Comments on: The Chapters of Cities

By: jon o

jon o — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 16:48:36 +0000

I was watching a flock of crows the other day. Eighty, maybe a hundred of the black birds. Swarming around some trees. Suddenly, on what looked like nothing more than a whim, eight or ten of them decided to light on a tree. The flock started to move on, but quickly about-faced and landed in the same tree. No sooner had the whole flock landed, when the original ten took off. The flock followed. Then the ten picked another tree, and the process repeated. This went on for as long as I could bear to watch a flock of crows, what with all the information streaming at me via this grey box and a beautiful woman whispering in my ear.

My friend, this is another wonderful piece of one of my favorite spaces on the Net. I only have one nit to pick.

“In the worst of cases property prices increased and low-income renters were forced to move out to other neighborhoods.”

I have two retorts:

1) Economics says that, the more desirable a place is, the higher the rent will be, assuming supply stays constant. Are you saying that making a place more desirable to live in is the worst thing that can happen to a place? I’m not sure you meant it that way…

2) There’s no such thing as low-income renters. There’s just people who may currently earn a low income. Most of them desire to earn a higher income. Most of them desire to become home-owners at some point. IMHO, the true beauty of America is not that everyone is equal, but that the ability to improve upon your present condition is greater here than anywhere else in the world. Says the child of low-income Mexican-American parents (home owners though) who’s made his way in this world.

By: Global Culture

Global Culture — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 03:46:22 +0000

the chapters of cities…

The following is an adaptation of the post by the same title appeared in el-oso.net, with a few of my own conclusions. In the original post “oso” explores some of the common patterns in the evolution of cities.
Chapter 1: Make-shift Slums…

By: bwalker

bwalker — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:16:38 +0000

Catherine – Detroit here we come – my co-worker was there last weekend and witnessed the hot story of a man killing his noisy neighbors setting the apartment on fire, then shooting one of the firemen!

lets go!

ps – #2 seems like the dark ages, but the golden dark ages? no?

By: catherine

catherine — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:38:53 +0000

Hmm, I’m not sure I agree with everything here. For one thing, at least in Boston, many of the neighborhoods that have become gentrified have not necessarily become wealthier. For example, Cambridge and Boston can be prohibitively expensive for hipster kids making $30k a year (if they’re lucky) so they move to Somerville, a traditionally working-class town adjacent to Cambridge. They bring their own culture, but they often don’t have as much wealth as the blue-collar workers around them (do you know how much a plumber makes?). i wonder what sort of influence that has on these neighborhoods?

I’m also reminded of this NY Times Magazine cover story on the downfall of Detroit, which ran a couple weeks ago:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/magazine/28detroit-t.html?_r=1

$5k for a decent house? Can’t we organize some hipster relocation movement?

By: Prentiss Riddle

Prentiss Riddle — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:21:31 +0000

I think you’re onto something but these stages are very specifically American. In countries where the affluent have never used the public school systems, my guess is that the analog to “white flight” is mostly driven by street crime and so it happens only when urban friction reaches an extreme. In Brazil it seems like for a long time the poor did all the moving, the working class emigrating outward and people too poor even for bus fare emigrating upward, so “suburban” in Brazil is an epithet meaning “declassé” while morro or hill is a synonym for favela or slum.

Surely some urban planner or historian has done a nice, accessible book on socioeconomic patterns in the development of cities worldwide. Anybody know of one?

Finally, about multiculturalism – I’d like to see a comparative study on second-generation language retention among immigrant communities in various countries. My impression is that deep cultural retention (e.g., language, complicated cooking or religious ritual) fades very fast in the US. I don’t know many second-gen South Asian kids born in the US who speak their parents’ language while it’s pretty common to do so in the UK. I’m sure there are many factors, including whether a language community has the necessary critical mass for daily language use outside the home, but subjectively it also seems to me that American consumerist culture tells kids at a very young age that the ways of the old country are boring and irrelevant. Or is that changing?