cities

I've previously written about the dangers facing cities in the upcoming economic collapse. Even as some "urbanists" are naïvely predicting that city cores will only strengthen during the coming decade as suburbs decline, cities face many hurdles. One is that second cities, both in the US and abroad are subject to a network effect, being left behind by a few more powerful brethren that get all the press. Been to Buffalo, Detroit, Utica, Syracuse, Albany, Newark or Paterson lately? Cities are a basket case.

But let's give equal opportunity to suburbs. Poverty has been dramatically increasing in suburbs during the last two decades. Take this piece on 18 Cities Whose Suburbs Are Rapidly Turning into Slums. Why is this happening? Certainly, in some cases, like New York, the poor are being priced out of cities. Instead of putting on our party hats and kazoos, as many urbanists seem to want, we should ask if this new form of out-of-sight/out-of-mind segregation isn't  evil. But that's not the only reason. 

Certainly part of it is the collapse of the US economy since the late 1960s, but there's more. Take a look at this article by Hanna Rosen from 2008 in the Atlantic Monthly in which she links the diffusion of poverty to government programs to get rid of the projects. As areas of concentrated poverty in cities are undone, poverty diffuses into a broader territory both within suburbs and within second cities (as in the case of Memphis, which is her focus).  

Network City is a complex place, a palimpsest of failed neoliberalist and Fordist policies. Unfortunately it is also not a very happy place, either, once you get past the shiny bits. 

Iceland's Eyjafjallajoekull volcano hasn't given up disrupting north Atlantic air travel this summer, but what if it's the harbinger of something bigger?

The global city is predicated on face to face communication being essential to major business deals. But the global city model, originally outlined by my colleague Saskia Sassen, is almost twenty years old. Trying booting up your Powerbook 100 to read this blog post. In this post I'd like to speculate on the impact of the volcano, technology, and global warming on the global city.  

First, let's talk global warming and green hype. During the last decade, friendly but misguided green advocates have advocated pedestrian-oriented cities as environmentally-sound alternatives to the suburbs. But looking at America (and many countries in Europe aren't all that different from this), most cities have seen sustained and uninterrupted declines in the last half century. The starring exceptions are the global city of various scales: New York, Chicago, Boston, LA, San Francisco and so on. For the most part, these cities have seen a remarkable renaissance as centers of business and creative activity. The urbanites who live here live in the global city, thinking nothing of jetting from London to Shanghai and alighting in San Francisco. Often, these individuals literally inhabit the global city and owning pied-à-tierres on multiple continents is increasingly as common among the super-wealthy as owning an estate is. At home, the "creative class" practices localism religiously, probably out enjoying home-smoked bacon cupcakes and carbon-neutral triple-pulled ristrettos right now.  

But the idea that this kind of life—which is as predicated on consumption as existence in deepest suburbia—is environmentally sound is laughable. Apart from the manic rate of conspicuous consumption in the global city, flying one mile on an airplane produces almost  as much CO2 as driving that same mile by oneself in an automobile (other side effects, including polluting in the very thin atmosphere high-up may be much worse). Moreover, if an average driver in the United States drives some 12,000 miles a year, that's half of what you need to get into a frequent flyer club.

I think by now you get the picture: the high-flyer of the global city is much worse for the environment than the suburbanite. So much for sustainable living. 

Now back to the volcano. The impact it's had on transatlantic travel has been massive as planes continue to be grounded in one European country or another multiple times a week. Pollution-wise, the amount of CO2 it released is significantly less than the amount of CO2 that would have been produced by the Airbuses and Boeings that happened not to fly on those days (obviously, the volcano also released other pollutants, many of which are quite toxic to life). Business travel had already dropped as a result of the recession. The volcano is a wake-up call. If my business relied on frequent international travel for face-to-face meetings, I'd begin asking myself how sustainable this is from an economic standpoint and how vulnerable my business was to such disruptions.   

There's more to the story. As I stated earlier, we're far from the day of the Powerbook 100, which couldn't even browse the Web. 70% of stock market trades now take place between computers at millisecond-level speeds. I have a hunch that the face-to-face financial deals that used to drive the global financial markets are becoming less important economically. 

