atlas(t)

prop 8 map mashup

i've blogged about implicitly threatening map mashups before (somewhere ...), and here they come, back around. Once again, this one is about same sex marriage -- in this case, who donated money to the Proposition 8 campaign. Somebody has done a Google Maps mashup to locate the addresses of Prop 8 donors on a map. Of course, these addresses are always available to the public under sunshine laws, and anyone can go and plug them into Google Maps themselves -- one by one -- if they want to see it on a map.

But of course, no one is going to go that extra step. The mashup accomplishes two things, actually:

1. It is mildly, implicitly threatening. It goes the extra step, removes the extra layer, to make it possible to see instantly where all the donors live on a map. It takes away the slight inconvenience that would prevent most people from seeing these addresses on a map ... and maybe doing something about it. It's all the more threatening because there are so few donors in San Francisco (pull back on the map and you'll see a lot more dots in the East Bay and the Central Valley.) Someone could potentially do an action with every single one of these addresses.
2. It gives us a better demographic feel for who is supporting Prop 8 and why. You'll notice, of course, almost nothing in the hipster Mission or the gay district, The Castro. This is something that you really need to map out the addresses to be able to see. This is one of the virtues of mapping.

So one informative, and one mildly antidemocratic purpose.

While transparency in political donations is essential, and demographic information is useful, I don't see what purpose it serves to have the name and street address of individuals donating to a particular cause shown on a map, expect to intimidate them. Why not have an ambiguous dot, with no name-labeling, hovering over the blocks of their houses without pointing out the exact house? That will give you the virtue of demographic information without the intimidation factor. Because frankly, if I knew that pro-life groups had my location on a map showing people who had donated money to Planned Parenthood, and were broadcasting it to their crazy fire-bombing fringes on the internet, I might think twice about making that donation.

On the other hand, Prop 8 supporters trying to overturn the 1974 California donor sunshine Proposition 9, is not the right response. You don't throw the application out with the mashup. Just make public map mashups using donor or voter names illegal, or even just unethical, and this stuff will stop. People will still be able to get lists and look the names up one by one. Orgs will still be able to mashup maps and use them internally, especially for research. But this kind of public encouragement of ... whatever ... won't be possible anymore. And I think that's enough.

What do you think?
Via.

obama's hud agenda

Oops, I neglected to publish this a couple of weeks ago. Sorry! I'll follow up on this soon.

weird. Obama has dedicated this whole broadcast to building up HUD in the public mind. He even acknowledges -- vaguely -- HUD's bullshit "urban renewal" policies.

But then, right before he announces his selection of Sean Donovan as his new Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, he says this, which I can't help taking as a blueprint for not just his HUD policy, but his financial development policy: "promoting cities as the backbone of regional growth, by not only solving the problems in our cities, but seizing the opportunities in our growing suburbs, exurbs, and metropolitan areas."

Of course, I think the blueprint is just this part: "promoting cities as the backbone of regional growth," while the rest is a his sop to diversity.

Fascinating that Obama has taken a crisis that's understood as a financial crisis -- the mortgage crisis -- and started pushing instead an agenda that makes it an affordable housing crisis. I'll lay 50 to 1 this was on his agenda four years ago and he would have found a way to make it stick no matter what happened. Smart.

puppet street

the renaming in San Francisco of Bush Street to Obama Street this week has reminded folks of the inaugural prank in 2001, when folks renamed Bush Street "Puppet" Street.

You can see photos here.

And here's a video documenting the action:

Typical SF culture jamming, except with the collusion/blind eye of the police, who didn't care, or enjoyed it. Interesting that culture jamming that attacks government is fine, but culture jamming that attacks business interests is ... not.

not wall street, not main street

renaming Bush St. in San Francisco Tuesday.

Via.

alien land and freedom

just for the fun, let's juxtapose two stories this week about Asians coming to California and dealing with land ownership.

The backdrop is the California Alien Land Law of 1913, a law repealed in 1952, which prohibited people ineligible for American citizenship, primarily Asians, from owning land. This was part of a raft of racist laws aimed at controlling Asian immigration, including barring Asian laborers from entry, and restriction of commercial fishing licenses to citizens.

One of the long-term consequences of this series of laws, which began with the Naturalization Act of 1790, was that Asians, although a substantial presence in the US since the mid-19th century, remained permanent foreigners -- literally alienated from the land -- in the American imagination. So, jumping ahead a century or two, how's this gonna play with 1) a conflict between government and squatter farmers, and 2) Chinese real estate carpetbaggers?

The Hmong community of Fresno is the second largest Hmong settlement in the States. Earlier this fall a Hmong community garden created without permission 13 years ago on public land was threatened when the city decided to take back the land to build a police station.

