Point: The idea that descendants of African slaves are the only people in the history of our species to be done in by the configuration of architectural blueprints is mistaken.

It was much, much more complicated than that: the culprit was aspects of social history in America starting in the late sixties, not merely how housing projects were constructed and how far their doors happened to be from the street.

John McWhorter at the New Republic argues against the commonly held perception that crimes and social conditions are worse off in taller public housing than low-rises. I don’t understand the Sonia Sotomayor connection though and it seems forced in order to attract eyeballs.

One in every ten people lived in urban areas a century ago. Now, for the first time ever, most people live in cities. By 2050, the United Nations projects, almost three-quarters of the world’s population will call urban areas home. The majority of this growth is centered in struggling, developing countries of the Global South, but cities in developed (or Global North) countries face increasingly complex challenges as well.

To help manage and plan for this accelerating urbanization, the Rockefeller Foundation convened an exceptional group of urbanists–leading policy makers and government officials, finance experts, urban researchers, members of civil society organizations, and other innovators–for a Global Urban Summit at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center. This book shares their diverse perspectives, creative approaches, and urgent agenda for harnessing the vast opportunities of urbanization for a better world.

Order this book free.

The peak toll in the first month of operation on State Route 167 in Washington was $5.75. I know, I know, you would never pay such an exorbitant amount when America has taught you that free roads are your birthright. But that money bought Washington drivers a 27-minute time savings. Is a half hour of your time worth $6?

Eric A. Morris in a two-part essay at Freakonomics weighs in favor of toll roads that vary in response to traffic levels as a way out of congestion and posits that this way, we may even love paying for roads that we generally consider free to us.

Tolerance of everything and openness to everybody are not universally accepted principles. This is one reason why globalization and migration have introduced new complications. Most religions advocate tolerance in theory, but organised religion can be oppressive in practice.

I’m glad they recognize the limitations imposed by differentiation of cultural and religious norms within civilizations in creating democratic cities and unless users themselves demand certain freedoms, it will be hard to impose such on them. But at the same time, unless you expose them to certain freedoms that we take for granted they’ll not know what they are missing out on. Considering the current conflict in Iraq which also faces similar dilemmas, can the nature of rebuilding their cities help any?

While often unseen or overlooked, 1 out of every 100 Delhi residents earns a livelihood as a wastepicker. As a group, these informal garbage men and women collect over half of the city’s waste.

The City Fix shares a video that highlights the plight of the wasterpickers and their almost daily harassment by the police. The city government recently passed laws that favored private trash collection companies over this informal sector of laborers.

Having studied the history of Supreme Court rulings for land use planning, I remain surprised at the extent of prejudice and discrimination practiced in the United States under the guise of ‘protecting personal property value’. Fortunately, the law usually rules against such prejudices however, it didn’t in the case of Aurora.

Urban Growth: Top: Dallas, US 1976 Bottom: Dallas, US 2001 [source].

You would assume that after buying a car, you in addition to having a road to drive your car would also have space to park it wherever you go, right? The statistics tell you otherwise:

There are over 15 lakh cars on Mumbai’s roads, but common parking space
for only — hold your breath — 8,000, thanks to the 100-odd pay-and-park
areas across the city. The city’s vehicular density is 591 vehicles per
square metre, compared to 163 in New Delhi and the international
average vehicular density of 300 [source].

Finding a parking spot in Mumbai, if you have driven there, can be an uphill battle and takes longer than it takes you to drive anywhere.

As environmental activists have pointed out, only 9 per cent of the 14
million people in the city use cars and two-wheelers, but over
Rs10,000 crore will be spent over the next few years on road projects [source: as above].

So if you have no space to park, wouldn’t it make sense to invest in mass transit systems instead of investing in infrastructure that only seeks to encourage private vehicle ownership. Being a democratic country, you cannot dictate what people ought not to buy but you can certainly influence public choice by emphasizing or deemphasizing certain sectors of urban development. Congestion Pricing [PDF link] would just one such tool.

Technorati Tags: transportation, parking, Mumbai, India, congestion pricing, urban development

A Madison Avenue antiques dealer is suing a group of unidentified homeless people for $1 million, saying that the group has taken up residence outside his posh Upper East Side business, using the sidewalk in front of the shop as a urinal, spittoon and occasional dressing room [source].

