Tag Archives: cities

The cities inhabited by animals

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A review of a new book compares gatherings of animals to human cities:

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Sometimes we simply need to appreciate what’s right in front of us. “Cathedral termites in Australia,” Mr. Huling writes, “build mounds more than 15 feet tall, which, relative to their individual size, makes their buildings significantly larger than humanity’s tallest skyscraper is to us.” Dusky farmerfish in East Asia grow “crops” of red algae by assiduously “weeding out less palatable foods” and have effectively domesticated a type of shrimp whose waste fertilizes the algae and boosts yields.

Perhaps the most impressive discoveries are animal “cities,” including two assemblies of octopuses, dubbed Octopolis and Octlantis, found off the east coast of Australia. Some gatherings even qualify as animal megapolises. A single atoll in the Seychelles serves as home to hundreds of thousands of tortoises, while millions of flamingoes flock annually to Lake Natron in Tanzania. The largest gathering of nonhuman mammals on earth takes place in Texas, where 20 million bats crowd into Bracken Cave near San Antonio. Their collective body heat raises the cave’s temperature to a sweltering 106°F, and the piles of guano beneath them are deep enough to bury the Statue of Liberty to her waist. All these congregations, Mr. Huling writes, represent “parallel societies with their own sophisticated life-worlds.”

The development of megacities in modern life could be viewed as an important human achievement. Bringing together that many people in one physical setting with some order and cooperation is remarkable.

But animals have done this for a long time. Many animals, in different kinds of habitats, come together in large numbers.

This gets at a longstanding question: what makes humans unique? And we can take it another direction: what makes human cities unique? The hint above is that perhaps cities are not unique to humans, even as the gatherings may not look like cities in terms of what humans expect to see.

Or what is unique about cities? Are they just large collections of people? Is there a unique urban experience or way of life? Can humans do things in cities they cannot do elsewhere? Are cities scaled up versions of smaller communities?

Understanding the large gatherings of animals could help us better grasp about what large numbers of humans living together and interacting with each other are really about.

Making the case for city downtowns

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A recent report from Gensler presents a vision for downtowns:

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Downtowns are citywide reputation engines. They anchor the tax base, centralize economic growth, and can determine whether a city feels dynamic or stagnant. Our research suggests that improving downtown experience is one of the most effective levers for strengthening a city’s brand, building a thriving economy, and retaining residents. Great downtowns — whether called a Central Business District (CBD), city center, or financial district — make their cities more competitive for talent, businesses, and investments.

Revenues. Business activity. Vibrancy. Status. Defining a city.

What are downtowns in the United States today? Are they more vacant than in the past, perhaps stuck in urban doom loops? Are metropolitan regions now where more people live and conduct their daily business?

The report goes on to suggest that downtowns can thrive if they pursue a mixed-use approach:

Urban vibrancy is generated by dwell time, not solely by how many people visit downtown. Cities that understand this move from prioritizing throughput to experience, creating spaces vibrant enough to turn an errand into an afternoon stay. In this way, the CBD can evolve from a business district into a living room for the entire city. Mixed-use density, activated ground floors connected to the street, and safe, walkable pedestrian areas create the conditions for urban vibrancy. Downtown design choices are never purely local decisions; their benefits extend across the entire city. The most successful cities of the future will be those that invest in their CBDs to foster an environment that encourages residents and businesses to stay.

This would require some major changes in American cities. This is not the first expert suggesting that downtowns need to change. However, the old model has been around a long time. People and systems are used to it. What might be a reasonable timeline for a big city to significantly change their downtown from a business-first model? How does a city pursue this across the board as opposed to a development here or a development there?

Different cities pursuing different versions of this could be useful. There likely is no one size fits all solution. The biggest cities or the superstar cities might have very different options compared to other cities. Or the local context might matter quite a bit.

