Tag Archives: cities

Three possible reasons why the harsh national spotlight is on Chicago

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Whet Moser proposes three reasons Chicago has received negative attention recently from the national media:

It’s a big, easy target. Chicago’s “Big Shoulders” image—it was the city that “built the American dream,” to use the historian Thomas Dyja’s words—makes any fall from that perch seem that much more momentous. “We were the future,” says the Northwestern professor Bill Savage.

The Obama factor. Chicago’s problems never used to be much of a national story (unless a governor got indicted). But after a skinny Chicagoan became president—a man whose team has included a Daley, our current mayor, and one of the country’s most powerful political advisers—the light of press attention shone more brightly. “When you look at what’s wrong [with the country],” says Savage, “you look at Chicago.”

It’s our turn. In the 1970s, New York City “was collapsing,” the Reader media critic Michael Miner points out. “The Summer of Sam, ‘Ford to New York: Drop Dead.’?” When Los Angeles hit hard times in the early 1990s, it “was just as much of a [media] whipping boy,” says Savage. Chicago is a logical third. It will be somebody else’s turn soon enough. Prepare yourself, Houston (which is projected to surpass Chicago in population by 2030): You may be next.

Some thoughts about each of these proposed reasons:

#1: Out of the three reasons listed above, I find this one the least plausible. Yes, Chicago was once the new American city (see the late 1800s) but it has been eclipsed by Los Angeles (perhaps Hollywood and the generally glitter of the city limits negative attention?) and Chicago has been suffering from the same kinds of problems as today (loss of manufacturing jobs, poverty, crime, inequality) since at least the 1970s if not all the way back in the early 1900s with the Black Belt and immigrant experience. Chicago may have once been the future (also see the 1893 Columbian Exposition) but that future disappeared a long time ago (and perhaps Chicagoans hold on to that 1893 fair a little too closely as well). This might be a longer story about Chicago representing the problems of the Rust Belt – a cycle of loss, rebirth (1990-2006 or so in Chicago), then problems again – than about the loss of a future.

#2: Chicago has never had a president so linked to the city. And, while Obama spent much of his adult life in Chicago, he isn’t originally from the city. While the Daleys are well known, their rule was much more provincial.

#3: This suggests that such negative attention is cyclical, either because different cities experience trouble at different times or there is a sort of revolving set of cities that receive attention. Houston might be next if people first learn about its growth and changes.

Plus, has Chicago received more negative attention recently than Detroit?

The possible effects of driverless cars on cities

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With the advent of driverless cars, here is one take on how they might transform city spaces:

Inner-city parking lots could become parks. Traffic lights could be less common because hidden sensors in cars and streets coordinate traffic. And, yes, parking tickets could become a rarity since cars would be smart enough to know where they are not supposed to be…

That city of the future could have narrower streets because parking spots would no longer be necessary. And the air would be cleaner because people would drive less. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 30 percent of driving in business districts is spent in a hunt for a parking spot, and the agency estimates that almost one billion miles of driving is wasted that way every year…

“The future city is not going to be a congestion-free environment. That same prediction was made that cars would free cities from the congestion of horses on the street,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School and a member of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford. “You have to build the sewer system to accommodate the breaks during the Super Bowl; it won’t be as pretty as we’re envisioning.”

Mr. Smith has an alternative vision of the impact of automated cars, which he believes are inevitable. Never mind that nice city center. He says that driverless cars will allow people to live farther from their offices and that the car could become an extension of home.

Interesting suggestions. Would sprawl be even more acceptable to people if they didn’t have to do the driving themselves? Pair this with the idea that there is a near endless supply of oil/gas and sprawl might be around a lot longer. I wonder if this would also lead to more cars overall and an uptick in miles driven per year, a figure that has been relatively flat in recent years.

