New Geography

Category: Urban Issues

  • Hyde Park, St. Louis: Are We Almost There Yet?

    Among potential titles for this article about the Hyde Park neighborhood of St. Louis, I played with The Archaeology of Stasis. My husband suggested It’s Not Happening Here. But neither seemed right. Both were too depressing to describe a place where people are working hard for change. I wanted a title that suggested a lot of hard work, but hope nonetheless.

    I recently toured the neighborhood on a chilly Sunday morning with a former graduate student of mine, Dan Gaeng. Hyde Park is in north St. Louis, near downtown. Its roots extend to the 1830s and ‘40s, when large numbers of German Americans settled there. Today, it is predominantly African-American. Dan, whose dad grew up in Hyde Park, had written a paper about the neighborhood, and it captured much of what I feel about the city of St. Louis in general. All the ingredients are here for a city that can turn the corner and make urban living a reality for a wide swath of folks – a few solid industries, devoted locals, an ideal location for communication and transportation with the rest of the nation, beautiful old housing stock, at least the bones of a viable public transportation network, ongoing local traditions, and affordable living. Yet St. Louis never seems to get there.

    There are some neighborhoods that have done it, to be sure. And downtown looks a lot better than it did when it served as the post-apocalyptic setting for “Escape from New York.” But there’s still a sense that St. Louis is stalled, moving neither toward recovery nor toward total desolation.

    The negative tinge to my headline candidates no doubt owed something to Kenneth Jackson’s 1985 Crabgrass Frontier. The author traces the construction of interstates, federal housing programs, mortgage lending practices, and white flight to explain the abandonment of urban cores for increasingly distant suburbs. St. Louis is a poster child of the phenomenon. Jackson quotes former St. Louis mayor Raymond Tucker, who explained in frustration, “We just cannot build enough lanes of highways to move all of our people by private automobile, and create enough parking space to store the cars without completely paving over our cities and removing all of the economic, social, and cultural establishments that the people were trying to reach in the first place.”

    Excoriating a 1973 RAND study that suggested that St. Louis could become “one of many large suburban centers of economic and residential life,” Jackson suggests that “such advice is for those who study statistics rather than cities. Too late, municipal leaders will realize that a slavish duplication of suburbia destroys the urban fabric that makes cities interesting.”

    And he paints a grim picture of neighborhoods like Hyde Park, as he notes St. Louis’s declining population. “Many of its old neighborhoods have become dispiriting collections of burned-out buildings, eviscerated homes, and vacant lots. Although the drone of traffic on the nearby interstate highways is constant, there is an eerie remoteness to the pock-marked streets. The air is polluted, the sidewalks are filthy, the juvenile crime rate is horrendous, and the remaining industries are languishing. Grimy warehouses and aging loft factories are landscaped by weed-grown lots adjoining half-used rail yards. Like an elderly couple no longer sure of their purpose in life after their children have moved away, these neighborhoods face an undirected future.”

    Twenty-three years after Jackson’s words, Hyde Park’s perseverance suggests that his portrait, while apt, misses a remarkably resilient local pride. Indeed, one title I considered was On the One Hand, On the Other Hand. It’s not that Hyde Park hasn’t suffered from the very trends that Jackson describes. In the mid-1950s, I-70 split the residential side of the neighborhood from its industrial workplaces. Pedestrian traffic virtually stopped. The decline of industrial employment in the city and white flight followed. The neighborhood appeared to hit bottom in the late 1960s, when youths began stealing from elderly residents.

    Since then, a series of revitalization efforts have made their own mark. The result is a patchwork of hope and despair. Renovated nineteenth-century homes mix with recently constructed townhouses, shuttered and crumbling row houses, and piles of burnt-out bricks. Some owners clearly take pride in their houses and yards (many yards still proudly displayed Obama signs on my post-election tour), while other properties appear barely occupied. The traces of old business names are visible on the bricks. It’s just the kind of local color that proponents of gentrification are fond of preserving, but there are few local businesses in operation now. An artist has purchased a former library, which he hopes to turn into a gallery, but it’s not yet open, and there’s no public art in the neighborhood.

    There is a full grocery store on the northern edge, but it’s a hike from the most vibrant part of Hyde Park, the cluster of homes that surround the still-active Holy Trinity Catholic Church and parish school. The church has bought up some of the area’s property and encouraged resettlement, much of it in Section 8 housing, but three of the most recent homes are shuttered because no one has purchased them. Former locals and parish school graduates do return to church on Sundays, but the neighborhood is now mainly non-Catholic.

    A local developer, who calls his company Blue Shutters (to contrast with the ubiquitous red shutters that signal the city’s purchase of a desolate building), has renovated several houses. He also has plans for the Turnverein, a one-time German exercise hall, which could serve as a community center. Dan mentioned that his parents held their wedding reception there. Unfortunately, the Turnverein had a serious fire in 2006. As the St. Louis blog “Ecology of Absence” noted, the fire received hardly any attention in the St. Louis Post Dispatch. The neighborhood received historic district status in the 1970s, but when I mentioned to my co-workers, students and neighbors that I had toured Hyde Park, none of them knew where it was.

    And maybe that doesn’t matter. I see no way that Hyde Park could become the kind of gentrified neighborhood that lures hipsters and boutiques, and makes city council members salivate. Moreover, the folks who have committed themselves to the slow and steady efforts of revitalization don’t seem to want their home to be such a place. As one of the residents whom Dan interviewed said, “Other people have wondered why I haven’t left, and I say, ‘Why should I? I’m fine here’. The neighbors look out for each other, and I like the house and neighborhood. There is a nice mixture of people, from the poor to the college educated and well-off. That’s important to me. I don’t want to live in just a homogeneous upper-middle-class area.”

    A remarkably diverse selection of institutions and people are involved in Hyde Park’s revitalization: “Ecology of Absence” blogger Michael Allen (also the Assistant Director of the Landmarks Association of St. Louis), Holy Trinity Church, and the Friedens Neighborhood Association, which is training local high school drop-outs in construction trades and providing G.E.D. preparation. Of course, there are also the dedicated folks who patiently turn out for one redevelopment meeting after another to plot the painstaking steps – the creation of an entry monument, for example, or streetscape enhancements – that could turn Hyde Park into a place that feels fully inhabited.

    It’s possible that twenty-three years from now Hyde Park will make me think not about Crabgrass Frontier, but about another book I read with my graduate students: Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, a study of the grassroots efforts behind the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi. Activist Ella Baker called the day-to-day efforts behind the movement “spade work.” It’s not glamorous and it doesn’t get a lot of credit, but there’s no real movement without it. There’s a lot of spade work going on in Hyde Park. It just might build a place.

    For more on Hyde Park, see:
    Ecology of Absence Blogspot, Friedens Neighborhood Foundation, Landmarks Association of St.Louis, St.Louis Development Corp.

    Flannery Burke is an assistant professor in the Department of History at St. Louis University. Originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, she writes about the American West, the environment, Los Angeles, and St. Louis.

  • How To Save The Industrial Heartland

    You would think an economic development official in Michigan these days would be contemplating either early retirement or seppuku. Yet the feisty Ron Kitchens, who runs Southwest Michigan First out of Kalamazoo, sounds almost giddy with the future prospects for his region.

