Tag Archives: cities

Lincoln, Nebraska #1 city in well-being

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A new survey from Gallup and Healthways puts Lincoln, Nebraska as the number one city in the U.S. for well-being:

Lincoln, Neb., had the highest Well-Being Index score (72.8) in the U.S. across the 189 metropolitan areas that Gallup and Healthways surveyed in 2012. Also in the top 10 are Boulder, Colo.; Provo-Orem, Utah; Ann Arbor, Mich.; Honolulu, Hawaii; Fort Collins-Loveland, Colo.; and Burlington-South Burlington, Vt…

At 60.8, Charleston, W.Va., had the lowest Well-Being Index score, displacing Huntington-Ashland, W.Va.-Ky.-Ohio, which held this position the two previous years. Huntington-Ashland’s score of 61.2 is up from 58.1 in 2010, which is the lowest score on record for any metro area across five years of data collection. Mobile, Ala.; Utica-Rome, N.Y.; Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton, N.C.; and Fort Smith, Ark.-Okla.; join Charleston and Huntington-Ashland as frequent occupants of the bottom 10 list each year…

Washington, D.C.-Arlington-Alexandria, Va.-Md.-W.Va., residents reported the highest wellbeing among the nation’s 52 largest metropolitan areas, defined as those with 1 million residents or more, followed by San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, Calif. These two metros have been in the top five among large metro areas in each of the past five years…

The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index score is an average of six sub-indexes, which individually examine life evaluation, emotional health, work environment, physical health, healthy behaviors, and access to basic necessities. The overall score and each of the six sub-index scores are calculated on a scale from 0 to 100, where a score of 100 represents the ideal. Gallup and Healthways have been tracking these measures daily since January 2008.

Interesting as there are more cities from the Great Plains and Midwest than I expected.

A few thoughts about the methodology:

1. After all is added up across these six measures, there isn’t much variation between the top and the bottom. Lincoln had the highest score at 72.8 and Charleston had the lowest at 60.8. So on a scale of 0 to 100, the range was just 12. This suggests there is not much variation in these measures and that this index may not tell us a whole lot. Are Americans simply generally optimistic about these topics or are they realistically not that different across cities?

2. What exactly does Gallup and Healthways do with this information that it requires daily polling? This is not a small sample:

Results are based on telephone interviews conducted as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index survey Jan. 2-Dec. 29, 2012, with a random sample of 353,563 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, selected using random-digit-dial sampling.

Perhaps there is some marketing edge to this surveying or it is related to some big research project.

Bonus well-being info: for occupations, doctors and then K-12 teachers lead the way and manufacturing-production workers and then transportation workers are at the bottom.

What’s the life expectancy of a Chinese skyscraper with too much sea sand in the concrete?

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I think most people assume skyscrapers will last a long time. But, a number of newer skyscrapers in China are endangered because of too much sea sand in the concrete:

A sand scandal is brewing in China, with concerns that low-quality concrete has been used in the construction of many of the country’s largest buildings — putting them at risk of collapse.

The recipe to make concrete is pretty simple — cement, aggregate and water — but the strength of the final batch can vary wildly depending on the kinds of aggregate and cement used and the proportions they’re mixed in. Commonly the aggregate used in many modern building projects consists of crushed gravel or other rock, including sand, and that’s the cause of so much distress in the Chinese construction industry at the moment. Inspections by state officials have found raw, unprocessed sea sand in at least 15 buildings under construction in Shenzhen, including a building which, when finished, was set to become China’s tallest…

It can take only a few decades for a building to become dangerously unsafe if untreated sea sand is used in its concrete — including the possibility of collapse. While this scandal has been confined only to Shenzhen thus far, the possibility of it spreading to other Chinese cities is cause for concern. The country currently has nine of the 20 tallest buildings in the world under construction, while there were reportedly so many skyscrapers under construction in 2011 that it worked out as a new one being topped out every five days right through into 2014.

This raises an interesting question about the life expectancy of major buildings. Just how long will the skyscrapers in the major skylines in the world last? How soon do they need to be replaced? What plans are in place to destroy or gut the buildings before they fall down? I have never heard such a discussion but I hope cities are prepared.

