Tag Archives: cities

Should cities worry about “city-killer” asteroids?

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Big cities around the world have plenty of problems to face without considering “city-killer” asteroids:

This Earth Day, Tuesday, April 22, three former NASA astronauts will present new evidence that our planet has experienced many more large-scale asteroid impacts over the past decade than previously thought… three to ten times more, in fact. A new visualization of data from a nuclear weapons warning network, to be unveiled by B612 Foundation CEO Ed Lu during the evening event at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, shows that “the only thing preventing a catastrophe from a ‘city-killer’ sized asteroid is blind luck.”

Since 2001, 26 atomic-bomb-scale explosions have occurred in remote locations around the world, far from populated areas, made evident by a nuclear weapons test warning network. In a recent press release B612 Foundation CEO Ed Lu states:

“This network has detected 26 multi-kiloton explosions since 2001, all of which are due to asteroid impacts. It shows that asteroid impacts are NOT rare—but actually 3-10 times more common than we previously thought. The fact that none of these asteroid impacts shown in the video was detected in advance is proof that the only thing preventing a catastrophe from a ‘city-killer’ sized asteroid is blind luck. The goal of the B612 Sentinel mission is to find and track asteroids decades before they hit Earth, allowing us to easily deflect them.”

I assume the typical big city would claim this is a national or international problem rather than a problem single cities can tackle. American cities alone, while wealthy by global standards, would have a hard time finding resources and expertise to address this.

At the same time, shouldn’t major cities have plans in place for something like this? The planning might not be too different than planning for a possible nuclear bomb attack, the sort of attack in a place like New York City that keeps President Obama occupied. Given a few days or few hours of warning, what could be done? Or perhaps some of these strikes might simply be so large that cities can’t worry too much about one and just have to play the odds, particularly when compared to other possible issues like natural disasters or civil unrest which might happen more frequently.

Steps for cities trying to brand themselves

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Most cities would love to attract more business and visitors and thereby expand their tax base. But, how can cities brand themselves today amidst so much competition?

Cities of varying sizes struggle with two related, but seemingly opposing, global and local forces. At one level, every city would like to benefit from the global flow of capital and the emerging landscapes of prosperity seen in “other” places. At another level, to be a recipient of such attention, a city has to offer something more than cheaper real estate and tax benefits.

What cities need is a sense of uniqueness; something that separates them from other cities. Without uniqueness, a city can easily be made invisible in a world of cities. In other words, without defining the “local,” there is no “global.” Here is where identifying a coherent message about a place, based on its identity, becomes crucial. One of the major challenges facing many cities, small and large, is how to make themselves visible, and how to identify, activate, and communicate their place identity – their brand – through actions.

The challenge of urban branding is that cities are not commodities. As such, urban branding is not the same as product or corporate-style branding. Cities are much more complex and contain multiple identity narratives; whatever the business and leadership says, there are other local voices that may challenge the accepted “script”. In fact, while city marketing may focus mainly on attracting capital through economic development and tourism, urban branding needs to move beyond the simply utilitarian, and consider memories, urban experiences, and quality of life issues that affect those who live in a city. A brand does not exist outside the reality of a city. It is not an imported idea. It is an internally generated identity, rooted in the history and assets of a city…

To make a city visible takes more than a logo. The future of a city region depends on a diversity of political, managerial, community and business leaders who will participate and sustain a process that will lead to an inclusively created brand, followed by actions that embrace it. Cities without articulated identities will remain invisible, lamenting at every historical turn the loss of yet another opportunity to be like their more successful neighbors.

The primary parts of this argument are: (1) have a cohesive and dynamic set of local leaders; (2) identify and/or develop a key unique feature or identity to build upon; and (3) focus not just on economic factors but cultural scenes. I don’t know that these have changed all that much in recent decades though the second and third pieces may seem more difficult today due to increased competition, both for perceived limited resources and the reality that cities now compete against a wider set of cities. Boosterism has been a consistent dimension of American cities for a long time but their status anxiety may have increased in recent decades.

I wonder if part of the branding issue today is defining what makes a city successful. What should the average city strive for in terms of development? Is it better to shoot for the moon? Should a city set more realistic goals? Is it okay for many leaders to be more of a regional center appealing to a more immediate population or should everyone go in on a global game? Is this about increasing population, having more tourists, attracting more businesses, rehabbing rundown neighborhoods, being able to pay their own bills, a combination of all of these or something else? Communities have all sorts of narratives they tell about themselves that can range from the stable community that pays its bills to a friendly, helping place to the city that has all of the quality of life amenities to the suburb that has a disproportionate of valuable white-collar jobs. Some of this branding/narrative development/character happens in relation to other cities geographically nearby or in a perceived similar category (Chicago might compare itself to New York City but they compare themselves to cities like London and Tokyo) but there is also an internal dimension they may not be intended for outsiders.

