Flyovers in Vancouver and Reykjavík, Iceland, where we’ll bet they don’t take our city’s grandeur for granted as so many of us do here.

“The Bear” has been tantalizing neighborhoods all over the city as it has filmed its third season. This Hulu show, in many ways a love letter to Chicago and its innovative artists and hospitality workers, is approaching a tipping point of popularity. If it retains its quality, which seems like a good bet, it will bring yet more attention to the city and maybe even spark the kind of spin-off tourist appeal that shows such as “Friends” and “Sex in the City” have brought to New York City for years.

Chicago is all over Broadway, too, right now. One of the surprise hits of the Broadway season, “The Heart of Rock and Roll,” a droll jukebox musical featuring the songs of Huey Lewis and the News, is set almost entirely at Chicago’s venerable Drake Hotel during the 1980s. That’s thanks to a writer, Jonathan A. Abrams, who grew up in the north suburbs and has peppered his show with accurate local references from Dick Butkus on down. “Illinoise,” which began at Chicago Shakespeare Theater and moved to Broadway, has its audiences staring at the word “Chicago” on its backdrop for the entire show. Plenty of them are posting it on social media.

Add to that the coming Democratic National Convention and the attendant media exposure, and Chicago will be making a lot of news this summer and well beyond.

An interesting collection to highlight: a tourist attraction, a television show, theater productions, and a political convention.

Chicago is, of course, a world class global city. Figuring out what cities rank highly includes culture, among other factors. In the United States, Chicago lags behind New York and Los Angeles in terms of population and prestige and there are cities coming up behind it (Toronto? Houston?). How much influential culture needs to occur and/or be noticed in Chicago?

Setting The Matrix in Chicago – sort of

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While recently rewatching The Matrix, I noticed multiple references to Chicago streets. And then there is a map in the second half of the film:

Looking closely, this is not exactly Chicago. But, the waterfront kind of looks like Chicago, there is a neighborhood on the map marked “City Loop,” the city has a river, and things do appear to converge in the district next to the waterfront.

Why the resemblance? One source suggests this is deliberate in the depiction of Mega City:

Early drafts of the screenplay identified the city as Chicago, and most of the street and landmark names referenced in the films are from Chicago,[4] such as Wabash and Lake, Franklin and Erie, State Street, Balbo Drive, Cumberland Ave, the Adams Street Bridge and the Loop Train.[5] Some street names, such as Paterson Pass and Wu Ping Ave., are derived from names of production staff.

In a brief screenshot of the first movie, wherein Tank zooms in a map on the screen to give Cypher directions to the telephone, the map of the city shows a coastline similar to that of Chicago’s Lake Michigan Coastline.

The creators have connections to Chicago:

Sure, most of the trilogy’s urban scenes were shot in Sydney, and close watchers of the first movie can spot several Sydney landmark buildings. But creators Larry and Andy Wachowski were raised in Chicago and drop at least five references in the first script…

The Wachowskis attended Whitney Young High School and spent two years in small liberal arts colleges before they each dropped out and started a construction business. Then the quirky film resume began to take shape.

This is not unusual in today’s filming of movies and shows: creators are from certain places, scenes may be shot in a variety of places, and the name of the place in the film or show may or may not align with the places that are depicted on screen. In The Matrix, a combination of modern cities produce a soulless but recognizable setting.

Assessing public arguments as an academic

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Two recent encounters with arguments made – one on a podcast, one in a book meant for a broad reading audience – reminded me of the unique ways academics assess arguments. In both cases, the makers of the argument made connections across different sources and sets of evidence to present a particular point of view. As I considered these arguments, here are two features of my own thought processes that stood out:

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  1. A tendency to defer to those with expertise in a particular area rather than assemble broad arguments with multiple data sources. It is difficult to make big arguments with multiple moving pieces as this might cover ground addressed by numerous scholars across different disciplines. In academia, scholars often have fairly narrow sets of expertise. Can one argument adequately represent all the important parts of knowledge? Why not assemble a larger argument from the clear expertise multiple scholars hold rather than try to do it as one person or a small team?
  2. An interest in assessing the methods and form of the argument from a disciplinary perspective. Different academic fields go about the study of the world differently. They have different methods and think differently about what might count as evidence. They put their arguments together in different ways. The content of an argument or the rhetorical force of an argument matter but we often expect them to be presented in particular ways. Go outside these methodologies or formats and academics might struggle to past this.

