I gave a talk on my diversity and firms research at LSE London on Monday. You can now read summaries on LSE’s British Policy and Politics blog and the SERC blog.
LSE London have also posted up the slides and a podcast. I hope they’ve included the bit at the beginning where Powerpoint stops working …
The paper’s been picking up some interest – thanks to The Economist’s Free Exchange blog – and you can read the whole thing here if you so wish.
The LSE Migration Studies Unit have published a new paper of mine, looking at the long term economic effects of migration in British cities.
In a nutshell, I find migration is good for productivity and wages, less good for low skill workers’ employment. Let’s explain why …
The paper takes stock of the UK’s last big ‘migration cycle’ – from the mid-1990s to 2008. During this time net migration spiked up from 30-40,000 people per year to around 198,000 by 2007 . Most of those people ended up in urban areas, although some rural areas saw rapid growth too.
We’d expect this kind of shift to change both the size and the composition of cities’ population and workforce. We’d also expect a mix of short term ‘shocks’ to labour supply, and more subtle changes to urban economic structure.
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Sure enough, I find:
1) Net migration to UK cities helps raise the productivity and wages of British-born workers, especially the higher skilled
2) Net migration is linked to lower employment rates, especially among lower skilled UK-born workers.
I think I can interpret these as causal effects. (For the econometricians, results survive a battery of robustness checks, including a shift-share IV specification.)
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For policymakers, there are two big stories here.
The good news is that the diversity migrants bring is good for UK productivity, and helps raise average incomes. A number of things are probably driving this – high skilled migrants, diversity-innovation effects, and the benefits of diasporic communities in trade links.
The bad news isn’t about migrants taking British jobs – that’s too simplistic. My research and other evidence suggest various things are happening here. It’s partly about deindustrialisation. Established migrant communities went where the jobs were in the 1960s and 70s, and have stayed in old industrial towns as jobs have gone. And it’s partly about employer behaviour – during the 1990s the UK has seen increasing numbers of low-quality entry-level jobs, plus increasing use of employment agencies, many of whom use largely migrant labour. As a result, low-skilled Britons face a combination of poor jobs, limited access and competition. In effect, the labour market locks them out.
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Like a number of others, I think migration is good for UK plc, and good for British cities. Policy should be encouraging high-skill migrants in – through universities and workplace channels. At the same time, we need tougher regulation of poor employers and employment agencies, as well as restrictions on lower-skilled workers.
That needs a more sophisticated system than a migration cap – although the Coalition’s latest proposals suggest they are trying to introduce some flexibilities into what most businesses and experts think is a basically flawed idea.
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Now, these findings are significantly different from most (but not all) research in this field. It’s worth explaining why, and why I think this paper adds value.
First, I’m looking at the long term – I have a 16-year panel, rather longer than most other studies in the field.
Second, I’m looking beyond the labour market – I’m able to identify some short term wage and job ‘shocks’, but I’m also able to look at dynamic effects on urban economies, such as productivity and cost of living effects.
Third, I pay careful attention to space – most research on the local effects of migration compares outcomes across regions or local authority districts, which are either too big or too small to represent functioning economic zones. By building a new dataset of real urban economies, I’m able to pick up effects other studies might have missed.
This is work in progress. So as ever, I’d welcome your comments.
I’m presenting a couple of papers at a Regional Studies Association Conference at Manchester University on Tuesday 2 November. The conference is titled Regions in a Shifting Global Landscape, and both my presentations will look at connections between cultural diversity, innovation and urban/regional economic development.
The first is work in progress, and looks at the role of ‘ethnic inventors’ in the UK. It’s the first UK work of its kind, so I’m excited to be doing it. In the US, ethnic Indian and Chinese communities play a huge role in the science and technology sectors, especially in places like Silicon Valley. I’m interested in whether anything similar is going on here – in cities like Manchester, or our own Silicon Fen. My initial results suggest we may have a similar diaspora of British-Indian high-tech inventors emerging. More on that on the day …
The second paper, done with Neil Lee, looks at whether London’s cosmopolitanism helps the capital’s firms to innovate. We find small but pretty robust ‘diversity effects’ for London businesses. That raises the question of whether other big and diverse British cities – like Manchester or Birmingham – might benefit in the same way. We hope to crunch some more data on this in the coming months.
Here are the conference details. Hope to see you some of you there.
ps. I realise the picture is only loosely related to diversity, innovation or Manchester. But I like it, so it’s going up.
Who actually uses Boris Bikes? Commuters, civil servants and city types. Who doesn’t? Shoppers and posh people. That’s the story so far, as suggested by data from the London Cycle Hire Explorer – flagged in Londonist, and recycled in Wednesday’s Evening Standard.
