Tag: the urbanophile

• The Human City

  As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about fluid labor markets and urban density, I thought I would present an opposing view.

  Joel Kotkin is a well known geographer and author. He has published a number of books, the most recent of which is called, The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us. He is also well known as a supporter of the suburbs, which is a somewhat contrarian view in today’s urban-centric world.

  Here is a recent interview he did with Aaron M. Renn (click here if you can’t see it below):

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  One of his messages is that the urban core is great for young people without kids, but that we shouldn’t expect it to serve everyone’s needs and wants – particularly those of families. Families need space and affordability, and urban cores are simply not engineered for that.

  Long live the suburb.

  2016.11.19

• Place is dead anyway

  

  Aaron Renn has a few observations up on his blog from a recent trip to San Francisco. Number 2 is as follows:

  “A curiously low energy city.  It’s tough to judge any American city’s street energy after living in New York, but San Francisco felt basically dead. Tourist areas around Union Square and the Embarcadero were crowded, and the Mission on a Friday night was hopping, but otherwise the city was very quiet. Haight-Ashbury was nearly deserted and many neighborhoods had the feel of a ghost town. It’s very strange to be walking around a city with such a dense built fabric but so few people.”

  I feel this way every, single, time, I visit San Francisco. I love San Francisco, but outside the main draws, the city feels eerily quiet. I have never understood why that is the case.

  This is something that I am sensitive to because I find it even impacts my own energy levels. For instance, Sundays in Toronto often feel too quiet for me. Fewer pedestrians. Slower drivers. Our collective metabolic rate slows down.

  I love the hustle of a busy city.

  2016.11.06

• Corporate disaggregation (and some book suggestions)

  

  The truism is that both people and companies are moving back to downtowns. We are living in an urban era. But when you really look at the data, it is clear that the suburbs are far from dead. And when it comes to companies, the way in which they are relocating to downtown is not the same as it was in previous generations.

  The Economist calls it “corporate disaggregation.” Aaron Renn calls it “executive headquarters.” And it is the idea that it is primarily the elite executive jobs that are moving back downtown. The routine jobs are remaining in the suburbs or are being pushed out to even further outposts. On top of this, a move downtown can also provide the impetus for downsizing.

  Here’s an excerpt from The Economist:

  “The best book to read if you want to understand corporate America’s migration patterns is not Mr Florida’s but a more recent study, Bill Bishop’s “The Big Sort”. It argues that Americans are increasingly clustering in distinct areas on the basis of their jobs and social values. The headquarters revolution is yet another iteration of the sorting process that the book describes, as companies allocate elite jobs to the cities and routine jobs to the provinces. Corporate disaggregation is no doubt a sensible use of resources. But it will also add to the tensions that are tearing America apart as many bosses choose to work in very different worlds from the vast majority of Americans, including their own employees.”

  It is interesting, and probably disconcerting, to note that the divisiveness we are seeing in politics is also manifesting itself in our cities. The causes are likely the same. We may be living in an urban era, but we are also living in an era where, sadly, broad-based urban prosperity appears to be declining. See Elephant Graph.

  Another somewhat related book that may be of interest is Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension. It is about the increasing complexity of our cities and our inability to properly understand it all. It argues that it may be time to seek out new tools.

  2016.09.10

• The local vs. global city

  Blogger and Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Aaron M. Renn, recently published an interesting long-form article called, Rethinking America’s Cities’ Success Strategy.

  One of the central themes is the idea that globalization has caused a kind of bifurcation in cities – a disconnect between the local and the global. In an effort to compete with other global cities around the world, we have begun to turn our back on local concerns. At the same time, not every city has the market power of, say, New York or London.

  So what does this mean for cities? Here’s a quote from the article that I think does a good job explaining the mental model:

  

  At the end of the article, Aaron makes a number of recommendations for how to better think about local entrepreneurship and economic growth. The first one is as follows:

  “Local civic priorities should favor building a successful and inclusive local economy, including entrepreneurship, over global concerns and real estate development.”

  Despite this being seemingly contradictory to do what I do for a living, I think it’s important to note that on a fundamental level, architects and developers simply create space. 

