Tag Archives: cities

Applying evolutionary biology to the city

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Biologist David Sloan Wilson has taken an interest in better understanding Binghamtom, New York. His lens: evolutionary biology.

Differences in prosociality, Wilson thought, should produce measurable outcomes — if not in reproductive success, perhaps in happiness, crime rates, neighbourhood tidiness or even the degree of community feeling expressed in the density of holiday decorations. “I really wanted to see a map of altruism,” he says. “I saw it in my mind.” And with a frisson of excitement, he realized that his models and experiments offered clues about how to intervene, how to structure real-world groups to favour prosociality. “Now is the implementation phase.” Evolutionary theory, Wilson decided, will improve life in Binghamton…

Binghamton is hard to love. Established in the early nineteenth century, it has long relied on big industry for its identity and prosperity — early on through the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company and then through IBM, which was founded in the area. But the manufacturers mostly decamped in the 1990s, and since then the city has taken on an aimless, shabby air. Dollar stores and coin-operated laundries fill the gaps between dilapidated Victorian houses and massive brick-and-stone churches. A Gallup poll in March 2011 listed Binghamton as one of the five US cities least liked by its residents. “It is a town that knows it is badly in need of a revival,” says Wilson. Even its motto, ‘Restoring the pride’, speaks of a city clinging to its past and ashamed of its present…

So Wilson decided to see whether he could raise up the prosocial valleys by creating conditions in which cooperation becomes a winning strategy — in effect, hacking the process of cultural evolution. He set about this largely by instituting friendly competitions between groups. His first idea was a park-design project, in which neighbourhoods were invited to compete for park-improvement funds by creating the best plan.

But Wilson soon found out that field experiments in real cities can take on lives of their own: different neighbourhoods couldn’t get their acts together on the same schedule, so the competition aspect largely disappeared. Instead, he is now working on turning multiple park ideas into reality. The dog park is one. Another is Sunflower Park, the most advanced project to date, but still a sad, mainly empty lot surrounded by a chain-link fence. Children don’t spend a lot of time playing here. Undaunted, Wilson is raising funds and laying plans for a relaxing community space flush with trees and amenities. “In a year,” he says, “we will serve you a hot dog from the pavilion.”

The rest of the article describes how Wilson acts more like a social scientist, taking surveys, making observations, interacting with residents, trying to understand local religious congregations. Some of this discussion is amusing as it rehashes debates about how close researchers should get to research subjects – social scientists would describe it as participant observation.

This reminds me of some of the work of early sociologists such as Herbert Spencer and the Chicago School who based at least some of their ideas on biological principles. Spencer viewed society as being like an organism and the Chicago School viewed competition for space as a primary driver of urban development and action. But evolutionary thinking has generally faded away in sociology (outside of sociobiology). Could sociologists, and urban sociologists, again view evolutionary principles as a boon for the field or simply a distraction from the better work that is going on in the field? Wilson is also interested in the topics of altruism and prosociality, topics that have attracted the attention of more sociologists in recent years. It would be interesting to hear what happens when Wilson comes to some conclusions about social and city life and then presents them to social scientists.

Replicating New York’s High Line

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New York City’s High Line, a park created out of old elevated railroad structures, has proven quite popular with visitors and with urban commentators. But can it be replicated in other places?

This week the second section of New York’s iconic High Line park opened with almost as much fanfare as the first section got when it opened in June 2009 and drew 2 million visitors in its first 10 months.

What makes the High Line so unique as an urban park is that it rises 30 feet above the street on a 1930s elevated freight line that was slated for destruction after the last train ran on it in 1980. Only the action of neighborhood community groups, committed to preservation of what they regarded as a local landmark, saved the High Line.

High Line concepts are being considered for other cities across the country. And well they should. For the message the High Line sends is: Treat your urban ruins carefully. They may be more valuable than you think.

The difficulty with trying to apply the High Line concept to other cities, as the architectural historian Witold Rybczynski recently observed, is that few cities have New York’s density. The High Line could not, for example, work in an old, industrial area people avoid, or in a neighborhood in which it towered over one- and two-story homes.

The density argument is that this works because there is a large nearby population. Visitors from elsewhere, other neighborhoods of the city or suburbanites or tourists, can also come but the park is sustained by daily visits from nearby residents. Urban amenities from parks to museums to public spaces need a steady population of visitors just to survive, let alone thrive. Just because they are unique or interesting is not a guarantee that visitors will come.

