SHORT essays on CITIES

The City: Brief Essays      Martin Krieger   6/1/17 6:56 PM

These brief essays were written either for a podcast or as epitomes of lectures in my courses on cities. There is repetition and changes of emphasis, but I have not tried to edit much. And the first and second pieces were deliberately written as previews of what is to come. I have posted some of this before, but I thought to put it all out again.

MK

What we know about cities

When we talk about urban life, there are some scholarly findings—many obvious—that suggest how policies and plans actually work. It’s remarkable how often these facts are ignored.

Cities take up space, and one’s location in a city (often with respect to a central or other significant district) determines house prices and rents and commutes, as well as job opportunities and safety and schools. Within that space, there are public spaces and parks and cemeteries, private spaces such as homes and businesses, and shopping, commercial and industrial activities, and services and bureaucracies. (E-commerce does not replace those actual spaces, it would seem.) All cities are built by government and by private developers, the latter under the purview of government, and in general density is necessary if these endeavors are to be financially viable and socially interesting. Developers and owners need to be assured that their title and property rights are firm if they are to invest and build and buy for the long term. Moreover, government and utility companies must provide the infrastructure of roads and power and water and refuse removal, if a location is to be viable at all. And much of the stuff needed to live and build comes from elsewhere, other cities and the hinterlands.

There needs to be a way of gathering money into bundles, through taxes and banking, so that government budgets and private loans are available for construction and improvements. Zoning, informal or legal, makes sure that residents and nuisances (say, a garbage dump) are not too adjacent, and they encourage the advantages or like activities or businesses being close to each other.

Cities are attractive for migrants from the countryside and perhaps from other cities. There are as well inflows of finance, power, and goods and foodstuffs, and outflows of other goods and pollutants. Moreover, there are internal flows of people, goods, and intermediate products. The effect of these concentrations is likely to lead to much greater numbers of interactions and outputs than might be anticipated by counting population or wealth.

Cities almost always emphasize the differences among people, in their talents, their backgrounds, and their races, just because people are right next to each other and encounter each other in commerce and social life, and because in such an economy the division of labor and specialization are great advantages. Usually, those differences lead to hierarchies, where some people and institutions are considered better than others, and the spatial isolation of the various levels in the hierarchy—albeit they breathe the same air and often must interact intimately. That makes it harder for those at the tops of hierarchies to ignore those toward the bottom—for the tops’ security and their well-being depends on a stable society, one that will be threatened by these hierarchies. Societal safety nets serve the interests of those at the top by securing and legitimating their status. At the same time, cities are places where people lose their original identities—from their neighborhoods, from the countryside--developing more homogeneous ones and then new distinctive identities.

Of course, people are born, grow, go to school, form families and new households, find work, and eventually die. This life cycle sets demands on what cities must provide, hospitals and cemeteries for example. The other major influences on city life are those of politics and regulation and the sacred. There is government, and its powers are substantial and often it regulates life. Moreover, the economy and social relations set up other regulations. And usually, there are sacred commitments—religion, school, sports teams—that provide cultural regulation.

To attend to these features of cities—location, infrastructure, finance, flows of people and goods, differentiation and hierarchy, and the life cycle and its regulation—is to be able to figure out how to make our lives better.

The Urban Context means: density, diversity, dispersion and concentration, the need for explicit spaces to carry on life and work, a complex market for buying and selling and so the divisions of labor and production, with a wide variety of consumption. There are public spaces. People actually encounter each other in public, and people are seen by strangers. There is as well groupings, as in neighborhoods, ethnicities, classes, and races, that lead to spatial agglomerations. Those who do not do well are likely to be encountered by all.

Cities are highly differentiated in space, activity, people…  That differentiation is often expressed in heterogeneity, that is parts that do not mix well (what is sometimes called ??? about difference} it also about hierarchy. And given the variety of people and activities, such hierarchy may have pervasive effects.

What we call jobs and professions become more varied, and they exist at all because the demand for work that must be done is likely to be highly differentiated, and so there is in effect a market for labor. Factories surely need workers, but there need to be customers for their products, and if there is diversity and density, there is likely room for a large number of producers of differentiated products.

Cities, as they grow and differentiate, and as they have an influx of people from elsewhere, become rather less intimate. People come to cities because for them alienation from an intimate community may well be very uncomfortable, and they accept the consequences of such alienation as the cost of freedom. Moreover, they may find intimate friends who are not so nearby to them but are within the city—since with more people there is greater likelihood of matching.

Cities grow by natural increase, by in-migration, by economic developments and by particular advantages that become apparent when they contribute to the economy. Cities are networked with other cities and with the hinterlands, for goods and food, for services, for intermediate products. Modes of transportation, if they are inexpensive and reliable, encourage those networks, and within cities they allow for a dispersion of work, commerce, play, residence. Communications, whether by post, telephone, or various electronic means, allow for the management of widespread enterprises (rail and the telegraph), for maintaining relationships that are commercial or personal, and for making connections among otherwise distant entities. Cities tend to become more dense with transactions and interactions, at least until congestion becomes too much. Infill is common, since there would always seem to be mismatched spaces and activities, and insofar as you can figure out how to take advantage of such mismatches, you are likely to thrive.

Cities decline, sometimes due to invasion or disease, sometimes because other cities take over some of their advantages.

Flows of material, capital, energy are intense, with major flow-ways among cities and within a hierarchy of cities.

Someones have to build the city, perhaps government, more likely entrepreneurs and individuals. Entrepreneurs want some assurance that property will not be taken away from them, by brigands or by government. Real property is always in tension with movable property (finance and money), and insofar as money is available for investment and building, real property will be developed. Whether there by hot-bedding, garage housing, pop-ups, … there is likely to be impromptu use of space, often not legal.

