atlas(t)

parag khanna world map

Just sticking my head above the parapet long enough to post this cool cool vid from TED of Indian American geopolitics dewd Parag Khanna talking about borders and the world map. Yay!

white flight reversed

the Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about "The End of White Flight" (i.e. the white gentrification of American cities).

Decades of white flight transformed America's cities. That era is drawing to a close.

In Washington, a historically black church is trying to attract white members to survive. Atlanta's next mayoral race is expected to feature the first competitive white candidate since the 1980s. San Francisco has lost so many African-Americans that Mayor Gavin Newsom created an "African-American Out-Migration Task Force and Advisory Committee" to help retain black residents.

"The city is experiencing growth, yet we're losing African-American families disproportionately," Mr. Newsom says. When that happens, "we lose part of our soul."

For much of the 20th century, the proportion of whites shrank in most U.S. cities. In recent years the decline has slowed considerably -- and in some significant cases has reversed. Between 2000 and 2006, eight of the 50 largest cities, including Boston, Seattle and San Francisco, saw the proportion of whites increase, according to Census figures. The previous decade, only three cities saw increases.

The article goes on to discuss many aspects of this reversal, including some truly disgusting behavior on the part of white parents in Brooklyn, who objected to their school selling ice cream as a fundraiser and tried to get the school district to open a new school in the same area so they could have their way with it.

Elsewhere in Brooklyn, in a majority African-American section of the borough, Councilwoman Letitia James says a handful of predominantly white parents last year asked her if some of their local tax money could be steered to schools in a nearby neighborhood. The parents wanted their kids in schools with a more diverse racial mix, Ms. James says, rather than the majority-black schools in her district.

The parents felt "tax dollars should follow the children, and not the school," Ms. James says. She denied their request.

Segregation, anyone?

The sad thing is that this gentrification could be a good thing for everyone involved if it weren't conducted as a classic Jacobsian destruction of diversity, coupled with clear racial geographical discrimination.

So WWJJD? Dumb question. The better question is, what should we do, we who live in these cities directly affected? It's a hard question for me to answer, because I now live in Oakland. When I lived in San Francisco, the destruction of its diversity affected me directly. But now that I live in the semi-suburban, and heavily black, heavily diverse, extension, the destruction of diversity in San Francisco benefits Oakland to a certain extent.

That is to say, working and middle-class blacks driven out of SF by the cost of living may end up in Oakland, where it's cheaper to live, dropping their job skills and, if they're business owners, employment opportunities here. Upper middle class blacks potentially driven out of SF by the destruction of the black community there could bring job skills, employment opps, and cash and investment capital to Oakland.

I don't know if this is in fact what has happened here. Oakland's downtown has been seeing a enormous condo-building boom and gentrification of its street-level businesses in the past couple of years. The condos will not sell; none of them opened before the housing market busted. But maybe they'll be converted to rentals, who knows? I guess if I end up staying in Oakland long-term, I'll find out.

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)

creative class

it's truly a map that compels attention, no? Where are the single mens? Where are the single wimmins? You'd think this would be a map you'd find on a dating or singles website, but it's actually one of the many pritty demographic maps on the Creative Class Group's website.

The Creative Class Group is Richard Florida's bizness. You know, Florida, the guru-esque author of The Rise of the Creative Class and maven of "creative economics." He's an urban studies dude who's made a career--a second career this millenium, that is, his first career was professor of urban studies or public policy or whatever they're calling cities under a microscope these days--out of pumping up this new "class" he's created. So the singles map makes more sense, given the marriage and child-bearing delays of this over-educated, necessarily mobile class.

I've been following his ideas from a distance (read: I've never read his books) and the critical consensus is that he's made a one-book idea stretch to four. No matter. At this point he's more of a Tony-Robbins-of-urban-renewal-type than a researcher/scholar. He appears to be more interested in selling his idea (literally) than in developing more. More ideas, I mean. I'm not criticizing. Like I said, I haven't read the book/s. This is just what I'm seeing ... from a distance.

Anyhoo, what is the creative class? Fittingly, the best video round-up is in this BMW commercial (which, not coincidentally, has nifty, atlas(t)ilicious animated aerial views of cities building themselves):

See? Doesn't it make a good commercial? Wouldn't you rather call yourself "creative class" than "upper-middle class?" (Because you are, you know. Creative class. The fact that you're reading this particular blog makes you so. See below.)

The breakdown of white collar/blue collar labor in the past two decades has led to our old denominations of American classes no longer accurately describing our new class system. But nobody's really been doing much about it because public discussions of class are (still) even more taboo than public discussions about race. And these selfsame public discussions about class, even when they do happen, are hijacked by privilege even more than public race discussions.

