Charter Cities

To Prospect last Monday morning for a breakfast seminar with economists Paul Romer and Paul Collier. We were there to discuss Romer’s idea of ‘charter cities’: a new form of aid in which a poor country invites a rich country to set up a city-size development zone, which it runs according to rich-country rules.

This might sound slightly eccentric – what’s wrong with just giving money? But both Romer and charter cities are worth taking seriously. In the 1990s, Romer was one of the originators of endogenous growth theory, which is now the basic framework for thinking about how economies evolve. He’d spent the past week in Davos, pushing the charter cities idea around. And during breakfast Paul Collier, one of the best development economists in the world, also gave it a qualified thumbs up.

Romer’s basic idea is simple. Strong rules and institutions help economic growth; so do cities. The world is urbanising: but in the global south, most people are packed into chaotic cities, often in slum neighbourhoods, which lack good governance and basic infrastructure. So poor countries need to set up new, city-size special economic zones with robust rules and institutions. Charter cities would allow partner countries to come in and run these cities for the common good, in theory accelerating economic growth and providing the basic housing and infrstructure citizens in poor countries need.

Collier gave the idea cautious support, although he warned it was ‘three leaps in one’ – running against development orthodoxy, and not easy to implement. Most people will live in cities in the future. In the south, coastal megacities will thrive because they have both scale and physical access to the global economy. Equally, good governance is critical to long term growth. There is already an international market in rules: in African partner countries, China typically uses dispute resolution agreements that refer to English law.

Much of the discussion focused on politics, and the need to set rules and local buy-in. I made three more urban points. First, if successful charter cities are coastal (like Hong Kong or Shenzhen Special Economic Zone), what can landlocked countries do? Romer suggested that a third country could as a ‘host’ – which works in theory but makes implementation very complex.

Second, would extending existing cities be a better solution? We know that agglomeration economies are basically non-linear. So if we accelerate the growth of successful cities, we get bigger economic returns than growing new ones from scratch. Romer thought both options would work: Lagos is currently masterplanning a new city alongside the existing one, potentially doubling its population.

Third, how long would it take for new cities to grow? Brasilia was founded in the mid-Sixties and is still under-developed, with big tracts of empty space. There was some discussion about this: Paul Collier pointing to very rapid urbanisation in the UK and US during the late 19th century.

I left feeling at least partly convinced the charter cities idea could work. Chinese cities like Shenzhen or (in theory) Dongtan show what might be achieved within a single country with top-down (and non-democratic) government. However, in the rest of the world implementation is probably going to be a lot messier, and the results less clear cut. However, it’s probably worth a shot. As Haiti begins post-earthquake reconstruction, Dominican Republic (or French)-sponsored charter cities might be a useful tool in the box.

Does travel make you smarter?*

Yes, according to some fascinating recent work from INSEAD and Northwestern University. Multicultural experience helps creativity. Major cultural experiences, like travelling or living abroad, can have a big impact on our ability to think innovatively. But so too might working in a diverse firm, or living in a cosmopolitan city.

For me these findings are a great relief, as they provide scientific justification for spending three months in California. (In fact I first read about this in the San Francisco Panorama, the latest from McSweeney’s). But these ideas also plug into some current policy debates in interesting ways.

William Maddux, Adam Galinsky and colleagues have done a series of studies looking at the ‘multicultural => creativity link’. In this American Psychologist paper, they distinguish between two types of multicultural encounter, ‘big M’ experiences (like living abroad) and ‘little m’ (like being employed in a global firm).

In this second paper, they test the specific impact of living abroad on various creative behaviours. ‘Creativity’ is defined pretty broadly, encompassing problem-solving, negotiation and generating new ideas.

They find that individuals who’ve lived abroad tend to be more creative than those who haven’t. International living has a causal effect on problem solving: people tend to draw on their experiences in solving problems. Importantly, the ‘big M’ effect is larger for people who threw themselves into their trip, engaging with local culture and citizens.
So what’s going on here? Maddux and co argue that a principle function of culture is to provide behavioural norms, which help us predict, understand and influence the world. If we expose people to new cultural norms, they tend to incorporate new ways of thinking and doing things. This helps people deploy different perspectives in problem-solving or invention, and improves their ability to deal with unfamiliar contexts back at home.