But, I think this article doesn’t go far enough in reimagining cities with a major transportation change. Where would parking be consolidated? How might this change how buildings are designed? Are we imagining some sort of Le Corbusier world with large buildings surrounded by parks, a more New Urbanist design with plenty of dense neighborhoods where cars stay toward the outside, or something else all together?

h/t Instapundit

The sociological term “civil inattention” sticks with people

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I’ve noticed that some of my Introduction to Sociology students really latch on to the idea of “civil inattention” and it appears others might have the same experience:

Some returned only my smile. Others returned my eye contact, too, albeit very briefly. Most appeared to be uncomfortable, even painfully awkward, at our exchange of social pleasantries that bordered on something deeper. I became even more intrigued.

“It’s called civil inattention,” explained my girlfriend, Karen, who learned about this sociological phenomenon back in college. “For some reason, it’s always stuck with me.”

It has always stuck with me, too, but I didn’t know it had a label — civil inattention. I immediately looked it up.

“Civil inattention is the process whereby strangers who are in close proximity demonstrate that they are aware of one another, without imposing on each other,” one definition stated. “It’s a recognition of the claims of others to a public space, and a sign also of their own personal boundaries.”

Simply put, the unspoken rule is that in a transient public encounter, strangers give visual notice to each other — a nod, smile, or quick eye contact — and then withdraw their attention. This sort of exchange takes place even more commonly in big cities where newcomers initially don’t understand it’s needed for a peaceful co-existence.

So why does this concept stick with people? I have a few thoughts:

1. Individuals feel guilty about this breakdown in communication. Perhaps they blame themselves for not being able to engage others, perhaps they blame the other person for rejecting them. Either way, the involved people feel like something went wrong.

2. People really seem to notice this in cities where they are in close proximity to other people but there is no interaction. In fact, people are trying to deliberately avoid interaction. Think the image of New Yorkers avoiding direct eye contact at all costs. Perhaps there is some implicit contrast with the stereotypical small-town life where everyone knows everyone. Of course, most Americans don’t live in such a setting.

3. There is a larger issue of how to act around strangers. Kids often hear strangers are dangerous. Does this change much when people get older? We hear all sorts of stories and data involving other groups and perhaps simply don’t know what to do when presented with people who fit those categories. In other words, civil inattention represents an inability to interact with people different than ourselves.

Viewing cities as crosses between stars and social networks

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A new paper from a physicist suggests cities are “social reactors,” somewhere between social networks and stars:

Others have suggested that cities look and operate like biological organisms, but that is not the case, says Bettencourt. “A city is a bunch of people, but more importantly, it’s a bunch of people interacting, so hence the social network,” he explains. “What’s important are the properties of this social network: the scaling was giving us clues. But then when you think of this superlinearity, which means the socioeconomic outputs are the result of those interactions, are expressed as growing superlinear functions of populations, the only system that I could think of in nature is a star. A star does have this property – it’s essentially a nuclear reactor sustained by gravity and shines brighter (has greater luminosity) the larger its mass. So there’s a sense that this behavior that is sustained by and created by attractive interactions and whose output is proportional to rate of interactions, is what a city is and a star is, and so in that sense they are analogous.”…

The result is this “special social reactor” that adheres to four main assumptions about city dynamics and scaling:

1) There are “mixing populations”: basically, cities have attractive interactions and social outputs are the results of those, which leads to more social interactions.

2) There is “incremental network growth”: notably, the networks themselves and the supporting infrastructure develop gradually as the city grows. The infrastructure is decentralized as are the networks themselves. This is very different from an organism, says Bettencourt, whose internal “infrastructure” (analogous to a vascular system for example) develops basically all at once and has a centralized node.

3) “Human effort is bounded”: as he writes in his paper, “The increasing mental and physical demand from their inhabitants has been a pervasive concern to social scientists. Thus this assumption is necessary to lift an important objection to any conceptualization of cities as scale-invariant systems.” In other words, “The costs imposed on people by living in the city do not scale up,” he says, because as the number of social interactions increase, one doesn’t have to necessarily travel more to get to these interactions. “The city comes to you as it becomes denser,” he notes.

4) “Socioeconomic outputs are proportional to local social interactions”: this gives us an interesting snapshot of exactly what a city is – not just a conglomeration of individuals, but rather a concentration of social interactions.

