(From Issue 23: Progress?, Summer 2009)

Kenneth Caldwell is a writer and communications consultant based in San Francisco. He holds a B.A. in urban studies from San Francisco State University and a Master’s in library and information studies. A contributor to Architectural Record, The Architect’s Newspaper and other publications, he can be reached at kenneth@kennethcaldwell.com.

San Jose, Calif. and London, England find themselves in a similar historic preservation predicament: Both cities are deciding whether to save or demolish large libraries built in the Brutalist style. While London has a significant number of architects and activists united to try to save its Brutalist library, San Jose struggles to get any support to save any of its mid-century buildings, let alone a tough sell like the old Martin Luther King Library on San Carlos. The midcentury time period is very important to telling the story of San Jose from its beginnings as the state capitol to its status as the birthplace of high tech … every year we lose more and more structures. How do we make it stop?
—Dionne Early, San Jose, Calif.

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(From Issue 23: Progress?, Summer 2009)

More of us live in cities now than ever before, and we’ve come for opportunities we didn’t have in the plains or mountains. In the city, whether in slums or condos, we are linked to millions of others, and can organize quickly and trade efficiently. But if we don’t get what we need, we just might revolt, writes Jeb Brugmann, an international development consultant who teaches at Cambridge University, in his absorbing (if turgidly written) Welcome to the Urban Revolution: How Cities Are Changing the World.

Brugmann gives the word “revolution” double meaning. The world’s cities, he writes, form a system through which huge, pressing problems ranging from climate change to poverty can be solved — hence the “urban revolution.” On the other hand, the system is capable of fomenting smallscale, literal revolutions when politics, planning, development and local needs clash infelicitously. Migrants, most of whom now move to cities, have the potential to turn nothing into something, given time and low interference from planners. But they can rebel if officials and institutions cut off opportunities for investment or “relocate” their homes.

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(From Issue 23: Progress?, Summer 2009)

The major industries of Los Angeles are manufacturing, media and — it occasionally seems — urban theorizing. The city has long served as a quarry for manufacturing larger claims, from Fredric Jameson’s interpretation of the Bonaventure Hotel as the architectural incarnation of “late capitalism” in his influential 1984 essay Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, through Mike Davis’ Marxist studies of race and class struggles in 1990’s City of Quartz and Edward Soja’s kinetic sojourns through L.A.’s post-metropolitan sprawl in 1996’s Thirdspace.

The best-known example of these remains Reyner Banham’s influential 1971 manifesto Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Written after the expatriate Englishman first learned how to drive (in order, he said, to “read Los Angeles in the original”), the book celebrated the city’s ad hoc, spontaneous approach to urban development.

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(From Issue 23: Progress?, Summer 2009)

Bosnians in Utica, Somalis in Lewiston, Hmong in Fresno: While big-city ethnic enclaves remain the primary destination for immigrants to the Unites States, a number of small towns have recently been revitalized by an influx of a particular ethnic group. However, none can claim the overwhelming diversity of Clarkston, Ga., a 1-square-mile town that government agencies saw as an ideal location for refugee resettlement, thanks to its plentiful rental options, access to nearby Atlanta, and need of a population boost. Over the last two decades thousands of refugees from a litany of headline-prone countries, including Kosovo, Sudan, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, the Congo and Liberia, have poured in.

Dumping the United Nations of conflict zones into a small southern town produced countless tensions over religion, food, schools and crime. But the issue that caught the eye of New York Times reporter Warren St. John was soccer. He spent a season chronicling “The Fugees,” youth soccer teams of Clarkston refugees spread over three age brackets. The result is his highly readable account Outcasts United, which bucks the cliches of a feel-good sports story but struggles to transcend the newspaper article that was its genesis.

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Over four decades after the Clean Air Act was signed by Congress, more than half the country continues to live in areas where pollution has reached unhealthy levels. Cities with different problems have taken steps to clean up the air. But is it enough?
by Hamida Kinge

(From Issue 23: Progress?, Summer 2009)

Jesse Marquez, 57, has trouble breathing through his nose, and on high smog days, he has trouble breathing, period. Marquez has lived his entire life in Wilmington, Calif., a mostly Hispanic neighborhood that borders the Port of Los Angeles Port and the Port of Long Beach.