There are 20 gardeners feeding around 300 people from this 4 acre plot. Over time the gardeners got grants and acknowledgment from organizations, with the approval of parks and recreation, but no formal permission. But then parks and recreation transferred the $750,000 parcel of land to the police, and the gardeners were supposed to be out by Nov 1.

The community looked to a new parks director to help them and at first he was enthusiastic.

He envisioned a cultural center, a park, carving the garden into smaller plots involving more people from all over the city, walkways, statues. It would be called the National Hmong Friendship Garden. The plans cost $2,500.

"He had plans drawn up. They were beautiful, expansive," says Edie Jessup, director of a hunger nutrition project with Metro Ministry. "We were all impressed. But then he said, 'By the way, it's up to you to raise the millions of dollars.' "

Of course, the garden was partly about growing food for a community that was "still struggl(ing) with poverty and food bills." City officials said the police department served the community as a whole, and that was that.

After protest and advocacy -- and the great article in the Fresno Bee I linked to above -- the city tried to arrange to move the police station to another site, but the plan was kiboshed when the city council tied on the vote. Now the garden has to move, although it hasn't yet.

Given the same state, and the same time frame, we have a much different second story: Curbed SF tipped me off to a new trend in China: organizing real estate trips to downturn-hobbled San Francisco, LA, and Vegas to buy up foreclosed homes.

As we have learned, the combination of rising housing prices in China and the appreciation of the Renminbi coupled with declining real estate prices in the US and the depreciation of the US dollar, has already become an impetus for Chinese investors to buy properties in the US. Besides, due to the continuous appreciation of the Renminbi, it is more cost effective to shop in the US. At the same time, the US sub-prime crisis has forced the prices of some of the mortgaged houses to drop, increasing the interest of some investors to go house hunting.

Apparently, half these folks

plan to buy houses when the US housing market is at its low level so that they can keep their children company when they study in the US. "My daughter started school in the US in August this year. I might as well buy a house if it is really cheap and I can visit her by the way," said ... one of the registered members.

Because of the decline of foreign students from the Islamic world due to post-9/11 immigration difficulties, 57% of foreign students currently in the United States are from Asia.

Okay. On the one hand, we've got a classic immigrant grit story superimposed on a group of refugees from a botched American war. They are traditionally agrarian, they're poor and dispossessed, they've squatted government land, and their welfare is not considered to coincide with broader community welfare. On the other hand, we have our greatest fear: an Asian superpower rising to meet us at a moment when our economy is faltering and our military superiority isn't doing us any good; citizens of that superpower are replacing us in our very own, white-picket-fenced dream homes, and not even living there but using them as edu-dachas!

The first is an age-old enclosure of the commons issue updated to post-Cold-War racialization, where the enclosing force is actually public ownership of a more institutional sort. The second is a new (or is it age-old?) situation: the US as exploited, exploitable land. This will be the first time since ... I don't know ... ever? ... that the US. has had foreign carpetbaggers coming in to take advantage of the mess we got ourselves into. And our family homes are now being colonized by the very people the US colonized in the mid-19th century. Does this make them Asian Americans, or are they going to be something else, something new?

Are these just the same old themes playing out yet again? Are we seeing new trends in immigration, land, ownership, conflict? Are there similarities in these two cases?

Discuss.

Crosspost.

race map of britain

a few days ago I was hanging out with a friend, a South Asian immigrant who grew up mostly in England but has lived in the States for a decade. She made an offhand reference to how much she hated England ... something I had never heard from her before, although we've been friends for about seven years.

I pressed on the point and she--shocked that she's never ranted to me yet--explained that, although (especially since 9/11) there's a lot of anti-South Asian prejudice in the States, it's nowhere near the level of daily hatred and harrassment a South Asian in the UK faces. Last time she was home, it took only 18 hours for her to get her first racial slur hurled from a car.

In the course of her rant, she mentioned a map that had greeted her on the front page of The Independent during one trip home. This was a race map that didn't show percentages of racial groups in England, but rather the chance that random pedestrians on the street would bump into someone of a different ethnicity. (facepalm/) Naturally, this led to a much more dramatically "colored" map than a simple population percentage map would have been.

Of course, I went looking for the map and it wasn't up at The Independent's site, but urban cartography had it in the archives. Here 'tis, above. And here's the explanation of the "method" used to produce such a highly colorized map.

Experts devised a "diversity index" based on the probability that any two people chosen at random from a particular area would be from different ethnic groups, even if neither of them are white. A score of 0.5 means there is more than 50 per cent chance of this happening -- and the area is classed as highly ethnically diverse.

