New Geography

Author: Ben Schulman

  • The New, Improved? Rust Belt

    There is no longer a Rust Belt. It melted into air. The decline of manufacturing, the vacancy of the immense, industrial structures that once defined the productive capacities and vibrant lives of so many pockmarked towns, the dwindling of social capital—all the prognosticators writing the obituaries for these dead geographies were right.

    How long were rust belt cities going to be able to, as author Robert Putnam would phrase it, “bowl alone?” It turns out not very long.

    Rust Belt cities don’t exist because the narrative surrounding them over the past few years has slowly changed. No longer are they identified as places of decay; now the story is that they’re places of opportunity and renewal. This conviction is emerging against the backdrop of a general sort of reintroduction of the American city as a great, good place; a crucible of talent, energy, youth and creativity. (As if that hasn’t always been the case.)

    Now, for every Detroit horror story, there’s a shiny Shinola. Buffalo is a nascent hipster haven.

    Levon Helm has risen from the dead and is singing, “Look out, Cleveland, some craft brew is comin’ through…”

    With its well-defined physical landscapes and deep cultural histories, the Rust Belt aesthetic has long been subject to the same forces that have turned places like Williamsburg, Brooklyn and Chicago’s Wicker Park into moneyed enclaves of those seeking a repurposed past for modern means. As the global city shatters into a million pieces, Rust Belt cities are poised to piggyback on their own organic growth, becoming ever more attractive with their lower barriers to achieve a sense of urban authenticity.

    Yet, as pockets of Rust Belt cities are successfully redeveloped, is there reason for concern that they may be losing some of what sets them apart?

    In Chicago, where the Rust Belt exists under the glittering shadow of its Global City sheen, the steady march of hipsterdom through Wicker Park and Logan Square is nearly complete. On the Far South Side of the city, on the fallow 700-acre grounds of the former US Steel South Works mill, a massive, master-planned mixed-use development is envisioned and (very) slowly taking shape.

    In the Corktown section of Detroit, the long-abandoned and derelict Michigan Central Station has morphed into an asset for a bevy of bars, shops and nightlife stops, which have deservedly garnered travel nods from Martha Stewart. Working through the Bedrock Financial-led-revitalizing downtown and past the hip enclave of Midtown, a new steward is currently cleaning up the infamous Packard Motor Plant and entertaining plans of perhaps an “autonomous community.”

    In Pittsburgh, a city always a little ahead into the future, Lawrenceville has been dubbed one of the “top 26 most hipster neighborhoods in the world” by Business Insider magazine, while in the South Side neighborhood, the old J&L Steel mill on the banks of the Monongahela River is currently home to SouthSide Works, a “shop/dine/play/live” mixed-use lifestyle center of offices, residences, movie theaters and outlets of H&M, American Eagle and The Cheesecake Factory.

    These movements through the cityscape may seem disconnected, but they represent a waning of the cultural affect that is specific to a sense of place and defines it. Whether it is a sort of hipster-variation-on-a-theme or a top-down, master planned repurposing of formerly industrial sites, there is an emerging urban typology that is seen and felt in cities everywhere. In this way, these commoditized developments echo their suburban forbearers in standardizing a formula for successful sameness.

    When the French anthropologist Marc Auge coined the term ‘non–place’ to describe the interstitial spaces in which so much of modern life unfolds, he focused in on the transitory nodes of transit and commerce such as airports, highways, and supermarkets to describe a condition wherein the individual “becomes no more than what he does or experiences in the role of passenger, customer, or driver”— namely, a consumer. Many critical urban theorists have adopted Auge’s theory to describe the monotony, placelessness, and anywhere-ness of sprawling suburbs.

    One could argue, though, that as cities proper increasingly mirror one another in their (re)development, Auge’s theory now threatens to apply itself to the fabric of cities themselves. It begs the question of whether there are perhaps other ways to engage and activate ‘non-place’ into meaningful, active space.

    Managing needed investment while maintaining distinctiveness — which is, of course, what makes any city worth its while to begin with — is a delicate dance. Like everywhere else, the Rust Belt is inspiration for a form of American magic realism, wrestles with this.

    Cities change. To assume the city hasn’t always been a speculative spectacle is ludicrous, as silly as it is to perpetuate dead geographies onto the living. But the refashioning of Rust Belt cities’ physical and cultural landscapes should at least give us pause to wonder if we’re losing realism and magic in manufacturing a sense of place.

    Ben Schulman is the Communications Director for the American Institute of Architects Chicago (AIA Chicago) and the co-creator of the Contraphonic Sound Series, a project that documents cities through sound.Follow @skyscrapinknees (https://twitter.com/skyscrapinknees)

    Flickr photo by Russ: Detroit Bike City Shinola

  • China’s Empty Trains… & Other Unintended Consequences

    In a technical sense, the economy has been in recovery since June of 2009. A year and a half into the rebound though, a general cloud of economic malaise continues to cover the nation. Fears of a diminished America are perpetuated from our political and punditry classes. We are told that our collective lack of preparation, education, innovation, industry, and of infrastructure are all setting us up to fall further. Economic indicators may reflect a bounce-back, but structurally, America is waning. It is China that is increasingly emerging as the world’s bright spot in terms of development. With its 10% annual growth rate, an economy poised to become the world’s largest, and a strategic smart-growth development plan, resplendent in renewable energy splendor and high-speed rail, the nascent superpower is aimed ever upwards.