It matters where you are located. Usually it is more expensive closer to the center, or one of the centers, but in compensation transport times are shorter and transport is less expensive. Insofar as you need to interact face-to-face, you want to be located near as many of your intimates as possible.  In general it is hard to be self-sufficient in a city, largely because land needed for animals and agriculture is not readily available.

The public policy and city planning issues include: providing streets and roadways, sewerage, water and utilities, safety and security (crime is more likely and possible if the population density is high), fire protection. Schooling is almost always locally provided (in the US), and the same for health facilities. Public health is a genuine problem since density means that disease can spread readily. Freight and food-distribution must be allowed, and there must be sufficient shelter provided either publicly or privately. Religious institutions, with many sects and religions, take up space. Government figures out how to divide space so that less-compatible uses are better separated yet allows for flexibility.  Cities consume resources, many of which are located at a distance, and they convert resources into goods that others want. They also concentrate resources associated with human capital. And disaster is not uncommon, whether fire or flood, disease, or invasion. How do you make for protection and recovery?

Politically, cities allow for more intimate governance, but also for more corruption it would seem. But cities usually are under the purview of counties, special districts, states and federal governments. Revenue is raised from taxes and fees, and there are substantial exchanges with counties, districts, and other governments. Cities are not at all autonomous, for they have to accord with larger regional or national imperatives.

There is a deep connection between what people do, their actions, in toto, and the built environment, and we might study just one and infer something about the other. There is another connection between the structure of the city and its history (built environment structure, people structure). What we see now is an accumulation of past actions and buildings, as well as destruction and rebuilding.  Hence, these connections must be informed by history, and in no sense are we in a long-term equilibrium.

Space and Place in Cities

Cities are places and they take up space. Their spaces may grow by development and annexation so that two cities grow into each other.

            Cities are dense, articulated and particularized, excluding and including, outspreading and infilling places, with flows of people and goods within the city, and without to other cities in the nation and internationally. 

            Cities are regulated by their economies, laws, their local geographies (eg. a river). Neighborhoods are relatively homogeneous and self-identified places, usually commercial, residential, and industrial uses are present--but sometimes only one or two. Cities grow by in-migration, often of diverse peoples, who may then be pushed into or choose to live close to each other (but not their children and grand-children).

Cities provide jobs and workers, religious places, educational institutions (less usually rather than more universal, until recently). They are almost always governed locally, although the nation or other nations may well control that. 

            Cities are usually built by developers, who have access to capital and power--developers might well be the state or preferred agents. They are rebuilt after devastation, after decline, with robust economies helping. In very robust economies they are overbuilt, and that overhang takes a while to be worked out.

            Geography matters: rivers, hills, local resources. But so does the interests of the state or of entrepreneurs.

            Cities have some sort of public streets, perhaps in a grid, perhaps with multiple colliding grids, perhaps with neighborhoods with complex streetways. Those arrangements are sometimes rebuilt, with enormous disruption (Paris). 

            Spaces are usually private, but there are public spaces as in parks and streets and public facilities. The private provision of public space is common, although such public spaces are still under private control. This has consequences for political demonstrations, photographing, etc.

            Spaces are marked by aural ambience (quiet, street noise, factory noise, hawkers) and by other sensory qualities (visual complexity, smells and fragrances, and sometimes even feel). The urban sensorium is always experienced, but often not even noted as we go about our activities. Stopping to smell the roses is occasioned by something stopping us in our tracks.

            Aerial and birds-eye views, historically from the tops of hills and or imagined as such, are vital for getting an overall sense. But walking will reveal details and flavors. 

            Cities are not ideas, they are actual places with social and economic factors that are found in part by looking and in part by deep investigation. Cities are always planned, by the state, by developers, by political actors. What might look like a jumble has a history that makes sense. Favellas, the hillside communities in Rio de Janeiro, may look like a jumble, but the residents have discerned a plan among the complexity, in part by informal regulation. Cities are always replanned and redesigned, usually in part and pieces, almost never wholesale. 

            Cities must have provision for water, waste, accessibility (roads,...), safety and security, and power. Even charming seemingly unplanned cities, those wonderful hillside cities (as in The American) must be ordered, often by the topography and by what others have done. But cities are also quite efficient, in providing for what people need. 

            People who live outside of cities, almost always use the services provided by the city. Yet the city needs the produce of the hinterland, for food, for construction materials, for waste disposal. Cities always pollute, but at least pollution may be sent elsewhere or isolated.

The Structure and Dynamics of Cities                

Cities develop in space and over time, and places are known as aging or renewing or perhaps stable neighborhoods of a particular era. We might understand urban flows and structure in terms of the movements of people or in terms of the built and social environment: People interact with each other through the exchange of goods, money, information, just what defines institutions and neighborhoods… and they are most likely to interact with neighbors, close-by in space, or status, or role. [Not all interactions are fair or legal, and those that are not are likely to be occasions for extracting a premium.]

Moreover, cities are heterogeneous and hierarchical. Stocks and flows of people and goods and property are intimately related, in space and in time. Disruption, invention and import, decay and export, account for imbalances. There is lots of fluctuation and change that appears to be unavoidable.

When we talk about cities, we often treat persons as simplified or abstract individuals--each with a small number of properties, such as age, income, race, gender.  Collectively, as flows and stocks, they then exhibit orderliness or symmetries (spatial, wealth, status) at various scales. These cultural categories then give meaning to what people do.

We might learn about urban life by inserting something out of place or alien to the culture, a “foreign” object, and finding out that we are in trouble. Usually, these inconveniences are minor, and they do not have lasting effects. But, during extraordinary times, such as economic downturns, flood, or invasion, we are able to see more of what is ordinarily hidden.

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Clustering in Cities and in Matter 

Cities show spatial clustering of people and enterprise, by class, by race, by kind of industry. Sometimes that clustering is deliberate, sometimes it is by chance, or market mechanisms, or the unplanned effect of regulations.