Wilmington is home to two large oil refineries, and a third sits just on its border, but the ports are the single largest source of pollution in SouthernCalifornia, accounting for approximately 25 percent of the region’s diesel soot and 50 percent of sulfur oxide emissions, a key component in harmful particle pollution. “It touches your life,” says Marquez, who believes his recurring sinusitis and bronchitis are due to the ports and who often drives to Tijuana to buy discounted inhalers. “It touches all your family and friends’ lives.”

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(From Issue 23: Progress?, Summer 2009)

If cities were classified like patients, then Newark, N.J., to many outsiders, would be quadriplegic. You can make the patient comfortable, improve his quality of life and buy a high-end wheelchair, but the sad fact is he will never walk again.

Since race riots devastated it in 1967, the nation’s third-oldest city has spent much of its existence atop lists no city wants to be anywhere near: most dangerous, poorest, even fewest on-time arrivals at its airport. In 1975, Harper’s magazine wrote a particularly damning pronouncement: “The City of Newark stands without serious challenge as the worst city of all.” Today, however, first-time visitors who walk worriedly out of Newark Penn Station see that Newark’s downtown is clean, polished and, around rush hour, absolutely packed with people. Perhaps they work there, at Prudential Insurance Company, a downtown institution, or at Cablevision, or at Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield. Perhaps they live there, in a new development or in Eleven80, a refurbished Art Deco tower built during Newark’s ’30s heyday. Perhaps they study at Seton Hall Law School, or Rutgers University’s Newark campus, or Essex County College. They might be seeing a New Jersey Devils game at the Prudential Center or the London Symphony Orchestra at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, which visitors can connect to via a sleek light rail line.

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(From Issue 23: Progress?, Summer 2009)

Kari Fulton is on the cusp of something big. At age 23, she has emerged as one of the youngest and most popular national leaders in climate and environmental justice. Her organization, the Energy Action Coalition, which unites 50 North American environmental groups, won an Elle 2008 Green Award (second place, after someone named Brad Pitt). In March she was named one of Glamour’s “Eco Heroes” along with Lisa Jackson, the new head of the EPA. Despite her assertion that she is more focused on her cause than with the press she’s been getting, the attention certainly can’t hurt her cause. Fulton helped bring more than 1,200 young people of color to Power Shift 2009. With 12,000 attendees, it was the largest youth summit on climate change in U.S. history. As national campus campaign coordinator for the Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative (EJCC), Fulton also mobilizes college students to push for campus sustainability and climate justice, mainly at HB CUs, or historically black colleges and universities (Fulton attended Howard University). In mid-March, Next American City caught up with Fulton just before she visited Louisiana’s Grambling State University to interview students about how HB CU students are greening their campuses and local communities.

What first got you interested in environmental issues?

I’m from Denver, so it’s pretty green out there. My neighbors composted. I never thought of that as “green” — I just thought of it as regular stuff that people did. I worked on campaigns around renewable energy in Colorado, and it really frustrated me because I was given maybe three talking points, but I didn’t know the issues. It was frustrating because I’m this little black girl talking about renewable energy in white neighborhoods and I didn’t even get it. After Hurricane Katrina I ended up going to the Gulf Coast region and volunteering. That was kind of my “A-ha!” moment. I said, “Okay, this is connected to our environment.” So, I started getting more involved in my campus and in doing community service.

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(From Issue 23: Progress?, Summer 2009)

Mark Gorton revolutionized file sharing when in 2000 he introduced Lime Wire, a computer application most often used for swapping music mp3s. With a similar goal of improving efficiency and community, he developed the Open Planning Project (TO PP), an organization that aims to assist both urban advocates and governments in an interactive urban planning process. Now a robust, multifaceted entity, TO PP includes the Livable Streets initiative (a reported blog, films about city streets and social networking forum) and tech tools such as GeoServer, open-source software that allows users to edit and share geospatial data.

Tell me about the many pieces of TOPP.

We’re trying to find out how digital tools can be useful for community organizations. Right now, we are working on transportation and land-use planning software for governments. Livable Streets is the “beta” for our civic engagement software. And then we have longerterm goals, like open-source government and transit reform. We’re working on getting government to adapt open-source software as a cost-savings device, but more importantly to enable best practices to be embedded in software and to have those shared around. The idea is that over time there [will be] a broad array of software with lots of functionality in the public realm for cities to adopt as they’d like.

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(From Issue 23: Progress?, Summer 2009)

Peter Bosselmann specializes in the representation and visualization of cities, but he’s also a prolific educator: At the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, Bosselmann is professor of urban design in architecture, city and regional planning, and landscape architecture, as well as head graduate adviser in the Master of Urban Design program. His most recent book, Urban Transformation: Understanding City Design and Form, was published by Island Press last fall.

