Response to Disaster

Monday's earthquake in central Italy brought disaster back to the forefront of international attention. Disasters take many forms, but are related in their unpredictable and severely disruptive effects. What does the threat of disaster mean for cities?

In many ways, urbanization increases our vulnerability to large-scale disaster. It multiplies damages associated with contagious disease, violent conflict, extreme poverty, environmental harzard, and loss of cultural heritage. As settlements become more concentrated in fewer places, threats to these places pose greater risk to stability at national and international levels.

At the same time, cities hold advantages for disaster prevention and recovery. In comparison with rural areas, they are more connected to global support and information networks. Public services, while not always dependable, offer some protection against the most devastating effects of disasters. Cities are also repositories of knowledge and resources that can be applied towards reducing vulnerabilities. Urban disasters don't always bring chaos, and can even inspire a sense of shared purpose, as evident in the resilience of Mumbai's population after the terrorist attacks last November.

Cities can prepare to mitigate disaster through coordinated governance and policy. Less concentrated settlements are worth considering, though population distribution isn't something to be forced. In most cases, I think we're better off strengthening the places where people choose to live. As the world's urban population grows rapidly, managing the threat of disaster to cities will be increasingly important for development and stability.

(Photo of a damaged house in Castelnuovo, Italy from Komonews.com; Photo of people in front of the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai from Chinaview.cn)

The Healing Power of Overcrowded Trains (and Other Urban Ills)

It has been almost a month since the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, and three weeks since I wrote about my return to a terror-tinted cityscape in "My Mumbai". By now, the attacks have completely disappeared from the international media spotlight. Although the aftermath still makes the front page in India, the main story under the headline "More 26/11 Aftershocks" in the December 19 edition of Mumbai's Hindustan Times was tellingly about India canceling its cricket tour in Pakistan. To be fair, this fact may do almost as much damage to the national psyche. Still, with the Taj and Oberoi hotels reopening today, Mumbai is virtually back to normal — albeit with some extra bag checks and a tempered night life.

When I wrote last, I marveled at the speed with which Mumbaikers reclaimed the city's spaces, which the terrorists sought to transform into sites of fear. Since then, Mumbaikers have taken back the streets not only by diving into the daily grind, but with a surge of activism. The weeks after the attack have seen a number of peace marches and rallies take place near affected sites with an energy uncharacteristic for a culture known for its resignation to fate. Although some of the demonstrations were less than peaceful (more platforms for venting anger against the government), these events were a visible sign of Mumbaikers taking back the city streets.

In my last report, I wondered how long it would take me to reclaim Mumbai for myself, as most residents had quickly done. How have I been doing? A lot better. In the first few days, I ducked when airplanes flew a bit lower than usual. It felt like a shadow had come over the landscape, and I felt an extreme sense of vulnerability, in Mumbai and in the world. For the next week, I avoided sites that were marked as danger zones on my mental map: train stations, night clubs, cinemas, restaurants frequented by foreigners. Not long after that, though, my routine was pretty much back to normal. The biggest change was that I stopped taking the train, which was my daily mode of transport to and from work. However, I took the train twice last week — and that's a start.

My progress has nothing to do with an increased sense of safety. Speculation that more terrorists had been on the boat and remain at large has still neither been definitively affirmed nor denied. Some political heads have rolled, and there are more police on the streets and bag and vehicle checks at high-profile spots, but I am not convinced that this has had a meaningful effect on security. Just a few days after the attacks, to prove a point, someone successfully got a gun through Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST), Mumbai's biggest station and the one in which terrorists fired in November. Unexploded bombs were found in the same station a week after the attack, whereas authorities declared the station safe and reopened it just a few hours after the shooting. It is well known that police do not have the capacity to fully secure vulnerable sites. Many officers haven't had a practice shot in a decade; in fact, a cop whose gun accidentally went off at CST set off a panic a few days after the attacks. Metal detectors and heightened police presence at stations appear to be mostly for show. I personally attempted to alert officers at a train station about some unidentified baggage last week; I might as well have told them I had a stomachache.

Although I don't actually feel more secure, I have realized that it's not really I who am reclaiming Mumbai, but Mumbai that is reclaiming me.

There are already so many homemade messes to deal with in Mumbai — poverty, inequality, communal riots, domestic bomb blasts by both Hindu and Muslim fundamentalists, gangsters, deadly flooding — that there is hardly time to fear external threats. The plague even made an appearance recently.

