Urban Studies

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“The Extent Of The Plunge In Childbearing Is Startling”

August 12, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The only thing trickier than predicting future population is interpreting what those people will mean for the world and its resources. From Malthus to Ehrlich, population bombs have defused themselves, even proved beneficial. Down deep, most likely think there’s a tipping point, a tragic number, but, of course, development of technologies can rework that math, stretch resources to new lengths. And a larger pool of talent makes it easier to create those new tools.

It would seem to make sense that immigrant nations can ride the wave of fluctuations best, not being dependent on internal fertility numbers. Robotics may reduce that advantage, however. Japan is certainly banking on that transformation.

In a Financial Times piece, Robin Harding writes that fertility seems to be on a steep decline globally, leveling off. If so, the ramifications will be many, including for Labor. The opening:

The extent of the plunge in childbearing is startling. Eighty-three countries containing 46 per cent of the world’s population — including every single country in Europe — now have fertility below replacement rate of about 2.1 births per woman. Another 46 per cent live in countries where the birth rate has fallen sharply. In 48 countries the population will decline between now and 2050.

That leaves just 9 per cent of the world’s population, almost all in Africa, living in nations with pre-industrial fertility rates of five or six children per woman. But even in Africa fertility is starting to dip. In a decade, the UN reckons, there will be just three countries with a fertility rate higher than five: Mali, Niger and Somalia. In three decades, it projects only Niger will be higher than four.

These projections include a fertility bounce in countries such as Germany and Japan. If more fecund nations follow this path of declining birth rates, therefore, a stable future population could quickly be locked in.

That would have enormous consequences for the world economy, geo­politics and the sum of human happiness, illustrated by some of the middle-income countries that have gone through a dramatic, and often ignored, fall in fertility.•

 

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“New Is The New Old”

August 12, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The contemporary Western attitude toward architecture is to protect the jewels, preserve them. Not so in Japan, a nation of people Pico Iyer refers to in a striking T Magazine essay as “pragmatic romantics.” Iyer writes of ancient buildings being regularly replaced by replicas in the same manner that some citizens hire elderly actors to portray deceased grandparents at family functions. It’s just a different mindset. The opening:

EVERY 20 YEARS, the most sacred Shinto site in Japan — the Grand Shrine at Ise — is completely torn down and replaced with a replica, constructed to look as weathered and authentic as the original structure built by an emperor in the seventh century. To many of us in the West, this sounds as sacrilegious as rebuilding the Western Wall tomorrow or hiring a Roman laborer to repaint the Sistine Chapel once a generation. But Japan has a different sense of what’s genuine and what’s not — of the relation of old to new — than we do; if the historic could benefit from a little help from art, or humanity, the reasoning goes, then wouldn’t it be unnatural not to provide it?

The motto guiding Japan’s way of being might be: New is the new old. For proof, you need only look at three recent high-profile and much-debated demolition jobs in Tokyo. The Hotel Okura, an icon of Japanese Modernism built in 1962 to commemorate the country’s arrival in the major leagues of nations as the host of the 1964 Olympics and cherished for its unique and atmospheric lobby, is currently being reduced to rubble in favor of two no doubt anonymous glass towers, meant to announce Japan’s continuing position in the big leagues, as the host of the 2020 Olympics. The once state-of-the-art National Olympic Stadium, designed by Mitsuo Katayama for the 1964 event, is being replaced by tomorrow’s idea of futurism: a new structure that was, until recently, set to be designed by Zaha Hadid. Even Tsukiji, the world’s largest fish market and the mainstay of jet-lagged sightseers for decades — is being mostly moved to a shopping mall, with the assurance that a copy of a place can sometimes look more authentic than the place itself. These erasures — most notably of the Okura, which became the personal cause of Tomas Maier, the creative director of Bottega Veneta — have elicited protests from devoted aesthetes the world over: What could the Japanese be thinking?

The answer is simple: The Japanese are different from you and me. They don’t confuse books with their covers.•

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Old Print Article: Robots Enter The U.S. Military, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1928)

August 11, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Televox was the 1920s robot that reportedly fetched your car from the garage or a bottle of wine the cellar. While these feats, along with many others, were said to have been ably performed, the cost of such a machine made it unmarketable.

Televox was also the star attraction of a very early insinuation of robotics into the American military when, in 1928, he barked out orders to the grunts. It was a bit of a publicity stunt but also the beginnings of robotizing war, which some then thought implausible, though nobody does now. An article follows from the June 11, 1928 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

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“The Unsticking Of The Urban Roads Is One Of The Side Effects Of Autonomous Cars”

August 11, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The perfecting of autonomous cars would do many good things (fight pollution, reduce highway deaths) and some bad (threaten job security for millions, be a scary target for hackers). Like most technologies, the size of the victories will be determined by how we manage the losses.

One thing that almost assuredly happens during a robocar age will be a decrease in traffic, due in large part to the end of the maddening search for parking spots.