The migration patterns of the world’s millionaires

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Here are the top destinations for the world’s millionaires:

According to a report from New World Wealth, the U.K. was the top destination in the world for migrating millionaires over the past decade. Between 2003 and 2013, the U.K. had a net inflow of 114,100 millionaires (people with $1 million or more excluding their primary residence)…

Singapore, with its tax-friendly policies and security, ranked second in attracting the world’s wandering wealthy. It gained 45,000 millionaires between 2003 and 2013. The U.S. ranked third, gaining 42,400 millionaires.

So where were all these millionaires moving from? Mostly China. According to the report, China had a net outflow of 76,200 millionaires during the 10-year period. India was the next largest loser, with a net outflow of 43,400, followed by France, Italy and Russia…

The study said that overall, London has the most millionaires of any city, with 339,300. New York ranks second with 300,100, followed by Tokyo (226,500) and Singapore (225,000).

Follow the money. Even as these millionaires then move to certain cities, there are certainly patterns within these cities as to where they move and with whom they associate. All of these top urban destinations for millionaires have strong finance sectors as well as some of the world’s most expensive housing even as some of them also have relatively poor areas, sizable immigrant populations, and numerous social problems within a short distance from the residences of some of the wealthiest people in the world.

Growing American political divide between urban and rural areas

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The urban/rural political divide has grown in the last few decades:

As Democrats have come to dominate U.S. cities, it is Republican strength in rural areas that allows the party to hold control of the House and remain competitive in presidential elections…

The U.S. divide wasn’t always this stark. For decades, rural America was part of the Democratic base, and as recently as 1993, just over half of rural Americans were represented by a House Democrat, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Conservative Democrats often represented rural districts, including Ms. Hartzler’s predecessor, Ike Skelton, who held the seat for 34 years before she ousted him in 2010.

That parity eventually gave way to GOP dominance. In 2013, 77% of rural Americans were represented by a House Republican. But in urban areas—which by the government’s definition includes both cities and suburbs—slightly less than half of residents were represented by congressional Republicans, despite the GOP’s 30-seat majority in the House…

In 1992, Bill Clinton won 60% of the Whole Foods counties and 40% of the Cracker Barrel counties, a 20-point difference. That gap that has widened every year since, and in 2012, Mr. Obama won 77% of Whole Foods counties and 29% of Cracker Barrel Counties, a 48-point difference.

And with this divide between cities and rural areas, the suburbs, particularly ones in the middle between exurbs and inner-ring suburbs, are where politicians fight for votes.

The profiles of a suburban county outside Kansas City and a rural county in Missouri suggests that most people make conscious choices about where they want to live. In other words, everyone in America can live wherever they want and they make these choices based on culture and politics. A common illustration for this is the plight of high school and college age adults and fears of  a rural “brain drain“: they can leave their small town for the big city where they see there is more excitement. To some degree, this is true: Americans are a mobile people yet it is a more complicated process than simply selecting a cultural milieu and parking there for the rest of their lives. On one hand, people can make much more finer-grained decisions than on a county by county basis (particularly in denser areas where there are plenty of communities to choose from) and on the other hand people are pushed and pulled by particular places through race and ethnicity, social networks, economic opportunities, and life changes. The article mentions cultural factors quite a bit but says little about race and ethnicity, a long-standing factor in where people live and evidenced today by continued residential segregation.

Just a note: the second author of this piece is Dante Chinni, also the co-author of Our Patchwork Nation. His analysis could be contrasted with sociologist Robert Wuthnow’s recentl book on small-town America.

Portraying a broken-down Chicago in Divergent

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The new movie Divergent takes place in a dystopian Chicago:

And instead of a vibrant, healthy metropolis of canals and glass towers downtown, the Lake Shore Drive bridge at the Chicago River has collapsed; a few skyscrapers have fallen into jumbles of stones; a few are heavily damaged, the outcome of some unnamed catastrophe; and many more stand dormant and dark. There don’t seem to be any cars, and there don’t seem to be any people. A little water remains in the main branch of the river but not that much. And everywhere, vegetation runs riot…

Throughout the spring and summer last year, while the movie crew of “Divergent” shot around Chicago, production designer Andy Nicholson, who had recently finished work on the technologically innovative “Gravity,” often found himself driving through potholes. Every day he drove to the set, he said, and every day he would notice “a lot of Chicago roads needed resurfacing or seemed about to be resurfaced or were in the middle of resurfacing. You saw a lot of neglect in Chicago.” And when the crew ventured into old steel yards on the South Side, Nicholson noticed overgrowth not unlike what he pictured for Michigan Avenue in the film…