But there is another angle to this as well. In the case of the High Line, we need to hear more about how the neighborhood and the city help make this possible: what is it about this particular social setting that creates an environment where this park can succeed? Witold Rybcynzski makes this argument:

The High Line may be a landscaping project, but a good part of its success is due to its architectural setting, which, like the 12th Arrondissement, is crowded with interesting old and new buildings. The park courses through the meatpacking district and Chelsea, heavily populated, high-energy residential neighborhoods. Very few American cities — and Manhattan is the densest urban area in the country — can offer the same combination of history and density.

Rybcynzski concludes by suggesting that this idea will end up becoming another “failed urban design strateg[y].”

So other cities could move in a couple of directions after this:

1. Try to build their own “High Line” anyway. Since this has gotten so much popular attention, someone is bound to try it. (Outside of Chicago, how many cities have existing elevated railroad structures?)

2. Look to develop their own unique repurposed structure(s). This would likely take different forms in different places but has the advantage of working with existing structures and the existing character of the community.

There must be other cities that have done something like this but how many of them are public spaces? I was thinking of several repurposed museum spaces, like the Tate Modern in London which was a former power station and the Museum of Science and Industry which dates back to the 1893 Columbian Exposition, but these require admission.

The financial benefits of not living in sprawl

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Richard Florida argues “The neighborhood you live in can have a huge effect on your ability to spend or save, do the kind of things you really want to, and navigate the ongoing economic crisis.” Cars are indicted here as they require large sums of money to maintain and operate.

Based on this data, Florida argues that we need to rethink what we promote:

There remain some pundits and politicians who continue to believe that we need to get housing back to its former levels. But that won’t work this time. The old Fordist housing-auto-energy economic model which helped bring on the crisis in the first place has reached its sell-by date. Our continued commitment to (and massive subsidizing of) it will only further erode the financial situation of middle-class and working families and hold back the recovery.

It’s becoming increasingly apparent that the typical tools of monetary and fiscal policy are proving insufficient to sustain the recovery. Our future prosperity requires that we to begin to shift precious resources from houses, cars and energy toward investments in new skills, technologies, and industries that can generate higher paying jobs and improve overall living standards.  And that in turn requires a new geography built around denser (more innovative and productive), more walkable, transit-oriented (more efficient) communities.

If American families and policy-makers don’t see being green or sustainable as reason enough to change the way we live, perhaps seeing the very tangible financial rewards that accrue to those who do will help them change their minds. As the poet wrote, “You must change your life.” The numbers speak for themselves.

In addition to being more green, Florida is making the pragmatic argument that denser, more walkable communities actually help improve the financial situations of residents.

This may be compelling evidence – Americans can be persuaded by financial incentives – but I still think it is an uphill climb against an American culture that prize cars, driving, and the freedom that it represents. Changing this mindset is difficult even with at least 38 years of evidence that gasoline will not always be cheap or plentiful, evidence that suggests long commutes harm relationships, and research showing people aren’t necessarily happy in the suburbs. People are willing to trade a lot for the vision of the dream of the single-family home in the suburbs.

What would help is an alternative, positive vision that would celebrate denser neighborhoods and more urban life. Rather than simply attack the suburbs, sprawl, and McMansions, how about images of more urban life that can combine the best of both city and suburban life? The narratives regarding denser lives tend to be about chaos and a lack of control – think of the recent stories of “flash mobs” and “wilding” in Chicago. This could change with younger generations as they grow up with different aspirations and values. As Florida has argued, younger people are attracted by more exciting urban areas and they have the potential to change social patterns as well as promote new types of policies. But this vision needs to include family life, not just 20-something or single life, in denser areas.

Chicago area businesses looking to move from suburban campuses

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The suburbanization boom after World War II was not just about the movement of residences to the suburbs: it included a large migration of jobs and business headquarters to suburban locations, often large “campuses.” Crain’s Chicago Business suggests this trend may now be going in reverse as Chicago area business look to leave these suburban campuses:

Fleeing urban decay, companies like Motorola Inc., Allstate Corp. and Sears Roebuck & Co. built fortress-like complexes on the fringes of metropolitan Chicago. Jobs and residential development followed, fueling sprawl and congestion across the region.

Today, Sears Holdings Corp. and AT&T Inc. are looking to escape their compounds in northwest suburban Hoffman Estates. A shrunken Motorola has space to let in Schaumburg. Sara Lee Corp. eyes downtown office space after less than a decade in Downers Grove. Companies from Groupon Inc. to GE Capital hire thousands in Chicago while their suburban counterparts shed workers.

All reflect changes in the corporate mindset that spawned the campuses dotting outer suburbia. Empire-building CEOs from the 1970s through the 1990s craved not only cheap real estate but total control of their environments. They created self-contained corporate villages that cut off employees from outside influences.

