Skyscrapin' Knees

Taking on non-place and the death of the Rust Belt in "The New, Improved? Rust Belt," my latest for @newgeography :http://ow.ly/KfDJu

There is no longer a Rust Belt. It melted into air. The decline of manufacturing, the vacancy of the immense, industrial structures that once defined the productive capacities and vibrant lives of so many pockmarked towns, the dwindling of social capital—all the prognosticators writing the obituaries for these dead geographies were right.

Unheralded classic by Donova.

Given their wild variances in geographic size, why is it that we use population as a metric to gauge the health of cities? What would happen to population numbers - and the perception of place - if all cities were the same geographic size?

These are consumptive geographies, wherein authenticity is commoditized and reduced to an amenity. These geographies are the spatial equivalent of a reproduction, echoing Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” wherein the cityscape, while flavored by nostalgia for a past never experienced by its purveyors or consumers, is “lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”

Should baseball players be making more?

According to Craig Calcaterra, it's an easy yes.

"... baseball as an industry brought in a record $8 billion+ last year, meaning player salaries are around 43% of revenues. Which seems high — depending on the industry, labor usually costs anywhere between 10 and 30 percent of revenues — but shouldn’t be all that surprising considering that in baseball, labor and the product being sold is one and the same. Indeed, the ballplayers and the games they play are the only reason the owners make that $8 billion. They are not a mere input to a more valuable finished product. The owners are not fabricating sheet metal before they can sell their product and stuff."

It's hard not to see Calcaterra's logic. As both labor and product, ballplayers are, viewed through Marx's lens of Entfremdung, more and less alienated from their labor than others.

In one sense, ballplayers don't fit in nicely with Marx's postulate that "Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not," as their performance is the end product of production. In another sense, as a member of a team, their individual production is collectively bundled with other individual production as a privately held commodity by the owners.