Let's put this all together then. A perfect storm is emerging. Far from the idea that the suburbs will collapse in Richard Florida's great reset, it is likely the global city that collapses, replaced by ubiquitous high-speed telecommunications and undone by changing climatological conditions, not to mention peak oil.

Make no mistake, I'm not offering up a new utopia of any sort here. What I'm predicting is an end to network culture as we know it and it won't be pretty. The coming collapse of the global city will be slow and brutal, accompanied by the stationary state that Gopal Balakrishnan described last year.

I don't see many easy solutions out there. Ironically, the best bet is probably the very scare-word the American right loves to deploy: socialism. Now it's unlikely to take hold in the US, at least not for a generation or two but some countries will probably get the drift and head in that direction. What gets us out of this morass and what form of global spatial organization replaces the global city is unclear. Still, the late, great global city was far from equitable or sustainable. We can hardly lament its passing.  

I spent half of my childhood in the thick of things in Chicago and the other half in rural-exurban Western Massachusetts. It always surprises me when someone says "I can't imagine you in the countryside" (I often fantasize publicly about living in Vermont or somewhere similarly rural). What, Points of Interest in the Owens River Valley wasn't enough for you? 

Since my exurban life came during my all-important teenage years, I found it  crucial to visit the city where I'd scour the record stores or to tune into WRPI, a great industrially-oriented radio station, something I could only do whenever the horrific local Christian station was off the air. When I went to college at Cornell in Ithaca, New York, I was even further from civilization and without even a decent radio station (the college radio station was obsessed with Phish, infinitely worse fate than even classic rock) and so-so record stores. I invested in a short wave radio to listen to the John Peel show (and, when I could get it, the brilliant, ill-fated Radio Sierra Leone) and took painfully long road trips to the city to the same record stores to collect more music.

All this is gone now. I haven't been to a record store in years. I'm a bit of an audiophile so I still keep the best music in CDs but no record store is as efficient as the Net so I even that fix takes place online. In any event the record stores have closed down, the staff off to do God knows what. The scene is gone.

Why do I blog this? Simply enough: the old role of cities as places that you go to in order to experience hard-to-find culture is over. The Nick Hornby novel/film High Fidelity is completely foreign to network culture. Ours is the world of the Long Tail. Everything is available. The city is dead.  

It's time for my promised set of predictions for the coming decade. It has been a transgression of disciplinary norms for historians to predict the future, but its also quite common among bloggers. So let's treat this as a blogosphere game, nothing more. It'll be interesting to see just how wildly wrong I am a decade from now.

In many respects, the next decade is likely to seem like a hangover after the party of the 2000s (yes, I said party). The good times of the boom were little more than a lie perpetrated by finance, utterly ungrounded in any economy reality, and were not based on any sustainable economic thought. Honestly, it's unclear to me how much players like Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, and Larry Summers were duplicitous and how much they were just duped. Perhaps they thought they would get out in time or drop dead before the bubbly stopped flowing. Or maybe they were just stupid. Either way, we start a decade with national and global economies in ruins. A generation that grew up believing that the world was their oyster is now faced with the same reality that my generation knew growing up: that we would likely be worse off than our parents. I see little to correct this condition and much to be worried about.

Gopal Balakshrishan predicts that the future global economy will be a stationary state, a long-term stagnation akin to that which we experienced in the 1970s and 1980s. China will start slowing. The United States, EU, the Mideast and East Asia will all make up a low growth block, a slowly decaying imperium. India, together with parts of Africa and South America, will be on the rise. To be clear: the very worst thing that could happen is that we would see otherwise. If another bubble forms—in carbon trading or infrastructure for example—watch out. Under network culture, capitalism and finance have parted ways. Hardt and Negri are right: our economy is immaterial now, but that immateriality is not the immateriality of Apple Computer, Google, or Facebook, it's the immateriality of Goldman Sachs and AIG. Whereas under traditional forms of capitalism the stock market was meant to produce returns on investment, a relationship summed up in Marx's equation M-C-M' (where M is money, C is a commodity produced with the money, and M' is money plus surplus value), the financial market now seems to operate under the scheme of M-M' (see Jeffrey Nealon's brilliant Foucault Beyond Foucault). Surplus value is the product of speculation.