Based on this, I wonder how well academics can work with arguments made to the public when we have been trained in specific that work within the parameters of academia.

When renovating a home might be more expensive than tearing it down and building a bigger new home

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In response to concerns from Portsmouth, New Hampshire residents that teardown McMansions were going to be constructed, the developer said:

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“By the time we renovated them, it would have been more expensive to do that than building a brand new energy-efficient home. That’s how we made the decision,” Chinburg said…

The company comes up with homes prices, he said, by “basically adding up what it costs to buy the property and build the homes,” and then adding “a fair margin.”

“Unfortunately that’s the market now … we’re not gouging people,” Chinburg said.

It would be interesting to see a breakdown of the different costs. Older homes may not be a great state of repair, they may need to be brought up to code, and they may not have the current features property owners expect. All of this requires money.

This reminds me of what can happen with big box stores. Vacant ones may not be very attractive given maintenance costs and the need to reconfigure the space for another user. Why not just build another one?

And while teardowns tend to occur in places where land is desirable, I wonder if this points to a tough future for many older homes and the aging American housing stock: will the costs of maintaining or updating the home be perceived as worth it?

The newly constructed modern farmhouse is…a scourge? A McMansion? Popular because of a TV show?

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A story about an LA teardown describes the rise of the modern farmhouse:

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Hollywood actor Chris Pratt, best known for his roles in the sitcom Parks and Recreation and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, has spurred the wrath of architecture enthusiasts over his decision to raze a historic 1950s house, designed by Craig Ellwood, to make way for a 15,000-square-foot mansion.

The move to demolish came shortly after Pratt purchased the mid-century home in an off-market sale for $12.5 million in January 2023. The house is located in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, across the street from Pratt’s mother-in-law, former first lady of California Maria Shriver. The historic house will be replaced by a modern farmhouse designed by architect Ken Ungar, Architectural Digest reported, and is now in the early stages of construction. Until its completion, Pratt is waiting it out with his wife, Katherine Schwarzenegger, in a $32 million estate in Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades neighborhood…

Pratt’s new home is adjacent to Shriver’s two homes, each valued at over over $10 million, carving out a family compound of sorts in the neighborhood. The demolition reflects the rising trend of modern, multimillion-dollar farmhouses cropping up in America’s suburbs that has gone on for decades and was newly revived after TV personality couple Joanna and Chip Gaines launched their debut show Fixer Upper, in which they remodeled old farmhouses, according to a National Association of Realtors report. Ungar has designed several multimillion-dollar mansions, including modern farmhouses, in Los Angeles.

This raises at least a few questions. Here are mine:

  1. Are the typical new farmhouses McMansions? In this particular case above, this is a home much larger than a McMansion. But, many modern farmhouses might fall into McMansion territory if they are a teardown, have some strange architectural features, and/or are part of suburban sprawl.
  2. In this particular case, the modern farmhouse is replacing a unique single-family home. But, one reading of the summary above is that the issue goes beyond this one property. The farmhouse has spread everywhere. Are there too many? Is it just a passing fad? Will a new style – and problem – be in play ten years from now?
  3. Could one TV show have significantly fed this trend? It is easy to point to a popular show – and then brand – as leading the charge. It would be interesting to see some numbers: how many builders and buyers were directly influenced by Chip and Joanna? Were they the only ones pushing modern farmhouses or were there other influencers? In this one case, who was Chris Pratt influenced by?