Sounds interesting. Cities are both agglomerations of social interactions as well as have unique infrastructures (physical and social) that gives shape to and is shaped by these interactions.

Comparing maps of urban poverty from 1980 and 2010

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These new maps of urban poverty show how poverty has changed in the last thirty years:

Poverty in the United States doesn’t look like it did just a few decades ago. In many metro areas, it touches more people today than in 1980. The demographics have changed too, with new and expanding communities of the Hispanic poor in cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas. And the geography has shifted – as we’ve previously written, following the work of Brookings Institution researchers Alan Berube and Elizabeth Kneebone, poverty now stretches well into the suburbs…

In some cities, like Milwaukee, it remains racially segregated, with the black poor living in one part of town, the white poor in another, and the Hispanic and Asian poor in separate pockets. In other cities, like Houston, racially diverse families living under the poverty line appear to share some of the same neighborhoods…

All of these pictures underscore why policy solutions created to address poverty years ago may not be well suited to the task today.

Research on urban poverty in the 1980s was largely focused on poor, black neighborhoods. This was the era of work by sociologists like William Julius Wilson, Paul Jargowsky, Doug Massey and Nancy Denton, and others who turned their attention to hyperconcentrated poverty which was largely ignored by the public and policymakers. As these maps illustrate, poverty today is much more complex involving different groups in new locations. In other words, our public understanding of urban poverty needs updating and needs to be able to tackle more variability.

Silicon Valley to eventually lose out to cities?

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An urbanist argues that Silicon Valley will die out because workers want to be in cities:

Why is Silicon Valley in Silicon Valley?

“You’ve got Stanford, you’ve got federal expenditures, and you’ve got an ecosystem” of start-up mentors and established institutions, said Bruce Katz, the founding director of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program. But Silicon Valley’s stranglehold on West Coast innovation is in danger, he said at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Friday. The main problem?

It’s no fun to live in Silicon Valley.

“What’s happening now is workers want to be in Oakland and San Francisco,” he told Walter Isaacson. Young workers want to live in a city — somewhere they can ride bikes, shop locally, walk to their favorite restaurants and bars, and live in a dense urban or urban-lite environment with nearby amenities. But Silicon Valley isn’t like a city. It’s like a suburb. “Silicon Valley is going to have to urbanize,” Katz said. “[There is a] migration out of Silicon Valley to places where people really want to live.”

This sounds like Richard Florida’s arguments about the creative class: a younger generation of educated workers want to be in thriving urban environments. However, I’m not sure Katz’s arguments are consistent – at least as presented in this article. He suggests that groups of politicians and business leaders help create certain environments. Hence, an area like Silicon Valley exists because there was a concentration of investment and infrastructure. Yet, Florida’s argument emphasizes more the individual desires of the creative class (or perhaps some sort of class consciousness). If Silicon Valley was indeed losing workers to cities (not just the Bay Area but places like Austin or Chicago or Manhattan), it could respond by creating more urban environments. This is a popular idea these days in more suburban settings: retrofit older developments like strip malls, shopping centers, office parks, and tract home developments into something denser and mixed use. Young workers may want a certain kind of environment but business leaders and politicians can help create and develop such areas, whether in Silicon Valley or somewhere else.

Another interpretation of Katz’s arguments is that corporate efforts to build all-inclusive work campuses (like with Facebook recently building a Main Street) just isn’t as appealing as the more “authentic” urban life.

Returning to past Olympic cities

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Intrigued by the tens of billions of dollars spent on recent Olympics by host cities, a photographer returns to the cities and structures of past Olympic games and documents some of the change:

The result is The Olympic City a book (out tomorrow) and traveling exhibition (opens tomorrow at Brooklyn, N.Y.’s Powerhouse Arena) of the photos Hustwit and Pack snapped, from Helsinki, Finland’s 1952 Olympic Stadium to London’s 2012 architectural spread, from Athens’ “completely unused” village to Beijing’s hulking gray structures. “It’s a little bit of an archaeological excursion,” Hustwit says. “We’re trying to find the evidence of the olympics in these places and look at how it’s affected that neighborhood and how people are living in these spaces.”