    How can that be? Where most of America sees a dysfunctional state tied down by a dismal industry, Kitchens points to the growth of jobs in his region in a host of fields, from business services to engineering and medical manufacturing. Indeed, as most Michigan communities have lost jobs this decade, the Kalamazoo region, with roughly 300,000 residents, has posted modest but consistent gains.

    Of course, Kalamazoo, which is home to several auto suppliers, has not been immune to the national downdraft that has slowed job growth. But unlike the state – which he describes as “a hospice for the auto industry” – Kalamazooans are already looking at expanding other emerging industries, including advanced machining, food processing, medical equipment, bioscience and engineering business services. Unemployment, although above the national average, is more than two points below the horrendous 9.3% statewide average.

    As Kitchens notes, this relative success came through often painstaking and laborious work, a marked departure from the “magic bullet” approach to economic recovery that often dominates Michigan and other rustbelt states. In the past, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm has touted ideas about developing “cool cities” to keep young people from bolting to more robust locales and, more recently, on the promise of so-called “green jobs” tied to sustainable energy.

    “People don’t want to talk about ‘blocking and tackling,’” Kitchens suggests. “You keep your head down and keep pushing. It’s not sexy but it works over the longer term.”

    For his part, Kitchens never much embraced the idea of coolness – a “cool Kalamazoo” effort even received $100,000 from Gov. Granholm as part of her strategy of promoting “creative urban development” as a way to keep talent in the state.

    Of course, this gambit failed miserably almost everywhere, even before the recent economic meltdown. Nearly one in three residents, according to a July 2006 Detroit News poll, believes Michigan is “a dying state.” Two in five of the state’s residents under 35 said they were seriously considering leaving for other locales.

    Kitchens does not express much faith either in Granholm’s latest gambit, developing Michigan into a green energy superpower. After all, states like Texas and California have a wide lead in these technologies and other areas, notably the Great Plains, possess a lot more wind and biofuel potential. And in terms of low-mileage “green” vehicles, the Big Three lag way behind not only the Japanese but even some European competitors.

    So instead of believing in reincarnation or finding some miraculous cure, Kitchens believes places must rely on exploiting their historic advantages. In the case of Michigan, those are assets like a powerful engineering tradition and a hard-working and skilled workforce that can be harnessed in fields outside the auto industry. In addition, the area enjoys a cost of living significantly below the national average and far less than those in the coastal states.

    “There’s no easy way to get out of the trouble the region is in,” Kitchens suggests. “You can’t make it by trying to be ‘cool places’ or be the green capital. Instead we have to focus on who we are, a place that has a great tradition of advanced engineering, and take advantage of this.”

    So far this approach has paid off, leading to the creation of some 8,000 new jobs over the past three years. The region has focused both on bringing in new companies as well as helping existing ones expand. Perhaps most importantly, it has also raised a $50 million venture capital fund from local investors to help launch fledgling entrepreneurs.

    The region also boasts an extensive set of business incubators, which seek to leverage the engineering skill of those just out of school or those who have left bigger companies.

    The Kalamazoo experience shows one way out for not only Michigan but also other struggling Midwestern industrial hubs. Another promising example can be seen in Cleveland’s recently developed “District of Design,” which seeks to capitalize on the regions historic strengths in specialty manufacturing. It is all about taking advantage of the embedded DNA that exists in these once wondrously productive places.

    This approach can even revive the residues of the automobile industry. There may be widespread and deserved contempt for the top management of firms like General Motors, but industry veterans repeatedly point out that the region – most particularly the area around Detroit – retains an enormous reservoir of engineering talent, which could provide the linchpin for regional recovery.

    One recent sign validating this was the opening of a new $200 million Toyota research and development center in suburban Detroit. The key reason for making the investment, noted Japanese Consul-General Tamotsu Shinotsuka, was Michigan’s “abundant human resources.” If you are looking for “resources” who know the business of building cars and engines, locating in Michigan has certain logic.

    Of course, this talent pool long has been available to the Big Three. However, as retired automotive engineer Amy Fritz has suggested, they have been ill-used by top management. American engineers, the British-born and educated Fritz suggests, are not inherently less talented than their Asian or European counterparts. They tend be more innovative but their creativity is often stifled by the short-term oriented management priorities of their bosses.

    “With or without a bailout, the Big Three as we have known them will not be the same,” writes Fritz. “One or two could disappear. Others will no doubt shrink. However, the intelligence that exists within the engineering and industrial talent of Michigan remains. This is what the country should look to save from extinction, not the mediocrities who have ruled from highest management.”

    Indeed, even in a future with a shrunken Big Three – and perhaps the extinction of at least one of them – the industrial heartland does not have to die. Nor does it have to become a permanent “hospice” for failed once-great companies. The way to a long-term prosperous future cannot be built by depending on the administrations of Washington or the political clout of the United Auto Workers.

    Instead, Michigan, and much of the industrial heartland, should build a strategy that taps into culture that once made it the envy of the manufacturing world. These people are the key to any recovery, the ones who can both transform fading companies or start new ones. As the late Soichiro Honda once told me, “What’s important is not gold or diamonds, but people.”

    This is the basic lesson of business that the current leaders of the Big Three, most Michigan politicians and perhaps too many on Capitol Hill have forgotten, or perhaps never learned. The industrial heartland may be down but as long as the talent and will is there, it is far from out.

    If you do not believe it, take a little trip up to Kalamazoo, which may be quietly showing how to take the Great Lakes toward a new and brighter future.

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • Rust Belt Realities: Pittsburgh Needs New Leaders, New Ideas and New Citizens

    The current recession provides a new opportunity for Pittsburgh’s elite to feel good about itself. With other boom economies from Phoenix to Miami on the skids – and other old Rust Belt cities like Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo even more down on their luck – the slow-growth achievements of the Pittsburgh region may seem rather impressive.

    Yet at the same time, the downturn also poses longer-term challenges for which the local leadership is likely to have no answers.

    In large part, Pittsburgh’s “success,” such as it is, has been based on what may be called a “legacy economy,” essentially funded by the residues of its rich entrepreneurial past. This includes the hospitals, universities and nonprofits whose endowments have underwritten the expansion of medical services and education, which have emerged as among the region’s few growth sectors.

    The other great advantage Pittsburgh has – as do potentially other shrinking Rust Belt burgs – is lower housing prices. That’s the good news. But the lack of a great surge in housing prices during the real estate “bubble” also testifies to the region’s general lack of overall attractiveness and its languid job market.

    The current national economic meltdown now changes these realities, and in ways that may not allow Pittsburgh and other slow-growth burgs as much comfort as they might wish.

    For one thing, the “legacy” economy is almost certain to start shrinking as the portfolio investments of universities, hospitals and nonprofits begin to erode. After all, these institutions rode the boom elsewhere for a long time; they now will reap the consequences of that dependence.

    Perhaps even more important, the great housing advantage seems certain to weaken as a net positive. As prices in Florida, Arizona and even California begin to decline, Rust Belt residents who’ve been thinking of moving to warm weather, more dynamic economies and lively entrepreneurial environments will now have their chance.

