Developing new architectural ideas from Third World slums

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Here is an interesting discussion of how some architects are looking to third-world slums for innovations in design:

The lofty vision of “Favela Cloud” touches upon several trends cycling through architecture today. First, it responds to the rising popularity of “architecture for social change,” for which the profession nobly renounces its service to the rich to address the issues of the poor. But the “Cloud” purportedly distinguishes itself from more conventional do-good design because its principle source of inspiration is the slum itself. As eVolo explains, the success of the design hinges on its “additive system that can grow and adapt to its site conditions,” motivated by the existing self-organizing logic of the favela. In other words, the intervention draws from the social and organizational qualities characteristic of the very environment it seeks to improve, a methodology that has its own backstory in architectural discourse, as I’ll explore later. By returning to its point of departure and theoretically folding back into itself, the shiny edifice straddling Santa Marta brings into question if and how architecture can intervene in communities that have developed in the abject absence of a welfare state…

With basic rights to food, potable water, and shelter categorically denied to slumdwellers, decent public architecture is but a pipe dream. Without functioning infrastructure, working sewage systems, proper housing, and designated civic spaces, slum-dwellers are forced to engineer their own systems of order. Waste from the city proper is salvaged in the slums to form constellations of cinderblock shelters fortified with sheets of tin and plastic-bag insulation; the meager space of a home easily and often doubles as a workshop; makeshift marketplaces sprout like weeds in every available space. As urban sociologist Erhard Berner wrote in his 1997 book examining land use in Manila, “Virtually all the gaps left open by city development are immediately filled with makeshift settlements that beat every record in population density.”…

Around the same time when Koolhaas was traveling to Lagos, San Diego-based architect Teddy Cruz was visiting Mexico’s border towns with a similar resolve to study under-the-radar urban phenomena. Cruz observed in Tijuana how developers were importing a superficial image of the American dream across the border in the form of cheap, miniature replicas of the suburbs. “What I noticed is how quickly these developments were retrofitted by the tenants,” Cruz told the New York Times, bringing attention to the makeshift mechanics’ shops and taco stands that quickly took over front lawns and the spaces between the homogenous suburban shells. Here along the border, the ersatz American utopia could not help but evolve into something much more layered and complex.

Cruz studied the individuated forms and programs and exported these lessons back across the border to suburban San Diego, where he was working on a design for a residential development for Latino immigrants. His resulting prototype weaves 12 affordable housing units, a community center, offices, gardens, and spaces for street markets and kiosks into a concrete frame. “In a place where current regulation allows only one use, we propose five different uses that support each other,” Cruz explains in an article for Residential Architect Magazine. “This suggests a model of social sustainability for San Diego, one that conveys density not as bulk but as social choreography.”

Combining technical and theoretical expertise with how people “live on the ground” seems like it could be a winning combination. It is one thing to impose a particular design or program on a group and another to work with them and utilize their own expertise. This can require some humility on the part of trained professionals…it would be interesting to know how this is viewed within the broader discipline of architecture.

I’ve highlighted Cruz’s work before.

40% drop in Americans’ wealth tied strongly to declining housing values

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Homeownership is big in American cultural ideology as well as on American asset sheets. Thus, when housing values drop, the wealth of Americans drops:

The Federal Reserve said the median net worth of families plunged by 39 percent in just three years, from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010. That puts Americans roughly on par with where they were in 1992…

But it was the implosion of the housing market that inflicted much of the pain. The median value of Americans’ stake in their homes fell by 42 percent between 2007 and 2010, to $55,000, according to the Fed.

The poorest families suffered the biggest loss of wealth from the drop in real estate prices. But middle-class Americans rely on housing for a larger part of their net worth. For some, it accounts for just more than half of their assets. That means every step downward is felt more acutely.

Rakesh Kochhar, associate director of research at the Pew Hispanic Center, calls this phenomenon the “reverse wealth effect.” As consumers watched the value of their homes rise during the boom, they felt more confident spending money, even if they did not actually cash in on the gains. Now, the moribund housing market has made many Americans wary of spending, even if their losses are just on paper.

Alas, it doesn’t look like housing values will be shooting back up anytime soon.

