Week 12: Cities and Nature

Kieran's piece was encouraging while Bill and Porus' was I suppose characteristically bleak - funny that the write the same way they teach. It was also interesting to think about the improvements in the urban environment that Bill and Porus wrote about in the 1990s. For sure the Amazon is still being destroyed for (perhaps just as fast as before), but I think Sao Paulo's rivers and significantly cleaner thanks to a grassroots movement that took hold in the area in the 90s!

While working on a project in the Town of Wayne, NY (about an hour west of Ithaca) I learned that Keuka lake's water is drinkable and that the smaller lake nearby, Waneta Lake, was not. I also learned that the rivers and run-off that feed Waneta lake eventually flow into the Chesapeake Bay (not far from my home town). This reminded that environmental problems comprise a network of local environmental challenges and that planners need to have the capacity to see the full network as well as the local problems.

There are a lot of wealthy people around the Chesapeake Bay, working hard to keep Purdue chicken plants from polluting Maryland's ground water and streams. At the same time, Town of Wayne residents should have two clean lakes, local septic systems should be improved or upgraded to a sewage system connected to a treatment plant. An improvement in Wayne is a small one for the Chesapeake, but there are hundred of towns along the Chesapeake watershed that could use a hand. Full network, many and varied local solutions....sounds like they need a planner :)

Week 11: Culture

Tuesday's readings fit nicely with Annie Leonard's talk on production chains (or "the history of stuff"). In her short film and talk Annie suggests three things - 1) people are disconnected from the full process and various externalities of our consumption, 2) our current consumption patterns are unsustainable 3) and if we better understand the real costs of "things" we'll be better able to create a new and regenerative (rather than distractive) system.
Zukin's piece notes that when public space becomes privatized it also becomes explicitly consumption based, whether Bryant Park users know it or not. Markusen's piece on import-substition economic development made me think about the possibility that that system is inherently closer to Annie's vision of a closed loop and sustainable production chain; that is if residents decided to produce for themselves in a sustainable manner (not always the case).
Talk of import-substitution always takes me back to my Latin Americanist days and does give me some pause - local production is not always the most efficient - but in my mind more importantly growth through human interaction is important. At least in Latin America, ISI required strict insulation and therefore exclusion which its fundamental flaw. It's interesting to think about it at an urban scale, rather than a national one.

Week 10

This weeks readings, as well as Prof Mitra's comments in class made me think about how, as a city planner, one manages to balance community engagement when community is such a fuzzy term. If I'm attempting to execute a participatory planning process at what scale do I frame my search for stakeholders and across what period of time? In a planning process, while identifying and involving stakeholders is the gold standard of inclusive planning, it can also be a tool for exclusion - keeping people out of the process who we or others don't deem important.
There was recently a great NPR bit on being part of a group/community/club and what that can mean. Me sense is that there needs to be checks and balances. Citywide policies that guide generally, professionals that can pull in back-up if a participatory process becomes small minded. I don't really have it worked out, I just know - wicked problems.

Week 9: Contested Cities

Heavy reading this week; not particularly uplifting. Both Havery's and Shatkin's pieces reminded me of my undergraduate outrage at privatization of public services and commodification of basic human necessities (think expensive bottled water).
Shatkin's piece on planning the privatopolis brought to mind my worries about the charter movement in public education in the US. Charter schools, in a way, are a first step towards privatizing universal public education. Charter schools receive per pupil funding from the local government, but are not beholden to the local educational system. They also raise large amounts of money from local and national non-profits, in some cases giving them a financial leg up over traditional public schools. The notion that public charter schools will compete with local schools so that all schools will improve or shut down some how ignores the fact that competition inherently creates winners and losers and in the case of education the loser schools will harm the unlucky children who had no other option than to attend their neighborhood school.
I firmly believe that the market should not decide the fate of basic services: education, health, water, air etc. City planning in the hands of private developers places makes decisions about those basic human issues the responsibility of business men and women who are first and foremost after a profit, not just a better world for all mankind. Worrisome.

Week 8: Segregation & Decline

Harvey's Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography provided an explanation to why the global financial sector crashed and how systemic risk, a new concept to many economists, is a basic and fundamental element of Marx's understanding of capitalism.

According to Harvey (an Marx), capital must be able to grow otherwise there will be a crisis and the magic growth number of the past hundred years has been a 3% average world wide (with some places growing more, others less, and some shrinking). If we accept that capital needs growth to survive (which I feel pretty comfortable with) then we must figure that at some point there is a limit to that growth, at which point the system comes to a screeching halt and falls apart.

I recently had an discussion with my husband about how even though the fed has been holding down interest rates banks still aren't lending at normal rates and that this is holding down economic growth. I bristled at the truism that economic growth must come from access to debt because it was the debt mentality that got us into the mess we're in today. After a bit of back and forth I said, yes...yes, I know that our current system runs off of debt, but imagine we're on mars and we're setting up a completely new system - is that how you'd choose to structure it? The answer was no, because, when you live in a world of spatial limitations and resources limitations, why would you want to function in a way that inherently exponential and unstable...in systems modeling we've got ourselves in a positive feedback loop. Not how I'd organize the world.

Week 7: Mega Cities

That 60 minutes exposé on the Chinese housing bubble was VERY interesting. I can't help but wonder, why don't squatters come in and take over, French style (a la Jeudi Noir)?