Said Haller: “They wanted to know what Chicago would look like 20 years in the future so they could then show its decline from there out. I told them: More tall buildings. And we don’t envision any new districts, but probably more expansion west. And we’re sort of slaves to transportation systems, so everything would continue to converge on the Loop.” He also told them about the city’s flood-fighting Deep Tunnel Project (in the film, one of the factions is headquartered in a network of massive underground tunnels). “I didn’t mean to sound optimistic,” Haller said, “but, barring ecological collapse, our dystopian possibilities are mitigated.”…

Despite seemingly intractable problems that would suggest it is a perfect 21st-century dystopian setting — perpetually heavy-handed government, gun violence, profound inequality — Chicago is, in fact, such a prosperous place that it’s likely new installments of “Divergent” will not film here. (The sequel, “Insurgent,” will shoot in Atlanta, and it is unclear what Chicago’s role will be.) The city is too expensive. Said Rich Moskal, director of the Chicago Film Office: “Filmmakers understand it’s a thriving place, which makes it difficult to push everything aside to film. Chicago can read, in places, as a city in decline. Yet, sitting next door, you’re also looking at some of the highest-priced real estate in the country.”

Predicting what cities of the future will look like is difficult for many films, whether projecting American cities will look more like Chinese cities in Her or creating all new cities in The Hunger Games. It sounds like the plan for Divergent was to try to “naturally” project what a decaying Chicago might look like in a few decades. It is interesting how they looked for inspiration to some of the older industrial area of Chicago, places that once housed more businesses and people but were left behind by a shift away from manufacturing. All major American cities likely have some areas that are like this, not all that far away from the glittering downtowns where business and political leaders try to funnel tourists and businesses. In fact, this is one of the more fascinating features of modern cities (since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution): there are parts humming with culture, business activity, and sparkling features of modern life and then there are places that literally seem of a different decade or century.

At the same time, the presence of potholes in the midst of one of the worst winters on record doesn’t necessarily foretell a dystopia in the near future…

A “single lifestyle” the primary factor in making a city one of the worst for singles?

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A recent list of the “10 Worst Cities for Singles” uses this criteria:

How did we come up with our list of the worst cities for singles? We started by looking for metropolitan areas with more than 125,000 people. Then we penalized places with small populations of singles, including the never-married, divorced and widowed. The share of unmarried residents in each of these bottom-ten cities is well shy of the national average.

Financial indicators didn’t boost the cities’ attractiveness. Although many of these areas boast below-average living costs, paychecks typically are way below average, too. We also factored in education level, keeping in mind that people with bachelor’s and advanced degrees are more likely to be gainfully employed. After all, you can’t exactly rock the single lifestyle without the earnings to fund it.

So there two primary factors in this analysis:

1. The number of single people. Presumably this has something to do with an exciting social scene, a la the culture and scene sought by the creative class. However, just measuring the number of single people doesn’t necessarily signal a more or less exciting cultural and entertainment scene.

2. The financial indicators are mainly about income, suggesting that single workers don’t want to be in places without high incomes. Does this mean younger workers only want higher-paying jobs? Is a high paying job the number one goal? The last line in the second paragraph above drives this point home: younger workers want a flashier “single lifestyle.”

All this seems to make some assumptions about single workers: they want high incomes, they want other singles around, and they want to “rock the single lifestyle.” While this may be the case for a number of them, it does highlight some different reasons for moving that are fairly accepted in American society today:

1. Economics. People need jobs. They should move where the jobs are. Young workers are particularly assumed to be more mobile and willing to move.

2. Finding exciting cultural centers. Places like Austin are held up as cities where one should move to enjoy life.

Are there other acceptable reasons for choosing where to live?

With diminishing water, privileging urban growth over farming in Arizona

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If water supplies are dwindling, should cities or farmers get more of the water? One writer suggests Arizona has made a clear choice for cities:

The shift away from irrigated agriculture in Arizona hasn’t come without a fight. By some measures, farmers are still winning. According to the Arizona Department of Water Resources, more than two-thirds of Arizona’s water is still used to irrigate fields, down from a peak of 90 percent last century.

Decades ago, state officials in Arizona begin to plan for a future without water—and that meant sacrificing agriculture for future urban growth. A massive civil engineering project in the 1960s diverted part of the Colorado River to feed Phoenix and Tucson. Those cities could not exist in their current state without this unnatural influx of Rocky Mountain snowmelt. Now there’s tension across the region, as the realities of climate change and extreme weather catch up with the business-as-usual agricultural bedrock that laid the foundation for the economy here.