Some other tidbits regarding housing and wealth from the Federal Reserve report:

-“The decline in median net worth was especially large for families in groups where housing was a larger share of assets, such as families headed by someone 35 to 44 years old (median net worth fell 54.4 percent) and families in the West region (median net worth fell 55.3 percent).” (p.2)

-“Housing was of greater importance than financial assets for the wealth position of most families. The national purchase-only LoanPerformance Home Price Index produced by First American CoreLogic fell 22.4 percent between September 2007 and September 2010, by which point house prices were fully 27.5 percent below the peak achieved in April 2006. The decline in house prices was most rapid in the states where the boom had been greatest. For example, California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida saw declines of 40 to 50 percent, while Iowa saw a decline of only about 1 percent. Homeownership rates fell over the period, in part because some families found it impossible to continue to afford their homes. By 2010, the homeownership rate was back down to a level last seen in the 2001 SCF, although that was still higher than in any previous SCF since at least 1989.” (p.4)

-“As might be expected from the previous discussion on the role of the decline in housing values in explaining median and mean wealth losses across various demographic groups, there are large differences in net worth changes by housing status. Median net worth for homeowners fell 29.1 percent between 2007 and 2010, while the mean fell 12.7 percent. The decline in median net worth for non-homeowners (hereafter, renters) was only 5.6 percent, though the decline in the mean was much larger at 23.4 percent. Renters have much lower median and mean net worth than homeowners in any survey year, so the dollar value of wealth losses for the renter group tended to be much smaller; for example, the median net worth of renters fell $300 over the three-year period, in contrast with $71,500 for
homeowners.” (p.22)

-“Housing wealth represents a large component of total family wealth; in 2010, primary residences accounted for 29.5 percent of total family assets. Over the 2007–10 period, this percentage declined 2.2 percentage points overall. The relative importance of housing in the total asset portfolio varies substantially over the income distribution, with housing generally constituting a progressively smaller share of assets with increasing levels of income, as shown in the following table…Homeowners in virtually all demographic groups saw losses in the median, and most of those losses were substantial; the one exception was the lowest quartile of the net worth distribution, where homeownership
jumped 8.1 percentage points and the median home value increased 31.2 percent, most likely reflecting a compositional shift within that lowest wealth group. Otherwise, substantial decreases in median housing values were widespread.” (p.47-49)

It sounds like the West (compared to other regions) and homeowners (compared to renters) were hit hard by a drop in housing values.

Philadelphia fighting food deserts through fresh fruits and vegetables at corner stores

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Philadelphia is launching a new initiative to fight food deserts through existing corner stores:

The $900,000 investment in better health depends on apples and oranges, chips and candy, $1,200 fridges and green plastic baskets. The results could steer the course of American food policy.

Philadelphia is trying to turn corner stores into greengrocers. For a small shop, it’s a risky business proposition. Vegetables have a limited shelf life, so a store owner must know how much will sell quickly — or watch profits rot away. He also lacks the buying power of large supermarkets and is often unable to meet the minimum orders required by the cheaper wholesalers that grocery stores use.

With shelf space at a premium, shop owners must pick and choose the products they think will sell best. Chips and candy and soda are a sure bet. Eggplant? It’s hard to know…

The city has recruited 632 corner stores — of 2,500 overall — to its Get Healthy Philly initiative. Of those, 122 have gotten more intensive support, been supplied with new fridges to store produce and connected with wholesalers from whom they can buy at lower prices. It is also working with schools to improve nutrition and helping neighborhoods launch farmers markets, a multifaceted approach officials hope will improve public health.

As the article suggests, there is a lot riding on this project. It will be interesting to see if this could (1) substantively help improve health and (2) be profitable.

The advantage here seems to be that the stores are already established in neighborhoods and probably already have an established clientele. This program then puts healthier food in front of people who may already be visiting these stores. Working with existing infrastructure sounds like it would be more effective as well as cheaper in the long run.

Earn sociology credit by volunteering at Illinois’ new 2-1-1 info phone number

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A new information phone number, 2-1-1, is close to being available to northeastern Illinois residents and sociology students at a few Illinois colleges can earn credit for volunteering at the call centers:

The number is a free, nonemergency option for information on health and human service agencies, spearheaded by United Way. More than 30 states have coverage for 100 percent of their residents, as does Puerto Rico. Illinois and Arkansas are the only two states with less than 20 percent of residents able to dial 211, according to United Way Worldwide 2011 statistics…

Now though, David Barber, executive director of the United Way of Greater McHenry County, is working with six other local United Ways to create a similar collaborative across McHenry, Kane, Kendall and Lake counties. Barber is on the board of 211 Illinois and was the chairman for the committee that issued a request for information from potential 211 operators for downstate counties…

Local college students studying sociology or psychology could get real-world experience helping people in need by volunteering at the call centers for class credit — as Illinois State University and Illinois Wesleyan students already do. A single call center could serve the entire region or multiple call centers could be formed.

