Cities and Nature

Olpadwala and Goldsmith make a number of compelling points in their article "Sustainability of Privilege", especially on the systemic problems present in the social layer of Commoner's 'onion' (attempt at an illustration below). In Commoner's model, ideally, the importance of the natural world should be taken into account by each consecutive layer, thus sustaining the natural core. However, because the relationships are inverted in reality, the social and political layer is self-serving, leading us in the wrong direction with economic goals that create unsustainable technologies and degrade the ecosystem. Negative behaviours such as excess consumption are driven by social norms, which perpetuate environmental damage. The authors write, "no genuine attenuation of environmental damage is possible without corresponding social change", arguing that structural and systemic barriers must be removed in order for localised, grassroots change to take root. Historical precedent shows times when the problems of the present seemed insurmountable, such as the Urban Manure Problem predicted in 1894 or the fear of running out of coal. It’s hard not to see the problems of today as truly insurmountable compared to those of the past, though, considering that our social norm demands consumption at a scale never before seen. In addition to grassroots change in consumption patterns, it is also necessary to solve much larger, macro-level problems, especially concerning energy and emissions. The authors quote the idea that one way to deal with environmental degradation is to convince the rich that it is in their own self interest to change things. How depressing this sounds! I prefer economic approaches that influence human behavior, such as high gas prices and carbon taxes. This is an effective way for the social and political system to better orient the inner layers of Commoner's onion towards nature (though the political will required to implement such policies could itself be seen as an insurmountable problem of the present).

Urban space and culture

I really enjoyed Markusen and Schrock this week. For all the focus planners may place on getting a particular big business into town, it is easy to lose sight of how that business will impact on re-spending within a city, and thus growth, over the long term (for example, Walmart may employ local people, but they will have incentives to spend their income inside Walmart, which sends money outside the city). I live in a city that is replete with "Buy Local! It makes a difference" signs and the sheer volume of the signs, I have to admit, made me cynical - I will be happy to support local businesses if they sell products I want, but I do not want to feel obliged to spend locally to prop up businesses whose value lies only in their localness. This article made me rethink the idea that local-orientation is far more complex than the parochial exercise I had taken it for. The ideas about worker location as just as important (if not more so) than industrial location particularly resonates. I often wonder how a certain New York glass company will attract the best and the brightest young workers to a relatively remote upstate New York location in the long term, particularly considering that young  technology professionals - at least according to Florida's analysis - tend to concentrate in metro areas that rate highly as centers of diversity and creativity.

Political Agglomerations

Holston and Appadurai's article is dated. It's difficult to read a 1990 article from the perspective of immigration policy of the Western world as it stands in 2013 without a very large grain of salt! The distinction between "formal" and "substantive" citizenship (the former to mean a certificate and the latter a series of rights a person exercises on a daily basis), is interesting, but I think the authors are speaking far too generally and make no compelling argument linking cities and citizenship. It is not at all true to say that "legally resident noncitizens, and even legally resident ones, often possess virtually identical socio-economic and civil rights as citizens". I have been an immigrant in the UK, and now the US, since 2007, and in neither country have I had "virtually identical" rights as citizens. In the UK I had access to healthcare and I had the right to work (and occasionally even vote), but I had no recourse to public funds should I become unemployed, even though I was contributing taxes. In the US, I was not allowed to work at all when I first arrived as an H-4 dependent. Many people who are US residents, but not citizens, may have different rights to members of their own family. As visa systems crack down on even middle class skilled workers, citizenship is very highly sought after. The relationship the authors try to illustrate between citizenship and the city is awkward in this reading -at the same time the authors argue for a citizenship based on a more localized scale, their article is not anchored enough to make this argument compelling - referencing such disparate cities as London, Los Angeles, Sao Paulo, Paris, Bombay. The claim that the urban poor unite to fight for rights to the city contradicts Davis' argument in "Slums" that one of the major problems with the growth of informal settlements is the inability for urban fringe dwellers to coordinate collective action, in contrast to the urban center dwellers of previous eras.

