Tag Archives: cities

Comparing New York locations “Then and Now”

Posted on by

Photographer Evan Joseph has co-authored a book that compares New York City locations Then and Now.

The book, an update to an earlier edition, pairs old photos of New York City with current photos of the same location. While photos in the previous edition didn’t always match exactly the heights and camera angles of the originals, in this edition, Joseph went through a painstaking process of matching the angle of each old photo. He did so by loading each historical image onto his iPad, he explained to us last week, going to each street photographed, and looking around until he could lock down the location of at least one building in the old photo. “Then I would keep doing it…keep moving around and around until I could get that building into the same location.”

While Joseph had no desire to use 100-year-old photography equipment to replicate the old photos—and is, in fact, known in the photography community for carrying around a lot of modern equipment—he found that he did miss one aspect of “then” photography. “What I quickly figured out was that the elevated subway lines that ran all over New York…were amazing photographic vantage points that no longer exist. So many of them were taken from 25 feet off the ground,” he says. “That is just an amazing place to shoot a building. It gets you above the traffic, it gets you above people, but not so high up that it’s a rooftop view. It renders the target…in a very natural and flattering perspective.” Joseph was left to replicate that perspective as best he could with a monopod, “really like a window-washer’s stick that I attached a photo mount too. Then I rigged up some remote triggers so I could fire the camera from holding a stick 10 feet about my head.” (Joseph also used his connections to developers and real estate brokers to get some of his shots from within other buildings.)

The book also gave Joseph the opportunity to do a little aerial photography, with a helicopter shoot of lower Manhattan. The goal was to replicate a photo that was probably taken from an airplane c. 1935—the result is the then-now pairing above.

Aside from that photo of lower Manhattan, downtown is underrepresented in the book, Joseph says, because most of the century-old photos of New York were taken by commercial architectural photographers, and there wasn’t much call for them to take photos of residential buildings. Instead, the photos of residential areas are snapshots, incorporating streets more than buildings. Still, Joseph thinks there may be material there for a future edition of the book, and we look forward to it.

I’ve always been fascinated by this concept. Once buildings disappear, people tend to forget about them and, of course, new generations have difficulty picturing what was there before. What was once a common streetscape known to thousands (or potentially millions in big cities) simply disappears. Skylines can change quickly as well.

Photography projects like these can also help residents and others get a quick view of urban change. While certain changes get a lot of attention (like the Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago), smaller changes frequently take place and may not be noticed until a whole series of changes occur.

A few years ago, I remember seeing an aerial black and white photograph of Lake Shore Drive crossing the Chicago River. In this photo, Lake Shore Drive still had its famous S-curve (see here) and there weren’t many big buildings in the immediate area. This area has been transformed quite a bit throughout Chicago’s history: it was once a railroad and dock area along the Chicago River that in recent years has become a center for condominiums (like the Aqua building which attracted attention after opening in 2010) and office buildings after Lake Shore Drive being moved closer to the lake. I spent a lot of this with this photo and thinking how much had changed in just several decades.

 

Another megatrend for 2030: the rise of megacities

Posted on by

While the declining power of the United States seems to be getting the most attention in a new report from the National Intelligence Council, the report also predicts change involving cities:

Although the Council does allow for the possibility of a “decisive re-assertion of U.S. power,” the futurists seem pretty well convinced that America is, relatively speaking, on the decline and that China is on the ascent. In fact, the Council believes nation-states in general are losing their oomph, in favor of “megacities [that will] flourish and take the lead in confronting global challenges.” And we’re not necessarily talking New York or Beijing here; some of these megacities could be somehow “built from scratch.”

One of these ideas is new and the other is not. The idea that megacities will become more powerful is not a new idea as metropolitan regions have been recognized for their economic, political, and cultural power. (See the 2012 Global Cities Index.) Concurrent with the rise of megacities, particularly in developing nations, are concerns some have with the ability of nation-states to cope with new global issues. If you go further back, you find discussions of “megapolis” and how these combinations of large cities would come to dominate national and global life.

