The Breaking Time

Amsterdam gulag: when your annoying neighbors can put you in prison

Piss off your neighbors and you have to live in the box

Amsterdam is going to create "scum villages" 

Yes, if your neighbors get too annoyed at you in Holland's capital, they'll soon be able to have you shipped off to what's essentially a low-level gulag. In fact, "there are already several small-scale trial projects in the Netherlands, including in Amsterdam, where 10 shipping container homes have been set aside for persistent offenders, living under 24-hour supervision from social workers and police."

Just to make clear, these are people who might be annoying, but whose behavior "falls short of criminality." So they've broken no law, but will essentially go to prison. That's amazingly fucked up.

I don't know about y'all, but like most people who live in cities, my neighborhood's inhabitants range from wonderful to absolute assholes. Yet I've mostly chalked the latter, as long as they don't cross any major lines, as a natural downside to living in a densely populated place. I don't feel the need to put them in a damn camp because they occasionally get on my nerves, and I sure as hell don't want them to have the power to do so to me. 

In practice, I can see this helping to put a really nasty edge on gentrification, shoving out the poor or different if enough of their neighbors get together. Indeed, that's how similar initiatives like the UK's ASBOs are generally used.

I've generally seen the Netherlands (from the outside, admittedly) as having an admirable combination between robust social services and a respect for individual freedom, but apparently that's not quite the case. Shockingly, to remain pluralistic, societies occasionally have to protect individuals from their own communities. Letting people send the couple down the hall to a damn shipping container because thheir neighbors think their sex is too loud doesn't accomplish that.

The progressive civil war over density

Now things get interesting — and complicated. An excellent map by Chris Howard

Longtime readers will know of my absolute loathing for the surprisingly enduring Red State/Blue State meme. It's a dangerously simplistic way of looking at what's a much more varied body politic.

Enter this map from Chris Howard, which not only divides votes in the last election by county and shades them on a spectrum of red and blue to represent margin of victory, but also shades denser counties darker, showing clusters of support. It's one of the best representations of the actual political divides out there, especially the urban/rural divide.

There's been a lot of talk over the role of urban voters in securing Obama's re-election. Emily Badger, writing for The Atlantic Cities site, posits that the same density shown on the map "requires a different kind of politics."

Perhaps, but it's worth noting here that one of the biggest on-the-ground political fights in cities, especially ostensibly leftists strongholds, is over density itself.

From the Bay Area to D.C., the battles continue, especially as plenty of planners diagnose a multitude of restrictions on density as a major reason why many desirable urban areas have costs-of-living that make it difficult for the working class to scrape by.

There's an error in thinking of political idelogies as running neatly along a spectrum. They're more like galaxies, with diverse systems of thought coalescing around a common core, especially when a bigger enemy is around. Populations that may vote the same way in national elections regularly engage in brutal fights over whether tall buildings are allowed in their neck of the woods.

In this case, density advocates place a higher priority on the need for more affordable housing and a form of infrastructure they see as more sustainable, while seeing communities as flexible entities that can accommodate changing populations. They tend to place more trust in numbers and urban planning types to shape future growth.

Neighborhood activists, meanwhile, see established local character and the ability to veto developments that might change it as more important than increasing the housing stock, perceiving community identity as more fragile than their opponents. They tend to trust local activists and small "d" democracy over planners and studies.

This fight can get extremely nasty once disagreements about centralization, visceral feelings of territory and class divides enter the mix.

Back in 2010, I wrote at length about Asheville's version of this struggle, and the pattern repeats itself in other liberal havens too. Ostensibly, the progressives on either side value both affordable housing and neighborhood character.

But in reality cities can have large amounts of new development of the type density advocates want or they can have every new building finely tuned to fit in with the existing neighborhood. They can not have both, so this fight rages on.

If the aftermath of 2012's political battles shows a growing urban electorate shaped by the perspective of density, and if shifting political realignments put those voters up for grabs, expect this war to gain national prominence.

The need for an infrastructure army

I wish I knew the photographer on this one. If y'all do, I'll happily add it.

Hurricane Sandy's struck, and while the devastation isn't as bad as a Katrina-level catastrophe (partly thanks to vastly superior emergency response), it's still estimated in the billions. With climate change and decaying infrastructure, this is going to happen again; the Onion has it nailed.

