New Geography

Category: Urban Issues

  • Despite Obama’s Policies, The Rust Belt’s Revival Could Save His Campaign

    Barack Obama’s political base always has been more “creative class” than working class—and his policies have favored that base, seeming to cater to energized issue and identity constituencies including African-Americans, Hispanics, gays, and greens, often at the expense of blue-collar workers.

    Yet improving conditions for those workers—particularly in the industrial heartland—could save his flagging presidency.

    The industrial zone’s four key states—Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—constitute the most critically contested territory in this year’s contest. Fifty-four electoral votes are at play here, with Pennsylvania’s 20 votes alone equaling all those at stake in the much-ballyhooed battleground of the Intermountain West (Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico).

    The Midwest is also home to the two states with the biggest drops in unemployment over the past two years. Michigan leads the way with an almost five percentage point drop, while Ohio comes in second with a nearly three–point decline. Other key Great Lakes battlegrounds—Wisconsin, Indiana and arguably Missouri—have also seen two-point drops in their unemployment numbers.

    “Rust Belt” no longer seems like a pejorative, as the northern industrial states now boast unemployment rates well below those in once-booming states including California, Nevada, Florida, and South Carolina.

    In the last two years the nation has added more than 400,000 manufacturing jobs, led by states in the upper Midwest. Between 2010 and 2011, Michigan led the nation by creating 25,000 new industrial jobs with a heady 5 percent growth rate second only to Oklahoma. Wisconsin came in second with 15,000 new positions, and a growth rate of more than 3 percent.

    These gains may not come to close to making up the losses suffered over the past decade, but the growth is encouraging. Manufacturing employment brings higher wages to regional economies. In the Cincinnati area, the average factory job pays $61,000 a year—$15,000 more than the city’s average wage. This creates an outsized impact on the rest of the economy, from housing and retail to demand for business services. There are already significant shortages of skilled workers such as welders and machinists.

    Midwestern employers are projecting an 18.5% jump—the largest of any region—in the number of college graduates that will be hired this year.

    The new industrial economy creates considerable demand for those who can fill STEM (science, technology, education, and mathematics related jobs). Between 2009 and 2011, Michigan enjoyed the second strongest rate of STEM growth in the nation, just behind Washington, D.C.

    Much of what generated the heartland recovery—and much of what could slow or even reverse it—lies outside of the president’s control. But if the momentum holds through November, the political winds there will be at Obama’s back, helping him sell Great Lakes voters on the idea that the nation is moving in the right direction under his leadership. The key here lies with the revived auto industry.

    Obama’s “decision to rescue GM and Chrysler was exceedingly popular in auto manufacturing dependent states like Michigan and Ohio,” says former Michigan Democratic Party chair Morley Winograd. “The rise in manufacturing employment since has buoyed housing prices, boosted workers’ morale, and allowed Obama, in these states anyway, to be able to claim he delivered on the campaign’s promise of hope and change. "

    Mitt Romney is now effectively even in the polls in Michigan (one of his three “home” states), but he may have trouble explaining his opposition to the auto bailouts if the economic tide is rising.

    “Obama will win Michigan in a walk, “ predicts Winograd. “Outside of a nostalgic visit to his boyhood home, Romney won’t be seen in the state after Labor Day.”

    One state both candidates are sure to spend time in is Ohio, which has already emerged once again as a bellwether in the race.

    Rick Platt, an industrial development official in Newark, an industrial city of 50,000 in the central part of the state, sees the Ohio race as a struggle between “two narratives” about Obama.

    The first is the positive one, a reflection of industrial gains of more than 10,000 jobs last year and falling unemployment. The other narrative builds around fear over a second Obama term.

    Those concerns are especially pronounced in traditional swing regions like the Utica Shale in the eastern part of Ohio and the coal-producing swaths of western Pennsylvania (nearly half of the businesses in the booming gas and oil extraction field are based in the industrial heartland) that have long been resentful of Washington regulators. Business owners are concerned—as are many of their employees—that a second Obama term could mean the EPA shutting down the nascent natural gas boom that’s begun to generate both energy and high-wage industrial jobs. Some businesses have postponed investment due to uncertainty about the election and the prospect of aggressive regulation.

    “There’s a lot of things in play,” says Platt, who has been active in Republican politics. Not surprisingly, he credits much of the region’s recovery to the economic policy of Republican governors like John Kasich in Ohio, Michigan’s Rick Snyder, and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker—all states he notes that are lapping Illinois.  The Land of Lincoln, Obama’s Democrat-controlled home state, suffers the region’s highest unemployment rate and is competing with California for the nation’s worst credit rating. “It’s not clear right now which of the two narratives will win out.”

    The health of the manufacturing economy may prove even more important to the president’s reelection than the Dow Jones index. If industrial growth softens or goes into reverse—for instance, if Europe’s economic troubles cross the Atlantic—the Midwest will feel the effects first.

    And if the Rust Belt suffers, Obama’s path to a second term gets that much tougher.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and contributing editor to the City Journal in New York. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.

    This piece originally appeared in The Daily Beast.

    Oklahoma City photo by BigStockPhoto.com.

  • The Collapse of Chicago Media

    When the satirical humor weekly The Onion announced it was moving its editorial staff from New York to Chicago it was considered quite a coup by boosters of the Windy City. Yet the hoopla surrounding revealed more about Chicago’s decline as a media center than any significant uptick. This includes news of a staff rebellion at the Onion in which writers attempted to scotch the move, with some ultimately deciding not to come. The strong celebration of a relatively small relocation in the grand scheme of things also shows a city looking hard for good media news where there has been so much bad recently.

    The biggest blow of the all has been the end of the Oprah Winfrey show and her departure for Los Angeles to start a new network. She was the one legitimate mega-star who came from Chicago and built an empire recognizably Chicago-based. When she left, her network, which has struggled to obtain distribution and viewers, carried a Rosie O’Donnell talk show based in Chicago that ultimately folded as well. Similarly, Playboy, another iconic Chicago media brand, also departed for LA.

    Some of this reflects national trends that have led to a greater concentration of media in New York and, to some extent, Washington. All across America, local media has struggled. The Tribune, Sun-Times, and alt-weekly Chicago Reader all went bankrupt, and while they continue to publish, they have become in many respects shadows of their former selves. New mayor Rahm Emanuel, while still engaging with local media, has frequently decided to bypass it, going directly to major national media to get the city’s story out. For example, he hosted New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, resulting in a fawning profile.

    Daley also had occasional good luck with the national media, getting glowing stories in publications like the Economist and the New Yorker. Many of these read like classic Sunday travel section pieces in their boosterism. One possible reason for that is that they are travel pieces. Chicago never had a huge number of national bureaus, and the number has shrunk in the past few years because of the difficulty in supporting a national footprint generally. For example, the Washington Post closed all of its bureaus, and the Chicago bureau was a casualty. Today most national news outlets don’t have a boots on the ground perspective of the city, and thus are open to being spun by clever locals.

    This lack of out of town and foreign media means that what coverage Chicago does get is often positive, but the flip side is that Chicago doesn’t have a built in platform for getting its message out nationally or globally. New York is America’s media center. DC, LA, and the Bay Area all have a robust out of town media presence because of the industries based there (government, entertainment, and tech respectively). They have a megaphone to the world that Chicago doesn’t. That’s perhaps one reason Emanuel made what many consider an ill-advised play for the NATO summit: it was a rare opportunity to showcase Chicago to global journalists.

    Chicago also falls short in new media. In many cities, the decline of the daily paper has been offset by a robust new media infrastructure. This includes sites like Crosscut in Seattle or MinnPost in the Twin Cities.  Major national sites like Gawker or the Huffington Post have tended to be based in traditional media center like New York or Washington. Chicago has been curiously absent here. An attempt at a non-profit online new site, the Chicago News Cooperative, failed due to financial difficulties, despite seven figures in funding from the MacArthur Foundation and a contract with the New York Times.  

