panopticonopolis

Peter Kropotkin (is such a mighty beard required of all anarchists?) regales us with a sentiment that rings just as true today as it did in 1885:

So the three presidential debates have gone by and nary a mention of cities. Actually, this isn't quite true - during the final throwdown, Mitt Romney mentioned that there were a lot of Chinese moving into cities. Chinese cities, that is. So I suppose American cities still came out 0-3 here.

Is this a big deal? It's obviously ironic, considering where the debates occurred: Denver, Long Island and Boca Raton. Perhaps not our finest urban foot forward, but at the same time the debates didn't occur in assorted cornfields, either. There has been plenty of hand-wringing in urbanist circles about this omission, though. Writing in New American City, Matt Bevilacqua is generally upset at the cold shoulder, while Kevin Baker of the New York Times took the opportunity to write a more partisan shakedown, accusing the Republican Party of not only lacking an urban policy, but of abdicating outreach to these voters for, well, generations now (Clyde Haberman having tested the waters for him a few days earlier). Finally, Curtis Johnson opined in citiwire.net:

How can anyone not see that the United States today is largely a mash-up of metro economies? How does any serious candidate for our highest office run around, or against, this reality? But listen carefully to the debates, read the press reports, analyze the spin of campaign artists. You’ll discover almost no mention of urban areas. It’s as if this reality is invisible, or if seen at all, irrelevant.

This brings to mind one of the great Oscar Wilde quotes, “There is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” Sure, one could argue that the candidates really wanted to talk about cities, but because our blessed Electoral College skews political influence towards the rural states, any candidate mentions urban areas to his or her peril. On the face of it, who can blame urbanists around the country for being miffed?

Well, I for one am relieved. Simply put, what good would have come of it? The debates are a dog-and-pony show, and while it might sound tempting to hear your work and/or passion brought up in such an exalted forum, would anyone have said anything substantive? It’s likely that any talk of US cities would have been folded into the larger rhetorical currents of jobs, economy and “freedom,” whatever that last item is. Certainly, in a forum whose most significant soundbites have emerged, respectively or together, as “Big Bird,” “binders full of women” and “horses and bayonets,” to expect nuance or engagement of the kind that urbanists value is a bit naive.

Perhaps then it’s more important, relatively speaking, to see whether cities make it into the platforms of the respective parties. Kevin Baker fillets the GOP here as well:

The party platform ratified [in Tampa] is over 31,000 words long. It includes subsections on myriad pressing topics, like “Restructuring the U.S. Postal Service for the Twenty-First Century” and “American Sovereignty in U.S. Courts,” which features a full-throated denunciation of the “unreasonable extension” of the Lacey Act of 1900 (please don’t ask). There are also passages specifying what our national policy should be all over the world — but not in one American city.

The Democratic party comes off a bit better, with several paragraphs recognizing the importance of cities, and a bit of lip service around the party's efforts to make them more inclusive places. However, conventions have long since ceased to be the crucibles in which platforms are forged (Baudrillard had this nailed by the 1980s), and the content of the platforms is now largely dictated by the party's nominee. So I think we can discount the importance of these documents with a certain degree of confidence.

So what is the rightful place of cities in the national political conversation? I would argue, given the current polarization and paralysis, none at all, or perhaps more diplomatically, as little as possible. Benjamin Barber, speaking at the Long Now Foundation in anticipation of his forthcoming book, If Mayors Ruled The World, makes the case:

Nation-states have made little progress towards this kind of global governance…they are quintessentially indisposed to cooperation and incapable of establishing public goods. If mayors ruled the world, [citizens] could participate locally and cooperate globally at the same time… a miracle of civic “glocality” that promises pragmatism before politics, innovation instead of ideology, practical solutions in place of sovereignty’s posturing.

Barber goes on to discuss how his original intention in writing the book was to propose the benefits cities could reap from collaborating directly with one another, but in the course of his research he found that cities were, in fact, already doing precisely this, and to great effect. Organizations such as C40, the Conference of Mayors and literally hundreds of others have been able to initiate far-ranging and effective actions without federal or even state-level permission or incentives. They have been able to share best practices for stormwater infrastructure management, inspire each other to implement bike sharing schemes, and even, in a somewhat intimidating display of transterritoriality, commit one another to climate action where nation-states have unconscionably failed. And yes, if one needs further proof of contrast, climate change went unmentioned during the debates as well.

