Tag Archives: cities

Richard Florida: we lack systematic data to compare cities

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As he considers Jane Jacobs’ impact, Richard Florida suggests we need more data about cities:

MCP: Some of the research around the built environment is pretty skimpy and not very scientific, in a lot of cases.

RF: Right. And it’s done by architects who are terrific, but are basically looking at it from the building level. We need a whole research agenda. A century or so ago John Hopkins University invented the teaching hospital, modern medicine. They said, medicine could be advanced by underpinning the way doctors treat people and develop clinical methodologies, with a solid, scientific research base. Think of it as a system that runs from laboratory to bed-side. We don’t have that for cities and urbanism.  But at the same time we know that the city is the key economic and social unit of our time. Billions of people across the world are pouring into cities and we are spending trillions upon trillions of dollars building new cities and rebuilding, expanding and upgrading existing ones. We’re doing it with little in the way of systematic research. We lack even the most basic data we need to compare and assess cities around the world. There’s no comparable grand challenge that we have so terribly under funded as cities and urbanism. We need to develop everything from the underlying science to better understand cities and their evolution, the systematic data to assess them and the educational and clinical protocols for building better, more prosperous and inclusive cities. Right now, mayors are out there winging it. Economic developers are out there winging it. There’s no clinical training program. There are some, actually, but they’re scattered about and they’re not having much impact. It’s going to take a big commitment. But we need to build the equivalent of the medical research infrastructure, with the equivalent of “teaching hospitals” for our cities.  When you think of it cities are our greatest laboratories for advancing our understanding the intersection of natural, physical, social and human environments—they’re our most complex organisms. This is going to be my next big research project: I’m calling it the Urban Genome Project. It’s what I hope to devote the rest of my career doing.

The cities as laboratories language echoes that of the Chicago School. But, much of the sociological literature suggests a basic tension in this area: how much are cities alike compared to how much are they different? Are there common processes across most or all cities that we can highlight and work with or does their unique contexts limit how much generalizing can be done? Hence, we have a range of studies with everything from examining large sets of cities at once or processes across all cities (like Florida would argue in The Rise of the Creative Class) versus studies of particular neighborhoods and cities to discover their idiosyncratic patterns.

Of course, we could just look at cities like a physicist might and argue there are power laws underlying cities…

Just how much historical preservation is too much?

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The source of this information is on one side of the issue but it is an interesting question to consider: just how much historic preservation of buildings is too much?

New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Act was intended to protect about three or four “historic districts”—Brooklyn Heights, Greenwich Village, etc.—preservationist James Van Derpool told the New York City Council in 1964. That’s all “anyone had seriously considered.”

The Landmarks Act  was passed the following year thanks in part to Van Derpool’s testimony. A half-century later the city has protected 138 historic districts. Nearly a third of the structures in Manhattan have been landmarked. As I argued in a Reason TV video published last year, entire swaths of New York City may as well be encased in a life-sized historical diorama. Out-of-control landmarking is undermining the process of creative destruction that made New York, well, New York…

What justifies these two designations? Landmarks Commission Chairwoman Meenakshi Srinivasan was left straining. She lauded the Pepsi sign for “its prominent siting” and “frequent appearances in pop culture.” The Park Slope blocks are part of an area, Srinivasan explained, that “owes its cohesiveness to its tree-lined streets, predominant residential character, and its high level of architectural integrity.”

If “prominent siting,” “tree-lined streets,” “residential character,” and “architectural integrity” are grounds for landmarking, what’s to stop the Commission from declaring every square inch of the Big Apple too precious to ever change?

Here are the two sides of the issue:

  1. The preservationists will argue that buildings and streetscapes need protecting because (1) capitalism and free markets tend to bulldoze meaningful structures for current residents and future generations in pursuit of progress and (2) residents of particular places should expect that features of the location that helped draw them there should remain there.
  2. Reason and others would argue that such restrictions limit the free market, stopping progress and natural processes of neighborhood change. Such regulations constrict the market for property which can drive up prices as well as freeze areas in time even as the world has moved on to better things.

Perhaps there is some middle point or range where both parties can get what they want? This opinion piece suggests nearly a third of Manhattan is simply too much but where is the empirical evidence to support this? Is Manhattan development suffering because of this? As is common in social life, neither side will likely get all that they want – no such designations vs. always having to get approval from the neighbors when building a new structure – so some compromise should be reached.