How is technology central to urban planning and education these days?

The tools have changed greatly over the last 30 years. There was a filmmaker, John Dykstra, who worked on Space Odyssey and Star Wars, who worked with us on making our first simulation. That was in the early ’70s — we still used celluloid film. There have been many innovations since then. The students currently like Google SketchUp, but a few years from now we probably won’t remember what it is.

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(From Issue 23: Progress?, Summer 2009)

When Northern Trust sponsored a PGA golf tournament in February, members of Congress and the media went a little crazy. The bank — which had received some $1.6 billion of the $700 billion the government has pledged to the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) — paid to fly employees and clients to Los Angeles, and then feted them with lavish dinners and entertainment by the likes of Chicago and Sheryl Crow. Another year — say, 2007, when the firm took over sponsorship of the tournament — the splash and pizzazz might not have seemed so obscene. But as a bank stakeholder, theoretically, one gets to call at least some of the shots, which is why the government – and, by extension, the public – has taken on such issues as bonuses, dividends, executive compensation and now, corporate sponsorship.

Northern Trust is hardly the only TARP bank that sponsors high- and lowprofile, for- and nonprofit events. Indeed, the bulk of the financial firms receiving aid from the government (532 and counting, according to ProPublica) sponsor events, stadiums, arts organizations and community initiatives. (Full disclosure: Next American City receives such funding.) But what had seemed like a win-win deal for banks and local institutions has now come under public scrutiny— potentially leaving cities in the lurch. At least one institution, Johnson Bank, which has branches in Arizona and Wisconsin, turned down TARP money precisely because it does not want to answer to the government regarding its sponsorships and community outreach.

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(From Issue 23: Progress?, Summer 2009)

The comedian Lewis Black has a great riff about Starbucks’ store locations. It begins with a corner in Houston where, he says, “there sits a Starbucks. And directly across the street … there is another Starbucks.”

This, Black contends, is the end of the universe.

Cue the laughter. To the casual observer, a Starbucks across the street from another Starbucks couldn’t be anything but a planning gaffe. Or could it? Companies use huge amounts of market research when deciding where to place stores. Developers, planners, government workers and educators depend on it too. Which neighborhood gets a grocery store? Where should a transit line run? Market research has the answers.

The problem is that those widely relied-upon “answers”—even when they don’t result in obvious goofs—still lead organizations astray. And the consequences are more serious than a surplus of skim mocha lattes.

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(From Issue 23: Progress?, Summer 2009)

Late last year, when the White House announced it would send $700 billion in bailout money to Wall Street, Milwaukee community organizer Sura Faraj began wondering what it would take to create a cash infusion for her corner of the world, hundreds of miles from the glass towers of Lower Manhattan.

Faraj first determined the financial system that got the United States into a recession wasn’t going to be the system that got it out. America couldn’t simply trust in God and the Federal Reserve anymore. With that in mind, the longtime activist began talking with neighbors in her community, Riverwest, about the idea of creating a local currency or credit system for the area, a progressive enclave not far from the University of Wisconsin’s Milwaukee campus. The idea spread quickly, and before she knew it — even before AIG blew its share of the bailout on bonuses — Faraj was fielding emails from perfect strangers. One newly unemployed computer programmer wanted to barter tech skills for a carpentry work. A gardener was looking to barter with homegrown vegetables. Another person was willing to walk dogs or baby-sit.

With the economy in shambles and localism all the rage, Faraj isn’t the only one experiencing this resurging interest in community-based economic exchange. In Philadelphia, Paul Glover, who in 1991 founded a local currency in Ithaca, N.Y., recently began working to expand a dormant Philadelphia currency program. One store, Bella Vista Natural Food Market, has already agreed to accept the community cash. Across town another Philadelphia nonprofit, Resources for Human Development, is expanding its own community- based currency and trading system called Equal Dollars. In California’s Mendocino County, a small group of activists printed up their own money this year. And while there are no plans to create a local currency in Newark, N.J., city officials briefly flirted with the idea last year.

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(From Issue 23: Progress?, Summer 2009)

We all suffer from city envy from time to time, especially upon witnessing some other city’s brainlessly elegant solution to a vexing problem — be it traffic, crime, affordable housing or inner-city education.