    This tidy narrative that the doom-chatterers both envy and fear is being dented by a number of recent stories concerning Chinese rail initiatives. As Tsinghua University’s Economics Professor Patrick Choavec writes, China’s high-speed rail is “expensive both to build and to operate, requiring high ticket prices to break even. The bulk of the long-distance passenger traffic, especially during the peak holiday periods, is migrant workers for whom the opportunity cost of time is relatively low. Even if they could afford a high-speed train ticket — which is doubtful given their limited incomes — they would probably prefer to conserve their cash and take a slower, cheaper train. If that proves true, the new high-speed lines will only incur losses while providing little or no relief to the existing transportation network.”

    Similarly, individual Chinese municipalities are eagerly developing subway systems, but as Chinese political scientist Zhang Ming wrote in China Daily, “geographical conditions in many cities are not conducive to building and/or maintaining subways. The landscape and hydrological conditions of a city determine whether it can have a subway… medium-sized cities may not have enough commuters to sustain a metro. Even in many large cities, which have enough commuters, subways are running at a loss because of the very high cost of operation and maintenance.” Historically, drive and a true demand have never run into a topographic problem it couldn’t solve, but these examples do raise questions about the efficacy of blanket government policies that ordain massive, heavily subsidized projects. Could such ventures produce results that are opposite of their intended outcome?

    China can find the answer right here in the States. The Italian sociologist Marco d’Eramo has related how the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in 1933 and the Federal Housing Authority in 1934, created in part to stem the mass wave of Great Depression-related foreclosures, did “more than any other measure… to contribute to turning America into a nation of unconquerable homeowners.” To increase homeownership for all, both agencies devised classification systems that assigned values to neighborhoods and homes that they then sought to rehabilitate through loans to potential buyers. The resulting standardized divisions largely enforced segregation in the name of stability, only further depressing segments of the housing market.

    Recent lessons from the Great Recession’s continued housing fallout show us how government policy can produce the opposite effect of its initial intention, as well. The still-reeling property values of neighborhoods nationwide, and the huge tracts of unused housing at the periphery of metro edges were created with the encouragement of government bodies just like the HOLC and FHA’. These policies expanded the cause of homeownership without taking into consideration the actual demand and cost. Subsidizing trains that very few can ride is quite similar to encouraging the building of houses in which very few can live.

    At least initially, it is easy to see why such investments look good to government entities. They promote job growth, increase demand for supplies and resources, and contribute to overall GDP. Where something wasn’t, something now is. But they are unsustainable projects in the long run. Without continued government subsidies—or of higher wages for Chinese workers to afford train tickets, or of an endless supply of cheap credit to US potential homebuyers—they tend to eat off of themselves. The eventual decline in Chinese trade ridership and in US home purchases shows the peril when government policies create incentives for development without real, inherent demand .

    With this in mind it is important to view President Obama’s high-speed rail proposals in the context of each location. High-speed rail is an important, necessary step to upgrade America’s infrastructure in certain locales, but it is not an across-the-board panacea. Chicago, for example, the rail capital of the nation, beset with both passenger and freight rail congestion, is a logical beneficiary of dedicated high-speed rail funds to develop a system capable of handling its latent demand and to untangle its gridlock. With Chicago’s large economic presence over its neighbors, it makes little sense, then, that freshly minted Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker remains adamantly opposed to a project that would benefit Milwaukee and Madison.

    Other places, though, have valid qualms. Cost concerns in Florida, for example, are legitimate. The 90 mph top speed on the Southeast High Speed Rail Corridor between Charlotte and Raleigh doesn’t sound too, well, high-speed. Cities like Denver, which supports a dense enough population to represent a demographic demand for light rail, can encourage its development as its roads reach capacity. In states like South Dakota and Iowa, it may mean going back to dirt.

    The new head of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Rep. John Mica (R-FL), made sense when he said, “I am a strong advocate of high-speed rail, but it has to be where it makes sense”. There is a difference between creating infrastructure for which there’s an inherent demand and nudging people to utilize it, and developing large-scale infrastructure projects for their own sake.

    Knowing the limitations of past attempts and failures, America has a chance to outgrow its mistakes and render the supposed competition with China irrelevant, as that aspiring nation fumbles in its own policy prescriptions. Harnessing the lasting lessons of the Great Recession means understanding that success isn’t measured in the size of a home, or in the length of a high-speed rail system. It’s measured in the effectiveness and efficiency of a place. If the U.S. holds this to heart, no one could be better primed to compete, as China’s empty trains swiftly rattle onwards.

    Photo by Ivan Walsh, High Speed Bullet Train, Beijing to Tianjing, China

    Ben Schulman is a Chicago-based writer on urban affairs. One of the proprietors behind independent record label Contraphonic, Inc., Schulman also heads the Contraphonic Chicago Sound Series.

  • Ben Schulman