atlas(t)

girlicious contestants' geography knowledge

i have to admit, dumb as it was, I watched The Pussycat Dolls Present Girlicious religiously.

Why that's a painful admission should be immediately apparent in this video.

It's not just the ignorance of young people who are mostly just out of high school and therefore should have those geography lessons they clearly never got still fresh in their minds. What bugs me the most about this is: these girls are invited onto this show, and held up as paragons of sexy girlhood, and given the ultimate prize of fame and minor-goddess status if they win. But their apparent lack of intelligence and educational achievement are considered not only fair game, but not at all an impediment to their being minor goddesses.

We can laugh at their ignorance without it at all impinging on our enjoyment of their ... er ... talents.

But then, if Hillary Clinton's campaign didn't make our society's overwhelming sexism clear, then how is anyone going to be able to see through this pretty blatant example?

more "squaw" renamings

we already knew this! It's in the title of the Monmonier book! Neverthelessons, here's a quote:

Moves to eliminate the term "squaw" from names of geographical sites are accelerating because of protests that the term is offensive.

The U.S. Board on Geographic Names has renamed 16 valleys, creeks and other sites so far this year. Pending proposals mean 2008 should see more changes than any year in a decade, the board says.

...

Valerie Fast Horse, a council member with the Coeur d'Alene Tribe of Idaho, Montana and Washington, says the usual translation of "squaw" is a profane term for female genitalia. It's so offensive in her tribe, she says, that members refer to it as "the 'S' word."

"They should translate the names into English and see how fast they get changed," she says.

That's what I'm sayin'. Of course, there's always some clown who doesn't get it:

"It irritated me," says Cody McDonald, a Judith Basin County commissioner. "When these things were named a hundred years ago, they didn't mean to offend anybody. … And it's a waste of time. Everybody's still going to call it 'Squaw Coulee.' "

Which is to say, he and his buddies are still gonna call it "Squaw Coulee," even after no one knows what "Squaw Coulee" is, just like that old lady in Berlin who gets into taxicabs and orders the drivers to take her to Adolf-Hitler-Platz.

And yeah, I'm sure the good ol' boys who named the peak "Squaw Tit" didn't mean to offend anybody, either.

Via Racialicious.

 

ice detention deaths

via Zuky, an interactive map showing 83 immigrant detainees whose deaths in detention might be due to neglect or abuse. Click here to engage with the interactive map and read the names.

jane jacobs on discrimination

the effective breaking down of residential discrimination outside a slum, and the less dramatic self-diversification within an unslumming slum, proceed concurrently. If America has now, in the case of Negroes, reached an effective halt in this process and in general entered a stage of arrested development -- a thought I find both highly improbable and quite intolerable -- then it may be that Negro slums cannot effectively unslum in the fashion demonstrated by slums formed by other ethnic populations and population mixtures. In this case, the damage to our cities might be the least of our worries; unslumming is a by-product of other kinds of vigor and other forms of economic and social change.

When an area has unslummed, it is easy to forget how bad it once was and how helpless both the area and its population were thought to be. ... As in the case of other slums, overcoming of discrimination outside the slum, and unslumming within the slum, must proceed concurrently. Neither can wait for the accomplishment of the other. Every relaxation of discrimination outside can help unslumming within. Progress in unslumming within helps outside. The two go together.

The inherent resources necessary for unslumming -- advancement and self-diversification in a population -- demonstrably exist among colored people, including the colored people who are in slums or who have passed through slums, as strikingly as these resources exist among white people. In a way the proved and obvious possession of these resources is more striking among the colored, because they emerge in spite of disproportionate obstacles against their emergence. Indeed, because of the very facts that colored populations advance, self-diversify, and have too much spirit to like ghettos, our inner cities have already lost far more of the Negro middle class than they can afford to lose.

I think inner cities will go on losing too much of the Negro middle class almost as fast as it forms until, in actual fact, the choice of remaining there no longer means, for a colored person, an implied acceptance of ghetto citizenship and status. In short, unslumming is at the very least directly -- as well as indirectly -- inhibited by discrimination.

        --- Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

nasa cyclone nargis flooding photos

nASA Earth Observatory images of Cyclone Nargis flooding Myanmar. Via Sepia Mutiny.

thoughts on jane jacobs two: atlantic yards

i posted nearly two years ago about an article by Brooklynite Jonathan Lethem protesting the planned development Atlantic Yards, which requires the clearing of existing residences using eminent domain. A court fifth amendment challenge to the developer was not upheld and building is underway.

At the time I couldn't figure out the rights and wrongs of the situation--although later that summer I visited my cousin who lives in Park Slope, and she told me that the same developer had created a less ambitious project in a nearby part of Brooklyn which had degraded the neighborhood and gotten no business, and ended up costing the city a great deal.

But after reading Death and Life I now have the framework to definitively hate Atlantic Yards.

Apparently, I'm not the only one who thought this way.

Karrie Jacobs (no relation) posted nearly two years ago in metropolismag.com about how her reading of Jacobs affected her view of the Atlantic Yards project. Her criticisms of the project based on Jacobs are as follows:

I don’t know whether Jacobs, circa 1959, would approve or disapprove of Ratner, circa 2006, but her take on the project would likely be a bit more nuanced than the simple declaration “too big.” In certain ways the Ratner plan, with its arena, density, and mixture of residential and office uses is influenced—albeit indirectly—by her thinking. The project’s substantial number of “affordable” housing units adds to its overall heterogeneity. On the other hand, a huge project by one developer and one architect cannot be diverse, and it’s possible that Jacobs would have reacted to Gehry’s irregular forms much as she reacted to Googie-style coffee shops: “virtual sameness trying, by dint of exhibitionism, to appear unique and different.”

