Tag Archives: cities

“Urban clusters” = a small town outside of an urban area

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In looking at Census definitions for urban areas, I found this definition for what many Americans would consider small towns:

For the 2010 Census, an urban area will comprise a densely settled core of census tracts and/or census blocks that meet minimum population density requirements, along with adjacent territory containing non-residential urban land uses as well as territory with low population density included to link outlying densely settled territory with the densely settled core.  To qualify as an urban area, the territory identified according to criteria must encompass at least 2,500 people, at least 1,500 of which reside outside institutional group quarters.  The Census Bureau identifies two types of urban areas:

  • Urbanized Areas (UAs) of 50,000 or more people;
  • Urban Clusters (UCs) of at least 2,500 and less than 50,000 people.

“Rural” encompasses all population, housing, and territory not included within an urban area.

From a certain perspective, this all makes sense. When we think of cities, we think of places with larger populations and the Census sets this boundary at 50,000 people. At the same time, “urban clusters” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as “urban areas.”

An additional complication in all of this is that Americans might legitimately see themselves as small town residents within an urban area. For example, the Chicago region may have over nine million residents but more than two-thirds live outside of the city and many live in communities under 60,000 people. The cultural attachment is “small town” is important: it often implies a tighter-knit community, a certain quality of life (particularly avoiding big city problems), and smaller units of government that are more responsive to local residents.

My recommendations would be:

1. Find a replacement term for “urban cluster” that is more palatable.

2. We need a better way to differentiate between small town feel and actual small towns. Leaders in Naperville often claim it has features of a small town even with a population of over 140,000.

“Megacities Might Not Save the Planet After All”

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One researcher suggests not all megacities are as efficient as they might be:

It turns out that while density equals efficiency, “megacity” does not necessarily equal density. Many megacity dwellers live outside those hyper-efficient city centers, Kennedy explains. Look at New York—if you live in Manhattan or parts of Brooklyn and Queens, you’re probably getting around on the subway. But if you live in Westchester, New Haven, or Newark? You’re probably driving your car—maybe not into the city center, but around it. And there are a lot of you. That’s why New York is almost off the chart in its consumption of transportation fuel, despite all its great rail.

Mega_Cities3

But not all megacities consume as many resources as New York. Look at the ones clustered at the bottom end of transportation energy use: Mumbai. Karachi. Lagos. Cairo. Delhi. These are also some of the cities that use the least amount of electricity per capita. Unfortunately that’s not because their electrical grids are super-efficient. It’s because not everyone living there has electricity. “There’s huge disparities between the amount of resources being used between the wealthiest megacities and the poorest ones,” Kennedy says. In the latter, the resource inputs aren’t enough to support a basic standard of living for all citizens…

So while developed-world megacities should consider reining in their gasoline and electricity use—or expanding center-city style efficient infrastructure to the ’burbs—growth (combined with smart policy) may be the answer to developing-world megacities’ woes. Which is good, because if one thing’s for sure it’s that megacities are growing, and they’re not going to stop.

So the issue may not really be density but a higher order issue of social class. In other words, efficiency is the result of different processes depending on the wealth and development of particular cities and countries. In wealthier countries, individuals have the resources to spread out and can afford to consume too much. On the other hand, poor countries have big cities with lots of residents who can’t afford to consume what they need.

Hillary Clinton’s biggest urban Facebook fan base is Baghdad?

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Melding political, social media, and urban analysis, a look at Hillary Clinton’s Facebook fans has an interesting geographic dimension:

Hillary Clinton’s Facebook pages have an unexpected fan base. At least 7 percent of Clinton’s Facebook fans list their hometown as Baghdad, way more than any other city in the world, including in the United States.

Vocativ’s exclusive analysis of Clinton’s Facebook fan statistics yielded a number of surprises. Despite her reputation as an urban Democrat favored by liberal elites, Iraqis and southerners are more likely to be a Facebook fan of Hillary than people living on America’s coasts. And the Democratic candidate for president has one of her largest followings in the great red-state of Texas.

While Chicago and New York City, both with 4 per cent of fans, round out the top three cities for Hillary’s Facebook base, Texas’ four major centers—Houston (3 percent), Dallas (3 percent), Austin (2 percent) and San Antonio (2 percent)—contain more of her Facebook supporters. Los Angeles with 3 percent of her fans, and Philadelphia and Atlanta, each with 2 percent, round out the Top 10 cities for Facebook fans of Hillary.

On a per capita basis, in which Vocativ compared a town’s population to percentage of Hillary’s likes, people living in cities and towns in Texas, Kentucky, Ohio, Arkansas, North Carolina and Wisconsin were the most likely to be her fans on Facebook than any other American residents.