Contested Cities

David Harvey asks, “why is it that we tend to think of the built environment of cities as somehow or other not being the environment? Where did that separation come from?” This is an excellent question. In a similar vein, I want to ask why we think of homeless people or ‘anti-social behavior’ is seen as somehow not belonging to the city. Ten years ago I was living in Elizabeth Bay, the densest suburb in Sydney, historically populated by single working women who occupied studio apartments in buildings now highly prized for their Art Deco features. Elizabeth Bay borders Sydney’s red light district, Kings Cross. Shortly after I moved there, the City embarked on a major upgrade project in the area. Brick sidewalks were replaced with high-grade granite and peppered with brass plaques commemorating Kings Cross’s colorful history. Well before I decided to study planning, the newly-installed exclusionary seating (with the third armrest) made me deeply uneasy. The area was famous for its ‘seediness’ and street life, yet the new development was excluding the very people that gave the area its identity at the same time it celebrated the area’s notoriety. Whilst the area has gentrified rapidly since, the homeless population has not entirely dissipated - instead, a smaller population has concentrated along the granite street. I’m pleased that King’s Cross has not completely lost its grit, even despite the decade-old high grade polishing which shows that exclusionary measures aren’t always successful, I think to the area’s benefit.

(An aside)

An article in today's paper sums up the first half of this class nicely. It is the tale of two tire factories in France, one doomed to failure due to a powerful union who will not agree to conditions designed to make the plant more competitive, the other with a future because its workforce is more amenable to change. The prevalent theme: a European country trying to save its industrial base in the face of global economic forces that necessitate massive increases in efficiency (car sales in Europe are the lowest in 20 years) and flexible workers; an objective at odds with a labor force used to the generous conditions of the welfare state. In the context of the theory we have been reading, this story feels like a clash of centuries: the union workers symbolising mid-20th fordism, the restructuring factory acknowledging the reality of 21st century neoliberalism and the global market. I enjoy the juxtaposition of this sad tale of the economic reality of globalisation with an advertisement for a luxury hotel in Miami, the page as a whole symbolising the inequalities created by capitalism on a global scale.

Segregation, Disinvestment and Decline

Now that we are in a century of unprecedented urbanization, much of the literature related to cities, makes use of the phrase "if present trends continue". For example, "if present trends continue, sometime early next century more than half of the world's population will be classified as urban rather than rural" (David Harvey, writing in 1997). This prediction proved to be accurate. Hollander and Nemeth discuss the forces behind population decline, which variously include globalisation, suburbanization and the natural economic cycle. I’m particularly interested in the cyclical idea. Though there is little doubt that Detroit is a shrinking city, it has been a shrinking city for over half a century now. Though the future certainly does look bleak if present trends continue, there are many examples of cities that have turned around despite similarly bleak predictions, such as Seattle thanks to a whim of Bill Gates. If we had a crystal ball to look into future of rust belt cities, I wonder whether the first nature advantages that became redundant in the 20th Century might prove to be drawcards once more, as climate change threatens powerful coastal cities such as New York. It is important to remember that whilst Detroit may be shrinking, it is also persisting.

Megacities and Cities of Slums

Mike Davis argues that, in many parts of the world, the absence of large-scale infrastructure projects, suburbia, or powerful manufacturing sectors has forced large swathes of the population into poverty. With the American frontier long closed and postwar waves of migration a relic of the 1950s, in the 21st Century the job of absorbing the excess labor of capitalism has fallen to largely peripheral informal settlements. Furthermore, as Davis points out, “today[’s] surplus labor … faces unprecedented barriers - a literal ‘great wall of high tech border enforcement - blocking large-scale migration to the rich countries.” As the UN’s 2003 report Slums concludes, the insurmountable problems of the Third World have largely been created by the First, through SAP policies that ground economies and public services to a halt. Now, despite a context of drastically decreased worldwide labor mobility, even those who are able to travel to the world’s global cities find the doors to work increasingly closed. Those who manage to defy border controls must eke out a living in the informal economy and live in fear of deportation. Reality TV shows in the UK, US and Australia trivialise the encounters between border control staff and people attempting to enter illegally, where the implied hero is the border control officer and the villain the refugee. Considering the history of First World economic policies that have created this situation, a more truthful representation would see these roles reversed.