Now the problem of homelessness in the United States is something that Americans wish that would simply disappear if they ignore it long enough. Hardly has anyone tried to understand the underlying cause of homelessness. Some term it as a urban truth that we have to live with while others look at it as nuisance that we could zone out of our visibility cone. While not being an expert on homelessness, I understand that in spite of millions of research dollars thrown at it, authorities haven’t been able to agree on a politically and economically feasible solution.

Why not give all homeless a free home? Of course, the United States so busy in resettling whole countries in the Middle East can afford it. But then that might logically lead to free-ridership and creating dependencies in the long run and definitely goes against the American ethos of work hard and you’ll succeed. At the same time, the core cause of homelessness is mental illness. I have seen numerous incidents of previously well-to-do individuals like lawyers, doctors, or businessmen being forced into homelessness due to chronic mental illness and lack of family support. Strangely a count of the homeless in the United States put the figure at an astounding low 744,000. But addressing causes of homelessness or seeking a solution may be beyond the scope of this post and let me return to the topic of discussion brought up by the article cited above.

“My concern is the health of the man,” Mr. Kemp said by phone from his store’s East 10th Street location today. “Sometimes he’s out there in blizzard conditions, and you and I pay taxes in New York City and some of that is to maintain decent shelters. And he should take advantage of
that.”While Mr. Kemp referred to one of the homeless men as a “nice guy,” he said it is time for them to part ways. “It’s nothing against him,” Mr. Kemp said. “I want him to be safe and not to be an obstruction to us.”

If you notice the tone in this paragraph, it goes beyond the usual get-out-of-my-way apathetic attitude that you would normally associate with the landowner. Mr. Kemp may have developed a personal relationship with the homeless man after seeing him around for more than 2 years and although understands the plight of the afflicted man, he is now taking a more practical stand by wishing more for the man. But at the same time, shifting the responsibility onto the city seems like a likely and easy solution.

Has the city or Mr. Kemp tried to understand why does the homeless man not want to go to a homeless shelter? Definitely a warm place however seedy might seem like a better option than living out in a New York winter. Probably the answer might be similar to that of a slum dweller who rather live in the squalor of a drain in Bandra than relocate to Mira Road. The homeless man might be thinking in economic terms as well – why move to a distant homeless shelter and spend time and money commuting when you can in fact live right on Madison Ave.and hope for better alms. After all, he is occupying public space. Mr.Kemp’s ownership ends at the threshold of his store.

But at the same time, a case can be made to the city on the grounds of harm to his property value/business due to presence of the homeless. The city may very well be interested in addressing the issue if it leads to loss of revenue through sales tax. Unfortunately apart for the humanitarian argument, the homeless may have little support.

The larger question here is, where should we move the homeless man to? Should he become someone else’s problem or should we just zone them out of sight? However ignoring a social problem has never solved any.

[article hat tip: Bongo Pondit]

Technorati Tags: homeless, urbanscape, New York, housing, Madison Ave.

The authors advocate a combined strategy of sustainable development and hazard mitigation to draft land use plans. Use of high risk areas such as flood plains, steep slopes, earthquake fault zones, coastal areas should be discouraged for human habitation. Sustainable practices advocate relocating land use away from hazard areas and relying on resilient building practices to withstand natural hazards.

The mitigation plan in addition to the comprehensive land use planning document allows the community to reassess its primary issues in a systematic manner. It also allows the community to understand the various connections and nexus between private land ownership and interests and public safety through proposed policies and programs. This contemplation not only informs the public of the risks but also makes them more aware of the mitigation strategies that the local government plans to implement either by coercion or cooperation. A comprehensive plan encapsulates the multiple goals, plans, issues, and policies of the community as a whole and transmits it to the interested stakeholders. The plan also forms a means to implement policy and enforce regulations, if need be, to counter risk vulnerabilities.

The primary values that should be considered before drafting a comprehensive plan are social values, market or economic values, and ecological values. These values examine the basic assumptions that a community holds central to its existence and proper balancing of these values are central to the model that links land use planning, mitigation, and sustainability. As FEMA puts it appropriately, all mitigation is local, the local government can use various powers – planning, regulatory, spending, taxing, and acquisition – that vary in its intensity with respect to coercion to formulate its own version of comprehensive plans.

