DanSheffield

richard florida talks about reshaping the urban landscape

in 2005 when Thomas Friedman was suggesting the world was flat, U of Toronto professor Richard Florida countered by saying, no, it's spiky. (an argument also put forward by John Raulston Saul in The Collapse of Globalism) In a new article in the Atlantic Monthly, Florida talks about How the Crash will Reshape America...

Every phase or epoch of capitalism has its own distinct geography, or what economic geographers call the “spatial fix” for the era. The physical character of the economy—the way land is used, the location of homes and businesses, the physical infrastructure that ties everything together—shapes consumption, production, and innovation. As the economy grows and evolves, so too must the landscape.

To a surprising degree, the causes of this crash are geographic in nature, and they point out a whole system of economic organization and growth that has reached its limit. Positioning the economy to grow strongly in the coming decades will require not just fiscal stimulus or industrial reform; it will require a new kind of geography as well, a new spatial fix for the next chapter of American economic history.

Florida, in the spirit of fellow Torontonian Jane Jacobs, goes on to suggest several possible scenarios -- the right spatial fix -- to emerge in North America, post this present crisis...

• The solution begins with the removal of homeownership from its long-privileged place at the center of the U.S. economy.

while homeownership has some social benefits—a higher level of civic engagement is one—it is costly to the economy. The economist Andrew Oswald has demonstrated that in both the United States and Europe, those places with higher homeownership rates also suffer from higher unemployment. Homeownership, Oswald found, is a more important predictor of unemployment than rates of unionization or the generosity of welfare benefits. Too often, it ties people to declining or blighted locations, and forces them into work—if they can find it—that is a poor match for their interests and abilities.

• we need to encourage growth in the regions and cities that are best positioned to compete in the coming decades: the great mega-regions that already power the economy, and the smaller, talent-attracting innovation centers inside them

we need to make elite cities and key mega-regions more attractive and affordable for all of America’s classes, not just the upper crust. High housing costs in these cities and in the more convenient suburbs around them, along with congested sprawl farther afield, have conspired to drive lower-income Americans away from these places over the past 30 years. This is profoundly unhealthy for our society.

• we need to begin making smarter use of both our urban spaces and the suburban rings that surround them—packing in more people, more affordably, while at the same time improving their quality of life.

That means liberal zoning and building codes within cities to allow more residential development, more mixed-use development in suburbs and cities alike, the in-filling of suburban cores near rail links, new investment in rail, and congestion pricing for travel on our roads. Not everyone wants to live in city centers, and the suburbs are not about to disappear. But we can do a much better job of connecting suburbs to cities and to each other, and allowing regions to grow bigger and denser without losing their velocity.

• we need to be clear that ultimately, we can’t stop the decline of some places, and that we would be foolish to try.

different eras favor different places, along with the industries and lifestyles those places embody. Band-Aids and bailouts cannot change that. Neither auto-company rescue packages nor policies designed to artificially prop up housing prices will position the country for renewed growth, at least not of the sustainable variety. We need to let demand for the key products and lifestyles of the old order fall, and begin building a new economy, based on a new geography.

lots of other good stuff in the article (although US focused of course)

interesting ideas for those of us who believe that the recovery of shalom involves recovering neighbourhood and relationships based on proximity

architecture, urban living and Christian worldview

Tim Chester has some interesting comments on a recent book by Philip Bess, a professor at Notre Dame University...

Here’s my underlying principle. Human beings are made to live and thrive in community. Human societies work well when relationships flourish (individual to individual, to family, to neighbourhood and to the polis).

Architecture and town planning cannot of themselves create community. But they can facilitate the flourishing of community or they can impede community. This then is one criteria by which we assess architecture and town planning from a Christian perspective.

here's a bit of info about the book..
 

“The city comes into existence . . . for the sake of the good life.” So wrote Aristotle nearly 2,400 years ago, articulating an idea that prevailed throughout most of Western culture and the world until the environmental consequences of the Industrial Revolution called into question the goodness of traditional urban life. Urban history ever since—from England’s early-nineteenth-century hygiene laws to mid-twentieth-century modernist architecture and planning to today’s New Urbanism—has consisted of efforts to ameliorate the consequences of the industrial city by either embracing or challenging the idealization of nature that has followed it.