  It might be a beautiful space. A space that improves well-being, creates value, and enables certain activities. But at the end of the day, there needs to be demand for that space. And a robust local economy is paramount to that equation. So I agree that we shouldn’t forget about local and expect that “if we build it, they will come.”

  If you have the time, the full article is worth a read. It’s also part of a broader series on entrepreneurship and cities, so there are a bunch of other related articles on the same page.

  2016.02.25

• A Detroit story of single family homes and pianos

  

  https://500px.com/embed.js

  I was reading Aaron Renn’s blog this morning and a post called, How Urban Planning Made Motown Records Possible, caught my attention. 

  His argument – taken from a book called Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story – is that the prevalence of pianos in black working class and middle class families was a key ingredient in Detroit ultimately punching above its weight musically.

  Here’s an excerpt that Aaron Renn shared on his blog:

  The family piano’s role in the music that flowed out of the residential streets of Detroit cannot be overstated. The piano, and its availability to children of the black working class and middle class, is essential to understanding what happened in that time and place, and why it happened, not just with Berry Gordy, Jr. but with so many other young black musicians who came of age there from the late forties to the early sixties. What was special then about pianos and Detroit? First, because of the auto plants and related industries, most Detroiters had steady salaries and families enjoyed a measure of disposable income they could use to listen to music in clubs and at home. Second, the economic geography of the city meant that the vast majority of residents lived in single family homes, not high-rise apartments, making it easier to deliver pianos and find room for them. And third, Detroit had the egalitarian advantage of a remarkable piano enterprise, the Grinnell Brothers Music House.

  Detroit is obviously not the only city with lots of single family homes. But it’s fascinating to think that this housing typology, combined with a number of other socioeconomic factors, could be what ultimately led to the creation of the Motown Sound.

  It’s also interesting to think about what kind of talent we might be squandering in our cities. I mean, look what happens when people have access to things like pianos (in the case of Detroit), computers (in the case of people like Bill Gates), and cheap/vacant space (in the case of Berlin and its clubs). They create amazing things.

  This is one of the reasons why I think we sometimes underestimate the importance of small scale moves when it comes to spurring innovation in cities. We forget that people will do incredible things when they are, quite simply, given the freedom to work on projects they are passionate about.

  If we could harness these passions instead of focusing so often on big political announcements, I think we’d all be better off.

  2015.10.24

• The Next Urban Renaissance

  

  The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research has just published a free book called, The Next Urban Renaissance: How Public-Policy Innovation and Evaluation Can Improve Life in America’s Cities.

  Here’s an excerpt from the foreword:

  This collection of essays brings together the best ideas from scholars with expertise across a broad spectrum of urban issues. The common theme of the papers is to innovate, evaluate, and leverage the remarkable private talent that is so abundant in America’s great cities. Public capacity is sharply limited; the ingenuity of urban entrepreneurs seems practically boundless. Local governments should be more entrepreneurial and do more to use the talents of the entrepreneurs around them.

  As a further preview, two of the ideas suggested in the book include: 1) reducing or eliminating parking requirements for new developments (which is something I’ve written about before on ATC) and 2) implementing a split-rate property tax for land and its improvements.

  If you’d like to download the free PDF, click here.

  2015.10.12

• The crisis of success

  I’m back and it feels great. I missed blogging the past 2 days. Though, there was something nice about not touching a computer all weekend.

  This morning I got up extra early and listened to a brief conversation between Aaron M. Renn of The Urbanophile and urbanist Richard Florida. The topic is New York’s “Great Reset”, and the impetus was a recent report (of the same name) that was put out by New York University.

  The conversation starts by talking about the resilience of New York City and its ability to accept and then reinvent itself in the wake of “creative destruction.” Destruction such as the financial crisis of 2008/2009. 

  But they then go on to talk about the challenges that New York, as well as many other cities, are now facing. Challenges brought about, not by failure, but by their tremendous success. Challenges such as income inequality and the dwindling middle class.

  The overarching premise is that we are still in the early stages of a new urban and creative economy. And that there’s lots of work to be done in order to figure out how to make it an inclusive one.

  There’s even mention of former Toronto mayor, Rob Ford.