The other idea is newer: large cities “built from scratch.” The rate of urbanization in some countries over the last few decades has been fantastic. For example, Chinese cities have grown tremendously. In the Middle East, several cities have arisen out of deserts. Third World megacities like Lagos or Sao Paulo keep growing. While quick construction is more possible today (extra tall buildings constructed in 90 days!), I wonder how possible it is to move millions of people around to new cities and have some semblance of social order.

Census data visualization: metropolitan population change by natural increase, international migration, and domestic migration

Posted on by

The Census regularly puts together new data visualizations to highlight newly collected data. The most recent visualization looks at population change in metropolitan areas between 2010-2011 and breaks down the change by natural increase, international migration, and domestic migration.

Several trends are quickly apparent:

1. Sunbelt growth continues at a higher pace and non-Sunbelt cities tend to lose residents by domestic migration.

2. Population increases by international migration still tends to be larger in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami.

3. There are some differences in natural increases to population. I assume this is basically a measure of birth rates.

However, I have two issues with this visualization. My biggest complaint is that the boxes are not weighted by population. New York has the largest natural increase to the population but it is also the largest metropolitan areas by quite a bit. A second issue is that the box sizes are not all the 50,000 or 10,000 population change as suggested by the key at the top. So while I can see relative population change, it is hard to know the exact figures.

Argument: cities could find more revenue by taxing people who commute in

Posted on by

Michael Pagano details the tax revenue issues facing American big cities and proposes a solution: tax commuters for the city services they use.

Over the past several decades, municipal tax systems have changed in many ways to try and capture the revenues needed to support essential services. But most cities continue to base their tax systems on dated notions of how local economies work and what drives income growth and wealth. Cities must be given the ability to develop tax and revenue systems that match the unique characteristics of their local economies, and that allow them to diversify revenues in ways that protect them from fiscal crises.How might that request be accommodated? Tax structures should be created that link cities to their underlying engines of growth or to income and wealth, similar in design to what the property tax attempted to accomplish two centuries ago. In Ohio for example, cities tax earnings at the place of employment and the place of residence. By taxing at the place of employment, users of city services (that is, employees who physically work at a site) contribute to the resource base for service provision.

Imagine if users of city-government services actually were required to pay for the full cost of those services? Imagine household decisions on where to live that is based on their paying the full cost of services. Imagine the decision calculus by individuals who would be responsible for paying their fair share. It could be revolutionary.

I wonder if changing the tax structure in this way would only serve to push more organizations and firms to the suburbs. Take the example of Chicago cited by Pagano. In the last few years, several companies, like Motorola, have announced they are moving workers back into the city. Would changing the tax structure make them reconsider?

Argument: individualistic political arguments don’t work in cities since they require contributing to the “public good”

Posted on by

After looking at the Democratic vote advantage in cities for the 2012 election, here is an argument about why individualistic political arguments don’t work in cities:

If Republicans are ever going to earn real votes in cities in the future, though, they’ll have to do more than just talk about them differently. The real problem seeps much deeper. As the Republican Party has moved further to the right, it has increasingly become the party of fierce individualism, of “I built that” and you take care of yourself. Cities, on the other hand, are fundamentally about the shared commons. If you live in a city and you think government – and other people – should stay out of your life, how will you get to work in the morning? Who will police your neighborhood? Where will you find a public park when your building has no back yard?

In a good piece on the GOP’s problem with geography earlier this week, The New Republic’s Lydia DePillis interviewed Princeton Historian Kevin Kruse, who made this point succinctly: “There are certain things in which the physical nature of a city, the fact the people are piled on top of each other, requires some notion of the public good,” he said. “Conservative ideology works beautifully in the suburbs, because it makes sense spatially.”

The real urban challenge for conservatives going forward will be to pull back from an ideology that leaves little room for the concept of “public good,” and that treats all public spending as if it were equally wasteful. Cities do demand, by definition, a greater role for government than a small rural town on the prairie. But the return on investment can also be much higher (in jobs created through transportation spending, in the number of citizens touched by public expenditures, in patents per capita, in the sheer share of economic growth driven by our metropolises).

Density makes all of these things possible, and it requires its own kind of politics. There’s no reason why the Democratic Party should have an exclusive lock on this idea. Investing government money efficiently – as Republicans want to do – is also about focusing on how it’s spent in cities. While Republicans are mulling this over in the next four years, it may help to look at Howard’s map. What is going on in those dark blue dots? What does it mean to live in those places – and to live there and hear from politicians that “government should get out of the way?”