Physical scientists understand clustering and orderliness when they think of the forces between molecules or particles. A liquid might freeze—its molecules clustering in an orderly fashion--so we have ice. Matter is modeled as a 3-d grid on which actual molecules are attached to the vertices; and, perhaps, something like electric fields may be attached to the links between vertices.

If the molecules interact with their nearest neighbors, the lattice or grid may develop clusters of like particles, in seas of unlike particles, in seas of like particles…  If the temperature is low enough, the particles form a sea of like particles, and they are said to be aligned--in effect, there is freezing. If the temperature is high enough, there is very little clustering at all. There is randomness and heterogeneity.

Those electric fields allow for new phenomena. Namely, particles become entangled with each other through those links and it becomes impossible to separate them from each other. Individuals are “confined,” so to speak, never to be on their own.

In actual cities we see orderliness, heterogeneity, and confinement—depending on social and economic conditions.  

It’s not as if people behave like molecules. Rather, there are common sources for the behavior of individuals in crowds.

Flows and Finance

Given an Economy and Space, both highly differentiated, there are substantial flows within and among cities. Transactions usually take place when we are in the same space (sometimes cyber, sometimes mail, sometimes exchanges as for stocks or grains), and so movement is almost always necessary.

Migration from the countryside, from other regions, and from other countries populate (or depopulate) a city. Cities offer freedom from rural and agricultural work, and job growth is usually urban (but see mining, for example). Moreover, within a city there is migration among neighborhoods, people moving up, down, sideways. Places and areas become differentiated by wealth, ethnicity, race, political attitude—people moving to find a good fit between themselves and their neighbors, although for many there are blatant restrictions to their movement.

Cities also extend themselves, often into agricultural land, and grow spatially (in part, by annexation) so that they bump into neighboring cities and topographic features. People like city amenities: water, power, police, schools,… Moreover, goods have to move between places because where they are produced and where consumed are often far from each other.  Such freight is quite demanding of space, from roadways, rail, warehouses, and ports. Moreover, services are often centralized, as in a hospital, and people need to travel to get those services.  “Sprawl” is a term used to describe urban extension before there is densification in that area.

Utilities, what we expect to be Flows available whenever we need them: electricity, natural gas, clean water, sewerage, storm sewers, communications by means of cables and microwave,… must go along with populations and spatial extents, and they form networks and systems that have to be coordinated. Roadways and rail lines are part of this utility system. Communications may affect material flows, encouraging business, visiting, and extended families. And people have to live someplace, work someplace, and get to work, go home, shop--so there is such a traffic flow. In these systems there is sometimes overload and congestion, since peak demand is much larger than average demand. Regulation, pricing, and overbuilding may deal with such overload; often the main cost is delays and lost time. Coordination is needed among the spaces, the users, the flows, and the productions. People constantly scheme and game the system to find ways of dealing with congestion, or to create scarcity and so be able to charge more.

Flows are provided for publicly, by private enterprises, and by enterprises given rights by public entities. Taxes, bonded indebtedness, and private capital pay for the production of these flow-ways, and users are charged fees for their consumption of flows. Often the capital cost of production is very great, and so the indebtedness is paid for by future users, rather than savings made before the facilities are constructed. It is always an economic and a political decision to build a flow-way, for we may deem some ways to be so crucial that they do not have to pay their way. In the US, freedom to flow and move is taken as a given, and that you are not at the center does not mean that you don’t get flows out to where you are. Accessibility matters politically and legally. Yet, those who have more get much more, those poor, much less.

Cities are mostly built by private enterprise, with systematic help from the public sector. Zoning assures builders that conflicting uses are unlikely to be nearby, governments provide home loans and or, more likely, guarantees to banks so that the loans are less risky, and government may well subsidize private projects or industries to encourage job growth and tax increments. Bankruptcy law means that those who take risks do not end up in jail, although they may lose their assets.

Property may well be owned or under governmental control, and some is sold off or given to private individuals. To get people to build, they need to be assured that their property will not be arbitrarily taken from them, for buildings, and other such, have long useful lifetimes. You cannot get their total benefits immediately. As importantly, capital is needed to construct the built environment, and few have that capital in their back pockets. Squatters and homesteaders and renters acquire their property (it may not be ownership and be tenure), whatever its security, through legislation and political action.

            The finance system (banks, various private funds) gathers the savings of individuals, of other funds (pensions, investment vehicles), so that the large capital demands of builders might be available. In the US, the federal government has been in the business of encouraging home ownership (and so home-building), by means of guaranteeing those loans and otherwise making capital available. Various schemes have developed to encourage the flow of private funds into real restate: real estate investment trusts (REIT), mortgage backed securities and variations thereon. Since, in general risk being higher demands greater reward (interest rate, say), these schemes try to modulate risk while offering bigger rewards than usual. (Future economic growth may make current bonds and loans much easier to pay off, and inflation does its work as well, but those who buy such bonds demand some premium for these risks.) One needs good measures of that risk, and rating agencies have proved unable to be honest brokers, and sellers have proved to be unreliable. Moreover, systematic risk, when there is strong correlation of risks, means that residual risk can be substantial and catastrophic. For sellers, transaction fees have come dominate the steady stream of income from loans, so there is little incentive to be reliable (they have no skin in the game once they sell a loan).

            On the other hand, local governments use taxes (property, sales) and bonded indebtedness for the parts of the city built by public entities, such as roads, or electrical systems, or schools, or…  Again, future users pay for the provision of flow-ways. There may be tax breaks for income from municipal bonds, so making it less expensive for a city to issue them.