Trying to untangle the factors behind a drop in violent crime across American cities

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What explains a decrease in violent crime in big American cities in the last few years? Some possibilities:

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Few experts endorse the idea that the police “had nothing to do with it,” as the Seattle protester claimed, but the link between the number of cops and the number of crimes seems hazier than ever. The low point in violent crime has arrived even though large police departments employed 6 percent fewer officers going into 2025 than they did at the beginning of 2020, according to a survey by the Police Executive Research Forum. Though they were mostly not in fact defunded, police forces were rocked by retirements and departures. New Orleans lost nearly a quarter of its officers in the years after the pandemic—and then recorded its lowest homicide rate since the 1970s in 2025. Philadelphia had its lowest per-capita police staffing since 1985—and just clocked its lowest murder rate since 1966.

There are many plausible explanations for the recent crime downturn: sharper policing strategy, more police overtime, low unemployment, the lure of digital life, the post-pandemic return to normalcy. Each of these surely played a role. But only one theory can match the decline in its scope and scale: that the massive, post-pandemic investment in local governments deployed during the Biden administration, particularly through the American Rescue Plan Act, delivered a huge boost to the infrastructure and services of American communities—including those that suffered most from violent crime. That spending may be responsible for our current pax urbana.

Naturally, every local leader likes to say that their police department is making the difference. But in this case, every happy family is not alike: Police staffing and strategy vary widely from place to place, so an exceptional local police chief can hardly explain gains that are so widespread. “What has changed nationally is a huge investment by the federal government in prevention in response to the COVID epidemic,” John Roman, a criminal-justice researcher who heads NORC’s Center on Public Safety and Justice at the University of Chicago, told me. He credits ARPA with sending billions to local governments to use as they saw fit, and defines prevention in the broadest possible sense. “Investing in education, police, librarians, community centers, social workers, local nonprofits. Local-government employment rolls increased almost perfectly inverse to the crime rate.”…

These hypotheses are about to be put to a test. Police staffing is recovering in many cities, and police funding remains as much a political priority as ever, but the last of the ARPA grants will be spent this year, forcing cities to make choices about which programs to fund and which to eliminate. Many “alternative” public-safety grants have already been cut by the Trump administration, leaving recipients such as schools and community organizations in the lurch. It’s as if the national gravity pulling down crime rates will suddenly evaporate, Roman, at the University of Chicago, suggested, revealing the weight of local choices. Baltimore is working on a post-ARPA plan to make sure its public-health approach to policing can be supported by the city’s general fund, but not every investment of the Biden years can be sustained.

Whether the trend continues – violent crime decreases – or reverses – violence crime numbers go up, I imagine this will lead to a good amount of academic research. As noted above, there could be a lot of factors at play. What methods can help address the multiple forces at work? What data can get at all the factors at play?

Additionally, this is a political matter. At the local and national level, residents, the media, and politicians pay attention to these figures. Numerous actors would be interested in figuring out what exactly happened. Some will want to take credit, others will argue for changes.

And if it does turn out evidence shows large-scale public funding helped reduce violent crime, how much would that influence funding? This could be contingent on elections and who is in office but it could also depend on other budget priorities.

Quantifiable running + big cities = “run-every-streeters”

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If you like to track your running and live in a large city, you could try to run every street:

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What began as a means for Barbosa to get his muscles moving following an injury has since grown into a year-plus pursuit, spurred on by the 25-year-old’s inclination to get to know more of the city after moving to the area more than three years ago.

As of the year’s end, Barbosa had just over 79% of Chicago’s more than 4,000 miles of street covered. He plans to finish by the spring, then eventually move on to other cities and repeat the venture on a new maze of streets…

He isn’t the only one. For years, from coast to coast, “run-every-streeters” have been taking on their version of the challenge, turning their metropolitan areas into bona fide treadmills. In 2018, a man ran every street in San Francisco over a span of 46 days. A couple years ago, another runner spent the better part of 12 months jogging every street in Manhattan, a 750-mile endeavor…

But he does like to expand his horizons. He started to use running as a means to explore new neighborhoods and the more he ran, he questioned just how much ground he was covering. Barbosa found an app to track his progress and when he saw there was a leaderboard of others doing the same, with the top contender hovering at about 55% of the city completed at the time, he thought, “‘I wonder if I can beat him?’” He’s been gaining traction since, both in mileage — and followers.