  You can listen to the talk below. If you can’t see the embedded play button, click here.

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  2015.09.14

• “Regulation for thee but not for me”

  Urbanist Aaron Renn recently published an interesting article in City Journal called “Libertarians of Convenience”. It talks about how today’s urban progressives are selectively favoring deregulation for the things that only matter to them – everything from urban housing to food trucks.

  Here’s a snippet:

  But it’s hard to avoid thinking, too, that some of the inconsistency reflects elite biases. The things that liberal-minded city residents like and want to do—eat from hip food trucks, smoke dope, and other “bourgeois bohemian” pursuits—should be left as free as possible, consequences be damned (raw-milk advocates downplay the nearly 1,000 cases of illnesses caused by it from 2007 through 2012). Those that they consider déclassé—Big Gulps, Marlboro Lights, McDonalds—should be restricted or even shut down. It’s regulation for thee but not for me.

  I like his angle, because we’re probably all – at least a little – guilty of subjectively wanting more of the things we like and less of the things we don’t like.

  What do you think of his argument?

  2015.05.14

• Are we becoming more or less entrepreneurial?

  Aaron M. Renn of The Urbanophile, recently wrote an interesting article in Governing called, Where’s America’s Entrepreneurial Economy? In it, he argues that despite the fact that there’s a perception that entrepreneurship is on the rise, overall rates are actually declining.

  The Brookings Institution found that so-called “firm entry rates” have declined since the 1970s and that they suffered a steep fall post-2005. And though millennials are often seen as an entrepreneurial generation, The Wall Street Journal reports that business ownership among those under the age of 30 recently hit a 24-year low. Self-employment has seen a similar downward trend. A study by Economic Modeling Specialists International found that both the total number of self-employed and their share of jobs have fallen since 2006.

  His argument is that outside of tech — where yes, the barriers to entry have fallen significantly over the years — it has actually become harder to start a company in a lot of other cases. And he specifically mentions two industries where he believes that is very much the case: construction and real estate.

  Why is that?

  Well, he cites a number of possible factors, one of which is increased licensing requirements for many industries. But the two most interesting for me are slow disruption cycles and the presence of large dominant firms.

  Real estate has both of those. 

  It’s also a capital intensive industry. And it’s becoming harder for smaller private players to compete with larger institutions and pension funds who struggle with “moving the investment needle”, not with access to capital. Real estate is no longer the fringe asset class it once was.

  In contrast, you have the tech space with fast disruption cycles and low barriers to entry. Yes, you also have large dominant players (Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and so on), but even they don’t have complete immunity in an environment where new ideas frequently trump access to capital.

  A culture of entrepreneurship across all industries is important for our society. I hope we never lose that.

  2015.03.16

• Why cities need to be our economic unit

  Last year I wrote a post called Province of Toronto, where I briefly talked about the outdated nature of how cities are organized and governed in Canada. I was effectively arguing that, in today’s global economy, our dominate economic unit needs to be the city–not the province. 

  This isn’t something that gets talked about a lot, but I feel strongly that we should be looking at it. We’re unnecessarily crippling the economic, social, and cultural potential of our cities because we, to put it bluntly, haven’t gotten around to reorganizing our governance structure.

  Well, this evening, I happened to stumble upon a great post by The Urbanophile called, Are States an Anachronism? In it, he cites a book by Richard Longworth called Caught in the Middle (that is now on my Clear reading list), which argues that states, as an economic unit in the US, are not only outdated, but hugely detrimental to the economy.

  More specifically, he outlines the following concerns (taken directly from The Urbanophile blog):

  1. States do not represent communities of interest.
  2. Arbitrary state lines encourage senseless border wars.
  3. Many state capitals are small, isolated, and cut off from knowledge about the global 21st century economy.
  4. Metro areas are the engines of the modern economy, but the rules for municipal and regional governance are set by states, and often in a manner that is directly contrary to urban interests.
  5. States can’t to much to help, but they can do a lot to hurt.

  For a complete explanation of each of the above points, I would encourage you to check out the full blog post, here. As I said before, this isn’t a topic that’s top of mind for most people. But it’s an important one. Our global competitiveness is at stake.

  2014.05.07