The American middle class and a high salary to “live comfortably” in a city with a 50/30/20 budget

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SmartAsset recently looked at the salary needed to “live comfortably” in American metro areas. The numbers are pretty high:

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Key Findings

  • On average, an individual needs $96,500 for sustainable comfort in a major U.S. city. This includes being able to pay off debt and invest for the future. It’s even more expensive for families, who need to make an average combined income of about $235,000 to support two adults and two children without the pressure of living paycheck to paycheck.
  • A family must make over $300k to raise two kids comfortably in six cities. Two working adults need to make a particularly high combined income in San Francisco ($339,123); San Jose ($334,547); Boston ($319,738); Arlington, VA ($318,573); New York City ($318,406); and Oakland, CA ($316,243) to raise two children with enough money for needs, wants and savings.
  • It takes the most money to live comfortably as a single person in New York City. This breaks down to $66.62 in hourly wages, or an annual salary of $138,570. To cover necessities as a single person in New York City, you’ll need an estimated $70,000 in wages. 

Here are the budget calculations:

SmartAsset used MIT Living Wage Calculator data to gather the basic cost of living for an individual with no children and for two working adults with two children. Data includes cost of necessities including housing, food, transportation and income taxes. It was last updated to reflect the most recent data available on Feb. 14, 2024.

Applying these costs to the 50/30/20 budget for 99 of the largest U.S. cities, MIT’s living wage is assumed to cover needs (i.e. 50% of one’s budget). From there the total wage was extrapolated for individuals and families to spend 30% of the total on wants and 20% on savings or debt payments.

I would be interested to see how this compares with how different people or groups over time have defined the American middle class. Is it a particular income band or an ability to have certain kinds of experiences? Do Americans in the middle class interpret their own lives as living comfortable?

Since most residents in cities do not have the salaries listed above, one conclusion is that many people are not able to live comfortably. Do these numbers mean that people below these salary points are living paycheck to paycheck (or think they are)?

This could lead to helpful discussions of social class, pay, and conditions in American cities. If Americans should be able to live on a 50/30/20 budget, what could be changed to help people achieve this?

Suburbs needing to revival older industrial parks

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What can a suburb do to breathe new life into a decades-old industrial park? Here are some ideas:

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Schaumburg officials hope a tax increment financing (TIF) district can provide the public resources needed to attract new investment in the village’s nearly 60-year-old, 573-acre Centex industrial park…

Neighboring Elk Grove Village’s 6-square-mile industrial park — the largest in the nation — wouldn’t be as successful without the kind of public-private partnership Schaumburg officials have in mind for Centex, Elk Grove Mayor Craig Johnson said.

Through a combination of location, modern infrastructure and a supportive local government, demand for some areas of the park has driven land prices there to $2 million an acre, Johnson added…

While Elk Grove’s industrial park includes the additional electricity capacity for such uses as data centers, Schaumburg is aiming to simply create a better environment for the type of manufacturing businesses that use the Centex industrial park today. But even those businesses have different needs than they did decades ago, Johnson said, such as higher ceilings and larger loading docks…

Johnson also noted that TIF funding allowed his village to acquire properties within its industrial park, package them into larger parcels and then sell them to businesses in need of more space.

Two thoughts come to mind:

  1. Many parts of the suburbs are no longer new. A sixty year old industrial park was created in the postwar era. The properties and the land use overall may not fit with what is in demand in 2024. At what point is it cheaper or easier to build new somewhere else? (I am thinking of what can happen with big box stores.)
  2. This exemplifies the kind of public-private partnership that is fairly common with development in the United States even as a lot of rhetoric suggests the U.S. takes a free market approach. There may be business competition but in the examples above, local governments are helping to create conditions or acting as middle men to get to the development they would prefer to see.

Another angle to this: what might suburbs do in the next few decades to set up industrial, commercial, and residential development for the next 50 years? At that point, even postwar suburbia will be roughly a century old.

Wrestling with the legacy of the cross at the De Soto National Memorial

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I recently visited the De Soto National Memorial near Bradenton, Florida. The entrance to the site describes the beginning of the landing of De Soto’s group:

A short trail that winds in a loop from the entrance back to the parking lot provides more details of the encounters. This includes some reflection on the role of the cross:

A complicated legacy that visitors are left to consider.