Architect Philip Bess’s Till We Have Built Jerusalem puts forth fresh arguments for traditional architecture and urbanism, their relationship to human flourishing, and the kind of culture required to create and sustain traditional towns and city neighborhoods. Bess not only dissects the questionable intellectual assumptions of contemporary architecture, he also shows how the individualist ethos of modern societies finds physical expression in contemporary suburban sprawl, making traditional urbanism difficult to sustain. He concludes by considering the role of both the natural law tradition and communal religion in providing intellectual and spiritual depth to contemporary attempts to build new—and revive existing—traditional towns and cities, attempts that, at their best, help fulfill our natural human desires for order, beauty, and community.

spiritual anthropology & the search to belong

just finished reading Joseph Myers' book The Search to Belong. It was this book that prompted my reminder of the Edward T. Hall material I posted about a few days ago. The notion that we all have a need to function in four spaces to live in a healthy manner: public, social, personal and intimate.

In a previous life I functioned as a pastor for small groups and discipleship (almost 20 years ago now). We all thot that small groups were required for everyone:) And being a Methodist meant that Wesley's emphasis on "the class meeting" should be a key building block. Of course, what you discover is that not everyone wants to be in a small group, and if you overemphasize small groups as "the" way to spiritual growth, you soon notice people wandering away. And eventually you come to understand that Wesley's class meeting was nothing like what we call "growth groups." What I like about Myers' book is that he helps to explain this phenomenon, by making use of Hall's observations. I have described John Wesley as a "spiritual anthropologist," I believe Myers fits the same category. Observing and making sense of how people live their lives and how that impacts their spiritual relationship with one another and with God.

here's one of his critiques of "church" as we know it:

It seems that in many ways we are not helping people with their life search. Rather, we are merely supplying them with another numbing thing to do that masks the real, nagging ache of their search for neighbourhood, for family, for belonging.

here's the essence of what Myers is saying:

Human beings communicate and develop a sense of belonging in all four spaces. All four spaces are where we connect, grow roots, and satisfy our search for community. And harmony among the spaces -- all four of them -- builds healthy community in individuals and organizations.

Notice that I am not saying that we must process people from public to social to personal to intimate. Notice that I am not saying that "intimate" is our ultimate goal. Intimate is not the most important, the most real, or the most authentic relationship.

The secret is to see all connections as significant. All of these spaces are important, real and authentic in people's lives. We need to validate what people themselves count as valid. When we validate the space where they are, we greatly increase our ability to bring help to their lives.

(he also gives a lot of clues on how to get there)

the myths of the "informal sector"

in international development circles the notion of the "informal sector" plays large. The thinking is that "there has been a proliferation of rudimentary informal activities which provide means of survival to the urban poor." That is, even is people are not employed in the formal employment sector, they are still managing to thrive in a kind of free-market competition within the informal sector. Dutch social scientist Jan Breman however has suggested that upward mobility in the informal economy is largely a myth inspired by wishful thinking.

The De Soto bootstrap model has a simple recipe for the informal sector: get the state out of the way, add micro-credit for micro-entrepreneurs and land titles for squatters, then let the markets take their course to produce the transubstantiation of poverty into capital.

In Planet of Slums, social theorist Mike Davis gives some specific responses to this notion.
1. Formal and informal is too simplistic; within the informal sector there is a reservoir of dynamic entrepreneurs and the community of the poor -- which contains a large body of residual and under-employed labour.
2. Even "entrepreneurs" in the informal sector, with some basic examination, will be found to be working directly or indirectly for someone else.
3. Informal employment is essentially the abscence of formal contracts, basic rights, regulations and bargaining power. Petty exploitation is the basic building block of the informal sector.
4. Informality ensures extreme abuse of women and children.
5. The informal sector does not create new jobs, but only fragments existing work, thus subdividing incomes. 5 people get a piece of one person's work who was employed at a living wage.
6. Desperate conditions cause people to turn to the "third economy" -- gambling, pyramid schemes, lotteries and other quasi-magical forms of wealth appropriation (including preachers who say give to me and God will bless you)
7. micro-credit and cooperative lending have little macro impact on the reduction of poverty. They aid micro-accumulation so as to enable "treading water." people can survive, but not thrive. which may be enough for many.
8. Encouraging competition within the informal sector depletes social capital and dissolves self-help networks which are essential for the survival of the very poor.
9. Extreme competetion in the informal sector, in the absence of enforced, regulated labour rights and practices often exacerbates ethnoreligious differentiation and sectarian violence.