As the 21st century enters its second decade, many companies are discovering the drawbacks of the isolation they sought. Hard-to-get-to headquarters limit the talent pool a company can draw on and feed a “not-invented-here” insularity that ignores major shifts in industries and markets.

This article suggests more corporations seek the opportunities that cities provide. Chicago certainly has opportunities – it was #6 in Foreign Policy’s 2010 global cities index. I wonder how much of this is driven by different factors:

1. Young people (college graduates, recent graduates) living in the city. We have some evidence that younger generations want denser environments and cultural opportunities. This would seem to go along with Richard Florida’s “creative class” idea that people and businesses move to exciting, innovative, culturally hip places.

1a. As a corollary, suburban places are no longer hip. These campuses are now decades old and involve stodgy suburbanites driving to stodgy workplaces. This is kind of interesting because the technology that would make instant connections possible may still not be enough to keep companies from relocating to the city.

2. Is there a particular business or city that has spurred this new thinking? If this has been shown to “work” elsewhere, it wouldn’t then be too surprising if other businesses followed suit.

3. Some have suggested that some businesses originally moved to the suburbs because their CEOs had already made the move and wanted their workplace to be closer to their homes. Could it be that CEOs and other important people in these corporations are now living in the city?

4. Tax breaks. This has been in the Chicago news recently with several companies, including Motorola and Sears, threatening to leave if they don’t get a better deal. Do these businesses get better incentives from the city of Chicago? Can increased tax breaks keep these campuses in the suburbs?

TED curator on moving away from McMansions to better-designed cities

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TED Curator Chris Anderson recently spoke at Harvard and envisioned a bright human future in cities rather than McMansions:

Designers have the answers to “the most important question we all face,” TED curator Chris Anderson told imminent Graduate School of Design graduates on Wednesday. “Can the coming world of 10 billion people survive and flourish without consuming itself in the process?” The key lies in finding “better ways to pattern our lives,” he added: “There is nothing written into our nature that says that the only path to a wonderful, rich, meaningful life is to own two cars and a McMansion in the suburbs.”…

Much of a successful future lies in “re-imaging what a city can be,” Anderson said. People will live closer together—“if only to give the rest of nature a chance,” and cities already offer “richer culture, a greater sense of community, a far lower carbon footprint per person—and the collision of ideas that nurtures innovation.” But architects have the means to incorporate “light, plant, trees, water, and beautiful forms into the city’s structures and landscapes” and imagine new ways for people to work and connect “without sacrificing your grandchildren.”

Technological trends in computer-assisted programs and construction techniques and materials, he said, make design more adaptable and effective than ever in terms of large-scale projects that affect millions of lives. “Suddenly the fractals and curves of Mother Nature are a legitimate part of the architectural lexicon.” Moreover, cultural and intellectual notions around common human values are changing. “The toxic belief that human nature and aesthetic values are infinitely malleable, and determined purely by cultural norms” is dying, Anderson asserted. In its place, there is growing agreement that “we should think of humans differently, that far from living in separate cultural bubbles, we actually share millions of years of evolutionary biology.”

Anderson is right about the powerful cultural narrative of the American dream of a single-family home in the suburbs: it is a narrative that could change in the future. McMansions and suburbs seem to operate here as the antithesis of Anderson’s vision: sprawling, mass produced places that separate people into different “cultural bubbles.” This story suggests that Anderson thinks designers can offer an alternative that would change how Americans think about the city. Besides participating in TED, how exactly would designers make this pitch to the broader culture?

I wonder what exactly Anderson’s cities might look like and what cities (or city neighborhoods/areas) might serve as models.

Increasing numbers of blacks moving to the suburbs

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One of the important shifts revealed in the 2010 Census is the increasing number of minorities in the American suburbs (also see the thoughts of the 2010 Census director here). This is particularly true of blacks who have moved from the city to the suburbs and this raises some concerns about the future of the neighborhoods they are leaving behind:

Taylor’s decision to live outside Chicago makes him part of a shift tracked by the 2010 Census that surprised many demographers and urban planners: He is among hundreds of thousands of blacks who moved away from cities with long histories as centers of African-American life, including Chicago, Oakland, Washington, New Orleans and Detroit…

Chicago’s population fell by 200,418 from 2000 to 2010, and blacks accounted for almost 89% of that drop. Hispanics surpassed blacks as the city’s largest minority group. Meanwhile, Plainfield grew by 204% overall, and its black population soared by more than 2,000%, the fastest rate in the region…

The trend has broad policy implications: As blacks who can afford to live in the suburbs depart, will cities have enough resources to help the low-income blacks left behind? Will the demand for housing be strong enough to support the revitalization of traditionally black inner-city neighborhoods? How will black churches, businesses and cultural institutions be affected? Will traffic congestion worsen because blacks moving to the suburbs keep their jobs in the city?