There are some things centralized institutions like governments are actually really good at, and marshaling massive resources (more than any locality could generate) to build big, useful things or deal with emergencies is one of them. Things like Sandy are going to happen more often, and that makes infrastructure and disaster response more important than ever.

I remember people complaining when the Deepwater Horizon spill happened that BP was in charge of fixing it, instead of the government. Some of them took this as an example of collusion or incompetence, and there was certainly plenty of that going around leading. But the truth was more mundane: there simply wasn't a well-equipped naval unit ready to stop that kind of disaster. 

After Sandy left, I wondered again why that is. Why don't we take some of that pile of cash being wasted on crap like the F-35 or the Crusader and spend it on elite disaster-response units and infrastructure building? After all, disasters (man-made or otherwise) are capable of causing as much damage in terms of lives and economic loss as a terrorist attack, and the military is already intertwined with disaster response. Militaries are also quite good at creating pressure-cooker cultures to deal with specific, dangerous tasks.

We can talk about things like decentralizing electric power or making communities more resilient, but anyone facing a sizable catastrophe knows that it's simply beyond the ability of any local area to handle. This is one area where "send in the army" actually makes sense.

Defending the hicks: A valid life outside New York/LA/SF/Portland/Boston...

Saul Steinberg's classic will, sadly, always be relevant

Here's an interesting piece from former New Yorker Cord Jefferson about finding a home in Los Angeles, and the blindness many Gothamites have about life outside their own borders:

A year ago, New York's Time magazine said the revitalization of downtown LA could be dubbed the neighborhood's "Manhattanization," as if New York invented the idea of clustering bars and restaurants to attract crowds. A few months later, writing about Pacific Standard Time, a massive multi-museum retrospective of the best in LA art from 1945 to 1980, the New York Times called the collection "overcompensation" from a city "where interest in culture starts and ends with movie grosses and who is on the cover of Vanity Fair." "It's corny," art critic Dave Hickey, who also used to direct the Reese Palley gallery in New York, told the Times of the collection. "It's the sort of thing that Denver would do."

When I moved out of New York, I knew at the time that it was the best decision for my career and pocketbook. Only now have I come to realize how important leaving was for my sanity, as well. Not that I was afflicted with claustrophobia or exhaustion or any of the pseudo-ailments with which so many hypochondriac New Yorkers diagnose themselves. Rather, I'd deliberately forgotten that life outside New York is just as pure and valid as life inside New York, which is a hazard of the City just the same as street crime, and one that's far more prevalent.

On a side note, Denver must've mauled Dave Hickey's family at some point in the past. Sheesh.

While I like Jefferson's piece quite a bit, it's worth noting that rural areas and small/mid-size cities get this sort of crap directed at them constantly, and from more corners.

Why is U.S. transit so inefficient? Culture and politics

Shit this pretty don't come cheap. Santiago Calatrava's $3.8 billion design for the World Trade Center transit hub.

A lot worth considering in this analysis of why the United States' transit costs are way higher than the rest of the world:

Tunneling in any dense urban environment is an expensive proposition, but the $5 billion price tag for just the first two miles of the Second Avenue subway cannot be explained by engineering difficulties. The segment runs mainly beneath a single broad avenue, unimpeded by rivers, super-tall skyscraper foundations or other subway lines.

American taxpayers will shell out many times what their counterparts in developed cities in Europe and Asia would pay. In the case of the Second Avenue line and other new rail infrastructure in New York City, they may have to pay five times as much.

Amtrak is just as bad. Its $151 billion master plan for basic high-speed rail service in the Northeast corridor is more expensive than Japan’s planned magnetic levitating train line between Tokyo and Osaka, most of which is to be buried deep underground, with tunnels through the Japan Alps and beneath its densest cities.

There's a whole array of reasons why transit in this country is so f'ing expensive to build: an overreliance on  “consultants who consultant with consultants and advisers who advise advisers," laws that emphasize cheap bids, 

Culture and politics tend to form the boundaries of what we believe we can build, as well as the way to do it. Sure, economic factors play a role, but as this case demonstrates, culture forms the what and how, which can exercise a greater influence on the whole situation. That's one reason this blog exists, because perspectives that emphasize money and technology often miss this badly.

