Tag: urbanization

• The Millennial Dream [Documentary]

  Back in 2015, I was interviewed for a documentary called The Millennial Dream. I then completely forgot about it until somebody tweeted it at me yesterday. So the documentary is out – it was released last year – and you can rent it or buy it on iTunes.

  The documentary calls into question the [North] American Dream. This idea that you just have to work hard, save up, buy a house in the suburbs, pay off your debt, and then everything will be just fine. For many, that dream is quickly disappearing, if it hasn’t already.

  Enter the Millennial Dream. Our economy is changing. Our jobs are changing. Our cities are changing. And by 2020, the Millennial generation is expected to form 50% of the global workforce. What is this generation dreaming about? That is what this documentary is about.

  But I should probably stop here because I haven’t actually seen the film. I could be overselling it. I’ll watch it this weekend and then report back. If you can’t see the trailer embedded below, click here.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVCNXJk2fT8&w=560&h=315]

  2017.04.04

• Big cities, small cities, and automation

  It’s fine to talk about the importance of big cities in today’s world, but there’s another side of this coin to consider. What happens to the towns and smaller cities who aren’t guiding the global economy?

  Here is an interesting snippet from the NY Times that recently caught my attention:

  As one of my college professors recently told me about higher education, “The sociological role we play is to suck talent out of small towns and redistribute it to big cities.” There have always been regional and class inequalities in our society, but the data tells us that we’re living through a unique period of segregation.

  If you combine the above with the fact that a significant number of jobs are likely to be automated in the near term, one has to wonder what the world is going to look like assuming the status quo continues.

  2017.03.20

• Why cities are where they are

  I’ve always been fascinated by questions around the origin and location of cities. How did they get their start and why did they get founded where they did? Access to water and resources are obvious factors. But it could have also been for defensive reasons. 

  In some cases, the location makes intuitive sense. Quebec City, for instance, is founded on high ground at the point “where the river narrows.” Both of these elements come in handy when you’re trying to fend off intruders. But in other cases, the exact location of a city or town may not be as obvious.

  Thankfully, Wendover Productions – which is a YouTube channel entirely focused on explaining how the world works – recently published a video called: Why Cities Are Where They Are. (Video embedded below.) It’s about 16 minutes long and it has gotten over 1 million views at the time of writing this post.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PWWtqfwacQ?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

  They also have a video that I watched today called: The Economics of Airline Class. It covers why airlines don’t care about coach and don’t make money off coach travellers. The real estate developer in me enjoyed the part about revenue per square foot for each “class” section of the plane.

  2017.03.18

• 4,000 years of urban history

  

  The Guardian recently published an extract from a book by Greg Clark called, Global Cities: A Short History. 

  The article and book cover 4,000 years of urbanization. More specifically, Clark explains why some cities become global leaders, others do not, and why it is common for cities to rise and fall over time – at intervals that are only becoming shorter.

  Below is an excerpt that talks about Amsterdam’s rise in the 17th century; a period of time known as the Dutch Golden Age. In the 1600′s, Amsterdam became the undisputed financial capital of the world and spawned the very first stock exchange. (Though, let’s not forget about Tulip Mania.)

  “Amsterdam took over the mantle from Antwerp and Genoa as Europe’s major commercial city during the 1600s, and it developed many of the technologies that underpin today’s global cities. The overthrow of the Spanish elite, which had hampered the interests of powerful local merchants, granted more freedom to Dutch traders. Soon after, the blockade of Spanish Antwerp triggered a flight of capital and talented entrepreneurs to Amsterdam.“

  "The protestant city became prized for its safe port, political stability and access to inland waterways. It maximised its appeal by guaranteeing equal protection to all merchants, wherever they came from, while developing standardised institutional norms. A relaxed attitude toward interest-bearing loans spurred the development of modern finance in Amsterdam, including maritime insurance, making the city both the logistical hub and the trade financier of Europe.”

  Certain things have changed. Maritime pursuits were once paramount to a city’s success, whereas today, connectivity happens in a myriad of other ways. But other things have not changed. 

  As I read through the article, I couldn’t help but notice a few reoccurring themes. Being closed to innovation and immigration didn’t work in the past and I don’t believe it works today.

  2016.12.11

• The Silicon Valley of hardware

  I generally dislike derivative city monikers – such as the title of this blog post. But I appreciate that it quickly gets the point across.

  Fusion recently published an interesting article talking about how Shenzhen, China is quickly rising as the hardware innovation capital of the world. Rather than simply serve as the place of production for companies such as Apple, the Chinese government would like to see it serve as a place of creation. In fact, some organizations are suggesting a terminology change from  “Made in China” to “Created in China.”

  A big part of the reason for all of this is that Silicon Valley long ago moved “up the stack.” It focused itself on software and internet services, because hardware wasn’t where the margins were. It wasn’t sexy. And so production got moved over to a low cost market. But now, with the rise of IoT, drones, and many other physical products, one could argue that Shenzhen has become highly relevant in the innovation ecosystem.