After every encounter with mayors, Barber marveled at their pragmatism and non-partisan approach to matters both significant and quotidian; it didn't mattermuch that picking up the garbage does not lend itself to giddy oratory, it had to be done, and the cost of not doing it manifests itself swiftly. It is also with a certain approval that he notes that the mayoralty is usually a "terminal elected position," meaning that very few mayors use the position as a springboard for furthering their political careers. (Interestingly, Barber does not mention Tim Campbell's work - perhaps because Campbell has already published?) Is it any wonder, then, that R.T. Rybak, Mayor of Minneapolis, has asserted that "city governments are the last standing functional form of government in the United States and possibly the world"?

Of course, cities are dependent on the surrounding state for plenty: defense, agriculture, infrastructure, etc. Barber is quite aware of this - as a case in point, he cites Norman Mailer’s secession plank when the latter rann for NYC mayor in 1969. And to push the example, New York’s Mayor Bloomberg may have stirred headlines with his ban on plus-size sodas, but “precious little of consequence is fully in the hands of the mayor and City Council. Pick an issue: new stadiums, garbage transfer stations, congestion pricing, development of the World Trade Center site — with all of them, and more, ultimate power rests in Albany. Sometimes a New Yorker has to wonder if the real mayor is named Sheldon Silver.” So there is still plenty of interdependence to go around; no one, it seems fair to say, is about to kick off a modern-day Hanseatic League.

Another way of asking what attention our political parties pay to cities is to wonder, what policies do not affect cities? The answer is, pretty much all of them. Indeed, Harry Moroz, in responding to Kevin Baker, makes precisely this point:

But Republicans already do articulate ideas about education reform, mass transit and innumerable other urban issues. While these may or may not be based on “fantastical theories,” they already compose an urban agenda that advocates less direct federal involvement in cities, that mostly opposes aid for state and local governments, that favors highways over mass transit and that leans heavily on charter schools as educational innovators.

What happens when you build cities to for only one reason, and that reason goes away? What if that city is full of scientists and engineers building nuclear warheads?

As we helplessly hurtle towards the next inflammation of the Olympic Games, some notes on the effects of the Games on the built environment might be in order.

Walking has been much in the news lately, or rather, how little Americans seem to be doing it. It’s obvious that walking is good for individual health, but what should perhaps be even more emphasized is the importance of walking for the overall health of the urban fabric. So, in addition to asking ourselves the question of how we can get people to walk more, we also ought to consider equally beneficial ways for designing the built environment, such that all this walking will bring about a result for society. Walking may be an end in itself, but if it is only considered as such, we forego the opportunity that it is a means as well.

A good statistic can rapidly become the victim of its own success. It's easy to parrot cocktail-party facts such as the contention that more than half of us (whoever 'we' are) now live in cities (whatever a 'city' is). Things get a bit dicier when those same facts are posited as future trends.

Sometimes you have to do everything yourself. Sometimes you just want to. From NPR:

[Marcin] Jakubowski says the experience of making his own tractor transformed him and he set about designing and building affordable alternatives to industrial machines. The documentation and design is made available for free online as part of his Open Source Ecology project.

Jakubowski plans to prototype several dozen machines, including a wind turbine, cement mixer and sawmill. He refers to them collectively as the Global Village Construction Set.

From Londonist:

These delicate paper structures by Matthew Picton, on show now at Sumarria Lunn Gallery, look appealing as a work of art, but also contain hidden layers of meaning. The four panels are representations of Bloomsbury, Clerkenwell (a little dubiously), Waterloo and Southwark. More than that, they are charred to represent damage sustained by these quarters during the Second World War. Picton used official bomb damage maps to accurately scorch his cityscape.

And yet there’s still one more layer. The structures are built from the pages of novels that explore themes of love and criminality during the war. The Waterloo quarter is made from Full Dark House by Londonist favourite Christopher Fowler. Clerkenwell is constructed from The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene. Bloomsbury comprises The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen. And Southwark uses The Very thought of You by Rosie Alison.

People may enjoy talking about driverless cars as the future of urban mobility, but the fact is that tweaking the humble bus and its accompanying infrastructure is pretty much the way forward for right now. This is especially true for the vast emerging cities of the developing world; for example, the benefits for public health can be significant.

David Sucher nails it with a two-image animation that has the laser-guided precision of a Zen koan. Another great addition to the tradition of placemaking. Those of you who are feeling skeptical, please check out the City Comforts site or a sample chapter, or just buy the damn book.