    Where major platforms have arisen in Chicago, they’ve often left in order to pursue their ambitions. For example, music site Pitchfork, which started out of a music festival in Chicago, moved its editorial staff to Brooklyn. Statistical journalist Nate Silver likewise moved to New York.

    The challenge facing media and journalists in Chicago was best perhaps summed up by JC Gabel, a die hard fan of the city.  He relaunched the historic Chicagoan magazine in an effort to rebuild the sort of infrastructure the city once had. He wrote in the launch issue:

    By all accounts, it should be an exciting time to live and work in Chicago. But there is little well-paid creative work available for the hungry freelancers—the writers, artists, photographers, editors and designers—who call Chicago home. Locally, what work there is pays a pittance; nothing that could sustain the kind of long-form storytelling we were discussing.

    This might help explain the mass exodus from Chicago of creative minds of our generation throughout the last few years. Opportunities on either coast—or overseas—eventually come calling, and although they retain pride in their erstwhile Midwestern hearts, they cease to be Chicagoans by physical address.

    Stop Smiling, the magazine I co-edited and co-published for more than a decade from Chicago, ultimately couldn’t have made it without also keeping a New York office and a strong West Coast presence. By and large, a majority of stories were executed in Los Angeles or New York, and all the money we raised through ad sales came right out of the agency machines on either coast. But Chicago was always our inspiration, a place where we retired to—first to brood, then to get our work done.

    I know firsthand how difficult it is to carve out a national niche audience in a city that many still consider fly-over country, despite its rich history and inventive spirit.

    Part of the challenge for Chicago lies in the ongoing changes being wrought by the internet and globalization. These are both spreading around some activities and ever more concentrating others. Media is among those undergoing further centralization into the handful of fortress hubs, notably New York and DC. This has hit Chicago, always a second-tier media center, hard.

    But the good news is that Chicago is full of talented folks like Gabel with a passion for their city. Chicago actually does have the critical mass of talent to support a far stronger media ecosystem than it has today. And with the low barriers in the internet age, there’s no insurmountable obstacles to making that happen. But clearly anyone trying to make a go of it in media in Chicago today is swimming upstream against a fast flowing current of decline.

    Aaron M. Renn is an independent writer on urban affairs and the founder of Telestrian, a data analysis and mapping tool. His writings appear at The Urbanophile.

    Tribune tower photo by Bigstockphoto.com.

  • Will Servants’ Quarters Come Back, Too?

    As the Great Recession enters its fourth summer, America continues to separate into the multiple economic strands that characterized an earlier day. Our cities, built mostly since the 1930s, poorly accommodate this lack of unity, and will require radical revision if our class divisions continue to deepen.

    Back in the era of the streetcar suburbs, at the turn of the 20th century, we also experienced a tiered, multiple economy. The post-Victorian prosperous middle class had carved itself new residential beltways around inner core cities – the so-called “suburbs”. The look and the form of these old residential beltways is fondly remembered by some, so much so that they are imitated in some new developments today. Tall houses tight to the street with service alleys and front porches marked America’s urban form in this era, and can be seen in much of the literature promoting traditional town planning.

    Examining the original homes more closely yields some surprises, for they were radically different than our homes of today. The differences aren’t apparent from the outside, which is perhaps not important to the planners who wish to reinstitute this kind of design. Turn-of-the-century houses accommodated two economies by dedicating the first two floors to the middle-class family who owned the home (usually white), while the attic or basement had a separate entry and stair to the kitchen, dedicated to the staff (usually from an immigrant or ethnic minority group).

    This two-tiered economy was considered natural and acceptable at the time. Domestic labor was an inexpensive and ingrained part of the American middle class experience. The staff often came and went via the service alleys, and the streetcars were often built to connect the housekeepers, butlers, and cooks to the city, while father commuted into town on his own.

    Cities were also two-tiered, with bands of low-income service housing interwoven between more prosperous neighborhoods. Winter Park, Florida, where I live and work, is a good example of this. Tony Park Avenue is a shopping street that runs north-south through the city beside a pretty chain of lakes. Surrounding those lakes are houses built as second homes for wealthy families from Chicago and elsewhere in the Midwest.

    On the west side of Park Avenue, within a short walk of those homes, sits one of those bands: Hannibal Square, a neighborhood where many of the domestic service workers lived. Tiny homes on 25 foot lots still exist, sandwiched together, out of sight of the promenading Winter Park set across the railroad tracks. This city form was repeated with many variations throughout the South. The word “segregation” comes closest to identifying this double economy, with all the inequality that it implies.

    In Winter Park’s post-World War II era, as Florida boomed, many of the grand old bungalows with attic apartments emptied out, and were sold to owners looking for permanent, year-round residences. This new generation used these structures differently. A combination of upward mobility, opportunity, and a new sense of unity in the decade of conformity made it unfashionable to have servants in one’s own home. By 1954, separate but equal was banished forever in schools. Housing was undergoing a similar evolution. Throughout the 1960s the two-tiered home was phased out, and many thought staff quarters and the upstairs-downstairs subculture was gone forever.

    Economic pressure, meanwhile, on neighborhoods like Hannibal Square became fierce. Original residents, now retired, saw their home values appreciate. A few sold out – much to the chagrin of their children, who felt a neighborhood allegiance and resented the gentrification and loss of identity of their community. Cities like St. Petersburg, Florida, that have a similar geography to Winter Park, are still experiencing severe strains in race relations as they cope with this dark vestige of a two-tiered economy.

    Yet by the turn of this century our housing forms had shown measurable progress indeed. Segregated staff quarters were largely things of the past. Suburban residents, whether from Hannibal Square or upper Winter Park, were competing in the same large job marketplace, freed from the caste system of servant and served.

    Nostalgia for the urban form that flourished in a two-tiered economy stems from a romantic notion about the simplicity of these times, and, at least for the prosperous, life certainly was simple. But adapting the architecture of 1905 to the residential market of the start of this century has been a selective process.

    Shady, narrow streets, white picket fences, and front porches where neighbors could sit and wave to passers-by are trademarks of yesteryear which developers — and buyers — wanted to see replicated. Where servant’s quarters used to be, interior square footage was regained for home theaters, home gyms, game rooms, play rooms, and family rooms, now that a domestic servant was not required. These rooms respond to our contemporary culture’s increasingly private, plugged-in world, but are at odds with the outward urban form that emulates an “eyes on the street” culture swept away by the car. Home prices skyrocketed partly because buyers were demanding the interior amenities that they craved, as well as exterior amenities that they were being taught to appreciate.

    Meanwhile, our economy was dis-unifying into strands that economist Paul Krugman so aptly nicknamed The Great Unraveling. We thought we were progressing, but it is a bitter truth that the world can, after all, regress.

    Should this multi-tiered economy harden into a physical form, it could likely resemble that of the previous century, a form that we thought we had put away for good. It would be sadly ironic if neo-traditional neighborhoods, created to resemble the forms of the old two-tiered economy, are to now be remodeled to accommodate the “new” two-tiered economy.

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

    Flickr Photo by Bob Carney. Neo-traditional homes – large homes on very small lots in Urbana, Maryland

  • Thunder On The Great Plains: A Written-Off Region Enjoys Revival

    They may not win their first championship against Miami’s evil empire, but the Oklahoma City Thunder have helped to put a spotlight on what may well be the most surprising success story of 21st century America: the revival of the Great Plains. Once widely dismissed as the ultimate in flyover country, the Plains states have outperformed the national average for the past decade by virtually every key measure of vitality — from population, income and GDP growth to unemployment — and show no sign of slowing down.

    It’s a historic turnaround. For decades, the East Coast media has portrayed the vast region between Texas and the Dakotas as a desiccated landscape of emptying towns, meth labs and right-wing “clingers.” Just five years ago, The New York Times described the Plains as “not far from forsaken.”

    Many in the media and academia embraced Deborah and Frank Popper’s notion that the whole region should be abandoned for “a Buffalo commons.” The Great Plains, the East Coast academics concluded, represents “the largest, longest-running agricultural and environmental miscalculation in American history” and boldly predicted the area would “become almost totally depopulated.”