  It’s also important to think about how Shenzhen fits in to the larger Pearl River Delta region. Here is an excerpt from the Fusion article:

  “Shenzhen has the geographical footprint of Los Angeles, but a population three times its size at 12 million people. It’s part of the Pearl River Delta, which also includes Hong Kong, the global financial capital and port city; Macau, the world’s largest gambling city; Guangzhou, home to one of China’s major ports, trading centers, and factories; and Dongguan, a manufacturing hub. It’s as if the tech talents of Silicon Valley, the big banks of New York, the manufacturing plants of Detroit and Pittsburgh, the casinos of Las Vegas and the shipping ports of Long Beach were all in one small part of the US, and a two hour drive from one another.”

  If you’re interested in this topic – both hardware innovation and the rapidly growing city of Shenzhen – take an hour and watch this documentary from Wired. Embedded below.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

  2016.09.12

• The back-end of our cities

  I love cities. We all love cities right now. 

  Everyone, for good reason, seems to be fixated on both people returning to cities (like those narcissistic Millennials) and people urbanizing for the very first time. This latter scenario is happening rapidly across the developing world and in many cases – but not all cases – it is helping to lift people out of extreme poverty.

  But by most measures, urban areas represent only about 2-3% of the world’s land area, despite housing over 50% of our population. So here’s an interesting thought for this morning: What is happening and what will happen with the remaining 97-98%?

  In this recent talk by architect Rem Koolhaas, he attempts to dissect the future of living, loving, and working through the lens of architecture. However, he starts by saying that architecture is, in fact, too slow to properly capture the zeitgeist of any time period. It is, “an unbelievably slow art.” That said, Koolhaas has a remarkable ability to identify what is happening (see Delirious New York) and then call it out in a way that you probably haven’t thought about. 

  In the above talk, he hones in on the impact of Silicon Valley – certainly the spirit of our time – on the rural landscape outside of our cities. Interestingly enough, he also talks about how the tech industry has begun to borrow terminology from architecture in order to describe itself.

  Screenshot from the video:

  

  Despite their ethereal appearance, technology giants still have large physical footprints for servers, production, logistics, and so on. But there’s no reason – or way – to accommodate them inside of our cities and so they cluster outside, in the 97-98% areas. These are places like the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, which is the home of Tesla’s new Gigafactory.

  Because of sheer scale and because there’s no need for them to possess much in the way of humanistic qualities, these are spaces which are void of architecture, urbanism, and, in some cases, a light spectrum beyond what is absolutely necessary for the specific function of the building (discussed in the video).

  Of course, the periphery has long serviced the core. But Koolhaas’ thinking has, as it often does, made me consider this phenomenon in a slightly different way. He paints a picture of a spiky world where we are all crammed into sensor and app-driven cities (the front-end), all of which are then powered by big mechanistic boxes that many of us may be naive to (the back-end). In some ways it feels like the Matrix. What we see and experience could just be the tip of the iceberg.

  Architecture may be unbearably slow, but as a society we have always built what matters to us most at the time. At one point it was places of worship. But today, at least for part of our landscape, it is boxes not intended for us to really experience. Maybe that’s not really architecture. Maybe it is simply the back-end for our cities.

  2016.07.03

• Young, educated, and urban

  The Wall Street Journal recently published this article talking about how the young and educated are flocking to high-density urban areas all across the United States. Here’s a set of charts from the article:

  

  There are many people who will point out – probably rightly – that despite the “return to cities” that we are currently seeing, the world is still suburbanizing. But, it doesn’t appear to be suburbanizing in quite the same way as it did for prior generations. There’s also a socioeconomic shift taking place.

  As an example, and to drive home the point that it’s not just the expensive coastal cities that are seeing rising home prices, the WSJ article focuses quite a bit on Ohio City – a neighborhood in Cleveland. Here’s what has been happening:

  In the Ohio City neighborhood, the median income skyrocketed to $93,000 from $23,000 since 2006, according to Ohio City Inc., a local nonprofit development group. Median home values shot up 800% since 2000 to $270,000, according to Ohio City Inc. Median rental prices in downtown Cleveland as a whole jumped 47% from late 2010 to late 2015, according to the Center for Population Dynamics at Cleveland State University.

  These are pretty dramatic increases – though $270,000 feels cheap to someone from Toronto. Still, it speaks to a trend. You and I both know that Ohio City isn’t the only neighborhood seeing those sorts of numbers.

  2016.06.11

• Young, rich, childless, and white

  Whenever I’m not sure what to write about, I just read. That’s one of the big benefits of daily blogging – it forces me to do that.

  This morning I stumbled upon the blog of Jed Kolko. Jed is an economist and, up until 2015, he was Chief Economist and VP of Analytics at Trulia.