From Peter Wayner at the Atlantic:

There’s plenty of research showing that a surprisingly large number of people are driving, trying to find a place to leave their car. A group called Transportation Alternatives studied the flow of cars around one Brooklyn neighborhood, Park Slope, and found that 64 percent of the local cars were searching for a place to park. It’s not just the inner core of cities either. Many cars in suburban downtowns and shopping-mall parking lots do the same thing.

Robot cars could change all that. The unsticking of the urban roads is one of the side effects of autonomous cars that will, in turn, change the landscape of cities— essentially eliminating one of the enduring symbols of urban life, the traffic jam full of honking cars and fuming passengers. It will also redefine how we use land in the city, unleashing trillions of dollars of real estate to be used for more than storing cars. Autonomous cars are poised to save us uncountable hours of time, not just by letting us sleep as the car drives, but by unblocking the roads so they flow faster.•

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“The Answer Is Anything But Obvious”

August 10, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In Andrew Schrank’s Pacific·Standard essay about Labor in the Digital Age, which imagines possible enlightened and benighted outcomes, he says the truest thing anyone can say on the topic: “The future of work and workers will not be dictated by technology alone.” No, it won’t.

An excerpt in which he looks at the Google Glass as half-full:

Is a jobless future inevitable? Do automation, computerization, and globalization necessarily conspire to undercut employment and living standards? Or might they be harnessed to benign ends by farsighted leaders? The answer is anything but obvious, for the relationship between automation and job loss is at best indeterminate, both within and across countries, and the relationship between automation and compensation is similarly opaque. For instance, Germany and Japan boast more robots per capita and less unemployment than the United States, and the stock of industrial robots and the average manufacturing wage have been growing in tandem—at double digit rates, no less—in China.

What excites me about the future of work and workers, therefore, is the possibility that the technological determinists are wrong, and that we will subordinate machinery to our needs and desires rather than vice versa. In this rosy scenario, machines take over the monotonous jobs and allow humans to pursue more leisurely or creative pursuits. Working hours fall and wages rise across the board. And productivity gains are distributed (and re-distributed) in accord with the principles of distributive justice and fairness.

While such a scenario may seem not just rosy but unrealistic, it is not entirely implausible.•

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“The First Serious Blueprint For Building Cities In Space Was Drawn Almost On A Whim”

August 10, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Gerald O’Neill’s space dreams were bold–and very unrealistic. The astrophysicist believed 40 years ago, right around the time of his popular paper, “The Colonization of Space,” that Earthlings would be able to make round-trip voyages to other planets for about $3000 before the end of the century. Not quite. 

O’Neill died, however, inspire the famous 1970s space-colonies design, which I’ve used on this site many times. From Brian Merchant at Vice:

The first serious blueprint for building cities in space was drawn almost on a whim. Forty years ago this summer, dozens of scientists gathered in the heart of Silicon Valley for one of NASA’s design studies, which were typically polite, educational affairs. But in 1975, the topic of inquiry was “The Colonization of Space,” a recent paper by the astrophysicist Gerard O’Neill.

“The idea was to review his ideas and to see if they were technically feasible,” said Mark Hopkins, an economist who was there. “Well, they were.” So the scientists had a choice—set about laying the groundwork for real, no-bullshit space colonization, or hold the regularly scheduled series of seminars. “We said, ‘To hell with that,'” Hopkins recalled. The ten-week program became a quest to outline a scientifically possible and economically viable way to build a human habitat in space.

What they came up with—designs for huge, orbital settlements—are still pretty much the basis for all our space digs today, science-fictional or otherwise.•

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“The Need For Unskilled Labor Is Beginning To Diminish”

August 10, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

You certainly don’t want to be a nation left behind by robotics any more than you’d want to miss out on the Industrial Revolution, but at the same time you need jobs for citizens of all skill levels. What to do?

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s goal of reducing unemployment among the nation’s many unskilled workers is threatened by automation, a sector other countries in the region (particularly Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia) are investing heavily in. The need for cheap labor is disappearing just when the nation needs it most. From Natalie Obiko Pearson at Bloomberg:

Robots and automation are invigorating once-sleepy Indian factories, boosting productivity by carrying out low-skill tasks more efficiently. While in theory, improved output is good for economic growth, the trend is creating a headache for Prime Minister Narendra Modi: Robots are diminishing roles for unskilled laborers that he wants to put to work as part of his Make in India campaign aimed at creating jobs for the poor.

India’s largely uneducated labor force and broken educational system aren’t ready for the more complex jobs that workers need when their low-skilled roles are taken over by machines. Meanwhile, nations employing robots more quickly, such as China, are becoming even more competitive.