Think about this for a minute. They're not going by absolute numbers, which is to say, how many people, or what percentage of people are what ethnicity. They're going by probability: what is the chance that people on the street will bump into someone of a different ethnicity. Depending on how they choose to do this (and they don't identify the "experts" doing it) they could be seriously inflating the impression of diversity--or danger--in these areas.

Additionally, they're talking about people meeting on the street. Is there any controlling for ethnic factors like the women of one community not going out as often as the women of another community? Or for the fact that a lot of these communities are concentrated in ethnic enclaves, so you wouldn't actually meet them on the street unless you went into their enclaves?

What this is, is an incendiary map intended to stoke racial suspicion. It's about the daily experience and perception of otherness. Think about the wording: what are your chances of meeting an outsider on the street! They're everywhere! On your streets! Look at how much chance you have of meeting an outsider on the street all over England! England is stained! Publicly stained!

Basically, they're counting on their readership not understanding the math, and especially how math and perception work together in sociological issues such as these.

Just an example of how maps can obscure and obfuscate as much as they illuminate.

obama's office of urban policy

political buzz, via members of his transition team, has it that Obama will fulfill his promise to create an Office of Urban Policy when he hits the presidency. Political Punch quotes one of his speeches:

"Yes, we need to fight poverty," he said. "Yes, we need to fight crime. Yes, we need to strengthen our cities. But we also need to stop seeing our cities as the problem and start seeing them as the solution. Because strong cities are the building blocks of strong regions, and strong regions are essential for a strong America."

Wow. Has someone been reading St. JJ?

Four Story breaks down Obama's election promises to The City.

• A focus on improving the liveability of cities;
• Increasing funds in metropolitan regions through better financial coordination and providing an urban green work sector;
• (and my personal favorite) A focus on the development and investment of affordable housing for everyone.

The only thing that would make our first trans-national and multiracial president more perfect would be a background in cartography.

obama video map

for those of you who haven't stumbled across this yet: Google has a gallery of election-related maps, including the one above of places Obama has made speeches where the speeches have been videotaped and put up on YouTube. Click on the location to see the video. Cool, huh?

There's also a map of red and blue states (click on each state to see the number of electoral votes), as they stand currently, and a historical map of red and blue states going back to 1980. Very interesting.

Oh, and please getcher ass out there and vote. And also, if you have time, make phone calls to swing states. Here's how. Or go here to sign up to visit a swing state.

mass transit in america

via Wikimedia Commons, this map of the Tokyo subway.

I have a t-shirt with this image on it, boughten from Urban Outfitters. Yes, as I've said before, mapfascination is zeitgeisty. I'm not even sure if I should bother writing a post about it.

This is an oblique lead-in to a brief post pointing you to a good article by Katharine Mieszkowski in Salon (does she ever write bad articles?) called "Who Says Americans Won't Ride Mass Transit?"

The thrust of the article is that gas prices are driving Americans back to mass transit, but governments are simultaneously cutting funding. So the new/old transit riders are not merely encountering the overcrowding that would result from an influx of new riders into existing schedules, but are actually joining at a time when lines and service are being cut.

It's a story being repeated across the country -- a story with a grim irony. California, under the Schwarzenegger administration, has embraced ambitious goals to fight global warming, pledging to bring greenhouse gas emissions down to 1990 levels by 2020. But you wouldn't know it from how the state is treating transit. Transportation is the No. 1 source of global warming pollution in the state, and it's the fastest-growing source, yet the state budget recently signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature raids $1.7 billion from transit funding.

"They're diverting the money from transit and keeping highways whole," says Tom Radulovich, a BART director and executive director of Livable City, a nonprofit group that promotes sustainable transportation. "There's been a big shift to transit as people are trying to avoid high gas prices. But we're taking billions of dollars away from transit, and investing billions in highways."

Mieszkowski calls the attitude of "'When you're allocating money for transit, nobody ever asks how crowded buses are'" a "persistent hangover of America's romance with the car." But I'd call it a date rape, not a romance. Naturally, I'm one of those misanthropic liberals who sees conspiracy everywhere, but it doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to recognize the persistence of the automobile industry's lobby against withdrawing money from public transit and putting it into highways at a time when any fool can see the writing on the wall. What else would you call a situation where the public is actually asking to put away their cars and ride the bus, and the government still won't step up?

Seriously? Vote for Obama.

global storm tracker on gustav

this is the global storm tracker just a minute or two ago, tracking Tropical Storm Hanna and Hurricane Gustav. You can see Gustav headed straight for New Orleans. Damn.

It seems they might be evacuating seriously this time. Maybe they learned their lesson. Maybe Bush needs to do something right so as not to completely kibosh McCain's chances. Or maybe it's all those high-powered Republicans who are in NOLA right now. Think that might be it?

I have a terrible feeling of sickness, dread, and disgust.