This hints at the broader knowledge we might gain from social media and should beg the question of how this information could be well used. I imagine this information could be used for political ends. Is this a curiosity? Is this something the Clinton campaign would want to change? Would this influence the behavior of other voters? The article itself is fairly agnostic about what this means.

This sounds like data mining and here is how the company behind this – Vocativ – describes its mission:

Vocativ is a media and technology venture that explores the deep web to discover original stories, hidden perspectives, emerging trends, and unheard voices from around the world. Our audience is the young, diverse, social generation that wants to share what’s interesting and what’s valuable. We reach them with a visual language, wherever they are naturally gathering…

Our proprietary technology, Verne, allows us to search and monitor the deep web to spot breaking news quickly, and discover stories that otherwise might not be told. Often we know what we’re looking for, such as witnesses near the front lines of a conflict or data related to an emerging political movement. We also uncover unexpected information, like pro-gun publications giving away assault rifles to fans of their Facebook pages.

Is this the Freakonomicization of journalism?

The “intensification of nervous stimulation” in documentaries of the cities of China and Taiwan

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Two new documentaries suggest the rapid urbanization of Chinese and Taiwanese cities may not be orderly:

Armed with newly available digital video equipment, independent documentarians have given Chinese filmmaking a genuine vanguard. “Disorder” is among the most disjunctive and disturbing of recent exposés. The movie’s first image shows a broken water main gushing like Old Faithful in the midst of a busy thoroughfare. The second shot frames a pedestrian beneath a car, the apparent victim of a traffic accident. Later he is seen — still lying in the street — bargaining for a payoff with the driver who struck him…

For 58 minutes, “Disorder” bombards the viewer with interwoven bulletins, presented without comment. Many are grotesque human-interest stories: Shops peddle illegal bear paws; escaped pigs roam the highway; a cockroach emerges from a bowl of noodles. One man brandishes what looks like a live crocodile, another washes himself in a polluted tributary of the Pearl River. Other sequences are more violent recordings of arguments and breakdowns. Civilians brawl with the police, and the movie ends with a remarkable sequence of cops beating a man nearly to death…

Most scenes are a single shot, without causal links to what precedes or may follow. Chronology is obscure; so is motivation. “Stray Dogs” won the grand jury prize at the 2013 Venice Film Festival, and given its radical near-absence of narrative, the movie has been a polarizing work. Some critics, including Stephen Holden, who reviewed “Stray Dogs” in The New York Times when it opened here last September, see it as akin to a gallery film installation. Others have noted that Mr. Tsai’s emphasis on activities shown in real time is suggestive of performance art…

Like other films by Mr. Tsai, it has a postapocalyptic feel. Torrential rain is virtually constant, and Taipei feels depopulated — a place where events, mostly concerning food and shelter, may be staged in situ. The aesthetic tension between Mr. Tsai’s beautifully lit and framed compositions and the desolation of his characters’ lives is disconcerting. They do not live in the metropolis so much as haunt its ruins.

The reviewer links the films to the thoughts of Georg Simmel in “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Simmel argued the individual would be overwhelmed in the modern city since there are too many things going on. To fight back, the individual would need to adopt a blase attitude. Perhaps, then, we can see these documentaries as attempts to gain some distance from the chaos of the urbanizing megacity. At the same time, modern film seems particularly well-suited to hinting at Simmel’s predictions given the prominence and frequent use of rapid cuts or non-traditional narratives (i.e., non-linear).

Of course, documentaries don’t have to be made this way. Indeed, it would be interesting to contrast these two with films that show the mundane and sequential features of modern life in a big city: going places, working low-skill and/or repetitive jobs, shopping or searching for necessities, child care, sleeping. Alas, these might not lend themselves as well to screens that want pretty rapid takes on what life looks like.

Patterns in “All Transit – Guess the City”

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A new online quiz moves you through four levels of difficulty as you try to identify the American city by only the traces of mass transit routes. Four quick patterns I observed playing through the levels:

1. The easier ones to identify are usually (1) big cities with (2) identifiable bodies of water.

2. One thing I found helpful on the map was the difference shown between bus and train lines. If there were fewer train lines with more bus routes along straight roads, I guessed Sunbelt cities. With their more recent histories based on automobile travel, they would be more likely to implement buses on the existing roads. But, some of the cities with more bus than train lines ended up being mid-sized cities in the Midwest and Northeast that probably couldn’t financially support large train lines.

3. There are a lot of mid-sized American cities and unlike #1 above, they are (1) not as well-known and (2) often away from large bodies of water.

4. Level 4 was pretty insane. For example, could you easily spot the difference between Davie, FL, Bryan, TX, Richardson, TX, and Poway, CA via their bus stops?

Mayors leading the charge for tackling infrastructure issues

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Who is tackling big infrastructure projects these days?

