Monday, September 29th, 2008
Failure of Ambition
Why did the Midwest fall behind? Why do its big cities continue to lag the top performers nationally? It’s easy to blame this on structural problems, but could the problem simply be a lack of will to compete?
Burgh Diaspora points us at this Time magazine article on Charlotte. As I previously noted about Nashville, Charlotte is a city of high ambition. They look at the boomtowns of the region like Atlanta, Dallas, and Phoenix and say, “Why not us?” Quoting:
“‘To understand Charlotte, you have to understand our ambition,’ says chamber of commerce head Bob Morgan. ‘We have a serious chip on our shoulder. We don’t want to be No. 2 to anybody.’ Civic leaders often compare their city to New York, Chicago, and even London.”
London? Ok, there’s more than a whiff of hubris in this Charlotte story. They claim to be the #2 banking center, but that only includes commercial banking, and is a heckuva lot less true after one of its two champions, Wachovia, got swallowed up by Citigroup. And their claim to having weathered the housing storm successfully is belied by the fact that Charlotte is ground zero for the edge subdivision turned nouveau slum story.
Still, when you compare it to most Midwestern burbs, the difference in sheer ambition is astounding. Charlotte measures itself against London, New York, and the top cities of the world. Most Midwestern cities other than Chicago and Minneapolis would be happy to be known as the “Star of the Rust Belt”. That’s like saying your ambition is to win the losers bracket in the JV playoffs again this year. The Midwest has, to a great extent, even given up on competing. When I talk to my colleagues in India or Argentina, what strikes me is how hungry they are. These are people who’ve gotten a taste of success and are desperate for more. They want to hit it big and take what they see as their rightful place in the new world order – and they are willing to kill themselves to get there. The most astounding thing to me is the work ethic in India. Here’s a place where it is still dotcom 1999. Anybody on my team there could literally walk across the street for a 30-50% bump. But instead they are in the office Saturdays and Sundays, killing themselves to hit the deadline. Places like Charlotte, Nashville, etc. have a bit of that same attitude. The Midwest, by contrast, sits, as Richard Longworth put it so well of Cleveland, “sour and crumbling”, unable to even muster the will to understand the world it is in, much less complete in it.
Charlotte gets it. As their leaders say, “Charlotte’s nine FORTUNE 500 companies help run the city, not only by writing checks–Bank of America and Wachovia have pledged $15 million apiece to build new cultural centers–but also by helping to write plans. ‘We’re a pro-business city like none I’ve ever seen,’ says Center City Partners head Michael Smith. ‘It’s true about Southern hospitality, but there’s a real hunger here.’ It can be jarring to hear Charlotte’s power brokers explain that it’s important to improve their city not for its own sake but for the sake of its businesses, which need high-quality culture to attract high-quality talent. “
And “While the rest of the country is sinking, Charlotte is soaring, with 28 construction cranes downtown. It’s got the nation’s least-battered metropolitan-housing market, lowest office-vacancy rates and fastest-growing airport. It hosts the NBA’s Charlotte Bobcats and the NFL’s Carolina Panthers. Its center-city population has doubled since 2000, and its light-rail system, just a year old, is already approaching its ridership goal for 2025. Meanwhile, ribbon-cuttings are scheduled for the NASCAR Hall of Fame, three museums, a theater and an African-American cultural center by 2010.”
Again, some of the stories are oversold, but the cumulative effect is real. I’ve been known as a rail skeptic, but regardless, when you decide to do something, do it. Not one comparable city in the Midwest has cranked out a rail system while Charlotte and Nashville put theirs into operation and started remaking their cities to take advantage of them. And a little hubris isn’t bad, when it motivates you to try to live up to your own big talk. In the Midwest, all we ever here from smaller cities is how they can’t compete with San Francisco or New York and have to get by on table scraps. Yet in Charlotte it seems every other person is a transplant from the Northeast. They figured out that they can build an offering that is capable of attracting the right kind of person – if they show a civic ambition that matches the personal ambitions of their target audience.