In this case, when governments in the U.S. think "we need to build a transit project," their culture jumps to "hire consultants," then to "make it pretty" before landing at "go with the lowest bid." That last one is backed up by legal guidelines that, in an attempt to curb corruption, often require the entity to go with the cheapest offer. Add all that together and you get transit that's way pricier than it has to be.

There's no iron law saying things have to work this way, just a lot of self-interested tradition, shaped by the way some political battles turned out in the past. Making transit more efficient doesn't so much require shiny breakthroughs as figuring a way to break that culture.

Turning Wal-Marts into libraries: Abandoned space as resource

Wal-Mart no more. Photo via Inhabitat.

Yes, Wal-Marts turned into libraries. That's the glorious word from Weburbanist:

There are thousands of abandoned big box stores sitting empty all over America, including hundreds of former Walmart stores. With each store taking up enough space for 2.5 football fields, Walmart’s use of more than 698 million square feet of land in the U.S. is one of its biggest environmental impacts. But at least one of those buildings has been transformed into something arguably much more useful: the nation’s largest library.

Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle transformed an abandoned Walmart in McAllen, Texas, into a 124,500-square-foot public library, the largest single-floor public library in the United States.

The design won the International Interior Design Association’s 2012 Library Interior Design Competition. MSR stripped out the old ceiling and walls of the building, gave the perimeter walls and bare warehouse ceiling a coat of white paint, and set to work adding glass-enclosed spaces, bright architectural details and row after row of books.

Holy f'ing hell that's awesome. I'm obviously not the only one who thinks so either, after I tweeted this particular piece of news this weekend (a tip o' the hat to Joshua Ellis for alerting me) people pounced on it: it ended up retweeted more than any item I've put out into the ether in awhile.

I think it partly struck a nerve because it represents the reverse of a widely-disliked corporate giant in favor of a wonderful public institution that's recently seemed in irreversible decline.

But there's something else here too: the last decade has seen a rise in "ruin porn," especially of blighted urban areas like Detroit. It's an admittedly addictive genre and I've occasionally succumbed myself. For much of the modern era, especially in America, the emphasis was "build," with the implicit assumption that cities and towns were perpetually on the make. The reverse of that trend in constant photos of grand old abandoned buildings fits into a narrative of perpetual rollback.

That's got it's allure certainly — there's a reason apocalypses are wildly popular — but people like tales of rejuvenation too. In a day when streetlights are going dark and roads are turning back to dirt, it's energizing to see something to the contrary, especially as big box stores themselves aren't exactly doing well.

McAllen's success also highlights that abandoned space is, in its way, a resource. Building shit from scratch is expensive, and the bigger it is, the more expensive it tends to be. People who want to try new models of living or development usually don't have a ton of resources, so places where they don't have to compete for space are particularly appealing.

This actually happened in my own city: downtown Asheville's a thriving place today because it had a bunch of old buildings left around that were initially cheap to renovate and try some interesting ideas in. Detroit's ruin porn too has been rebutted by a narrative of revival (and suitable skepticism). Berlin's a cheap place to live because it's got a ton of old buildings left around.

While the usefulness of old space isn't exactly new (Jane Jacobs was harping about it 50 years ago), it does seem resurgent as cities have regained their importance relative to the suburbs. The reuse of big-box albatrosses in particular seems to bode well for smaller cities and rural areas, where this has been the primary form of development boom for too long.

Of course, once one starts reusing those spaces, the next battles come up: gentrification, city governments' political limits, and more. Nonetheless, this is a lovely example of using a supposed detriment as an advantage.

Law-less zones: when authority and anarchy shake hands

Just another Pirate Utopia

Some interesting news out of Copenhagen, as the squat of Christiania just won long-sought autonomy:

"'It's not a perfect society, but one of the nice things about being here is that it doesn't have to be," says one resident, who calls himself only Vesinger.

Vesinger delivers his assessment of Christiania with obvious affection. He has lived here with his two little boys for six months, a recent convert to the Christianian way of life.

And it is not hard to see why this tiny enclave just south of Copenhagen's city centre is an attractive location for a family.

Trees and plant life thrive free from human interference and pesticides. It is more racially diverse, culturally open and creatively expressive than your average Danish neighbourhood.

Christiania has been a squat for nearly 40 years, ever since a group of enterprising hippies broke down the fences and set up in the disused military barracks.