    Yet a funny thing happened on the way to oblivion. Rising commodity prices, the tapping of shale gas and oil formations and an unheralded shift of industry and people into the interior has propelled the Plains economy through the Great Recession.

    Since 2000, the Plains’ population has grown 14%, well above the national rate of 9%. This has been driven by migration from the coasts, particularly Southern California, to the region’s cities and towns. Contrary to perceptions of the area as a wind-swept old-age home, demographer Ali Modarres has found that the vast majority of the newcomers are between 20 and 35.

    Oklahoma City epitomizes these trends. Over the last decade, the city’s population expanded 14%, roughly three times as fast as the San Francisco area and more than four times the rate of growth of New York or Los Angeles. Between 2010 and 2011 OKC ranked 10th out of the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan areas in terms of rate of net growth.

    Nothing more reflects the changing fortunes of Oklahoma City than the strong net migration from many coastal communities, notably Los Angeles and Riverside, a historic reversal of the great “Okie” migration of the 1920s and 1930s. In the past decade, over 20,000 more Californians have migrated to Oklahoma than the other way around. OKC has even experienced a small net migration from the Heat’s South Florida stomping grounds.

    The city’s transformation from a cow town into an attractive, modern metropolis has been fueled by some $2 billion in public investment and over $5 billion in private investment, says Roy Williams, president of the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce. Besides the arena for the Thunder, the city has engineered a successful riverfront development known as Bricktown, fostered a growing arts scene and become more ethnically diverse, largely as a result of immigration from Mexico.

    This pattern of revived urbanization can be seen in other Plains cities. World-class art museums grace Ft. Worth’s Cultural District, and downtown in Omaha, Neb., has become a lively venue bristling with revelers on weekends. Even downtown Fargo, N.D., now boasts a boutique hotel, youth-oriented bars, interesting restaurants and a small, but vibrant arts scene.

    Great Plains cities are doing well, however, predominantly due to their strong record of economic growth. Over a decade in which most large metropolitan areas lost jobs, Ft. Worth, Dallas, Oklahoma City and Omaha have created employment. Unlike many Bush-era boom towns, such as Las Vegas, Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif., or the major Florida cities, the Plains did not hemorrhage jobs during the Great Recession.

    The Plains states enjoy some of the lowest unemployment rates in the country. There were seven states with unemployment of 5% or less in April; four are on the Plains: North Dakota, with the nation’s lowest jobless rate at 3%, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Oklahoma.

    This is partly due to a booming energy industry. As U.S. oil and gas production has surged over the past decade, the Plains’ share has grown from roughly a third to nearly 45%. The biggest two gainers, Texas and Oklahoma, together boosted their energy employment by 220,000.

    But the Great Plains’ economic dynamism extends well beyond energy. The region’s farms and ranches cover an area exceeding 500 million acres,or over 790,000 square miles — larger than Mexico — and account for roughly a quarter of the nation’s agricultural production. These farms have benefited from the long-term increase in food commodity prices — notably wheat, corn, soybeans — and record exports. Since 2007 the Plains share of food shipments abroad has surged from 20% to nearly 25%.

    At the same time, the region’s industrial sector, notes research by Praxis Strategy Group’s Mark Schill, has withstood the recession better than the rest of the nation. Never a center of unionized mass manufacturing, the region has become a location of choice for expanding industries, in part due to low costs, cheap energy and a favorable regulatory environment.

    They know all about this in Oklahoma . Last year the Sooner State led the nation in industrial growth. One major coup: a large Boeing facility moved last year from California to OKC. The Dakotas and Nebraska also sit in the top ranks of producers of new industrial jobs. Since 2007, the Plains states have boosted their share of U.S. manufactured good from 19% to 21%.

    More surprising still has been the region’s surge in employment in jobs related to science, technology, engineering and math. This has been spearheaded, of course, by Texas, but most other Plains states — North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma — also have enjoyed well above average tech job growth. North Dakota, remarkably, now boasts the second-highest percentage of people 25 to 44 with a post-secondary education, behind only Massachusetts; it also has one of the highest rates of high-tech startups in the nation.

    Given their generally strong state budgets, the Plains states have continued to pour more resources per capita into university-related research than their counterparts elsewhere. North Dakota ranks number one here, but South Dakota, Oklahoma, Kansas, Montana and Texas all rank in the top 10.

    None of this suggests that the Plains are ready to bid for primacy as high-tech centers with California or Massachusetts, or Ohio and Michigan as the country’s industrial bastions. For all their improved amenities, Omaha, Ft. Worth or Oklahoma City seem unlikely to surpass New York City as the nation’s cultural, restaurant or financial capital in our lifetimes.

    Yet it seems clear that the region, long dismissed as irrelevant, will play a much larger role in the nation’s economic future. Like the young Thunder, the people of the Plains now have a prairie wind at their back.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and contributing editor to the City Journal in New York. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.

    This piece originally appeared in Forbes.

    Oklahoma City photo by BigStockPhoto.com.

  • The Evolving Urban Form: Tokyo

    Tokyo is the ultimate in urbanization, being nearly one-half larger than any other urban area in the world. Further, Tokyo has retained its position as the largest urban area in the world for longer than any period since London’s approximately 100 year run from the early 1800s to the early 1900s. During the 1920s, New York became the largest, but was displaced by Tokyo in 1955.

    Tokyo became the world’s largest urban area by adding more than 20 million people between 1955 and 2000, adding more people than lived in any other urban area in the world during that period. Even with its now slow growth, Tokyo seems likely to remain number one for two decades or more. However, if the breakneck growth of urban areas like Jakarta, Delhi and Manila continues, Tokyo could relinquish its position by 2030, especially if Tokyo begins losing population, joining Japan in that country’s accelerating rate of population decline as is projected (below). 

    The Tokyo region is much more than Tokyo proper (the "ku-area"). It includes Yokohama, which with 3.7 million people is larger than any suburb in the world except for Howrah in the Calcutta area. Kawasaki, between Tokyo and Yokohama has a population of 1.4 million, while Saitama, to the north has 1.2 million. Chiba, on the way to Narita International Airport, is home to nearly 1,000,000. There are multiple possible definitions of the Tokyo region. This article defines the Tokyo metropolitan area as Chiba, Kanagawa, Saitama and Tokyo prefectures (Note 1).

    Suburban Areas: Tokyo also has the largest suburban population of any metropolitan region in the world. Approximately 26.7 million, or 75 percent of the Tokyo region’s 35.4 million population lives in suburban areas. This is the largest expanse of suburbanization in the world. The suburban population increase since 1950 exceeds that of New York, Los Angeles, and Paris combined (Note 2).

    The Core

    Tokyo is unique in having abolished its core municipality. In 1943, the former city of Tokyo was combined with the prefecture of Tokyo. This area was also labeled the Tokyo "metropolis." (Note 3) The prefecture of Tokyo contained a number of additional municipalities, which were not impacted by the merger, while the former area of the city of Tokyo was directly administered by the prefecture. In the intervening decades, the former city has been reorganized into 23 wards (ku), which have obtained considerable self-government authority, emerging as the near equivalent of cities themselves.

    This "ku" area can be considered the historical core municipality. The 23 ku reached a peak population in 1965 of 8.893 million in 1965. In the next 30 years, the 23 ku sustained a population loss of more than 900,000, while the suburban areas were adding more than 20 million. The ku area exceeded its previous peak in the 2010 census, reaching 8.946 million, approximately 50,000 more than in 1965.