    To thrive, Pittsburgh simply cannot rely on being somewhere that is a good place to go to school, get sick or die. It needs to offer restless, entrepreneurial people an opportunity to succeed and do something new.

    As local blogger Jim Russell notes, the real problem with his hometown is not that people leave, but that others do not come to replace them. People always leave places, but exciting locales – Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Houston or San Francisco – also attract large numbers of new people. The immigrants, many of them seeking the “main chance,” are generally the people who shake things up and bring new energy to places.

    Who seeks their “main chance” in Pittsburgh? Certainly not foreign immigrants, who are staying away in droves. Metropolitan Pittsburgh has one of the lowest percentages of foreign-born residents in the nation. Even Detroit, with its sizable Arab population, has some sort of ethnic vibe.

    In the short run, some might argue, not having immigrants relieves the stress on schools and eases potential social tensions. Yet in the America that is emerging, these newcomers represent arguably the most dynamic new element and harbingers of the future. By 2000, one in five American children already were the progeny of immigrants, mostly Asian or Latino; by 2015 they will make up as much as one-third of American kids.

    Rather than compliment itself on not exhausting itself by running too fast, the Pittsburgh region should think about producing enough of a pulse to attract immigrants and aggressive young people. A place that reassures itself on the basis of its stable, homogeneous and rapidly aging population seems doomed to achieve little better than self-satisfied stagnation.

    City leaders may be proud to see Pittsburgh hailed in the media – most recently by USA Today and the Cleveland Plain Dealer – as a poster child for urban “renaissance,” yet these glowing accounts are clearly not inspiring many people to settle there.

    Indeed, in a nation with the most vigorous demographics in the advanced industrial world, the City of Pittsburgh continues to suffer one of the most precipitous declines in population. Like the former East Germany, the town needs more coffins than cribs. Even the suburbs of Pittsburgh have been losing population.

    More worrisome, there seems no strategy – or even an inclination of needing one – to change this reality. Rather than stimulate the grassroots economy, the region for decades has sought to revive itself by spending billions on new stadia, arenas, convention centers and cultural facilities, sometimes in the process demolishing vibrant working-class neighborhoods or local business districts. Meanwhile, the roads and bridges of the city – which continues to battle bankruptcy – are in a constant state of disrepair.

    Every time I read about or visit Pittsburgh, the powers that be have a new project to prove to themselves that the city actually has a life. Most recently, it’s a lame-brained scheme to create a 1.2-mile, $435 million (at least) transit tunnel under the Allegheny River to connect Downtown’s heavily subsidized office towers to the North Shore’s even more heavily taxpayer-funded pro sports stadiums and a future casino.

    Yet, in reality, Pittsburgh’s “Tunnel to Nowhere” is simply part of the same old brain-dead development strategy that may impress visiting journalists or conventioneers but creates little in the way of good new jobs or long-term opportunities.

    You have to think about what the energetic people who come to a community really want – things like economic opportunities, single-family houses and good schools for their kids. Who but speculators and city officials cares about luring the latest ESPN Zone or Planet Hollywood? These kinds of venues are simply commodities now, with no sense of place and available in any city of decent size willing to subsidize them.

    So what should the Pittsburgh region do differently?

    The first thing would be to consider using its scarce public funds to revive the old urban neighborhoods and leafy suburbs that constitute Pittsburgh’s greatest competitive advantage. These are places that may attract students now, but to matter in the long term, some of these young people must stay after they graduate. This will be particularly critical as the current “echo boom” begins to fade and the now record-high number of students begins to drop.

    Second, the region should target growing small businesses. The era when Pittsburgh was a big-business town is all but over. In 1960, 22 Fortune 500 companies were headquartered there. Now it’s roughly a third that number. High taxes, tiresome regulatory regimes and the enormous burden created by outsized city employee pensions have hit the small entrepreneur hardest. Addressing these issues is more important to them than new arts venues or jazz clubs.

    Finally, the city needs a shtick to call its own. It might look at its historic strengths as an innovative engineering city. Pittsburgh could look also to its hinterland, a region rich in beauty and resources, as part of its competitive advantage.

    All of these things could provide linchpins for a true renaissance – one driven not by public relations and shiny new subsidized edifices, but by the energy of its people.

    That’s what has always made for great cities – and what will do so well after this current recession has passed into memory. Pittsburgh has the potential to catch the inevitable next wave that will emerge after the crisis, but only if it can get past its long-standing celebration of mediocrity.

    This article originally appeared at Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • Farmer’s Markets: Reviving Public Space in Central Florida

    By Richard Reep

    Noted architect Daniel Liebeskind, teaching at Yale in the early 1990s, proclaimed “Public space is dead”. A provocative notion at the time, he was simply observing American cultural phenomena, and our evolution away from Main Street into the mall, away from the downtown church to the suburban megachurch, and away from common space into private space. While all this is true, it misses a countercyclical element in our cities, and in the Orlando area, public space is very much alive and assuming a new role in the neighborhoods.

    Human social activities still need to take place, and we are surprisingly adaptable when it comes to getting the interaction we need, when we need it. Public space has hosted political, sacred, commercial, and ceremonial activities for the entire history of the city. This recent flight from public to private is due to the perception of personal safety, and the need to conduct social activities in a secure zone. We simply don’t much care whether the backdrop for our social life is a 19th century town square, or a 20th century suburban shopping mall.

    Crime rose in the last half of the 20th century beyond the level of comfort for most citizens, and although it receded in the late 1990’s (for reasons yet to be satisfactorily explained), crime has resurged. This year, Orlando jumped from a relatively crime-free status to a position within the top 10 in the country for violent crime, and nearly every neighborhood has experienced an increase in various forms of break-ins, vandalism, and theft. Along with our economic lives, our civic lives seem to be going backward at the present moment.

    Thus, private space thrives and public space dies; this has been our only means of control over our personal security. Shopping malls and big box stores are our new Main Streets, and instead of condemning their form, we should be studying them, because they are telling us what people need and crave as part of their daily lives.

    In the public arena, cities cope with the crime trend variously, and it is instructive to look at Orlando’s methods in light of its commitment to New Urbanism as a city growth model. Orlando has recently published Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design via a Bureau of Justice Assistance grant. Aimed at both businesses and individuals, the booklet recommends that private outdoor space be well-defined by gates and clear perimeters, and suggests other design elements to reduce the risk of being targeted by criminals.

    Much of the booklet makes sense and reinforces strategies such as natural surveillance, target hardening, territorial reinforcement, and access control. The booklet also tries in vain to tie new urbanist ideals to crime prevention. For example, speed tables, a favorite new urbanist device to reduce speeding, are cited as a way to tell “potential offenders they had better think twice before committing a crime.” Whether there is a correlation between speed bumps and safe neighborhoods remains to be seen.

    The booklet rightly states that “streets should be designed to discourage cut-through traffic” as a means of natural access control. Ironically, this flies in the face of new urbanist development patterns, which encourage open-ended, straight street grids, and discourage cul-de-sacs as elitist. The practical reality of safety and security necessarily overrides the theory and rhetoric of New Urbanism as it is applied in Orlando.

    We continue to evolve into a city that has troubled public spaces and increasing private spaces, much like the rest of the country. While the crime rate has risen suddenly in Central Florida, however, our public space, far from being doomed, is now hosting scenes of new civic involvement.