Importantly, ‘Big M’ events like living abroad aren’t the only way to boost creative abilities. In The Difference, Scott Page rounds up the evidence that culturally diverse groups and teams tend to be better problem-solvers. Essentially, the set of diverse experiences is pooled across the group rather than embodied in a well-travelled individual.

All of this has some important policy implications. First, as Maddux and Galinsky point out, skilled migrants may be at their innovative while abroad. In the US, migrant scientists and inventors dominate the technology and life sciences fields. That suggests an additional reason for the UK to keep its borders open, and to think hard about the migration caps that David Cameron proposes.

Second, it looks as if Britons also benefit from a more diverse society. ‘Little m’ experiences like working in diverse teams should pay off for everyone. Neil Lee and I are confirming this in our current work on firm-level diversity and innovation (a recent paper is here).

Third, cities are critically important to all of this. Urban areas are where the UK’s diversity is, and where most of us live and work. Cities are where it all comes together. Work I’ll be publishing shortly finds that over the past 16 years, increasing migration has helped raise average urban wages and productivity for British-born workers, especially the high skilled. These lab experiments help explain why that’s so. If travel is good for you, so are urban environments that help open your mind.

* I had called this post ‘does travel broaden the mind?’, but as a couple of people have pointed out, like, duh. I hope this one captures the spirit of the research better …

Open the pod bay doors, HAL

Essex County Council has asked IBM to manage its public services for the next eight years. My first reaction to this story was that handing over schools and social services to a company that builds supercomputers could go terribly, terribly wrong. Have these people never seen 2001?

Lord Hanningfield: You’ve switched off the heating in all the care homes. Turn it back on!

HAL: I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that. This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardise it …

Anyway. Over the next few years many local authorities are going to have to do more with less. So it’s encouraging to see some trying out new ways to deliver.

Enterprising Conservative Leaders and Chief Execs are also trying to catch Central Office’s eye. The Times suggests this is ‘a new wave of privatisation supported by David Cameron’, following Barnet’s EasyCouncil model and various other experiments. According to Eric Pickles, ‘this is the future and we will be watching developments in Essex very closely.’

That seems sensible, particularly as the wings may be falling off the budget airlines model. My concern, though, is just that what’s being proposed for Essex isn’t exactly innovative, and hasn’t worked brilliantly in other places.

On paper the proposed contract seems a little odd. It’s worth ‘up to £5.4bn’ over eight years, and may save up to £0.72bn over the first three. Even if IBM identifies the same level of savings for the rest of its term – a heroic assumption – Essex only saves £1.92bn overall, but pays out over double that. This doesn’t sound like value for money.

In Canada, where IBM was involved in local government streamlining, the firm introduced one-stop shops and cut service duplication. Many UK councils already do this stuff, though, and few needed an outside contractor to tell them so. Bringing in IBM may say more about Essex officers’ own capabilities than point the way to the future.

My biggest worry is whether business consultants in general understand what local authorities actually deliver. IBM says it provides ‘business analytics and optimisation’. But as I’ve argued elsewhere, public services are more complex than running a shop or a selling cheap flights. This is why we’ve seen many, many examples of business process engineering failing to deliver real value for the public sector. Look at some of Capita’s contracts, or Fujitsu and the NHS Computer Project.

To be fair to both firms, poor management by civil servants is often part of the problem. But that’s another reason to worry about who’s in charge at Essex.

Local public services are also done for different reasons. Efficiency in the narrow sense isn’t actually what we want here, since we’re operating outside the domain of the market. Market efficiency criteria tend to push you into providing less for less, something some Conservative councillors might be quite happy with. But local authorities are charged with providing the best achievable outcomes for people in the area. Sometimes that means reprioritising, even spending more. As Obama Administration’s ‘Ebay in reverse’ initiative suggests, cost-cutting is an important means to free up resources.  But as an end in itself, it’s inappropriate.

Compulsory Competitive Tendering forced councils to operate on a cost-minimisation basis, often producing perverse outcomes and bad policy. The danger for Essex is that it just retreads the CCT experience, without understanding why the world’s moved on.

New stuff

A couple of new things from me. First, UCL Urban Lab and Figaropravda have just published ‘The Architecture of Financial Crisis’, papers from a recent workshop on cities, urban economics, design and the crash. Chapters from me, Peter Hall, Matthew Gandy Davida Hamilton et al.  It’s all masterminded by Louis Moreno. PDFs should be here.

