Change? What kind of Change?

Yesterday, General Motors filed for bankruptcy and the US Government now owns a 60% stake in the largest American car company. Whether it be for better or worse, one thing is clear: the auto industry will not remain the same, and change is coming. Perhaps now, in the beginning of one of the largest economic restructurings ever, it is an appropriate time to talk about change. 

There are 2 types of change: regulative change and massive change. One works to bring processes up to date and improve efficiency while the other creates a whole new logic, a whole way of doing things, thereby completely changing the way a system works. GM thought it could save itself by closing plants, streamlining processes, and attempting to create a leaner, more efficient manufacturing company. The problem is, the US automotive industry doesn't just need to be more efficient, it needs to be completely restructured. It is not just the processes that need to change; it's also the motivations, the way of thinking, and the image that drives the company. GM and Ford have resorted to making cartoon cars out of classics! Isn't that post-modernism in a bottle? Is that where we should be? Meanwhile, BMW is making concepts like the GINA which could inspire and rewrite the future of automotive technology. OK, end American Auto Rant.

America, and indeed the developed world, doesn't need regulative change, but massive change. Technology has vastly improved the way we communicate and connect with each other and yet we seem to take that at face value and fail to realize how these massive changes could rewrite the ways in which we operate as a society. The vast spread of information provided by the internet allows for and encourages experimentation. In a trying time like this, we should not hang tight to what we know, but venture out into the unknown to explore and grow, like the pilgrims, or like Lewis and Clark. Regulative change is like pioneering a new cassette tape when everyone has an iPod. In our cities, our landscapes, our businesses, and our buildings, we need to start seeing massive change that will bring us as a society up to the level of our technology.


The restructuring of GM is an opportunity to create massive change, to rewrite not only an industry but a country, and a mentality. If we want to be in a new age, we have to start acting like we are already there.  

(Photos from ideo.ro and wikimedia. The original full-sized versions can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

LaHood: Not a Disastrous Pick, After All?

I don't know about you, but after Ray LaHood was tapped to serve as Obama's Secretary of Transportation, most of what I read around the urblogosphere was bad-news-bears. Urban policy wonk Ryan Avent questioned the decision over at Grist, as well as his own blog; over at WorldChanging, Alex Steffen wondered aloud wether Obama had used the position as a throwaway to appease Republicans; and transit blog The Overheard Wire took a padded swipe at the new Sec. Interested in getting the opinion of someone in the transit policy arena from LaHood's home state (which, luckily enough, happens to be my own), I checked in with a friend who's on the board of the Chicago-based Active Transportation Alliance, formerly the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation. He pointed me to an editorial piece in the org's latest newsletter, ModeShift, which paints a much sunnier picture of LaHood than I've become accustomed to reading. According to the ModeShift article, LaHood is a strong and vocal proponent of rails-to-trails programs, and has been twice-honored by the League of Illinois Bicyclists for his efforts on biking issues. So his mass transit record is still murky, but it sounds like LaHood's not all bad news. Just a bit of food for thought.

Edit: all that being said, I'm starting to wish that this Nadler fellow would have been given the nod.

Barack & Jane

Spotted on Beyond DC, a video of President-elect Obama from a town hall-style gathering back during the election season in Toledo, Ohio. Not only does he speak at length about the importance of building strong cities and metropolitan areas in the economic recovery process, he starts off by praising Jane Jacobs, calling The Death and Life of Great American Cities "a great book." Kind of amazing to see and hear; certainly gives this urbanist hope for the future. Now let's see if he delivers. Ten days to go...

Urban America, Urban World

Besides reveling in the renewed post-election America-philia as an American living abroad, I was happy to hear that less than a week after he became President-Elect, Barack Obama affirmed his campaign promise to create a federal Office of Urban Policy. As someone who has had her eye on urban denial in the developing world, I hadn't fully realized that the U.S. has yet to acknowledge our urban future.

The new federal office will be in charge of developing a comprehensive and targeted strategy for America’s cities and coordinating the work of agencies like the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Department of Transportation, and Department of Labor. Given its title, I thought HUD may have been doing this job, but it seems to mostly ignore the second half of its name and focus overwhelmingly on homeownership and reluctantly on public housing programs. It also doesn't bode well that HUD’s secretary resigned in the very heat of the mortgage crisis in April amid corruption allegations.