And data about the content of calls will be available to constantly improve service.

This is interesting that this service is making its way to more suburban areas. Chicago has had a popular 3-1-1 number for years. The Chicago number had 4.2 million calls last year. According to the FAQs, here are the “most requested city services in Chicago“:

  • Street Lights – All/Out
  • Graffiti Removal
  • Garbage Cart Black
  • Rodent Baiting/Rat Complaint
  • Shelter Request
  • Building Violation
  • Pot Hole in Street
  • Abandoned Vehicle Complaint

I would be interested to know what these sociology (and psychology) students encounter when answering these phone calls. How much could their sociological training come into play?

I am intrigued by the last idea quoted above: the phone number operates as a sort of voluntary needs-based assessment. On one hand, the phone number is not a representative sample of needs in an area and people may not call the phone number about certain issues. On the other hand, if a subject continually comes up, it could be some indication that services in that area are needed.

Changing sets in “Clybourne Park” from a nice 1959 house to a home ready to be knocked down for a McMansion

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The play Clyboune Park is on Broadway and just won a 2012 Tony Award for Best Play. In going from Act 1 to Act 2, the play shifts from a house in 1959 to the same home 50 years later that is ripe for a McMansion teardown:

That’s because Clybourne Park is a biting, funny riff on Lorraine Hansberry’s classic play A Raisin in the Sun, one that takes place in the house that Hansberry’s African-American characters purchase in an otherwise all-white neighborhood. It’s talked about, but never seen, in her play, but it’s the fulcrum of the conversations in Clybourne Park.

“The first act is in 1959, in sort of an Eisenhower-era middle class/working class household,” Ostling explains. “The people are packing up to move. And in the second act, it’s 2009. The neighborhood sort of went down, the house is trashed, and they’re preparing to raze it and build a McMansion. So it’s really two completely different sets.”

In the first act, the set has a cozy, lived-in feel — from the flowery 1950s wallpaper to the period doorknobs. When the curtain rises for Act 2, most of the details have changed significantly.

“All the woodwork is painted over,” Ostling says. “The front door has been replaced — because we were thinking, you know, they probably wanted more security, so that nice wood-and-glass front door is replaced with a security door that has some serious bolts in it.”

During intermission, the set has to be changed very, very quickly; a crew of five swings walls in a highly coordinated intermission ballet. When they first rehearsed the changeover, it took 30 or 40 minutes. Now, Ostling says, “We’re not waiting for the crew at all. We’re waiting for people to go to the bathroom!”

The home may be the same but much has changed between 1959 and 2009, both in American neighborhoods as in what Americans expect in their interiors. I would be interested to see what the “ready to be razed for a McMansion” interior look is these days – probably not much granite and stainless steel.

I’ve always been intrigued by how homes are portrayed on TV, in movies, and in plays. On one hand, they are typically depicted as “average” places. Of course, this look is very staged and I’m not sure these homes really look like typical homes. Yet, they always feel a little strange already as you know they are often cutaway all along one angle to allow for cameras. You know what this is like if you have seen a play or gone on a TV set where the interior looks a little familiar but is completely open with plenty of room for cameras and lights.

Economist Stiglitz: “American Dream is a myth”

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Nobel winning economist Joseph Stiglitz discusses the effects of income inequality in the United States:

In his latest book, The Price of Inequality, Columbia Professor and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz examines the causes of income inequality and offers some remedies. In between, he reaches some startling conclusions, including that America is “no longer the land of opportunity” and “the ‘American dream’ is a myth.”

While we all know stories of people who’ve moved up the social stratosphere, Stiglitz says the statistics tell a very different story. In the last 30 years the share of national income held by the top 1% of Americans has doubled; for to the top 0.1%, their share has tripled, he reports. Meanwhile, median incomes for American workers have stagnated.

Even more than income inequality, “America has the least equality of opportunity of any of the advanced industrial economies,” Stiglitz says. In short, the status you’re born into — whether rich or poor — is more likely to be the status of your adult life in America vs. any other advanced economy, including ‘Old Europe’.

For example, just 8% of students at America’s elite universities come from households in the bottom 50% of income, Stiglitz says, even as those universities are “needs blind” — meaning admission isn’t predicated on your ability to pay.