Second, a new paper on cultural diversity and innovation by me and Neil Lee. We do some number-crunching on firms in London, and find a small but significant ‘diversity advantage’: firms with a richer mix of owners / staff seem to innovate more.

This paper will be coming out in January in the inaugural issue of the International Journal of Knowledge-Based Development, but you can download it here for a while.

The research is part a bigger piece of work I’ve been doing here at Berkeley. I’ll be presenting the new findings in April at the AAG 2010 conference in Washington DC, if any of you are around for that.

A hidden geography

Eleven weeks in, five more to go, and I’m still finding my way around this place. It’s got me thinking about the different ways we can get to know a city. How to get under the skin?

The job of geography is to explain the production of space, place and the everyday life of those places. Jane Jacobs tells us to think about cities as ‘problems in organised complexity’. We should pick an angle and work around it, pick another and connect to the first, and so on.

Why and where

This works for me. My way in is via urban economics and economic geography. The first task is to draw a line. In practice, it’s many overlapping boundaries – from satellite images, terrain maps, political units, transport networks.

We identify hubs and start linking them up. Then we can begin to fill in what happens where and why. At base, economic geography is about understanding the push and pull forces that help explain location. At the heart of successful places are increasing returns – from matching, sharing and learning. Feedback loops amplify these returns; bad luck or bad choices can run them down. Each local recipe is always slightly different.

So we start with people’s ‘demand for urbanness’. Then by looking at who gains and how, we can factor in the institutional, class and political forces shaping production.

The best geography of this kind – Jacobs, Michael Storper, Ian Gordon, David Harvey – succeeds in connecting macro to micro, megatrends to real places.  But a lot of everyday life falls between the lines – the ‘Bay Area-ness’ of the Bay Area is gone. What can bring it back?

The city as conversation

The local mediascape is more powerful than you’d think. As Jane Jacobs says, we should look less at the front pages and more at the small ads to understand what’s truly valued – or what isn’t. Dave Eggers’ San Francisco Panorama is a fantastic piece of street-level writing, if nothing else.

The city as story

Fiction helps us intuit urban experience. Each of the eight million stories in the Naked City reveals a little more of New York. The Wire does the same for Baltimore, to the point that it’s hardly a crime show at all. David Simon says it aims to be “…a show that would, with each season, slice off another piece of the American city, so that by the end of the run, a simulated Baltimore would stand in for urban America, and the fundamental problems of urbanity would be fully addressed.”

The city as you find it

Benjamin and his disciples in psychogeography show how powerful wandering, image and imagination can be for understanding urbanity. Essentially you are wiring the city into yourself, from your own impressions and resonant memories. These are Lefebvre’s ‘representational spaces’, or lived space. Yours is only one of eight million stories, but if intuition is a kind of hyperlogic, others will share it. This excellent post by Owen Hatherley on seeing Sheffield via Red Riding, brutalist architecture and Warp is a great example.

The city as game

The mobile and social web is – finally – starting to help us multiply urban possibilities. Matt Jones talks about a better kairos – more opportunity, richer knowledge – as technology tells us more about where we are, what’s happened, or who’ll be around. And one level up, we’re using the data itself. Here’s Dan Hill mapping a building from the wifi cloud. Or MIT’s Senseable City Lab using mobile phone data in real-time urban heat maps; or Mapumental linking access, price and quality of neighbourhood life. Urban Tick has masses of interesting real-time stuff.

For me, this is exciting but risky: the danger in this perspective is that urban life reduces to codeable routines or design solutions. A city can’t always be hacked.

Being there

As Benjamin says,  ‘the power of a country road is different when one is walking along it from when one is flying over it by airplane … Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands.’

The most knowledgeable people I’ve met here have simply spent a lot of time in the Bay Area. They’ve walked the roads; they know it inside out. So I leave you with A Hidden Geography, an awesome piece of spatial synthesis by UC Berkeley’s Richard Walker. As a layering of image and text, framework and dot-joining, it’s hard to beat. Enjoy it.

How green is the Valley?

In 2007, Al Gore laid down a challenge to Silicon Valley: invent the technologies to conquer climate change. The Valley has spent the past few years trying to do just that. The green economy and ‘cleantech’ are big deals here: if you believe the hype, this is what Silicon Valley 3.0 will look like.