Although there are periods of growth in the actual value of real estate, the costs of maintenance, taxes, and the changing market make that less sure than is commonly believed. If you have large influxes of people and industry into an area, it is likely that real estate prices will rise.  Real estate markets will fall if there is a lack of liquidity (loans), neighborhoods and places decay, and bubbles burst. On the other hand real estate and buildings last a long time, much longer than planned, and population growth is common (but declines happen as well). People do make money in real estate, from their homes and their entrepreneurial ventures, and their investments, but this is a volatile asset and the chances for losing money and bankruptcy are not uncommon

Heterogeneity and Hierarchy in the City    

             

We have talked about Space, Economy, Building, and Finance—and in what sense these are urban topics. Now I want to focus on people. Characteristic of cities is the larger number of people close-by each other, and that as a whole they are quite varied in race, class, wealth, health, … The reason for this is that unless migration and jobs and procreation are regulated, there will be a variety of people who end up in a city, at least for a while. Migrations, which often are group migrations, means that there can be very different and new groups in a city. In the process of social and economic interaction, some people become better off, some become worse off. It’s easy to see what your neighbors are like, and because of the flows of people, you have a sense, at least, of your not-so-neighbors. Since it is virtually impossible to grow your own food or put up your own shelter, in most cities, being poor may well make it impossible for you to thrive. At the same time, if your life depends on having a job or doing transactions with others, the variety of people and industries in most cities means that you are likely to be better off than if you lived in a more isolated area.

                If there is heterogeneity, there is also hierarchy. We somehow convince ourselves that skin color, nationality, ethnic group, wealth, personal attractiveness, etc. comes not in a variety but in a hierarchy, where some ways are better than others. Poverty among mendicant monks is not the way most people view the poor in their city. It usually is a plus to be whiter, taller, richer; and then certain particular characteristics (ethnicity) may put you in a particular hierarchy (better Armenian than Azeri?).

                Why is there poverty in a rich and vibrant city, we might ask? Why are biases hierarchized? Why is there not only an economy, but also an informal economy, and an underground economy? Why do some people participate in criminality? Why are some people comparatively healthy, other subject to chronic disease? Why are people separated in somewhat more homogeneous neighborhoods, and what does this have to do with zoning and discrimination? What are the consequences of massive migrations or the US’s legacy of slavery? Why do some people choose to live in a place with little amenity, while for others amenity motivates them. And can people make such choices?

                Whatever the answers, the crucial point is that cities make heterogeneity inevitable, and people make hierarchy almost inevitable. Moreover, it helps to start out with advantages (wealth, education, …), but people sometimes squander those advantages. And substantial changes in the society, such as the decline of industrial jobs in a city, can have profound consequences for those who are most vulnerable. That unions are much less influential than they were 40-50 years ago influences what part of the economic pie goes to those who work for others, and that too creates vast differences.

            What does all of this, the last two paragraphs, have to do with cities? One might well have all these phenomena in rural and agricultural areas. But cities make the differences and hierarchies rather more acute, the presence of differences and variety rather more salient, the contrasts and judgments rather more commonly felt.

            Moreover, any explanation must involve a consideration of the social and political and economic environment, historical precedents, and then consideration of individual responsibility for their situation. In general if your situation is auspicious, you are much less in need of your individual resources, than if you are in an inauspicious situation.

So if you want to explain heterogeneity and hierarchy, and why some individual is lower on that totem pole or why someone is on top, you must start out with understanding that environment and how it is auspicious or inauspicious. I do not believe this is so much a political position, as a scholarly one—but perhaps I am wrong here.

Two other considerations: Cities are in general sites of alienation, although neighborhoods may well be solidaritous. Hence, when things go awry, it may be hard to get support from others, although there are more others—so there is a balance between numbers and alienation. And, second, anything that depends on interactions (infectious disease, pollution, buying/selling, crime, …) is likely proportional to the square of the number of people in an area—N² although that N might be the number of people you are in contact with or potentially in contact with through communications or transportation (over some period of time).

Neighborhoods (as in Sampson, Great American City)

Neighborhoods differ, “everyone” knows about each of them, have different levels of wealth, as well as levels of disorder, not to speak of class and race. Cities are a montage of neighborhoods and there is a flow of people among neighborhoods, often similar ones.

Sorting by neighborhood is either: Neighborhoods choose people or people choose neighborhoods. In any case, people enact their neighborhood expectations, and that is enforced (what Sampson calls “collective efficacy”).

Disorder is differently perceived (vs. objectively measured). Crime and disorder have a root cause it would seem, but Disorder may not be indicative of Crime argues Sampson.

There is spatial inequality derived in part of from concentrated and cumulative (dis-)advantages. Also there are other worlds, so to speak, cutting across neighborhoods,  as in the informal economy, and when people have jobs that are not reliable.

There is lots of room for individual responsibility and initiative or going-along. But always, in the neighborhood context.

People escape their neighborhoods, but this is not easy—going up or down. Most people and most neighborhoods are stable, for better or worse.

To make Neighborhoods better: make them less violent, give kids better schooling and early childhood education, immigrants move in and occupy a neighborhood. There are lots of efforts to make neighborhoods better through urban planning, development, etc. It is not clear when and if they work well.  There is as well the tragedies of urban renewal although those who are displaced may then find a better life.

The Economy of Cities

You surely do not need a city to have an economy, but cities create the opportunity for a lively economy:  lots of buyers and sellers and manufacturers and importers, and lots of connections to other cities and to the hinterlands and to foreign economies.

Diversity and Division of Labor leads to lots of exchanges and often to transformations of the society.  New modes of organization and communication and manufacture—technology—allow for transformation.

Location matters. Centers are valuable. People choose to live, work, do business based on quite local factors—if they have choices.

Migration is much like technology, introducing new disruptive forces.

Corruption and informal enterprises lead to an underground economy, one that in effect provides the above- ground economy with some of what it needs.

Stability and order are crucial, since so many people are in such close proximity.

Taxes and property rights, often national rather than urban, make for amenity and security and so for investment and risk-taking

Cities with great inequality (of whatever sort), and distinguish this from diversity, are less stable.

Amenities such as parks and the arts and … have to be provided, and often are best provided through the state.

Cities do decline and rise, usually over longer periods, neighborhoods too. Competition, war, invention.