    Growth Trends:

    Census data indicates that in 1940, the core accounted for 53 percent of the region’s population. This dropped to 41 percent in 1950, with the largest share of war-time population losses in the ku area. The core gained back to 47 percent of the population in 1960. After that, nearly all growth was in the suburbs. Between 1950 and 2000, 87 percent of the population gain was in the suburbs. In the last decade, the suburbs share of growth dropped to 63 percent (Figure 1 and Table)

    Tokyo Metropolitan Region
    Population by Sector: 1920-2010
    Year Tokyo Region Former City of Tokyo Balance of Tokyo Prefecture Tokyo Prefecture Kanagawa Prefecture Saitama Prefecture Chiba Prefecture
    1920    7,678,000  2,173,000     1,526,000     3,699,000   1,323,000   1,320,000   1,336,000
    1930    9,958,000  1,995,000     3,414,000     5,409,000   1,620,000   1,459,000   1,470,000
    1940  12,740,000  6,779,000        576,000     7,355,000   2,189,000   1,608,000   1,588,000
    1950  13,051,000  5,385,000        893,000     6,278,000   2,488,000   2,146,000   2,139,000
    1955  15,424,000  6,969,000     1,068,000     8,037,000   2,919,000   2,263,000   2,205,000
    1960  17,864,000  8,310,000     1,374,000     9,684,000   3,443,000   2,431,000   2,306,000
    1965  21,017,000  8,893,000     1,976,000   10,869,000   4,431,000   3,015,000   2,702,000
    1970  24,113,000  8,787,000     2,621,000   11,408,000   5,472,000   3,866,000   3,367,000
    1975  27,042,000  8,647,000     3,027,000   11,674,000   6,398,000   4,821,000   4,149,000
    1980  28,697,000  8,349,000     3,269,000   11,618,000   6,924,000   5,420,000   4,735,000
    1985  30,273,000  8,354,000     3,475,000   11,829,000   7,432,000   5,864,000   5,148,000
    1990  31,796,000  8,164,000     3,692,000   11,856,000   7,980,000   6,405,000   5,555,000
    1995  32,577,000  7,968,000     3,806,000   11,774,000   8,246,000   6,759,000   5,798,000
    2000  33,413,000  8,130,408     3,928,592   12,059,000   8,490,000   6,938,000   5,926,000
    2005  34,472,000  8,490,000     4,081,000   12,571,000   8,791,000   7,054,000   6,056,000
    2010  35,618,000  8,946,000     4,213,000   13,159,000   9,048,000   7,195,000   6,216,000
    Data from Census of Japan

     

    Generally, however the last decade has been far better for the core than in any period since 1960. Over each of the last two five year census periods, the percentage growth in the core has been greater than that of the suburbs, which, examining data from Europe, United States, Canada, and elsewhere is quite unusual.

    Density Comparisons

    Tokyo is often portrayed as one of the world’s highest density urban areas. It is not. At a density of 11,300 per square mile (4,300 per square kilometer), Tokyo is less dense than London (13,700 & 5,300), one-sixth the density of Hong Kong (67,000 & 25,900) and one-tenth the density of Dhaka (115,000 & 44,400). There are two reasons for this:

    1. Tokyo does not have intensely dense central areas. The ku area has a density of 37,300 per square kilometer (14,400 per square kilometer). This is well below the densities of Manhattan (69,000 & 27,000) and the ville de Paris (51,000 & 21,000). Only one of the ku (Toshima) exceeds the density of Paris.
    2. Further, according to the Japan House and Land Survey of 2008, Tokyo has a large stock of detached houses, by definition lower density. Nearly 45 percent of the Tokyo region’s housing is detached. One-third of the dwellings within 30 kilometers (18 miles) of the core are detached. This figure rises to more than 60 percent outside 30 kilometers from the core and 85 percent between 60 and 70 kilometers (37-43 kilometers) from the core (Figure 2).

    Transport

    Tokyo is a transit oriented metropolis, with by far the highest transit usage in the world. In 2007, 65 percent of trips within a 50 mile radius were by mass transit. Overall transit usage is (passenger miles or kilometers) in the Tokyo region is approximately double that of all combined usage in the United States and nearly 10 times that of Paris, according to the Millennium Cities Data base. At the same time, one-way work trip travel times are reported to be the highest in the high income world, at a median of 45.9 minutes (Note 4) for main earners. Work trip travel times from residences are the shortest from the most remote residential locations (60-70 kilometers from the core) at a median of 26 minutes and at 29 minutes from residences between 50 and 60 kilometers from the core. Median travel times are 36 minutes one way within 10 kilometers of the core (Figure 3). The longest commutes are from residences located between 10 and 50 kilometers from the core (6 to 31 miles), which peak at 54.5 minutes each way between 20 and 30 kilometers (12 and 18 kilometers) from the core.

    Toward a City State?

    Japan has been centralizing for decades, principally as rural citizens have moved to the largest metropolitan areas. Since 1950, Tokyo has routinely attracted much more than its proportionate share of population growth. In the last two census periods, all Japan’s growth has been in the Tokyo metropolitan area as national population growth has stagnated. Between 2000 and 2005, the Tokyo region added 1.1 million new residents, while the rest of the nation lost 200,000 residents. The imbalance became even starker between 2005 and 2010, as Tokyo added 1.1 million new residents, while the rest of the nation lost 900,000. (Figure 4)

    Eventually, Japan’s imploding population will finally impact Tokyo. Population projections indicate that between 2010 and 2035, Tokyo will start losing population. But Tokyo’s loss, at 2.1 million, would be a small fraction of the 16.5 million loss projected for the rest of the nation (Figure 5). If that occurs, Tokyo will account for 30 percent of Japan’s population, compared to 16 percent in 1950. With Japan’s rock-bottom fertility rate, a declining Tokyo will dominate an even larger share of the country’s declining    population and economy in the coming decades.

    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.”

    Photo: Yamanote Loop Train, Tokyo Station (by author)

    Note 1: The government defines a Tokyo major metropolitan area, using smaller area data. However, insufficient data is readily available for this article.

    Note 2: These three urban areas have the largest suburban populations in the high income world outside Tokyo and Osaka-Kobe Kyoto.

    Note 3: The term "Tokyo metropolis," has misled any number of analysts to believe that it means the Tokyo metropolitan area. In fact, it means only the prefecture of Tokyo, which is only one of the from one of the from four to eight prefectures (part or all) that can be considered a part of the metropolitan area, depending on the definition. Thus any comparison of the "Tokyo metropolis" with anything else in metropolitan in the world is best dismissed out of hand.

    Note 4: Based on an analysis of the detailed data, it is estimated that the one-way average work trip travel time is more than 48 minutes.

  • Historic Heritage of the Rust Belt

    I’ve been spending a lot of time in Ravenna recently. No, not the town in Italy with its early Christian buildings and glittering mosaics. I mean Ravenna, Ohio, a small industrial city of some 12,000 people near Akron. 

    Along with Akron and Cleveland, Ravenna flourished as an industrial center in the early 20th century.  In recent decades, however, its economy, like most of northeastern Ohio’s, has been sluggish at best, and the town hasn’t changed much physically for many years except for occasional demolitions at the center and new subdivisions at the periphery. News from Ravenna rarely makes it even into the Cleveland papers. It is certainly not known for its architecture.  It has some perfectly good late 19th and early 20th century houses and commercial buildings, but none of these is likely to draw tourists.

    One of the very few really remarkable things about Ravenna is a 150-foot high flagpole erected in 1893.  Almost absurdly high for the scale of the city, it is a fascinating product of late 19th century American engineering ingenuity and vernacular design as well as a reflection of patriotism and civic pride. Standing right in the center of the city, it is arguably the most notable monument not just of Ravenna but for miles around.

    Unfortunately, township trustees now plan to demolish it.


    Image:  Ravenna flagpole viewed from East Main Street, Ravenna Ohio.  Photo by Tom Riddle, 2012

    The battle over the Ravenna flagpole says a good deal about the fate of the great manufacturing belt that stretches along the southern edge of the Great Lakes. Once one of the greatest manufacturing regions of the world, it has struggled mightily since World War II as aging infrastructure, obsolete industrial facilities, a gap in educational attainment, and non-competitive wages have left it fighting to find its place in the late 20th, not to mention the 21st century economy.

    In many ways Ravenna is a microcosm of the larger region.  In Ravenna, as throughout the region, economic stagnation has taken a toll on the city’s built environment. Main Street has vacant storefronts and empty lots where stores used to stand. Some of the housing stock has started to deteriorate. 