Chicago as a laboratory – for residential segregation?

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A quote discussing a new documentary about residential segregation in Chicago reminded me of imagery used by sociologist Robert Park about seeing a city as a laboratory for study:

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“This documentary really shows that Chicago is not just a place where segregation happened, but in some ways the intellectual and bureaucratic headquarters for thinking about how to carry it out,” Brown said. “It was a real brain trust in Chicago starting at the very turn of the 20th century, thinking about the problems that Blacks posed for real estate values and coming up with different ways of thinking about that as salesmen from the realtor point of view, as an intellectual problem being studied at UChicago, and the way the different neighborhood associations were also trying out different ways of keeping Blacks out of their neighborhoods.”

In other words, at official, neighborhood, and organizational levels, Chicago worked out how to practice residential segregation. Over the years, Chicago has ranked high on measures of residential segregation. A quick visual of the situation – such as a dot map showing race and ethnicity of residents – shows the differences in residences in Chicago today. And did other places follow the lead of Chicago?

I look forward to seeing this documentary.

Maintaining the undersea cables that keep today’s world humming

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The Internet-enabled world of today might not be possible without having and repairing thousands of undersea cables:

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The world’s emails, TikToks, classified memos, bank transfers, satellite surveillance, and FaceTime calls travel on cables that are about as thin as a garden hose. There are about 800,000 miles of these skinny tubes crisscrossing the Earth’s oceans, representing nearly 600 different systems, according to the industry tracking organization TeleGeography. The cables are buried near shore, but for the vast majority of their length, they just sit amid the gray ooze and alien creatures of the ocean floor, the hair-thin strands of glass at their center glowing with lasers encoding the world’s data…

Fortunately, there is enough redundancy in the world’s cables to make it nearly impossible for a well-connected country to be cut off, but cable breaks do happen. On average, they happen every other day, about 200 times a year. The reason websites continue to load, bank transfers go through, and civilization persists is because of the thousand or so people living aboard 20-some ships stationed around the world, who race to fix each cable as soon as it breaks…

The world is in the midst of a cable boom, with multiple new transoceanic lines announced every year. But there is growing concern that the industry responsible for maintaining these cables is running perilously lean. There are 77 cable ships in the world, according to data supplied by SubTel Forum, but most are focused on the more profitable work of laying new systems. Only 22 are designated for repair, and it’s an aging and eclectic fleet. Often, maintenance is their second act. Some, like Alcatel’s Ile de Molene, are converted tugs. Others, like Global Marine’s Wave Sentinel, were once ferries. Global Marine recently told Data Centre Dynamics that it’s trying to extend the life of its ships to 40 years, citing a lack of money. One out of 4 repair ships have already passed that milestone. The design life for bulk carriers and oil tankers, by contrast, is 20 years…

“One of the biggest problems we have in this industry is attracting new people to it,” said Constable. He recalled another panel he was on in Singapore meant to introduce university students to the industry. “The audience was probably about 10 university kids and 60 old gray people from the industry just filling out their day,” he said. When he speaks with students looking to get into tech, he tries to convince them that subsea cables are also part — a foundational part — of the tech industry. “They all want to be data scientists and that sort of stuff,” he said. “But for me, I find this industry fascinating. You’re dealing with the most hostile environment on the planet, eight kilometers deep in the oceans, working with some pretty high technology, traveling all over the world. You’re on the forefront of geopolitics, and it’s critical for the whole way the world operates now.”

This is a great example of invisible infrastructure. How many Internet users each day think about the cables that support the system? I am guessing very few.

The article suggests the methods of repairing undersea cables resembles that of the first repairers of cables in the second half of the nineteenth century. Given our technological advances, are there quicker ways to do this? I imagine one reason these systems are still used is because they are considered economical. At what point do the cables go away in favor of a different system?