Propinquity still seems to matter. Face-to-face is important in many areas. So the big question we still ask, 150+ years after the railroads, is how will such communication and transportation technologies alter urban life.

And neighborhood economies are often important, but with better transport (and freight) those economies tend to become larger in spatial extent.

How Cities are Built

Cities are built by government, by private individuals, by builders and real estate developers. The land may be owned by government, and leased for say 99 years, or it may be sold by government to raise revenue, or given away by government to encourage settlement. There are regulations concerning safety and health, zoning, size and type of building, etc. Regulations are in general not liked by owners until their neighbors do something that hurts their property. Land and improvements are often taxed to pay for government services, in part because it is hard to hide such assets. Infrastructure is in part provided by government, in part by "natural monopolists" which are private entities (and so they receive exclusive licenses from government). Some uses are relatively protected from taxation.

Strong property rights encourage development and building. Weak rights make it hard to justify improvements with longer term payoffs.

Planning in terms of comprehensive plans, zoning, incentives, etc. may be merely coercive, from a authoritarian government. In more liberal societies, planning is indicative or guiding, giving greater certainty to developers and residents about what will be nearby. Presumably, there could be a market for rights to build, or compensation to neighbors for stuff they might not prefer and to encourage them not to go to the courts. But regulation has proved helpful, since litigation is costly, has uncertain outcomes, and takes a long time to get settled.

As for property, it might be real or immovable property of land and buildings, but it may include air rights, permission for floor-area ratios, or mineral rights under the land. Property may be under long-term leases. There are rules about when government can take over property for public purposes, compensating the owners. And there are markets for air rights, etc., where someone who has such rights but does not use them might sell them to someone who can then use them.

Places are valuable because they are well connected to other places, so roads, transit, ports, industry, will affect the value of property and the possibility of certain kinds of economic activity.

In the US, the federal government plays a very large role in city development, from guaranteeing home loans, building some roads, setting standards for safety and health. Tax rules can encourage or discourage speculative building or office towers. 

There is always an intimate relationship of public and private in urban development. So, if you want fire and police protection, in most places you have to pay taxes, often based on property values. But one might have private police and fire provision, but this is quite rare.

And of course, government builds public schools and parks, although there is private provision of such as well.

Different eras have different stories of city building. I have focused mostly on the contemporary US, here.

Where the money comes from to enable city development.

Banks make short term construction loans, with a sense that when the building is done they will be able to get their money back. For the longer run, there are mortgages, since almost no one has the money to just purchase a building or unit outright. Moreover, in general, if you want to sell, there need to be buyers, so it helps if the economy is in good shape, the loan institutions are working well, and buyers have enough credit-worthiness to pay. Hence  homeowners have an interest in the well-being of immigrants, at least in LA, since they are likely to be buyers in the future and unless they have good incomes they won’t be in the market and so your home will fetch less than you hoped.

a. To encourage home lending, the Federal government has developed loan guarantee programs (FHA, VET HOME LOANS…) and institutions that make home loans—Fannie Mae…

b. To encourage investors to get into lending for mortgages, securities backed by a bunch of mortgages (and their repayment) have been invented, with all sorts of wonderful “improvements” to make them more attractive in terms of risk and reward. Unfortunately, many of the mortgages were much riskier than advertised, and so these securities tumbled in value when the economy hit a blip—people walked away from their mortgages. What happens is that if a random number of mortgagees happen to default, most others continue to make their payments, and the risks are moderate. But if a large number walk away at the same time, the risk becomes much larger, the rewards correspondingly smaller.

c. Since building takes time, it is possible that if a bunch of builders/developers decide to start a project at the same time, and the timing is not optimal, there will be an oversupply and so lots of problems.

Globalization

The main point is that cities are gathering places for diverse people, they have to work together since not only are the close-by each other, they need each other. And they need as well the people at other cities.

As for globalization, per se. Basically, either because of division of labor and specialization, resources, dominance (as in colonialism), or capital value, there is an enormous trade in goods and skills among cities, often far apart. Migrations, planned and unplanned, create many groups within major cities, each group having different origins, looks, customs, yet they all eventually in a generation or two homogenize but not completely. There is still hierarchies and domination, but somewhat different than conventional colonialism. Race or nationality are modulated by class and income and religion, so diversity is the new normal. In the course of things, there is discrimination and unfair treatment, just what eventually creates problems that make cities tumultuous.

The City in Gravity

Geographers and urban planners explain how parts of the city influence other parts using a formula much like Newton’s law of gravitation. Einstein’s extension of Newton again shows how the paths of falling objects determine the distribution of mass-energy, and vice versa. Correspondingly, in a city being nearby matters, and where and when you go depends on what there is to do there. We really have no such precise theory for cities as we do for the universe. Still, we might think of cities as modeled by the cosmos.

            The Big Bang’s expanding universe rapidly cools down, in stages not unlike steam becoming water becoming ice. And eventually, it is cool enough and there is time enough to form stars and galaxies as bits of dust gravitate toward each other. So cities form and expand, and as they expand people and developers form neighborhoods–as people and activities gravitate, so to speak, toward each other. And, just as stars might eventually die or explode, perhaps to eventually form new stars, so neighborhoods may dissipate as they become too dense and chaotic for their residents, leading to new neighborhoods.

            In a patterned history, the stars’ individual ages are indicated by their color and brightness. So in neighborhoods, time is marked by patterned histories of development and decay (and rebirth). And, like Black Holes, cities attract everything in their region. As for Black Holes, much of the detailed particulars of each person so attracted are erased by city life and its anonymity.

These city-cosmos analogies participate in a long tradition of notional correspondences of the microcosm and the macrocosm.

Sounds of the City

The sights, sounds, and smells of a neighborhood are distinctive and pervasive. We might know where we are by the odors or the noise of a place: tanning factories or botanical gardens, freeways adjacent to or distant from residential neighborhoods. So we might document the urban sensorium, in particular the aural background or ambient sound of different parts of Los Angeles.