It would also be interesting to look at the level of historic preservation in wealthier vs. poorer areas. Can more of Manhattan be saved because there are resources to do so versus an inability to save many noteworthy structures in poorer American neighborhoods because there are few organizations who could handle the burden? In other words, perhaps historic preservation is an issue largely faced by wealthier communities who can afford to protect some of their gloried past.

A new MLS team will “lift a community and drive a civic renaissance”?

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I’m a little skeptical of the claim that adding a Major League Soccer team will have a tremendous impact on a city:

Here’s what Detroit Pistons owner Tom Gores and Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert said in their joint announcement that they had partnered up to bring an MLS franchise to Detroit:

“Detroit is rising and we know firsthand the power of sports to lift a community and drive a civic renaissance. We are very excited about the prospect of bringing Major League Soccer to Detroit and building an ownership group that represents a cross-section of investors.”

You could swap out “Detroit” in that paragraph for any number of cities and it wouldn’t seem out of place. Sacramento, St. Louis, and the other cities vying to get in on the next wave of MLS expansion have all used the language of revival and civic pride when announcing their MLS intentions. This tracks with MLS’ twin desires to get teams and downtown stadiums into midtier cities throughout the nation and attract a younger, hipper crowd to full those seats.

The article is more interested in whether having so many teams is good for MLS but I would want evidence for the other part of the claim: how do we know that sports “lift a community and drive a civic renaissance”? Do cities without major sports franchises have less civic pride because of it or miss out because have this kind of economic engine?

Remember: academics have consistently found that it is sports team owners who benefit the most from stadium deals as residents will spend their entertainment dollars elsewhere if there are not sports teams to support. Additionally, bigger thriving cities tend to lead to sports teams, not the other way around. Yet, this sort of language is common among sports owners as they try to demonstrate a broader value beyond entertainment. And recent plans for new stadiums – such as the proposed NFL stadium in Los Angeles – are partly about the sports venue and also about a package of commercial and residential space that will in use throughout the year.

Finally, if a soccer team is considered the means by which to turnaround Detroit, it is likely going to take a lot more than that…

Replicating American style suburbs outside a growing Ugandan city

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In the United States, wealthier and whiter residents tended to leave big cities and their problems for the safety of the suburbs. Is the same process underway in Africa?

In many ways, Akright City, 15 miles from the capital city Kampala, feels like the anti-African city, a polo-wearing, golf-playing suburban inversion of the continent’s teeming metropolises. And that is exactly the point. Akright, like other private cities sprouting up across the Africa in recent years, offers a tantalizing answer to the question of how to fix the continent’s creaking colonial cities: Give up. Start Over.

It’s a trend repeated across the continent, from Johannesburg’s Steyn City — a walled town twice the size of Monaco — to Lagos’ Eko Atlantic, a beachfront cluster of skyscrapers and condos that bills itself as Africa’s Dubai. Private cities are not unique to Africa, but they have special significance on a continent where most urban infrastructure was designed for a long-gone colonial elite, rather than the millions who now crowd in searching for economic opportunity. By some calculations, this is the world’s fastest urbanizing region, and from Dar es Salaam to Luanda, its overtaxed cities are ill-equipped to keep up. By grafting entirely new cities onto the edges of these metropolises, their builders say they can leap-frog the region’s development challenges and create outposts of first-world luxury on the world’s poorest continent…

But it hasn’t quite worked out that way. Today, neighborhoods with dreamy names like “California Village,” “New World Village,” and “European Village” stand less than half full. Soaring mansions sit beside gaping construction sites, many on roads that are little more than a gash of dirt cut into the hillside. A lush golf course stands completely empty on a recent afternoon. Midway through the project, the money dried up, and many of Akright’s more grandiose components were abandoned, including a massive call centre that once ambitiously promised to help Uganda displace India as the world’s outsourcing darling. Kamugisha promises the slowdown is only temporary…

“Life is more or less like Europe: it’s enclosed, we don’t see our neighbors, everyone goes away during the day,” says Grace Amoah, who has lived in Akright for a decade and runs a small convenience store here, one of the few businesses open on a recent afternoon. “They want more people to come here, but I think the distances are too far, it’s too expensive.”