The pictures are interesting as is seeing how cities are utilizing these venues:

Beijing’s Lao Shan Velodrome is still being used, though the amount of wear (Pack speculates degradation could be accelerated by pollution) makes it look like a building from the ’60s. The giant parking lots are being used for driver training: “When I was there there were people to there learning how to parallel park,” Pack said…

Another shot of Athens’ Olympic Village, which is now totally empty. “The takeaway [of the project] is that the cities that really needed these venues already have done well,” Hustwit said. “But the majority of these cities weren’t really thinking about the long-term benefit for the people who lived there.”…

Despite the fact that Sarajevo’s Olympic infrastructure is totally destroyed, the Olympics remains “a point of pride” and “very much part of the city’s cultural history,” Hustwit said.

Cities tend to vie for Olympics for the prestige they offer but the buildings and money tend not to benefit the average person of the country (unless you count civic and/or national pride). Given the costs of preparing for the Olympics, I wonder if we are nearing a point where no cities will even want to compete for the games. Yet, my urban suspicions suggest there may just be a few cities who might want the power of the Olympics to do some major redevelopment in their cities that would be much harder to accomplish otherwise.

New York City interested in large-scale food scrap recycling

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National Geographic discusses plans for food scrap recycling in New York City:

In his State of the City address in February, Bloomberg had called food waste “New York City’s final recycling frontier.” The mayor said, “We bury 1.2 million tons of food waste in landfills every year at a cost of nearly $80 per ton. That waste can be used as fertilizer or converted to energy at a much lower price. That’s good for the environment and for taxpayers.”

The administration says it will soon be looking to pay a local composting plant to process 100,000 tons of food scraps a year, or about 10 percent of the city’s residential food waste. In the Big Apple, only residential refuse is handled directly by the city, since businesses must hire private disposal service providers…

The city says it also intends to hire a company to build a plant that will turn food waste into biogas—methane that can be burned to generate electricity just like natural gas. The food waste program is expected to ramp up over the next few years, starting with volunteers, until it reaches full deployment around 2015 or 2016…

Under the mayor’s new program, participants will get picnic-basket-size containers, which they can fill with everything from used coffee filters to broccoli stalks. Those bins will then be emptied into bigger brown containers at the curb for pickup. Those who live in apartment buildings, as many Manhattanites do, will drop the waste off at centralized bins.

Administration officials told reporters that the city can save $100 million a year composting food waste instead of sending it to landfills, most of which are in other states. Bloomberg has said he expects the program may become mandatory in the coming years, although that will be up to his predecessors, since his term is winding down.

Curbside composting! Read on to see how this has played out in San Francisco which has had mandatory food waste composting for several years.

The green efforts plus the potential cost-savings will interest a lot of people. But, this is also a large infrastructure effort involving getting containers to residents, coordinating pickups and centralized locations, and then finally disposing of the material. I hope we see more about how such a program is implemented and effectively run. And, if the program has such good benefits, why haven’t more cities jumped into this? Perhaps it is just a matter of time. Also, could suburban composting work like this or are there more costs due to lower densities?

Side note: it will be interesting to see the visuals of compost boxes out on New York streets. The contrast between garbage day in New York City versus Chicago and its system of alleys where the garbage is away from the street is striking.

“A staggering migration” of hundreds of millions to Chinese cities

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A New York Times video highlights the large number of Chinese residents the government intends to resettle to cities in the new two decades. Three quick thoughts on the video:

1. Yes, the scale of urbanization in China is astounding. As the video notes, China’s urbanization rate has approached Western levels in a matter of decades while it took centuries in the West.

2. The video argues that the rapid urbanization in recent years was more natural while the planned urbanization in the next 15 years is more forced by the government. I think this is an odd choice of words: “natural” versus “forced.” This seems to borrow from a typical US/Western explanation that people are free to make choices between urban, suburban, and rural areas. It may feel this way for those with money but it obscures that there are plenty of social forces, such as economic opportunities or race/ethnicity, that “push” and “pull” people away from certain areas. “Forced” seems more correct for official government policy that will require people to move but as a sociologist, I would be very hesitant to suggest social process were inevitable or “natural” or that individuals are complete free agents who can live where they like.