F. Murray Shafer has argued that the sound of modern cities is lo-fi, with lots of noise hiding significant sounds at a distance.

We have literary evidence of the aural environment: the sounds of the bells in a city in a novel, the clatter in a textile factory. Nowadays, we might develop accurate archives of the urban aural environment recording in digital surround-sound, records that can be preserved indefinitely.

In one Hispanic neighborhood in Los Angeles, I was recording the sounds of children playing in a school yard. The neighborhood was reasonably quiet, although freeways surround the neighborhood and add an unavoidable background hum.  Then I heard, faintly in the distance, the call of a lady selling tamales, riding on on her tricycle, closer and louder: “Tamales! … TAMALES!...”

When I was a child in Brooklyn, there would be vendors coming around offering to sharpen knives or selling fruit and vegetables. Here in this Hispanic neighborhood, it makes sense to offer tamales, and by moving around much as do those vendors, she enlarges her customer base.

To appreciate what is going on in this neighborhood, you have to pay attention and listen to those everyday sounds.

Real Cities

People readily assert just what is wrong with Los Angeles, or big cities, or urban life. Yes, cities are unavoidably congested, conflict ridden, hierarchized, and alienating. They are as well the sources of invention and entrepreneurship, political empowerment, social mobility, and community.

Cities almost always have too many people and activities. They are congested. They are crowded and noisy and messy. That also means they allow for lots of interaction among peoples and institutions, just the source of their vitality.

Cities are conflict ridden just because they are a confluence of cultures and interests and peoples.

Adam Smith’s division of labor and specialization is further articulated, just because there is high spatial density of people in a city and the availability of goods from other places such as the hinterlands or other cities. (It is unlikely you grow your own food.) That, too, makes for productivity and opportunity.

In cities, hierarchies rather than being based on hereditary status and land, are likely based specialized talents and skills, on race and ethnicity, and on wealth—and they are often expressed spatially through where people live and work. Urban hierarchies do allow for mobility for some, while being all too present for most.

            And cities are alienating, for whatever solidarity or community one might have had is now erased. But, given the varieties of peoples, new communities develop, and there is freedom to forget your past and start anew.

            For cities, what we most complain about is the source of what we value the most. We are stuck with a cornucopia of opportunity and the burdens of constraint.

Appendix: What We Might Know About Cities

We know about cities through the means we have of observing them. Here I want to focus on our visual and other sensory knowledge of the city. I will draw from observational astronomy and the nature of stars to suggest something about the nature of cities.

Observational astronomers know about the universe through the information we on earth receive that is electromagnetic: light, visible and ultraviolet and infrared, x-rays, and radio waves. (Cosmic rays consisting of elementary particles and high-energy photons play an important but lesser role. Gravitational waves have yet to be directly observed.) Astronomer have to develop better detectors of those electromagnetic signals (telescopes for the most part) and find more transparent places to put them—say Mauna Kea in Hawaii or on a satellite such as the Hubble.

For cities, one can do much better. One can talk to people and watch what they do, map various phenomena, analyze economic and other such data. Remote sensing as done by the astronomers is also available, although the remote is much closer to the phenomena (drones, airplanes, satellites). Other than talking to people, these methods all demand a complex organized society to produce the data and sensors as part of its bureaucratic processes.

For the moment, I want to focus on what we might observe visually. If we are on the ground, doing interviews and fieldwork with a camera in hand, we can ask probing questions when unexpected information comes our way, record movies of interesting phenomena in space and time, and look behind us or nearby to see more of what is going on. We can get closer or get another perspective and angle or check in-back-of by moving ourselves; we can get a more detailed image with a telephoto lens. We can get more in our frame using a wide-angle lens.

What is outside the frame, whatever its dimensions and proportions, is not available to us.  (Sound recording devices can be set to in effect start recording several seconds before we press the record button, and the “frame” provided by a microphone is often all round.) We might record many images, each with a different spatial perspective, or also at different times, or of similar phenomena at different locations or times—in effect a tomography.

Our cameras will provide us with lots of detail, especially if they are provided with good lenses, we employ a tripod or hold the camera steady, and our sensors are sufficiently resolving of detail. Digital sensors are remarkably good since their capacity to provide high definition only starts disappearing, and rapidly so, when the detail on the sensor is a bit less than two pixels wide, while film’s resolution falls off much more slowly even for details that are as large as several grain sizes on the film. Charles Marville’s photographs of Paris streets in about 1870 provide extraordinary detail. He used a negative the size of letter paper, a lens with a comparatively small opening so he had lots of depth of field, and the wet-plate emulsion is grainless. He surely has less resolution than modern cameras and sensors, but his negative is more than 60 times larger than is a 35mm negative (and perhaps 1000 times larger than your cellphone camera’s sensor—not really a fair comparison to be sure).

Eventually, an image will fall apart under sufficient enlargement, in part because of aberrations of the lens, poor focusing or lack of depth of field, or camera motion that blurs the image.

Of course, unlike our eyes, cameras do not move to follow and explore events, unless the photographer chooses to do so. On the other hand, photographs provide remarkable detail in space and time, especially if we have suites of photographs spread out over an area and repeatedly made over a period of time, as in the satellite surveillance photographs in the CORONA program of the 1960s.

Our camera might be an automatic camera, with perhaps no adjustments to be made by ourselves, since it has sensors and algorithms that make for good images, given the lighting, the nature of the subject (e.g. faces), and the particular peculiarities of the sensor (film, digital) and lens (distortions corrected digitally).

Or we might have what is in effect a fancy box camera, fancy being my term of art for a camera where we focus, choose the lens opening and shutter speed, and the film and its speed, and perhaps as well chose the lens. Such was the view camera of old. The fancy box camera in the hands of an experienced and thoughtful picture maker is likely to make more informative images than is the automatic camera. But for most of us the automatic camera is a better choice. And such automatic cameras tend to be small (as in smartphones), and the best camera to use is the one you have with you.