I wonder if the lesson is this: it is difficult to develop and maintain American-style suburbs without an advanced economic system that can support lots of private housing away from employment and cultural centers. In other words, this represents an attempt to take a shortcut through the development process by which cities in the United States were successful and then gave rise to suburbs. The sorts of American suburbs we have today couldn’t have developed without the rapid growth of cities from the mid-1800s onward. (This leads to interesting questions for today such as whether suburbs can continue for long periods with a decaying or dead urban core – think the suburbs of Detroit where many are well-off even as the city has struggled for decades.)

“The New Urban Blight Is Rich People”

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Here is a popular magazine treatment of the debate between New Urbanism and Richard Florida against opponents and Joel Kotkin:

Many cities, in consequence, have become “Floridian,” with “loft districts” rising from industrial ashes in Cleveland and Raleigh, hipster enclaves in Chattanooga, a gayborhood in Philadelphia, reclaimed waterfronts in Baltimore and Minneapolis. Much of this work preceded Florida—but there was socialism before Lenin, too. Florida gave the New Urbanists the vision they wanted of themselves, as saviors of the American city emptied by suburban sprawl, champions of creativity and ingenuity who were going to make Indianapolis the Paris of the 22nd century.

But any intellectual movement must encounter a backlash, and the one to the New Urbanism is only growing, in part because it’s now mature enough for us to see its effects. On the face of it, the New Urbanism is very pretty: Court Street in Brooklyn looks splendid, as does San Francisco’s Valencia Street. The aforementioned travel section of The New York Times has a column, called “Surfacing,” that frequently resorts to profiling some forlorn, blighted neighborhood suddenly graced by taxidermy shops that double as yoga studios. I am, as a matter of fact, writing this from a Whole Foods in West Berkeley, California, a formerly industrial district that was recently “Surfaced” in the Times. The coffee I am drinking was roasted about 20 feet away from my Apple laptop. How’s that for local?

Problem is, surfacing is usually whitening: Gentrification by any other name would taste as hoppy, with the same notes of citrus peel. There is really only one strike against the New Urbanism, but it’s a strike thrown by Nolan Ryan: It turns cities into playgrounds for moneyed, childless whites while pushing out the poor, the working-class, immigrants, seniors and anyone else not plugged into “the knowledge economy.” Right around the time that Michael Bloomberg was remaking Manhattan as a hive for stateless billionaires, I saw a slogan that captured perfectly the new glimmer of the city: “New York: If you can make it here, you probably have a trust fund.”

You could accuse me of writing a faux-populist diatribe, but the numbers are on my side this time around. Jed Kolko, a Harvard-trained economist who was, until recently, the chief of analytics for Trulia, has found that from 2000 to 2014, more Americans moved out of urban centers than into them. Using data from the U.S. Census, he concluded, in a recent post on his blog: “While well-educated, higher-income young adults have become much more likely to live in dense urban neighborhoods, most demographic groups have been left out of the urban revival.” The people who continue to move to cities, he concludes, are “increasingly young, rich, childless, and white.” These are the creatives, the hipsters, the pioneers, who fled the countryside for the big city, where cultures would clash and ideas foment. But all they did is turn Bedford-Stuyvesant into Minnetonka.

So what? I posed this question to Joel Kotkin, an urbanist and demographer based in that decidedly suburban setting of Orange County, California. Author of the forthcoming The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us, Kotkin defends the suburbs, which is nearly as radical as an evolutionary biologist defending creationism. Kotkin argues that suburbs are where middle-class families want to live, and middle-class families are, as he told me in a recent phone conversation, “the bedrock of the Republic.” A city hostile to the middle class is, in Kotkin’s view, a sea hostile to fish.

What is the answer to this debate, which like many others, have become politicized (Republican visions of small towns and suburbs and Democratic visions of thriving cities)? Could both sides have some merit to their arguments – New Urbanists regarding aesthetics and community life and Kotkin et al. with American’s continued interest in suburbia? One possible solution is to introduce more New Urbanist developments and communities in suburbs. This would allow people to have their suburban life but at higher densities and with planning that might encourage more street life.

At the same time, neither New Urbanists or Kotkin really address issues of race and ethnicity in the United States. Both do so indirectly, suggesting that their models offer better options for non-whites. But, what if the larger issue was really residential segregation, which can occur in New Urbanist communities as well as in suburbs?