There's every chance that I have little idea to what lengths the financial powers will go to continue this condition. After all, I would have said that we should have had a lengthy recession following the dot.com boom and we didn't. Still, the Dow Jones, NASDAQ, house prices (measured in real dollars), and salaries all went down over the course of the decade, so it's plausible to say that for the most part, the economy was a shambles.

Climate change will become more widely accepted as corporations realize that it can lead to consumption and profits when little else can. If we are unlucky, the green "movement" will become a boom. We will finally realize that peak oil has past, perhaps around 2006. Climate change will be very real. It will not be as apocalyptic as some have predicted, but major changes will be in the works. We should expect more major natural disasters, including a tragic toll on human life.   

Populations will be aging worldwide during the next decade and baby boomers will be pulling more money out of their retirement accounts to cover their expenses. At the same time, younger people will find it harder to get a job as the de facto retirement age rises well into the seventies, even the eighties. A greater divide will open up between three classes. At the top, the super-rich will continue controlling national policies and will have the luxury of living in late Roman splendor. A new "upper middle" class will emerge among those who were lucky enough to accumulate some serious cash during the glory days. Below that will come the masses, impossibly in debt from credit cards, college educations, medical bills and nursing home bills for their parents but unable to find jobs that can do anything to pull them out of the mire. The rifts between all three classes will grow, but it's the one between the upper middle class (notice there is no lower middle class anymore) and the new proles that will be the greatest. This is where social unrest will come from, but right now it seems more likely to be from the Right than the Left. Still, there's always hope.

Speaking of hope, if things go right, governments will turn away from get-rich-quick schemes like "creative cities" or speculative financial schemes and instead find ways to build long-term strategies for resurrecting manufacturing. It will be a painful period of restructuring for the creative industries. Old media, the arts, finance, law, advertising, and so on will suffer greatly. Digital media will continue to be a relatively smart choice for a career, even as it becomes more mainstreamed into other professions. For example, it will become as common in schools of architecture to study the design of media environments as it is now to study housing. We will see a rise of cottage industries in developing nations as individuals in their garages will realize that they can produce things with the means of production at hand. Think of eBay and Etsy, but on a greater scale. National health insurance in the US will help in this respect, as it will remove individuals from the need to work for large corporations. But all will not be roses in the world of desktop manufacture. Toxicity caused by garage operations will be a matter of contention in many communities.

Some cities are simply doomed, but if we're lucky, some leaders will turn to intelligent ways of dealing with this condition. To me, the idea of building the world's largest urban farm in Detroit sounds smart. Look for some of these cities—Buffalo maybe?—to follow Berlin's path and become some of the most interesting places to live in the country. If artists and bohemians are finding it impossible to live in places like New York, San Francisco or Los Angeles anymore, they may well turn elsewhere, to the boon of cities formerly in decline. The hippest places to live will no longer be New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco. The move toward smaller cities—remember Athens, Georgia, Austin, Texas and Seattle?—will explode in this decade as the over-capitalized major cities will face crises. But to be clear, this is an inversion from the model of the creative city. These cities will not see real estate values increase greatly. The new classes populating them will not be rich, but rather will turn to a of new DIY bohemianism, cultivating gardens, joining with neighbors communally and building vibrant cultural scenes.

With the death of creative cities, planners will also have to turn toward regions. As jobs continue to empty out, city cores will also see a decline in their fortunes. Eventually, this may resurrect places like New York and San Francisco as interesting places to live in again, but for now, it will cause a crisis. Smart city leaders will form alliances with heads of suburban communities to force greater regional planning than ever before. This will be the decade of the suburbs. We began the last decade with over 50% of the world's population living in urban areas. I predict that by the end of the next decade over 50% of the world's population will live in suburban areas. This isn't just Westchester and Rancho Palos Verdes but rather Garfield, New Jersey and East Los Angeles. Worldwide, it will include the banlieues and the shantytowns. Ending the anti-suburban rhetoric is critical for planners. Instead, we'll be asking how to make suburbs better while boosting the city core. Suburbs may become the models for cities as the focus turns toward devolving government toward local levels, even as tax revenue will be shared across broad regions.