“The need for unskilled labor is beginning to diminish,” Akhilesh Tilotia, head of thematic research at Kotak Institutional Equities in Mumbai and author of a book on India’s demographic impact. “Whatever education we’re putting in and whatever skill development we’re potentially trying to put out – – does it match where the industry will potentially be five to 10 years hence? That linkage is reasonably broken in India.” …

In the race to create factory jobs, Modi isn’t just competing against Asian rivals. Robots are increasingly helping developed economies. In Switzerland, robots make toothbrushes for export; in Spain, they cut and pack lettuce heads — a job previously done by migrants; in Germany, they fill tubs of ice cream, and in the U.K. they assemble yogurt into multipacks at a rate of 80 a minute.•

 

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“It Might Be Cheapest Just To Have A Robot Follow A Violent Criminal Around All The Time”

August 9, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Transhumanist Presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan penned a Vice article about the influence next-wave technologies may have on violent crime, which he views largely as a form of mental disease. A lot of it is pretty far out there–cranial implants modifying behavior, death-row inmates choosing to be cryogenically frozen, etc. I’ll grant that he’s right on two points:

1) Criminal behavior is modified already in many cases by prescription drugs and psychiatry.

2) Surveillance and tracking, for all the issues they bring, will make it increasingly difficult to stealthily commit traditional crimes.

But debates about cerebral reconditioning and lobotomy? Yikes. Sounds almost criminal.

From Istvan:

One other method that could be considered for death row criminals is cryonics. The movie Minority Report, which features precogs who can see crime activity in the future, show other ways violent criminals are dealt with: namely a form of suspended animation where criminals dream out their lives. So the concept isn’t unheard of. With this in mind, maybe violent criminals even today should legally be given the option for cryonics, to be returned to a living state in the future where the reconditioning of the brain and new preventative technology—such as ubiquitous surveillance—means they could no longer commit violent acts.

Speaking of extreme surveillance—that rapidly growing field of technology also presents near-term alternatives for criminals on death row that might be considered sufficient punishment. We could permanently track and monitor death row criminals. And we could have an ankle brace (or implant) that releases a powerful tranquilizer if violent behavior is reported or attempted.

Surveillance and tracking of criminals would be expensive to monitor, but perhaps in five to 10 years time basic computer recognition programs in charge of drones might be able to do the surveillance affordably. In fact, it might be cheapest just to have a robot follow a violent criminal around all the time, another technology that also should be here in less than a decade’s time. Violent criminals could, for example, only travel in driverless cars approved and monitored by local police, and they’d always be accompanied by some drone or robot caretaker.•

 

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A Brief Note From 1857 About An Overdose

August 9, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the June 6, 1857 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

leeches5

 

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“The Fact That Data Itself Is Biased May Be Shocking To Some”

August 7, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Humans are so terribly at hiring other humans for jobs that it seems plausible software couldn’t do much worse. I think that will certainly be true eventually, if it isn’t already, though algorithms won’t likely be much better at identifying non-traditional candidates with deeply embedded talents. Perhaps a human-machine hybrid à la freestyle chess would work best for the foreseeable future?

In arguing that journalists aren’t being rigorous enough when reporting on HR software systems, Andrew Gelman and Kaiser Fung of the Daily Beast point out that data doesn’t necessarily mitigate bias. An excerpt:

Software is said to be “free of human biases.” This is a false statement. Every statistical model is a composite of data and assumptions; and both data and assumptions carry biases.

The fact that data itself is biased may be shocking to some. Occasionally, the bias is so potent that it could invalidate entire projects. Consider those startups that are building models to predict who should be hired. The data to build such machines typically come from recruiting databases, including the characteristics of past applicants, and indicators of which applicants were successful. But this historical database is tainted by past hiring practices, which reflected a lack of diversity. If these employers never had diverse applicants, or never made many minority hires, there is scant data available to create a predictive model that can increase diversity! Ironically, to accomplish this goal, the scientists should code human bias into the software.•

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“Countless Pit Stops Along Well-Worn Trucking Routes Could Become Ghost Towns”

August 7, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The passage below from Rachel Nuwer’s BBC report about technological unemployment speaks to why I largely disagree with Jerry Kaplan that robotics will be far worse for male workers than female. There probably will be a difference, but if the machines come en masse in a compressed period of time, they come for most of us.

Oxford’s Carl Frey tells Nuwer that “overall, people should be happy that a lot of these jobs have actually disappeared,” when speaking of drudgery that’s heretofore been vanished by electrical gadgets, but the new reality may mean a tremendous aggregate improvement enjoyed by relatively few. In the long-term, that may all work itself out, but we better be ready with solutions in the short- and medium-term.

The excerpt:

Self-driving trucks wouldn’t be good news for everyone, however. Critics point out that, should this breakthrough be realised, there will be a significant knock-on effect for employment. In the US, up to 3.5 million drivers and 5.2 million additional personnel who work directly within the industry would be out of a job. Additionally, countless pit stops along well-worn trucking routes could become ghost towns. Self-driving trucks, in other words, might wreck millions of lives and bring disaster to a significant sector of the economy.

