Scarcity contra Austerity (Design Observer)

"We live in an age of austerity; or, rather, we are told that we live in an age of austerity. In the United States and throughout Europe, austerity is presented as a necessary stricture, and the mantra “cuts now, growth later” is repeated so steadily that it seems an inevitability, with consequences ranging from the personal (shortened shopping lists) to the public (cutbacks in major civic projects). As a discipline that spans the private-public spectrum, architecture inevitably is bound to this new regime, and so it is not surprising that the machinations of economic austerity are being played out in the mainstream of contemporary building."

Jeanne Gang Interview (Wall Street Journal)

"The truth is that cities and nature are completely intertwined, and we should find ways to make them seamless. With the human population now at seven billion and climbing, cities have become huge territories that don't allow the passage of other species through them. What's interesting to me is figuring out how closely we can get these two communities to intersect, so that animals can have their territory while at the same time increasing and concentrating the human population. We can bring seams of nature—like veins—through the middle of the city."

Generation Whine: Self-pitying Twentysomethings And The Boomers Who Made Them (The New Republic)

“Girls” is part portrait and part send-up of a particular type: relatively privileged, newly ejected from the liberal arts bubble, armed with an expectation that the world will react to their quest for fulfillment with appreciative patience. And one reason the show struck such a chord was surely that its real-life inspiration is everywhere right now. A steady stream of articles and books is constantly reminding us that today’s young people, the recession’s unlucky children, are experiencing their twenties as an unprecedented period of paralyzing limbo."

City Colleges Doing the Right Thing? (Crain's)

"Ms. Hyman dubs her strategy Reinvention. Its aim, she says, is to award students with an occupational certificate or associate's degree that has value in the job market or at a four-year university."

Stress and the city: Urban decay (Nature Journal)

Scientists are testing the idea that the stress of modern city life is a breeding ground for psychosis.

"Identifying which parts of a busy city life are the most stressful is another massive challenge (see 'Stress and the city'). The common urban experience of feeling different from your neighbours because of socioeconomic status or ethnicity could be one factor, Meyer-Lindenberg thinks. If so, immigrant groups, who often experience isolation, may be processing stress in a similar way to city-dwellers."

The Face of Decline (Richard Longworth)

"...Leave Manhattan and the Loop, head east from Seattle or north from the Bos-wash Corridor, hit the interstates through the Midwest and the South, plunge into the empty and echoing hearts of Detroit or Cleveland or the arid reaches of the Great Plains, and another America emerges."

The Perils of Rust Belt Memes (Richey Piiparinene, Atlantic Cities)

"Ruin!" versus "Revival!" narratives are mesofacts— broad, flexible yet significant beliefs about places or peoples. Mesofacts influence perceptions, which drive behaviors, which affect how places are cared for, praised, derided, or left for dead. When we package the idea of a Rust Belt death and rebirth with superficial themes, people on the ground are left to clean up the mess.

Dreaming Big Along the River (Chicago Sun-Times)

"Putting aside the question of funding, there was much to like about the conceptual ideas released Monday, which responded to requests for proposals dating back to the Daley administration. The designs, based partly on community input over the past few years, reveal something that would be uniquely Chicago, not simply copied from riverwalks elsewhere.

Money remains an issue. But we’re glad it hasn’t stopped Chicago from thinking big."

Debunking City Lists & Rankings

One of the symptoms of professional journalism's decline is an increasing reversion to lists and rankings for various news items and cultural events. These lists seem to pop up with greater frequency toward the end of the year (Top moments in reality TV, top moments in the presidential campaigns, top songs of the year, etc.) The primary reason for this is simply that informative, investigative journalism requires either expertise or a great deal of research - both of which are expensive. The days of in-depth reporting - of journalists who knew the characters and dynamics of the places they lived - are almost history. Apart from cities that have large enough populations to support alternative newspapers and websites, local journalism itself is almost history.

For large national publications with writers who are experts at nothing in particular - it is far easier, cheaper and more profitable to do a cursory glance at some statistics and generate a list or ranking based on an excel metric. The places that we live and work are not immune to this obtuse, shallow form of data-smog. Not a week goes by without a major news source publishing a meaningless list with a couple paragraphs of shallow observation. Travel magazines do this frequently, but so do publications like Forbes and Atlantic Cities. Apart from clear quantitative analysis measures like population, ethnicity, income distribution, etc. (things that the Census measures) - the vast majority of the lists that masquerade as information about cities are completely meaningless. Lists for the "happiest, coolest, most well-educated" or "best" - are laughably immaterial.

