The view from here

Out the front window of chez Ken

Learning from Chicago

I’m developing a hypothesis that the neighborhood around Lincoln Square is the way mankind was meant to live. This is the classic three-story city: leafy streets with small multi-unit walkups and up / down duplexes with short setbacks, no side yards, and just enough room at the back for a tiny yard and a garage. Archetypal Germantown Chicago, just dense enough to be walking distance from transit and the obligatory coffee house and ethnic restaurants. The vast expanse stretching from the Gold Coast to Evanston remains one of the most fascinating urban districts that I know. Is it Southern California beautiful? No. Is it Highland Park clean? No. Is it West (Greenwich) Village interesting? No. It is, however, real.

Here one gets the sense that this is a real, legitimate, possible urban city. Sort of the density that one arrives at by default once all of the older concentrated areas are gentrified and the initial suburban districts are built-up. This is the Old Urbanism that the New Urbanists are drooling to recreate. My only question is the logistical how. So much of the city is the artifact of a concentration of skilled labor and low relative wages. The intricate masonry and woodwork (surprisingly in combination), the real materials, the naturally ventilated rows gentrified into using every available square foot of available outdoor space. I shudder to think of the replacement cost for a street like Leland Avenue.

Yet, it’s surprisingly affordable. This little piece of heaven should command Manhattan rents, but is priced more like the better parts of Dallas. Wage deflation? Perhaps. More probably a lack of middle-aged, dual-earner families and their school-age children. It always strikes me that in a really interesting neighborhood in almost any American city how I see young adults, the elderly, and infants in strollers (lots of those) but almost never pre-teen and teenage children. Maybe it’s just my anecdotal experience, but I really think it runs deeper than that. The way public schools are organized, added to a few parenting neuroses, is almost a recipe for single-demographic districts and ever-newer development. The Warrens’ Two Income Trap still remains the best description of this phenomenon I’ve seen.

Two things are really odd here: The first is how a seemingly-unrelated idea like public school allotment determines so much – well – architecture. The second is that these places always seem to be totally functioning and fantastic or squalid slums, quite often with the exact same original building stock. (I’m thinking not only North and South Chicago, but also the eerie similarity of ultra-tony University Park and we-don’t-speak-English-here-anymore Oak Cliff in Dallas.) It’s almost enough to make a guy quit the profession and become an economist.

A final all-too-appropriate note: The closing paragraph of Witold Rybczynski’s eulogy for Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities) in Slate. Rest in peace Jane.

That vision of the urban good life had wide appeal, but the supply of old cities that offered the requisite mix of street life, architecture, and diversity was limited. The lively city districts that Jacobs championed, including her beloved Village, have become exclusive enclaves, closed to all but the extremely wealthy. She always considered the amenities of city life to be everyday and widely available goods. Little could she have imagined then that they would become luxuries instead.
- Witold Rybczynski – Slate, April 26, 06

Toward an experimental ethics

“The [nonzero-sum] coordination game probably lies behind the stability of institutions and traditions and perhaps the phenomenon of leadership itself. Among the possible sets of rules that might govern a conflict, tradition points to the particular set that everyone can expect everyone else to be conscious of as a conspicuous candidate for adoption; it wins be default over those that cannot readily be identified by tacit consent. The force of many rules of etiquette and social restraint, including some () that have been divested of their relevance and authority, seems to depend on their having become “solutions” to a coordination game: everyone expects everyone to expect everyone to expect observance, so that non-observance carries the pain of conspicuousness.” Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 1960 (p.91) emphasis added

Remember this

War on Terror?

War against whom?

Finally . . . some sanity

After finally dipping into the Amazon hegemony, I was able to get a copy of Robert Bruegman’s Sprawl, the long-awaited academic response to the ever-present anti-auto screeds of urban reformers. Not necessarily pro-sprawl per se, he traces the history of the development of urban banlieues and faubourgs in cities throughout history. The most interesting discovery is the history of literature bemoaning the suburbs of the day. With London as the most instructive example, everything from the Garden City movement to the districts of semi-detached houses that are now held up as the shining examples of urbanism was denigrated when new by the urban elites of the time as soulless destruction of both town and country. What amazed me was the implicit undertone in the work: History is a history of class warfare.