    The age-old agora, contrary to reports of its death, is actually alive and well. Weekend markets are springing up in public nooks and crannies around the older, urban core, and in the suburban public parks as well. These markets are scenes of a new American involvement with each other, in a manner similar to the traditional European town square and the historical American village green. “Farmer’s Markets,” “Fresh Markets,” and “Weekend Markets” are becoming popular not just in downtown Orlando, but in downtown Winter Park, Maitland, College Park, and surrounding communities. These markets are exciting because they are growing, despite all the forces working against them: crime, internet commerce, and the accelerated kinetic lives we lead in this new millennium. People are finding something important at these small, crowded, open-air market stalls, and it isn’t just good tomatoes.

    For merchants, they ostensibly cut out the army of middlemen between the customer and contemporary, chain-store retail. Open-air markets are an exciting and interesting alternative to the internet, a medium that prevents direct sampling of a physical, sensual product such as food. And, a visit to the Winter Park Farmer’s Market on any given Saturday would make any mall-store merchant green with envy: hands holding full shopping bags, and lots of them. Business is being done!

    For customers, the thrill of a bargain is supplemented by a sense of community and a shared enjoyment of a vibrant local scene. Maitland, a suburban municipality five miles north of Orlando, recently started its own Farmers’ Market and has already outgrown Quinn Strom Park, and will soon be moving to the larger Lake Lily Park next year. Customers are treated to live music performances, occasional tables of Fresh Art by Maitland Art Center artists, and stalls by masseuses, cheese makers, and ethnic food providers. The informal nature of these markets guarantee spontaneity, an enjoyment of shared community, and an opportunity for relaxed interaction and discourse free of the manipulation of marketers, advertisers, designers, and other enablers of the high art of contemporary Western consumption.

    At least in Central Florida, public space is not dead at all; people seek ways to maintain the tradition of the agora, despite assault upon this tradition. Although safety needs have forced us to flee to malls, supermarkets, big box retail, and the internet for our consumer needs, we’ve traded safety and security for spontaneity and deeper interaction. We are ingenious at finding ways around the slick, sophisticated veneer of chain-store commerce for a more visceral sensory and social experience.

    In Central Florida, these markets are springing up to provide this, and they reinforce locality and pride in our neighborhoods, for they are a reference that citizens are more and more often using to reinforce their neighborhoods’ identity. If this trend continues, these markets may increase in weekly frequency and broaden their involvement by becoming a forum for public speaking and political dialogue. Public space is alive and well in the new millennium, and its new adaptation to this old use can provide an exciting glimpse into the future.

    Richard Reep is an Architect and artist living in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.

  • China Should Send Western Planners Home

    For centuries, the West sent missionaries around the world to spread various gospels. It is no different now, though the clerics tend to hold degrees from planning schools rather than those overtly specializing in theology.

    This could also create tragic results as ideologies created in one context are imported into a totally foreign one.

    China, which is creating a new future, needs to forge its own path for urban development. For one thing China is experiencing unprecedented economic growth on a scale unimaginable in the contemporary West. Over the past two decades, living standards have risen at a rate that may be unprecedented in world history. Gross domestic product per capita still remains below high-income world standards, at one-sixth that of the US level. Nonetheless, there is great regional disparity, with incomes in east coast urban areas above that of urban areas in the central and western regions

    Yet in sharp contrast to the west, which has been heavily urban for over a century, China remains substantially more rural than urban. According to United Nations data, China’s population was only 40 percent urban in 2000. This compares to urban rates of over 70 percent in many high-income nations. But now people are moving in large numbers from rural areas to the urban areas, following the pattern of development that has occurred virtually wherever incomes have risen markedly.

    The reasons for the move are also the same as they have been through history: Urban areas offer great opportunities and generally higher standard of living than rural areas. The United Nations estimates that by 2030, 60 percent of the Chinese population will live in urban areas. This represents a staggering migration – the movement of 350,000,000 people – a population greater than that of the United States and Canada combined.

    Already, China has very large urban areas. Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and Guangzhou have 10,000,000 or more residents. A number of other urban areas have more than 5,000,000 people. Dongguan, the world’s largest unknown urban area is nestled between Guangzhou and Shenzhen on the Pearl River Delta and no one seems to know what its population is – estimates range from 7.5 million to more than 10 million. See Demographia World Urban Areas.

    Western Planners Descend
    To a cadre of western urban planners, developers and architects, China represents the ultimate market. Like the Christian missionaries, they come to China with a sense of both rectitude and guilt about their own countries. They admonish Chinese officials “not to repeat our mistakes.” The primary mistakes, they explain, are urban sprawl (a pejorative term for suburbanization) and automobile use. To go to planner heaven, they must eschew these steps and go straight to the ideal state of smart growth, transit dependence and new urbanist principles.

    Chinese officials visiting the United States, Western Europe, Canada or Australia must wonder at the disconnect between the wasteland described by Western planners and the unparalleled quality of life enjoyed by people in the West. It is not without reason that the Chinese (and for that matter, the Indians, Indonesians, Nigerians, etc. ad nausea) would like to be rich like us. It is not without surprise that the hosts graciously listen, nod and, to their inestimable credit and good fortune of Chinese citizens, largely ignore the bankrupt advice.

    You don’t have to be an American or European to realize that the automobile has created mobile urban areas in which employers and employees have far greater choices or that mobility makes labor markets more efficient. It is not a mistake that housing built on inexpensive land on the periphery of urban areas has made it possible for so many millions to build up financial equity in their own homes, or enjoy the kind of privacy that the more wealthy or well-connected have enjoyed. Nor is it a mistake that nearby inexpensive land has been developed by retailers and other businesses who are, as a result, able to provide lower prices than would otherwise be possible.

    The West has achieved its unparalleled affluence because planners were unable to impose their will to prevent suburbanization and the expansion of mobility. They could not hold back the democratization of prosperity.

    If planners had been in charge, mass low cost, relatively low density housing would not exist. Western nations would now be principally inhabited by renters rather than homeowners. Employees would be limited to those few places they could get on foot or public transport, rather than the whole urban area made accessible by the automobile.

    There would be less wealth and it would be less broadly distributed. “Big-box” stores on the urban fringe would not have emerged, resulting in people paying higher prices with their smaller incomes.

    Indeed, for any who might wish for China to stumble in its competition with the West, it is hard to imagine a more promising strategy than importing Western planning ideas and planners to China.

    China should continue to develop commercial and industrial land on the urban periphery, while expanding the already extensive freeway system to bring production and prosperity to every nook and cranny of the nation. China should continue down the road of allowing people to live how they like, whether it is in the new high-rise luxury condominiums or the lower rise town houses and detached housing (called villas in China) that can be found throughout its urban areas. It is clear that China will continue to become more mobile (and thereby richer and more productive) as car ownership explodes and those who cannot afford cars increasingly obtain the same level of mobility with electric motorbikes.

    The operative word here is “continue.” Generally, Chinese urban planning policies have been a substantial contributor to the nation’s rising wealth. It is to be hoped that the advice of the western planners will continue to be respectfully listened to and largely ignored. The people of China are entering an era of great new opportunity; they should not close the gates just as it arrives.