Dire warnings such as these are frequently issued, not only for the trucking industry, but for the world’s workforce at large. As machines, software and robots become more sophisticated, some fear that we stand to lose millions of jobs. According to one unpublished study, the coming wave of technological breakthroughs endangers up to 47% of total employment in the US.

But is there any truth to such projections, and if so, how concerned should we be? Will the robots take over, rendering us all professional couch potatoes, as imagined in the film Wall-E, or will technological innovation give us the freedom to pursue more creative, rewarding endeavours?•

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“My Brother — The Anti-Tebow”

August 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

One positive outcome of our newly decentralized media is that all of society is now a long tail, with room for far more categories of beliefs and lifestyles, whether someone is Transgender or Libertarian or Atheist.

Case in point: Houston Texans star Arian Foster. Religion goes with football the way it does with war, perhaps because they’re two activities where you might want to pray you don’t get killed, but Foster, who’s played in the heart of the Bible Belt his entire college and pro career, doesn’t believe anyone is watching over him except for the replay assistant in the NFL booth. The former Muslim is now a devout atheist who offers a respectful Namaste bow after a TD but does not pray in a huddle. In an ESPN Magazine article, Tim Keown profiles the running back as he publicly discusses his lack of religion for the first time. An excerpt:

THE HOUSE IS a churn of activity. Arian’s mother, Bernadette, and sister, Christina, are cooking what they proudly call “authentic New Mexican food.” His older brother, Abdul, is splayed out on a room-sized sectional, watching basketball and fielding requests from the five little kids — three of them Arian’s — who are bouncing from the living room to the large playhouse, complete with slide, in the front room. I tell Abdul why I’m here and he says, “My brother — the anti-Tebow,” with a comic eye roll.

Arian Foster, 28, has spent his entire public football career — in college at Tennessee, in the NFL with the Texans — in the Bible Belt. Playing in the sport that most closely aligns itself with religion, in which God and country are both industry and packaging, in which the pregame flyover blends with the postgame prayer, Foster does not believe in God.

“Everybody always says the same thing: You have to have faith,” he says. “That’s my whole thing: Faith isn’t enough for me. For people who are struggling with that, they’re nervous about telling their families or afraid of the backlash … man, don’t be afraid to be you. I was, for years.”

He has tossed out sly hints in the past, just enough to give himself wink-and-a-nod deniability, but he recently decided to become a public face of the nonreligious.•

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

August 6, 2015 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

"If you think you can do this--basically 'depositing' some stool into a Tupperware container on a regular basis..."

“If you think you can do this–basically ‘depositing’ some stool into a Tupperware container on a regular basis…”

Fecal Transplant Donor Needed (Brooklyn)

I am seeking healthy FMT (fecal microbiota transplant―yes poop!) donors who live in Brooklyn or Manhattan, and am hoping you or someone you know would be willing to help me and possibly save my life.

After a year-long barrage of antibiotic treatment for Lyme disease wiped out my gut flora (aka microbiome), my health went into a downward spiral resulting in diabetes, obesity, metabolic syndrome (high blood pressure, high cholesterol/triglyceride and high insulin levels), gout, arthritis, crippling fatigues and acid reflux. . .all now conclusively linked to a decimated microbiome. The good news: Reversing the above ailments is now squarely in the crosshairs of biotech research companies who are “mining” the microbiome to develop pill forms of restorative “human” probiotics. The bad news: This will take 5 to10 years for general use.

I don’t have 5 to 10 years.

The only way available to me NOW to restore a functioning microbiome is for me to use medically supervised FMT therapy with healthy, carefully screened donors.

Fecal transplants work in a similar way to a blood or bone marrow transplant, only they’re less invasive. The idea is for the infusion of “good bugs” to conquer the “bad bugs” (or in my case, NO bugs!) and gradually restore good health. FMTs have proven to be astonishingly effective in wiping out deadly Clostridium difficile infections, (to which I can personally attest) as well as curing other ailments now linked to microbiome deficiencies such as ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s, Celiac, Diabetes 1, Autism, MS, et al. However, just as FMT’s were gaining a foothold in major medical centers nationwide to treat C.diff, the FDA put the kibosh on them in 2013 and now it’s difficult to get one unless doctors fill out lengthy paperwork which means people are dying while bureaucrats fiddle. So the technique has gone “underground,” with successful home application of the procedure being as safe and effective as in a hospital so long as the donors are carefully screened and the procedure, for me, (using a simple enema bottle) follows proper medical protocols.

So I need a few healthy people who would, once they pass the simple health questionnaire, blood and stool tests (at no cost to you, my husband and I are covering all non-insured screenings) to “donate” on as close to a daily basis as possible for at least a month. Living close to us is essential, moving in for the donation period is also an option. We will provide all supplies (surgical gloves and disposable Tupperware containers) and cover any costs related to these “donations” and pick them up on a daily basis.

I am working with my doctors to ensure this treatment adheres to current medical standards and practices. We are using an enhanced version of MIT’s “OpenBiome” FMT donor bank screening criteria and current scientific medical data to design the therapy course. We are providing privacy agreements for everyone’s protection and comfort levels.