It would be interesting to know whether this was a thing before the ease of tracking movement via apps and GPS. It would be one thing to track running on a paper map. This is certainly doable. On the other hand, if a phone or a watch will track someone with no effort, now all the participant has to do is move. They could do their normal run or walk or bicycling and their route is captured. Their movement is quickly mapped and quantified. They just have to follow through with moving along every street.

Furthermore, they can compare their results to others. A leaderboard is referenced above. Does this mean the app or tracker is providing every street/mile as a goal? This is another step toward more people covering every street: their movement is tracked but it can become a competition to meet this goal. There will be a winner!

Any runner want to take on every mile in cities with more square miles than Chicago, like Nashville or Jacksonville or Juneau?

What society defines as “sinful” and ranking the most sinful cities

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A recent Wallethub list of the “most sinful cities in America” is built on this definition of sin:

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“Regardless of any particular religious tenets, certain activities are considered ‘sinful’ by society as a whole. Sometimes, these activities are always bad, like violent crimes or identity theft. In other cases, they may be relatively harmless in moderation but incredibly destructive when not kept under control, such as alcohol use or gambling. The most sinful cities are those where illicit activities and vices alike are the most widespread.” – Chip Lupo, WalletHub Analyst…

To determine the most sinful cities in America, WalletHub compared 182 cities — including the 150 most populated U.S. cities, plus at least two of the most populated cities in each state — across seven key dimensions: 1) Anger & Hatred, 2) Jealousy, 3) Excesses & Vices, 4) Greed, 5) Lust, 6) Vanity and 7) Laziness.

We examined those dimensions using 37 relevant metrics listed below with their corresponding weights. Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the highest level of sinfulness.

I find intriguing the idea that sins as defined by American society are less about religious traditions and more about social constructions of sin. Where do these ideas about sin come from and who defines them? The seven categories seem like they could match up with the traditional seven deadly sins.

If Americans see a list about sins, how many connect that to a religious meaning rather than a social meaning? If Americans grow up loosely connected to religion or are not connected at all, how do they learn about sin? Perhaps sin is more like modern capitalism which sociologist Max Weber argued lost it religious motivations and meanings decades ago. Are these measures good proxies for secularized sins?

Looking at the list of cities, some would not be a surprise. Others might be. For example, a number of cities in what would be considered the Bible Belt make the top 10. There are also some cities that some Americans might assume are higher than they are (Washington, D.C., at #35 and San Francisco at #42, for two examples).

Finances, ideal lifestyles, and the push and pull away from cities experienced by young adults

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Looking back at residential patterns after the late 2000s economic crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, what motivated younger adults to leave cities and move to suburban or rural communities?

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Later waves that arrived just after the Great Recession, however, had a different type of migrant identity. As luxury housing continued to be built in New York City and affordable areas disappeared, some residents found the big city “inhospitable to their desired urban lifestyle and identity”: “Many of today’s newcomers to Newburgh use the term ‘priced out’…though few actually left in direct response to their rents rising or their landlord pressuring them to move out,” Ocejo writes. “But cost still played an important role in their decision to relocate…. They felt displaced from their own potential and opportunities to thrive as middle-class urbanites living a specific city lifestyle in the metropolis.”

Herein lies the tension between getting “pushed” from a city versus “pulled.” Some contemporary migrants are pushed from a particular lifestyle and pulled by a promise that it can be built elsewhere. Unlike midcentury white flight—which was highly dependent on the construction of suburban housing, racism, and statecraft—middle-class millennials (especially those facing mounting city prices and remote work) find that smaller cities and towns cater to a broader vision for life, one that provides opportunities to buy a house, build a business, or comfortably raise a family…

“When people move from one community to another…they leave behind their old job, connections, identity, and seek out new ones. They force themselves to go meet their neighbors, or to show up at a new church on Sunday, despite the awkwardness,” Appelbaum writes. What this might mean for rural or metro areas is yet to be seen. But for people moving out of large cities, it’s redefining what upward mobility might look like. Building wealth through housing may be unattainable, but it’s being replaced by a search for a new American dream: self-actualization.