Jane's Walk Toronto

I was listening to CBC this morning on the drive in to work and heard Jane Farrow describing a city walking tour event in Toronto called Jane's Walk. It's actually not related to Jane Farrow (she's an organizer), but Jane Jacobs who said: “No one can find what will work for our cities by looking at …suburban garden cities, manipulating scale models, or inventing dream cities. You’ve got to get out and walk."

The event features over 60 free guided walks in Toronto neighbourhoods.

Costford: affordable, indigenous housing in Kerala

I had the opportunity today to visit a number of housing project sites in and around Trivandrum, in the south of Kerala state, India. These housing projects are designed and developed by COSTFORD, a 30 year old NGO [Centre of Science and Technology for Rural Development]. My friend Syam Chandra from Dundas, Ontario, invited me on this tour. Syam used to work for COSTFORD when he first graduated in engineering. COSTFORD's official task is to "create and implement design and construction strategies sensitive to energy conservation, cost and use of indigenous building materials and practices." [thanks to Merle who guided me around to all the sites]

this picture is from the Chenka Choola slum in Trivandrum. These uniquely designed homes accommodate 10 families on 3 floors.

the original impetus came from the work of British-born architect Laurie Baker, who worked with COSTFORD until his death last year at the age of 90. Baker lived more that 60 years in India, initially coming to work with the International Leprosy Mission. He married Elizabeth, an Indian medical doctor, who was also involved in medical mission work all of her life. Raised a Methodist, Baker was a practicing Quaker all of his adult life. His involvement in the development of sustainable, energy efficient, cost-effective, indigenous architecture  was an outflow of his wholistic engagement with the world in which God has placed him.

click here for a fascinating tribute to Baker's style in architecture and life...

travel to Niger & Ghana

I leave today for Niger and Ghana in West Africa.
I will be visiting David & Jennifer Wright in Niamey, the capital of Niger. This will be my 4th visit to Niger. In Accra, Ghana I will be with John-Mark and Loreli Cockram. My second visit to Ghana. Both visits include mentoring conversations with these workers as well as training and strategic planning components with national leaders. My flight route is Toronto-Paris-Niamey-Paris-Lagos-Accra-Lagos-Paris-Toronto!!!

Leisure-Work-poem

here's a gift...

Leisure
by Michael O'Siadhail

What does it mean?
Suddenly, effortlessly, to touch the core.
Mostly in the glow of friends
but today just strolling the length of a city street.
Carnival moments.
The apple back on its tree
in a garden lost, a garden longed for.

I move among the traders.
Stacks of aubergines, rows of tiger-lilies.
Rings of silver and cornelian.
A feast of action.
Cross-legged, an Indian plays
music on a saw-blade glittering in the sun

In the sweat of thy face
shalt thou eat bread. First hearing
that story, I'd bled for Adam.
I bump into an acquaintance and begin to apologize
"Taking a break,
be hard at it tomorrow."
Puritan in me, so afraid of paradise

Anaxagoras the sage
(a century before Plato) mulled it over
on a street like this in Athens.
First question: Why are you here on earth?
Answer: To behold.
No excuses called for.
Contemplation. Seeing. Fierce and intense.

This majesty. This fullness.
Does it all foreshadow another Eden?
The air is laden with yearning.
I can't say for what and I can't be silent either.
Rejoice. Rejoice.
To attest the gift of a day.
To saunter and gaze. To own the world.

urbaniziation may not lead to secularization

"Predictions that increased urbanization around the world would lead to a more secularized society are unfounded, and in fact the opposite may be true, according to a new report from the United Nations Population Fund." read more here...

the world is not flat

despite the popularity of Thomas Friedman's thesis, that The World is Flat, which I have read, digested and reflected upon (as well as his earlier Lexus and the Olive Tree), there is another whole discussion around the notion that the world is definitely NOT flat. I think the soundest articulation so far is John Raulston Saul's The Collapse of Globalism. The fact that he sees the world through a Canadian lens is very refreshing. If you have taken the time to read Friedman I highly recommend adding Saul's book to your list.  Here's another link to some thots from Nora Ephron that help bring a couple insights, as well.