In particular, the purported ills of urbanization for which Mumbai is berated and that both frustrate and dazzle visitors seem to be a large part of what makes residents so resilient. Getting from one place to another, you are constantly stuck in traffic jams, narrowly avoiding being hit by a moving vehicle and navigating an obstacle course of sewage puddles, hawkers and pavement dwellers. You take in an overwhelming barrage of smells, sounds and sights: garbage and incense, temple bells and car horns, wandering cows and densely packed slums. Everyone and their mother is carrying around an over-sized package. Fireworks that sound like bombs explode on a daily basis (nothing gets in the way of marriage season). Part of the ability to bounce back may come from habituation to moving on no matter what comes at you throughout the day. In such a chaotic and taxing environment, there is no time or energy to be afraid.

There's no better example of this than the city's crowded trains — the main site of my personal struggle with fear. In the latest issue of Time Out Mumbai (the cover of which was a picture of a giant screw with the words, "Our message for terrorists...Screw you!"), Reason #7 that Mumbaikers bounce back quickly from crises is local train journeys: "Every day, just under half of the city's population boards the local train, 5,000 of us jammed into carriages designed to hold 1,800 people... When we board the train, we make an unspoken pact with our fellow citizens: we know we're in for a horrid time for a little while, but in the end, we'll all get to our destination. Those daily negotiations give us a sense of empathy and solidarity with our fellow citizens that's unique to Mumbai... We're just showing the city the same tough love that it bestows upon us every day." Sometimes it feels like solidarity, other times like survival of the fittest, but when you are busy trying to keep from getting physically crushed in a stampede of saris while avoiding elbowing the newborn cradled behind you, it's pretty hard to worry about anything else. Besides, as 4000 people die every year in accidents on Mumbai's trains, the journey poses more pressing safety issues.

As seems to happen so often, it appears that my greatest hope for recovery lies in the same place as my biggest fear: in this case, on the local train.

(Photo of station from Times of India. Photo of peace march from E-Talk India. Photo of train from the Mumbai Insomniac blog. Photo of flood from the Delhi Greens blog.)

The Paradox of the False Positive

An excerpt from Cory Doctorow's latest book, Little Brother:

If you ever decide to do something as stupid as build an automatic terrorism detector, here's a math lesson you need to learn first. It's called "the paradox of the false positive," and it's a doozy.

Say you have a new disease, called Super-AIDS. Only one in a million people gets Super-AIDS. You develop a test for Super-AIDS that's 99 percent accurate. I mean, 99 percent of the time, it gives the correct result -- true if the subject is infected, and false if the subject is healthy. You give the test to a million people.

One in a million people have Super-AIDS. One in a hundred people that you test will generate a "false positive" -- the test will say he has Super-AIDS even though he doesn't. That's what "99 percent accurate" means: one percent wrong.

What's one percent of one million?

1,000,000/100 = 10,000

One in a million people has Super-AIDS. If you test a million random people, you'll probably only find one case of real Super-AIDS. But your test won't identify *one* person as having Super-AIDS. It will identify *10,000* people as having it.

Your 99 percent accurate test will perform with 99.99 percent *inaccuracy*.

That's the paradox of the false positive. When you try to find something really rare, your test's accuracy has to match the rarity of the thing you're looking for. If you're trying to point at a single pixel on your screen, a sharp pencil is a good pointer: the pencil-tip is a lot smaller (more accurate) than the pixels. But a pencil-tip is no good at pointing at a single *atom* in your screen. For that, you need a pointer -- a test -- that's one atom wide or less at the tip.

This is the paradox of the false positive, and here's how it applies to terrorism:

Terrorists are really rare. In a city of twenty million like New York, there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside. 10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent.

That's pretty rare all right. Now, say you've got some software that can sift through all the bank-records, or toll-pass records, or public transit records, or phone-call records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent of the time.

In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test will identify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten of them are terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and investigate two hundred thousand innocent people.

Guess what? Terrorism tests aren't anywhere *close* to 99 percent accurate. More like 60 percent accurate. Even 40 percent accurate, sometimes.

What this all meant was that the Department of Homeland Security had set itself up to fail badly. They were trying to spot incredibly rare events -- a person is a terrorist -- with inaccurate systems

.