The Explorer app is simple but powerful: it shows the 10 most and least popular docking stations across the capital. Obviously it’s early days, and usage will change (see below). And I’m just eyeballing the data – no fancy analysis here. First impressions:
1) Commuters are the main users – the most popular spots are mainly around the major stations – Waterloo (354 bikes yesterday), King’s Cross (305), London Bridge (256) and Liverpool Street (226). This is why TfL already wants to spend another £81m on new bikes and docking stations.
2) Biking to meetings and running errands also seem popular – viz heavy daytime (and lunchtime) use during the week in Covent Garden, (196) Strand (189) and Fitzrovia (187).
3) Weekend biking is on – judging by the past week at least, there’s no obvious drop-off on Saturdays or Sundays in the most popular spots. That suggests some tourists might be venturing out too.
4) There’s a bit of an East/West divide – six of the least popular docking stations are in West London, mainly Kensington (28 bikes) and Chelsea (25-29). I would have expected some use around Paddington and White City, but perhaps the Westway is putting people off. Support for scary road theory comes from other cold spots around Elephant and New Kent Road (26 each).
5) Alternatively, bike use is low in well-off neighbourhoods where residents prefer to drive, such as Kensington and Chelsea, Bayswater (27) and St John’s Wood (20). Or where serious shopping is going on (all of the above). Obviously that’s just postcode stereotyping, but still – I bet there’s something in it.
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The open data is incredibly helpful, and not just for urbanists. At one level the bike scheme is a gigantic social experiment – give people new tools for getting around the city, step back and see what happens.
There are useful parallels here with new technologies, especially portable gear like mobile phones. The lesson from these is that technology changes us, but we change it too, and unpredictably. In the jargon, use is endogenous to the user. Texting is the classic example of user-driven innovation for mobiles: open platforms like Android are doing something similar for smartphones.
A lot of this happens through experimenting and messing about, and this is already happening with blue bikes – via mashups like the Explorer, or Barley-ish attempts at stunt riding. More interesting stuff is bubbling up at this user forum.
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In turn, that suggests Boris Bike dynamics might look very different in a year’s time. So far, riders are currently making 19,000 journeys per day, not put off by bikes variously described as ‘like flying Ryanair’ (Jon Snow) and ‘like driving a tractor’ (anonymous friend).
That number could rocket up when Pay as You Go rates are introduced, and the early adopters are joined by loads of tourists and casual users. We could see new hotspots around St James’ Park, Baker Street and Tower Hill. And even bike snobs like me might get round to trying the thing …
The big city’s the place to find fame and fortune, wouldn’t you think? Not according to the Commission for Rural Communities, whose new report claims ‘rural areas have more entrepreneurs’. This seems odd – aren’t cities supposed to help ideas flow, with banks to lend money, and customers to sell to?
All the evidence suggests innovation is heavily urbanised, for example. So what on earth’s been going on in the British countryside? Is the fresh air good for the brain?
The report’s here. It’s nearly 200 pages long, so to save you reading it I’ve done some digging. The relevant findings are:
1) A survey of bank lending finds that in 2008 and 2009, rural areas had more start-ups per working-age population than urban areas (p131)
2) GEM survey data for 2004-2008 finds higher rates of ‘entrepreneurship activity’ in rural areas than urban areas. Strikingly, the survey suggests rural entrepreneurship rates are ‘as high as inner London’ (p133).
The report uses good definitions of ‘urban’ and ‘rural’, based on this DEFRA typology. But there are questions about which rural areas we’re talking about – more on that in a moment.
Let’s start with start-ups. First, there’s not much urban-rural difference in business birth rates – 13.9 per thousand people in rural areas, 12.7 in urban areas. Second, in absolute terms there are far more start-ups in cities than the countryside – hardly surprising since c.80% of the English population live in urban areas.
Third, there’s noise in the data – the survey in question covers 93% of all bank lending, which is pretty good, but doesn’t adjust for the rest. If 80% of those loans were to city firms, a reasonable assumption, the urban-rural difference is less than one percentage point.
‘Entrepreneurship’ is a slightly more nebulous concept, and it turns out the GEM data needs a big pinch of salt. For one thing, the survey is based on just 43,000 firms across the UK – which might risk sampling error if you’re looking at small rural areas.
More seriously, GEM actually measures something called ‘total early-stage entrepreneurial activity’ – which is a weighted index including ‘nascent business activity’. This could include things like writing a business plan, but not actually doing anything with it. (I’ve also no idea how the Index is built because GEM doesn’t say.)
In the CRC small print, GEM concedes it’s tracking ‘propensity to be entrepreneurial’, rather than *actual* entrepreneurs. It’s hardly convincing.
So, case not proven – on the basis of these numbers. However, let’s suspend disbelief and assume there is a new generation of rural whizz-kids. What might explain this?