Governors have long been among the nation’s loudest advocates for pouring concrete. Interstate highways? New bridges? Major development projects? They love it. When a huge pot of federal money opened up as part of the 2009 stimulus package, states were eager to get their share of the cash and push it toward pet projects, shovel-ready or not.

And that’s what makes it interesting to see mayors taking the lead on transportation spending. At an event Monday in Boston, the U.S. Conference of Mayors launched what it says will be the largest coordinated campaign by mayors in some time, pushing Congress to reauthorize the surface-transportation bill and to increase funding for local and state infrastructure projects…

All of that combines to create a situation in which mayors, rather than governors, can take over the dominant role in pushing for transportation spending. Of course, mayors have plenty of concerns of their own, especially in big cities. Major bridges like the one that collapsed in Minnesota in 2007 worry them, as do crumbling urban highway interchanges and failing subway systems. Here in D.C., a major parkway was snarled for much of Tuesday after crumbling masonry fell off a bridge into the roadway. Some of the mayors who are most involved in pushing for more infrastructure money are Democratic mayors in Republican-led states—like Kasim Reed of Atlanta.

The article suggests this is primarily a political Republican vs. Democrat question with Democratic mayors pushing for things that Republicans at the national level don’t support. But, I think this ignores another factor: these mayors are at the level of government that is closest to some of these issues. For them, infrastructure is not an abstract concept but rather more often about specific projects that can enhance life in their city. It is the difference between saying “America’s bridges are in trouble” versus “Boston needs an underground highway in order to free up land, improve traffic, and reduce pollution.” And Americans tend to like local government as they see it as more responsive to immediate needs. Governors can lobby for particular projects but they also have to keep in mind the concerns of multiple actors, which might even up pitting cities against each other for limited funds (i.e., is LA or San Francisco more worthy of a major transportation project). Mayors like the applicable projects that they can point to as real change. (An odd thought to throw in here: dictators often like to memorialize themselves with large-scale planning efforts that will outlive them. When municipal power is concentrated in the hands of a single figure, such as a powerful mayor, is a similar process at work?)

While the mayors may be closer to the infrastructure issues, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they can get things done. What kind of clout do mayors have when there are other layers (like governors) to contend with?

In economic terms, 1 baseball team = 1 midsized department store

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Following up on the academic consensus that sports do not economically benefit communities, one economist notes the economic impact of sports teams:

“If every sports team in Chicago were to suddenly disappear, the impact on the Chicago economy would be a fraction of 1 percent,” Leeds says. “A baseball team has about the same impact on a community as a midsize department store.”

The reason?

Economists say the biggest reason sports teams don’t have much impact is that they don’t tend to spur new spending.  Most people have a limited entertainment budget, so the dollars they are spending when they go to a game is money they would have spent elsewhere, maybe even at a restaurant or small businesses where more money would have stayed in the community. Plus, Matheson says, rather than draw people to a neighborhood, games can actually repel them.

Don’t underestimate the money generated by large retail stores. When I worked a short stint at a local Target at the end of high school, I remember seeing the board in our office that listed daily sales. The figure was typically around $100,000. That generates a lot of tax revenue through sales taxes and property taxes.

This is more evidence that the more important feature of sports teams in major cities is their social and cultural value. Teams provide something for a city to rally around and contribute to the city’s collective identify. In major cities with millions of people, it is difficult to find features or events that can bring large numbers of people together. Sports teams also provide opportunities for leisure, whether through enjoying the stadium experience or experiencing the game from afar. Now, if only we could find politicians that would admit the taxpayer money going to stadiums or teams was due to the interest in having a common sports identity and leisure experience rather than some grand economic impact…

Obama administration proposal to limit tax-free government bonds for stadiums

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Federal policy might change how sports teams and municipalities negotiate stadium deals:

That’s what the Obama administration proposed in its budget last month: to end the issuance of tax-free government bonds for professional sports facilities, a practice that has, according to research by Bloomberg, siphoned $17 billion of public money into arenas for NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL franchises over the last 30 years and cost Americans $4 billion in forgone federal taxes on top of that. It’s too late for residents of Cobb County, but Congress might yet save the rest of us some dough…

So how did we wind up in this situation? Local authorities have long used tax-exempt bonds to raise money for certain private uses—whether factories, train stations, or home mortgage loans—in addition to schools, sewers, and other infrastructure projects. In most cases, the ensuing economic growth was at least intended to pay back the municipal investment. Sports stadiums were no different: Governments could raise money in exchange for a share of future revenue…

Much of the rest of the article summarizes the research that shows cities and taxpayers tend not to come out ahead in these deals. So, this new policy might solve the problem?

Still, it wouldn’t stop cities from paying for stadiums. The last time Congress made public financing more onerous, in 1986, the result was a disaster: Cities jumped to meet the new, harsher terms, opening a three-decade stadium construction spree.