The biggest drawback to Atlantic Yards, according to my reading of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is that it will be constructed atop a rail yard that currently separates the neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Prospect Heights. The new development is unlikely to knit together those two neighborhoods; instead, lacking the cross-streets that Jacobs thought were key to urban vitality, it will exacerbate the division, generating more of what she termed “border vacuums.”

But she goes on to point out, quite rationally, that

Admittedly I could be the one misreading Jacobs—cherry-picking her book for the ideas that support my own penchant for density, diversity, and complexity—but it’s clear from the book’s final chapter, “The Kind of Problem a City Is,” that she was arguing above all against reductive thinking.

... The mistake made by Jacobs’s detractors and acolytes alike is to regard her as a champion of stasis—to believe she was advocating the world’s cities be built as simulacra of the West Village circa 1960. Admirers and opponents have routinely taken her arguments for complexity and turned them into formulas. But the book I just read was an inspiration to move forward without losing sight that cities are powerful, dynamic, ever-changing entities made up of myriad gestures big and small.

I'll be visiting the area next week and intend to go check out the site. Stay tuned.

*****Update 5/3/08

Turns out, Karrie Jacobs has a blog and she just posted about Atlantic Yards recently. Plus, Saint JJ is all over her blog.

thoughts on jane jacobs one: the fountainhead

Photo via

jane Jacobs may be a genius, but I mistrust genius, especially where it relates to architecture and city planning ... probably because my sister sent me, without irony, a copy of The Fountainhead when I was a freshman in college (she a sophomore) and, although I threw it across the room every fifty pages or so, I felt that I had to finish it, and therefore read all the way through the part where Roark 'sploded up a housing project because they changed the pipes or something and then justified it on account of his genius, even though he was a rapist. Jane Jacobs gives me a whole new set of ammo against Howard Roark that I never thought I'd get--or need--namely the simple fact that housing projects are bad, and for that, I forgive her her genius.

Jane Jacobs is, in fact, the anti-Howard Roark: because she was real whereas Roark was fictional; because she stood for the collective using principles to guide minimal interference in community long-term, "natural" building and development processes that brought aesthetic diversity and diversity of use, while Roark was all about the monolithic, single-use project designed by an individual and forced upon a disempowered mass; because she was a woman and Roark, a man--a very important difference; because she was married, a parent, and lived in urban neighborhoods and Roark was perennially single, fatally paternalistic, and residentially nomadic, through urban, exurban, and privileged rural spaces.

I'm shocked that I remember this much about a book I threw across the room twenty years ago. Let this be the last time I ever write about Rand.

we paved paradise

i'm poking my head back in here for a moment (I'm still mostly over at atlas(t): The Galleon Trade Edition) to point out a terrific article in Salon by Katherine Mieskowski about the environmental effects of parking. It's called "We Paved Paradise."

In Tippecanoe County, Ind., there are 250,000 more parking spaces than registered cars and trucks. That means that if every driver left home at the same time and parked at the local mini-marts, grocery stores, churches and schools, there would still be a quarter of a million empty spaces.

... "Parking appears free because its cost is widely dispersed in slightly higher prices for everything else," explains Shoup. "Because we buy and use cars without thinking about the cost of parking, we congest traffic, waste fuel, and pollute the air more than we would if we each paid for our own parking. Everyone parks free at everyone else's expense, and we all enjoy our free parking, but our cars are choking our cities.

... The environmental impacts of all this parking go way beyond paving paradise. The impervious surfaces of parking lots accumulate pollutants ... from all kinds of diffuse sources, such as industry smokestacks, automobiles and even home gas water heaters.

"If they were naturally settling on a tree or grass, they would wash off those and into the soil, and the soil would hold them in place, so they wouldn't get into the local stream, lake or river," ... But when the same substances settle on parking lots, rain washes them into streams, lakes and rivers. Engel calculates that the Tippecanoe land used for parking creates 1,000 times the heavy-metal runoff that it would if used for agriculture. Because the surface of the lots doesn't absorb water, it also creates 25 times the water runoff that agricultural land would, which can increase erosion in local waterways.

Parking lots also contribute to the "urban heat island effect." The steel, concrete and blacktops of buildings, roads and parking lots absorb solar heat during the day, making urban areas typically 2 to 5 degrees hotter than the surrounding countryside. ... The urban heat island effect can be so dramatic that it changes the weather. One Indianapolis study found that thunderstorms that reach the city often split in two, going around it, and merging again into one storm after the urban area. "The urban heat island is not simply a temperature issue. It could affect our water availability," says Niyogi.

Check it out.

civil war maps

the above and other purty purty maps of the civil war (historical!) to be found at this website. Yay the digital archiving impulse!

Yes, I have nothing further to say.

history of religion

mapsofwar.com has done it again with this History of Religion animated map. It's oversimplified, but its main point for me is how long Christianity hasn't been a dominant religion anywhere but Europe. Actually, for much more of human history, Islam has been dominant. Think about that

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