If you think you can do this–basically “depositing” some stool into a Tupperware container on a regular basis–it should allow my body to mend itself. . .for which I would be eternally grateful.

"Moving in for the donation period is also an option."

“Moving in for the donation period is also an option.”

A Brief Note From 1859 About An Innocent Plea

August 6, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the June 20, 1859 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

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“This Is The Real Face Of Journalism Today”

August 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

For all the great things the shift from newsprint to the Internet has brought us, one thing lost in that dynamic has been the ability for fledgling reporters–even veteran ones–to pay the bills, especially those wishing to write about important social issues. Like most of America, the middle is largely gone in journalism, the fear of falling having proved to be no mere paranoia.

In a Guardian piece, Barbara Ehrenreich writes about this new arrangement, the few haves and the many have-nots, particularly among those who wish to cover poverty in America. After all, what is the good of everybody having their own channel in a decentralized media if they can’t afford the electricity to power their laptop or recharge their smartphone? An excerpt:

In the last few years, I’ve gotten to know a number of people who are at least as qualified writers as I am, especially when it comes to the subject of poverty, but who’ve been held back by their own poverty. There’s Darryl Wellington, for example, a local columnist (and poet) in Santa Fe who has, at times, had to supplement his tiny income by selling his plasma – a fallback than can have serious health consequences. Or Joe Williams, who, after losing an editorial job, was reduced to writing for $50 a piece for online political sites while mowing lawns and working in a sporting goods store for $10 an hour to pay for a room in a friend’s house. Linda Tirado was blogging about her job as a cook at Ihop when she managed to snag a contract for a powerful book entitled Hand to Mouth (for which I wrote the preface). Now she is working on a “multi-media mentoring project” to help other working-class journalists get published.

There are many thousands of people like these – gifted journalists who want to address serious social issues but cannot afford to do so in a media environment that thrives by refusing to pay, or anywhere near adequately pay, its “content providers.” Some were born into poverty and have stories to tell about coping with low-wage jobs, evictions or life as a foster child. Others inhabit the once-proud urban “creative class,” which now finds itself priced out of its traditional neighborhoods, like Park Slope or LA’s Echo Park, scrambling for health insurance and childcare, sleeping on other people’s couches. They want to write – or do photography or documentaries. They have a lot to say, but it’s beginning to make more sense to apply for work as a cashier or a fry-cook.

This is the real face of journalism today: not million dollar-a-year anchorpersons, but low-wage workers and downwardly spiraling professionals who can’t muster up expenses to even start on the articles, photo-essays and videos they want to do, much less find an outlet to cover the costs of doing them.•

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“Where Do The Dislodged Go?”

August 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

New York City was always about money, but it wasn’t only about it. Now it is. 

The economist Tyler Cowen believes American cities will be only for the rich in the not-too-distant future, and that we’ll look back in wonder that poor people used to actually live in such glamorous places. I still don’t believe that’s true–or don’t want to believe it–but the NYC non-rich are being treated like suspects and moved out to the edges until they fall off. And it’s a long way down from there.

Real estate prices are booming, a global market snaps up addresses, Airbnb helps move rental stock off the market and subsidized rents are quickly disappearing. Sometimes I still like it here, walking in Soho or buying books at the Strand, but I do increasingly feel like an expat in the city where I’ve always lived.

From Michael Greenberg’s New York Review of Books piece about the documentary Homme Less:

The spike in prices has profoundly altered the psychology of these neighborhoods, threatening the security of thousands of long-term residents, many of them families with working parents. The transformation has been dizzyingly abrupt. The process of repopulating a neighborhood with a wealthier class of residents that took twenty years on the Lower East Side during the late 1990s and early 2000s can now occur in five years or less in some parts of Brooklyn and Queens.

In August 2013, for example, Burke Leighton Asset Management bought 805 St. Marks Avenue, a pre-war, six-story building with two hundred apartments in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, for $22 million. In May, a little more than a year and a half later, they sold it to a Swedish real estate company called Akelius for $44 million. Akelius’s CEO said that he decided to invest in Crown Heights when he saw an increasing number of young people with “single-speed bicycles” in the neighborhood. I’ve no knowledge of Akelius’s plans for the building, but the only sure way to derive a reasonable return from this level of investment would be to find a means to deregulate the rent-stabilized apartments, and this invariably involves dislodging the families who live in them.

Over the past fifteen years New York has lost more than 200,000 units of affordable housing—20 percent of the current stock. The rate of loss has accelerated in recent years, putting the future of the city’s remaining rent-regulated apartments in grave doubt. What becomes of a city that economically bars its working class from living in it? New York may be in the process of finding out. Once apartments become deregulated, they never come back.

Where do the dislodged go? And how many are there?•

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“Is It Possible To Design A Utopia?”