This reminds me of some of the observations of early sociologists about the transition from more rural village and farm life to urban life in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Cities aren’t just different because there are more people who are living and working closer together; this changes the social interactions (think of Simmel’s talk of the blase attitude in cities) as well as the social interdependence (think of Durkheim’s discussion of the division of labor).

One way Republicans could positively argue about cities: along with their surrounding metropolitan regions, cities are economic engines. A thriving economy needs thriving firms in these regions that encourage innovation, provide jobs, and interact with and operate in nearby communities.

Are there cities that are more individualistic than others? Can you have a global city that has a more individualistic ethos?

Analyzing cities in 1588

Posted on by

A newly translated into English work from an Italian observer in 1588 provides a perspective on cities:

His book called On the Causes of the Greatness and Magnificence of Cities, written in 1588, has just been translated into English for the first time in four centuries and published by the University of Toronto Press.

Funny how modern it is, once you get past the obligatory nod toward the ancients and Botero starts talking about the world he actually knows. This stretched from cities built by the Incas (he admired their engineering) to the Indian island of Goa, a vigorous trading partner of the Portuguese.

Botero doesn’t care much about fortresses and armies; he looks for trade, transportation routes, a middle class, contact with foreign states, universities, and growth, as well an an effective ruler. Not so different from our day…

Botero writes: “Someone will ask me which is of greater value for improving a place and increasing its population: the fertility of its soil, or the industry of its people?” That’s easy, he says. Industry wins over farming or other production of raw materials every time.

This article suggests Botero seems to have a more modern perspective on cities and has been called the first urban sociologist. Having never encountered his work before, I wonder if we could flip this around: perhaps Botero was living at the leading edge of the modern era in northern Italy in the late 16th century. The Italian Renaissance had already occurred. This would be around the same era in which Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism suggested modern capitalism developed. Cities were connected more than ever before and Europeans now had information about cities in the Americas and Asia. It still takes someone to notice and point out these changes but the world and big cities were changing by this point in time.

Marlins’ publicly-funded stadium not the exception among Major League Baseball teams

Posted on by

There is a lot of conversation today about the trade/fire sale undertaken by the Miami Marlins and how this relates to the team’s opening of a new stadium for the 2012 season that was largely funded by public money.Yet, this is a larger trend: 20 of the last 21 baseball stadiums built have been partly funded by public money.

And like nobody else, he hoarded massive checks from MLB while passing along the bill for the stadium to the taxpayers.

The Marlins can claim the money comes from tourism-tax dollars. Truth is, Miami-Dade County moved general-use monies from property taxes to free up the tourist cash. This is the dirtiest secret of Selig’s two decades as commissioner: The “golden era” of which he so often brags came off the taxpayer’s teat.

Of the 21 stadiums built since Camden Yards started the boom in 1992, the San Francisco Giants’ AT&T Park is the only one privately funded. Baseball’s business plan depended on new stadiums with sweetheart deals filling the coffers of ownership groups lucky enough to leverage politicians or voters into signing off on them. Cities signed deal after dreadful deal, few worse than the Marlins’, who paid for less than 20 percent of the stadium, received a $35 million interest-free loan to help and used $2.5 million more of public money to fund seizures.

Despite Loria and Samson’s protestations otherwise, this was always the endgame of their stadium gambit. Selig saw the Marlins’ audited finances every year. He knew they were lying. He went along with it anyway. That’s how he does business. He protects his friends. It’s why Fred Wilpon still owns the Mets. It’s why Frank McCourt doesn’t own the Dodgers.

As I’ve written about before (see here and here), studies show the construction of sports stadiums tends to benefit team owners and not the public. Teams are often able to hold a city hostage because no political leader wants to be the one who lets the favorite team go. Yet, the economic data would suggest it wouldn’t really hurt a city to do just that.