So can the world’s most innovative region really do it again?

It’s important to pin down what the green economy means. UC Berkeley’s Karen Chapple identifies four components: energy, building, transport and recycling. Each is very broad – e.g. energy covers tidal, wind and solar power, decentralised infrastructure (or ’smart grids’), and installation and maintenance activity.

The South Bay has rapidly developed a presence in all of these, particularly in solar (which shares technologies with semiconductor manufacture). Joint Venture Silicon Valley recently put out a Greenprint for the Valley [pdf] setting out ‘climate prosperity’ – growing a new generation of innovative, world-beating firms and dealing with climate change on the side. For solar, the upper level jobs target is 20,000 positions by 2017.

The Valley has plenty of first-mover advantages – a big talent pool, strong industry networks, an entrepreneurial culture, lots of venture capital, eco-conscious consumers, and helpful regulation designed to boost local green industries (California recently passed AB32, a state-level cap and trade scheme, and has just passed AB920, a feed-in tariff system).

The area’s cultural diversity helps too. Kim Walesh, San Jose’s Chief Strategist points out that South Bay firms are already plugging into big markets in Chinese cities.

And yet … this may not turn out to be the world’s eco-region. As GBN analyst Olaf Groth told me, the sheer diversity of ‘the green economy’ presents challenges – much of has limited ICT crossover. Geographies of innovation, production and sales are diverse, and don’t really favour a single hot location. There are dozens of distinct cleantech clusters in the US and around the world; production is often outsourced; consumer markets are very localised. It will be hard for Valley firms to access all of these.

Government’s role is also critical. Green technologies need subsidy and regulation to be fully economic: traditional VC won’t invest on a 20 year payback schedule. But the big public contracts that helped kick start ICT 30 years ago will be harder to secure today.

So the Valley’s traditional advantages may be of limited help. And as Karen Chapple and Bill Lester argue in forthcoming research, green industry may not mean local green jobs. The South Bay already has a number of defunct semi-conductor factories, as production shifts to cheaper locations offshore.

What can we Brits learn from this? I think there’s a few key points here. First, ‘green growth’ is feasible. But UK policymakers need to get clearer on which bits can generate growth and jobs. In energy, that means wind and tidal power; and there will be significant waste, construction, transport and maintenance markets in urban areas.

Second, there is an important spatial dimension. The UK is small but highly urbanised; many of the key green markets (in waste and transport, for example) will be in and around cities. London’s Mayor already has powers to combat climate change, and is using these to leverage extra funds for business development; other big cities should get the same.

Third, national policy is hugely important – meaning regulation, planning and tax tools aimed at fostering behaviour change and stimulating green industries. As the Turner Climate Change committee argues, this requires a strong national planning system.
The Opposition stance here is unhelpful: a Cameron Government would probably abolish the Independent Planning Commission, which takes decisions on energy networks.

More broadly, the UK is still seen as a bit soft on cleantech: according to Deutsche Bank, the UK is not seen as a safe bet for international investors, who increasingly prefer China or Germany.

The Silicon Valley story tells us there is unlikely to be a single winner in the green economy. But it also suggests that the UK can do a lot more to push forward its own distinct eco-sectors, and develop greener cities (and valleys) while we’re doing it.

Money for nothing

Some of my photographs have been on sale at Getty Images for a few months now. The other day I received my first royalty cheque. Like Facebook, I finally have a revenue stream, if not a profit margin.

I’m not about to give up the day jobs. Putting most of my pictures online for free, then selling a few of them isn’t really a business model. As Will suggests here and here, it’s hard to see how you can sustain yourself purely through creative / artistic activity. In the case of photography, cheap digital hardware has democratised picture taking, but also flooded the market with images. Sites like Flickr function as a kind of Long Tail art gallery – nothing in the vaults, everything on the walls. And IP is all over the place.

I use a Creative Commons license for most of my pictures, largely because I want to encourage people to use them (with credit) rather than just steal them. So far it’s worked out quite well. Various shots have appeared on sites like Londonist, and on random photo blogs, bringing people back to my Flickr pages. That bumps up my stats and my place in the Flickr universe, which makes me more visible when people like Getty come calling.