The authors advocate the incorporation of hazard mitigation into land use planning to effectively channelize the implementation of such mitigating strategies. Usually communities wait for a “window of opportunity” to break down resistance to mitigation and introduce sustainable and innovative policy changes in the comprehensive plans. Mitigation strategies can be studied and emphasized at every stage of the planning process; be it generating planning intelligence or monitoring, evaluating, and revising plans in accordance with the changed objectives.

However, there is no single approach to design a hazard mitigation planning comprehensive plan and it is dependant on the planners and the relevant authorities to choose an appropriate method that would suit the region. The local government must be specific about studying the method necessary to involve the community in the planning process including deciding which component of a plan to include and emphasize given the motivations and political leanings of the people. This would let the planners understand what kind of plan and more importantly, what mitigation strategies to employ. The resulting plan need not be in accordance to a single strategy but instead be a hybrid, combining policies, land use plans & maps, and management programs geared toward realizing the consensual goals and objectives of the community. Creating a separate chapter on hazard mitigation in a comprehensive plan might also be considered as a middle ground between fully integrating hazard plans into the comprehensive plan and creating a separate hazards plan.

Reference: Chapter 4: Cooperating With Nature: Confronting Natural Hazards With Land-Use Planning for Sustainable Communities (Natural Hazards and Disasters).

Technorati Tags: mitigation, disaster relief, land use, planning, sustainability, comprehensive plan, values, FEMA

In a thought-provoking article, Robert A.Wicks, an Unix administrator in Atlanta succinctly lays down arguments to the weakening consequences for African Americans due to government welfare in the United States [via]:

Black men used to be sold up the river. This was a process in which the patriarch of a family would be sold from one plantation to another, breaking up families. Many slave owners had as much respect for the integrity of a black family as a cattle rancher would for the integrity of a bovine family. Single motherhood had always, therefore, been more socially acceptable among blacks. This was an absolute necessity, obviously, and not some indication of some mass failure of black people’s character. After the end of that wretched practice, many women didn’t remarry, as they had no way to tell if their husband was dead or not. This is one reason black women have always had such an obvious role in black economic development. Many black women have always had to work.

Somethings that we routinely consider as morally unacceptable or causing poverty have subtle historical undertones that still have lingering effects. Unfortunately we have either never thought about this or have paid scant regard to this undeniable effect. Similarly, democracy may not yet be the perfect solution for the Middle East and the Bush Administration trying to impose ‘our’ idea of a perfect governing system may be basically faulty. Food for thought, eh?

Wicks goes on then to tackle the ongoing war on drugs and offers radical solutions to tackle the problem at its root:

Ownership of streets and roads would do more to solve the problem of street crime than just about anything else. Drug dealing usually heavily involves the streets. Dealers perform transactions on the streets, crack fiends hang out on the streets. What if the streets were privatized? How many of you would allow a drug dealer to make sales in your living room? How about allow crack heads to hang out in the kitchen? Then why would you allow them to do the same on your street? Well, the problem is that the streets are not owned by those who live along them. They are owned by government, and government is usually an absentee landlord.

Seems okay in principle but I find it difficult to implement. But to Hicks’ credit, he tries offering some implementable solutions like creating a neighborhood ‘company’ or involving NGOs to micro-manage streets. Basically his arguments are rooted in the principle of property rights and the legal right of an individual to keep away unwelcome elements from it. This also has serious implications for neighborhood revitalization by trying to entrust the residents with the responsibility of changing it themselves, which is not an uncommon strategy at all.

Hicks concludes with a strong statement against the government which I think in principle he is against the government imposing its will on the people:

For me, one of the most troubling aspects of government is how government is always the exception. How many moral codes permit stealing? Yet government taxes are somehow different. How many moral codes permit the killing of children? Yet, government wars are somehow different. How many moral codes permit someone to storm a person’s house in the middle of the night for something they are doing in the privacy of their own homes? Yet government is somehow different. It is always the exception. I often wonder how many ostensibly religious people aren’t simply idol worshipers in the most literal sense, considering how many exceptions they allow government. If there are exceptions that you are willing to allow for in the case for freedom here and there, what exceptions will be allowed in the future?