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”

  • City Planning and The Politics of Pollution

    Part Two. Yesterday, in Part One, Critser discussed scientific advances in understanding air pollution. Today, he addresses the social implications.

    The new science of air pollution, with its emphasis on dose-response mechanisms, may remake the traditional advocacy realm of social and environmental justice. In the past, that world has been focused on class, race and ethnicity, classic markers of inequality and vulnerability. Today, the focus is more “exposure driven.” “Dosage… may be something people who have ignored environmental justice can get their heads around,” one researcher at last month’s Environmental Epidemiology conference in Pasadena noted. “It may get people’s attention on something that affects us all.”

    Other new observations are recasting ancient (and highly suspect) urban-suburban dichotomies as well. If one parses the science of small, regional temperature increases—the kind we may see more of in the future—and how those spikes “activate” ultrafine particles, one discovers a disturbing phenomenon: The combination of heat and UFPs makes airborne plant pollens more inflammatory. Such was the finding of Italian researchers studying how traffic emissions and high temperatures in Naples fortify the toxicity of urtica, the common allergen known as the nettle plant. One wonders how the same combination remakes the lovely sage and chaparral environment surrounding Southern California suburbs, even when the region isn’t burning. It is a disturbing prospect for those who believe they have escaped inflammation by exchanging big cities for exurban greenlands.

    What, besides moving to Iceland, can be done? Few have thought more about that, at the practical level, than Andrea Hricko, an associate professor of clinical preventive medicine at USC, where she is trying to translate epidemiological data about pollution into practical public health policy. For years, Hricko’s focus was the Port of Los Angeles and the neighborhoods and schools surrounding that diesel-saturated realm. What she found were huge spikes in childhood chronic diseases, especially asthma, as well as other heart and lung problems. She and others succeeded in getting one school relocated—pushed back from the most truck-intensive route near the Alameda Corridor—but even that victory was a lesson in the unintended consequences of regulation.

    “Come over here, you have to see this,” she said to a visitor one day in her crammed office on the medical school campus. On her computer appeared a picture of a group of kids playing soccer. In the immediate background loomed trucks belching the substances that eventually make the port air so heinously foggy. “See, this is where the school was. This was supposed to be the buffer zone, but… being that it is also rare, unoccupied space, and LA schools have so little recreational area, it is now a defacto playground. So you have kids better protected inside, but doing their deepest breathing part of their day right on top of the trucks.” It’s a perfect public health storm, she notes, because “getting kids outside and exercising more is a huge priority in the obesity-diabetes crisis.”

    Hricko’s focus on the ports, arguably the octopus of contemporary industrial Los Angeles, has taught her some hard lessons. You can always get a regulation that says, for example, don’t build a school within X distance of a freeway, but you can rarely switch the scenario around, say, with a ruling that says don’t widen a freeway when it is within X distance of a school. The same is true of building a new rail yard, as is the case just north of the port today. For years, area residents waged war with the railroad and the port to simply locate the new yard closer to the water, which would have drastically reduced the number of short, emission-intensive trips by trucks, and thus hopefully cut down the high rate of respiratory disease in the area. The solution, instead, was to go ahead and build the yard right by the homes, with a promise by state regulatory agencies to install new, high efficiency filters in all area homes. While that protects the children while they’re inside—and, it would seem, suggests a possible boom enterprise for the filter industry—it’s far from an ideal solution. “They’re still spending most of their time outside, and we still need to get them to exercise more while they’re out there. It’s a frustrating exercise.”

    Hricko has also wondered if the same impasse won’t obtain in the arena of the low-income housing juggernaut led by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. One recent hearing concerned an affordable housing complex proposed alongside the 5 freeway near East Los Angeles. As Hricko tells it, that project would be sandwiched between one of the most emissions-choked portions of the freeway and the mass transit Gold Line, which would run just behind it. “There was all kinds of talk about filtering, etcetera, but the real question was never brought to the fore: Perhaps this shouldn’t be considered for housing in the first place.” She notes that a member of the LA County Public Health staff made precisely this point… privately.

    One can understand why. Affordable housing is an important, unmet need in Los Angeles, one with a substantial political establishment behind it and a charismatic mayor in front of it. There is, as a result, an understandable reluctance to get in the way of the parade, especially after years of political impasse. The mayor recently upped the ante and proclaimed a new $5 billion housing initiative, much of which would center on building new housing near mass transit stations. The essence of this transit pod strategy has a fairly sustainable logic: If you can get people to live near mass transit, you’ll dramatically reduce one of the biggest single factors in urban pollution: the numerous short, one-to-five mile trips that people make every day, whether to work or to the store or to pick up the kids at school. You’ll also reduce traffic jams.

    The problem, of course, is human nature, and the naughty desire by poor people, especially in Los Angeles, to be like the rich people, driving whenever and to wherever they want. Compounding this, for the scheme to work, we still must get from the station to work and people will use a car to do that. “For Antonio’s plan to work, you’d basically have to make it a condition of ownership that you don’t have a car. Or, that if you are going to buy this housing, you have to work somewhere on the trainline,” Hricko said with a knowing smile. “Because if you don’t, you still have people driving. You’re defeating your purpose before you ever get started.”

    That’s one realm where a leader like Villaraigosa, with his celebrity status and megawatt smile, could lead by example. But that hasn’t happened so far. Mike Woo, who describes himself as a supporter of the mayor, says “I want to say that I think the mayor’s people are on top of this. I wish I could say that. I really wish I could say that.” Woo notes that there is a slightly bigger time window for solving the housing crunch than is popularly acknowledged. The Planning Commission’s most recent staff report holds that meeting the need for housing in most transit corridors for the next 8-10 years does not require raising the density of housing.

    That’s a rare breather, Woo says. Let’s make the most of it.

    Greg Critser is the author of Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World (Houghton Mifflin 2003), Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (Houghton 2005), and Eternity Soup: Inside the Quest to End Aging (Random/Harmony 2009).

  • Will The New Air Pollution Science Choke City Planners?

    Part One of A Two-Part Series

    Not long ago, Michael Woo, a former Los Angeles city councilman and current member of the Los Angeles City Planning Commission, took up a case pending approval by that body: a mixed housing-retail development near the intersection of Cahuenga Boulevard and Riverside Drive. Like many of the remaining buildable sites in the city, the property is right next to a roaring motorway; the windows of some apartments would look right out onto the 134 Freeway. To Angelinos, who have grown up in a car culture, it was hardly a remarkable proposal. But Woo, perhaps one of the brainier members of the city’s political elite—after losing a mayoral race to Richard Riordan in the early 1990s he became a professor of public policy at University of Southern California—had a problem with it, and he couldn’t quite let it go.

    Just a few weeks before, the Commission had witnessed a lengthy presentation by a scientist who’d been studying how living within 500 yards of high traffic corridors—freeways and some particularly busy streets—substantially raises the risk for a number of chronic diseases. “We were all sort of sitting there, looking at this proposal and discussing it through the conventional lens we normally use, when I said, `Wait a minute. Didn’t we just hear a pretty compelling argument about this the other day? Can we talk about that for a minute?’ It struck me that it was impossible to read those studies and then continue approving housing that sits that close to freeways.”