Social mobility is key to American Dream as the idea goes like this: work hard and you should be able to rise from the lower ranks to the top. This is linked to recent comments sociologist William Julius Wilson made about promoting “affirmative opportunity.” In America, we assume that people with good traits and skills, such as hard work, motivation, creativity, etc., will be able to move up the social ranks. However, this “rags-to-riches” tale obscures the fact that relatively few people are able to do this. We love to hold up examples of people like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs as people who didn’t even need college to become fabulously successful and wealthy but we forget that their cases are rare, we likely wouldn’t advise our own kids to drop out of college, and both of them had some advantages (read Outliers for some details about how Gates’ background helped him get ahead).

If social mobility is much more limited today, how long is it before this part of the Dream falls apart? I wonder how long it takes for a national mythos to catch up with reality.

From this brief excerpt, it doesn’t sound like Stiglitz is saying much new about inequality. Others have been talking for years about growing inequality with commentary about American headed for a “two-class society” stretching back to the early 1960s.

 

Study: home values increase several percent very near a Walmart

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A new study suggests that the value of a home increases a few percent if it is located within a half-mile of a Walmart:

It turns out, according to their recently published research, that values increase an average of 2 to 3 percent for homes within half a mile of a Wal-Mart store and 1 to 2 percent when the home is a half mile to 1 mile from a store…

The duo studied more than 1 million home sales between January 1998 and January 2008 near 159 Wal-Marts that were built between July 2000 and January 2006. They compared the prices of homes within four miles of a store that sold up to 21/2 years before an opening or 21/2 years afterward. The long time frame was picked on purpose, after the researchers discovered that the median number of days between when Wal-Mart announced a new store and when it opened was 516 days.

The study also noted that Wal-Mart’s entry into a market often acts as a beacon, generating other economic development nearby…

“On average, the benefits to quick and easy access to the lower retail prices offered by Wal-Mart and shopping at these other stores appear to matter more to households than any increase in crime, traffic and congestion, noise and light pollution or other negative externalities that would be capitalized into housing prices,” the professors wrote.

One interpretation of these findings: people are willing to pay a little more to be located near some commercial development. They may not want to live right next to it evidenced by the fact that most municipalities have some strong guidelines about how commercial areas to demarcate the space between development and residential areas, often with some combination of a berm, a fence, and trees/bushes. But, being a few moments away from a place where you can quickly buy groceries (and Walmart is the country’s biggest grocery store) and other goods is a plus.

One thing that is likely ironic about this data is that while homes close to the Walmart are a little higher, it is unlikely that residents walk to Walmart even though they could. You could interpret this data as evidence people want to live closer to some denser commercial development but having a Walmart nearby is probably not about walkability.

I wonder if these researchers could also tell how much development Walmarts tend to attract. Do they tend to act as anchors for one corner of a busy intersection? Is it enough for development on multiple corners? How many square feet of retail space, on average, can be successfully operated once a Walmart moves in?

I’m now going to look for real estate ads that mention the proximity of a Walmart…I’m not holding my breath.

Media looks for ways to better measure fragmented audience

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As media platforms proliferate, media companies are looking for better ways to measure their audience:

“We have Omniture data, comScore, Nielsen, some of our internal metrics that we look at — they don’t match,” Wert said.

Hampering the effort are audiences splintering into ever smaller shards as they use an array of outlets and platforms — including websites, mobile devices, print and broadcast…

The tinier the pieces the more precious each becomes. It’s more important than ever for traditional media looking to cover the costs of producing content to deliver to marketers as much information as possible about who’s watching, reading and listening.

Arguably, technology has made the measurement systems better than ever. But the result is counterintuitive: Consumers are followed more closely but the numbers don’t always add up, and it’s not clear how to put a value on those numbers…

Nielsen’s Patrick Dineen, senior vice president of local television audience measurement, said it’s “wildly inappropriate” to try to track audiences through one medium. Kevin Gallagher, executive vice president and local director at Starcom, said his firm has replaced talk of traditional media planning with something that tracks targeted consumers’ daily interaction with media.

Getting the right numbers means media companies will be able to more accurately gauge advertising, particularly target audiences, and then make more money. Solving these issues and appropriately valuing these media interactions will be a huge issue moving forward and whoever can do it first or do it best could have an advantage.

No golden age of books: “five hundred or so legitimate bookstores” in the US in the 1930s

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As people lament the closure of chain bookstores like Borders as well as independent bookstores, having fewer bookstores may not be sending us to some dark age. Indeed, easily accessible and abundant bookstores may be a relatively recent feature of society: there were few bookstores in the US in the 1930s.