And after a recent government ruling, this small society is celebrating its independence as a kind of semi-autonomous region. They call it Freetown Christiania.

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Under the new rules, residents are allowed to buy their land at knock-down prices and the remainder will be put up for rent by the state.

Although this effectively turns a hippy haven into a local council for Ms Larson, it means for the first time they can exist in security as well as peace.

"It will be a new way of living," she says.

"We do not have to worry anymore about whether the government will throw us off our land. Hopefully now that we have won our right to own the land, then we will be able to feel more secure and start to deal with some of the problems that exist here."

Ah, "we won, now what?" the question would-be revolutionaries in every field have to grapple, specifically, Christiania's relatively lawless status has drawn increasingly violent drug dealers:

There have been outbreaks of violence including gun battles on the streets as rival gangs fight for control of Christiania's drugs trade.

On the notorious Pusher Street, skinheads with pitbulls glare menacingly from behind their stalls draped in camouflage netting at anyone who looks like they might be there to do anything other than buy drugs.

Society: never a simple issue.

Christiana's problems aren't new ones either. Back in 2008, I did a brief write-up on the history of the Kowloon Walled City for Coilhouse. Instead of hippie idealism, in that case the lawless zone was founded on a far more mercantile culture, but it faced many of the same problems. As I summed it up then:

Yes, the anarchistic types out there are correct when they say that the Walled City is evidence that humans can co-exist, and even thrive, without laws constantly piled on them. But it’s not that simple. After all, without massive police raids (government incarnate), the place would have probably become a mob-run tyranny. Its residents had a degree of freedom that anyone who comes home to piles of bills or endless forms can’t help but envy. They also had darkness, a lower life expectancy, filthy living conditions and huge numbers of drug addicts.

If the problems with the drug gangs keep building, Christiania will probably need police raids, ironically, to keep its ungoverned character. Anarchists, by ideology or default (as in Kowloon) have never been particularly good at handling organized violence. At the same time, while a hell of a lot greener than the urban labyrinth that was Kowloon, many of the other traits seem similar: functionally self-governing, relatively peaceful, ensconced in a niche and free of some of the surrounding society's ills.

This brings up a paradox: in both cases, lawless areas had their lawlessness preserved by, well, the law. So, what does one do with that particular contradiction?

Defanged metropoli

Cities! Over half of humanity now lives in the damn things. Naturally, the futurists are f'ing beside themselves over the wonders this portends. Why, here's prosperity prophet Richard Florida, writing in The Atlantic about how "giant city-states" will own your future: 

Gradually, our great complexes of cities and suburbs are being knit into mega-regions -- giant city-states that are home to millions upon millions of people and generate billions and in some cases trillions of dollars of economic activity. Driving this is not just our individual choices and preferences but the very logic of economic development. Geographic concentration and clustering speeds the transmission of new ideas, increases the underlying productivity of people and firms, and generates powerful economies of scale.

He's got a point, of course, though for additional perspective you should read Nicholas Lemann's (paywalled, sadly) piece on the fight over urban identity. But there's one problem with dubbing this the new age of city-states, namely, the "state" part: most metropoli don't have a huge amount of say in government, often even in their own.

Why, for all their economic and cultural importance, are cities still politically impotent?

Revenge of the commons

The commons has received much praise as a powerful model for our own era, but mostly forgotten is how those extolled structures were actually run, and what they did to their rivals.

Some fascinating information in this article on medieval communes:

Because much of medieval Europe lacked central authority to provide protection, each city had to provide its own protection for citizens both inside the city walls, and outside. Thus towns formed communes, a legal basis for turning the cities into self-governing corporations. Although in most cases the development of communes was connected with that of the cities, there were rural communes, notably in France and England, that were formed to protect the common interests of villagers.

Every town had its own commune and no two communes were alike, but at their heart, communes were sworn allegiances of mutual defense. When a commune was formed, all participating members gathered and swore an oath in a public ceremony, promising to defend each other in times of trouble, and to maintain the peace within the city proper.

What did it mean for a commune member to defend another? If a commune member was attacked outside the city, it was too late to call for help, as it was unlikely anyone would arrive in time. Instead, the commune would promise to exact revenge on the attacker, the threat of revenge being a form of defense. However, if the attacker was a noble, safely ensconced in a castle (as was often the case), the town commune could not muster the forces to attack him directly. Instead they might attack the noble's family, burn his crops, kill his serfs, or destroy his orchards in retribution.