There’s still room in the club. There is an opportunity out there for one of the smaller Midwest cities to step up and claim their place at the table. But right now it looks like only Chicago and Minneapolis wants it. It’s the parable of the talents, played out in real life. Will anyone else step up? Only time will tell.
PS: One of the top sources of migrants to Charlotte: the Rust Belt.
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Review: Massive Change by Bruce Mau
“Natural resources … pollution … world’s food supply … pressures of population growth … Every trend in material human welfare has been improving – and promises to do so indefinitely.” – Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource
With those provocative words on the cover, economist Julian L. Simon launched his magnum opus, a paean to the ingenuity of man and a rebuke to the doomsayers who have been more or less continuing to predict man-made catastrophe for the world since the time of Malthus. Simon was an unapologetic free trader and man of the economic right. While his favorite philosopher was David Hume, he also lavishes considerable praise on Friedrick Hayek and the book opens with “an appreciation” from Milton Friedman. Simon became known as a “cornucopian”, someone who saw the ultimate resource as human brainpower and creativity, and in that resource he believed would be the answer to the problems of the future. Simon would, no doubt, view the current oil price spike in a positive light, saying it will stimulate new energy production and the creation of efficiency technology that will end up leaving us better off than if the crisis had never happened.
I had always associated conucopianism as a position of the right. Then along came this book that I would have to view as a “left cornucopianism” counterpart to Simon. Massive Change is a project conceived by Bruce Mau (of Life Style and S, M, L, XL fame). It is a book, but also a web site and a couple years ago a traveling art exhibit. Massive Change explores the intersection of design and technology across a range of disciplines, showing the world on a precipice of radically different ways of doing things. Mau celebrates this as a good thing. His project is overtly utopian, and explicitly chartered to realize Arnold J. Toynbee’s goal of “an age in which human society dared to think of the welfare of the whole human race as a practical objective.” Mau’s rationalistic utopianism, anti-militarism, and strong social justice/social equality orientation mark him as a man of the left. However, in a sense he’s a bit of a reactionary as well, a throwback to the pre-Silent Spring days when we stood in awed wonder at the latest technology and saw science as a force of human progress instead of a threat to its existence. Back to the days when a company could promise without any trace of irony, “Better Living Through Chemistry”. That phrase, perhaps more than any other, sums up Mau’s vision for the world. That, or “We have the technology.” He wants better living for mankind as a whole, especially the least fortunate, through the new technologies we are on the verge of unleashing.
Even if you don’t care for his politics or vision, Mau’s book (which actually appears to be ghostwritten by someone named Jennifer Leonard), is a must read for anyone who wants to have their thinking stimulated about the new world of the 21st century. And there is a new world. If you thought the 20th century brought change, you ain’t seen nothing yet. While he doesn’t call it out directly, Mau seems to implicitly argue that we’re on the verge of some type of “punctured equilibrium” in which convergence between radical innovations in materials, processes, markets, life sciences, social structures, and much more is going to revolutionize life as we know it. We are approaching a sort of godhood, where we have the ability to design and shape the world on an unimaginable scale. Nanotechnology, genetic engineering, etc. give humans the capacity to literally shape the stuff of life. Mau sees this technology combined with a new, humanistic and progressivist ethos, as finally allowing technology and design to capture that long ago promise.
As a writer on cities, the prescriptions aren’t clear to me, but the considerations are pointed. As we read about the crazy things we can do with nanotechnology, “cradle to cradle” materials life cycles, artificial tissues, the exploding internet user base and increasing rate of technical innovation and so on, it seems odd that the current trends in urban thinking still seem to revolve around retro-notions of re-creating a 19th century urban vision of the city (sans horse manure). As we talk about things like life sciences economic development strategies, it seems clear that we aren’t seeing the whole picture about where the hockey puck is going.
