urbanism

Last week's Economist contains a provocative discussion of The Big Sort. Why The Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart. I've long been interested in the phenomenon of demographic clustering. See for example, the essay that I co-wrote with Anne Friedberg for the Networked Publics book. According to this model, mobility is leading individuals to cluster in communities of other like-minded individuals. In Bill Bishop's book, and the Economist article, the concern is with the consequences of such clustering for politics. Americans increasingly don't talk to people with political views unlike themselves. Instead, we live in liberal urban environments or conservative exurbs or whatever community turns us on. I don't suspect Europe is going to do much better. The EU has changed dramatically in the last two decades and, with the freedom of mobility that Europeans enjoy, old ties like language and family are going to dissipate over time, in favor of a similar clustered world.

The consequences for politics are relatively clear, if distrubing, but this "big sort" also has consequences for urbanism since politics is such a huge part of thinking about cities. So when we think of dredging up Jane Jacobs yet again for models of thinking about the city, let's remember the ideological context and the larger complexities of such situations.

The May 29th issue of the Economist finally came today and it has one of the most intelligent articles about suburbs that I've read lately. It comes back to one of the key issues for my Network City project. Cities, as Lewis Wirth pointed out in his seminal article, Urbanism as a Way of Life, had traditionally been places of difference, places in which individuals from rural backgrounds were deterritorialized (to use Deleuzean terms) to become new, urban beings. But something strange has happened over the last two decades.

The Economist piece "An Age of Transformation" talks about how minorities, immigrants, and increasingly, gays and lesbians are leaving cities (one staggering statistic: at current rates of departure, there will not be a single African American in Los Angeles by 2050). As the global city becomes increasingly homogeneous, today's advocates of the creative city may seem as backwards to us as Corbusier did to Jane Jacobs. 

If the creative class is now the dominant target for advocates of urban growth who argue that it is the engine of future economic growth, where does that leave the avant-garde? I'm such a Hegelian, but doesn't this mean we're done with the avant-garde once and for all? 

I have always been deeply skeptical of the wireless cities idea. The business models of cities teaming with ISPs to give away free access to the Internet via city-wide wireless networks never made sense, the idea always seemed incompatible with the desires of law enforcement for tracking and surveillance, and the need to upgrade routers every couple of years seemed insurmountable (oh, you live in an 802.11b city…). Moreover, having lived in a dense urban area for a decade, I can attest to the difficulty of having wireless cross one floor of an apartment building, let alone an entire city block. Given current technology limitations, there is just too much interference in dense urban environments to make the wireless city a reality. The most naive ideas suggested that giving away wireless services in cities would somehow lead to economic booms. But urban boosters are given to such ideas (remember the Bilbao-effect?), so it's no great surprise. 

So now it's over, at least in the United States. Read this article at the New York Times. 

A couple of days ago, I mentioned that the New York Times expressed deep confusion that a real estate bubble had taken place. I wondered aloud why the Times didn't see the real estate bubble for what it was when, in contrast, the Economist had expressed concern years earlier? Is it that the Times hires reporters straight out of college or is there something more? Maybe it's that the population of Manhattan has always increased?*

Well, the answer came this week when I gave the students in my spring Network City course Harvey Molotch's seminal essay "The City as Growth Machine." Molotch's analysis is of the way that certain industries—primarily the finance and real estate industries—dominate urban politics with the intention of expanding their businesses. These interests promote a naturalized view of growth in which we are simply not to question that cities will always get bigger or that they should always get bigger.

But Molotch also points out that newspapers encourage the growth machine as a way of expanding their subscription base. Moreover, foreshadowing the argument of the rather naïve creative cities movement, arts organizations such as the symphony, opera, and art museums are also beholden to the model of the city as growth machine. I'll leave it to you to imagine where architects are in all this. 

So much for objectivity then. I suppose that we can forgive the Times for playing its structural role (not having a single urban base, the Economist would find little benefit in playing urban booster) if we really have to, but in rereading Molotch's essay (and it is available at that link above) it seems crucial to me to ask what the broader consequences of such allegiances are and what architects might do to be critical of them. Certainly not things like this (e.g. OMA in Dubai…note that Delirious New York was written at the lowest point in that table below). 

*Heavy sarcasm intended. Sure, Manhattan's population has gone up lately, but like most American cities, this is only a small uptick after a sustained decline. New York City has continually expanded. Not so for Manhattan.

See the following figures, borrowed form Wikipedia. note that Manhattan was 1/3 more populous in 1910! 

[image by glueckauf from Flickr]

Are there other versions of Quartzsite? Although I am frequently asked about it, the planned nature of Burning Man doesn't interest me. What does interest me is the 7km market in Odessa. 

In 1989 the Odessa city government expelled an impromptu flea market to a site some 7km outside of town. Since then the market has grown tremendously to over 170 acres in 2006 and does an estimated $20 million of business a day. 

See the New York Times for more. 

Over at the Atlantic Monthly, Christopher B. Leinberger suggests that suburbs are "the next slum." In his article for the March issue, he observes a massive oversupply in housing and suggests that Americans are moving, en masse, back to the city. The result, he concludes, is that the suburbs will be as eviscerated as cities were in the 1950s. 

Not so fast. Suburbs may have an oversupply of housing and older, inner ring suburbs are increasingly the first destination for immigrants, but cities have their own problems, not the least of which is a huge amount of purchasing by investors and global travelers who want an pied-à-terre in every major city.

See this harrowing article from the New York Times on life at the Plaza Hotel, recently converted to condos. In this scenario, reminiscent of Hollow City, the history of late 1990s San Francisco by Rebecca Solnit, cities become impossibly expensive playgrounds for a global élite with more ordinary individuals such as cooks, nurses, lawyers, dentists, doctors living on the periphery wearing T-shirts that say "Bring Back the Real NY."

The Winter 2008 issue of Log 11 is out.

I ran across this advertisement in the subway the other day. It brought to mind the last of Robert Sumrell’s three thesis proposals in 2001 and I was struck by how this project takes advantage of the existing conditions—bored passengers waiting for the train accessorized with ubiquitous white headphones—integrating media distribution to a particular place and time in the form of an ad.

What else can we leave out in the city?