It could be a lifecycle effect – people downsize or move their families out of the city, starting new businesses in the countryside. Migration data suggests there could be something in this – young single people move into cities, older people with partners and children move out. Other studies suggest people gain skills and learning in cities, taking these with them when they leave.
There could also be a technology effect. The CRC’s start-up figures suggests that most loans go to business services like accountancy and consulting, a lot of which can be done by phone or online (anecdata – my accountant operates out of deepest East Sussex).
That implies a third point – many of rural areas are actually around the edges of big urban areas. In the jargon, they’re ‘peri-urban’ – pleasant, leafy communities with decent schools and public services, and good links into the urban core. Not surprisingly, these neighbourhoods tend to come near the top of ‘best place to live’ surveys.
In turn, that suggests some final lessons. Don’t overspin your data. The city and country have more in common than you might imagine. And ultimately, enterprise is less about place than about people.
This is the first of two posts on ‘shrinking cities’, or as civil servants might put it, ‘places with a long history of economic underperformance’. In the UK, this means cities like Hull or Stoke-on-Trent with low average incomes and higher-than-average deprivation rates; abroad, places like Leipzig, Cleveland or Detroit.
The politics of improving life for people in under-performing places is extremely sensitive, as Policy Exchange discovered when they appeared to suggest moving people out of ‘failing’ Northern cities. Recently there’s been more interest, via LSE’s ‘Phoenix Cities’ book, Julien Temple’s ‘Requiem for Detroit?’ and from the Centre for Cities (see Dermot’s helpful summary, and my thoughts from last summer).
Why now? First, during the 2000s a lot of economic development funding went into cities. But this has not always improved residents’ overall welfare. As the business cycle turns, city leaders are looking for new ways forward. Second, there’s now less regeneration money around. Between 2011 and 2015, central government departments like CLG may face 20-25% spending cuts. So Whitehall policymakers are looking hard at if, where and how to spend.
At the recent AAG Conference in Washington DC, Michael Storper offered some helpful thoughts on all of this.
Spatial disparities exist, Storper argues, because there are benefits of clustering economic activity, and these persist over time. Agglomeration economies help explain why cities exist, and why they still matter. Theory and real world experience also suggest that long term convergence is unlikely.
So agglomeration leads to disparities between places. At the same time, increasing returns to skills lead to disparities between people. And because higher-skilled people tend to sort into more successful cities, we often get poorer people concentrated in poorer places.
The question for policymakers is what, if anything, we should do about this? Storper outlines three responses.
We could aim for ‘spatial equity’, compensating people and places who lose out. This feels appealing – but what does it really mean? Is holding successful places back fair to their residents? And how do we actually equalise outcomes? Even the UK’s very centralised public services haven’t got rid of postcode lotteries.
Another view is that we invest in poorer places. This is the traditional regeneration perspective. Structural economic change has long term impacts that markets won’t deal with – physical decay, poverty, crime. And there are efficiency costs to this – not least higher spending on benefits. Area-based policies tackle these externalities, get markets working again and places back on their feet.
This has been pretty much the UK approach for the past two decades. It’s given many cities a public makeover – and has made them nicer places to live. But most evidence suggests that improving places doesn’t easily translate into improving outcomes for people. Trickle-down regeneration works about as well as trickle-down economics.
People can move, and it’s hard to assess area-based initiatives if some recipients leave the area. ‘Regeneration thinking’ also doesn’t say how to balance limited resources between helping poor places recover, and helping growing places do better. CLG’s Regeneration Framework has a go, but isn’t completely convincing.
A third view comes from urban economics, especially Ed Glaeser (and now, Richard Florida). In its simplest form, this says we should focus on people, not places. People are mobile; investing in their mobility and human capital improves their economic prospects. Investing in immobile places does not, especially as convergence is unlikely.
To me, this feels like the right starting point for policy. This view is also increasingly fashionable in UK policy circles, and partly explains the bad press traditional regeneration has been getting. But as Storper points out, it’s more complicated than it looks to implement. There are three big policy points.
First, it’s not clear everyone is truly ‘mobile’. People are free to move; but less skilled people have less information or resources to migrate between cities. Policy interventions might improve mobility, although we don’t have strong evidence here – increasing choice in the social housing system could help, also expanding housing supply in more successful places. Research and experiments should look to fill this gap.
Second, it implies we maximise economic welfare. But we know people think beyond money. Some local responses to Policy Exchange’s report reveal people happy to live in ‘failing’ Newcastle and Liverpool – because they like being there. At an LSE screening, critics of Julien Temple’s film similarly pointed out that nearly a million people still live in ‘failed’ Detroit.