This particular concrete problem wouldn’t arise if only they had built the skyscrapers out of wood…

Show your knowledge of US metro areas with the US Census “Population Bracketology”

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Even the United States Census Bureau is getting into brackets and bracketology. Go here to play “Population Bracketology” which shows your knowledge of the population of metropolitan areas in the United States.

Yes, it should be easy to select the winner. But, I like that a lot of the initial pairings matched Sunbelt versus Rust Belt cities. Some of these were hard to choose. On the other hand, the Los Angeles-New York City matchup in the first round knocked out a contender…

Scholars suggest switch from urban studies to urban science and the DNA of cities

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Several scholars recently called for pursuing urban science:

William Solecki compares the current study of cities to natural history in the 19th century. Back then most natural scientists were content to explore and document the extent of biological and behavioral differences in the world. Only recently has science moved from cataloguing life to understanding the genetic code that forms its very basis.

It’s time for urban studies to evolve the same way, says Solecki, a geographer at Hunter College who’s also director of the C.U.N.Y. Institute for Sustainable Cities. Scholars from any number of disciplines — economics and history to ecology and psychology — have explored and documented various aspects of city life through their own unique lenses. What’s needed now, Solecki contends, is a new science of urbanization that looks beyond the surface of cities to the fundamental laws that form their very basis too…

In Environment, the researchers outline three basic research goals for their proposed science of urbanization:

  1. To define the basic components of urbanization across time, space, and place.
  2. To identify the universal laws of city-building, presenting urbanization as a natural system.
  3. To link this new system of urbanization with other fundamental processes that occur in the world.

The result, Solecki believes, will be a stronger understanding of the “DNA” of cities — and, by extension, an improved ability to address urban problems in a systemic manner. Right now, for instance, urban transport scholars respond to the problem of sprawl and congestion with ideas like bike lanes or bus-rapid transit lines. Those programs can be great for cities, but in a way they fix a symptom of a problem that still lingers. An improved science of urbanization would isolate the underlying processes that caused this unsustainable development in the first place.

Three quick thoughts:

1. I think this assumes we have the kind of data and methodology that could get at the “DNA of cities.” Presumably, this is big data collected in innovative ways. To use the natural science metaphor, it is one thing to know about the existence of DNA and it is another thing to collect and analyze it. With this new kind of data, cities can then be viewed as complex systems with lots of moving pieces.

2. Are there necessarily universal laws underlying cities? We are currently in an academic world where there are a variety of theories about urban growth but they tend to be idiosyncratic to particular cities, apply to particular time periods, and emphasize different aspects of social, economic, and political life. Is this because no one has really put it all together yet or because it is really hard to find universal laws?

3.

“Being White in Philly”

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Philadelphia magazine recently published a piece titled “Being White in Philly.” Here is the argument of the article:

I’ve shared my view of North Broad Street with people—white friends and colleagues—who see something else there: New buildings. Progress. Gentrification. They’re sunny about the area around Temple. I think they’re blind, that they’ve stopped looking. Indeed, I’ve begun to think that most white people stopped looking around at large segments of our city, at our poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods, a long time ago. One of the reasons, plainly put, is queasiness over race. Many of those neighborhoods are predominantly African-American. And if you’re white, you don’t merely avoid them—you do your best to erase them from your thoughts.

At the same time, white Philadelphians think a great deal about race. Begin to talk to people, and it’s clear it’s a dominant motif in and around our city. Everyone seems to have a story, often an uncomfortable story, about how white and black people relate…

Fifty years after the height of the civil rights movement, more than 25 years after electing its first African-American mayor, Philadelphia remains a largely segregated city, with uneasy boundaries in culture and understanding. And also in well-being. There is a black middle class, certainly, and blacks are well-represented in our power structure, but there remains a vast and seemingly permanent black underclass. Thirty-one percent of Philadelphia’s more than 600,000 black residents live below the poverty line. Blacks are more likely than whites to be victims of a crime or commit one, to drop out of school and to be unemployed.

What gets examined publicly about race is generally one-dimensional, looked at almost exclusively from the perspective of people of color. Of course, it is black people who have faced generations of discrimination and who deal with it still. But our public discourse ignores the fact that race—particularly in a place like Philadelphia—is also an issue for white people. Though white people never talk about it.