What I read in this description is an intertwining of financial matters and what lifestyle people see themselves having. Costs and resources matter; housing is a sizable portion of many budgets. Housing has become more expensive in many American metropolitan areas. But cultural narratives and individual aspirations also matter; what life does someone want to live? What do they see as a good life?

On this first factor, it helps to have more financial resources. The stories told in this article seem to involve people who had enough resources that they had options of where to live. They could make a major move, perhaps by selling a residence in one place to go to another. Or they had careers and job skills that enabled them to live in multiple places.

On this second factor, Americans have developed a lot of narratives over time about desirable lives. They want a single-family home in the suburbs. They want to be individuals who pursue their own path (the self-actualization suggested above). They want to engage community life. And so on.

Perhaps then it would be helpful to think about a two-pole line that demonstrates how people make decisions about where to live and what to pursue. On one side of the line is finances and what is possible in terms of money and resources. On the other side of the line is an image of the life they want to live and what that entails on a day-to-day and long-term basis. Depending on the current situation personally and in society, they might slide a marker more toward one pole than the other.

(Does this describe how young adults make these decisions or is this limited to a certain subset with particular resources and goals?)

Chicago as the epicenter for the creation of American time zones

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When Americans decided on time zones in the late 1800s, where did they gather to formalize the boundaries and clocks? Chicago, a railroad center:

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Until 1883, a Chicagoan asked to tell what time it was could give more than one answer and still be correct.

There was local time, determined by the position of the sun at high noon at a centrally located spot in town, usually City Hall. There was also railroad time, which put Columbus, Ohio, six minutes faster than Cincinnati and 19 minutes faster than Chicago. Scattered across the country were 100 different local time zones, and the railroads had some 53 zones of their own.

To do away with the inevitable confusion, the railroads took the matter into their own hands, holding a General Time Convention in the fall of 1883 at the Grand Pacific Hotel at LaSalle Street and Jackson Boulevard. (Today, a plaque at the location — which is just north of the Chicago Board of Trade Building — notes its significance).

Its purpose: to develop a better and more uniform system of railroad scheduling. The Standard Time System — based on the mean solar time at the central meridian of each time zone — was formally inaugurated on Nov. 18, 1883, a day that came to be known as the “Day of Two Noons.”

Another summary of the same story ended this way:

But it was an astonishingly rapid and successful shift, syncing up almost the entire country in the space of a week, with all roads leading back to Chicago.

Three interrelated features of Chicago stand out to me as contributing to being the place where time zones were agreed upon:

  1. A railroad center with numerous major railways running in and through the city and region.
  2. Business leaders, specifically railroad leaders, pushing for standard time zones in order to help their commercial activity. Chicago was a center for commerce and industry.
  3. The ease of getting in and out of Chicago – lots of railroads, central location in the United States – helped facilitate a meeting there.

These features of Chicago still hold today. The city continues to be a railroad center with lots of traffic throughout the region. It is still a business center, a leading global city. And it still serves as a transportation hub. Just as the railroad executives found it a good place to gather, see the number of important meetings that take place near O’Hare Airport, in the city, and throughout the region.

Might such a meeting in 1883 taken place elsewhere? Perhaps. If something as consequential as time zones were to be decided in 2025, which American city might we expect to host the discussion: the political center of Washington, D.C.? The leading global city of New York? The tech capital in San Francisco?

Chicago, a city of (many suburban) neighborhoods

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Chicago grew in a way that many American cities have grown: they annexed land and communities just outside their borders. Famously, New York City annexed Brooklyn in 1898 when the separate community across the East River was one of the most populous communities in the United States. But Chicago also had its share of large annexations that helped it add neighborhoods and expand to the borders it has today. The Encyclopedia of Chicago summarizes this process:

The Encyclopedia of Chicago (The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 22

For Chicago, the period of extensive annexations extended from 1851 to 1920. The largest annexation occurred in 1889, when four of five incorporated townships surrounding Chicago (as well as a part of the fifth) were annexed to the city. Most annexations to Chicago during these years came because Chicago offered superior services, from better water connections in the nineteenth century to better high schools in the early twentieth. Later, prior incorporations and suburban resistance to the power and urban complexity of Chicago halted the process.