Urban economists explain this in terms of spatial equilibrium. People sort by economic prospects, and prefer different kinds of communities. Low wages get traded off against low cost of living and/or better amenities. In spatial equilibrium local labour, housing and ‘quality of life’ markets all clear, so that real wages equalise across all places. Ongoing SERC research finds some UK evidence for this.
The spatial equilibrium approach implies we don’t need to worry so much about disparities in nominal income. But in some poorer places, especially given mobility barriers, we may want to adopt measures (better quality housing, tackling crime) which will improve residents’ wider wellbeing – and thus raise real incomes.
Finally, national politics and local delivery are both critical. The UK is generally less tolerant of inequality than the US. Our politics is steeped in notions of fair play and universal standards: we’re a long way from accepting apparently large income disparities on the basis of hard-to-explain equilibrium concepts.
British over-centralisation also makes it politically difficult to do anything about managing decline: London policy apparatchiks seem to be telling other cities what to do (which they are). This is one reason why the Housing Market Renewal programme has often been so painful, why Policy Exchange got in trouble, and why the Coalition’s emphasis on localism is important. In future, devolution and actually doing managed decline need to go hand in hand. I’ll explore these ideas further in the next post, and take a look at some international experiences along the way.
Green jobs are hot. All three political parties want to shift Britain onto a low-carbon growth path. It’s a powerful meme. Two questions, then: what are green jobs? And where will they be? My guess is: mostly quite boring. But they will be everywhere, and they will be a big deal for towns and cities.
So what are ‘green jobs’? ippr’s new report suggests that ‘all jobs should be green’ in future. I’m not sure. Let’s focus on activities with the biggest carbon footprint: energy, waste, transport and construction. Some jobs in other sectors can be greened too, say if manufacturers adopt more sustainable workflows.
Where will green jobs be? To answer that, we need to consider how the UK moves onto a greener growth trajectory. There are two basic approaches, impling different roles for government – and different levels of political engagement.
Let’s call the first the Green Industries approach. This is about increasing the UK’s global share of high-value green activity – like wind turbines and low-carbon vehicles. It also encompasses major infrastructure like high-speed rail. National Government holds the policy levers: public money, tax breaks, business support (and to an extent, picking winners).
The second approach we could call Green Places. This is about making towns, cities and households more sustainable. The focus is on non-traded activities: buildings, energy and waste systems, local public transport – and things like repairing windmills on roofs.
Local government has a critical role here, alongside Whitehall: via recycling, local planning standards (like the Merton Rule), procurement and PPPs (like the ESCOs in Woking and Birmingham). Whitehall matters behind the scenes – for example, through DECC’s new Feed-In Tariff rules.
Green Industries are the sexy, photogenic things politicians get excited about, and are the focus of Labour’s Low Carbon Industrial Strategy, the Conservatives’ ‘Marine Energy Parks’ idea, and the Lib Dems’ green growth plans. Interestingly, the Tories seem keener on Green Places than Labour – see proposals for a ‘green deal’ for households, and support for micro-generation.
My guess is that Green Industries, though exciting, will only take the UK so far. First, only a few places will have them. The range of green technologies is vast. With no global standards, potential for international growth is capped. Most importantly, geographies of innovation, production and sales already differ. Silicon Valley leads the US in ‘cleantech’ R&D – but large-scale manufacturing is already shifting from the US to China and other cheap locations.
Second, the UK is already lagging. In wind turbines – where Britain should be a leader – the top firms are German and Scandinavian. (From this perspective, one of the saddest things about last year’s Vesta dispute is that Vesta is Danish).
Third, policy options are pretty limited. Green industries in the US are supported by Government stimulus money and a massive VC sector. Other European governments have funded producers for years. Britain has plenty of strategy, but limited cash to back these up. Low Carbon Economic Areas have no funding attached, and rely on existing RDA / LA budgets plus local ingenuity. The experience of Science Cities, a similar approach, doesn’t get my hopes up.
The Green Places approach is much more prosaic, but will have bigger impacts on more people. Cities’ carbon footprint is large: the C40 group estimates that worldwide, urban areas represent around 75% of the world’s energy use and CO2 emissions. Fiscally, Green Places largely involves redirecting existing budgets. (Some costs are passed on to firms and households – but councils should be allowed to use tools like TIF to ease financing constraints.)
Finally, British local government is already on the case. The Merton Rule is a classic example of how local policy innovation has shaped national thinking. Woking is a leader in decentralised energy. And Greater Manchester’s LCEA proposals look pretty good, with a five-year retrofit programme, small-scale renewables and smart meters for thousands of households across the city.
The UK needs both green industries and green places. But let’s not get over-excited about the first, while underplaying the second. Green jobs might be more dull than we thought. But they’re important as ever.
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.
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 …
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
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.