Urban farming will come to the fore and community-supported agriculture will become widespread. This won't just be a movement among the hipster rich. It will spread to the immigrant poor who will realize that they can eat better, healthier, and cheaper by working with members of their immigrant community running farms inside and outside the city instead of shopping at the local supermarket. A few smart mayors will realize that cities in decline need community gardens and these will thrive. The rising cost of long-distance transportation due to the continued decline of infrastructure and peak oil will go a long way toward fostering this new localism.

The divisions in politics will grow. By the end of the decade, the polarization within countries will drive toward hyper-localism. Nonpartisan commissions will study the devolution of power to local governments in areas of education, individual rights (abortion will be illegal in many states, guns in many others), the environment, and so on. In many states gay rights will become accepted, in others, homosexuality may become illegal again. Slowly talk will start on both sides about the US moving toward the model of the EU. Conservatives may drive this initially and the Left will pick it up. In that case, I'm moving to Vermont, no question.

Architects will turn away from starchitecture. Thoughtful books, videos, and Web sites on the field will grow. Parametric modeling will go urban, looking toward GIS. Some of those results will be worth talking about. Responsive architecture will become accepted into the profession as will the idea of architects incorporating interfaces—and interface design—into their work.

In technology, the introduction of the Apple iSlate will make a huge difference in how we view tablets. It will not save media, but it will allow us to interface with it in a new way. eBooks will take hold, as will eBook piracy. Apple itself will suffer as its attempts to make the iSlate a closed platform like the iPhone will lead first to hacks and later to a successful challenge on the basis of unfair restraint of trade. A few years after the introduction of the iSlate, an interface between tablets and keyboards will essentially replace notebook computers. Wine will advance to such a point that the distinction between operating systems will begin to blur. In a move that will initially seem puzzling but will then be brilliant, Microsoft will embrace Wine and encourage its production. By the end of the decade, operating systems will be mere flavors.

The Internet of Things will take hold. An open-source based interface will be the default for televisions, refrigerators, cars and so on. Geolocative, augmented-reality games will become popular. Kevin Slavin will be the Time Web site's Man of the Year in 2018. As mobile network usage continues to grow, network neutrality will become more of an issue until a challenger (maybe Google, maybe not) comes to the scene with a huge amount of bandwidth at its disposal. Fears about Google will rise and by the end of the decade, antitrust hearings will be well-advanced.

We will see substantive steps toward artificial intelligence during the decade. HAL won't be talking to us yet, but the advances in computation will make the technology of 2019 seem far, far ahead of where it is now. The laws of physics will take a toll on Moore's Law, slowing the rate of advance but programmers will turn back toward more elegant, efficient code to get more out of existing hardware.

Manned spaceflight will end in the United States, but the EU, China, and Russia will continue to run the International Space Station, even after one or two life- and station-threatening crises onboard. Eventually there will be a world space consortium established, even as commercial suborbital flights go up a few dozen times a year and unmanned probes to Pluto, Mars, Venus and Europa deliver fantastic results. Earth-like planets will be found in other solar systems and there will be tantalizing hints of microscopic life elsewhere in the solar system even as the mystery of why we have found nobody else in the universe grows.

Toward the end of the decade, there will be signs of the end of network culture. It'll have had a good run of 30 years: the length of one generation. It's at that stage that everything solid will melt into air again, but just how, I have no idea.

As I stated at the outset, this is just a game on the blogosphere, something fun to do after a day of skiing with the family. Do pitch in and offer your own suggestions. I'm eager to hear them.

Fellow resident of my adopted hometown of Montclair, NJ and New York Times journalist David Carr has a new piece out yesterday entitled "The Fall and Rise of Media" in which he explores the rapid decline of the (traditional) media industry and makes a case for optimism about new media. It's a good read, take a look.