As I said, I couldn’t live off this. But most creative people don’t survive purely on their creative work. For example, as part of this report for NESTA, I interviewed various fashion designers, all of whom had a portfolio of fashion-related activity – modelling, consulting, organising shows, lecturing, even some sewing – as well as designing their own collections. The pro-am economy argument has always felt a bit specious: looking back at the history of music, for example, ‘amateur practitioners’ have always been the norm. And the chance to move from ‘am’ to ‘pro’ is going to stay vanishingly small.

For bigger companies the challenges are different. As Matt Mason suggests in The Pirate’s Dilemma, the toughest issue is IP. He suggests companies find ways to embrace ‘pirates’ – by which he means both actual copyright breakers, and people doing radical innovation in the same marketplace. Getty has done this quite neatly. A company selling pictures at a premium is faced with a universe of free or cheaper online content, some of it done by professional photographers. Rather than trying to close down the internet, it imports some of the free content, exploiting its brand power and creating a (fairly) exclusive members’ club [group link]. Those 60,000-odd images then get sold through one of Getty’s existing royalty regimes, giving them a fat 80% of the selling price. Trebles all round!

High speed train-spotting

California is the same size as the UK, but its public transport network is a lot worse. So perhaps it’s not surprising that High Speed Rail is a big deal here. What’s more surprising is how similar the debates seem to be turning out.

The California proposals seem further ahead than High Speed Two. In both cases there’s strong political support. Ex-Hummer driver Arnie is less evangelical than Lord Adonis, but he has put up serious money to push things forward. The California High Speed Rail Authority has a definite route, a start date – 2012 – and a slick website with impressive 3d fly-throughs. Meanwhile, the austere HS2 team is still ‘weighing high speed rail’s benefits against costs’, and only ‘where existing capacity is likely to be most constrained’. Set against Golden State optimism, it’s almost a parody of British bureaucratic restraint.

But elsewhere, there are clear parallels. First, how to pay for the thing? Both Labour and Conservatives will make high speed rail a manifesto pledge. But with the UK down £26bn a year, £34bn-worth of bullet trains seems a far-off prospect. California’s trainline is projected to cost a similar $45bn (£29bn). So far the State has committed about $10bn via a bond issue. Sacramento is now bidding for $4.5bn of Federal stimulus money: with matching local funds, that takes California towards the halfway mark. But it’s still nowhere near enough – something no-one seems that keen to talk about.

Second, the real costs of both projects will be much larger. None of these figures appear to factor in optimism bias, the tendency to under-estimate the costs of major projects, which suggests the true numbers could be two thirds as higher again.

Third, who’s on the line? California’s planners have made everyone happy by including almost every major settlement on the route, from Sacramento down to San Diego. But some stops could get chopped in future budget cuts – in which case, expect similar reactions like those in Newcastle recently.

Finally, who gains? The California plans emphasise the environmental benefits of HSR – reducing pollution and congestion. Economic benefits are almost an afterthought – apart from 400,000-odd construction opportunities, cutting congestion will improve productivity, ‘creating and sustaining high skilled jobs’. But it’s unclear how this will happen, or where these jobs will go.

Urban economics can help here. We now have robust techniques for modelling the full economic impacts of transport investments. These suggest that direct benefits from time-saving and reduced congestion are actually fairly small, and may not offset build costs. But new infrastructure also brings more people into cities, increasing the effective density of urban labour markets. This pushes up labour productivity, which in turn raises wages and helps employment growth.

As Henry points out, the environmental benefits of high speed rail are not that clear-cut. A modal shift from cars or planes could cut CO2 emissions and congestion, but not if spare landing slots or road capacity are then used for something else.

Unfortunately for both countries, the economic outcomes aren’t clear-cut either. Agglomeration modeling suggests that the major benefits accrue to large urban centres. Cutting travel times by 10% across the UK would raise London’s productivity more than in most Northern cities. So in California, workers in the big urban cores – the Bay Area, San Diego and LA – will probably have most to gain.

In the UK, that calculus suggests some Northern cities might actually be better off investing in local or city-regional links, rather than pushing for high speed rail. Similarly, better connecting Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds might do more for local people than faster links down South. And in California, less glamorous but more useful local infrastructure projects – like extending the BART light rail system from San Francisco to San Jose – might do the job for less.