"How do you govern a community?" is an old question. The rise of towns and cities as a counterbalance to aristocratic authority was a major factor behind the Renaissance and, by extension, the modern world. In some ways, the urban rise hasn't stopped; most of humanity now lives in a city.

The medieval commune busts the stereotypical version of medieval history that, if it considers the peasantry at all, considers them mostly as oppressed masses, focusing instead on the culture and fights of the nobility. Turns out that peasants were plenty active in trying to develop ways to make their own lives less dangerous and hurt those that hurt them. Furthermore, they began independently adapting this basic structure once it proved successful elsewhere.

The medieval commune began by addressing the most basic need: physical protection. It then follows to the most basic way of deterrence: revenge. It is revealing that, in such an anarchic environment, peasants and artisans had an extremely no-bullshit idea of what would protect their own independence, and on what principles their rivals operated.

Interesting too to compare the way the word "commune" has changed over the centuries, from a revenge-based structure of expedience to a byword for egalitarian experimentation. 

In function, the medieval commune was more like a gang than a utopian social movement, not striving for any higher ideal than "don't fuck with us and let us run our own affairs." Which, for a medieval peasant, was a big deal. Notice that this relied on organized banditry — including the slaughter of serfs — to protect its own independence.

Like a gang or tribe, anything outside its orbit was expendable, and it focused on striking where its enemy was weak.

Of course, the communes didn't stay that communal, because ad-hoc organization is usually a precursor to more formal hierarchy. The Siena commune, one of the most successful, was ruled by an oligarchy of nine local leaders by the late 1200s. In Italy and Switzerland, where communes had the greatest success, they formed the foundation for more structured city-state republics.

Widespread disorder was a major reason for their existence in the first place, and the formation of centralized states both reduced that issue and created standing forces capable of subjugating the more rebellious communes.

Nonetheless, an interesting wrinkle here: contra the modern narrative, the communes were cooperative and competitive, with the threatened destruction of their foes (or their lands) a major reason for their existence. At the same time, their example shows that the most enduring structures start with an effective structure for a basic need and build from there.

A little autarky can be a good thing

Out of France comes a report that, as farms increasingly flee cities and their surrounding areas, metropoli like Paris and Milan might struggle to feed themselves:

Paris used to be a city of food artisans and its suburbs a melange of lush market gardens thanks to the Seine's alluvia. The globalization of the food system symbolized by, among other things, the international wholesale market of Rungis built outside Paris in the late '60s, brought in standardized products at a much lower price. Add to that real estate speculation and the absence of proper agricultural land management and soon farms were pushed farther and farther from the city and converted to better-yielding crops. 

Beyond the loss of patrimony, the disconnect from food production puts the capital in a precarious food security situation. With a food system relying on unsustainable oil-fed transportation, not only Paris but also most cities throughout the world are at risk. If the transport system were to fail, food would run out on supermarket shelves within a few days. 

Keep in mind that the writer isn't talking about a notorious sprawl like Los Angeles, but far denser European cities. 

The majority of humanity now lives in urban areas, a trend that probably won't cease anytime soon. While cities can be more sustainable than their detractors suggest, vulnerabilities like this leave them open to disaster or civil unrest.

Meanwhile, nations around the world practically quaked as China's rare earth embargo promised to deprive materials needed for the electronics societies have become increasingly dependent on.

Autarky — self-sufficiency, in short — has a bad reputation in economics, and rightly so. It is impossible for a society to be completely self-sufficient in any sort of complex economy. The attendant attempts to cut off trade entirely are usually the province of dictators and extremely stagnant societies. However, both of the above cases demonstrate that in targeted areas, autarky is a necessary balance in an increasingly interconnected world.

Remedying these vulnerabilities aren't impossible. Rare earth mines in more locations or writing policy in a way that preserves urban farmland (as Japan has done, with some success) are both relatively inexpensive moves that save a lot of trouble in the long run, without requiring economic cloistering.

Advanced technology and global trade networks are an important part of an evolving world. But the idea that the resources and connections they depend upon are inexhaustible or invulnerable is ludicrous. Preventing collapses depends as much on preparation as innovation.