Why does it seem that we are always struggling to keep the art of placemaking from being forgotten? What is it that compels us to ignore these lessons that never go away? That we should be lucky to have people like William Whyte and Christopher Alexander and now David Sucher popping up every once in a while to remind us, but still...

A few nights ago I had the good fortune to catch "The Pruitt-Igoe Myth" at the IFC Center here in New York. The documentary is a fascinating corrective to the assumption that when we talk about failed public housing, we are talking about failed architectural design.

My latest column for 3QuarksDaily begins with the story of Pruitt-Igoe. The narratives and ideologies that are woven around that history are a microcosm of how we choose to perceive architecture, urban planning and public policy during the 20th century. But more interesting is what Pruitt-Igoe can teach us about resilience.

Culture warriors from the 1990s may remember Charles Murray, who rather stirred the pot with The Bell Curve, a highly contentious book co-written with Richard Herrnstein. The authors hypothesized, among other things, that not only intelligence but also its alleged heritability could be measured and used to explain differences in the success of social (or, perhaps, economic and ethnic) groups.* At any rate, Murray, who seems to be a refreshingly damn-the-torpedoes type of fellow, is back with another doozy, this time concerning inequality in America.

The inequality narrative is nothing new, of course. The Economist has been harping on the threat that income inequality poses for years now (I believe that this is due, in no small part, to that publication's consistent undercurrent of Burkean anxiety). in 2009, Emmanuel Saez won the John Bates Clarke medal for illuminating how income inequality is not just increasing but is increasing at faster velocities for the more rarefied strata. And the Russell Sage Foundation recently released a pretty authoritative report on the matter, although I'm sure they won't be the last to do so. And regardless of your opinion of it, the Occupy movement has brought the inequality narrative into the forefront of the "national conversation", if such a thing actually exists.

But Murray is here to tell us that income inequality is just the tip of the iceberg: what we are really faced with is, as he puts it, "cultural inequality." As he writes in a recent Wall Street Journal essay in support of his book, Coming Apart:

And the isolation is only going to get worse. Increasingly, the people who run the country were born into that world. Unlike the typical member of the elite in 1960, they have never known anything but the new upper-class culture. We are now seeing more and more third-generation members of the elite. Not even their grandparents have been able to give them a window into life in the rest of America.

This isn't really all that earthshattering, but Murray introduces a few new angles. The first is his exclusive focus on the white demographic. I will return to the consequences of this choice in a moment, but let's accept that, as seconded by his soft-ball fellow-WSJ reviewer, this was done "to avoid conflating race with class".

The other, more interesting decision is that of a spatial narrative. Coming Apart sets up two opposing geographies: Fishtown is a traditional working class Philadelphia neighborhood, and Belmont an upper-class enclave outside of Boston. From a writerly point of view, it's a great hook on which to hang a story. You would think, then, that Murray would go on to tell the story of how these two communities, while always differentiated by income, initially were not that different in terms of their social, cultural and religious values. Families mingled easily; social disparities were present but not exclusionary. Imagine the mise-en-scène of Terrence Malick's Tree of Life, then spend the next 50 years pulling that neighborhood apart, until you're left with Good Will Hunting on one side of the tracks and Desperate Housewives on the other.

Except that's not what Murray does. While the narrative itself, as constructed by his selection of socio-economic indicators (eg, marriage, education, employment, churchgoing, etc), is fairly unobjectionable, the geography is a fiction. Murray writes:

To be assigned to Belmont, the people in the statistical nationwide databases on which I am drawing must have at least a bachelor's degree and work as a manager, physician, attorney, engineer, architect, scientist, college professor or content producer in the media. To be assigned to Fishtown, they must have no academic degree higher than a high-school diploma. If they work, it must be in a blue-collar job, a low-skill service job such as cashier, or a low-skill white-collar job such as mail clerk or receptionist.

People who qualify for my Belmont constitute about 20% of the white population of the U.S., ages 30 to 49. People who qualify for my Fishtown constitute about 30% of the white population of the U.S., ages 30 to 49.

So, while Fishtown and Belmont are, in fact, real neighborhoods, they have been stuffed with about half of the white population of the United States (ages 30-49). I really don't know what to think of this kind of now-you-see-it-now-you-don't approach. On the one hand, social science, when conducted on such a grand scale, is always challenged to be somewhat abstracted and scalable. Eliminating all kinds of variables to get to the heart of the matter - like controlling for class by disregarding race - is what puts the "science" into "social science". Or so the story goes.

