west north

Recent quotables. No common theme.

Bill McKibbenin Yes! Magazine:

The kind of extreme independence that derived from cheap fossil fuel—the fact that we need our neighbors for nothing at all—can’t last. Either we build real community, of the kind that lets us embrace mass transit and local food and co-housing and you name it, or we will go down clinging to the wreckage of our privatized society.

From the Baffler, “The flight of the creative class: a bohemian rhapsody” (satire), Paul Maliszewski and Thomas Frank:

“Creative people do have certain needs, however, They require hip entertainment, organic street-level culture, and artistic environments—from restaurants serving mind-boggling fusions of world cuisines, like Thai and Tex-Mex or Indian and Australian, to experimental theaters, avant-garde galleries, and authentic coffee shops with mismatched cups and saucers and deteriorating couches. Creative people crave lively street scenes and late-night music venues serving up pricey energy drinks in test tubes. In short, creative people insist they lead the sort of lives that feed their creativity, inspiring them.”

Thomas Geoghegan, “The Law in Shambles” (Prickly Paradigm, 2005), excerpted in same Baffler:

“In a plutocracy, we don’t trust the government. Why should we? It does nothing for us, it is underfunded, and it’s unreliable. This attitude, in turn, makes the problem worse. The more arbitrary and unfair we think things are, the more we drop out. We don’t simply stop voting. We stop reading the paper. Stop following it at all…

“Remember the teaching of the great law professor Clyde Summers: ‘It costs a lot of money for people to have “rights.”‘ [...]

“Where I live, in Chicago, I’m in a ring of nuclear power plants. I’d be in terrible danger if we ever successfully muzzled the trial lawyers. It’s only the tort system that saves us from another Three Mile Island. Yes, I agree, it might be nice if we had more nuclear plants. We could cut down on Mideast oil. We could slow down global warming. And if I lived in France, with all its nuclear energy, I might think it was a good thing. So why do I oppose it here?

“Because France has a real administrative state, a real civil service, and the best and brightest do the regulating. In America, we can’t even keep the trains on the tracks. And so, sure, as a citizen, Id like to curb the trial lawyers.

“But I also want to live.”

Some bits from the January 2007 SMARTRAQ report, about the market demand for sprawl vs. walkable neighborhoods, for my future reference:

page 9. Residents of the least walkable neighborhoods generated 20% more CO2 from travel then residents of the most walkable neighborhoods, about 2 kg more CO2 per person per weekday.

Residents of the most walkable areas are 2.4X more likely to get the level of daily activity necessary to maintain health (30 minutes): 37% vs. 18% in the least walkable neighborhoods.

page 10. About a third of metro Atlantans living in conventional suburban development would have preferred a more walkable environment, but apparently traded it off for other reasons such as affordability, school quality, or perception of crime in addition to lack of supply. It is likely that this mismatch between community preference and choice is due to an undersupply of walkable environments.

page 32. 55% of survey respondents preferred a shorter commute, even if residential densities were higher and lot sizes smaller. 33% of respondents preferred such an option, but did not currently live in this type of neighborhood.

56% of respondents would prefer a neighborhood where they had easy travel choices, even if it meant a smaller house, over a house in a neighborhood where they had to drive for everything. 37% would prefer such an area, but did not currently.

young and restless Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

The first set of charts, graphs, and illustrations has come back from the planners examining Wicker Park & Bucktown on behalf of we, the people of WP-B (or at least our special service area). The most astonishing finding, in my view, is here: our neighborhood’s people are defined by a stunning — indeed, almost statistically improbable — self-segregation of young people.

Nearly 52% of the population is between 20-39, compared to just 29% nationally. 45.4% even fall within that most marketer-coveted of all age groups, the 18-35s. Maybe we could make a lot of money selling sidewalk billboards.

Perhaps even more quizzically, young men significantly outnumber young women in most age brackets: 9.4% (nearly one in ten!) neighborhood residents are (like me) men in their late 20s, nearly three times the share in the American populace. It’s not even an appreciably gay neighborhood, either.

Almost all other age groups are underrepresented (relative to their national shares) in the neighborhood by about 30-50% — except for preschool aged children. Sure enough, the kids leave at school age — although not nearly to the “total” extent that is sometimes claimed by alarmists. Why, there are about as many grade-schoolers living here as 60-somethings.

(Produced by Interface Studio for Wicker Park Bucktown Special Service Area #33)

The Neighbors Project offers How to call the shots in your neighborhood:

If you’ve ever wondered who made the decision to put up the giant flag or rip up a street or cancel your favorite parade, chances are it’s your neighborhood association. They’re usually quite powerful.

Coming soon: part two, in which we demonstrate how to stage a coup of your neighborhood association, or alternately to start a brand new one and seize the reins from the old one in order to create a bitter neighborhood feud!

An article by Alex Williams in the Sunday NYT talks about “light” and “deep” green, timely given the recent rocketing ascendance of pricey green gear:

“A legitimate beef that people have with green consumerism is, at end of the day, the things causing climate change are more caused by politics and the economy than individual behavior,” said Michel Gelobter, a former professor of environmental policy at Rutgers who is now president of Redefining Progress, a nonprofit policy group that promotes sustainable living.