In other words, the policy might close the loophole for this particular financial instrument but there are other ways to make such deals. As I’ve said repeatedly, few politicians are willing to let the big team get away. Of course, the historical record suggests that everything does not necessarily fall apart when teams move. Many of the cities since the 1950s that saw teams move away later saw new teams take their place. Sports teams only have limited numbers of places they can move to make the kind of money they want; this is the reason Los Angeles looms so large right now in the NFL’s urban landscape because the next options are not very good.

The bigger question may be whether cities and suburbs can stop themselves from making bad deals, even with federal policies that take away some of their options.

SimCity set path for games about systems, not about characters

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In contrast to video games about characters, SimCity made the gameplay about the complex system at work in cities:

Such was the payload of SimCity: not a game about people, even though its residents, the Sims, would later get their own spin-off. Nor is it a game about particular cities, for it is difficult to recreate one with the game’s brittle, indirect tools. Rather, SimCity is a game about urban societies, about the relationship between land value, pollution, industry, taxation, growth, and other factors. It’s not really a simulation, despite its name, nor is it an educational game. Nobody would want a SimCity expert running their town’s urban planning office. But the game got us all to think about the relationships that make a city run, succeed, and decay, and in so doing to rise above our individual interests, even if only for a moment…

The best games model the systems in our world—or the ones of imagination—by means of systems running in software. Just as photography offers a way of seeing aspects of the world we often look past, game design becomes an exercise in operating that world, of manipulating the weird mechanisms that turn its gears when we’re not looking. The amplifying effect of natural disaster and global unrest on oil futures. The relationship between serving size consistency and profitability in an ice cream parlor. The relative unlikelihood of global influenza pandemic absent a perfect storm of rapid, transcontinental transmission.

And system dynamics are not just a feature of non-fictional games or serious games. The most popular abstract games seem to have much in common with titles like SimCity than they do with Super Mario. Tetris is a game about manipulating the mathematical abstractions of four orthogonally connected squares, known as tetrominoes, when subjected to gravity and time. Words With Friends is a game about arranging letters into valid words, given one’s own knowledge merged with the availability and willingness of one’s stable of friends. A game, it turns out, is a lens onto the sublime in the ordinary. An emulsion that captured behavior rather than light…

There’s another way to think about games. What if games’ role in representation and identity lies not in offering familiar characters for us to embody, but in helping wrest us from the temptation of personal identification entirely? What if the real fight against monocultural bias and blinkeredness does not involve the accelerated indulgence of identification, but the abdication of our own selfish, individual desires in the interest of participating in systems larger than ourselves? What if the thing games most have to show us is the higher-order domains to which we might belong, including families, neighborhoods, cities, nations, social systems, and even formal structures and patterns? What if replacing militarized male brutes with everyone’s favorite alternative identity just results in Balkanization rather than inclusion?

Fascinating argument. Could video games truly be a tool that help players move beyond individualism? At the same time, even a game about systems still can provide an individualized experience: SimCity players could spend hours by themselves crafting a city in their own image (and the game even provided some space for this with honorary statues and the like). Such games could be social – you could have various players interacting with each other either as leaders of different cities or even as leaders within the same city – but they generally were not.

This doesn’t have to stay at the level of argument. Why not run some tests or experiments to see how players of character-driven versus system-driven games compare on certain outcomes?

When a major city’s tallest structure is a roller coaster

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Perhaps this could only happen in Orlando: the city’s tallest structure will soon be a roller coaster.

The Skyscraper aims to live up to its name. When construction of the roller coaster is completed in 2106, it will dominate Orlando’s skyline. At 570 feet, the Skyscraper will loom over the next tallest structure, the Suntrust Center—which is itself only a few dozen feet taller than the Orlando Eye, a 400-foot-tall Ferris wheel opening this spring.

Orlando appears to be one-upping other cities in the global race to build soaring structures that aren’t buildings. Where plenty of cities have built observation wheels (Orlando included), the Theme Park Capital of the World is looking to distinguish itself through a different kind of roller coaster, one whose footprint and height resemble, well, a skyscraper’s.

Developers released new plans last week for the Skyplex, a $300 million entertainment center that will anchored by the Skyscraper. The expanded plans include the Skyfall, a 450-foot tall drop ride (built into the Skyscraper structure) that will itself be taller than the tallest building in downtown Orlando.

Tall buildings may be functional but they are also intended to say something about the city: that it is has a certain level of success and sophistication. A skyline is meant to stand out and provide a lasting and permanent (though it is open to change, people don’t really consider losing major buildings from the skyline) image of a city. So, Orlando seems to be staking its claim to entertainment and amusement, to lasting screams and high speeds. And once you have this tall ride, how do you top it?