    The Commission then asked for the developer’s point of view on the issue. “As I recall, the only real mitigation that they brought up was almost comic,” Woo says. “Their idea was, you know, we’ve got that covered: We’re going to make sure that residents can’t open the windows that face the freeway.” The project was approved.

    Woo doesn’t particularly fault anyone in the exchange, because the implications of the new science of air pollution—much of it driven by pioneering work at USC, the University of California at Los Angeles, and California Institute of Technology—are utterly mind boggling. No one has quite calculated exactly how much buildable land would be excised from use for housing and schools if this growing body of work were to take hold in the policy realm, but, as Woo said, “We can’t hide from this issue anymore. The hard science on the subject is compelling. It makes you fundamentally rethink some pretty key parts of how, where and why we’re building housing in such locations.”

    For decades, pretty much everyone “knew” that smog—usually measured as ozone, the gas that forms from sunlight’s ionizing effect on air particles—caused all kinds of health problems, principally those associated with the lungs, like asthma. But the truth of the matter is that, until ten years or so ago, no one knew how that happened; they didn’t know the “mechanism of action,” the intricate physiological processes that lead to chronic airway inflammation. Epidemiological data was confounding, because some high ozone communities showed lower rates of asthma than low ozone communities. Also, smog levels—measured as ozone—were going down, while asthma rates were going though the roof.

    One suspect was what researchers called fresh emissions, comprised of ultrafine particles, or UFPs, which are so small that they can penetrate the furthest reaches of the lung’s bronchial branches and set off the systemic inflammation that causes respiratory disease. Thus, it was possible to have lower ozone levels and still have increased levels of inflammation, or as USC Professor Robert McConnell notes, “You could have cleaner horizons but still have increasing inflammation to people who live closer to where the particles are being produced.” McConnell has been leading the federally funded Children’s Health Study in Los Angeles for over a decade. “I tell people that I’m studying how pollution causes asthma, and people look at me and say, `I thought we already knew that,’” says McConnell. “The fact is that we assume risks that aren’t there, and we’re ignorant of risks that are there.”

    What caused the sea change in pollution epidemiology—the ability to link exposure to tail pipe emissions and chronic diseases—is as much a story of ingenuity at the lab bench as it is one of persistence against conveniently indolent regulations. At USC, engineers over the past 20 years have invented ways to concentrate particles from the freeway, assess their specific toxicity in human doses, and then test various theses with lab animals genetically engineered to physiologically respond like humans. They have also developed ways to track real-time daily human exposures to ultrafine particles. On any given day in Los Angeles there are mobile smog units measuring how pollution ebbs and flows on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis. There are people wearing “personal ambient pollution” backpacks to track how individuals experience different loads of smog throughout their day, part of which may be spent in a low-pollution environment, part in a high. Through modern genomics, we also now know that several highly prevalent gene mutations make some people more susceptible to pollution, and that others make them less susceptible.

    At all three universities, engineers in the aerosol sciences developed machines that could accurately measure not just ozone—a rather crude measure of air toxicity—but also specific toxins, known as ultrafine particulate matter, or UFPs, of less than 2.5 microns. It is stuff so small that it can reach the bottom of the airways; there, it can over-stimulate the so-called inflammatory cascade of the body’s native defense system and turn it into a disease called asthma. At UCLA, cell biologists, toxicologists and lung and heart specialists have even been able to image what happens to the human cell when it’s exposed to high levels of ultrafine particles. It is the kind of image that can make one utterly despairing, but one that also might clue modern physicians, medical researchers and environmental scientists on how to better focus on the issue and perhaps mitigate it.

    A few examples of new directions within the science:

    Ultrafine Particles, Diesel Exhaust And Asthma: A growing consensus holds that, infants, young children, and expectant women experience substantial elevations in risk for deficits in lung function growth when living near high volume motorways. There is less consensus on the recommended buffer zone, ranging from 75 meters to 500 meters.

    Ultrafine Particles And Heart Disease: A growing body of laboratory experiments and human observational work links heart disease, especially the process leading to atherosclerosis and heart attack, to air pollution. Recent work at UCLA and USC on lab mice parked next to the 110 Freeway has suggested an alarming thesis of causality: That chronic exposure to high levels of ultrafine particles may make us more likely to get heart disease because it makes HDL—the so-called “good,” form of cholesterol that “cleans up” the bad form—dysfunctional.

    Diesel, Ultrafine Particles And Alzheimer’s: Work coming out of Mexico City, increasingly LA’s sister city in the environmental sciences, documents how amyloid plaque, one of two suspect brain proteins associated with Alzheimer’s, increases with exposure to air particles, especially in children and young adults.

    Diabetes, High Blood Pressure And Obesity: A small but growing body of research shows that being fat and breathing smog is really bad for you. Worse, high exposures may accentuate existing diabetes and metabolic syndrome, the perfect storm of high cholesterol, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure.

    Air Pollution, Expectant Mothers, And Infants: UCLA researchers have repeatedly demonstrated a consistent, dose-dependent relationship between expectant mothers living in high traffic-emission-adjacent housing and premature births, low birth weights, birth defects and respiratory diseases. In a recent report, the UCLA Institute of the Environment concluded that the problems were of such magnitude as to “require drastic changes to motor vehicle and transportation systems” over the next decades.

    In Part Two, Critser explores the politics of pollution.

    Greg Critser is the author of Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World (Houghton Mifflin 2003), Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (Houghton 2005), and Eternity Soup: Inside the Quest to End Aging (Random/Harmony 2009).

  • Rethinking Risk During a Financial Crisis: Learning from Mexico

    Last month I visited a small town in southern Mexico. It is a quiet and modestly prosperous place. Outside some of the homes are older Suburbans, Jeeps and Explorers; the license plates show that their owners have recently returned from the US, driven out by the collapsing economy and heightened nativist anxieties. Almost every family, it seems, has some member who has spent time up north; only a very few of them are still hanging on through the recession.

    For the most part, Mexicans are innocent by-standers in the current financial debacle. They didn’t allow themselves to be talked into strange mortgages or multiple credit cards; whether north or south of the border, this is for them still predominantly a cash economy. Even for those who went to the US, their key goal was to accumulate dollars and send them south, where, as pesos, they provide the basics and even a few luxuries for many families. Until recently, these remittances have been second only to oil income in importance for Mexico; now both are shrinking fast.

    There is something more than a little unfair in the manner in which the recession is hurting our southern neighbor. Mexicans, for the most part, have a personal risk calculus that is the complete reverse of ours. Like most people who have experienced hard times, they are not obsessed with the little things that might go awry; they don’t place little flags around puddles in the grocery store, and most dogs have never received a rabies shot. The sidewalks often look as though a tree is trying to push its way through the ground and electrical cables are frequently visible. It’s not unusual to see a local butcher frying up vast cauldrons of meats in front of his carnecineria, something that would drive American health inspectors to apoplexy.

    In contrast to their wealthier Northern neighbors, Mexicans seem quite happy to take responsibility for themselves and don’t expect to sue someone every time they stub their toe. But their collective view of risk is also the reverse of ours. Property is, for most people, something to live in and not something for speculation. Building one’s own home is common but it’s usually done in stages, whenever there is cash to spare. The results may be untidy, with streets perpetually possessing the appearance of construction zones, but there is no evidence of any foreclosure crisis—forests of ‘for sale’ signs are absent, in Veracruz, at least.