Carr puts on a brave face as he remind us that all reigns are temporary. The media jobs being swept away are positions that were obsolete years ago, he suggests, all but invoking Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” as an up side to the devastation that media outlets face today. As historian Jackson Lears reminds us in his latest book, Rebirth of a Nation, Americans have a longstanding fascination with the idea of rebirth and our own era is hardly immune to.

This struck a chord for me this morning as I had just finished watching the third season of Mad Men last night* and wondered about the show's future. (spoiler alert!) With the end of the old firm that the Mad Men worked for, would the new firm they would build be nimble and intelligent, able to embrace the changing terrain of the 1960s, a diabolical player in an alternate universe version of Thomas Frank's The Conquest of Cool? Or is it destined to be wiped out by the juggernaut of sociocultural change that comprises the mid and late 1960s the way Philip Johnson was, at least for a decade? In the atemporal world of network culture, we often forget how commonly we still look backward to find reference points for transformations in the contemporary world. Here I’d identify the popularity of Mad Men today. It offers us a glimpse at a moment of massive, societal transformation, as a relatively comfortable came unglued. Perhaps four decades from now we'll see a remake of Mad Men set at the New York Times, or at a dot.com corporation. Certainly, it would lack well-designed furniture and well-cut suits, but so it goes.

In his article, Carr points to a new generation of under-30 journalists armed with netbooks, wireless connections, and visions of reshaping their world. Let's hope so. The dinosaurs were dinosaurs not only because of their attitude and their budgets, but also because of the poverty, our worse yet, the outright fiction, of their reportage (no disrespect to David, but the Times itself often led the way with this: Judith Miller anyone?). No question, it’s high time to renew media. Already the architectural blogosphere is smarter, sharper, and more critical than newspaper critics have been in decades.

But there's also much to dread and not just for the dinosaurs. Rarely do things go back to normal after a serious downturn. Economic regimes undergo radical changes during recessions, often even more dramatic than during boom times when excess liquidity keeps the status quo well lubricated. 

What we're seeing now, then, isn’t just the disappearance of some crufty old salts from journalism, but rather the restructuring of the creative class. Media is very much at the forefront of this. Faced by the perfect storm of a collapsing subscription base and the decline of the advertising dollar, media corporations have figured out that the losses of income are permanent and made cuts accordingly.

In contrast, architects are flailing about. This doesn’t mean that job losses in the profession haven’t been massive, but the profession has done little to rethink how it operates. There’s little question that we won’t see another building boom the size of the one we just witnessed again in our lifetime (nor do I wish it: there's only so much economic destabilization we can take!). The downsizing is going to be permanent. The result will be heady competition between young unemployed veterans with serious job experience after a few years in the job force and a corps of new graduates trained in new skills that even those who graduated five years ago don't have. If my readers want to see me as a pessimist, that's fine, chalk up my position to a refusal to buy Prozac, but I’ve lived through enough recessions to know that the last few years were a huge anomaly and there’s a price to be paid for the excesses.

Beyond the collapse of the media sector, the very core of the contemporary upper middle class—jobs in media, advertising, real estate, finance, law and other services—faces evisceration, and may well follow the lower middle class into extinction over the course of the next decade. Those jobs are gone now and with them a host of possible commissions for architects. More than that, since the Obama administration’s greatest accomplishment seems to be to have unloaded the word “hope” of any meaning, at this point it seems likely that the shift rightward during the next elections will ensure that cities are deprived of the funding necessary to keep them afloat. Fade back to Mad Men and the early 1960s. It’s at this moment that New York takes a turning point and Mayor Robert F. Wagner sees his city entering into a multi-decade fiscal crisis from which it barely recovered.

Decades from now, will the monuments of the last decade—sadly much inferior to the monuments of the 1950s (where, after all, is our Seagram or Lever? The Standard? Magnolia Bakery maybe?)—remind us of the last days of the Creative Class and the hipster city? In 2029 will Sex in the City be as anachronistic in its depiction of the city as a thriving place for young people, just as Breakfast at Tiffany’s was in 1979?