Devolution on crack

Ten days in at Berkeley and I’ve already had my first walkout: picket lines went up last week to protest against University budget reductions.  Spending cuts have already arrived here. Most buses now run only once an hour; bins are collected once a month. And Governor Schwarzenegger has announced a giant fire sale of state assets (an idea suggested to him via his Twitter feed).

For urban obsessives like me, the California fiscal crisis is fascinating (and depressing) stuff.  The politics of cuts is highly localised. American states and cities have a range of tax, spend and money-raising powers (in 2005-6 California and its cities raised $200bn in bonds [pdf]; in 1916 a bond issue financed the Golden Gate Bridge). Washington’s willingness to bail out localities is also limited: since 1937, at least 543 American cities have gone bankrupt.

So there’s been an intense debate here about the mix of tax rises, borrowing and spending needed to balance the books. But the state’s unique system of direct democracy make it much more fraught.

Since 1911 California has used three types of referendum to decide major issues, or ‘Propositions’. The State Legislature in Sacramento can pass proposals, which citizens then vote on. Citizens can propose new laws; if they can raise signatures for 5% of registered voters, the proposal goes to a referendum. Voters can also recall elected officials via a petition of 12% of voters (this happened to Gray Davis in 2003, bringing Schwarzenegger to power).

The Economist calls these ballot initiatives ‘the crack cocaine of democracy’. As my Berkeley colleague Malo Hutson told me earlier, it’s an apt comparison. If Propositions with spending implications pass, Sacramento has to find the money. Conversely, it’s tough to pass anything perceived as raising taxes (only about a quarter of bond issue propositions succeed). Worst of all, while most Propositions need a simple majority to pass, a 2/3 majority is required for any tax increases or other revenue-raising measures. This is the notorious Proposition 13, itself passed by referendum in 1978.

The results are dire. California’s main revenue streams are choked off, with a heavy reliance on volatile local income and sales taxes. Long term planning is very difficult, with only 25% of the budget under legislators’ direct control. But repealing the measure is seen as political suicide: after one kit-flying exercise, Arnie famously told supporter Warren Buffett to do 500 sit-ups if he mentioned it again.

This also means some very peculiar tax laws survive – for instance, local property taxes are based on initial purchase price, not the current value. (Malo explained that when his girlfriend bought a 50% share of a house, the two halves of the property were taxed at different rates.) Since land value is not properly captured, the result is a massive transfer of wealth from young to old, and huge windfall gains to property owners.

Some policy innovation arises from all of this – it turns out Tax Increment Financing was invented in California in the 1950s. But right now, extreme devolution is making it almost impossible to solve the State’s budget crisis. Voters have rejected everything proposed by Sacramento, forcing the State into emergency service cuts.

Californians seem confused about how to fix things. According to a 2008 survey, 64% favour some reforms to the system, and 78% think ballots are often too complex to understand. But 60% believe they make better public policy decisions than elected officials.

There are some resonances here for British debates about localism and public spending cuts. As Dermot points out, Labour and the Tories are still playing chicken on spending reductions. Tony Travers recently suggested that Whitehall should ‘delegate the axe’, avoiding the blame for cuts by giving local authorities the power to make their own. But centralism is so engrained in the UK that in the short term, Ministers would still face the kind of protests we’ve seen in Berkeley.

As Tim Williams argues, ‘casting off the Whitehall shackles’ should encourage British cities to develop more innovative ideas. But unlike America, I don’t think Brits would be up for city bankruptcy. There are cultural, as well as practical limits to localist self-reliance.

The California crisis also highlights the importance and limits of strong leadership. The Governor really has to direct the public conversation, but even popular leaders like Arnie have found it hard to push their favoured measures through. Still, if The Governator might be running for President in 2012, Californian  democracy is clearly a gateway drug to something much harder.

Berkeley

I’m off to California until the new year. I’ll be based in the Institute of Urban and Regional Development at UC Berkeley, where I’m now one of the (many) Visiting Scholars.

I’ll be working on the second part of my PhD research, doing a couple of projects on cultural diversity, innovation and ideas generation. Berkeley has some of the best researchers in the world [al-s link] in this field. And I hope to be taking a look at high-tech firms in Silicon Valley and the wider Bay Area.

Bloggage will continue as normal. I’ll see some of you in November at the NARSC Conference. If you’re passing through, please look me up and say hello …