Additionally, I cannot imagine too many city or suburban leaders would turn down or discourage wealthy residents moving to their community.

Cities will need to adapt to self-driving cars

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If self-driving cars arrive soon, cities may not be ready:

Just six percent of long-range transportation plans in major US cities are factoring the impact of autonomous cars, according to a report released in the fall by the National League of Cities. That’s a bad sign. “Even though driverless cars may be shoehorned to fit the traditional urban environment in the short term, it won’t be a long-term solution for maximizing potential benefits,” says Lili Du, an assistant professor of transportation engineering at Illinois Tech.

The Driverless Cities Project is developing a comprehensive answer, folding in urban design, landscape architecture, transportation engineering, sociology, urban networks, and planning law. (The project is a finalist for the university’s $1 million Nayar Prize for research with meaningful social impacts.) The idea is to explore current research around the country, along with the more forward-thinking planning initiatives, and fold in their own studies to create a suite of guidelines—including model urban codes that determine so much about city environments—for municipalities to incorporate into their planning.

There’s plenty to consider. For example, we don’t know how parking will work for autonomous vehicles. Should cities be building lots outside urban centers? Is parking still necessary at all? Wireless vehicle-to-vehicle communication will lets cars pack together more tightly, which raises questions about how we fit them onto our streets.

Their autonomous operation alone can obviate the need for traffic signals and road signs. That’ll go a long way toward beautifying city streets, Marshall says, but brings up other problems regarding pedestrian safety, speed limits, roadway design, and the need for and sizes of driveways and curbs. Even further, vehicle ownership and usage patterns will change, once we’re able to summon an autonomous car through an app and then shoo it away once it delivers us at our destination. Who’s going to own and operate those cars, and what will they do when not serving their owners? Park in the ‘burbs? Infinite-Uber-loop?

It sounds like there is a lot of good that could be done in helping to reverse the changes that occurred from the early to mid-1900s where cities were altered in significant ways – wider streets and smaller sidewalks, the construction of highways – to make it easier for cars to operate in the city. Of course, making some of these roadway changes doesn’t necessarily lead to a Jane Jacobs urban paradise. Take downtown Manhattan: you could reduce the size of roads and give pedestrians more space. Yet, the scale of the buildings often would not help; you can create all sorts of sidewalks but if they are shrouded in shadows from skyscrapers, is it inviting? Or, adding more pedestrian space may not necessarily lead to more lively street life if there isn’t a mix of uses to attract people. On the whole, having to emphasize cars less could be very attractive but a lot of additional work would need to be done to truly take advantage of the opportunity.

Google exploring constructing their own city

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A new Google city would allow the company to test ideas:

The boss of Sidewalk Labs, the firm’s New York City firm described as an ‘urban innovation’ company mentioned the idea at a summit hosted by The Information. 

‘Thinking about a city from the Internet up is really compelling,’ Sidewalk CEO Dan Doctoroff said at the event…

Later he added that building a new city could help test solutions to cybersecurity and privacy issues: ‘If you could create a place, it’d be a laboratory to experiment with these problems.’…

‘Sidewalk will focus on improving city life for everyone by developing and incubating urban technologies to address issues like cost of living, efficient transportation and energy usage,’ chief executive Larry Page said in a post at the Internet titan’s Google+ social network.

On the one hand, it would be difficult to test certain products – like a self-driving car – without having your own city that mimics real life.

On the other hand, I could see certain issues arising:

  1. If people lived in this city, what kind of rights would they have?
  2. For those who are already worried about the lack of public spaces in many big cities, what about a big city owned by a globally powerful corporation?
  3. Could such a model of corporations building cities offer benefits such that they become more attractive than what we have now where cities are theoretically for residents?

See an earlier post about Google planning its own city.

Who is moving to cities? Young, educated, wealthy, childless, white

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Certain people – not everyone – are moving to American cities:

Americans aren’t moving back to the cities. Just 20- and 30-somethings.

But actually, not all 20- and 30-somethings are moving back to the cities. Only those with a four-year college degree and incomes in the top 40 percent are.

And not even all 20- and 30-somethings with a four-year college degree and incomes in the top 40 percent are moving back into cities. Mostly the ones without school-age kids are.