On the other hand, it is intellectually suspect to provoke readers' empathetic responses by intimating a place when you really aren't. The fact is that we are hard-wired to think in terms of place - it is a bit duller to have to prefix every statement with "In the aggregate, white people between the ages of 30 to 49..." On the other hand, it is much more compelling to visualize a single mother, pushing a pram down a Fishtown street.

This is, however, a trivial objection. More seriously, an analysis that is geographically non-specific offers great latitude when positing causes or consequences. You can't - or don't have to - point to the closure of a factory, or the construction of a new office park, as reasons why things do or don't turn out, socially or economically.

To illustrate, let's take up Murray's narrative on his own terms. What, exactly, created this "cultural inequality"? Because he has exonerated himself of geography, Murray can invoke such macro-scale events such as "the rise of the welfare state". In fact, following a serious and credible exposition, Murray trots out exactly these old chestnuts. This lamentation is then followed by a prescription to revive the Senecan virtues, which frankly fizzles into a conservative version of "Be excellent to each other". Really? After all his hard work, that's all we get? At least David Brooks, in his opinion piece on Coming Apart, understands that people sometimes need to be forced to get along:

I doubt Murray would agree, but we need a National Service Program. We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together, if only for a few years. We need a program in which people from both tribes work together to spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement.

Thus we have the stirrings of policy, but policy that is born without context - spatial or otherwise. Such a deracinated recommendation cannot result in anything but a myriad of unintended consequences - a sort of No Class Left Behind. Nor does it seem to fully grasp the forces that are continuing to perpetuate inequality, however you choose to define it. (As an example, please consider Ajay Kapur's concept of "plutonomics", but that is a post for another time).

By the same token, anyone is now just as free to posit his or her own theory of the causation of inequality. As Roger Lowenstein charitably puts it in his review for BusinessWeek, "Hereby a modest proposition is offered: Vastly diverging wages had something to do with it." Thus, from the progressive liberal (and, come to think of it, Austrian) point of view, capitalism did exactly what it is supposed to do. It manufactured more choices for people who could afford to choose, and these choices compounded over the years. Sure, why not? In this frame, Louis CK's take on banks is just as good an explanation as any, and generally more entertaining.

Moreover - and here is the real clincher - this lack of geographic specificity comes back to haunt Murray. It prevents him from discussing how these disparities of wealth have altered the built environment, and this is essential to the hope of understanding a problem that pretty much everyone agrees is serious and sticky. What is the physical difference created by living in an exurban gated community - which, along with shopping malls and widespread car ownership, effectively didn't exist in 1960? It's not like people are unaware of the importance of this. For example, since at least 1989, Evan MacKenzie has been describing the history and consequences of increasingly isolated, self-sufficient and indeed self-governing enclaves.

One simply cannot discuss segregation of either income or culture without asking, What are the consequences of this trend, and what are the perceived costs of reversing it? To be more specific, what needs to be offered to those living in gated communities, such that they will return to more mixed neighborhoods? Put even more bluntly - what's in it for me? Alternatively, in a previous post, I wrote about Kristiaan Borrett and the successful examples of urban design in Antwerp:

Linking spatial policy with social policy is a powerful combination, but how does Borrett define success? Simple: “Success is when people who have the means to live in the suburbs move back into the city.”

Appealing to Senecan virtues - really some kind of daft noblesse oblige - holds little credibility here. The idea of a National Service Program pales in comparison to the power of people acting out of their own self-interest, which, come to think of it, seems to be what conservatives and libertarians like Murray ought to prefer in the first place.

Finally, I want to revisit the demographic question: Why white people? Or rather, What is it that we can learn from just focusing on this demographic? Christopher Chabris, writing some time ago in Commentary about the aftershocks of The Bell Curve, contended that Murray's previous book 

set out to prove that American society was becoming increasingly meritocratic, in the sense that wealth and other positive social outcomes were being distributed more and more according to people's intelligence and less and less according to their social backgrounds. Furthermore, to the extent that intelligence was not subject to easy environmental control, but was instead difficult to modify and even in part inherited, genetic differences among individuals, Herrnstein and Murray posited, would contribute significantly to their futures.

I don't know if Murray is indeed turning his back on the meritocratic argument he made 18 years ago. It doesn't help that he is focusing on a portion of our population that is declining, either. Unless this is his idea of an elegy, the intention behind the choice is far from clear. So I found it compelling that, just yesterday morning, NPR covered a study done by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, itself no shrinking violet when it comes to free-market cheerleading. As NPR reports, Edward Glaeser and Jacob Vigdor

looked at Census figures and found the segregation of African-Americans has reached its lowest point in a century. Fair housing laws allowed African-Americans into white neighborhoods. Black people have moved into suburbs. White people have moved into formerly all-black center city neighborhoods which have gentrified.