Read the whole thing even if you disagree with most of it. Definitely an thought-provoking read and it is time well-spent.

Technorati Tags: culture, war on drugs, government, libertarian, African American, Black, slavery, control, choice

Basically their argument lies in raising the minimum wage. As known, the minimum wages causes disproportinate unemployment amongst the least skilled individuals and as many immigrants have a lower skill set than native, any rise in the minimum wage is likely to affect them adversely.

Alex Tabarrok, an economist at George Mason rightly points to the social injustice angle of this move by asking whether the Times would have published this op-ed if it “advocated minimum wages as a way of creating unemployment among
African Americans and raising white wages.” Probably it makes sense and even works perfectly economically but then no nation is a purely capitalistic society where concepts such as social justice is ignored completely. It is always a balancing act that varies with the times. But I guess political climate is a more influential factor.

Technorati Tags: unemployment, economics, minimum wage, politics

Middle-class city dwellers across the country are being
squeezed….In New York, the supply of apartments considered affordable
to households with incomes like those earned by starting firefighters
or police officers plunged by a whopping 205,000 in just three years.

….Firefighters who want to live in high-priced cities can work two jobs, said W. Michael Cox, chief economist for the Federal Reserve Bankof Dallas. “I think it’s great,” he said. “It gives you portfolio diversification in your income.”

Did he really say that? If yes, I hope it was tongue-in-cheek but I fear it isn’t.

Technorati Tags: India, rescue, Haryana, Prince

Mumbai tried this few years back when they built almost 55 flyovers in a span of five years and Delhi followed suit. Bangalore is the latest villain in traffic management. The situation is so bad that industries that flocked to Bangalore and helped it to prosper are now threatening to leave if the situation is not immediately remedied. Madman provides us with incisive analysis, completely with barebones sketches of the traffic woes that even newer flyovers seem to excacerbate.

I have always maintained that flyovers do not necessarily solve the problem; they simply postpone it for a later administration. Nowadays, considering the bureaucratic and legal delays involved in contracting out and constructing a flyover, it is often obsolete as soon as it is completed. That said, flyovers are in fact a necessary evil. Their core function is to eliminate the traffic lights so as to ensure an uninterrupted and continuous flow of traffic. Ideally, it would be great if you do not encounter any intersection between your point of origin and the destination but unless we completely envelope our urbanscape with flyovers that is not possible. Flyovers have to end somewhere and usually where they end or intersect with other flyovers, a bottleneck is the obvious result almost always negating the advantage of the flyover.

I am no road engineeer or traffic consultant to offer profound solutions. Would it be advisable to isolate heavy-traffic zones like the airport or other transit terminals from individual cars and making them accessible through public transit only? I would prefer to take the train to the airport when it takes me directly inside the terminal like at Hartsfield International Airport whereas taking a bus from downtown Houston is definitely a no-no. Flyovers have a capacity limit that is easily surpassed and often near-impossible to fix. Additional flyovers may not be the solution. Probably, it is time to think ‘outside the flyover’.

Feast your eyes on several such abandoned sites. Never was desolation and abandonment pictured so beautifully. All that is left to be done is to clean up the sites and redevelop them to satiate our need for more urban development. Of course, green spaces sprinkled liberally would do just as well.

“Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.” – Bill Vaughan

Couldn’t agree more.

America’s small-medium towns, for e.g. the one that I live in – College Station – have almost everything that a typical American needs for their daily living; a Wal-Mart, a Target, couple of Krogers or Albertsons’ (big-box grocery stores), scores of fast-food joints and at least one of each franchise-gourmet places. You can live here as long as you want and not miss anything at all. The local Jins or the Panda Express provides your occasional oriental experience and your talk with the odd international student is enough to satiate your “global” experience longings. Only if you are in a big city like New York, would you be faced with a multitude of choices and thus be implored to know and seek more.

It is fine to juxtapose the old Greenwich Village against the gargantuan planning of the corrupt Robert Moses. Few other social scientists of her time grasped the idea of spontaneous order. But what to do if a city grows from one million to ten million people, as has happened many times in the Third World?

