Tag Archives: cities

The country home of urbanist Lewis Mumford

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Lewis Mumford was a well-known mid-twentieth century urbanist. Mumford had a country home in New York:

For six decades, the Federal-style country home that sits at 187 Leedsville Road was the residence of renowned American historian, sociologist and influential literary critic Lewis Mumford…

Mumford first became acquainted with Amenia in 1926, when Joel Spingarn, an educator, literary critic and civil rights activist invited Mumford and his wife, Sophia, to spend the summer at Troutbeck, his estate farther north on Leedsville Road. A decade earlier, Troutbeck hosted a meeting that laid the groundwork for what would become the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Having become enamored with the community, the Mumfords returned in 1929 and for $2,500 purchased property and an early 19th-century home just down the road from Troutbeck. While initially using it as a summer residence, Mumford made Amenia his year-round home in 1936.

He began to expand the property by purchasing surrounding parcels and upgraded the 1830s-era home with electricity and heating. Discovering an affinity for gardening, Mumford landscaped the grounds and added walking trails and formal gardens…

Mumford found the peace and quiet at his Amenia home conducive to writing and many of his major works about the role of cities in civilization and the roots of industrialization were accomplished in the first-floor study of the residence. He installed numerous bookcases in the house for his large collection of books.

Am I alone in thinking it ironic that Mumford, a scholar of cities, did much of his writing away from the city? It would be interesting to explore this interplay further. I could see the possible argument: being away from the city for stretches brings it peculiarities into sharper relief.

Disagreeing lists: most religious US metro area vs. the most Bible-minded cities

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There are multiple ways to measure religion and two lists about religiosity in American cities illustrate this:

According to Gallup, Provo-Orem is the most religious U.S. metro area, with 77 percent of residents identifying as “very religious.” That’s a full 13 percentage points higher than the second-ranked city—Montgomery, Alabama—where 64 percent of residents say they are very religious.

Of the top 10 most religious cities identified by Gallup, only three are outside of the South: Provo-Orem; Ogden-Clearfield, Utah; and Holland-Grand Haven, Mich.

But of greater interest, Gallup’s list looks significantly different from one released by Barna Group and American Bible Society earlier this year. Barna’s list of America’s most “Bible-minded” cities, based on “highest combined levels of regular Bible reading and belief in the Bible’s accuracy,” listed Knoxville, Tenn., as the top city. However, Gallup’s ranking shows that fewer than 50 percent of Knoxville residents identify as “very religious”; Knoxville was nowhere near Gallup’s top 10—or even the top 20.

In fact, only two of Barna’s top 10 most Bible-minded cities correspond with Gallup’s: Barna’s fifth-ranked Jackson, Miss., and ninth-ranked Huntsville, Ala., are third and fifth among Gallup’s cities, respectively. Two other top Barna picks (Shreveport, La., and Chattanooga, Tenn.) fell within Gallup’s top 20.

The lists’ least-religious/least Bible-minded cities don’t exactly line up either. Whereas most of Barna’s picks are in the New England region, Gallup reports the lowest percentages of “very religious” believers in West coast cities.

While these two lists may both be dealing with aspects of religion, we shouldn’t be surprised they have different findings. Barna, as it often does, is looking at a specific aspect of Christian practice as understood by a particular Christian group while Gallup is taking a broader view and ends up with a city with a heavy concentration of Mormons at the top of the list (and the only Utah city on the list, Salt Lake City, is #84 out of 96 on Barna’s list). We could take other aspects of religiosity, such as church attendance or giving to churches and religious organizations or feeling “spiritual,” and the results across cities could differ.

It does appear, however, that the two lists generally agree that the South and Midwest/Great Plains (+ Utah) are more religious than the Northeast and West.

Is New York City friendly or unfriendly to developers?

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While New Yorkers may think they and the city are relatively open to development, Megan McArdle argues the city is quite unfriendly to development:

Outside of the Observer’s home city, and a few similarly restrictive metro areas, the presumption is that developers should be allowed to build whatever they think will sell, subject to reasonable concerns about thinks like flammability and sewer connections.  They don’t let the neighbors tie up your project for years with tangles over landmark preservation or zoning or frivolous complaints to the building commission.  They don’t slap height limits on attractive, centrally located neighborhoods.  They don’t pass “inclusionary zoning” or affordable housing mandates forcing you to devote a certain number of your units to below-market rents.  And as a result, housing is affordable.

I am constantly surprised by the extent to which New Yorkers regard all this not only laudatory, but normal–even as they bemoan the high cost of housing.  Some of my lefty neighbors on the Upper West Side were at one point simultaneously enthusiastically supporting “affordable housing” organizations–and agitating to block construction of a new building that would ruin their lovely natural light.   Obviously, some of this is sheer hypocrisy; everyone is theoretically in favor of affordable housing, but they are also in favor of getting a high selling price for their home, and when those two conflict . . .

But as that Observer snippet suggests, much of it isn’t hypocrisy.  It’s a genuine belief that allowing any developer to build anything at all is an aggressively pro-capitalist position; allowing them to build where you live is extreme generosity.  Coupled with a genuine failure to connect all those neighborhood review boards and zoning restrictions to the fact that there don’t seem to be enough apartments to go around.

New York is probably strange in this regard considering its density and demand for expensive housing. But, McArdle also seems to suggest that most of the rest of the country doesn’t have many rules about development. Is this true? Lots of big cities as well as communities within metropolitan areas, even conservative ones, have some restrictions on development. For example, take a look at some of the debates over teardowns taking place in communities across the country. These debates aren’t just taking place in communities like New York City even as these communities take a variety of positions on how to proceed regarding teardowns.

My guess is there is a continuum of responses in metropolitan areas to development. Places like New York City and Portland, Oregon are unusual in the restrictions they have placed on development. On the other hand, not all places are like some of the more expansive Sunbelt cities that are characterized as allowing anything. It would be interesting to see such a continuum and where communities can be placedon it.

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.