Or is it possible that somehow the Obama administration will wise up? That he’ll take a cue from Harvard and fire Larry Summers together with the investment bankers that have infected the Cabinet, and insist that America not only has a public option for health insurance but that we’re going to rebuild manufacturing, in some smart, as yet unforeseen way? Heck, maybe the multitude will throw off its shackles and we’ll all live in a Shangri-La of post-Marxist immaterial culture. 

One thing’s for sure, though. We’re not going back to 2002. Time will tell who succeeds in navigating through it as individuals, nations, and worlds.  

   
*In general, I don't have the time to ever watch shows when they first come out so I watch them time-shifted, either on my pitifully small Verizon DVR or on my AppleTV,  Roku box, or sometimes even via Blu-Ray disc from Netflix. I point this out since I want to hammer home how media consumption habits are changing. It's particularly interesting watching my children, who have never known a world without on-demand or, for that matter, full-time PBS Kids Sprout.
 

Richard Florida has a piece in the March 2009 Atlantic, How the Crash Will Reshape America. Readers will not be surprised to hear that there's a lot to disagree with in the piece, particularly Florida's continued support of his notion of the creative class, then again, the idea his bread and butter so of course he's going to tout it. 

Florida suggests that the creative class® is still going to be a mainstay for cities, but we'll see otherwise. I am now predicting a major newspaper closing within months, not by the end of the year and I think there's a very strong likelihood that the Times itself won't stay in print for long, except maybe as some kind of Sunday morning rip-off of Monocle: news subsidized by fashion and style (this is actually the Times now, but think of the whole paper in the magazine). The music industry has been bleeding like a stuck pig for years and there's only so much blood left. Hollywood is going to continue its dance of death, surviving for the moment, although worse off that before. I expect that the next economic crisis will take it down as well. Hipsters have managed the illusion of living without any means of financial sustenance for a while. Now we get to see them do it for real. Florida's creative class is hardly well. For all of the excitement about amateur-generated content, it is hard to see how it can be monetized. Between the crisis in overproduction of cultural goods that marks network culture and the free availability of amateur-generated content, the creative industries are set for a Detroit-style tailspin. Make no mistake, this economic crisis is their first round. 

Similarly, Florida's prediction that financial centers will continue to dominate is questionable. I won't outrightly say that he's wrong, since my research doesn't confirm this yet, but the financial collapse is also a transition. Nobody is going to trust the friendly face of their doe-eyed real estate broker, banker, or financial advisor anymore. These jobs, along with a similar array of positions in the financial sector, will be streamlined out of existence. Over 50,000 jobs in lower Manhattan are history and I suspect we'll see double that before the crisis is over. Where will these freshly-minted MBAs go? Here Florida is right: there were plenty of financial industry jobs in peripheral places in Middle America and as those have evaporated, the MBAs won't be able to find easy jobs back home, unless they are good with the topless dancing. 

This is a central problem with the creative class: it doesn't really exist and it never did. On the contrary, the creative class was a place in which the financial sector could hide itself. Take a look at Kevin Phillips's Bad Money for the real story. It was finance, e.g. the bubble economy, that dominated the American economy since the 1980s. Like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, the financial sector liked to surround itself with the trappings of the creative class and saw itself as creative. Moreover, with the massive cuts in taxes at the top brackets over the last thirty years, living in cities and consuming culture like mad was something the financial industry did, but this is hardly the same as suggesting, as Florida does, that creative professionals have much say in the economy.

When I was growing up in rural Western Massachusetts, the local General Electric plant was shedding jobs. My friends in high school saw themselves as "burnouts," understanding that before they even held a job, any dreams of a well-paying life in industry were gone. Finance and the creative class will now follow in their wake. Sadly there isn't a whole lot left to replace them and as I've already stated, infrastructure is hardly being funded in Obama's stimulus plan. Why do people continue to think it is? It baffles me.   

I'll agree with Florida when he observes that the early predictions this crisis would undo the United States were self-serving. On the contrary, other countries are suffering much harder and will continue to suffer much harder. For all the blather about the problems in the United States, the country has massive resources and Americans work harder and absorb immigration (and thereby cheap labor, new talent, and global connections) more readily than any other country. Speculation was as crazy, if not crazier, in the EU and Asia than in the US. Americans didn't build Dubai or CCTV. A quick check: is real estate in your city more expensive than in New York? If you aren't in a global city (I'd include London, Tokyo, and Hong Kong), then you're doomed. This is not to say that real estate in those cities isn't going to collapse, but it is to say that real estate in countries on the periphery of Europe will likely never recover to its pre-bust levels. 