The 21st century is going to be very different from the 20th or the 19th. It will require new visions of what a city can be, and what the urban economy can be. Perhaps it could be some type of erzatz 1950’s Greenwich Village, with all of our technological wonders going to enable us to enjoy that existence without any of the attendant downsides, such as the pollution and byproducts of the production, distribution, and energy processes of the day. Something tells me that’s too simplistic a vision. We need to challenge ourselves to consider the implications of the technologically driven change in our world and try to figure out what the real possibilities are.
The book itself is episodal and breezy. It is divided into chapters covering various economies (in the original sense of the word): materials, energy, information, images, markets, politics, etc. For each one there are examples of what is going on, along with interviews with subject matter experts including Freeman Dyson, Lawrence Lessig, Hernando de Soto, Bruce Sterling, and Jeffrey Sachs. And there are pictures galore, which are worth the price of the book by themselves (currently less than $20 from Amazon.com brand new in hardcover). This makes it an easy read. You can easily pick up the book, read a couple of pages, and put it back down none until the next day without losing the thread.
Many of the topics covered aren’t that mind blowing in and of themselves. To anyone in the know, they’ll probably sound simplistic and dated. For example, it is difficult to get too excited hearing about Linux and GNU again. But the power of the book comes not from any individual example (though there are a few standouts). Rather, it is the sheer broad range of areas where change is coming and multipling, and the convergence across these areas that shows that we stand. This book lets you see the forest, when all too often in the popular media we only see the trees. It’s not the individual stories, it is the cumulative effect. To an extent, Mau is hinting at a non-AI based Singularity.
Massive Change is definitely worth reading for anyone questioning where the world is heading, or could head in one optimistic vision, in the century we just stepped into.
For another take, see the review of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art exhibit by David Hoppe.
“For most of us design is invisible. Until it fails. In fact, the secret ambition of design is to become invisible, to be taken up into the culture, absorbed into the background. The highest order of success in design is to achieve ubiquity, to become banal. The automobile, the freeway, the airplane, the cell phone, the air conditioner, the high-rise – all invented and developed first in the West, but fully adopted and embraced the world over – have achieved design nirvana. They are no longer considered unnatural. They are boring, even tedious. Most of the time we live our lives within these invisible systems, blissfully unaware of the artificial life, the intensely designed infrastructures that support them. Accidents, disasters, crises. When systems fail we become temporarily conscious of the extraordinary force and power of design, and the effect that it generates. Every accident provides a brief moment of awareness in real life, what is actually happening, and our dependence on the underlying systems of design. Every plane crash is a rupture, a shock to the system, precisely because our experience of flight is so carefully designed away from the reality of the event. As we sip champagne, read the morning paper, and settle in before takeoff, we choose not to experience the torque, the thrust, the speed, the altitude, the temperature, the thousands of pounds of explosive jet fuels cradled beneath us, the infinite complexity of the onboard systems, and the very real risks and dangers of takeoff and landing. Massive Change is an ambitious project that humbly attempts to chart the bewildering complexity of our increasingly interconnected (and designed) world. We have done our best to open it up by breaking it down, and putting as many fascinating fragments as we could find back together again, between the covers of this book. We hope to make evident the design decisions that go on and are made manifest across disciplines. Massive Change is not about the world of design; it’s about the design of the world.” – Bruce Mau, Massive Change, text accompanying the opening plates.
Thursday, September 25th, 2008
Fast and Cheap Ways to Improve Public Transit in Indianapolis Right Now
I’m passionate about public transit. For those of you who know me primarily through my posting about rail transit being a bad idea for Indianapolis, you might not believe me. But I’ve long been a transit rider. In fact, in a previous life I published a transit newsletter for three years. I try to ride transit in every city I visit.