August 5, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The success of China’s insta-cities is dubious even with the iron fist of authoritarianism set to crush dissenters, but dense “cities in a building” or “cities in the sky,” attempts at large-scale, ecologically friendly developments influenced by the work of the late Arcology designer Paolo Soleri, have a particularly spotty track record. Abu Dhabi’s Masdar City (even a diminished version) may prove the exception, but top-down developments seldom satisfy human desires, even if they’re ostensibly good for us.

In a smart Aeon essay, Jared Keller writes of Soleri’s Arizona desert dream and explores why its offshoots, potential goldmines, don’t pan out. An excerpt:

In 1956, Soleri and his wife Corolyn ‘Colly’ Woods moved just miles from Phoenix’s out-of-control suburban sprawl to set up an architectural workshop, dubbed Cosanti (from the Italiancosa and anti, or ‘before things’), in Paradise Valley to develop his unique philosophy of architecture. One of Soleri’s earliest visions was Mesa City, a proposed city the size of Manhattan with 2 million inhabitants. Over five years, Soleri would draw hundreds of feet of scrolls detailing the intricate structures and landscape of this hypothetical metropolis.

In 1970, Soleri finally broke ground on Arcosanti, an experimental city and ‘urban laboratory’ that has been under construction for nearly half a century. To the average visitor, Arcosanti looks like a college campus sprouting in the middle of the desert, molded from the red silt of the surrounding mesa. The complex is marked by a cluster of soaring stone apses, crafted in Soleri’s distinct, casting-inspired architectural style, designed to absorb sunlight and power the town’s energy grid. The majority of buildings are oriented to the south to capture the sun’s light and heat, while an open roof design yields maximum sunlight in the winter and shade in the summer. Artisans live and work in a densely packed compound, designed for maximum energy efficiency and sustainability. The community’s permanent residents keep greenhouses and agricultural fields, and income from bell-casting goes to maintaining the town’s infrastructure.

Arcosanti is as socially efficient as it is sustainable. The buildings and walkways are built in a more dynamic formation than a conventional city grid, not just to conserve resources but also to encourage increased social interaction between residents, forcing them to bump into each other in various open-air atriums, gardens and greenhouses. Living quarters are clustered in a honeycomb of sparse, minimalist apartments, all virtually identical. The open design and emphasis on sustainable living has created a distinctly hippy, communitarian vibe; the population of the town is mostly Soleri fanatics and bell-casting artisans. The city has never been officially finished, and while the current population wavers around 80, the town was designed to sustain some 5,000. …

Despite Soleri’s best efforts, it’s not clear that humanity is ready for the perfect architectural utopias he imagined.•

 

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Old Print Article: “Sitting Down Is The Best Way To Shoot A Lion,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1934)

August 5, 2015 in Books, Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

Once Ernest Hemingway was dead and his cult of personality vanished, his stock as a writer fell precipitously, which was justice. It’s difficult to believe now that Hemingway was considered the greatest writer of his age by many while he was alive. He got somewhere with The Sun Also Rises, but the rest of his work was largely overrated, and he’s most interesting now for the era he lived in and for being representative of a particular type of damaged American male, one who marked his pages with symbolism of sexual dysfunction while boasting of a zeal for big-game hunting. What a douche. In an article in the April 25, 1934 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, he told report Guy Hickok about Depression Era safaris.

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“Levin Has Been Warning TMZ Employees Both Past And Present Not To Speak”

August 5, 2015 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

TMZ seems to exist solely to excitedly announce which famous people have died, some of whom have actually died.

My main issue with Harvey Levin’s clown car of entertainment reportage isn’t that it’s scurrilous, which it is, but that it doesn’t use that scurrilousness to a good end, never holding a light to the industry’s dark side. The outlet is just another part of the Hollywood game, not revealing anything too damaging which could jeopardize access. You don’t think maybe the folks there might have heard something about the many, many abuses and inequities that occur in show business? The site may report on lawsuits stemming from such behaviors if they’ve already come to light, but it will never break such stories. There are relationships to be maintained.

Nicholas Schmidle, a very talented New Yorker writer, is working on a TMZ story, according to a piece by Matthew Belloni and Chris Gardner of The Hollywood Reporter, and I can’t wait. The opening:

Levin, 64, has been warning TMZ employees both past and present not to speak to writer Nicholas Schmidle, whose résumé might explain why Levin is so nervous. Schmidle’s previous subjects include the hunt for Osama bin Laden (his New Yorker story “Getting Bin Laden” was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2013), a Russian arms trafficker and war crimes in Kosovo. In addition, The New Yorker has shown a willingness to publish unflattering stories set in the world of media and entertainment. For instance, the Conde Nast-owned magazine’s lengthy profile of filmmaker Paul Haggis’ separation from Scientology by writer Lawrence Wright led to Wright’s book Going Clear and the Alex Gibney-directed HBO documentary that premiered at Sundance and was recently nominated for an Emmy. Several TMZ insiders have spoken to Schmidle anyway, according to sources, as have others in the so-called Thirty Mile Zone around Hollywood from which TMZ took its name.•

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“Iceberg Slim’s Prose Was, And Is, As Ecstatic And Original As A Chuck Berry Guitar Solo”

August 5, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

I know it sounds unlikely, but I once asked Snoop Dogg what it was he liked about pimping, that disgraceful thing, when he was a child. He answered in the most consumerist terms: the clothes, the cars, the hair–the style that only money could buy. It was the closest thing to capitalism that young Calvin Broadus could imagine his.