Chicago is often known now as a city of neighborhoods and starting with efforts by University of Chicago sociologists in the 1920s to define Chicago neighborhoods, it has 77 community areas. But many of these areas were once suburban. Historian Elaine Lewinnek in The Working Man’s Reward discusses what happened in Lake Township, bordered by Pershing, State, 87th, and Cicero, as it developed as an industrial suburb with working-class residents. It was added to the city in 1889, an important year for the city’s boundaries as several other large suburban areas were incorporated into the city including Hyde Park just east of Lake Township and Jefferson Township and Lake View Township on the north side of the Loop.

As these suburban areas became part of the city, they received city services and became part of the larger city’s fabric. They added residents and structures. But they also have hints of suburban life. Row upon row of single-family homes. Strip malls and big box stores. Residents might drive more.

Such neighborhoods can be found in many American cities. Big cities are not just the dense downtowns with skyscrapers, major corporate offices, and certain cultural institutions. They include numerous residential, commercial, and industrial neighborhoods on their edges where the borders of municipal boundaries can blur.

Some American cities have seen no gain in housing values for decades, others with large gains

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Looking at long-term data regarding housing values in different American cities shows large differences across places:

What drives these differences?

When we stopped to think about that, we couldn’t get it out of our heads. So many of us have internalized the lesson that homes are speculative, flippable investment vehicles, yet in much of the country — Cleveland, Memphis, Detroit, we could keep going — housing has been a truly quotidian commodity. There, home prices simply keep pace with inflation over the long run, no different from spaghetti or sprockets…

Consider that Dallas, Houston, Seattle and Portland, Oregon, all had what the researchers would classify as high demand for housing. But prices in Dallas and Houston have only roughly doubled in price since 1890, compared with a more than sixfold jump in Portland, or almost fivefold in Seattle…

“If prices go up,” Lyons asked us rhetorically, “does supply come on stream to follow? Do people look to build homes?”

Since 1970, the metros where housing stock grew the least relative to population growth — think Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego or Seattle — saw the some of the fastest home price growth. While metros that built enough housing — such as Atlanta, Phoenix and Charleston, South Carolina, saw home prices rise much less rapidly, even as their populations soared.

Does this suggest that Americans have come to view houses as investments when some places in the country have not experienced large increases in housing values over time?

For the cities with big increases over time, how do local leaders and residents see the jump in property values? It clearly leads to issues with affordable housing: rising housing values prices some people out of the market, particularly compared to what that market was and what residents had previously experienced. But rising housing costs can be viewed positively: people can sell their properties for more money and rising values can be associated with success.

This might be another reason why it is difficult to address housing issues at a national level. Housing is a very local issue and the cities in the top row of the graphic above have very different conditions compared to the cities in the bottom row.

Jobs as economic engines and prestige for big cities

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Walgreens recently announced it will move employees from Chicago’s Loop to its suburban headquarters. The Chicago Tribune discusses the consequences:

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But let’s be honest: this news stings. The city loses many hundreds of workers who are downtown most days of the week. Grabbing lunch. Shopping. Going out after work.

And it loses just a little bit more prestige.

Jobs are often thought of in terms of their economic benefits. A company is hiring and paying people. Those employees then spend money in the community. Having lots of good-paying and/or stable jobs can be a sign of a strong local economy.

But jobs are also about prestige for cities. In this case, the jobs are attached to a large company founded in the city. Having jobs of prominent companies in a community suggests the community is a desirable place to be.

Politicians and leaders love to talk about gaining jobs. “We added this many jobs.” Or “major corporations added jobs here.” It is partly about economics but it is also about status; they can claim to be the one who brought the jobs to the community or they created the conditions that led to the jobs.

In other words, a region may have lots of jobs but if there are constantly stories – or even just perceptions – that companies are eliminating jobs in a city, this can be a blow to the place’s prestige. To lose jobs to another community hints that the place losing the jobs is not as desirable.