Category Archives: Sociology

Sociologist who studies sports riots tries to explain Vancouver riots

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On Thursday, I threw out a few ideas about the riots in Vancouver after the Canuck’s Game 7 loss. A sociologist who has studied over 200 sports riots suggests what happened in Vancouver was quite unusual as it followed a loss rather than a win:

In fact it is so unusual that Jerry Lewis, the author of Sports Fan Violence in North America, told CBC News that what we saw Wednesday night “might be called the Vancouver effect.”

An emeritus professor of sociology at Kent State University in Ohio, Lewis has looked closely at over 200 sports riots in the U.S. and none of them followed a loss by the home team.

That little quirk aside, however, Vancouver’s night of rampage does fit relatively well with the overall pattern of sports riots in North America. From his research, Lewis has identified five common conditions:

  • A natural urban gathering place.
  • The availability of a ‘cadre’ of young, white males.
  • Championship stakes.
  • Deep in the series.
  • A close, exciting game.

It appears that the riots in Vancouver followed some of the patterns of sports riots (the five cited above) except for the fact that they came after a loss. Lewis and another academic go on to suggest that the rioting in Vancouver “was simply an expression of frustration.” Another academic also suggests that North Americans tend to pout after sports losses while European crowds are more liable to cause trouble because they see it as an attack on their identity.

If all of this is true, then the real question to ask is why this happened in Vancouver (and also happened in 1994)? Lots of cities go through big sports losses and there are a lot of frustrated sports fans every year as only one team can win a championship in each major sports. What leads to a different reaction in Vancouver? This sounds like it could be a very interesting case study.

Dioramas of suburbs and McMansions

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The New York Times has a story about photographers who build model homes and suburban scenes in order to photograph them:

Yet “Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities,” at the Museum of Arts and Design, circles back to the two-dimensional image in ways that feel very sophisticated. A good number of the show’s more than 40 artists build model homes, cities and landscapes mainly to photograph them…

James Casebere, meanwhile, shows his photographs but not the architectural models of suburban housing developments on which they are based. By controlling the lighting and printing his images on a large scale, he makes sprawl seem even more aggressive and insidious. In “Landscape With Houses (Dutchess County, N.Y.) #8” tightly spaced McMansions tower over a quaint white-clapboard farmhouse.

Mr. Casebere is something of an anomaly in this show because he is so focused on the present. Other examples of model architecture tend to indulge nostalgia, along the lines of Michael Paul Smith’s bland 1950s strip mall and Alan Wolfson’s gritty little slice of 1970s Canal Street in New York…

The trip through all of these microcosms can be tedious: too many shoeboxes, not enough ideas. One exception is a video by Junebum Park, who uses his hands and a rooftop camera to turn an ordinary parking lot into a kind of moving diorama. A simple trick of perspective is all it takes to make him the master of Matchbox cars and ant-size pedestrians.

The article ends by suggesting that too many of the dioramas are similar. What would happen if an artist presented suburban homes in a positive light rather than portraying sprawl as “aggressive and insidious” – would this be different enough or unacceptable?

I am intrigued by the idea that a “bland” 1950s strip mall induces nostalgia. What exactly does this look like?

A new bridge in Wheaton highlights problems with the railroad tracks, north-south routes

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The Wesley Street bridge in Wheaton recently reopened after being completely rebuilt. Here is how it was changed:

The project involved several components including demolishing the existing bridge and reconstructing the approach roads, according to a press release..

A stoplight has been added where Manchester Road, Bridge Street and Wesley Street intersect, and a change in traffic pattern will allow drivers to turn left onto Bridge Street. This turn was previously prohibited due to the structural deficiencies with the old bridge, the release said.

The new structure also does not have weight restrictions, opening it up to emergency vehicles, school buses and trucks.

This is the only news story online I could find that actually had a picture of the bridge (though it is not a great angle to show off the new road bridge). Particularly compared to the old bridge, the new one has some nice styling and is a nice addition to the landscape.

But the reopening of the bridge also highlights two long-running issues in Wheaton:

1. This is the only bridge/underpass near the downtown and when the bridge is out, drivers would have had to go west to County Farm Road and or to the east side of Glen Ellyn to avoid an at-grade crossing. For decades, the City of Wheaton has looked at possible plans to avoid the railroad tracks downtown. Unfortunately, any major construction would have altered the existing buildings near Main and Front Street, the heart of the historic downtown. (Wheaton has approved plans for a pedestrian underpass at Chase Street but this requires losing an at-grade crossing plus it is east of the downtown.)

2. One possible bridge/underpass solution touched on another issue: the lack of north-south routes through Wheaton. This is partly a legacy of the hub and spoke model of the Chicago area where railroad lines (and Wheaton was built on the first one) radiate out from the center of Chicago but the connections between these lines are rare. Several decades ago, the city considered linking up Naperville Road, which dead ends just south of the railroad tracks to Main Street so that there would be a single major road through downtown Wheaton. Again, this would have required a lot of work so plans never moved forward. Another option was to push Gary Road further south but this also would have required a lot of work. While this bridge is helpful in navigating around the railroad tracks, it still requires driving around the downtown and isn’t part of a north-south path through the city.