And if you thought that was it, it turns out that not all 20- and 30-somethings with a four-year college degree in the top 40 percent of income without school-age children are moving back into cities. It’s mostly just the ones that are white.

And does this group receive disproportionate attention from (1) city leaders who want a new generation of wealthy city residents and (2) the media who may identify well with these particular demographics? If the people moving to cities did not share these traits (such as immigrants), would they get as much attention?

Thompson also suggests geographic segregation by class: the wealthiest clustering in the densest cities with everyone else setting for suburbia. It has been this way for a while…

Tool to help urban strangers converse, make eye contact

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Several researchers are working on the Jokebox, an invention intended to promote social interaction in cities:

Mara Balestrini, an expert in human-computer interaction and director of research at Ideas for Change, has been investigating ways to bring shared experiences back into public spaces. She’s been working with researchers from the UK and Mexico on the Jokebox project – an installation that involves separate wooden boxes, each equipped with speakers, sensors and arcade-style buttons, that tell a joke when two people activate them simultaneously.

The key, Balestrini tells me, is that it’s impossible for one person to push both buttons. “The Jokebox is an ice-breaker, an excuse to get strangers to talk to each other or to share a laugh in public spaces,” she explains. “It is also a technology prototype that can help us understand how to design novel interfaces to foster social connectedness in urban settings by encouraging eye contact and co-operation between strangers.”

As part of their study, the researchers conducted a series of tests in the north-western Mexican city of Ensenada. Boxes were set up in a park, a shopping centre and a bus stop. According to the project’s findings, people in those settings reacted in different ways – kids and parents would be more likely to play with the boxes in the park, for example, whereas teenagers were more likely to engage in the shopping centre. Even when people avoided using the Jokebox directly, which was frequently the case at the bus stop, it still provided an excuse for interaction – as is the case in this moment of gentle warmth….

Balestrini tells me future cities will combine different types of technologies, from those that support efficiency by replacing the humans to those that try to foster shared encounters among people. She says it is crucial to enable playfulness and curiosity, particularly in a moment where the discourse around cities revolves around ideas of data-driven automation and efficiency.

It is interesting to consider that it might be technology that could help bring people back into conversation. Is this the best we can do in societies thrilled with technological progress and private space (even when we are in public)? How successful might this be in drawing people out of their private realms or will it primarily appeal to those who are already more interested in social interaction? I’m not surprised that this device uses humor, a social phenomena that can cut across all sorts of social divides. At the same time, the humor has to be broad and affirming rather than the critique and sarcasm that is very common today.

White flight starting in the 1910s, not after World War II

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Two economists look at white flight as it occurred decades before the post-World War II era:

Economists Allison Shertzer and Randall P. Walsh at the University of Pittsburgh analyzed data from 10 large U.S. cities in the Northeast and the Midwest from 1900 to 1930 to isolate the role of white flight that occurred in that period—before the Federal Housing Authority, which instituted many of the discriminatory housing policies, was born. They found that the exodus of white people from a particular neighborhood following the arrival of black residents led to a 34 percent increase in segregation during the 1910s; In the 1920s, it resulted in a striking 50 percent increase…

They isolated demographic data for 10 U.S. cities—New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Boston, and Baltimore in the Northeast, and Cincinnati, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, and St. Louis in the Midwest—all of which had seen large influxes in black residents as a result of the Great Migration. They then designed a strategy to quantify the contribution of white flight to racial segregation…

One important thing to note: when white people left their neighborhoods in response to black arrivals in this period, they didn’t go to the suburbs—because suburbs didn’t really exist until the second half of the 20th century. They went to neighborhoods pretty similar to the ones they left—at least in terms of tax bases and public spending. That means that the measurements of white flight here “may thus provide a better gauge of racial distaste than those using postwar data,” the authors write in the paper.

When I’m asked about suburbanization, I often note that is start in the early 1900s, was derailed by the Great Depression, and then really took off after World War II. Many of the processes of post-war suburbia – including mass consumption, the construction of major roads and highways, more mass produced homes, the dominance of the automobile for daily life and planning, and changing racial and ethnic demographics in numerous urban neighborhoods – were already underway decades before. Perhaps it is convenient to blame the post-war era – and there were specific policy changes that happened then like federal funding for highways and changes to the mortgage industry to make homes accessible for more Americans – but these disliked features of 1950s suburbia have deeper roots.