Bruegman notes that anti-sprawl movements only seem to spring up when the middle classes create for themselves cheaper versions of the lifestyles that the upper classes already enjoy (Tuxedo Park, anyone?) In his observation, the upper-middle class scribbling set looks with disgust on the democratization of the idea of the house in the country by their aesthetically challenged inferiors. The thesis is that disurbanization (technically “flattening density gradients”) are tied not to technology or planning structure but to affluence. The private car replaced not the public streetcar, but the private carriage. Only as the personal transportation always available to the gentry became readily available to the less-well heeled did the detached house at the perimeter of the city come into its own. (This would help explain the structure of Gaudi’s work in nineteenth century Barcelona, see Answer Before the Question below.)

His bibliography is to die for, and covers a breadth of material that tells us that the phenomenon is not new, and isn’t quite as simple as one would think. Some observations: New suburban developments are actually getting denser, as lot sizes get smaller (but houses larger) and much development occurs in the water-strapped southwest where municipal piping dictates increased density. Statistical Los Angeles is denser than statistical New York (think about Westchester and Bergen counties), and actually the densest large city in the U.S. Poster-child Portland is still one of the least-dense cities in the country, and less than half as dense as their bogeyman L.A. Both density gradients and auto-trip numbers follow identical trends in the U.S. and Europe, only with a time-delay representing post-war rebuilding. (finally, someone that realizes that Paris has suburbs – and here I thought I was alone.) Nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

The urban problem still seems one of desire rather than conspiracy. But how to evaluate the consequences of desire?

Evidence apropos: I came across this in a completely unrelated work on history of the mainland villas surrounding Venice; one city fathers crowing over the benefits of the agricultural estate. Growth boosterism, Renaissance style.

“All holdings will be improved. Many families will transfer themselves there and there will follow an increase in tax receipts. The harm that was done in earlier times when men and animals were obliged to drink muddy, swirling waters gathered in the ditches will cease with this operation for the conservation of life.” Alvise Cornaro, Venice, 1556.

Bold steps in the bay state

What do the arrows tell us?

Death and Ideas

History, so they say, repeats itself. Why? Institutional power is difficult to change. Why? Possibly for the same reason: Mortality.

Read through the immediate contemporaries of Marx and Dostoevsky and you’ll see arguments crop up that look frighteningly familiar. Worries about globalization, loss of the small-scale workforce, pernicious immigration, the impersonality of technology, things like this. The period of before the First World War was a flowering of activity, reform, and ideas that seems to have been entirely forgotten. Arguments about residential dispersion and urban living date all the way back to the advent of the street car, yet seem to recur as original ideas to the anti-automotive crowd today. The problem may be that true continuity lasts only as long as memory.

For centuries, generations were relatively short, as lifespan wasn’t what it is today. This meant turnover of intellectual capital every fifty years or so. Even today, reformers rage against a system or policy without ever seeming to ask, “now, why was this done in the first place?” The shift from generation to generation, forgetting the logic that created the world of their birth, seems to be the natural flow that creates the Hegelian dialectic of which uncle Karl was so fond. (Although he certainly didn’t see it that way.) I often wonder if the great cold warriors of the last generation could have been transported back to the world of Hapsburg and Prussian Europe if they wouldn’t have gone a totally different direction. There is history written, but it can’t capture the mood and feel of the time – the assumptions made, the great fears of the time, the social traumas that created collective phobia that drove public opinion. When those that remember a time die, the real lessons from that time “we tried this, because that was a problem,” die as well. I wonder if the great communards of the 1960s realized that they were the modern inheritors of the Fourierists of a hundred years before.

Conversely, sometimes there just isn’t enough death. It been said that progress happens one funeral at a time; this based on the observation that a new idea often requires not changing the mind of the existing system (scientists, intellectuals, what have you,) but rather the ascendance of the next generation that were receptive of the new ideas before becoming set in their ways. Now, people are living longer. Not only that, but morbidity has decreased to a rate that it’s not unusual to have codgers in their eighties milling around the boardroom and refusing to leave. As the age of retirement (of people who like being there) grows older and older, the generations below them exist in a sort of extended adolescence, unable to affect the system until they’re ancient enough to become inflexible themselves. For instance: Mike Wallace is just too damn old. However effective he may be, is it really the best thing for journalism to have a prominent spokesman working from the mindset of the Nixon administration? Fresh blood is not simply youth, it’s someone from a different perspective that’s been able to have enough experiences while young enough for them to make a difference. This isn’t possible while sitting around for forty years waiting for the old guy to finally kick off.
The miracles of modern medicine have given us a legion of baby boomers, minds still unconsciously rooted in a world of North American monopoly from 1962, that refuse to either pass the baton or learn from the mistakes of their grandparents and great-grandparents. Frustrating