Roderick Harrison, a sociologist at Howard University in Washington and a former chief of the racial statistics branch of the Census Bureau, says the changes reflect the improving economic status of some African Americans.

Traffic seems to be a lesser issue compared to some of these bigger questions. And these questions are not new: at least since the 1980s, commentators have been asking about what may happen to urban neighborhoods and institutions when middle-class Blacks leave for the suburbs.

We could also ask about how this might change the suburbs. Are we at the point as a society where suburban residents really just care about social class, i.e. being able to buy into the suburbs and maintain a middle-class lifestyle? Or will whites leave suburban neighborhoods when Blacks move in just as they did in urban neighborhoods in the 1950s and 1960s? I wrote earlier about how minorities were fitting into Schaumburg, a noted edge city outside of the Chicago, and a noted historian, Thomas Sugrue, suggested that the move of Blacks to the suburbs in the Detroit region may not be all that positive. I suspect there will be a lot of discussions in suburbs about these changes, often couched in terms of issues like affordable housing (see this example from the wealthy Chicago suburb of Winnetka), property values, and the quality of schools.

It is interesting to note that Plainfield is cited in this particular story: Joliet, Plainfield, Aurora, and the suburban region far southwest of Chicago is a booming area. And if you were curious about the African-American growth in Plainfield, it was 0.8% Black in 2000 (110 out of 13,038) and is roughly 6% Black in 2010 (out of 39,581).

Decentralization as a reason why LA just doesn’t care as much about the results of their sports teams

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In an article that throws out a number of reasons why Los Angeles doesn’t seem to be as disappointed as other places when their sports teams don’t do well, a sociologist cites the factor of decentralization:

Sports fans in L.A. are more likely than those in other cities to come from somewhere else, bringing their old loyalties with them, diluting our civic passion.

“L.A. is very diversified and decentralized,” said David Halle, a UCLA sociologist who studies big-city culture. “That’s part of the whole zeitgeist.”

It’s different in, say, Boston, where books are written about how entrenched New England families pass the Red Sox and Celtics down through generations.

It is intriguing that decentralization is cited as a reason for lower levels of sports loyalty. The Los Angeles region is well-known for its sprawling landscape with a number of residential and economic nodes. Does this mean that there is a less cohesive civic feeling, using sports loyalty as a proxy for this, in Los Angeles compared to other places? Is this true of all places with pronounced sprawl?

There is an image (and rightfully so) of Los Angeles as the place where millions of Americans went to in the mid 20th century for the climate, the stars, and above all, economic opportunities. So is this the case in other American cities that have had a large influx of people, particularly other cities in the South and West that have grown in the last 60 years? Does Atlanta or Charlotte or Houston have similar lower levels of sports loyalties? I assume this might be the case in Florida and Arizona with a large number of retirees. But over time, wouldn’t there be a base of native Los Angeles residents who are loyal to local teams?

The state of public transit in the 100 largest American cities

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The Brookings Institution just released a new report, Missed Opportunity: Transit and Jobs in Metropolitan America, examining the mass transit systems in the 100 largest American cities. Here are some of the findings:

Nearly 70 percent of large metropolitan residents live in neighborhoods with access to transit service of some kind…

The typical metropolitan resident can reach about 30 percent of jobs in their metropolitan area via transit in 90 minutes…

About one-quarter of jobs in low- and middle-skill industries are accessible via transit within 90 minutes for the typical metropolitan commuter, compared to one-third of jobs in high-skill industries…

Fifteen of the 20 metro areas that rank highest on a combined score of transit coverage and job access are in the West…

With the primary focus of the report on jobs, there is a lot of interesting data. Here are a few things I noticed in going through the full report:

-Page 3 highlights three trends for metropolitan areas: “metro growth and expansion” with both city and suburban growth during the 2000s, “employment decentralization” (with a figure that only roughly 20% of metropolitan jobs are within 3 miles of the city center), and the “suburbanization of poverty.”

-Page 4 notes some of the problems of mass transit in today’s metropolitan regions: “old hub and spokes” which don’t work as well since “39 percent of work trips are entirely suburban” (a problem in the Chicago region, hence the need for the Star Line), “serving low-density areas” (a problem in many suburban areas and a recurring problem in the western suburbs of Chicago such as Naperville), and “spatial mismatch and the costs of transportation” (the idea that the people who work in certain jobs/industries don’t necessarily live near these jobs).