Not only are many of these qualities subjective, the lists themselves are often comparing apples to oranges. The most egregious error that almost every list makes is to rank cities in absolute terms (the most creative) when measuring by relative statistics - the average number of Starbucks per person. This relative measure automatically rules out any city of significant socio-economic diversity and ignores the effects of critical mass. A small college town may have more Starbucks per person than New York, but it certainly doesn't have the critical mass of relationships and talent to invent in the same manner.

Everything depends on how one defines a city - or what you would call a "population" in statistics. Is a city defined by municipal limits or an entire metropolitan area? Either way there are huge problems comparing cities in different parts of the country (with different historical circumstances) to each other. For example; older cities of the North and Upper Midwest were the first to by hemmed in by Home Rule laws that allowed townships and small municipalities to prevent annexation by the central city. No such limitation exists on newer cities like Houston, that continue to annex their periphery into already sprawling municiple boundaries. Thus, through historical development patterns different cities encompass different scopes and mixtures of their overall metropolitan population. Many older cities, like Chicago, remain defined as much by their working class neighborhoods and slums as they are by their beautifully gentrified quarters.

As a result of college towns and geographically small, extensively gentrified cities like Boston, San Francisco and Seattle tend to dominate "livability" measures. America's largest, most diverse cities - New York, Chicago and Los Angeles are almost always near the bottom of these lists and rankings - even though they each contain several neighborhoods that, if considered independently, would out-rank their smaller competitors by leaps and bounds. For example; you can fit Boston (48 sq. mi) and Manhattan (22 sq. mi) inside the city limits of Chicago (227 sq. mi) and still have room left over for Detroit (138 sq. mi). Incidentally Boston + Manhattan + Detroit roughly equals Chicago in population. Los Angeles is geographically the size of two Chicagos. Houston and Phoenix are both as big as Los Angeles and Detroit combined.

Large cities with large working class and poor populations inevitably score poorly on these lists precisely because the they target the kind of generic qualities that define upper middle class urbanity. They say nothing of a city's character, its history, its assets or its opportunities. Lists say nothing about the relationships and networks of people and capital that define the city.

Almost every list suffers from confirmation bias - or the tendency to favor information that confirms preexisting beliefs. The creation of a city list or ranking probably says more about the perceptions of the publication or author than it does about the cities in question. Each lists reveals the criteria that a publication deems relevant to the definition of whatever quality they're ranking. The bias and subjectivity of these findings was most egregious in a recent "Coolest Cities" list created by Forbes. Houston certainly come to most people's mind when thinking of a cool city, but Forbes, a conservative financial magazine has clear motivations behind picking a bland, sprawling, southern "Red" city ahead of traditionally urban, liberal oasis. To achieve this "cool city" coup they simply used metrics like unemployment rate, age of home ownership and population growth - which have more to do with job growth and affordability than anything else.

The point, once again, is obviously not to report or inform us about the condition of metropolitan America - it is to call our attention to relatively meaningless bits of information that confirm rather than challenge the reader's perception of cities. Forbes doesn't want all of its conservative suburban readers feeling uncool while they tour the golf course, so it tells them what they want to hear - that they're just as cool - actually, this year they're cooler - than the fashion whores in New York City. Of course, in my book both of them are lame.

Almost every list, in other words, is bullshit. Unfortunately its often the only substitute people have for any real knowledge about America's cities.

The G.O.P., Anti-Urbanism and the Demonization of Obama

How the G.O.P. Became the Anti-Urban Party (Kevin Baker, NY Times)

"For Republicans, cities now became object lessons on the shortcomings of activist government and the welfare state — sinkholes of crime and social dysfunction, where Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” cavorted in their Cadillacs. The very idea of the city seemed to be a thing of the past, an archaic concept"

Mr. Baker had nice piece in the Sunday New York Times, but it only begins to scratch the surface the G.O.P.'s demonization of all things urban. America has a long history of anti-urbanism. For most of our history popular folklore has idealized rural life and frontier adventure while making urban life the repository of everything implicitly un-American, corrupt and evil.