    Nor is that the only visual difference between nondescript Mexican and American cities. Antiseptic zoning is much less common in Mexico, with the result that families live above the store, or behind the workshop, or even on the roof of some buildings. Affluent homes may stand next to literal ruins. In most American cities, this would be evidence of a neighborhood slipping into decay, causing realtors to flee to more ordered areas. But for Mexicans, this juxtaposition simply adds to the sense of being in an organic place rather than on a Disney set. What it means for neighborliness is hard to judge, but it would certainly make an interesting comparative research project.

    Of course, there are some equivalents to the homogenous subdivisions that dominate the American housing market. I saw several large up-scale gated communities that were standing idle, waiting for better times. I was also shown several housing developments, where government agencies were building terraced homes for state workers. What is striking to the visitor is that these would never be offered in the US housing market, as they would be judged to be unacceptably small. At approximately one thousand square feet, they are half the size of the average American home, (approximately 2200 square feet) and significantly smaller than most new houses.

    Even though Mexican families are, on average, larger (with more children and more generations living together), the expectation is not that every member of the family gets a bathroom or even a bedroom. It is also common to buy small and build out, or up, as needs dictate and finances permit. Anyone who has traveled in Asia will also be familiar with this phenomenon, which manifests itself in ground floor apartments that encroach upon the street, balconies that become bedrooms and so forth. High density and modest means lead to invention, if not the kinds of appearance mandated by Home Owner Associations or preferred by the fusspot New Urbanist designers.

    In the past, the Mexican financial system has been criticized for maintaining a tight hold on credit. Even before the current crisis, high interest rates were unfriendly to the consumer, slowing the pace of both urban development and speculation. Given our current crisis, perhaps it’s worth asking whether this points to how the American market may develop in the future. Certainly, we can expect that credit will remain tight for a significant while. The rules for obtaining a mortgage will become more onerous; interest rates will be fixed, appraisals will be exact. McMansions will be of little interest except to large families of means; smaller and older homes will be at a premium. Definitions of overcrowding may change; design expectations will be downsized, and home maintenance will become more usual. As opportunities in the formal labor marketplace shrink, perhaps for an extended period, more Americans will work from their homes and garages, much as occurs in many developing countries.

    There may also be significantly less mobility, with little or no speculative purchasing. This is likely to have the greatest impact on the condominium market. Even affluent parents will be obligated to keep their college-age kids on campus rather than in condos that they hope to flip after graduation. And even when they have a degree, these young adults – with large student loans, minimal credit and no cash for a down payment – will become used to staying with their parents for longer periods, as is frequently the case in Mexico and other developing markets. This could extend into marriage and even family formation. The condos themselves will, for the foreseeable future, revert to rental properties, catering to those who can no longer maintain a foothold in the owner market.

    This does not imply that American cities are going to turn into Mexican ones any time soon. But there is much to be learned by studying the ways that Mexicans calculate risk. We might have fewer families borrowing beyond their means, and continually trying to beat the market. And with less aggregate risk in one part of our lives, we might then view other parts of our daily world with a little less obsession with control. We might be a little more relaxed about who lives next door; we might also be a little more tolerant about the age of their truck or the color of the drapes. After all, they might be Mexican, in which case we know that, if they are there, they can probably actually afford it.

    Andrew Kirby is the editor of the interdisciplinary Elsevier journal “Cities.”This is his 20th year as a resident of Arizona.

  • Former Insider on the Auto Bailout: Never Underestimate Brainpower in Detroit

    In all the many (how many) years I worked as an engineer in and around the auto industry, I got to compare conditions in Europe, Japan and America. Yet in many ways the American situation was perhaps the most tragic – the most potential, most eagerly squandered. It’s not Americans who are flawed, but the business model imposed from the top.

    For example, I do not believe American engineers are inferior to those working elsewhere. It’s just the way their inputs are handled. Toyota and Honda have long-term viable plans that forecast many years down the road. This gives engineers a clear direction.

    On the other hand, Detroit’s automakers, as well as some European ones, tend to look at short-term gains in order to satisfy shareholders. GM’s big problems were due to planning short-term while sacrificing the farm down the road.

    GM became too big. They had too many brands and too many models. Alfred P. Sloan created all these brands in order to counter Henry Ford, but also to provide various products for people at all economic levels. These internal GM brands were to compete against one another as well as outside companies. What Sloan did not realize is how this internal competition would impact the engineers who develop products and the marketing staff who have to sell them.

    Of course some of the problem had to do with the power and influence many of GM’s shareholders had over the board as well as the CEO. These shareholders wanted their cut and they wanted things done their way. For years, it all came down to satisfying the shareholders at the expense of GM’s long-term reputation. To this day, I know people who will not buy a GM product simply because they had a poorly made Pontiac back in 1983.

    Keep in mind, buying a car is a HUGE purchase for just about anyone. This cannot be compared to purchasing a ticket on a bankrupt airliner or buying a golf club from a defunct golf manufacturer. Americans today have long memories when it comes to vehicle purchases. Yet, these are the same Americans who demand instant gratification and who trample people at stores on Black Friday in order to save an extra $12.00 on a Chinese-made sweater.

    But my biggest complaint has to do with the wasting of great talent. There is a popular myth that American engineers are lazier or more stupid than their Asian and European counterparts. I highly disagree with this notion. There may well be different cultural values, but that does not define a worker’s skill set or determination. American engineers are simply more independent in their thinking than their Japanese and European counterparts. Independently-thinking renegades will create nothing but extra trouble for a platform design team.

    This is system that American engineers and designers are placed into once they graduate from college. It’s a cultural “machine” if you will. In Japan, Toyota’s engineers become “one” with the company and they simply work as one machine. There is no “I” in Toyota’s system – or in Japan’s industrial marketplace for that matter. Unfortunately, at GM people appeared to be hell-bent on receiving singular credit for their accomplishments.

    Please understand that the Japanese people are not a diverse bunch. They are known in the automotive industry for improving upon established ideas, designs and systems. The Japanese, however, are not known to create something from the ground up like their American counterparts. American engineers take more risks, since they want to be rewarded. The Japanese simply create and work for the common good of their employer.

    Toyota
    Toyota is a company that is known for its stubborn planning and ways. They take their time and do things right the first time. This is the Toyota way – most of the time.

    But this is not always the case. Toyota got derailed with their Avalon model. This car has been nothing but trouble from the drawing board to the production line. It is a piece of garbage.

    Why is it so bad? Maybe it is because this time they followed the flawed American model. Toyota rushed it because it saw the potential for a quick profit. They did not take their time to think things through. They simply used the American business model for a short-term gain and it failed them.

    In contrast, GM took its time to develop the new Malibu, and Ford used over 1100 engineers to develop the new F150. The Malibu is better than anything Toyota has right now. How do I know? I drive a Camry and I compared it to the Malibu.