    The biggest change in Ravenna, as in most Rust Belt cities, though, has been the transformation in the industrial landscape. In city after city from Duluth, Minnesota, to Rochester, New York, icons of American industry have vanished. The Homestead Steel works outside Pittsburgh has been largely demolished, replaced by a shopping mall. The same fate has befallen the LTV Steel plant in Cleveland and the great Western Electric complex on the boundary between Chicago and Cicero.


    Image:  Hawthorne Works Shopping Center in front of remaining tower of the Western Electric Hawthorne Works in Cicero Illinois

    Some of this demolition was necessary, even welcome, since many of these factories were located amidst densely populated neighborhoods and constituted a logistical and environmental nightmare. But much of the demolition has been motivated primarily by a desire to remove from sight embarrassing reminders of a previous era. Demolishing the factory, city fathers figure, better allows potential buyers of the site to appreciate a wonderful riverside location or proximity to downtown and the endless opportunities to build something new. 

    What has replaced those grand temples of industry, however, has usually been underwhelming, with late 19th century brick loft buildings reduced to rubble to make way for cheap one-story strip malls that neither employ a lot of workers nor generate a lot of tax revenue. The old urban identity has been destroyed, but there has been very little to take its place. 

    The process is akin to the efforts of men and women of a certain age who resort  to plastic surgery, hair implants and clothes more appropriate for a younger generation. These cosmetic efforts rarely fool anyone.  In fact, what they most clearly convey is a loss of confidence.  

    Fortunately there is a growing awareness that wholesale demolition of industrial fabric does not necessarily   prepare cities for their post-industrial future. This movement to save industrial heritage came into its own first in Britain, not surprisingly, since Britain was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. For decades now important eighteenth and early nineteenth century industrial sites have been preserved, often as historic sites and tourist destinations.


    Image: Ironbridge in Coalbrookdale, Shropshire, England, named a World Heritage Site in 1986

    A similar thing has happened in the United States.


    Image:  Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Slater Mill, started 1793, now a National Historic Landmark.

     

     Old loft buildings have become residential condominiums, even in some rather unlikely places.

    Image: River Mill Condominiums along the Fox River in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, opened in 1986 in a building constructed for the Paine Lumber Company


    Image: Quaker Square, Akron, a hotel developed in 1980 in concrete silos built by the Quaker Oats Company in the 1930s and now owned by the University of Akron.

    The preservation of the industrial landscape that cannot be easily reused has been more problematic.   Even so, there has been a movement to preserve some of the most important examples both as testimony to the industrial heritage of their regions and as a way of showcasing the regions in which they are located, providing amenities for the citizens and attracting tourists.

    Germany has been a leader in this movement. The Voelklinger Huette outside Saarbrucken preserves an entire complex intact as a monument to the industrial heritage of the area.  Even more spectacular has been the transformation of large pieces of the Ruhrgebiet, the heart of Germany’s pre-World War II heavy industry, into a set of imaginative parks, museums and other institutions.


    Voelklingen Huette (Voelklingen Iron Works) near Saarbrucken, Germany. A UNESCO World Heritage site and museum.


    Duisburg Nord Landschaftspark (landscape park) in Duisburg, Germany, a coal and steel plant transformed into a public park according to designs done in 1991 by architect Peter Latz who retained as many of the old structures as possible.

    Of course, the Ravenna flagpole lacks the grandeur or the historical significance of these places. But it is an important historic relic in its own right and arguably as important for Ravenna as the great industrial complex at Duisburg is to the Ruhrgebiet.

    Erected in 1893 by the Van Dorn Iron Works of Cleveland, the flagpole was one of at least four similar or identical structures erected in the northeast of the United States. It appears that only the one at Palmyra, New York, still stands. Recently refurbished, the Palmyra pole seems to have been built as a mast for displaying banners of political candidates. 


    Image:  Post card of Main Street Ravenna showing the flagpole in front of the courthouse.


    Image:  Palmyra, New York, flagpole, fabricated, like the Ravenna pole, by the Van Dorn Iron Works of Cleveland. It has been recently restored.

    These flagpoles reflect late 19th century American engineering ingenuity. Earlier poles had usually been of wood. They frequently snapped in high winds and had to be replaced. When the Ravennans needed to replace their pole they used a new and improved technology available to them.

    The technology, involving the use of latticed steel boxes, was developed for the railroad and construction industry. The individual elements were not new. Steel had been replacing wrought and cast iron for a number of years. Truss bridges and other constructions using similar structural technologies had been well developed earlier in the century. Inexpensive steel and the techniques of constructing large structures out of it using rivets rather than bolts, however, was new. The technology was ideally suited to the construction of large structures of all kinds, notably bridges.

     

    The same qualities of strength and light weight that made it ideal for bridges also made it perfect for towers. All over Europe and America engineers used latticed towers not just for flagpoles, for but lighthouses, look-out stations, electric light towers and a host of other uses.


    Image:  Electric Light Tower, constructed in 1881 at the corner of Market and Santa Clara streets in San Jose, California to house arc lights intended to illuminate downtown.  It collapsed in December 1915.

     
    Image: A surviving “Moonlight Tower” in Austin, Texas.  Manufactured by the Fort Wayne Electrical Company for use in Detroit, 31 of the towers were purchased from the city of Detroit and re-erected in Austin.  In 1970 the remaining 17 towers were listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The city spent $1.3 million to dismantle and restore these towers in the early 1990s.  



    Image: Villingen, Germany, Aussichtsturm (Observation Tower) 1888. This 30 meter high tower, erected on a hill outside the village of Villingen, provided views over the surrounding countryside as far as the Alps.

    The grandest example of this structural technique is, of course, the Eiffel Tower, built for the Paris exposition of 1889. Although larger in scale than any of the other examples, it used many of the same materials and construction methods as the Ravenna flagpole. Initially heavily criticized by much of the artistic elite of the day as being essentially useless and much too big, the Eiffel Tower soon came to symbolize Paris to the world. No one would imagine demolishing it today.


    Image:  Paris, Eiffel Tower built for the 1889 Exposition. It reaches a height of  1015 feet using latticed steel elements and rivets similar to those used on the Ravenna flagpole

    The Ravenna pole, erected four years later was built as a monument to national pride and an affirmation of the place of the city of Ravenna in the larger American republic. The pole also had a more local significance. It would allow Ravennans for once to greatly outstrip their neighbors and rivals in Kent, 10 miles to the west. In fact, at the time of its completion, the pole must have been one of the taller flagpoles in America and one of the taller structures anywhere outside the largest cities.  Of course, by now it has been dwarfed, particularly in the last couple of decades when a new battle for flagpole superlatives has broken out, curiously enough this time in some of the most out-of-the-way corners of the globe.

    National Flagpole at Baku, Azerbaijan, at 545 ft. flagpole, briefly the world’s highest flagpole before being eclipsed by one in Tajikistan. Both were built by a company in San Diego.

    Even if now dwarfed by flagpoles in Azerbaijan, North Korea, and Tajikistan, the Ravenna flagpole still reflects the pride of a struggling industrial city. It has required periodic maintenance and has gotten into the news occasionally when some inebriated citizen has tried to climb it. However, for most Ravennans it has come to be so much taken for granted that citizens were stunned when they heard that the  Trustees of the Township of Ravenna, the body that has jurisdiction, decided that it was a legal liability, a drain on township resources and should be demolished. In response, a group of local citizens has stepped in and is fighting to maintain the pole, raising money toward its repair and trying to see if ownership can be transferred to a governmental entity or group of entities willing to maintain it.

    In one way, this is a fight about intangibles like local pride, patriotism, a desire to maintain historic heritage and a sense of place. Some people write off these sentiments as mere nostalgia. But preservation of this kind can have tangible consequences. No one is claiming that preserving the pole will generate vast new tourist revenues or solve basic economic problems. But the movement to save the flagpole rests on the notion that stewardship of historic heritage can play an important role in reminding everyone of the specific qualities of a place that made it successful in the past – and perhaps can be built upon to craft a better future.

    Robert Bruegmann is professor emeritus of Art history, Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

  • Cities, Cars, People: Is Changing Car Use a Function of New Urbanism?