I don’t know if the late and infamous pimp Iceberg Slim (born Robert Beck) was what Malcolm X would have been had he never been politicized, but he certainly was the template for Don King, Dr. Dre and other African-American males who wanted into the capitalist system in the worst way–and got there by those means. The way they looked at it, their hands weren’t any dirtier than anyone else’s, just darker. 

A new biography of Slim encourages us to consider him for his literary talent, not just his outsize persona. Dwight Garner of the New York Times, who writes beautifully on any topic, has a review. The opening:

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, if you wanted a book by Iceberg Slim, the best-selling black writer in America, you didn’t go to a bookstore. You went to a black-owned barbershop or liquor store or gas station. Maybe you found a copy on a corner table down the block, or being passed around in prison.

The first and finest of his books was a memoir, Pimp: The Story of My Life, published in 1967. This was street literature, marketed as pulp. The New York Times didn’t merely not review Pimp, Justin Gifford notes in Street Poison: The Biography of Iceberg Slim. Given the title, this newspaper wouldn’t even print an ad for it.

Pimp related stories from Iceberg Slim’s 25 years on the streets of Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit and other cities. It was dark. The author learned to mistreat women with a chilly élan. It was dirty, so filled with raw language and vividly described sex acts that, nearly 50 years later, the book still makes your eyeballs leap out of your skull, as if you were at the bottom of a bungee jump.

Yet Iceberg Slim’s prose was, and is, as ecstatic and original as a Chuck Berry guitar solo. Mark Twain meets Malcolm X in his sentences. When he was caught with an underage girl by her father, for example, the author didn’t just run. “I vaulted over the back fence,” he wrote, “and torpedoed down the alley.”

Pimp is a different sort of American coming-of-age story, the tale of a determined young man who connived to take what society would not give. It’s a subversive classic.•

_______________________________

A masked Slim meets Joe Pyne in the 1960s.

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“I Thought, That’s My Replacement”

August 4, 2015 in Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Two videos about the changing nature of work in America.

The first is a PBS Newshour report by Paul Solman about technological unemployment, featuring some very dire predictions by Humans Need Not Apply author Jerry Kaplan, who believes robot caddies and delivery bots will lead to displaced, starving workers who’ll die in the streets if serious measures aren’t taken. Well, that could happen, though there’s no reason it need to.

The second is a Financial Times piece by Anna Nicolaou about the coworking startup WeWork, which leases monthly space to telecommuters who long to tether–a “capitalist kibbutz” as its called by founder Adam Neumann. My reaction to the company is that it seems especially prone to a bad financial downturn, but I would bet Neumann would argue the reverse, that short-term leases would be more attractive at such a time. At any rate, it’s an interesting look into the dynamic of the modern office space.

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

August 4, 2015 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

"Minimal costume."

“Minimal costume.”

Gallery Attendant at the Museum of Sex (Flatiron)

The Museum of Sex has launched it’s newest exhibit called Splendor in the Grass.

We have an exciting opportunity for the right individuals to work for the city’s only institution dedication to preserving the exploration of the history, evolution and cultural significance of human sexuality.
We are seeking engaging, dynamic individuals to join our team and help the exhibit be the best it can be by giving stellar customer experience.

This is an entry level position as a gallery attendant helping customers with an interactive attraction. The position requires a minimal costume.

Responsibilities include but are not limited to:

  • Helping patrons on the attractions 
  • Ensuring the safety of all who enter the exhibit
  • Using best judgment and always being mindful of the art
  • Maintaining gallery standards
  • Upholding the highest level of customer service

Pertinent backgrounds include: Theatre, Hospitality, Customer Service, Retail

A PHOTO MUST ACCOMPANY YOUR RESUME.

 

“It’s No Substitute For Rail”

August 4, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets, but until then urban centers are going to become increasingly dense and we’ll need people-moving mass transportation.

In a Conversation essay, Roberto Palacin argues the future of rail travel isn’t magnetic levitation or the Hyperloop but something very similar to high-speed trains of today. (It should be noted he doesn’t address how the perfecting of driverless vehicles would impact rail.) An excerpt about why the the writer feels the Hyperloop is not the next big thing:

Hyperloop is an elegant idea: travelling seamlessly at 1,220kph (that’s right, 760mph – just under the speed of sound) in gracefully designed pods that arrive as often as every 30 seconds is very appealing. The concept is based around very straight tubes with a partial vacuum applied under the pods. These pods have an electric compressor fan on their nose which actively transfers high-pressure air from the front to the rear, creating an air cushion once a linear electric motor has launched the pod. All this would be battery and solar powered.