To be clear, it's not that racial differences have vanished in American neighborhoods. But the study concludes that entirely white urban neighborhoods, those with exactly zero black residents, have become all but extinct.

Heavens, that sounds like a real spatial analysis. It's messy, not entirely conclusive but thoroughly grounded in some kind of place. But it's not just the Manhattan Institute that is conducting this kind of research. Robert Sampson's new book, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect, demonstrates that place continues to matter. Sampson works through and updates the Chicago School of urban sociology, and demonstrates that the art of understanding space on the neighborhood level is alive and well:

Logic demands that if neighborhoods do not matter and placelessness reigns, then the city is more or less a random swirl. Anyone (or anything) could be here just as easily as there. Identities and inequalities by place should be rapidly interchangeable, the durable inequality of a community rare, and neighborhood effects on both individuals and higher-level social processes should be weak or nonexistent.…

By contrast, the guiding thesis of this book is that differentiation by neighborhood is not only everywhere to be seen, but that it has durable properties—with cultural and social mechanisms of reproduction—and with effects that span a wide variety of social phenomena. Whether it be crime, poverty, child health, protest, leadership networks, civic engagement, home foreclosures, teen births, altruism, mobility flows, collective efficacy, or immigration…the city is ordered by a spatial logic (“placed”) and yields differences as much today as a century ago. The effect of distance is not just geographical but simultaneously social…

The similarity between Sampson's and Murray's indicators is striking, but the difference even more so: these indicators now belong somewhere. Once you abandon place, you cannot reconstitute it. An analysis bereft of place yields facile observations such as the one made by Brooks, in the same Times op-ed piece:

They live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive.

I would very much like Charles Murray to point out exactly what neighborhoods Brooks is talking about. But I doubt that he could; in Murray's world, that bit was left behind long ago.

Update: A friend pointed me to David Frum's long and excellent review of Coming Apart. While Frum - nor, to my knowledge, anyone else - engage the spatial critique I make above, his passionate response addresses many, if not most, other aspects of Murray's frame. And what better choice than a true conservative apostate to wield the axe?

Is Detroit alive or dead? It depends, I suppose, on your viewpoint, or if you're paying attention in the first place. The Times recently posted a brief little docu on scrap metal 'salvagers' in Detroit (or are they thieves? This, too, depends on your point of view). At any rate, it highlighted for me what are two emerging - and competing - narratives of Detroit. These two narratives - I'll call them 'ruin porn' versus 'our very own Berlin' - are interesting for two reasons. The first is that here are contradictory views about the same built environment, which is not that difficult to imagine, since cities can support many seemingly contradictory narratives. The second reason is more interesting, since it provides some insights into how we choose to look at cities.

Detroit's ruin porn narrative has gotten lots of play over the years. I remember the first time I ever heard it, actually - as a punchline in the Kentucky Fried Movie, ca. 1977. Since then, as popular wisdom would have it, Detroit has had plenty of time to maintain this downward trajectory. More recently, one could enjoy a chorus line of photo-essays appealing to our rubbernecking proclivities: please consider the fact that these three books were all published within the span of a year (although I have to ask, where is Robert Polidori when you really need him?).

Add to this the Times's featured doc-let, which is a trailer for a feature-length effort called 'Detropia' recently shown at Sundance (I'm assuming that  'detritus'+'utopia'='Detropia'. Get it? Ok, good). This is dystopia at its finest: when it's not dark, everything is grey, muddy, cold and generally nicely prepped for the end of the world. When they're not pulling down decrepit factories for scrap with badly outclassed pickup trucks, these Detropians are a grumpy, hard-scrabble lot that crack wise while warming themselves by a trash fire. I don't know about the rest of the film, but the city depicted in the trailer is a place where I wouldn't settle for anyone less than Snake Plisskin as my tour guide/security detail. In any case, all our narrative is missing is some Chinese guy in a shiny suit peeling off a few yuan as payment, and we would be all set for globalization's last act.