Everyone might have a race story, but few whites risk the third-rail danger of speaking publicly about race, given the long, troubled history of race relations in this country and even more so in this city. Race is only talked about in a sanitized form, when it’s talked about at all, with actual thoughts and feelings buried, which only ups the ante. Race remains the elephant in the room, even on the absurd level of who holds the door to enter a convenience store.

My first thought after quickly reading through the article was that the writer ignores the privileged positions of whites vis a vis minorities in Philadelphia and the United States. Part of what makes it difficult for whites to talk about race is they then have to acknowledge that currently and historically whites have been advantaged and don’t face the same kind of discrimination that blacks and others have faced. Without being willing to tackle these power dynamics and the larger structural inequalities at hand, it is difficult to have a conversation.

Modern dilemma: parents choosing between cities and nature for their kids

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William Giraldi highlights a modern dilemma: how to parent such that one’s kids truly experience nature.

My pastoral idealism and viridity have convinced me that humans are happier, less aggrieved creatures among bucolic splendor, awash in Wordsworth’s “vital feelings of delight” inspired by the interconnectedness of nature. Or, as Thoreau has it in Walden, “There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.” For anyone who has anguished beneath the black dog of melancholy, that seems an irresistible promise. Concrete, steel, car alarms, and computers are not soothing, not even a smidgen religious. The human spectacle lacks tranquility. We are so ensconced in artificiality, is it any wonder many of us are miserable and almost mad? In Thoreau’s celebrated Journal (for a personal record of the nineteenth-century American mind at work it is second only to Emerson’s magisterial Journals), he argues that you can’t have it both ways, that you must decide between nature and society: “You cannot have a deep sympathy with both man & nature. Those qualities which bring you near to the one estrange you from the other.”

That’s the rub: You can’t have it both ways. Certainly not if you earn an average income and don’t own a weekend and summer house in Vermont or New Hampshire. Even so, do you honestly want to spend half of the weekend in your earth-killing car, stymied on a highway with a million other Bostonians trying to give their children a weekend’s worth of rustic bliss? There’s no constancy in that, and aggravation enough to age you. And so once you accept Thoreau’s formulation, the line is drawn: on this side is city life, on that side nature. You must choose. But our lives, our circumstances, choose for us, do they not? Who is really master of his own fate? It was easy for Thoreau; he was a bachelor without a job or children to feed. He could sit in the Concord woods and whistle with the wind (he also accidently burned down more than three hundred acres of those woods in 1844). I have to go to work every morning, and I’m not about to switch professions and become a lumberjack so my boy can daily chase after chipmunks and maybe become a bard. In a certain mood you could very quickly come to the conclusion that Thoreau is full of shit…

HEMINGWAY’S BOY-HERO Nick Adams spends his childhood and adolescence praying to the forests of Michigan—the wilderness his sanctuary, his temple—and yet, for all of his communion with nature, Nick doesn’t turn out that well (nor did Hemingway himself). I have a family member who was reared in the woods of Maine, in the sanctified wild where I found the sublime. The last I saw her, she was two hundred pounds overweight, tattooed from neck to feet, and had a slightly off child from a nowhere-to-be-found father and not even the dimmest possibility of employment. Many of the Mainers I’ve met have become immune to the grandeur just outside their doors. They don’t even look. As I continue to contemplate a monumental uprooting from Boston into a backwoods, that cousin of mine towers like a reprimand or warning. You can’t just drop a child into the woods, clap your hands, and expect him or her to turn into Wordsworth or Carson.

And if Ethan is never allowed Thoreau’s all-important constancy in nature? I’ll chastise myself for choosing one place over another. But that’s the paradox of place: We want to be somewhere, and then we want to be somewhere else. There’s always somewhere better, even if the place we are is best. This dilemma of the city versus the woods has become for me a question of proper parenting, of how to inspire awe in Ethan, and how to invoke Wordsworth and Thoreau anywhere we are—at the apex of the Prudential Tower in downtown Boston or on a mountain in Colorado. The question has become not Will we move to the country? but rather What kind of father do I want to be?

It seems to me that underlying this argument is the steady urbanization America has undergone since Thoreau lived. According to this chart, the United States first became 50% urban in the early 1900s and reached 70% not too long after the conclusion of World War II.

