atlas(t)

A Tale of Two Koreatowns

there's a fight going on between LA's Koreans and Bangladeshis over district naming. In the area known (and mapped), but unofficially, as "Koreatown," the growing Bangladeshi community has asked for a portion in the center of Koreatown to be named, officially, "Little Bangladesh."

The proposal has angered longtime residents who have worked hard to promote the district as a Korean cultural destination and economic hub. City officials, meanwhile, worry that neither side is taking into account the full diversity of an area that is also home to many Latinos and Thai Americans, among others.

More than a name is at stake. Although largely symbolic, the recognition afforded by a special district designation can help establish a community within the cultural mosaic of Southern California, said Hamid Khan, executive director of the nonprofit South Asian Network. When noted on maps and street signs, it can also attract visitors and help local business.

I remember visiting Koreatown throughout the 90s, and all anyone ever said was that there were more Latinos than Koreans in Koreatown.

I think such district naming has less to do with who actually lives there, and more to do with recognizing a particular minority that is (supposedly) only found there. There are no efforts to name Koreatown anything Latino because all of LA is considered Latino.

Two things may be happening here: the first is that Koreans are no longer perceived as being restricted to Koreatown. Perhaps Korean businesses and residents have become so ubiquitous, that they're now perceived to be a universal LA minority, rather than one contained within their enclave. The second is that, in the past decade, Bangladeshis have become a substantial minority.

Although the 2000 census counted just 157 Bangladeshis in Koreatown, a survey conducted five years later by the South Asian Network and the UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research suggested a population of 6,000 to 8,000, Khan said. Since then, the Bangladeshi American community says that its numbers have swelled to more than 10,000.

I'm not commenting on what's right here, just on how demographics are changing. Used to be, immigrants of color took over enclaves from European immigrant groups; now they're taking them over from each other. So much for API solidarity.

In other news, the owner of my local cafe just informed me that I live in Koreatown, Oakland. I didn't know that. Turns out, a Korean business owners association voted to create a Koreatown Northgate Oakland Community Benefit Association in 2007, and have been active for the past half-year in doing stuff like getting the Koreatown designation for Telegraph between 20th and 35th approved, buying banners for the street, and starting a blog, which has, so far, only reported on a stolen trash can (but here's hoping.)

Sure there are a lot of Korean businesses and community centers in this area. But the area is still mostly black. And the Korean businesses aren't concentrated. Some of the best restaurants are above 35th, and there's a strip mall around 40th. Also, ground zero for the primarily white gallery center of Oakland's monthly Art Murmur event, is between Grand and 26th along Telegraph. So an argument could be made for this area being designated some sort of artist game preserve.

I don't really care what it's called, but I see the issues, is what I'm saying. I guess they need to designate someplace Koreatown -- if they need to do it at all -- but the area chosen seems somewhat random ... or maybe simply chosen so as not to step on toes. Get much above 40th and you're into the "Temescal" shopping district. They already have banners. Get much below Grand and you're into the new condos-and-entertainment district called "Uptown." They've already sunk a lot of money into bringing the downtown "Uptown" back ... money that's looking like thrown away since the subprime mortgage crisis.

I wonder if it will make a whit of difference, is what I'm wondering.

History of the Ordnance Survey

i'm genuinely uncertain of the purpose of the article, but the BBC News reported recently on a nonfiction prize given to a Brit research fellow for a book she's writing on the history of the UK's Ordnance Survey, the body that mapped the Isles. The article is actually the fellow's (Rachel Hewitt's) thoughts on the book and why she wrote it.

Founded in 1791, it was the product of a very different type of revolution: the French Revolution and its threat to English's south coast.

A military survey became essential, and the Ordnance Survey was born.

It was also a revolution in itself. The OS was the very first complete, accurate map of the British Isles conducted on a uniform scale. The story of its birth and progress is therefore a story of the history and identity of the United Kingdom and its landscape.

... British writers found themselves enamoured with Ordnance Survey maps from the start. William Wordsworth befriended the early surveyors; Jane Austen adored the sense of order that the maps gave to the nation in an otherwise disorderly, revolutionary period; and, more recently, Brian Friel has considered the OS's Irish map to encapsulate the brutal, imperial nature of England's rule.