However, hope springs eternal in the human breast. The other thread is the resurrection narrative, where scrappy Detroiters are rallying around their city. It is interesting to note to what extent this narrative is about food and agriculture. Whereas the 'ruin porn' narrative is about scrap and disassembly, urban resurrection signifies that you've tumbled all the way down Maslow's hierarchy and are starting to claw your way up all over again, which means having a place to sleep and something to eat. This is not a new narrative for Detroit, either. The first time I ever heard of urban agriculture was within the context of Detroit's abandoned lots; this was sometime in 1998. More recently, its boosters have touted Detroit as the first city in the United States with the chance to be completely self-sufficient in terms of food production.

But this latter narrative isn't complete yet - in fact, "our Berlin" passes Go and collects $200 as we jump straight to the arts. It says something about our facile self-regard as a society that the resurrection narrative hopscotches the rest of Maslow and heads straight to becoming the next TriBeCa. After all, this isn't North Korea, now, is it?

I am, of course, being unnecessarily dismissive here. Jane Jacobs wrote of the importance of old building stock as vital capital for new ideas and commerce (187ff). The fact that Detroit has plenty of supply, low density and therefore low rents makes her prescription correct at this moment, even in the eyes of contemporary critics such as Edward Glaeser. And certainly no one disputes that it will take Richard Scarry's full assortment of townspeople to pull off any revitalization. But - and this is the interesting bit - Detroit somehow inspires people to compare it to Berlin. After all, Berlin is flat, spread out, not dense, cheap and therefore full of artists and designers. Both Berlin and Detroit were, in their respective heydays, economic powerhouses and centers of industrial innovation. Moreover, both cities are considered epicenters of techno music. So Detroit must be our Berlin, right?

Not really. This is more of a manifestation of our desire to make sense of our environment by finding patterns where there are none (also known as apophenia, my personal nomination for the word of the year). As Mitch McEwen writes:

If Detroit is being called the next Brooklyn or Berlin, it is possibly because we have not yet sufficiently understood what Brooklyn and Berlin are made of. We have not yet created the terms of assessment, parsed the mechanisms at work, so we must point from one thing to another, like a child calling every dog by the name of the family puppy. "Look, it's another Fido, and another!"

I am finding that urban studies is particularly susceptible to this. For example, the Los Angeles School of urbanism sought to deep-six the older Chicago School by positing the urban form of Los Angeles as the future template for the global city. Indeed, the LA School has gained significant traction, to the point that I have heard Karachi discussed in these terms. Really? Karachi? Fortunately, Martin Murray (whose ideas around "post-modern urban forms" I have touched on here and here) and others have disputed this kind of pattern-making. Each city ought to be understood on its own terms. Does Detroit have something comparable to the institution of the Bundestag, or its Turkish diaspora, let alone the history of a wall literally cleaving the city in half? Does Berlin have decades of white flight, virtually no public transport, or the more-or-less irrevocable fade of its entire industrial raison d'être?

These are a few fundamental differences that I conjured up in about two minutes of lazy thinking. Thus, the problematic around the "comparative" thrust of urban studies can be summed up like this: Does the significance of the similarities outweigh the significance of the differences? It gets even more contentious if we posit that we have identified the right similarities and differences. This matters because when you begin thinking that you know how things compare, you start creating policy, and then you wonder why something that works in one city fails in another (which will be the subject of my next post).

In a thoughtful essay on what living among the ruins of a city like Detroit might truly entail, Jerry Herron writes:

I feel like Gibbon’s Petrarch, then: astonished at the seeming indifference of the local citizenry to Detroit’s monumental fragments, humbled at the discovery that after 30 years in the city I seem to know more about its crumbling relics than the natives do — many of them, at least. But these are not ruins from some distant age; they are distinctly mine; and I find it hard to recover Gibbon’s hearty self-satisfaction at the “supine indifference” of Roman natives. Here in Detroit, the city has been ruined by the same people who still inhabit it. So the question is, who understands better what the place really means: the person who tries to remember it, or the one who lets it go?

Chris Burden (yes, that Chris Burden) has a new installation up at LACMA called Metropolis II, which NPR profiled this past weekend (I assume that it considers itself the self-proclaimed sequel to this Metropolis). Appropriately enough for its location, a significant aspect of the installation is its reliance on car culture - 1,200 zippy, Matchbox-size cars careening across multi-lane highways and city streets at speeds of over 200mph.

You would think that, at such density and speeds, accidents might happen - and they do. In fact, it's one of the points of the installation - there are switches that a human "traffic controller" can throw to stop certain flows, thus averting pileups. There is, of course, the added thrill of wondering if there will be a pile-up during your particular visit: leveraging our attraction to Schadenfreude is a canny trick on Burden's part.