Adding to this, early American suburbs were often envisioned as a compromise between urban and rural life. These original suburbs, like Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, were built around big lots, parks, and winding streets that helped emphasize topography and natural settings. Wealthier residents could get away from the dirtiness of the city, with the urbanization rate also tied to industrialization, in the suburbs. Of course, suburbs don’t have this same natural or green reputation today. For example, suburban critic James Howard Kuntsler’s TED talk dismisses the sometimes comical attempts to make suburban settings more green such as planting single trees in the middle of planters in massive parking lots. Yet, the suburbs still tend to offer more space and are theoretically closer to nature.

There is also a hint of a class argument here. True immersion in nature requires some money to make the trip. For families that need to work, have little money for vacations, and can’t get away for a variety of reasons, nature can become a luxury.

Toronto now the fourth largest city in North America, Chicago drops to fifth largest

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The Toronto Star reported on Thursday that Toronto passed Chicago to become the fourth largest city in North America:

But according to the latest census data from Statistics Canada, as of last July 1, Toronto’s population was 2,791,140, about 84,000 more than Chicago’s 2,707,120.

While both numbers are estimates, the gap was enough to spur Toronto economic development staffers to declare the city is “now the fourth largest municipality in North America.”

Toronto (the city proper, not the GTA) grew by 38,000 in the previous 12 months. In Chicago’s case, 12-month growth was about 11,000.

When it comes to cities, size matters. Besides bragging rights, growing cities may accrue economic benefits, stronger exposure and presence on the world stage, and more clout at the national level. Growth suggests vitality and attractiveness.

Small wonder Chicago officials seemed unusually reticent when it came to addressing Hogtown’s (at least theoretical) leap ahead of their toddlin’ town.

This won’t help Chicagoans who are already nervous about Chicago being considered a global city. A quick search of the Chicago Tribune website suggests this is not a story on Chicago’s radar screen though an early February 2013 editorial praised Canada. The Chicago Sun-Times did feature an article by Neil Steinberg on the population changes and differences between the cities…but Steinberg also got himself embroiled in a hostile Twitter exchange.

Planning for the 7 billion person city

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Two architects recently won an award for planning for a city that would include all the residents of the world:

This is the premise behind an ambitious research project, called “The City of 7 Billion,” for which the two recently won the $100,000 Latrobe Prize from the American Institute of Architects College of Fellows. With the geo-spatial model Mendis and Hsiang are creating – think a super-enhanced, zoomable Google Earth, Hsiang says – they’re hoping to study the impact of population growth and resource consumption at the scale of the whole world.

Every corner of the planet, they argue, is “urban” in some sense, touched by farming that feeds cities, pollution that comes out of them, industrialization that has made urban centers what they are today. So why not think of the world as a single urban entity?…

Now she and Mendis will be trying to do something similar – sew together disparate data sets, turn them into spatial models, then make those models accessible to the public – with a vastly more complex scenario. They want to connect not just land use with population density, but also income data, carbon dioxide levels, and geographical terrain. Their model of the whole world as one continuous urban terrain could then be used as a predictive tool for planning development into the future.

Hsiang and Mendis are hoping to communicate data and ideas that the political and scientific communities have had a hard time conveying to the public. This may sound like an odd job for architects – visualizing worldwide data about air quality – but Hsiang and Mendis argue that architects are precisely the professionals to do this…

More often, however, they have not been working at the same scale as policy-makers and scientists. “For too long, the architecture profession has been complicit in focusing on buildings and the scale of buildings,” Mendis says. “And I think that’s been detrimental to us.” The City of 7 Billion is an attempt to change that, to involve architects in big-picture questions more often debated by economists and geographers and social scientists.

This sounds like an interesting project on multiple levels:

1. Trying to imagine what a megacity of this size would look like. We are a long way from a megapolis this size yet there are parts of the world that might benefit from such thinking.

2. Putting together data in new ways. This is stretching some of the boundaries of data visualization by putting it in 3-D form.

3. Helping architects get involved in larger conversations about cities.

It will be worth watching where this goes.

Michigan to appoint emergency manager for Detroit

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The city of Detroit will soon lose self-governance as Michigan Governor Rick Snyder says an emergency manager will take control:

“I believe it’s important to declare the city of Detroit in financial emergency,” Snyder announced at a midday press conference on Friday, in front of the banner, “Detroit Can’t Wait.” The EM will assume the suspended powers of the mayor and city council, and will take unilateral control of municipal finances, union contracts, pension systems, and more.