Hopefully, future dispatches in this series about water and drought in the Southwest will begin to address the normative questions: what is the proper ratio of water for cities and farmers? Is it necessarily bad if farmers can’t produce as much in Arizona and California (could more be produced elsewhere, do farmers need to shift to new crops, etc.)? Both farming and urban growth have changed the natural water patterns in the region but does one have a stronger claim to the water in the long run?

Economic output of American metro areas rival that of foreign countries

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One interesting indicator of the economic power of American metropolitan areas is how they match up with the output of foreign countries:

The greater New York metro, far and away America’s largest and richest, is projected to produce $1.4 trillion dollars in GMP in 2014. This makes it about the same size as Australia, equivalent the world’s 12th largest economy.

L.A., projected to account for almost $830 billion in GMP, has a larger economy than that of the Netherlands, and would therefore number among the world’s top 20 economies.

Chicago, with more than $610 billion in GMP, is about the same size as Switzerland and significantly bigger than Sweden…

And even far smaller metros can outpace some substantial national economies. With $180 billion in GMP, Denver’s economy is comparable to that of the entire country of New Zealand. Even Anchorage, Alaska, projected to produce nearly $30 billion in GMP, is about the same size as Latvia.

It strikes me that this is also a pretty fascinating look at America’s economic power overall. If each of these metropolitan areas could be their own city-states, having them all in one country is quite a feat. Of course, if they were split up, this could change their economic output. In fact, it would be interesting to play a what if game with that very question: which would US metros would thrive as independent states and which would falter?

Differences in selfies across global cities

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A new online project finds that selfies taken in different global cities like Moscow, New York, and Sao Paulo exhibit some differences:

That seems the most salient takeaway from “Selfie City,” an ambitious selfie-mapping project released Wednesday by a group of independent and university-affiliated researchers. The project sought to extract data from 3,200 selfies taken in Bangkok, Berlin, Moscow, New York and Sao Paolo, then map that data along demographic and geographic lines. Do people in New York smile more than people in Berlin? (Yes.) Does the face angle or camera tilt say something about culture? (Possibly.)…

Many of the researchers’ findings are less than conclusive — there’s either not enough data, or advanced enough analysis, to really make sweeping statements without a bit of salt. The photos — 20,000 for each city — were scraped during a one-week period in December and analyzed/culled to 600 by computer software and Mechanical Turk. While 600 photos may seem like a lot, there’s no indication whether that number is a statistically significant one, nor whether the culled photos represent each country’s Instagram demographics…

Selfie City has found more evidence for a phenomenon both sociologists and casual users have noted already: women take far more self-portraits than men. (Up to 4.6 times as many, at least in Moscow.)…

They also suggest that people take more expressive selfies and strike different poses between cities. Bangkok and Sao Paulo, for instance, are by far the smiliest — Moscow and Berlin, not so much.

Sounds like a clever use of available images and analysis options to start exploring differences across cities. While not all residents of these big cities will follow such patterns, cities are often known for particular social features. New Yorkers may be relatively gruff. Other cities are known as being open and friendly – think of the popular images of big Brazilian cities. (I wonder how much this will come up with future World Cup and Olympics coverage.)

At the same time, how many selfies would a researcher have to look at to get a representative sample? Over what time period? And, perhaps the underlying issue that can’t really be solved – this is likely a very select population that regularly takes and posts selfies (even beyond whether this represents the typical Instagram/social media user).

Sprawling American cities have less inequality

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A new report from the Brookings Institution suggests sprawling American cities have less inequality:

In a new report, All Cities Are Not Created Unequal, Berube compared levels of inequality in fifty large American cities. He found the gap between rich and poor is rising in large cities on the East and West Coasts, while cities in the South and West like Las Vegas, Mesa, and Fort Worth, are more equal, and retain more of what the middle class needs…

“They built a lot more housing over time that has managed to maintain a middle class, and they don’t have sectors of the economy, like finance and technology, that tend to be driving incomes at the upper end of the distribution,” Berube said. “They’ve got sectors like transportation, warehousing, and retail.”

Those are industries, Berube says, where you’re unlikely to strike it very rich, but where a middle-class income is still within reach.

This sounds very much like David Rusk’s argument in Cities Without Suburbs. He suggests what differentiates cities is their elasticity, a measure of how much land they have annexed during their history. Newer cities, particularly in the South and West, have been able to annex more land. This then gives them more residents who might otherwise move to the suburbs, boosting the city’s tax base and mix of residents.

Read the full Brookings report here.