    One cornerstone for urban designers and planners seeking to transform the polycentric or suburban city of the 20th Century into something resembling the high density city of the 19th was a cross-city comparison by Newman and Kenworthy and successors. [1]   They argued that this proved automobile dependence is a function of city density.  It followed that regulating for greater residential densities and increasing the capacity of public transport systems to avoid the congestion that would follow if people continued to drive themselves would improve the sustainability of cities.

    Of course, any comparison with the overcrowded and unhealthy cities of an earlier century is unfair: today’s density is achieved with higher standards of private and public space, and much enhanced transit and sanitation.  And many, probably the majority, of 21st century citizens in high income nations can escape the confines of the urban environment on occasional sojourns to country or coast (or beyond), unlike their 19th Century or developing world counterparts.  They can even find repose in the midst of 24/7 city hubbub in their own in-house media centres.

    But can we really build urban policy on the Newman and Kenworthy analysis?  Especially given evidence that car use is declining anyway?

    Questionable correlation
    There are still questions over the original analysis and it successors.  Cross-cultural effects, physical geography, differences in economic structure, incomes, wealth, and growth all intervene in the relationship between city density and car dependence.  And cause and effect are hard to pin down. 

    Perhaps more critical: the leap from observing relationships across cities at a point in time to regulating travel behaviour, housing ,and consumption choices into the future assumes that individual behaviour is a microcosm of collective behaviour. This fallacy of inference has long been recognised by the biological and sociological sciences.  And the likelihood of getting policy wrong by making such an assumption is far greater when dealing with populations of people, with their diverse circumstances, beliefs, values, and means, compared with, say, populations of penguins. 

    Is it this blind spot that has made it so much more difficult to get people out of their cars or their low density houses than anticipated by urban reformists?

    The city as a time warp
    One problem is that analyses of city density and car dependence are usually static.  Plotting urban form and transport consumption at a particular point in time – the mid/late 20th century in the Newman and Kenworthy case – embodies particular patterns of technology, wealth, and behaviour.  Consequently, their urban prescription is based implicitly on the 9 to 5 work day; single city centres that focus urban employment, exchange, and consumption; and the nuclear family with its distinctive housing and service demands. These are all urban artifacts that have been breaking down since the 1960s.

    But the times they are a-changing
    In a 2011 paper the authors acknowledge that things are changing as international evidence shows rates of car use beginning to decline in parts of the world.  A partial view of what they are changing from, though, sustains a deterministic explanation of the why and what they are changing to:

    “technological limits set by the inability of cars to continue causing urban sprawl within travel time budgets; the rapid growth in transit and re-urbanization which combine to cause exponential declines in car use; the reduction of car use by older people in cities and among younger people due to the emerging culture of urbanism and the growth in the price of fuel which underlies all the above factors”.[2]

    The view remains time-bound; even the reference to exponential decline is a simplistic inference of the relationship between public transport and car use taken from a cross section of cities in 1995. 

    Individual agency barely gets a mention.  Any description of an “emerging culture of urbanism” needs to be embedded in the reality of evolving patterns of wealth, income, and consumption and even in simple demographics to determine just how real and significant it is.

    Growing old and driving more
    What are the grounds for the claim that older people are reducing their car use, for example? I took a quick look at the evidence for New Zealand.  It is certainly not the case here.  The rate of growth in driving has been higher among older age groups than among younger – with decline most evident among the under 45s.  

    Is it so different in the other ageing societies from which Newman and Kenworthy draw their examples?

    Figure 1: Changes in Annual Driving Distance by Age, New Zealand 1990-2008

     

    Fewer kilometres doesn’t mean less dependence
    What does go a long way to explaining declining car travel in the aggregate is the fact that older people don’t drive as much younger people, and populations in western cities are simply getting older.  It’s simple maths – as the population ages car usage will go down, despite a greater propensity to drive among older cohorts. Again, look at the evidence from New Zealand:

    Figure 2: Automobile Dependence by Age Group, New Zealand 2004-2008

     

    Car usage appears to decline after age 44, rapidly after retirement age, 65. 

    Why does car use fall with age?
    There are a number of reasons why this may be so.  From 45 years on households have fewer transport-dependent children.  Mature families may have more localised social networks.  A greater share of recreation may be neighbourhood based.

    On retirement work trips disappear and incomes, discretionary dollars and consumption fall.  The capacity for more shared travel and trip planning increases as households age.  Diminished car use doesn’t necessarily mean that households are less automobile dependent.  They just doesn’t generate as much travel demand.

    These explanations don’t depend on particular urban designs.  Yet Newman and Kenworthy claim that diminished driving happens because “older people move back into cities from the suburbs”.  This is not consistent with the common observation of people’s preference to age in place.[3]  (For the New Zealand evidence, see my posting Ageing in the City).

    Moving into the centre – a one-way street?
    And their notion “the children growing up in the suburbs would begin flocking back into the cities rather than continuing the life of car dependence” rather simplifies a historically specific event: the transition of sons and daughters of the baby boomers from young adulthood, advanced education, and job seeking to the career and housing paths associated with their movement into more stable relationships.  As they age, it is highly likely that suburban preferences re-emerge, sustained by the capacity to purchase and operate a private vehicle.

    Generation X boosted inner city dwelling over the past two decades, and Generation Y will do so, to a lesser extent, for another decade.  The 15 to 24 year age group also coincides with the age of greatest automobile independence (illustrated for New Zealand in Figure 3).  But don’t expect this historically-specific phenomenon to sustain some sort of indefinite culture of city consolidation, and I wouldn’t bet the fiscal bank on expensive transit systems designed around the assumption that it will. 

    These are passing generations: their successors will be that much smaller and facing a somewhat different world.[4]

    Figure 3: Use of non-Automotive Modes by Age Group, New Zealand 2004-2008

     

    Who are we planning for?
    Of course, there are plenty of exceptions to prove the rule: but that is the point.  Diverse communities have diverse expectations and behaviours. And they are continuously changing, in composition, in form, and in behaviour. 

    The failure of modernity lay in its assumption of conformity and convergence, compounded by the conceit that we could regulate for it.  And planning for what is little more than a statistical construct – the auto-independent city – risks blinding us to the richness and opportunity of alternatives, of lifestyle, of environmental stewardship, of urban design, and of mobility.

    If we start with the behaviour of individuals and households our designs for sustainable cities may be less deterministic and our planning less didactic, better informed, lighter in touch, and a lot more effective in meeting the long-term needs of evolving urban communities.

    Phil McDermott is a Director of CityScope Consultants in Auckland, New Zealand, and Adjunct Professor of Regional and Urban Development at Auckland University of Technology.  He works in urban, economic and transport development throughout New Zealand and in Australia, Asia, and the Pacific.  He was formerly Head of the School of Resource and Environmental Planning at Massey University and General Manager of the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation in Sydney. This piece originally appeared at is blog: Cities Matter.

    Aukland photo by Bigstockphoto.com.

    [1]            Newman, P and Kenworthy J (1989) Cities and Auto Dependency: A Sourcebook. Gower, Aldershot
                         Newman, P and Kenworthy, J Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence, Island Press, Washington, D.C.
    [2]        Newman P and Kenworthy J (2011) “‘Peak Car Use’: Understanding the Demise of Automobile Dependence”, World Policy Transport and Practice, 17, 2, 31-42
    [3]        Pynoos R, Caraviello R, and Cicero C (2009) “Lifelong Housing: The Anchor in Aging-Friendly Communities”, Journal of the America Society on Aging, 33, 2, 26-32
    [4]         For New Zealand, check the numbers

  • The Evolving Urban Form: Cairo

    Cairo, Egypt’s capital, has long had some of the highest neighborhood population densities in the world. In the 1960s it was reported that one neighborhood had a density of 353,000 people per square mile (136,000 per square kilometer). The most recent data from the Egypt’s statistical authority (the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics or CAPMAS) indicates that within the Cairo governate (the province in which the municipality of Cairo is located), the overall urban population density is 117,000 per square mile, or 45,000 per square kilometer. This means that urbanization in the Cairo governate is more than 1.5 times the population density of Manhattan (in New York city) and the ville de Paris.