Technically it’s a challenging design, although if someone can make it happen it’s the man who proposed the idea, Elon Musk, the man behind SpaceX and Tesla. However, Hyperloop is not rail travel. It is, as Musk puts it, a fifth mode of transport (after trains, cars, boats and planes). It’s designed to link Los Angeles to San Francisco; cities hundreds of miles apart that can be connected in an almost straight line over a relative flat landscape. This simply isn’t an option in much of the world.

Ultimately, if Hyperloop happens at all it will be a stand-alone system. It’s no substitute for rail.•

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“Will The Office Change All That Much?”

August 4, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Following up on the post about technological unemployment in the office-support sector, here’s an excerpt from a 1975 Bloomberg piece that wondered about the office of the future. A business revolution threatened to not only decrease paper but people as well (though this article focused more on the former than the latter.) A “collection of these electronic terminals linked to each other and to electronic filing cabinets…will change our daily life,” one analyst promised, and it certainly has. 

The opening:

The office is the last corporate holdout to the automation tide that has swept through the factory and the accounting department. It has changed little since the invention of the typewriter 100 years ago. But in almost a matter of months, office automation has emerged as a full-blown systems approach that will revolutionize how offices work.

At least this is the gospel being preached by office equipment makers and the research community. And because the labor-intensive office desperately needs the help of technology, nearly every company with large offices is trying to determine how this onrushing wave of new hardware and procedures can help to improve its office productivity.

Will the office change all that much? Listen to George E. Pake, who heads Xerox Corp.’s Palo Alto (Calif.) Research Center, a new think tank already having a significant impact on the copier giant’s strategies for going after the office systems market: “There is absolutely no question that there will be a revolution in the office over the next 20 years. What we are doing will change the office like the jet plane revolutionized travel and the way that TV has altered family life.”

Pake says that in 1995 his office will be completely different; there will be a TV-display terminal with keyboard sitting on his desk. “I’ll be able to call up documents from my files on the screen, or by pressing a button,” he says. “I can get my mail or any messages. I don’t know how much hard copy [printed paper] I’ll want in this world.”

The Paperless Office

Some believe that the paperless office is not that far off. Vincent E. Giuliano of Arthur D. Little, Inc., figures that the use of paper in business for records and correspondence should be declining by 1980, “and by 1990, most record-handling will be electronic.”

But there seem to be just as many industry experts who feel that the office of the future is not around the corner. “It will be a long time—it always takes longer than we expect to change the way people customarily do their business,” says Evelyn Berezin, president of Redactron Corp., which has the second-largest installed base (after International Business Machines Corp.) of text-editing typewriters. “The EDP [data-processing] industry in the 1950s thought that the whole world would have made the transition to computers by 1960. And it hasn’t happened yet.”•

 

A Brief Note From 1910 About A Talking Dog

August 4, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

don

From the November 20, 1910 New York Times:

Berlin–The scientific sensation of the hour in Germany is the talking dog Don, a dark-brown setter belonging to a royal gamekeeper named Ebers at Thiershütte, near Hamburg. Don promises to become as celebrated an attraction as the horse Clever Hans, which startled the sociological savants of Europe eight years ago with his alleged mathematical feats.

Karl Hagenback, the world-famed animal dealer, has offered Don’s master $2,500 for the privilege of exhibiting the dog in the Hagenback outdoor menagerie at Hamburg. The dog’s vocabulary, it is said, already embraces six words.

His alleged elocutionary powers came to light early this week as the result of reports from the United States that Prof. Alexander Graham Bell had succeeded in teaching a terrier to speak. It was declared that Germany not only possessed a dog with similar gifts but a dog which had been talking for five years, in fact, ever since he was six months old.

The story was first considered a joke, but Thiershütte all the week has been the Mecca of interested inquirers, who have come away convinced that Don is a genuine canine wonder. His callers included a number of newspaper men, who went to Thiershütte to interview the dog. The gamekeeper, Ebers, affirms that the dog began talking in 1905 without training of any kind. According to his owner, the animal sauntered up one day to the table where the family were eating, and, when his master asked, ‘You want something, don’t you?’ the dog stupefied the family by replying in a deep, masculine tone, ‘Haben, haben,’ (‘Want, want’). The tone was not a bark or growl, it is declared, but distinct speech, and increased in plainness from day to day as his master took more interest in the dog’s newly discovered talent. 

Shortly afterward, the story goes, the dog learned to say ‘Hunger’ when asked what he had. Then he was taught to say ‘Küchen,’ (cakes) and finally ‘Ja’ and ‘Nein.’ And it is added that he is now able to string several of these words together in sensible rotation and will say ‘Hunger, I want cakes,’ when an appropriate question is addressed to him.•

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