3. The visual in the video is unique. I understand the purpose: to give people the sense of just how large this urban resettlement in China will be. And it is visually more interesting than a graph. At the same time, it is odd to put so many major metropolitan areas in a line. The cities are geographically disparate so why line them up?

Chicago tries to solve stormwater issues with Deep Tunnel but is behind in utilizing greener options

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The Chicago Tribune suggests while Chicago has pursued the impressive Deep Tunnel project to relieve stormwater issues, the city has fallen behind in pursuing greener alternatives:

Cities from Philadelphia to Seattle already are moving aggressively to prevent basement backups and sewage overflows without the expensive work of laying pipes and boring tunnels. Milwaukee is the first city in the nation with a federal stormwater permit that legally requires “green infrastructure,” such as streets and parking lots with permeable pavement and neighborhood rain gardens designed to capture the first flush of stormwater…

For instance, the Green Alley program promoted by former Mayor Richard Daley has overhauled just 1 percent of the 1,900 miles of Chicago alleys with permeable pavement, according to city records. Other than a showcase project on Cermak Road in the Pilsen neighborhood, city officials could not provide details about any other street outfitted with green infrastructure…

Daley’s 2003 “Water Agenda” and 2008 “Climate Action Plan” promoted green infrastructure as a solution. Mayor Rahm Emanuel embraced the idea last year in his “Sustainable Chicago 2015” plan, which called for making the projects a routine part of the city’s bricks-and-mortar budget and promised to annually convert 1.5 million square feet of impervious surfaces into areas that allow runoff to seep into the ground.

But despite the years of talk about green alternatives, the city’s money and political focus largely is still on big-ticket construction projects like Emanuel’s program to replace and refurbish old sewer lines, funded in part by doubling water bills for the average household by 2015.

The larger official response to flooding and sewage overflows in Chicago and suburban Cook County is the Deep Tunnel, a network of massive storm sewers and cavernous flood-control reservoirs that has been under construction since the mid-1970s. The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, a tax-supported agency that operates independently from city government, has spent more than $3 billion on the project but isn’t scheduled to complete it until at least 2029.

There seem to be several issues at work:

1. Deep Tunnel is a sunk cost already and it will still be years before it is fully operational. Can a government back away from such a large project, supposedly one of the largest civil engineering efforts in the world, when so much money has already been spent? This kind of retreat with billions spent already is difficult to envision. Also, I assume we know more about stormwater management today than people did in the 1960s and 1970s when Deep Tunnel was planned.

2. The greener alternatives seem to take a different approach to stormwater. Instead of relying on a large, centralized system, it sounds like other cities have stricter requirements for individual property owners. These owners can’t foist the problem off on the city or nearby properties; they have to find ways to reduce their contributions to the system.

3. Chicago has tried to promote a greener image over the last decade or so. Mayor Daley was fond of pointing out the city’s green roof initiative. Here is a little bit more on Chicago’s green roofs:

“If every rooftop in Chicago was covered with a green roof, the city could save $100 million in energy every year,” said Jason Westrope, a developer for Development Management Associates, who has overseen the building of green roofs in the city.

Green roofs also help absorb stormwater runoff. That’s important because the city’s stormwater drains through its sewers, and if the system gets overloaded after a big storm, that wastewater is in danger of backflowing into the river, the lake, and even into people’s basements.

Chicago already has 359 green roofs covering almost 5.5 million square feet — that’s more than any other city in North America. But city planners are pushing for even more.

Chicago has mandated that all new buildings that require any public funds must be “LEED” Certified — designed with energy efficiency in mind — and that usually includes a green roof. Any project with a green roof in its plan gets a faster permitting process. That combined with energy savings is the kind of green that incentivizes developers.

Does this assessment of Deep Tunnel work against this green image? Compared to other major cities, how exactly does Chicago rank in terms of green programs and initiatives? It is one thing to look at a single project, even a massive one, compared to an overall assessment.