California housing forecast includes fewer McMansions, depressed construction industry

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Several researchers from UCLA suggest California housing industry will experience some changes in the next few years including a construction industry that will need years to recover:

UCLA forecasters have seen the future of California’s housing market, and it looks like this: more apartments near the coast, fewer McMansions in the desert…

That’s bad news for the state economy, however, for two reasons. One is that construction of multifamily homes requires less labor than construction of single-family homes. Second, areas such as the Inland Empire and Central Valley that were hit hardest by the housing bust won’t get a construction boom to help pull them out of the economic doldrums.

This means “there is an even larger structural unemployment problem in California than we originally thought,” Nickelsburg wrote in the forecast. “Not only do we have excess construction, real estate and support skills, but some of those that will be demanded will be in the wrong geography.”

California won’t start adding a significant number of building permits until 2013, forecasters say, which is one of the reasons the state’s unemployment rate will stay above 10% until the middle of that year. Nonfarm employment in the state won’t return to pre-recession levels until 2014, and construction employment won’t reach those levels until at least 2021.

The demographic shifts and move away from McMansions have been predicted elsewhere but the longer-term impact of a troubled construction industry has sort of flown under the radar. I wonder how much of the current unemployment troubles in the US are the result of the lack of home construction, i.e., what percent of the unemployed are construction workers? Where do construction workers end up working in a prolonged housing industry slump?

All of this is a reminder that the housing crisis which helped lead to the economic crisis is a longer-term issue. Lower housing prices don’t just influence homeowners who wish they could sell or get a return on their home or large lending institutions who lost a lot of money – millions of construction workers are under- or unemployed and communities can no longer rely on quick single-family home construction to help revive their economies.

Championship wins and losses as an “acceptable” time to riot

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It has become a somewhat common ritual (though it doesn’t happen in all instances): a team wins a championship and happy fans celebrate with small riots and civil disturbances. But the script got flipped Tuesday night in Vancouver after the Canucks lost Game 7 to the Bruins:

Almost 150 people required hospital treatment overnight and close to 100 were arrested after rioters swept through downtown Vancouver following a Canucks loss to the Boston Bruins in the decisive Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals…

Rioting and looting left cars burned, stores in shambles and windows shattered over a roughly 10-block radius of the city’s main shopping district.

Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson said “organized hoodlums bent on creating chaos incited the riot” and noted the city proved with the 2010 Winter Olympics that it could hold peaceful gatherings. A local business leader estimated more than 50 businesses have been damaged…

“The destructive actions and needless violence demonstrated by a minority of people last night in Vancouver is highly disappointing to us all,” the team statement read. “We are proud of the city we live and play in and know that the actions of these misguided individuals are not reflective of the citizens of Vancouver or of any true fans of the Canucks or the game of hockey.”

The rest of the article goes on to suggest that people in Vancouver are shocked that this happened. But this brings up some interesting questions:

1. Why riot after the outcome of championship series and not so much at other times (like at the Olympics)? Sports do invoke a lot of emotions but as a friend suggested to me recently, sports help channel passions into non-destructive channels. So people these days get so worked up over sports that it spills into civil disobedience? Perhaps we are taking sports too seriously.

2. Could there be small groups of people in cities that are looking for excuses to do things like this and then seize upon the circumstances of a sports championship? If this is the case, then there are larger systemic issues to deal with. At the same time, it means that a city can blame some “bad apples” (“organized hoodlums” in the story above) rather than admitting there may be bigger problems.

3. I wonder how much stories like these continue to push people toward the suburbs.

Class I railroads converge in Chicago region

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Chicago continues to be a critical transportation hub in the United States. A recent short interview in Chicago said 70% of American rail traffic moves through the Chicago area and 6 of the Class I railroads in the United States run through the region. Here is a description of Class I railroads from the Department of the Interior:

There were 554 common carrier freight railroads operating in the United States in 2002, classified into five groups.

Class I railroads are those with operating revenue of at least $272 million in 2002. Class I carriers comprise only 1 percent of the number of U.S. freight railroads, but they account for 70 percent of the industry’s mileage operated, 89 percent of its employees, and 92 percent of its freight revenue. Class I carriers typically operate in many different states and concentrate largely (though not exclusively) on long-haul, high-density intercity traffic lanes. There are seven Class I railroads ranging in size from just over 3,000 to more than 33,000 miles operated and from 2,600 to more than 46,000 employees.

Here are the seven Class I carriers: “The Burlington Northern and Santa Fe (BNSD); CSX Transportation (CSX); Grand Trunk Corporation, which consists of the U.S. operations of Canadian National (CN), including the former Grand Trunk Western (GTW), Illinois Central (IC), and Wisconsin Central; Kansas City Southern (KCS); Norfolk Southern (NS); The former Soo Line (800) owned by Canadian Pacific (CP); Union Pacific (UP).”

Of course, this can lead to a number of issues:

1. The Chicago region has a large number of at-grade crossings and long freight trains are a nuisance for many drivers, particularly in denser areas.

2. This requires a lot of space to transfer cargo. In recent years, the newer intermodal facilities have moved further out from the city of Chicago with new facilities in Rochelle (west of DeKalk, south of Rockford) and the Joliet Arsenal.

3. Freight tracks closer to the city can be congested, delaying passenger trains.

The trick for the railroads (and others?) is to remind residents of the Chicago how important railroads are for transporting goods. In recent years, there has some more advertising about this, particularly touting the greener use of fuel compared to trucking. But more could be done within the region to provide evidence that Chicago continues to be important partly because of this traffic.

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.