-Page 13 has an explanation for why they chose a 90-minute one-way commuting threshold in the study. If you change the threshold, the percent of jobs available changes quite a bit: “[A]cross all metro areas, the typical worker can reach about 30 percent of total metropolitan jobs in 90 minutes. At a 60-minute commute threshold, only 13 percent of jobs are accessible for the typical worker. For a 45-minute commute, the share drops to 7 percent.” This seems to be quite a high threshold but as they note, more than half of metropolitan commutes are longer than 45 minutes (according to 2008 American Community Survey data).

-Page 18 has a graph comparing the availability of high/medium/low skill jobs within 90 minutes by city or suburban setting. Interestingly, a higher percentage of jobs accessible from the city were high-skill while a higher percentage of accessible suburban jobs were low-skill.

-Pages 20-21 look at some of the differences between the West, with the most accessible mass transit and higher percentage of accessible jobs, and the South, the region at the other end of the spectrum. The findings about the South are not too surprising as it is known for sprawl but the finding that the West dominates the list of cities (15 of the top 20) is interesting. Does this suggest that these Western cities have made much more concerted efforts to provide mass transit?

If you look at the more specific data for the Chicago region, it appears to be fairly average compared to the other 100 metro areas.

Men’s Health on the isolation of suburbia

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One can find commentary about suburbs almost anywhere, including at a Men’s Health blog. Here are their thoughts about the isolation of suburbia:

Researchers note that urbanites find liveliness, other people, and diversity more satisfying than those in the suburbs do. Suburbanites seem to find more satisfaction in economic status…

In the process, we replaced urban “stoop culture” with isolation. “Immigrants and other urbanites used to have casual interactions on a daily basis,” she says. “But once people started moving to the suburbs, they lost that sense of spontaneous social interaction.”

Sure, suburbanites technically could have walked the distance to their neighbor’s house. But the focus was more on individual households—partly due to the decline of the extended family. “Moving to the suburbs also meant moving away from your extended family into single family households,” Park explains.

This made our individual—fenced in—households the focus of our lives. Not just that—our new neighbors had different backgrounds and we had less in common with them, meaning forming new relationships took even more effort. (Fortunately, we finally had the TV to turn to instead!)…

The problem isn’t really suburbia itself; it’s isolation, which can affect anyone. (Fess up, city dwellers. Do you really even know who lives next door?)

On one hand, this post trades in some common images of suburbia: isolated homeowners who really live in “Disturbia, USA” (in the headline) and a thesis that asks “what’s wrong with the modern suburb?.” On the other hand, this issue of isolation is a commonly-cited problem in American life today. Interestingly, the last part of the post I cited above suggests the problem of isolation is found in both cities and suburbs. So is the problem really suburbia or is suburbia simply a symptom of larger issues of individualism and status-seeking within American culture?

Quick Review: The Cosmopolitan Canopy

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While I have already written some about Elijah Anderson’s new book The Cosmopolitan Canopy (here and here), I had a chance to read the book for myself and I have a few thoughts.

1. The book is supposedly about the public spaces in Philadelphia (and other big cities) where people of different races and social classes can mingle and interact without the difficulties that race and social class can often impose. Interestingly, this isn’t really the focus of the whole book (more on this shortly). But in this section, I thought some of the analysis was thin. It is clear that Anderson has spent a lot of time in some of these spaces, such as the Reading Terminal Market. I don’t doubt his observations but others have written before about public spaces and how they operate.

1a. Thinking about this, I would enjoy seeing some work on this in suburban settings. Since this is where most Americans now live, how do public spaces in the suburbs operate?

2. The strongest part of the book, in my opinion, was the latter half when Anderson focuses more on the experiences of black males in these canopies and elsewhere. Here, Anderson provides a lot of insight into how race still is a master status, even within high-powered workplaces. His examples are interesting, including settings like law firms and upper-end restaurants, and he has some insights into how race still has a profound impact on everyday interaction. This section reminded me of Anderson’s extended story of John Turner in Code of the Street where the ethnographic data really tells us about the current state of American race.

2a. It would also be interesting to get the stories of the whites involved in these examples.

3. The emphasis of the book is Philadelphia but I would have enjoyed reading about the flavor of this particular city opposed to other large cities. Would cosmopolitan canopies work the same in other places? Does the interaction depend on the mix of groups and races? What happens in newer large cities where there may be fewer public spaces and established neighborhoods? Are spaces like Rittenhouse Square or The Gallery unique or similar to other spaces?

On the whole, I think Anderson contributes to our knowledge by exploring how race still matters in American lives today. The part about cosmopolitan canopies is intriguing but could be better developed.