In contrast to Obama's urban focus (his campaign website included sections on "Urban Policy" and "Poverty", as well as a fact sheet on his urban strategy), the McCain-Palin camp ignored cities altogether. Their campaign website didn’t seem to even have mentioned the word; instead, they listed the right to bear arms, national service, and a space program as key issues more worthy of discussion.

Here in India, the idea that this is at heart a rural country and that migrants who come to work in urban centers are "encroachers" who should by no means be encouraged to stay with luxuries like basic shelter or sanitation is a surprisingly deep-seated, although waning, attitude. Mahatma Gandhi's oft-repeated quote —"India is not to be found in its few cities but in the 700,000 villages" — is still re-printed on half-page spreads in The Times of India. All members of the elite Indian civil service, who will go on to fill the nation’s powerful bureaucratic posts, are required to first serve a term in a rural location. Domestic development efforts are still largely focused on rural areas. Many cities are implementing development plans that remain unchanged from when they were approved two decades earlier; some cities and states lack an urban policy altogether — especially one that affords due attention to their large poor populations.

A focus on rural development and denial of urbanization as a systemic and irreversible force is not unique to India. This remains the tenor of policy in most developing countries and, by some accounts, of international aid.

What exactly accounts for the deep-seated ambivalence of America towards its cities? The agrarian ideal (famously promoted by Thomas Jefferson) and resistance to the clogged metropolises of the Old World go back to the founding days of the United States. Frank Lloyd Wright and other intellectuals, as well as developers and the media, helped to reify suburbs as incubators for model families and idyllic town-country living. Activists like Lewis Mumford and Jacob Riis helped highlight the social ills bred by city life. Then, there's always been the "frontier mentality" encouraging us to spread out because he have so much darn land. White flight, the erosion of cities’ industrial cores, and the concentration of poverty and violence have helped give cities a bad name in the last quarter-century. It is well known that "inner-city" and "urban" have become euphemisms for “violent, poor and black.”

It is fitting that we elect an "urban" president the year we become an urban world. As Obama realizes, America's cities need attention because they "house over 80 percent of the people, businesses, universities and cultural institutions… and produce well over 85 percent of the nation's wealth." In a globalized world, cities are on their way to eclipsing countries as centers of wealth and power. They are a locus of productivity, culture and innovation, but also of poverty and inequality.

Obama's urban sensitivity may have come from his days as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago — or perhaps from a cursory glance at the general state of affairs in the world — but I hope it also signals a shift on a larger scale away from idealization of suburbs and bad-mouthing of cities: not only for the sake of nurturing our own cities, but also for directing programs and resources to address the effects of urbanization around the world.

(Photos from Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Pitch Blog)

CartogrAmerica

Besides its outcome, the 2008 election was remarkable for another reason: the incredible range of maps produced to explain how people voted. My favorite map, by far, was actually a cartogram produced by Mark Newman.



Cartograms, "transformations of a map where the original polygons expand or contract their area based on an attribute value they have," can tell remarkable stories. In Newman's cartogram, above, counties are scaled based on the size of their populations and colored based on the proportion of democratic and republican votes. Besides being able to see how many people actually live in urban areas, this cartogram shows how people tend to vote there too. More analysis and a comparison to the 2004 election can be found on Newman's site.

(Cartogram by Mark Newman. Version with labels available from flickr.

Incredible

Just got back from Barack's massive victory rally in Grant Park, here in Chicago. America's first black prez certainly knows how to throw a party; but the really amazing thing wasn't actually the rally itself, which was fairly typical (if nonetheless inspiring) political fare. The mind-blowing aspect of this event was how it completely devoured the city core. As far as the eye could see, down every street in the Loop and well into River North along the Magnificent Mile, hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of supporters jammed the streets, sidewalks, and Mayor Daley's beloved planted medians. Every building with an LED or a floodlight mount was decked out in red, white, and blue. Buildings without such decorative schemes opted for window art, lighting interiors to form an American flag, "Vote 2008," and USA. Miles away from the event, the streets literally rung with the excitement of an entire city. The sense of pride, and of common purpose, was so intense you could taste it.

It seemed fitting that America's first urban president in quite a while should come from here, the most quintessentially American of cities. Obama is an American President, and a Son of Chicago. Tonight, we celebrated both.