  His most recent post argues – naturally with lots of data and charts – that for all of our talk of (re)urbanization, it’s actually a specific subset of the population that is far more likely to be have urbanized between 2000 and 2014: the young, rich, childless, and white. (Note: His post is talking specifically about U.S. cities.) 

  Below are a few of his charts. 

  In all cases, the x-axis represents % change in urban living between 2000 and 2014. All of the data is from Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) – 2000 decennial Census and from the 2014 one-year American Community Survey (ACS).

  Here is age:

  

  Household income:

  

  Education and children:

  

  And here is race/ethnicity:

  

  2016.04.02

• Toronto is at the center of an emerging megalopolis

  

  High speed train by asean leung on 500px

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

  With the recent talk around downtown Cleveland’s resurgence, I am reminded that for those of us living near the Great Lakes, we are living in one of the most important urban agglomerations in the world: The Great Lakes Megalopolis.

  In 1962, French geographer Jean Gottmann wrote a seminal book called, Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States. And in it, he described the remarkable clustering of cities in the northeast, running from Boston in the north to Washington D.C. in the south. He called this the Northeast Megalopolis.

  The term megalopolis simply refers to a clustering or chain of generally adjacent metropolitan areas.

  Then in the 1960s and 1970s, architect and planner Constantinos Doxiadis started writing about the emergence of what he called the Great Lakes Megalopolis. In his mind, a contiguous urban region was forming that stretched all the way from Chicago in the west to Quebec City in the north east. And at its economic center was the city of Detroit.

  More recently, Richard Florida, as well as others, have been referring to these urban clusters as mega-regions. And in the case of the Great Lakes, Florida broke the area down into two distinct regions: Chi-Pitts in the west and Tor-Buff-Chester in the east. (I think you can guess how the names were derived.)

  According to his research, these two mega-regions have a combined population of almost 60 million people and an economic output equivalent to almost $3 trillion. That places it in line with the Northeast Megalopolis. But according to the Brookings Institution, the output coming from the Great Lakes could be closer to $4.5 trillion.

  Whatever the case may be and whatever you want to call it, the Great Lakes Megalopolis is unquestionably an economic and cultural powerhouse. But this has me wondering whether or not we’re doing enough to unleash its full potential.

  When I attended Joe Berridge’s talk last week on Toronto as a global city, I asked him how he thought we should be organizing our cities and regions. Do city-states make sense? Should we be rethinking the relationship between provinces/states and cities?

  His response was that we should be creating agencies and entities with regional authority (as opposed to fighting to make any constitutional changes). For example, the Toronto region should not have an array of competing transit agencies (as it does today). It should have one regional transit authority that blankets the region. People, ideas, and capital don’t follow borders.

  So with that in mind, what opportunities are there for us to unite the metropolitan areas within the Great Lakes Megalopolis?

  The first idea that comes to my mind is a high speed rail network that seamlessly connects to each city’s local transit network. Imagine a Great Lakes bullet train that could zip you across the region. It would completely reorganize the spatial landscape.

  Here’s an excerpt from a recent report by the Independent Transport Commission called, Ambitions & Opportunities – Understanding the Spatial Effects of High Speed Rail:

  There has been a global shift of economic power and influence from nation states to cities and city-regions. Today’s successful cities collaborate across existing boundaries to form polycentric metropolitan regions. As a result cities function in a much less self-contained manner than they did fifty years ago. Longterm trends in the pattern of urban settlement reflect the interplay between opportunities for dispersal afforded by greater mobility, and economic and social forces promoting concentration.

  But what else could we be doing to empower the Great Lakes Megalopolis? 

  I would love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below. I think there’s a strong case to be made for thinking at the scale of the megalopolis and not just at the scale of our own backyard.

  2015.06.25

• Hidden gems in the Tenderloin

  

  I’ve written about the Tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco before. It’s an infamous neighborhood in the center of the city that has for decades resisted gentrification (which was the topic of my post).

  But as the technology sector continues to urbanize, many fear that it’s only a matter of time before it does eventually gentrify. A new nickname has even emerged for the neighborhood: the Twitterloin.

  However, a local nonprofit called the Wildflowers Institute is trying to ensure that gentrification doesn’t erase the cultural assets currently housed in the neighborhood. Through a project called “Hidden Gems”, the group is literally knocking on doors to find active artists within the community (many of whom live in single rooms) and then supporting them through fellowship programs and other investments.

  What’s fascinating about their approach is that they are actively seeking out the informal activities taking place within the community – activities that would otherwise be hidden and then potentially lost. Once discovered, they then do a number of mapping exercises to keep track of this data.

  As somebody who believes city building will become a lot more data driven in the future, I think this is a really interesting initiative. And as gentrification pressures continue to increase in San Francisco, I’m sure this information will help guide the discussions. You can’t account for something you don’t know exists.

  If you’d like to learn more about this initiative, check out this short 4 minute video from the New York Times. I would then love to hear from you in the comment section below.

  2015.01.11