The consolidation of power will likely lead to cuts and asset sales that the mayor and city council had sought to avoid, which could include the privatization of most of the city’s water supply or the sale of Belle Isle Park. The EM also has the power to declare the city bankrupt, though that option seems unlikely.

The process has racial and political overtones. Detroit is over 80 percent black and its city government is controlled by Democrats; the Michigan statehouse is largely white and firmly in Republican control. If an EM is appointed in nearby Inkster (pop. 25,000, currently under a “consent agreement” with the state), as Chris Savage has pointed out, more than half of Michigan’s 1.4 million African Americans will be governed by unelected officials.

Snyder’s decision follows last week’s devastating report from a state review team that Detroit is unable to address its long-term financial problems. The Motor City, the investigation found, has $14.9 billion in long-term debt and pension obligations, and its general fund has not shown a surplus since 2004. The review team unanimously recommended state intervention…

Five other cities in Michigan are also under state control. Detroit will be the largest city in the country to lose the ability to govern itself.

It will be interesting to see what goals the emergency manager has. To fix the budget and turn a surplus? To contract the city to a viable size? To try to attract growth? To stem the population loss? To privatize unprofitable utilities? Related to the goals, I’m also curious to know how the state will determine whether the emergency manager is “successful.” What happens if the emergency manager doesn’t work out?

In the long run, the ability to self-govern seems to be a bedrock principle in American life. I wonder how much Governor Snyder really wants to do this versus feeling like it has to be done to turn Detroit around. The political fall-out from such a move may not be pretty and states don’t want to be in long-term positions like these.

Joel Kotkin links population increases in Sunbelt, Great Plains, and Mountain West with positive business climates

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Joel Kotkin argues the recent population growth and population loss in certain regions of the U.S. is related to business climate:

These trends point to a U.S. economic future dominated by four growth corridors that are generally less dense, more affordable, and markedly more conservative and pro-business: the Great Plains, the Intermountain West, the Third Coast (spanning the Gulf states from Texas to Florida), and the Southeastern industrial belt.

Overall, these corridors account for 45% of the nation’s land mass and 30% of its population. Between 2001 and 2011, job growth in the Great Plains, the Intermountain West and the Third Coast was between 7% and 8%—nearly 10 times the job growth rate for the rest of the country. Only the Southeastern industrial belt tracked close to the national average…

Energy, manufacturing and agriculture are playing a major role in the corridor states’ revival. The resurgence of fossil fuel–based energy, notably shale oil and natural gas, is especially important. Over the past decade, Texas alone has added 180,000 mostly high-paying energy-related jobs, Oklahoma another 40,000, and the Intermountain West well over 30,000. Energy-rich California, despite the nation’s third-highest unemployment rate, has created a mere 20,000 such jobs. In New York, meanwhile, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is still delaying a decision on hydraulic fracturing…

Since 2000, the Intermountain West’s population has grown by 20%, the Third Coast’s by 14%, the long-depopulating Great Plains by over 14%, and the Southeast by 13%. Population in the rest of the U.S. has grown barely 7%. Last year, the largest net recipients of domestic migrants were Texas and Florida, which between them gained 150,000. The biggest losers? New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California.

As a result, the corridors are home to most of America’s fastest-growing big cities, including Charlotte, Raleigh, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Salt Lake City, Oklahoma City and Denver. Critically for the economic and political future, the growth corridor seems particularly appealing to young families with children.

This is part of a larger demographic trend that has taken place in the last 50 years in the United States: larger population growth in the Sunbelt and West. This has been accompanied by the growth of major cities, particularly places like Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Phoenix, and the movement of jobs to these areas.

It would be interesting to view these struggles as part of a larger power struggle between regions. It is obvious to pick up on the political implications but we could also look at economic, social, cultural, and religious implications. These growing Sunbelt cities don’t quite have the global status several of the northern cities do. Is this a function of time or can they catch up? Where does Washington D.C. fit into this – still a compromise city between North and South? How different are everyday lives in these different parts of the country? How much do businesses who relocate to these areas like the regions beyond the bottom-line considerations?

h/t Instapundit