    Interestingly enough, GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz had personal input into the Malibu’s development. That is the MAJOR divergence from traditional platform development in the past. Engineers and designers received personal hands-on feedback from a car-guy at the top, not some bean counter. I am sure they felt invigorated to hear his thoughts from him rather than receiving them in a fluff letter typed by a secretary.

    Back to Michigan?
    Up until the late 90s, many in Michigan simply did not value a college education. Many were simply cushioned by the fact that they could graduate high school and get a job on the assembly line. I fear that this attitude towards college will grow in the southern states such as Mississippi and Alabama. Many down there are starting to have the “I’ll be fine” attitude that many in Michigan once had.

    But the future in Michigan may be brighter than many suppose. Southeast Michigan will remain a research and development powerhouse well into the future. Many of Detroit’s auto engineers and related companies can easily adapt (technically speaking) to alternative technologies such as wind, solar, and new materials. Never underestimate the amount of brainpower in Detroit. Prior to my stint in Detroit, I was under the impression that every Big Three employee was a lazy slouch. My ignorant attitude was squashed pretty damn quickly once I started working with them.

    So here’s a bright point for the future. You will see more technical industries branching off from the auto industry. Companies like Dow are already taking advantage of Metro Detroit’s diverse and increasingly well-educated Arab population. I see a future in Michigan revolving around chemicals, green energy, transportation and international trade in general.

    But the car industry won’t go away either. Toyota, for example, decided to keep its R&D operation in Michigan rather than relocate to Alabama. There was simply no incentive for Toyota to migrate its brainpower to the South. Right now – although this may change – the auto industry in the south is incomplete since they lack the planning and design processes needed.

    With or without a bailout, the Big Three as we have known them will not be the same. One or two could disappear. Others will no doubt shrink. But the intelligence that exists within the engineering and industrial talent of Michigan remains. This is what the country should look to save from extinction, not the mediocrities who have ruled from highest management.

    Amy Fritz was born in Cambridge, England during World War II. Her mother was a seamstress and her father a pilot with the RAF. Her uncles worked in various capacities within the British automobile industry and her father became an engineer and professor.

    After studying engineering at Cambridge, Fritz developed an interest in automobiles and went to work for a now defunct automotive supplier. Her occupation took her to Europe, Asia and North America, where she eventually settled as a technical engineering contractor for various auto-related companies. She is now semi-retired and living in the Denver area.

  • Euroburbia: A Personal View

    The image of the European city as a tourist’s paradise of charming inner-city neighborhoods interconnected by high-speed rail networks is not entirely false, but it does not give the full picture of how most Europeans live. Contrary to the mythology embraced by romantics among planners and ‘green’ politicians, urban areas of Europe sprawl just as much as any American or Western city.

    Of course, there are the wealthy and often childless few who live in the renovated urban cores – but at much lower density than at any time in their history. Instead of crowding picturesquely into city, the teeming hordes of the middle class have sought their refuge in the arboreal outskirts. They drive from their single-family homes and townhouse developments to their offices in old city centers, in business parks on the edge of the center and to other villages with massive industrial parks attached to them.

    As a result Germany has long since ceased to be the country that one sees in Grimm’s Fairy Tales or Goethe. Much of it looks like America or Canada. Freeways interconnect exurban villages swelling with housing developments and industrial parks. The German dream is a lot like the American one, only with more rules.

    The most interesting factor is the diversity of these suburbs. They are still predominantly German, but then again so is the country. I live in an exurb of Nuremberg in northern Bavaria. It was the city of Dürer and Hans Sachs as well as the infamous Nazi rallies and post-war trials. It still has castles from the Medieval past, but the need for labor to rebuild destroyed cities – and eventually the resulting prosperity – in the post-war years saw new faces and cultures arrive with immigrants from countries like Turkey.

    Just like in America, many of these newcomers worked until they retired and decided that they wanted to stay. Some of their children are having trouble but not all of them. The children that move out of their neighborhoods to the suburbs integrate better because their parents tend to be more prosperous and thus resent Germany less. The other reason is the fact they are more exposed to the language. Cem Ozdemir was just elected as leader of the Green Party here and he does not speak the pidgin common among a lot of Turkish immigrants. I moved to the suburbs for much the same reason. My wife and I are both non-native speakers but we know that if our children are going to succeed they will need to speak German well and act like Germans. Ideally they will become hyphenated Germans, as in American-Croat-Germans, which is roughly what they would be.

    Of course, some recent newcomers still huddle in their ghettos here, the soulless housing estates built to satisfy Le Corbusier’s destructive urban fantasies. But a lot of them are moving out and up. Their ultimate dream is not a castle or a turn of the century apartment. They want their own house. They want decent schools for their kids, a place to park their cars and easy access to work. That is why they are here and not in their old neighborhoods.

    But diversity is a relatively new benefit of German suburbs. We also moved here for a basic need of space. We had lived in the inner city in a charming apartment but one that simply could not hold kids. It felt cramped just as our offspring popped out.

    There’s also one often-unrecognized advantage to our suburbia: a stronger feeling of neighborhood. Germany is a country of renters. It can be fairly alienating when the residents have little vested interest in where they live. A lot of rental apartments are in buildings that are anything but charming. Here in the suburbs of Germany almost everybody owns their own home. One street is actually named Eigenheimstraße, which translates to Privately-owned-home Street. It is an indication of the pride that Germans have in being able to say that a house belongs to them. They also lovingly tend their yards and fill them with garden gnomes – some harmless, some borderline obscene – and other bric-a-brac that fills countless yards across the urban expanses of America.

    Then there are the schools. The school system here in Germany is fairly uniform with secondary schools more or less standardized. Performance at the elementary school level is vital: children are clearly, quickly and brutally sorted here. At the age of ten, the teachers decide if a child is going to go to college, vocational school or rot in the festering hell of the Hauptschule. The latter is nothing more than a storage facility for tomorrow’s losers.

    We moved to make sure that our neighborhood was mainly German. We wanted to make sure that our children were comfortable with the language and they needed friends who spoke German to feel that way. Most immigrant children fail for the simple reason that they don’t speak German at home, and in pre-school most of their friends speak their parents’ native language as well. This means that they speak Turkish or Russian well but can barely express themselves in German. This then puts them at a disadvantage when working their way through the school system. They have to take remedial language courses. The suburbs allow them to avoid all that.

    The last reason is a place to park our cars. Germans love cars. They love engineering and are very proud of their car industry. They design cars that are the epitome of luxury and performance. Most Germans do not drive cars like this, yet stubbornly continue to own cars despite the government’s multiple efforts to make it too expensive. We pay hefty gas taxes in an effort to fight the “Green House effect,” but most of us feel that it’s just an excuse for the government to steal our money in order to pay for its bloated welfare system.

    Car-ownership in Europe is almost at American levels and Europeans, despite the much-ballyhooed efforts to introduce bikes in Paris, will continue to drive. As in America, the anti-car and anti-suburban ideologues are loud and active, but as long as people prize security, privacy, space and mobility, it’s likely Europe’s version of the suburban American dream will continue to thrive for years ahead.

    Kirk Rogers resides in Bubenreuth on the outer edges of Nuremberg and teaches languages and Amercan culture at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg’s Institut für Fremdsprachen und Auslandskunde. He has been living in Germany for about ten years now due to an inexplicable fascination with German culture.