DHS, in Doctorow's skillfully-written book (full disclosre: I'm a long-time fan) has taken over San Francisco after a pretty horrific terrorist attack, and implemented a security net so obnoxious that everyone is a suspect, turning the "innocent until proven guilty" maxim fundamental to the US justice system on its ear in the name of "protecting" the very citizens it interrogates on every corner.

As if we needed a reminder, the recent Mumbai attacks have thrust the extraordinarily rare specter of the large-scale, well-coordinated urban terror strike back into the public spotlight. Doctorow's greatest strength has always been his ability to make the future feel incredibly near; it is not even remotely difficult to imagine a scenario like the one described in LIttle Brother playing out were another major attack to strike a US city. Almost as frightening than the idea of an actual attack (or more frightening, depending on who you talk to) is the idea of what might come after. Imagine a massive citizen-tracking web, to put London's CCTV to shame, layered on top of the already overanxious contemporary cityscape, and consider the paradox of the false positive. Not pretty.

Little Brother is available for free download under Creative Commons licence right here.

My Mumbai

I was lucky enough to be out of Mumbai, where I live and work, during the terrifying days of November 26-29. When I flew back last Saturday, I returned to a different city. On the face of it, not much had changed up North (the attacks were in the South), except that things were eerily calm and an intangible gloom hung in windows and faces. But as my taxi sailed familiar routes, places where I had met friends for coffee, bought my first salwar kameez, picked up vegetables on the way home or got of the train every day – the backdrops against which I had carved out a home here – seemed physically hostile and foreign.

Terrorists focus their attacks on large cities not only because they have dense concentrations of people, but because they can use the fabric of the city itself to dishearten and terrorize. They prey on the physical landscape of the city, and even more devastatingly, on inhabitants' imagined cities. Their aim is to transform individual and collective memories of, myths about, and relationships to specific places in the city by converting them into loci of fear and insecurity.

It makes sense that those wishing to destabilize and cause fear would attack urban icons. Civilizations find their most visible expression in cities, and iconic sites come to serve as symbols that define collective identity. Desecrating iconic sites like Mumbai's Taj Hotel is a way to destroy much more than lives or historic structures — it is a way to attack the heart of the city and nation. Damaging collective reference points creates is a deep sense of instability and insecurity. Although the Taj will be rebuilt, it will not be the same Taj; terror will be written into the physical structure and its depictions in postcards, pamphlets and photographs for some time to come.

Besides iconic sites, perpetrators of the attacks in Mumbai and other parts of India have targeted other symbolic places in the city to distort their meaning in the minds of users. Sites of leisure, like amusement parks, nightclubs and cafes; sites of healing and protection, like hospitals and police vehicles; and sites of exchange, like street markets and stock exchanges, become places of insecurity and potential violence. Threatened or actual attacks on every mode of transportation – airplanes and airports, trains and railway stations, buses, taxis and auto-rickshaws – seek to paralyze us. Terror works by causing people to enslave themselves by confining their movements, barring themselves from certain places in the city, and shrinking their spheres of security.

Insecurity and public calls for action lead to increased militarization of the city, as your bags are triple-checked in malls and movie theaters, billboards remind you to keep an eye out for unattended baggage and armed policemen peer into your taxi at checkpoints. Heightened policing and militarization, in turn, reinforces the identification of certain sites with violence and fear.

As terror tries to colonize our imagined cities, it is through reclamation of city space that people affirms their resilience in the face of terror. Mumbaikers have been incredibly insistent on maintaining their daily routines and the life of the city. On the day that I got back to Mumbai, wedding processions took place on the streets, construction work proceeded apace, and people were out eating, shopping and watching movies. I already managed to get stuck in a traffic jam. Leopold Cafe, a well-known tourist hangout that was the first hit in the attacks, re-opened on Sunday, and Not Just Jazz by the Bay, a popular bar and restaurant near the Oberoi Hotel at Nariman Point that was taken over by terrorists, was full of revelers by Saturday. Of course, the majority of Mumbai's population – hawkers, slum and pavement dwellers, day laborers – cannot afford to stay home or avoid the train. They've never been to the Taj and face many more immediate threats to their lives and sustenance than the specter of terrorism.

The day I got back to Mumbai, it was the familiar whirl of the drill in the adjoining building, the cries of the vegetable-wallah on the street and the sound of the bell ringing in the morning puja that represented a city insistent on staying alive. In time, I hope I can reclaim my Mumbai, as well.