This leads me to a thought: what city would be most willing to let a team leave town for another locale? Even if pro sports teams don’t necessarily bring in money, they are also status symbols to show a city is “major league.” What will be the next team to go? One way to think about this is to look at cities that lack major teams. We could look at Los Angeles and the NFL; even though the metropolitan area has two baseball teams, two basketball teams, and two hockey teams, the city has not had a NFL team since 1994. Despite all the conversation about teams possible moving there (the Vikings were one of the recent teams though they got a publicly-funded stadium in a close vote last year), no one has moved yet. Seattle and the NBA is another interesting case; the city lost the Supersonics, now the Oklahoma City Thunder, after the 2007-2008 season and there have been recent conversations about a new stadium and team.

My guess is that the Marlins won’t be leaving Miami anytime soon though it would be appropriate if the city did renounce them. What an odd franchise overall: they were an expansion team that started play in 1993 presumably to take advantage of the growing city (the 8th largest metropolitan area in the United States) and its Latin American population (in recent years, 27-28% of baseball players were Latino), they have won two World Series titles (1997 and 2003, the year of Bartman), and held multiple fire sales.

Using famous diagrams to explore the changes in urban planning

Posted on by

The San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association has put together a new exhibit that provides an overview of urban planning. See 10 of the diagrams and short descriptions here. Also, here is a quick overview of the exhibit:

The exhibition’s title – Grand Reductions – suggests the simple illustration’s power to encapsulate complex ideas. And for that reason the medium has always been suited to the city, an intricate organism that has been re-imagined (with satellite towns! in rural grids! in megaregions!) by generations of architects, planners and idealists. In the urban context, diagrams can be powerful precisely because they make weighty questions of land use and design digestible in a single sweep of the eye. But as Le Corbusier’s plan illustrates, they can also seductively oversimplify the problems of cities. These 10 diagrams have been tremendously influential – not always for the good.

“The diagram can cut both ways: It can either be a distillation in the best sense of really taking a very complex set of issues and providing us with a very elegant communication of the solution,” Grant says. “Or it can artificially simplify something that actually needs to be complex.”

Over the years, some of these drawings have perhaps been taken too literally, while others likely lie behind some of your favorite spots in your city. “Even if you don’t know the diagram,” Grant says, “you might know the places that the diagram inspired.” SPUR shared these images from the exhibition, which opened this week. If you happen to live in San Francisco, you can also visit the show in person at the SPUR Urban Center Gallery (654 Mission Street) through February (oh, and it’s free!).

Three things strike me when looking at these influential diagrams:

1. On one hand, these diagrams are very similar to maps. On the other hand, they involve a particular vision that can sometimes be hard to achieve with a two dimensional image. These diagrams provide particular perspectives but they go beyond just being maps because the creators (and perhaps some of the viewers) can see a bigger picture.

2. They indicate a more scientific or rational approach to putting together cities. Particularly in the last century, urban planning has become a professional field that involves theories along with specific training and methods. These diagrams involve a lot of straight lines, overhead views, and the idea that the proper placement of buildings, streets, and other features can lead to the right outcomes.

3. These diagrams are quite artistic. Do they qualify as art?

How much does a 21st century city, like San Diego, need a catchy slogan?

Posted on by

A sociologist argues San Diego needs a new slogan for the 21st century:

“San Diego: First City of the 21st Century.”…

Industrial sociologist Walshok, whose book on San Diego as a center of innovation in science, technology and other sectors is due out next year from Stanford University, said this area has a public relations problem — no catchy “narrative” that sells.

“L.A. has the movies, San Francisco has the Gold Rush,” she said. “But I think our capacity to innovate and reinvent is our DNA. That’s what the community has been able to do in the 21st century. It isn’t a process that just happens in the lab. It’s in the ecology of the people, the neighborhoods, the diverse talent … ”

Walshok’s moniker recalls former Mayor Susan Golding’s formulation of a slogan coined in the 1990s, “San Diego: The First Great City of the 21st Century.”

While I get the idea behind the slogan, I’m not sure it really captures the idea of innovation and reinvention.

Looking beyond San Diego, is a slogan necessary for a 21st century city? Does it really encourage business growth from outsiders who see and like the slogan or is it more about people in a community developing a unifying theme that helps bring them together? I suspect it is more of the second. Slogans could help a city establish its own character and this is not unimportant. It might indicate that the local business community has banded together for booster purposes. It could reflect history and aspirations while also highlighting a strength that sets the city apart from other cities. Of course, slogans can be used for marketing purposes but it takes some time and sustained pressure for the concepts to sink in.