Florida is also right that we should give up homeownership in favor of rentals. Obama needs to roll back laws, enacted decades ago, that favor new rental construction and encourage landlords to find ways to profit with existing apartment buildings while maintaining them in good condition. Nurturing an older housing stock in cities would keep labor costs down by making it easier for employees to live near their workplaces, encourage economic and ethnic diversity, and discourage commuting long distances. These are all vital things and they have been lost in the reshaping of American cities to serve Florida's creative class (e.g. the financial sector in hipster clothes). I am not referring to section 8 housing here. There is room for that, but there is also a need for housing for the working class and we have abandoned that wholesale in search of easy profits.      

He's also right about foreclosures. We need to find gentle ways to reduce the prices of real estate by another 20 to 30% and not prop it up artificially. I don't like the idea of subsidizing housing for former homeowners (this also undoes the support for landlords I mention above), but prices need to drop and drop fast.  

I have problems with even the cautious optimism at the end of the article. We've reached a heat-death within capitalism. The ponzi scheme shuffled around for so long and took so many people's money that we've exhausted any possible economic growth that the biggest technological advance in this generation, network convergence, offered us. Finding ways to make a profit in this economy may be possible on an individual level, but I am not confident that growth can be stimulated again on a worldwide level. Both in this country and elsewhere, a lot of people who made poor job choices are going to have to find other ways to make a living besides finance and they'll have to do it back home, in the same places that have been depopulating for years since that is where housing is cheapest. Am I optimistic? No, not at all. Too bad Starbucks isn't hiring much these days.    

®creative class is a registered trademark of the Creative Class Group LTD, global services advisory firm founded by Richard Florida.

Yule Heibel passed a link to Obama talking about cities after being given a copy of Death and Life of American Cities by Jane Jacobs over Twitter the other day. 

I retweeted it, prompting the following thoughtful e-mail from Derek Lindner. 

To Obama's credit, the video shows that he has familiarity with Jacobs, and by referencing 'all the studies' (or some such thing) he shows that he is up on more recent theories of urban planning, though what those are we don't know (Biden, OTOH, is flipping through the book in the background looking as though it's in Urdu.)  Of course Obama's does nothing to let the man giving him the book realize that he's just insulted Obama's intelligence, as if he'd just been handed, say, Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom (1962) as a presidential primer on economics. 

The depressing thing is that no one else realizes Obama's just been insulted, because the level of maturity of the discourse in general on the topic is so low. No one expects the president to know any better than Jacobs (or, apparently, to even know Jacobs, for that matter).

I'm hopeful that with Obama in office the level of public discourse will rise significantly, but I'm a bit nervous as to what might happen with the federal govt taking a larger role in urban planning policy at a national scale. Some high-level vision might be welcome--after seeing New Orleans' planning process first hand, I'm not a strong advocate of bottom-up planning methodologies--but look at what central banking has done for our economy lately. Perhaps its better to let some decisions be made locally? 

Hm, I'd like to see your top five list of things Obama should do regarding urban planning policy. 

d

That's my hope too, Derek. 

First of all, Jane Jacobs is a neoliberal (and Banham isn't that far off too). Her faith in the spontaneous social order of the city led us right to the current mess, in which doe-eyed real estate developers took up the life that she found so appealing and sold it as spectacle, only to wind up choking the life out of it. Have you been to the Village lately? There's no there, there, although they have Anthropologie.