“A lot of what we need to do doesn’t have to do with what you put in your shopping basket,” he said. “It has to do with mass transit, housing density. It has to do with the war and subsidies for the coal and fossil fuel industry.” [...]

“We didn’t find that people felt that their consumption gave them a pass, so to speak,” [Michael] Shellenberger [of market research firm American Environics] said. “They knew what they were doing wasn’t going to deal with the problems, and these little consumer things won’t add up. But they do it as a practice of mindfulness. They didn’t see it as antithetical to political action. Folks who were engaged in these green practices were actually becoming more committed to more transformative political action on global warming.”

[posted to CCM list]

Me to this list, 24 April 2003:

Hear, hear! I don’t think “anarchy routes” are ANY fun. There’s always
dilly-dallying about where the ride’s going to go, the ride ends up going
in circles and ends up in the same old parts of town that pretty much
replicate my daily commute. (We live surrounded by architectural splendor!
Let’s go and see it!) We end up being really antagonistic, inertia keeps us
on streets for really long and boring (and bus-schedule-wreaking)
stretches. The ride loses its energy fast as people who don’t have anything
to look forward to make other plans and ditch the ride — not that there
was much energy to start with, since the ride has no common (or consensus)
vision to begin with. “Anarchy” is capricious, frustrating, and boring.

This is not to say that a lot of planning has to go into a ride to make it
great. Gareth’s totally impromptu, sketched-on-a-paper-napkin map the time
the French Cycling Sisters showed up a few summers back totally rocked.

Okay, so maybe I’m a stickler for order and responsibility and planning.
But hey, in my experience, those sure beat the alternative.

Also, the “anarchy map” privileges the individuals up front; no one else gets any say in where the mass goes. With pre-printed maps, the entire group gets a chance to read, vet, and vote on the maps.

From a Sprol.com report on HFCS production: “I heard recently the claim that health depends less on how we take care of ourselves than how we take care of each-other.”

Bill McKibben writes in the current American Prospect on global warming:

Europe and Japan have been able to begin grappling with climate change because they retain a different conception of public life. They don’t need houses as large as ours because their cities are in some sense an extension of people’s living rooms. They can cope with public transportation because they haven’t spread as far into distant and disconnected suburbs. In this light, it makes sense that Portland and New York and San Francisco have emerged as the centers of American activism. Those cities still have some public life. But suburban Atlanta? In case you’re wondering if such airy speculation makes a concrete difference, consider that western Europeans use, on average, 50-percent less fossil fuel than Americans. _Not because their lives are poorer, and not because they have some magical technology; because they think a little differently about life_… (emphasis added)

No, the political force that finally manages to take this issue on is the political force that also understands and helps to nurture the deep-rooted and unsatisfied American desire for real community, for real connection between people. The force that dares to actually say out loud that “more” is no longer making us happier, that the need for security and for connection is now more important.

But you could also make a decent argument that this issue is one of the doors into a new and more interesting politics. A politics that is about living the good life instead of acquiring more things. A politics that is about guaranteeing one another medical care and retirement security and a planet to inhabit. Those tasks all seem beyond the every-man-for-himself ethos of post-Reagan America; they rely on some emergent solidarity. Exactly how it will emerge and who will embody it are not yet clear, but physics and chemistry seem to require it.

Global warming is that rare (well, I hope so), overwhelming, all-encompassing, big-picture threat which could ultimately force a new politics of solidarity onto humanity — and, as McKibben points out, it’s just that solidarity which has been sorely lacking in American politics. Climate could also become the defining issue of my generation: “the baby boomers”:http://hubbert.mines.edu/news/Udall-Andrews_99-1.pdf (scroll to page 6) got us into this mess, with more than _half_ of the world’s total oil reserves consumed during their lifetimes. That leaves their children to either (a) clean up the mess in a reasonable manner or (b) further delay the inevitable end of profligacy, merely ensuring that it’ll only get worse.

Thumbnail images of posters and other Situationist propaganda from 1968.

In re-reading Stan Greenberg’s “The Two Americas” (hey, it’s one way to see what went wrong), I came across this: the groups he calls The Faithful and The Secular Warriors, the core of each party’s social ideologies — white evangelical Protestants on the one hand and the unchurched and disarmed on the other — are almost equivalent in the electorate. The Faithful are 17%, the Secular Warriors are 15%.

So, whose values are “truly” American?

Another thought on AIA: I’ve never seen another profession quite so dedicated to the acquisition of continuing education units (LUs in the trade). The sessions have little scanning stations precisely timed to make sure that you have indeed been sitting inside, absorbing that crucial information; every little tour, many of the booths, even quizzes in the back of Record give you the chance to accumulate those valuable LUs (especially those crucial HSWs). Sheesh — you’d think that people would be in it because it’s interesting, but no. It’s not even like the requirements are all that onerous: eight HSW credit hours means a total of four or five classes or seminars a year. As they helpfully point out in the conference book, you can earn all that at one stinkin’ conference.