    In recent decades, government officials have undertaken a program to encourage people to decentralize their living and work arrangements, and to move to several new towns in the area.

    Overall, the governates that comprise the Cairo metropolitan area have a population of approximately 20.5 million, according to a CAPMAS 2012 estimate. This is approximately the same size of metropolitan areas such as New York and Mexico City. The Cairo metropolitan area is comprised of three governates, which are principally urban, but which also contain millions living in rural areas:

    The governate of Cairo (Al Qāhirah) is the largest of these jurisdictions. Parts of the Cairo governate and the Giza government would be considered in the urban core, but the political jurisdictions in Cairo do not lend themselves well to conventional core versus suburban designations (Note 1). The Cairo governate is located on the east bank of the Nile River, and spreads many kilometers, especially to the East and South. This area includes the Cairo international airport and Heliopolis, one of the most affluent areas in the Cairo metropolitan area. The governate of Cairo also includes "New Cairo," an attractive new town located in the southeastern quadrant. This area includes a number of university campuses, multi-story condominium buildings and detached housing. Eventually, New Cairo is expected to have 4,000,000 residents, though the new town is little more than a decade old and still has a modest population of approximately 125,000.


    New Cairo: University

    The governate of Giza (Al Jīzah) is located on the west bank of the Nile River and, in reality, constitutes a continuation of the urban core. Giza is home the Great Pyramids, which rise on a hill from the western urban fringe. Giza is also home to considerable informal housing development   much different than generally found in other megacities. Much of the development is high rise, with concrete block buildings rising seven and more stories from the streets. Generally, the streets are so narrow and irregular that they are not shown on local maps. The governate of Giza also includes the "6th of October" new town, located on the west side of the hills on which the Great Pyramids stand. Eventually, 6th of October is expected to have a population of 3,000,000, though it appears to be less than 500,000 today. The governate of Giza also includes the Sheihk Zayed new town. These new towns have commercial activities, multi-story condominiums and detached housing.


    Sheikh Zayed: Detached Housing


    Giza: Informal Housing

    The governate of Kalyoubia (Al Qalyūbīyah) is located to the north of the Cairo and Giza governates. Unlike Cairo and Giza, Kalyoubia has a majority of its population living in rural areas. However, the continuous urbanization of Cairo stretches into the governate and includes more than 1.5 million people, much of it in the municipality of Shubrā al-Khaymah.

    Slowing Growth: Like many of the developing world’s megacities, Cairo has experienced its strongest growth in the half century after World War II. In 1937, the metropolitan area had a population of under 3 million. This more than doubled to 7 million by 1966, and again to 14 million by 1996.  From 1996 to 2012, the metropolitan area added 5.5 million people (Note 2). However, more recently, the growth rate has slowed considerably. Between 1996 and 2006, metropolitan Cairo added 28 percent to its population (an increase of more than 4,000,000). However the 2006 to 2012 rate would indicate that by 2016, Cairo is likely to add only 13 percent to its population (approximately 2,000,000 people).

    While the governates of the Cairo metropolitan area do not lend themselves well to urban versus suburban population analysis, Cairo clearly has expanded geographically as it has added population. The more central governates of Cairo and Giza have continued to grow, however much of the growth has been in peripheral areas, such as New Cairo, 6th of October and the Helwan area, south of Cairo on the Nile (in the Cairo governate).

    Where the Growth is Occurring: Even so, the governate of Cairo accounted for only 19 percent of the metropolitan area’s growth from 2006 to 2012, down from 34 percent in the 1996 to 2006 period. The governate of Giza had the greatest growth between 2006 and 2012, at 47 percent of metropolitan growth, an increase from the 39 percent of 1996 to 2016. The governate of Kalyoubia accounted for 34 percent of the growth from 2006 to 2012, an increase from 26 percent between 1996 and 2016 (Figure 1).

    Cairo’s Physical Expansion: Even though the suburban versus core analysis is difficult to gauge from governate data, a paper by Mootaz Farid and Hatam Al Shafie of Cairo University contains depictions of the urban footprint from 1943 to 1982. In each of the depicted years, the continuous urbanization of Cairo covers only a miniscule share of the present urban footprint. Figure 2 provides an estimate of the urban footprint in 1968 compared to the 2012 urban footprint, indicating that much of the growth was on the periphery.

    The Key to Decentralization: The key to making the new towns successful in attracting more residents lies with the dispersion of employment. There is a wealth of international experience to indicate that "self-sufficient" new towns really cannot be self sufficient if they are within commuting distance of the rest of the urban area. In the case of Cairo (as elsewhere) it will prove critical to ensure that there are substantial local employment opportunities for new town residents, although it is likely that a serious degree of self sufficiency may prove difficult to achieve.

    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.”

    Top Photograph: The Great Pyramid (Giza). All photos by author

    ——

    Note 1: In the past decade there  have been reorganizations of governates in the Cairo metropolitan area. This article uses three present governates for all years.

    Note 2: Earlier population data is from http://statoids.com/ueg.html.

  • Is Perestroika Coming In California?

    When Jerry Brown was elected governor for a third time in 2010, there was widespread hope that he would repair the state’s crumbling and dysfunctional political edifice. But instead of becoming a Californian Mikhail Gorbachev, he has turned out to be something more resembling Konstantin Chernenko or Yuri Andropov, an aged hegemon desperately trying to save a dying system.

    As with the old party bosses in Russia, Brown’s distinct lack of courage has only worsened California’s lurch toward fiscal and economic disaster. Yet as the budget woes worsen, other Californians, including some Democrats, are beginning to recognize the need for perestroika in the Golden State. This was most evident in the overwhelming vote last week in two key cities, San Diego and San Jose, to reform public employee pensions, a huge reversal after decades of ever more expansive public union power in the state.

    California’s “progressive” approach has been enshrined in what is essentially a one-party state that is almost Soviet in its rigidity and inability to adapt to changing conditions. With conservatives, most businesses and taxpayer advocates marginalized, California politics has become the plaything of three powerful interest groups: public-sector unions, the Bay Area/Silicon Valley elite and the greens. Their agendas, largely unrestrained by serious opposition, have brought this great state to its knees.

    California’s ruling troika has been melded by a combination of self-interest and a common ideology. Their ruling tenets center on support for an ever more intrusive, and expensive, state apparatus; the need to turn California into an Ecotopian green state; and a shared belief that the “genius” of Silicon Valley can pay for all of this.

    Now this world view is foundering on the rocks of economic reality. The Soviet Union armed itself to the teeth and sent cosmonauts into space while the public waited on line for toothpaste and sausages. Similarly, Californians suffer from a combination of high taxes and intrusive regulation coupled with a miserable education system — the state’s students now rank 47th in science achievement — and a rapidly deteriorating infrastructure.

    The current recession has been particularly severe, continuing at a more acute level than in most states, including places like Florida and Arizona, which also suffered greatly from the housing bust. California now has the third highest unemployment rate in the U.S., beating out only its co-dependent evil twin Nevada and Rhode Island. At the same time, according to a recent Public Policy Institute of California study, inequality in the devoutly “progressive” state has been growing much faster than in the rest of the country.

    The most auspicious sign of grassroots support for perestroika was last week’s smack down of public employee unions in San Jose and San Diego. For the first time in recent memory, the unions suffered a humiliating defeat — the measures passed by a margin greater than two to one — as voters endorsed deep reform of the pension burdens bringing these cities to the brink of bankruptcy. Backed by its Democratic mayor, Chuck Reed, San Jose’s measure B aims to reduce pension benefits for both future and current hires. Unsurprisingly, the public employee have threatened to sue.

    This may precipitate what could become the California equivalent of a prairie fire. Like San Jose and San Diego, many other California cities are on the verge of bankruptcy. Union-dominated Los Angeles could be the next big domino to fall, according to the city’s own chief administrative office, and has been forced to boost its bonded indebtedness and cut back on critical infrastructure spending to stave off the inevitable.