I haven’t gotten far enough along in the book [Two-Bit Culture by Kenneth C. Davis] to tell you how Davis argues the story, but early in the book, I was absolutely dumbfounded by his description of the publishing business in 1931. He draws on a “landmark survey of publishing practices” carried out by one Orin H. Cheney, a banker, as a service to the National Association of Book Publishers…

“In the entire country, there were only some four thousand places where a book could be purchased, and most of these were gift shops and stationary stores that carried only a few popular novels,” Davis writes. “In reality, there were but five hundred or so legitimate bookstores that warranted regular visits from publishers’ salesmen (and in 1931 they were all men). Of these five hundred, most were refined, old-fashioned ‘carriage trade’ stores catering to an elite clientele in the nation’s twelve largest cities.”

Furthermore, two-thirds of American counties — 66 percent! — had exactly 0 bookstores. It was a relatively tiny business centered in the urban areas of the country. Did some great books come out back then? Of course! But they were aimed only at the tiny percentage of the country that was visible to publishers of the time: sophisticated urban elites. It wasn’t that people couldn’t read; by 1940, UNESCO estimated that 95 percent of adults in America were literate. No, it’s just that the vast majority of adults were not considered to be part of the cultural enterprise of book publishing. People read stuff (the paper, the Bible, comic books), just not what the publishers were putting out.

This data suggests that there is a big difference between books being published (and there is a reason the printing press is regarded as a major invention in human history) and how books can be purchased by consumers. There were not a lot of bookstores where people could browse thousands of volumes, let alone go online at Amazon.com and find tens of thousands of books.

If there was a paucity of bookstores in the 1930s, might the profile of libraries have been higher then? Libraries would have been one of the few places where average citizens could have found a wider range of books. Indeed, just before this period was when the Carnegie libraries were built:

A Carnegie library is a library built with money donated by Scottish-American businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. 2,509 Carnegie libraries were built between 1883 and 1929, including some belonging to public and university library systems. 1,689 were built in the United States, 660 in Britain and Ireland, 125 in Canada, and others in Australia, New Zealand, Serbia, the Caribbean, and Fiji.

That is a lot of libraries when there were only 500 or so bookstores in the entire United States.

William Julius Wilson argues for “affirmative opportunity” rather than affirmative action

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Sociologist William Julius Wilson recently made an argument for “affirmative opportunity” rather than affirmative action:

In a paper entitled “Race and affirming opportunity in the Barack Obama era,” Wilson urges a move away from controversial quotas in favor of a merit-based system that features flexible criteria of evaluation, which assess, in addition to exam results, personal attributes such as perseverance, motivation, interpersonal skills, reliability, creativity and leadership qualities. Wilson calls this approach ‘affirmative opportunity.’ He writes:

“These new flexible, merit-based criteria would less likely exclude people who have as much potential to succeed as those from more privileged backgrounds. I call this approach, ‘affirmative opportunity’ not ‘affirmative action’ to signal a shift in emphasis away from quotas and numerical guidelines, which is how affirmative action has come to be understood—and widely resented. Instead, the emphasis is on achieving equality of opportunity, a principle that most Americans still support.”

Wilson dismisses some recent calls for a move to a class-based, rather than a race-based system, arguing that class-based affirmative action would still favor whites, who are not “weighed down by the accumulation of disadvantages that stem from racial restrictions”…

Wilson ends his paper with a plea that no-one should be able to enter a hospital ward of newborn babies and accurately predict their future social and economic position in society solely on the basis of their race and class. “Unfortunately, in many neighborhoods in the United States you can accurately make such predictions,” he says, before issuing a final call to President Obama to use the upcoming election debates to argue that ‘affirmative opportunity’ programs are the way forward in offering every American equality of life chances and putting an end to both economic and racial disadvantage for good.

It would be interesting to see some numbers in how this might play out compared to affirmative action. Couldn’t solely judging individuals open up room for more subjective judgments on factors like race and class?

Wilson’s ideas about the hospital ward sound similar to the pitch made in Waiting for Superman: do we really want children’s lives to be determined by a lottery? The documentary suggests this happens when kids are applying to better schools (only a small number are randomly selected) and Wilson suggests is taking place by which neighborhood a kid happens to be born in.

Wilson has long argued that systems to fight racism should help large numbers of Americans, not just specific groups as this breeds resentment.