For a little background on Parisian squatters http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12135687

Nezar's "Urban Informality, a new way off life" shines a little light on that question for me and also helped me understand my frame. As a Latin Americanist, I understand informal housing and labor in the Latin American context: organized and politically pushy (think FMLN in El Salvador or PT in Brazil). So to read about the middle eastern approach of "redress" was a bit of mental shift for me.

That citizens who were acting agains the state in some way (by illegally occupying land or not following code) by trying to sneak a settlement in and then pretend it was always there and is legitimate is really fascinating to me, because it implies implicit cooperation on both sides.

Which brings me back to China. I would assume that a homeless rural migrants staging a political movement around occupying vacant housing owned by China's middle class would not go well for them; perhaps a bit of a non-starter. That leaves the sneak technique, but since the exposé suggested that informal residents were just packing up their bricks and leaving, I have to imagine that the state or maybe the property owners have a system to prevent squatting - i.e. does not have implicit cooperation.

Which begs the question. Where are those people going with their bricks?

Week 6: Global Cities

To me, the most interesting discussion that this week's reading brought up was the notion that the geopolitical creation of nations is now obsolete and the city-state is the new geopolitical unit of relevance. I am not particularly impressed with the modern nation state; colonial boundaries, war, division of cultures/families/people due to boarders created by war or colonization. However, to replace the nation state for the city state based on capitalist forces seems like a spectacular way to create groups of people and geographical reasons who a ignored losers in the global capitalist economy. 

When it comes to geopolitical relevance urban and rural need to be reasonably balance, even if their populations are not. I believe that it is easy for city folk (I count myself as one) to think that the world revolves around the city, but million of people who don't have any access to food (produced in rural areas) are useless. 

That's all for now.

Week 5: Uneven Geo of Capitalism

I really appreciated Susan Fainstein's article, Changing World Economy and Urban Restructuring, because while I respect and largely agree with the Marxist critique of capitalism it is often just that, at critique, no solutions, and no clear path out. Fainstein's article helps progressives visualize the possibility of change.

She explains that two world views, the macro and the micro are both correct and both should be understood, but that action usually happens on the micro scale. She does mention how national politics makes local change hard (think about California passing gay marriage, then getting a ton of national attention for it, and then voting it away again), but she suggests that at the community, city, and maybe even regional level that changing the relationship between government, capital, and people is indeed possible.

Week 4: Urban Agglomeration

Molotch's, City as Growth Machine raises the question, if you limit the population of a city what number is the upper limit? If the limit is 500,000, what if Susan and Scott have baby Alice and baby Alice turns out to be the 500,001 Santa Barbaran? Is she kicked out? Can local government really control in that way?

Some cities have none-developable greenbelts that prevent sprawl at the periphery of the city (like Portland); very different than a population cap. In the case of Portland the government is controlling land in a upper class community in a first world country. The same land use regulations are ineffective most Latin American cities, where squatters create informal where they are legally not supposed to be.

I agree that the race to the bottom between cities, counties, and states - to offer the best benefits to business, in the pursuit of jobs, but to the detriment to society as a whole - is a problem. However, I do not think that Beverly Hills or West Palm Beach style population control methods are replicable on a large scale; what works for a small group of organized elites does not work for the larger urban community.

I think Molotch's article is an interesting thought experiment, but I don't agree with his prescription.

Week 3: Questions and Episte

Engels and Deegan - I'm trying to connect these two readings and only finding weak ties. Here's what I got:

• Engels was observing society and thus a sociologist, not just a philosopher and political theorist.
• Deegan might have thought that Engels' observations were markedly male.

Aside from trying to make connections, Engels description of Manchester, England made me think of Carolina Maria de Jesus's autobiography Child of the Dark, which is her observations of living in a Sao Paulo slum in the 1950s. In reading Engels one likes to think that we've come so far, that society will not tolerate those kind of squalid conditions for our fellow humans, but yet we do.

Deegan's observations of sexism in the University of Chicago's school of sociology were interesting, but not ground breaking for a female raised in the 1980s/1990s. Just this past weekend my friends (male and female) and I discussed sexism in the work place, how likely it was that the man perpetrating it was completely unaware, what is to be done about it, etc.

I am acutely aware that the findings in Deegan's study relates to my work in public transportation planning. Attending the transportation research board's annual meeting is very much like walking into a white male frat party - transportation engineering and planning are very white male dominated in the US and Latin America (white is relative in Latin America). Aside from being conscious of this, I'm not really sure what my take aways from Deegan's work should be.

Week 2: Urban Imaginations

Fishman's article changed the way I look at suburbs, I can't say I appreciate them anymore than I did before, but I understand them in a whole new way. It was a relief to learn that they weren't an American invention even if the US franchised them (so to speak).

The article did make me wonder, however, what drove the British bourgeois to shift to nuclear family style living. Did wealth accumulation require one to lop-off connections to extended family? Was it an attempt to look more like the landed aristocracy? What does it mean to family, community, and society when the ideal is that you're physically close only too your immediate family? Do suburbs exist in places where extended families are just as important as the nuclear family...when you're rich does that culture hold anywhere?

Parkers article was a nice refresher for Intro to Planning, not really mind blowing, but reasonably interesting. I think it raises question about the dangers of thinking on a utopic scale; planning can become religion rather than a professional and rational endeavor. However, if you're not striving for the ideal, what exactly are you working towards? Imagine if a planner was hired by a community and the came at them with this: "Hello community A...I'm here to help you plan your community, I don't know what a good community looks like, so let's just try some things a see what works, ok?" I doubt that would go well. Given that, how do you balance the reality that there can be no perfect plans, just better than other options plans, with real human needs like shelter, clean water, community, safety, etc?