To be sure, favelas and shanties work far better than their reputations. Drug gangs aside, they embody many of the best qualities of Jacob’s analysis, or for that matter Hayek’s. But surely it is a problem when there is no piped water or reliable electricity. How can you get those services into new areas without some serious planning? You can call for private sector involvement but it is planning nonetheless and it probably will involve some use of eminent domain. Or how about new roads?

I believe he straddles an important middle-ground that has plagued much of planning literature. Planning, everyone agrees is important and necessary but they differ on how much planning or control is required. Libertarians argue that the market should be allowed to let a city organically grow according to the economic needs of the people. But then, we have a resulting city like Houston that you definitely wouldn’t pride living in. Complete top-down approach, like that empowered Le Corbusier gave rise to Chandigarh which I believe, failed to connect with the people and still remains a mystery even to the people who live there. Jacobs may have leaned a wee bit too much toward the left but her opposition to Moses, who built much of New York’s infrastructure, was well-intentioned. Moses’ creations may have helped New York be the city that is today but at the same time, social injustices cannot be overlooked in the name of progress. Equal representation to all sections of the society must remain planning’s overarching objective.

Times are much different from when Moses and Jacobs practices their professions and it may not be possible to adhere to simply one process of planning. Globalization and urban agglomeration has made Jacobs’ idyllic sense of a community redundant whereas the global melting pot of cultures and ethnicities in any metropolis worth its salt has refocused attention on social justice.

Is it time to develop a new theory for planning that focuses on changing times, social and economic, as well as keep an eye on sustainability? Or does one already exist that needs a little tweaking?

The basin of the world’s third largest river (after Nile and Amazon), New Orleans and much of Louisiana stands on unstable ground that constantly changes its geographic form every thousand years. The mouth of the Mississippi has moved left and right since forever and it continually seeks to do so. But it finds itself restricted and controlled by the sub-standard levee system (the Dutch do it better). New Orleans is famously known to exist below sea level and if you look at the cross-section of the city, you will see a great depression in a bowl-like fashion protected by feeble contraptions erected by man. In spite of many warnings by scientists and climatologists, stubbornness of American people (in the region) often mistaken as resilience failed to inspire any preventive action. The result – Hurricane Katrina literally exposed the dangers of human impact on marshlands by destroying nearly 80% of the city. Levees snapped like twigs and all talk of their engineering prowess was muted.

We walked through the Ninth Ward and even after six months we could see destruction and wrecked home as far as our eyes could see. It is almost that this part of town has been declared a ghost town and no cares to rebuild. The catch however might be that probably the best option is not to rebuild. Easier said than done; this area was inhabited by mostly low-income people because no one else wanted to live on ‘that’ side of the town. The low-income people also happen to be mostly African-American so the issue of not rebuilding slowly transcends from that of rational thinking to resolving issues of social and racial equity. Can we genuinely deny these people from coming back? If we can stop them from living in this vulnerable location, where do we put them? Of course, New Orleans needs people who can work low-end jobs at the bars, restaurants, grocery stores and those people cannot live in flood-safe areas occupied by the middle- and upper-class residents. So technically, the low-income people have a choice of living in flood-prone areas that are cheap to build in but face risks of destruction almost every year or not living in New Orleans at all. So will New Orleans exist as an urban space without its share of poor people that are needed (relative and in an economic sense) in a society? Probably not; no matter how much the upper class of New Orleans citizenry secretly wishes. Hence my conclusion that New Orleans may or must not exist in its current urban form; it should either drastically evolve to live sustainably and densely so as to reduce its ecological footprint in a worsening ecosystem or in a worst-case scenario, count its losses, cherish its history, pack up and move on.

Cities have died before either gradually due to economic or social decline or suddenly due to natural cataclysmic changes. Our capacity to absorb havoc wrecked by nature might have increased and it might take one heck of a natural disaster to wipe off a city especially in a developed nation. As I mentioned, the next hurricane season is expected to be worse and so will be subsequent seasons; natural processes or global warming – the consequences are similar. If at all we choose to rebuild, the way we do it will be paramount in testing the hypothesis that man learns from history. Sadly, I think that we often prove that hypothesis wrong.