Cities Rising

Yesterday's Washington Post talks about the anti-urban bias of American politics:

Is Obama's ascent a further sign...that our cities are back and that the country is making peace with its non-agrarian side? And would a big-city president address as never before the problems of our urban cores -- blighted housing, shoddy public transit, dismal schools?

Well, one can hope, but few of these problems have traditionally been considered national in scope -- the president doesn't build subways or set school curriculum for example.  Of course, the federal government does play an important role in funding local projects, and with economic crisis potentially leading to mass transit cuts, among other things, this role is even more important.

This part is encouraging:

One of the first interest groups [Obama] met with after securing the Democratic nomination in June was an alliance of bicycling advocates. 

Maybe they talked to him about how to make America more French.

(Photo from Flickr user glennharper. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

A Letter to Barack

Dear Senator Obama;

Of America's four largest cities, Houston and Chicago are partially underwater, and New York's financial heart is having a coronary. Los Angeles seems to be in the best shape right now, and when you can say that, you know that we have a very, very serious situation on our hands.

Meanwhile, Senator McCain and his moose nugget continue to their banshee screeching about your lipstick on a pig comment in an effort to move the election further and further into their party's most familiar territory: the character assassination campaign.

For over a year and a half, you have promised us a different campaign. You have promised us that you would rise above the pettiness and catscratching that usually passes for political discourse in this country. You gave us your word that, this time, things were going to change. You practically trademarked the word.

Senator Obama, the idea that Americans don't want to hear about actual issues, that the last thing they want to hear is policy talk -- this is the most insidious lie that has been told. True, there are those in both camps that would follow their party out of a plane in flight without a parachute. They are of little concern.

You can run the same campaign that we have seen time and time again. You can continue to get caught up in the scuffle that the GOP is so desperate to get you caught up in. When they will launch an attack ad that oh-so-coyly (tee hee, tee hee) suggests that you just might be a pedophile, what line is left for them to cross?

There is no winning, here, sir. The deeper you get into their fight, the less energized your base will be. The more of us young, tech-savvy folks who launched you past Senator Clinton into the position where you now sit will feel duped, cheated, and used.

Our greatest cities are on their knees. What will you do, Senator, to rectify the situation on Wall Street? In the plainest of terms (because no one loves wonk but a wonkette), tell us what happened, and how you intend to address it if you are elected. What can be done for Houston and Chicago, and other waterfront cities, to protect them in the future? Yes, the current relief efforts are important, but what will you do, specifically, to address the problems that are creating these increasingly dangerous storm systems that travel further inland each year?

Senator Obama, you are at a crossroads, and the current polling information has little good to say about the way that you've responded to Senator McCain's attacks thus far. If you cannot live up to your promise of change on the campaign trail, you have little hope of winning this election, because it speaks very poorly of your ability to affect change once you are in office.

We are still holding our breath. Change the conversation.

Hickenlooper on Biden

I've got my doubts about Barack's veep choice, but this quote from Denver mayor John Hickenlooper gives me hope. Perhaps, as is very, very possible with the contemporary media, Biden's big mouth has overshadowed wise policy. Let's hope that's the case.

At any rate, here's what Hickenlooper had to say yesterday:

"From the point of view of a big-city mayor, I think Barack Obama couldn't have picked a better vice-president. Joe Biden has been at the forefront of a lot of urban policy issues - the governor was just talking about his domestic violence legislation. He has consistently shown that you don't throw money at problems, right? You come up with solutions, and they you measure your investment, you measure your outcomes. He will be very warmly received by the mayors of this country."


(From, Via)

The Urban President

What I find most impressive about Barack Obama is his ability to speak about the Bush administration's bungling over the past eight years that so clearly outlines the need for a different approach. As I listened to his speech to the US Conference of Mayors, I found myself shocked -- dumbfounded, even -- to hear a presidential candidate speaking about urban issues in such plain and ambitious terms. That a presidential candidate would talk the talk about metropolitan- and regional-scale economics, mass transit and high-speed rail, and the specific ways that the war in Iraq hurts individual cities and neighborhoods, is almost hard to believe after eight years of secrecy, corporate carte blanche, and a complete lack of focus on anything that actually matters to peoples' day-to-day lives.

"Neglect," Obama quips, "is not a policy for America's metropolitan areas." Word.

If you like the clip above, check out the full video on the US Conference of Mayors website.