Cosmologically, much of what we see is a consequences of gravity, and then of nuclear and particle forces. Gravity in its 1/r² form pushes cosmic material to agglomerate and then become more and more dense; eventually if there is enough of mass involved in such an agglomeration we’ll have a star, one that is powered by nuclear interactions at its core when the gravitational pressure is so large that nuclei and particles can no longer ignore each other.

So we might say that cities agglomerate, perhaps because there is a deliberate or random concentration of people who then attract others who want to interact with them. What is crucial is to realize that for stars of a certain mass their history is determined by their nuclear physics (the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram); and eventually, if they are quite massive, their history is determined by very strong gravitational forces leading to white dwarfs, brown dwarfs, supernovae, neutron stars, and black holes: that is, either leading to dead stars that stop sending out signals of their existence (they’ve run out of energy to burn), or stars that are so gravitationally dense that in their turbulent lives, they emit gravity energy (gravitational waves); or stars that explode sending out lots of material that can then eventually agglomerate again, or stars that have such powerful gravitational forces they absorb anything that comes close to them and what we see are the death throes of those absorbed stars.

Schematically, cities are much the same. We may discern paths and prospective histories for some cities, but nothing so determined as for stars since there are many influences along the way that are external to a city (other cities, federal governments,…). In general, as for the Big Bang, the evolution of a city is best seen in logarithmic time: that is the first months, then the first years, the first decades, the first centuries.  Put differently, if we think of time as delimited by events, significant events appear at time scales that start out small, and subsequent events eventually appear at times scales that are many times larger. Namely, rather than using a clock and ruler to understand cities, use your historian’s hat and select significant events as the appropriate time-scales.  Now, cities may act much like black holes in that they absorb populations from the hinterlands and in effect destroy the individual histories as those populations as they become members of the city and alienated from their very particular pasts.

Moreover, at any time in the evolution or history of a city, there is a connection between the people, institutions, and the built environment (we’ll call these three “people”) and the spatial patterns and movements in a city. In effect the people create a geography, while, reciprocally, the geography and shape of space and time guide those populations in their movements and history.

In general relativity, John A. Wheeler said,

Mass tells Spacetime how to Curve, and Spacetime (Curvature) tells Mass how to Move (Fall Down, that is, gravity).

In our context, we might say:

People tell Cities how and where and when to create circulation, and Circulation tells people how to go about their business.

The geometry of spacetime is the same as the distribution of matter and energy in the universe, whereby geometry I mean the straight lines defined by the path of light (electromagnetism again). Here, the networks of movements and the networks of people are the same: they define each other.

These analogies are far-fetched. Still, I think they allow us to think about cities in useful ways. So, for example, planning creates possibilities for future circulation (understood broadly), in effect it gives us an option to be called upon in the future if we need it. So we are not quite a general relativistic system, for we can insert new masses into the city in a deliberate way.

Photographing in New York City

The street becomes your museum; . . . you want [your work] to commence from life, and that's in the street now. Walker Evans, 1971

A city street will tell you as much in its way as your morning newspaper….One fact it will not only tell you but rub it into you hard: everybody works.” April 1946 WE re a Fortune article.

I'm not a photographer. I'm a columnist who writes with pictures. Bill Cunningham (all NYTimes, 3Jy16):

You need the street . . .  [to complement the designer fashion shows, so as to see how people adapt the fashion to their own lives, and the evening hours]

I'm looking for the stunners.

Just remember they need you. You don't need them. (BC re your dates)

He let the streets talk to him. . . . He goes out for several days and sees the story emerge. (Simone Oliver re BC

A city is a viscous dense congested interacting fluid of particles (people, institutions, the built environment), particles that interact through collision and exchange. Cities foster networks and lines of flow. In that network fluid, there are density concentrations and so clustering of particles, and confinement, so that some particles are not to be freed from each other (never to be seen individuated, always bound to the flow). Dynamically, what people do and the city’s physical and institutional structure mirror each other (albeit with mismatches that adjust in time and space), as in general relativity ala Wheeler[1], and there are supportive flows of pecuniary resources, materials, and communications, as well as flows of entrepreneurship and consumption. There is an impetus to differentiation and diversity, one that leads to both heterogeneity and hierarchy. [What is the impetus, and why heterogeneity and hierarchy??] There is a division of labor; there are markets to distribute alienated goods and services. Yet there are neighborhoods, in which there is greater uniformity and restricted diversity—in part because people enact their neighborhood’s values and pressures, learning how to be seen and how to behave so that they belong. Neighborhoods are in this sense self-conscious. On the streets, it is manifest that you are in a place and a time. [Ideas to be inserted:; cosmological models such as black holes, big bang, stellar evolution…]

My photographs of New York City display its being a jumble of accumulated accretions, yet at the right perspective and distance the city appears orderly and repetitious. When you get much closer, that orderliness becomes a voyeur’s dream of fascinating detail and peculiarity.  Outside of busy Manhattan, what you see is lots of brick and some sort of plastic siding, in apartment and commercial buildings and in single-family and two-family row housing—with signs of distinctiveness in the names on the buildings, displays of religious symbols, and in the choice of siding. At the ends of the subways lines, in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, there are basic stores, perhaps a McDonald’s and some chain stores, and brick and siding—what is called “transit oriented development,” but now after fifty to one-hundred-plus years of ups and downs, a palimpsest. Some of the time, those end-stations are in fact surrounded by vigorous local shopping, massive flows of people from  busses to the Subway, and stores radiating out in all directions, sometimes only along a main street or under the elevated line. There is exposed infrastructure that reaches down to surround the built environment, supports and girders marking streets or actually coming in contact with the sides of homes. The Subways provide some of the most vivid infrastructure, as well as aerial and subterranean viewpoints. The voyeur can look into the plate glass windows of restaurants and bars find “the right people” lounging in their consumption; the open doorways of general stores, the less-right people finding their latest fix; the entryways of boutiques and chain-stores with twenties and thirties (yet to be in tow of children) or local working people shopping. There is as well industrial production, open garages and cellars, backrooms, and the brightly lit tunnels to underground garages--all right in front of you. There may be stalls of fruit and vegetables, and often people providing self-conscious displays of autonomy and iconoclasm. Just to the side of carefully tended facades, there are interstices and alleys--sometimes they are parking lots or just parking for residents, sometimes pathways to the rear entrances of buildings, sometimes service entrances decorated with dumpsters and strewn garbage.