(In racially mixed discussions of race, people of color tend to want to use the discussion to talk about white privilege and whites tend to want to use the discussion to force people of color to acknowledge that they--the individual whites involved--are not racist. Similarly, in public discussions of class, the college educated, creative-capital-endowed, upper-middlish folks hijack the discussion so that they can explain to everyone why they're "not really upper-middle class," even though everyone knows they are. Like "white," "upper-middle class" is the designation no one wants in name, but whose privileges everyone wants in fact.)

So we are inhabiting a bit of an intellectual wild west as far as the new class system goes. We haven't yet defined the classes that now exist in a global economy militarily, but no longer industrially, dominated by the United States. A United States where the median class is ALL college-educated, and whose jobs are defined by the computer applications they require, rather than possessing junior college or trade school certificates and job-defined by collar-color or business-ownership. A United States where the working lower-class is no longer highly trained industrial labor, but rather tip-earning service sector.

Florida's thesis conveniently flows businesspeople into the continuum of hipsters who deep down think they're artists but haven't pursued their art since they graduated from college. Anyone who lives in a city with lots of gays and goes to the theater and hits the galleries occasionally, can call themselves a part of the "creative class," no matter what level of creativity their work requires.

I say "not coincidentally" about the atlas(t)iliciousness above because one of the fads/trends/interests of the "creative class" (if we are to accept Robbins' Florida's definition, and we are for now, for the sake of this post) is urbanism itself, and mappiness. I've been intending to write about this, and I still do, but I just want to check in here on the fact that you all, darling readers, are obviously "creative class," and that so am I ... and that the obsession with space and maps and urbanism is really just a navel-gazing concern with the necessary tools of a burgeoning, globally-mobile class privileged to avoid not just the dirtiness of industry, but also the dirtiness of business administration. Okay, I'm putting my high horse out to pasture now.

It's interesting that Florida is taking the process of gentrification--that St. JJ calls "the self-destruction of diversity"--and gives it a positive spin ... at least, positive for members of his "creative class" who are unselfconsciously concerned with their property values. Okay, I am criticizing.

But this smug pat on one's own back--argh! "creative class!"--reminds me of a site I criticized in a post a year or two ago, for bored DIYers encouraging illegal invasions of private property for the sake of investigating the urban infrastructure. The site simply assumed that people who didn't illegally invade private property to look at boiler rooms and ventilation tubes lived their lives in a state of numb blindness to the beauty and vitality around them. Likewise, this class "analysis" seems to presuppose not just that this "new" class is necessarily "creative," but also that no other class is.

Okay, you know what? I've gotten as far as I can on curmudgeonly energy alone. Now I have to read the damn book. I'm wondering here if he'll address the fact that this so-called creative class that values "innovation" is itself radically undereducated in science and math to such a degree that what can, from abroad, be seen as our artistic decadence threatens to move the centers of scientific and technological innovation abroad. The only reason the US hasn't yet lost the sci and tech innovation edge is that we're able, with our stable polity and economy, to attract scientists and engineers from foreign climes.

And the identity politics of American culture of the past 25 years has evolved to help "creative class" immigrants and their children find a safe outlet for the inevitable results of integrating into a still-xenophobic non-"creative" populace. In fact, that's part of what this blog is here for: to take a progressive stance on race and class and help creative-classly contribute to a super-culture, that blunts the edge of our still racist mainstream life.

I'ma shut up now.

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.

maglev train

Via Scott Westerfeld I came upon this video about a Japanese maglev train in testing phase. This is one of those emerging transportation technologies that gets my undies into a bunch. Nothing more to say here.

garmin vs. maposaurus

"you just can't beat a good old fashioned map sometimes." Indeed.

and

maps are a good way to learn about a civilization. Early maps were full of mythical beasts, representative of our awe of the unknown world. As science developed, these mysteries were solved, and maps, as well as life, became overly complicated and busy. This is the story of a civilization that knows no end to its consumption and is always seeking the final frontier.

Yeah, whatever. Despite the prose, this little video is quite lovely. Yay for DIY!

google maps commercial

real time rome

a very cool project from MIT for the Venice Biennale, involving bus traffic, pedestrian traffic (as measured by the use of handheld devices) 'n' stuff like that mapped out.

Real Time Rome is:

the MIT SENSEable City Lab’s contribution to the 2006 Venice Biennale, directed by professor Richard Burdett. The project aggregated data from cell phones (obtained using Telecom Italia's innovative Lochness platform), buses and taxis in Rome to better understand urban dynamics in real time. By revealing the pulse of the city, the project aims to show how technology can help individuals make more informed decisions about their environment. In the long run, will it be possible to reduce the inefficiencies of present day urban systems and open the way to a more sustainable urban future?