(Photo of Taj by Indranil Mukherjee, Guardian.co.uk. Photo of Leopold's by Amar Singh, About.com )

Quotable

"I do believe that suburban living is a form of torture. If you made suspected terrorists live in big suburban houses, they would talk eventually. But they'd probably only say things like, 'Have you seen my keys?'"

--Cary Tennis at Salon.com

WEEKEND READING: October 6-12, 2007

It's been a busy week for this blogger, so the Weekend Reading list will be a bit shorter than usual.

ITEM ONE: Part IV, aka "The World's Worst Blog," put up a public poll to determine the three Best Archiblogs of 2007. Where has been nominated. Feel free to vote for it, if you so choose. ;-)

ITEM TWO: The new issue of The Next American City features this great article about the ripple effect war causes on crime, which happens to be available online.

ITEM THREE: City of Faded Elegance points us to the new edition of the Virginia Quarterly Review, which has a ton of great content on contemporary South America.

ITEM FOUR: Aussie blog Pigs Will Fly reports on so-called Sustainability Streets. The formula is quite fun: Mulch (learn), Sow (plan), Grow (do), Harvest (teach).

ITEM FIVE: Planetizen features a great post about a new museum in Salt Lake City that focuses on the ever-changing nature of the city.

Have a great weekend!

(Photo from Flickr user LeggNet.)

Clarity

Generally, the only personal information you'll get about this blogger is my opinion on some urbanism-related issue. That's not to say that I take myself too seriously here; let's be real -- I'm no professional. But it seems incredibly disingenuous to write about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in any sense other than personal. It also seems odd to write about anything else today. Perhaps that's just a part of the cultural PTSD Americans are going through; we aren't haunted day in and day out, but once a year we all feel a yearning to share our stories about "that day" with each other. Even more interestingly, it's a day when most of us will actually listen to what one another have to say. At any rate, if you don't want to listen to my own account, consider this your fair warning.

And so.

I was still living in the Milwaukee area six years ago on the day of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I was away when from the television when the second plane hit, as well as when the towers fell, so the most potently visual events of the day will never be as vivid for me, I don't think, as they are for many Americans. I remember what happened, but not as it happened. September 11th is, for me, a day of video replays. I saw the images a million times before September 12th, but what happened has always felt distant to me.

In fact, what I remember most vivdly from the whole ordeal came several days after September 11th. There is a massive church in the hills to the northwest of Milwaukee called Holy Hill. Perched atop -- you guessed it -- a hill, the building's two steeples dominate the rural skyline for miles in every direction. One of the towers has a public observation deck, and I traveled out to Holy Hill with two friends on the Friday after the attacks. There was no particular reason for the trip; we were bewildered by what had happened, and were perhaps looking for that musty feeling of sanctuary that religious buildings can provide.

I had been to Holy Hill once before that day with my family, and I remembered being able to see Milwaukee's stubby little skyline, over 25 miles away, enshrouded in a typical urban haze. On the Friday after the attacks, when I returned to the steepletop room with my friends, the skies were the perfect blue of early autumn, and the urban haze that had hung over the city was vanished; the air was quiet in a way that changed my understanding of that phrase. Planes had been grounded for days, of course, and as a result the view from the tower was so clear you could practically see the windows of the individual buildings in the skyline. For some reason, that image of the city stretched out at the point where the early reds and oranges of the very leafy metro area dropped off into Lake Michigan (also visible from the tower that day) has always stuck with me.

Whenever I think back on the September 11th attacks, I remember the confusion and the anxiety that followed, while the attacks themselves border on the abstract, like a never-quite-forgotten childhood nightmare. And whenever I find myself in a position now that causes me great confusion and anxiety, I use the memory I have of the view from the tower at Holy Hill to remind myself that, oftentimes, tragedy and struggle can wind up clearing things up in a way that I had never expected.

Perhaps that's too literal of an interpretation; perhaps, as many are arguing lately, enough time has passed that emotional license has revoked for people writing about September 11th, and I've just made an ass of myself by adding to the pile of endless and unncessary pontification; perhaps this post is entirely off topic and completely inappropriate. Still, I felt compelled to write it.

I live under a flight path into O'Hare, and as I write this post I can hear jets flying overhead. Most days I don't notice, but today is different.