I am writing a 'biography' of this iconic national institution.

Her whole article is weirdly fragmented and nonlinear, and it's hard to figure out why they asked her to publish the piece, rather than just interviewing her and writing a more coherent -- and cohesive -- article.

But I'm still interested in the book, and may request a review copy when it comes out next year.

Speaking of reviews, up next is a review of Experimental Geography as soon as I get some room in my schedule to breathe.

baby name wizard namemapper

i can't believe I haven't posted about this before.

One of my favorite sites is the Baby Name Wizard site, where you can find out neat stuff about American baby names. Yes, I know, it sounds boring, but it's really not. First of all, the site features the Namevoyager, a widget that contains the 1000 most popular baby names in the US of each year since 1880. You can type a name into the voyager and see the progress of the name's popularity over the past 130 years. (Yes, go there immediately and type in your name. It's a trip. Here's where I blogged about my name. Turns out I was named at the absolute nadir of my name's popularity.)

But the fun doesn't end there. Wizard Laura Wattenberg keeps a blog (she's written books on this stuff. She's an expert) in which she analyzes the current naming trends, comments on celebrity names (like Track and Trig), and talks about stuff like regional naming patterns. In fact, she's come up with a map of the naming regions of the United States. Look:

(Are you sure I haven't posted about this before, Google blog search?) You can get a partial explanation here, but I think the rest is in her book.

The blog is some of the best cultural analysis I've seen in the blogosphere -- and through a unique lens. She also has a baby name wiki on the site.

The site's latest nifty application is the Namemapper, where you can type in a name and see the states of the Union -- since 1960 -- where the name appeared in the top 1000. Basically, you can track the trek of the name through the country in popularity. The image at the top of this post is, of course, the Namemapper tracking the popularity of my name since 1960. Yeah, it blossomed in the "Midwestern Reserve" and the "Creative Fringe," and wandered from there. It's never quite made it to the "Spanish South" or the "Neotraditionals."

You don't have to have a baby to be interested in this stuff. Wattenberg's latest blog post analyzes red state and blue state names, which are the opposite of what you'd think: red state names are newly coined and daring; blue state names are traditional. Looking at a variety of data she tells us that this is because blue state parents are far more likely to be older, red staters to be younger. And she goes from there to point out that, while political opinions and values between red and blue are closer than ever, the perception of a divide is greater than ever ... but that might just be because the average age difference of mothers in red and blue (20 and 22 in 1970; 22 and 27 in 2000) is widening. It's a "life story gap," not a values gap.

See what you can do with maps?

atlas(t) holiday gift guide

i've written so. Damn. Many. gift guides and year-end lists in the past couple of weeks that I can't think in any other mode. Such is the life of a blogger.

So, since my head's in this space already, might as well do a gift guide for the mappy and geographically inclined geek in your life. This is an ENTIRELY SUBJECTIVE list. I will not consider gifts that SOME OTHER map/geo geek than myself might like. This is just what you should send me if you wanna get on my good side.

Here goes:

• Panamap Series by Urban Mapping

A brand new series of what I can only imagine to be lenticular maps, in which three maps of the same city -- streets, subways, neighborhoods and landmarks -- are arranged like those postcards of Jesus so when you tilt the map one way, you'll see one image, and when you tilt it another way, you'll see another image. Three maps in one! Whether it works well or not, it's a collector's item. There are currently maps of Manhattan and Chicago.

• City Walks Decks Series by Chronicle Books

A wonderful series comprising one boxed deck of cards for each city. There are 50 cards per city, and each card contains a simple walking tour of a route of particular interest: either a neighborhood, or a themed tour. On one side of the card is a map of the route, and on the other side is the text explaining what you're seeing. The cards are the size of a mass market paperback, i.e. easy to carry around, and this is the perfect gift for someone going to a city with an extra day or two to spend walking around. The series covers 14 major metropolises at this point.

• Window Seat Books by Gregory Dicum

Two books that offer a detailed and well-designed guide to reading landscapes from the window seat of an airplane. There's one for the US, and one for Europe. I don't know if this series will continue, but I sure hope so. This is the perfect gift for a frequent flyer.