I suppose I’m now an LU provider: take my two CNU tours on Thursday, 24 June and you’ll have earned three LUs. Who knew that my knowledge was that easily quantifiable?

$40,000 a year for 10 years, apparently, is what it takes to convince a developer to lease to a small, local retailer instead of a large chain. I’m all for interesting little local shops downtown, but surely there’s a more effective way to do this — a publicly owned public market, perhaps?

This is weird: a suburban tract-house developer in Aurora is building 30 units of cohousing within one of his planned communities.

A nurse… said: “The problem is the government has made us feel like we’ve come out of this divided. The… party exudes a feeling that you are either with them and [the country] or you are somehow unpatriotic or against them.”

– a Socialist voter in Madrid

Sadly, American voters seem to be otherwise disposed: even though the current regime has plainly failed to protect the citizenry, plenty of voters still give Bush credit for “leadership through crisis.” Some pundits are saying that an “October surprise” terrorist attack would benefit Bush, as voters rally ’round the flag — even though an attack then, after three years of the Everlasting War on Evildoers, would plainly demonstrate the incompetence of those in power.

Also from The Guardian, a pleasant paean to how Spain’s citizenry is standing against the new era of fear:

What’s at stake is a long history of the city, that exchange point for trade and ideas that has been the crux of all civilisations. The city orders how large numbers of human beings live in close proximity. In so doing, it civilises and turns strangers into citizens who belong to a civil society in which they treat each other with (more or less) civility. All these words have the same Latin root, civitas.

What the demonstrations in Spain remind us is that civility — the measure of goodwill from one stranger to another — is ultimately what makes a city’s spirit. It is the accumulation of tiny, daily interactions with bus conductors, fellow commuters, newspaper sellers and coffee-shop waitresses — the humour, the greetings, the gestures of help that smooth the rough edges of urban living.

Instead, in the past two days the vacuum has been filled by the people; the politicians would do well to listen, and articulate their civility rather than rush to use the shabby and meaningless metaphor of a “war on terror”. You cannot fight fire with fire, was the implicit message of the silent crowds. Spain’s mourning will have global resonance — as did 9/11. Over half the world’s population now live in cities, and the images we have seen in the past few days offer two alternatives of what the city might mean in the 21st century: a place of terror where the stranger is to be feared and distrusted, or the determined solidarity of strangers — a sea of hands waving hastily scribbled messages with the one word that says everything: “No”. Thank you, Spain, for giving us a choice.

Unfortunately, Americans have never had “liberté, égalité, fraternité” as a rallying cry; in today’s consumer society, we actively shun the latter two. Alex Shakar writes in _The Savage Girl_ that “Hell is not necessarily other people; hell is being surrounded by people who share no solidarity,” which sounds a lot like home.

Yesterday’s NYT ran an article summarizing one study drawn from the MacArthur-funded Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. Dr Felton Earls finds that strong social capital (”collective efficacy,” in the study’s parlance) underlies both the “eyes on the street” and “broken windows” theories on crime prevention. In other words, strong neighborhood social capital creates safe neighborhoods and positive school outcomes:

In a landmark 1997 paper that he wrote with colleagues in the journal Science, and in a subsequent study in The American Journal of Sociology, Dr. Earls reported that most major crimes were linked not to “broken windows” but to two other neighborhood variables: concentrated poverty and what he calls, with an unfortunate instinct for the dry and off-putting language of social science, collective efficacy.

“If you got a crew to clean up the mess,” Dr. Earls said, “it would last for two weeks and go back to where it was. The point of intervention is not to clean up the neighborhood, but to work on its collective efficacy. If you organized a community meeting in a local church or school, it’s a chance for people to meet and solve problems.

“It is the worship of strength and charisma themselves that I find alarming in a democratic system. I think once the electorate acts from its own troubled id, we are vulnerable to the election of untold numbers of scoundrels, one of whom or a series of whom, could spell the end of democracy.” Cary Tennis

Could Arianna as governor put the party back into increasingly one-party California?

“Straight viewers… want to learn about people who are different from them. We can’t just have all white, middle class characters on television,” says Scott Seomin of GLAAD. Funny, then, that the article talks up NBC’s “Will & Grace” and “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” where all the characters are… white and middle class.

The latest Trixie spinoff: the Lincoln Park Gay Chad Society. From a cultural studies perspective, this is more properly a reaction, but to what? to Trixies, to the circuit-queen scene, to gay assimilation or to being closeted, to masculinity or femininity? hmm.

Robert Kagan’s hypothesis of irreconcilable differences between the EU and USA has merit, says Stephen Holmes, but only because it cuts both ways: well-policed Europe only conceives of civil solutions to conflict, whereas militarized America only thinks of bombs. (Or maybe just West Texas only thinks of bombs.) On another note, war proponents often claim that Hussein is “like Hitler.” But not even Texans have yet suggested war as a way to liberate the people of Zimbabwe from a dictator who just declared himself “Hitler ten-fold.”