    As services drop and taxes rise — California’s already are among the nation’s highest — voters increasingly realize that one of the main problems is over-generous pensions for public sector workers. This is reflected in the sad reality that the state consistently competes with Illinois for the worst bond rating in the country. Most recently, the state upped its deficit estimate to $16 billion from a $9.2 billion estimate made just in January.

    Brown could have used this mounting crisis to reveal his inner Gorbachev. But instead, he has so far chosen a classic Chernenko-Andropov muddle. He proposed a mild pension reform but could not persuade his own party — aware that vengeful the unions will be around long after the old man is gone — to consider it.

    More recently, the governor showed his own inner Stalinist by jettisoning his original more modest tax increase proposal for a more radical teachers’ union measure that would raise California’s income tax to the highest in the nation.

    Brown’s “millionaire’s” tax, as it is being marketed, starts with individuals making $250,000 or more. Right now it is still ahead in the polls but seems to be losing ground. Joel Fox, a longtime anti- tax activist, senses that people in the state — as evidenced by the San Jose and San Diego votes — are beginning to realize that the tax increases are designed primarily not to improve the schools, keep the parks open or pave the roads but simply to bolster public-sector pay and pensions.

    This collective turning on of the civic light bulb comes at the same time that the primary economic delusion that has dominated progressive politics — the myth of the high-tech savior — has fallen into disrepute. Under Brown and his monumentally incompetent predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, state officials maintained a belief that Silicon Valley’s money machine would be able to bail the state out of its budgetary morass.

    In this context, the underwhelming performance of Facebook’s IPO last month takes on major political significance. Not only will there be fewer puerile billionaires to inflate the Valley real estate market and bankroll “progressive” candidates and causes, scores of hip wannabe start-ups suddenly may find themselves no longer the darlings of venture capital investors or the stock market. Like California’s budget itself, the social media boom is now looking like something of a fraud.

    Another potential casualty of the weak economy could be the green drive to remake the state into a kind of Ecotopian paradise. This is evident in growing opposition to some of Brown’s most beloved initiatives, notably a fantastically expensive high-speed rail system. Sold in the euphoric progressive atmosphere of 2008, support has collapsed as the price tag has soared and the state’s grievous fiscal problems have worsened. The most recent LA Times poll currently finds nearly three in five California voters would like to see the project scrapped.

    Once unassailable politically, the environmental community is fracturing between those thoroughly allied to rent-seeking capitalists and the Democratic Party and those still primarily concerned with preserving nature. The Sierra Club, for example, objects to Brown’s attempt to exempt the high-speed line from environmental review. Some Greens also object to Brown-supported projects like the massive tortoise-roasting solar farm planned for the Mojave Desert.

    Both Brown and the Greens also have failed to deliver many of the much ballyhooed “green jobs” that they insisted their policies would produce. Instead they may soon have to confront an electorate increasingly skeptical about green fantasies and more concerned with a persistently under-performing economy.

    Clearly, the conditions for a California perestroika are coming into place. Still missing is a coherent vision — from either Independents, centrist Democrats or Republicans — that can unite business, private-sector workers and taxpayers around a fiscally prudent, pro-economic growth agenda. Yet it’s clearly good news that , for the first time in a decade, there’s hope that the whole corrupt, failing California political edifice could come crashing down, providing a renewed hope for recovering the state’s former greatness.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and contributing editor to the City Journal in New York. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.

    This piece originally appeared in Forbes.

    Jerry Brown photo by BigStockPhoto.com.

  • How To Build a Culture of Bike Safety

    As I’ve settled into life in Florida, I’ve found myself for the first time using a bicycle as a form of transportation instead of as a form of leisure activity. And, as an urban designer involved in a team that designs bicycle and pedestrian master plans, I’ve become increasingly aware of the factors that make urban bike use a feasible — or not so feasible — choice.

    The Risk & Fear Factors: While I might actually be safe riding my bike down a neighborhood collector road on a dedicated bike lane, when I’m alongside two 10-foot lanes of traffic I do not feel safe. Therefore, I don’t ride there. It’s a question of perceived risk vs actual risk. As it turns out, I am not unique. Linda Baker in Scientific American has suggested that, when cycling, women are more adverse to risk than men.

    The Gender Gap: Baker has also suggested that cycling to work impedes a woman’s ability to conform to social norms, including makeup, dress, and hairstyles. That issue would be a big bite to chew, so I’ll put aside addressing it here. But consider: While cycling has become a big grass roots movement through organizations like Pro Walk/ Pro Bike and The National Center for Bicycling and Walking, there is an enormous gender gap among users. Planner Jan Garrard states, “If you want to know if an urban environment supports cycling, you can forget about all the detailed ‘bikeability indexes’—just measure the proportion of cyclists who are female.” I personally can’t remember the last time or if I’ve ever seen a woman on a bicycle on the Tampa streets.

    Nearly all the new riders on US roads in the last 20 years have been men between the ages of 25 and 64. Taking into account the national demographics, this means that we are currently designing bike-friendly streets for a relatively small constituency.

    How can we provide cycling options in a way that reaches out to more users?

    The Infrastructure Factor: Substantially lowering the risk of cycling can be best accomplished through a change in infrastructure. Cycle tracks, like the one in New York City, are becoming more popular. Because of the complete physical separation from the threat of cars, all users perceive — and experience — a lower threat to their safety. The problem, besides the constant challenge of funding, is finding the right-of-way to accommodate bikes, especially in a car-centric culture like Florida. There has to be evidence of a high enough level of ridership to justify cutting out a lane from a congested street. It’s a chicken and the egg conundrum: there is not the required ridership now because a majority of 50% of the population doesn’t feel safe.

    A good compromise might be to allow room for a physical separation between a one-way bike lane and car traffic. Creative use of medians and plantings, as in Denver, is one example of this. Simply placing parallel parking between car traffic and the bike lane is another.

    The Get-More-Riders Factor: Building a bike culture is more than just infrastructure, but building appropriate spaces is an integral piece. As Billy Hattaway, a Florida DOT official pointed out to me, if we don’t create bike lanes that cater to a larger part of the population we might lose the justification to have bike lanes at all.

    At the Congress for the New Urbanism annual conference, Wesley Marshall showed evidence proving that the more cyclists there are, the more safe it is to bike. There is a belief by some transportation planning engineers that more cyclists and users in the road make it unsafe, but “safety in numbers” is true. It’s partly because drivers are more aware of cyclists when they see them more often; they’re on the lookout for them.

    The Land Use Factor: People will only choose cycling as a mode of transportation if it is convenient and efficient. Ridership in parts of the city without mixed-uses and with low density will be low compared with more urban areas with many commercial/residential/institutional uses nearby and close together. Riding to a local grocery store to get a gallon of milk is realistic. Riding to a Wal-Mart for your weekly shopping is not. But Marshall’s research showed that the biggest aspect of achieving bike safety is intersection density. The more intersections there were in a development, the safer it was for riders. At first thought this seems to go against common sense, because intersections are the sites of many crashes, but more connectivity = slower speeds = more awareness. Connectivity also allows for more mixed-uses and higher densities. Many cities put their resources into developing recreational cycling trails. While this is admirable, as a “wanna-be” cyclist, I’m a proponent of putting those funds into street design, instead. Putting the infrastructure on routes where people go in their everyday lives will lead to the biggest increase in ridership.

    A lot of factors need to come together to increase ridership and bridge the gender gap in cycling. I’m someone who would love to ditch my car in favor of my bike on my daily commute, but risk aversion holds me back. Providing a lane along the side of the road is not enough: we must examine the evidence and psychology behind riding in order to make it a real choice for the majority of the population. Otherwise, we will find ourselves losing the justification to provide cycling options at all.

    Erin Chantry is an Urban Designer in the Urban Design and Community Planning Service Team with Tindale-Oliver & Associates. She is also the author of the blog At the Helm of the Public Realm.

    Photo: Protected / Separated bicycle lane on Dunsmuir Street, downtown Vancouver, Canada, by Paul Krueger