• Elvis Mars Globe by Greaves and Thomas

At £90.00, it's not cheap. But this accurate globe of Mars, with the whimsical inclusion of the site where an Elvis statue was found in 1989, according to a British tabloid, is the perfect gift for a Mars fan. My folks won years' worth of brownie points by getting this for me for Christmas a few years back. Greaves and Thomas also has a number of other historical and beautiful globes, including Cassini's 1790 terrestrial and celestial globes, and the first antipodean globe, which simply reverses the direction of the globe so we can see what the world looks like to an Australian.

• Starry Night star mapping software

When I was trying to figure out, for my feng shui on Mars novel, what constellations one would see from Mars, an astronomy professor turned me on to the Starry Night software which, among other things, enables you to see what the night sky looks like from other points of view than from Earth. Awesome. They've just released a new version, which is a bit pricey ($150) but great for your astronomer or star chart geek.

• Cheap historical facsimile maps

For those mapping geeks who just like to see -- or hang on their walls -- maps from historical periods, you can't go too far wrong by looking online for facsimile reproductions.

• Like these maps of the Great Lakes, which are $10-15 apiece.
• Or this boxed set of maps of London from four different periods for £27.50. 
• Blue Monocle Maps has a whole historical collection, which you can get in a variety of sizes and on your choice of paper, including world cities like this one of Beijing. These start at around £30.
• Historic Urban Plans has smaller maps of cities the world over that start at around $10.
• Historic Maps Restored has a series of higher-quality maps starting at $30 which are mostly of the US -- railroad maps, topographical maps, panorama maps, etc. There is a small collection of international maps.
• The Old Map Company sells maps of mostly England, starting at around £6. There's a small collection of international maps.

• (ETA): Here's one more I just found ... MAP PLATES! From Signals.com, these plates represent some of the countries of Europe, not all. But how cool is a series of plates in geographical shapes that fit together to make a map? I WANT.

There's much more along the lines of interdisciplinary books on geographical ideas, but I don't want to recommend very many books right now. I think the above is enough to go on for now, don't you?

But please feel free to add your ideas to the comments below!

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.

three gorges dam

speaking of Edward Burtynsky, a video on YouTube of a talk he gave that's on Manufactured Landscapes turned me on to the scale of change caused by the Three Gorges Dam in China.

Here's the clip:

Here's a good summary of the project:

Here's an animation showing the changes the dam has made to the landscape:

Here's a clip in Chinese with a lot of information about the dam, much of which is self explanatory, if you don't speak Chinese. There are some rah-rah shots of the dam, and some animations of how the dam was built:

What fascinates me the most is the underwater cities. Sure, the buildings were destroyed to as not to interfere with ships, but there must be some lower levels of high rises, and some one and two-story buildings they didn't bother smashing. It would be great if someone went down there in ten or twenty years to photograph what happened to the landscape down there.

In fact, I should find out if there are underwater villages in other areas that have been photographed many years later.

collective nouns list

wiktionary has an appendix which is a searchable database of collective nouns, those nouns used to collect a group of other nouns, like a "pride" of lions, or, famously, a "murder" of crows. You can search by collective noun, or noun, and they include both standard and ... uh ... made up ones.

This is another item--the quirkiness of collective nouns--that has become popular and trendy lately. I've seen lists of collective nouns in recent quirkster books and mentioned in various quirkster contexts. I'd hesitate to align myself with the forces of collective quirk ... only, it's a database!

I like a "hand" of bananas and a "stare" or a "parliament" of owls (both are so appropriate, no?)

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.

Happy Birthday, Walter Gropius!

i don't know if google is way too cool, or if it's the new Absolut vodka, but I found out that today is Walter Gropius' 125th birthday by seeing this googlogo (above).

I associate Gropius with all my atlas(t)y stuff, because the first time I learned about him was when I was a bus tour guide in Berlin and had to mention the Bauhaus Museum as we passed it near the canal bordering the Tiergarten--which building was, itself, designed by Gropius.

(Only a short stretch away was the site where Rosa Luxembourg's body was found in the canal months after her assassination, and in another direction the site in the Tiergarten where Karl Liebknecht was shot as well. I love that these were all contemporaries whose significance is siloed. And Berlin is just chockablock full of historically charged sites.)

The museum/archive is depicted below.

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.