But before you get too down on your hometown, read the newest book by Harvard Law professors Gerald Frug and David Barron, who, in City Bound: How States Stifle Urban Innovation, reveal the gaping chasm that often exists between what a city should do, given the needs of its population, and what it can do, given its legal authority to enact reform. For instance, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s much-discussed proposal to introduce congestion pricing for cars entering Manhattan below 86th Street died because the city itself had no authority to implement such a plan; the real power lay with the state legislature.

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(From Issue 23: Progress?, Summer 2009)

In late March, Mexico City’s Centro Histórico buzzed with the sights and sounds of the annual Festival de México. For 18 days, crowds packed the streets to attend some 280 concerts, performances and educational events. One Friday night in the Zócalo, a mammoth public square and the civic heart of Mexico, the National Symphonic Orchestra competed with indigenous dancers and drummers for attention.

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Why cities shouldn’t buy into the convention center economy
by Josh Stephens

(From Issue 23: Progress?, Summer 2009)

Two generations ago, city economies relied on money from the products they manufactured. Faraway customers purchased Fords, Zeniths, Maytags and Levi’s, and their cash made its way to the factory foreman and his workers, who would then spread the wealth to the local butcher and baker. In the postindustrial visitor economy, however, the city itself becomes the product, and cities must contrive reasons for people to visit. Enter the convention center.

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(From Issue 23: Progress?, Summer 2009)

Around 9:30 p.m. on a Monday night in July 2007, Elana Berkowitz, a Harvard graduate student who was interning in Washington, D.C., returned from a business trip to the row house where she was renting a room in Mount Pleasant, a gentrifying neighborhood next to the sprawling, woodsy Rock Creek Park.

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(From Issue 22: Cities In Crisis, Spring 2009)

Scott Gabriel Knowles is assistant professor of history and director of the Great Works Symposium at Drexel University. He is the editor of a forthcoming book on the city planning work and legacy of Edmund Bacon, and is currently writing a book titled Experts in Disaster: A History of Risk and Authority in the Modern United States.

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An interview with Cary Moon
by Diana Lind

(From Issue 22: Cities In Crisis, Spring 2009)

In 2001, Seattle suffered an earthquake that damaged one of its main highways, the Alaskan Way Viaduct. The highway department, city and state began rethinking how to replace the highway; proposals ranged from creating a new, larger elevated highway to digging an underground tunnel highway, to combining these two options with an on-ground highway. Cary Moon, an urban designer and planner, didn’t think Seattle needed a highway at all. She proposed tearing down the Viaduct and re-using its acreage as new public spaces that could improve the area’s ecology, draw tourism and connect the city to its waterfront. In her plan, public transportation, a waterfront urban street, ferry service and city streets would service the Viaduct’s traffic. In 2004, Moon and partners Grant Cogswell and Julie Parrett formed the People’s Waterfront Coalition to rally the public to their cause — and get elected officials’ attention. Five years later, the highway still stands, but the city has come to see Moon’s perspective. This interview was conducted at the end of 2008 and features a postscript from early 2009.

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An interview with Richard Saul Wurman
by Diana Lind

(From Issue 22: Cities In Crisis, Spring 2009)

Richard Saul Wurman, who coined the term “information architecture,” lives by the principle that information needs to be understandable. The 73-year-old, Philadelphia-born architect and graphic designer has published over 80 books, aiming to clarify subjects ranging from Tokyo to health care. Wurman is, however, perhaps best known as the creator of the highly successful Technology/Education/Design (TED ) conferences, the mission of which is to start conversations about “ideas worth spreading.” With the belief that “understanding precedes action,” Wurman has set out on a new project called 19.20.21 focusing on the contemporary phenomenon of supercities. Wurman will collect and disseminate data on 19 cities (ranging from Mexico City to Lagos to Moscow) that have 20 million people in the 21st century. Visit the project’s Web site, 192021.org, for more information.

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An interview with Roope Mokka
by Nick Lalla

(From Issue 22: Cities In Crisis, Spring 2009)

When social scientist Roope Mokka sought to answer the question “What will the city look like in 2050?” he turned to the Internet. Mokka,whose think tank, Demos Helsinki, studies social change, saw in Wikipedia, social networking platforms and open-source software a new paradigm applicable to politics, production and real-space social organization. He’s offered a vision of a “Wikicity,” which functions like the Internet. Mokka’s idea might conjure specters of techno-utopias past (like Le Corbusier’s city-as-machine), but it’s also generating something rare in today’s future-city debates: excitement.

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