Second, Obama is clearly above it all. He's appealing to a crowd in Toledo, a city which is too peripheral to be in the global order of things and for which the promised Bilbao-effect of the Sejima glass pavilion isn't going to pan out (I went there last year, it was ho-hum…in contrast, the old museum building captivated, especially a great show of work by David Macauley). Still, he points out that you can't separate cities from the metropolitan regions they are in. Jacobs is still very much part of the crowd that favors a division between the city and the suburb. It's funny that as I was taking Amtrak back from Philadelphia to Jersey today, I thought of a more lasting, if lesser known, to the field of urban studies, Jean Gottmann's Megalopolis, published in the same year as Jacobs's book. In the video Obama is on Gottmann's side, not Jacobs's:

We must abandon the idea of the city as a tightly settled and organized unit in which people, activities, and riches are crowded into a very small area clearly separated from its nonurban surroundings. Every city in this region spreads out far and wide around its original nucleus; it grows amidst an irregularly colloidal mixture of rural and suburban landscapes; it melts on broad fronts with other mixtures, of somewhat similar though different texture, belonging to the suburban neighborhoods of other cities. (Gottmann, 5)

Moreover, I suspect Obama, or at least his advisors, have read and absorbed much more cutting edge material. Certainly Bill Bishop's The Big Sort seems like a blueprint for how Obama won the election. I'm hoping he's reading stuff by the Metropolitan Institute at Virginian Tech, which to my mind consistently does the most interesting work on cities out there. It would also be great to hear that Obama had read some Stephen Graham and certainly, as a cautionary measure, Rebecca Solnit's Hollow City. I'm a little bit scared, however, by the comment about Chicago. Certainly its doing well, but are the Richard Florida/Bilbao-Effect model that drove that metropolis is finished. We'll see, I guess.

As for my recommendations for what Obama should do with cities, they're on their way, really they are. 

Readers of this blog will be familiar with my concerns about today's urban boosterism. Many american cities, we are told, are in a new golden age, witnessing an influx of trendy architecture, trendy stores, trendy people, and trendy ideas. Suburbs are the (not-so-)new evil, ungreen, untrendy, unloved by academics. 

But what's really happening is a fundamental shift in the city that makes burb-bashing (of this sort, for example) increasingly questionable.

Some strange things are afoot. First, there is an overall demographic trend of the middle class moving out of the cities. See Michael Barone's The Realignment of America in the Wall Street Journal for more. White flight takes place on a country-wide level as middle-class whites (and middle class African Americans too) move out of coastal cities such as New York or Los Angeles (yes, this is happening, please pay attention) to interior megalopolises. Much of this is happening at a metropolitan scale. In other words, many of these people are moving out of suburbs in coastal cities to suburbs in the interior megalpolises (what you thought that the kids who grew up in the Valley were all in Silver Lake now?).

Something else is happening within major metropolitan regions such as Chicago, San Francisco, and New York. In these places, for the first time in many decades, white flight has virtually stopped or even reversed itself. See this article on The End of White Flight by Conor Dougherty, again from the WSJ. Instead of undoing segregation, we are seeing a new condition. Forced out by rising rents, taxes, and the cost of living, poor African Americans as well as immigrants are moving out of cities to older inner suburbs (often left by the white middle class moving to the country's interior). Being smaller, these impoverished suburbs have little political clout and even less revenue for schools or services. A downward spiral begins.

Are cities so great today? We hear a lot about how cities are diverse and suburbs are not, but what is diverse about fancy boutiques selling doggie clothes and organic take out? Does your neighbor from Switzerland who speaks better English than you do and lives off a trust fund make it diverse?

I'm not so easily convinced. I lived my first twelve years in a neighborhood in Chicago that was diverse. There were poor African American families, middle class whites, weird bohemian artist Eastern European refugee families (mine, and the only one in that area), Mexican families, Jewish survivors of World War II Germany, Greeks, gays, Indians, and many others. There was even one rich family. They lived in a penthouse on top of a residential hotel across the street. Urban homesteaders seemed like part of the diversity. They were not. In the decades after we left, that neighborhood got turned into yet another unaffordable hipster heaven. That kind of experience seems increasingly uncommon in cities today.

So a call to action for urban planners and writers about cities. Stop with the Jane Jacobs already! It's been nearly 50 years since she formulated her theories. 50 years!!! Everything has changed since. And through away your Situationists. Their corpses have long since been infected by hipster real estate agents.

Let's take a cold, hard look at cities and suburbs as they are today.