Here is a quick summary of a 2005 survey about city nicknames:

In 2005 the consultancy Tagline Guru conducted a small survey of professionals in the fields of branding, marketing, and advertising aimed at identifying the “best” U.S. city slogans and nicknames. Participants were asked to evaluate about 800 nicknames and 400 slogans, considering several criteria in their assessments. The assigned criteria were: whether the nickname or slogan expresses the “brand character, affinity, style, and personality” of the city, whether it “tells a story in a clever, fun, and memorable way,” uniqueness and originality, and whether it “inspires you to visit there, live there, or learn more.”

The top-ranked nickname in the survey was New York City’s “The Big Apple,” followed by “Sin City” (Las Vegas), “The Big Easy” (New Orleans), “Motor City” (Detroit), and “The Windy City” (Chicago). In addition to the number-two nickname, Las Vegas had the top-rated slogan: “What Happens Here, Stays Here.” The second- through fifth-place slogans were “So Very Virginia” (Charlottesville, Virginia), “Always Turned On” (Atlantic City, New Jersey), “Cleveland Rocks!” (Cleveland, Ohio), and “The Sweetest Place on Earth” (Hershey, Pennsylvania).

Outside of Las Vegas, aren’t the more informal nicknames on this list a lot more prominent than the official slogans?

Building more resilient cities

Posted on by

Constructing cities and social and political institutions that are resilient in response to disasters, like Hurricane Sandy, is not an easy task:

An article from The New York Times this past September explored New York City’s vulnerability from flooding, casting an eerie hindsight over this week’s storm. Dr. Klaus H. Jacob, a research scientist at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and an adviser to the city on climate change (also author of this predictive study), told the Times that subway tunnels would have flooded during Hurricane Irene had the storm surge been one foot higher. “We’ve been extremely lucky,” he told the paper. “I’m disappointed that the political process hasn’t recognized that we’re playing Russian roulette.” Today, repairs and service restoration are only just beginning in New York’s flooded subway system.

The opportunity is to rethink infrastructure in terms of resilience, and not just rebuild it as it was (as this post in Scientific American points out). As University of Toronto professor Christopher Kennedy points out in his important book on The Evolution of Great World Cities, the definition of infrastructure goes far beyond roads, airports, tunnels, rail systems, subways and bridges and includes the rules, code and norms which govern how cities are built. His research points out that London’s rise to global commercial dominance in the 17th century was fueled by its response to the catastrophic fires of 1666. These led to sweeping changes in the city’s building codes and widening of its streets, which in turn led to increased densities, the adoption of new building technologies, and ultimately remade the city in ways that put it on a new growth trajectory.
The roadblock to building resilient cities, quite simply, has less to do with science and more to do with institutions and politics, as Steve Nash pointed out a couple of years ago in The New Republic.

For one thing, the politics of sea-level rise are still hazy—no one seems to agree on whether it’s a local, state, or federal responsibility. And Congress is not doing much to resolve these issues. The climate bill that passed the House last year merely calls for more research, even though more blue-ribbon panels seem superfluous at this point. “Do you need cost-benefit analysis to know that you’re going to protect Manhattan?” asks [Jim Titus of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency]. “That you’re not going to allow the Jefferson Memorial to go underwater? That Miami is going to continue to exist?” Those aren’t trick questions. But, for now, they’re going unanswered.

In other words, it isn’t just about rebuilding the same thing over and over again. Cities, and countries, need to develop plans by which the new construction is better suited to possible future disasters. The response to massive fires is cited above (and it reminds me of the changes in building after the Chicago Fire in 1871) but this has also occurred in response to earthquakes by setting codes so that buildings are better suited to face future threats. And being able to develop forward-thinking plans requires more flexible institutions that can respond to whatever changes come along. What worked in the past won’t necessarily work in the future so only changing after a major event or disaster is not a good thing. At the same time, such major events also may allow for a more sweeping reaction and change to take place in cities.