            Of course, many block-faces are repetitions of tract housing and apartment buildings, with a sprinkle of schools and churches.

            Often, neighborhoods are of no distinction, although their residents believe their particular neighborhood is of longstanding distinguished characteristics and qualities, only appreciated by residents and the cognoscenti. Neighborhood residents work hard to keep up (or down) their neighborhood, enacting what is expected and suggesting to neighbors that they had better keep in line. Throughout the city, fancy parts or much less fancy, life is ordinary—in part because people learn how to act according to their place, modulating their enactment to suit places as they move through the city. Surely, photographers will provide images of the weird and idiosyncratic, but we see those images as such because most of life is ordinary and we have learned to ignore, actively and deliberately, anything that will disturb us.

            Most block-faces and their streets are peopled by children, parents, and the elderly, with little action except when children are going to school or adults going to work. There is very little of the proverbial stoop life, or the elderly women looking out the windows patrolling the street (ala Jane Jacobs).  Commercial street life and life in the Subway is meant to be flow-friendly and unobtrusive. Vendors provide immediate needs whether for falafel or umbrellas or notions. There are waves of people (coming from emptying trains at this station, say), moving quite deliberately and quickly, and the meeting or apparent clash of those waves, when people are going to the right exits or subway platforms or place in town, is an apparently careless but unobtrusive interaction of waves (what physicists would call “quasi-elastic scattering,” soliton-like), waves of people threading through each other, individuals in that wave feeling its general direction but adjusting their pathways (toward their own immediate destination) while avoiding oncoming  distractions and collisions—as if they could  sense and so predict what will happen in the next two seconds (which in fact they can do). [I am not sure what molecules are actually doing in a fluidic-flow, but it must somehow be like this, a guided random walk?--albeit they do not experience longer-range forces since they do not have eyes and ears. Put differently, I believe differential equations do work in this realm, albeit with viscosity. And what the molecules do feel are collisions with nearby molecules, so that if they are not in the flow, they will feel forces that push them back in.]

            Unlike the renderings of various proposed urban plans and developments, most people, in most neighborhoods, on most Subway trains, on most streets, are not smartly dressed, although many may try to be fashionable or otherwise display their taste and preferences. (There are streets where people do so dress up, but rarely are they in the neighborhoods.)

Urban Tomography

For cities before 1850, we only know about the urban sensorium, our experiences of sight, sound, smell, feel, from vivid descriptions and graphics. Nowadays, we can do better.

            In the 1850s and 1860s Charles Marville photographed more than 500 streets of Paris, both before they were eviscerated and after they were rebuilt under Napoleon III’s orders with the direction of Baron Haussmann—creating the Paris we know today with its grand boulevards.

            I learned from Marville that it is vital to make suites of images, much as are made in a CAT scan of your brain. Such tomography, the prefix tomo is the Latin for a slice, as in a horizontal slice of the brain, allows one to see in multiple dimensions.

In our case, the dimensions are time and variations within a subject matter. You want to achieve a general sense that would include those manifold slice.

            In Los Angeles, I have photographed the facades of 800+ storefront houses of worship, people at work at 225 industrial sites including at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and at the iconic County-USC hospital, and all the electrical power stations of the Department of Water and Power. And we have recorded the sounds of Los Angeles in high-quality calibrated surround sound.

            We have also rephotographed the sites Marville photographed in Paris but now 135 years later, to compare then and now.

Google Street View and social media are wonderful but also quite partial. You have to go out and be there and look and make your own photographs.

            Our work is meant to create a living present for the future. Systematic, indexed, and archived documentation captures a legacy that will remain for future generations to study and enjoy.

Detroit as the City of Industry

In the early 1930s, Edsel Ford commissioned Diego Rivera (1886-1957), the Mexican muralist, to paint, by means of fresco, an enclosed courtyard of the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum. The work is a paean to Nature, Industry, Civilization, and People. Ford’s interest in industry and overlapped with Rivera’s Marxist interest in modernism.  There is an education in studying all four walls of the courtyard.

            Henry Ford, Edsel’s father, had developed the River Rouge manufacturing plant downriver from Detroit, integrated so that it took in raw materials and put out Ford automobiles. It was a City of Industry. Rivera’s panoply of images show the process of manufacture, from the making of steel to the sewing of the automobile’s upholstery.  Featured in portraits were the actual actors: the industrial capitalist Henry Ford, the cultivated and elite Edsel, the managers and engineers, and the supervisors and workers at the furnaces and sewing machines. There is a mutual dependence of the managers and engineers with the workers, while the capitalists are literally sidelined.

            Rivera displayed modern industry:  aviation, water supply, energy production, and chemicals and pharmaceuticals. As well as Nature, from its geological strata that made for resource-rich places, in cities and hinterlands, places that made this City of Industry possible, to generativity in childbirth.  Those children and their parents, who worked at River Rouge, were portrayed as of many races (as the notion was then understood) with complex and rich cultures.

            Here is a city (even in the Great Depression), at the nexus of transport and resources, a universe of capital, people, and goods, as well as of labor conflict and eventually war producti

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[1] Mass tells Spacetime how to Curve, and Spacetime (Curvature) tells Mass how to Move (Fall Down, that is, gravity). OR  People tell Cities how and where and when to create circulation, and Circulation tells people how to go about their business.