Where I differ from many transit advocates is that I believe that transit should be primarily about rider mobility, and I think we need to take a realistic approach that looks at the facts around development patterns, cost, likely ridership, etc. and not just rely on conventional wisdom from the transit hymnal and build it and they will come logic. As I said in my really, really cheap manifesto, it’s about results, not how much money one can spend.
In light of that, I will lay out a series of ideas about how to improve transit in Indianapolis today, not years from now, that won’t cost much money to implement. Some of them are conceivably even free and can be implemented with existing staff and budgets. I can’t say these are all the right things to do, but I believe all of them are worthy of serious consideration.
- Run bus service every ten minutes to Fountain Square. To have real bus service, that is to say, where you can just show up and wait for the next bus without consulting a schedule, you need ten minute headways or better all day, maybe 15, but that’s pushing it. Indygo currently operates on 30 to 60 minute headways, which is a non-starter. To really start proving the transit concept locally, Indy needs to start piloting with enhanced service at ten minute headways to see how to make it work or if in fact it can be made to work. The perfect place to start is Fountain Square. This is one of the city’s official cultural districts. Its downtown area is already “transit oriented development” and there is plenty of opportunity for further infill. A segment of the population there is tightly connected to downtown. However, the distance is a bit too far to walk comfortably in bad weather (about 1 ½ miles to the core of the Mile Square). Today, Indygo’s web site tells me there are three routes that go through Fountain Square: the #12-Beechcrest, the #14-Prospect and the #22-Shelby. These three bus routes run on 30 minute headways. Today, they all get to Fountain Square at the exact same time. For example, the #12 arrives at Virginia/South at 7:13am, the #14 gets there at 7:14am, and the #22 also gets there at 7:14am. It looks to me like three buses come in a row, then there isn’t another bus for half an hour. That’s insane. If Indygo simply staggered the routes, a bus could come through Fountain Square every ten minutes – right now, today – without spending an extra dime to add any new service. Now perhaps things are set up this way to facilitate downtown transfers, so perhaps this isn’t a slam dunk decision to make. But I think it goes to show that you could make dramatic transit improvements in an emerging neighborhood that primed to take advantage of it today without spending anything other than the cost of printing new schedules. And for people in Fountain Square, you wouldn’t even need a schedule, which is the whole point.
- Get a new domain name. indygo.net has to go. A .net domain name is completely bush league. If you can’t spring for a real domain name, no one will take you seriously. If indygo.com is too pricey, at least do indygo.gov or something. Dittos for cirta.us for the Central Indiana Regional Transit Authority.
- Implement mobile phone bus tracking. Chicago has a system called “Bus Tracker” that uses GPS in buses to feed an online service that tells you how long until the next bus arrives. Right now this is a mobile web app only, but soon they are rolling out a texting solution where you text your stop number to a special number and it texts you back the next buses arriving. This is hugely beneficial to riders on the go. What’s more, even large percentages of poor people have cell phones, so it isn’t just targeting the MacBook crowd. My idea: just contact with the CTA to ride their system. The cost is basically some GPS devices, route mapping, and setup. It’s a win-win. The CTA gets a revenue source to amortize their fixed investment over, and Indygo gets the advantages of economies of scale (i.e., lower unit cost) and speed to market. Imagine what a game changer this could be for Indy. With some buses running only once an hour, people have to get to the stop very early to avoid missing that bus. If you knew exactly when it was arriving, you could cut your wait time with confidence.
- Leverage texting for emergency messaging. The CTA is also rolling out texting for communicating to riders about service disruptions and other problems. Again, just see if the CTA will let Indygo pay them on an incremental cost basis to ride that infrastructure. (By the way, one source of potential funding for Chicago transit improvements is simply to spin off some of these things into a service bureau / hosted service for other transit providers. Be the “Google Transit” of this stuff before Google is. Eventually they could even float the thing – or just plain sell it to Google for Big Buck$ to pour into capital improvements. Just my free business advice).
- Start a “Friends of IndyGo” group if one doesn’t exist already. Ther