Since the Civil Rights Movement the G.O.P. has persistantly projected the blame for social and economic problems away from "Middle America" to everyone that is not white, suburban, Christian and conservative. The "people that are ruining our country" are thus all implicitly urban; immigrants, minorities, homosexuals, intellectual elites and so on. Barack Obama, a former community organizer, an intellectual, a Chicago resident and a clear product of our country's mixed racial heritage personifies everything that confuses and scares the Right-Wing. It's no wonder that, despite Obama's objectively moderate polices, Republicans have literally done everything they can to demonize and de-legitimize his presidency for the last four years. As the 2012 presidential campaign has entered the final month, Mitt Romney has resorted to grossly distorting, if not out-right lying, about Obama's record while evading the truth about his own platform.

Chicago, the President's home town and the heart of the Democratic Party, has come to occupy the center of the G.O.P.'s anti-urban rhetoric. Republican politicians continuously characterize Obama as a member of the "Chicago Machine" - which is laughable to those who know anything about Chicago politics. Obama is no machine boss. He's an academic who's consistently caught in an abyss between opposing forces that very few of his supporters or enemies understand.

Fear of a Black President (Ta-Nehisi Coates)

"In a democracy, so the saying goes, the people get the government they deserve. Part of Obama’s genius is a remarkable ability to soothe race consciousness among whites. Any black person who’s worked in the professional world is well acquainted with this trick. But never has it been practiced at such a high level, and never have its limits been so obviously exposed. This need to talk in dulcet tones, to never be angry regardless of the offense, bespeaks a strange and compromised integration indeed, revealing a country so infantile that it can countenance white acceptance of blacks only when they meet an Al Roker standard."

Obama's Power Problem (Rick Perlstein, Chicago Mag)

"Both political traditions—that of the Democratic machine and that of the idealistic reformer—can successfully confer power. But what has become increasingly clear is that Obama has not harnessed the potential flowing from either. Indeed, the president’s biggest problem, come the election on November 6, isn’t that he’s too Chicago. It’s that he’s not Chicago enough."

Despite all of the evidence to the contrary, the G.O.P.'s imaginary Obama remains a foreign-born, communist, Chicago ward boss that shared stogies with Saul Alinksy and David Ayres. This mythology is geared toward making Obama far more radical and threatening than he really is. This strategy is very effective in stoking the hatered the G.O.P.'s base of old, reactionary white people but falls on def years to younger generations. The "silent majority" that left the city decades ago may still have strong anti-urban sentiments, but their children are increasingly positive about city life.

Urbanity doesn't imply the same things that it did 30 years ago. Today it represents everything that is current, dynamic, diverse and interesting about contemporary American life. Increasing numbers of young people are not only moving to cities, they're beginning to invest and raise families there. There are still inner city ghettos and bombed-out shells of once great cities - but even they have become cool in the next generation's search for authenticity. The script has flipped. The most desirable lifestyle isn't in the suburbs, its in the heart of cities like New York, San Francisco and Chicago. The new frontier isn't the suburbs, its Detroit.

Many suburbs are now as racially and economically diverse as cities. They may not be "urban" in the traditional sense, but they tend to have much more in common with the central city than its rural hinterlands. By defining itself as so strongly anti-urban the G.O.P. has become increasingly marginalized to a core group of mostly old, white, rural/exurban evangelical voters.

A Tale of Two Conventions (Mother Jones)

"At the Tampa arena, many GOP delegates oozed entitlement and privilege. When Ann Romney proclaimed, "This is our country"—and the crowd cheered—it didn't come across as a moment celebrating inclusion."

A President for Cities (Brad Lander, Huffington Post)

"Democrats embrace and invest in cities. We recognize and value them as places of extraordinary vitality, where jobs are created, where diversity and tolerance are fostered, where immigrants are welcomed, and where those "obligations to one another" are addressed."

The present division of the parties - one urban and cosmopolitan, the other rural and reactionary - has created a tragic paralysis at time when our country needs foresight and long-term solutions more than ever.

Cities have always been the engine of civilization. They encompass our triumphs and our tragedies, they represent the best and worst of human nature. America's great experiment with suburbia was motivated as much by a desire to escape from our problems as it was an attempt to find a better life. In fact, in America "better life" has too often been a euphemism for an avoidance of responsibility. The G.O.P.'s repeated appeal to anti-urban mythologies and reactionary, right-wing policies is nothing less than an attempt to perpetuate a daydream of irresponsibility. The Party's answer to solving the problems of society is to leave it behind - to escape from civilization to a private utopia of consumption. This will do nothing but hasten our decline. The answer is not to leave, not to escape, not to lie to ourselves, but to return - to face reality, to dig in and to rebuild our nation. This must begin, as it always has, in the City.