Curry Chandler is a writer, researcher, and independent scholar working in the field of communication and media studies. His writing on media theory and policy has been published in the popular press as well as academic journals. Curry approaches the study of communication from a distinctly critical perspective, and with a commitment to addressing inequality in power relations. The scope of his research activity includes media ecology, political economy, and the critique of ideology.
Curry is a graduate student in the Communication Department at the University of Pittsburgh, having previously earned degrees from Pepperdine University and the University of Central Florida.
To cap off 2022 here’s a montage of cycling videos I shot this year, mostly from this past Fall. The footage includes rides from Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, New York, and Toronto. Special thanks to Ben McSpadden who wrote and recorded original music for the montage!
This Fall ended up being travel-heavy for me, with multiple research and work-related trips following in quick succession after a personal excursion to spend time with my parents. As November draws to a close I am recuperating from what feels like a whirlwind of interchangeable liminal spaces and solitary wanderings in strange cities. The physical toll has mostly been limited to fatigue and fouled-up feet, though the final injury was leaving my favorite sunglasses in the Uber that brought me home on the last leg of the journey.
My visit to New Orleans was occasioned by the annual national convention of my ostensible academic discipline. It was the first trip to New Orleans of my adult life, and as with past conferences I was determined to make time to explore the city proper and not have my experience limited to hotel lobbies and ballrooms. But frankly I was still feeling burned out from my solo travel in Toronto two weeks earlier, and colder-than-expected New Orleans weather further dampened my exploratory ambitions (though it was still warmer than Pittsburgh, which was freshly dusted with snow when I departed).
I had planned to at least try out the city’s bike share program and get some cycling in around the French Quarter. But even on that front my ambitions were stymied. The Blue Bikes Nola system uses a proprietary app, and the ride pricing seemed steeper than I’ve seen in other cities. The locking mechanism was also unique: each bike has an affixed cable that users must manually secure to the docking port (or any other desired fixture, I suppose). The first two docking stations I came across were completely empty, and by the time I found an available fleet I wasn’t in the mood to go riding in the rain. It was good to catch up with friends and colleagues (some of whom I hadn’t seen in several years, having not attended an in-person convention since the pre-COVID days), but I ultimately failed in my mission to take advantage of my time in New Orleans beyond the confines of the conference.
I was back home for a single day before embarking for New York. This was a research-related trip that I had been trying to plan for several months. Due to a crowded schedule and emergent personal circumstances I had to book this travel for the week of Thanksgiving, which was less than ideal for a number of reasons. But at least the weather worked out in my favor and it was mostly beautiful late Fall conditions in New York.
I think it was my first time back in the city in five years. After my recent experiences navigating unfamiliar terrain and figuring out public transit in various cities there was something comforting about returning to the subway system. Even though I’ve never been a New Yorker, I’ve often felt a reflexive defensiveness about the outdated infrastructure that gets unfavorably compared to newer transit systems in other cities. “Sure the subway stations are dingy, and the Metrocard reader at the turnstile doesn’t work half of the time, but that’s New York City charm!” Since the last time I was in the city the MTA has upgraded the entry turnstiles to the Omny system whereby you just tap your phone or credit card to enter. I’ve long held on to my Metrocards as souvenirs (and bookmarks) so there’s a nostalgic pang in seeing them be phased out.
I’m pretty sure the CitiBike program had already been implemented when I was last in New York, but the bike share system has a much greater presence now. The bikes and their stations were ubiquitous in each of the boroughs I visited. The increased number of bike lanes was also apparent.
The “Oculus” World Trade Center transit hub had recently opened at the time of my previous visit but this was my first time being inside. The PATH train to New Jersey still requires a physical Metrocard so I was able to scratch my memento itch.
The PATH train was another first-time experience and increased my envy of the affordable and reliable transit in the greater metropolitan area. I disembarked at Newark Penn Station for my first foray on the Jersey side of the Hudson.
I’ll have more to say about my Newark experience in the future, but in the meantime here are some stray street scenes from this first trip.
For the first time in many years I took a proper trip during the annual academic spring break this past March. Obviously the past two years were disrupted by the pandemic, but even before that I had become accustomed to spending that week recuperating at home (or working my way through student papers). But this year I wasn’t just looking to shake off the covid blues, rather I was determined to make good on a promise to visit two of my dearest friends.
These friends are two of my closest relationships from grad school and from Pittsburgh in general, and in addition to having shared a lot of great times they were also a vital source of support when I was struggling through both professional and personal hardships. In March 2020, just days before our school’s spring break for that year, the Covid-19 threat materialized as a true public health crisis. Campuses around the country began canceling in-person classes for the remainder of the semester and our university soon followed suit. We gathered at my friends’ apartment (I was living just down the hill in their same neighborhood at the time) to toast our newly extended spring recess, playing a round of the Pandemic board game which was intermittently interrupted by breaking news reports: Tom Hanks had contracted coronavirus; the NBA season was canceled; President Trump was announcing travel restrictions. For the next couple of weeks I would periodically trek up the hill to visit my friends, my face covered with a makeshift bandana as I surveyed eerily empty streets. As we processed this unfolding new reality and discussed quarantine plans my friends assured me that I would be welcome in their home during the crisis, that I was officially part of their pandemic social bubble. This was tremendously important to me as I would otherwise be braving the lockdown alone in my basement studio apartment.
I ultimately decided to leave Pittsburgh to stay with my family for what I thought would be a fortnight at most. On the day I left I visited one half of this friend pair in the bakery he worked down the street. He gave me some pastries for my drive and I gifted him all the toilet paper I had in my apartment (these were the days of the great toilet paper run, when bath tissue was a highly valued commodity). Before I left the bakery there was a pregnant pause in place of a parting embrace, but there was a new strong sense of maintaining physical distance. My friend said something like, “What if this is the last time we see each other?” I replied something along the lines of, “Don’t worry, it won’t be.”
My stay in Nashville was gradually extended until it became indefinite. I kept in touch with my friends to see how they were faring, and after a few weeks got news that one of them had received a post-doc appointment and they would be moving to Maine. We continued to keep tabs long distance with occasional Zoom calls to catch up. Nearly 18 months later I was moving back to Pittsburgh, and in addition to other reasons this return took on a melancholic poignance in part because my friends would not be there.
In the past year my friends have continued to have major changes in their lives: finishing their PhDs, welcoming a new baby, and most recently the news that would be leaving Maine for jobs in Virginia. With their move coming up this summer I took the opportunity during spring break to see their new family addition and also where they’ve been living for the last two years. After assuring me that I should not feel obligated to visit and that their current parenting duties did not offer much in the way of excitement, I told them I was committed and they were evidently and heartwarmingly excited.
I had already made my Maine travel arrangements when my grandmother died in April. So I would now be going to Tennessee for the funeral and then immediately embarking on my Maine trip. I didn’t sleep the night following the funeral due to my extremely early departure time out of Nashville the next morning, so I was exhausted on multiple levels when beginning the next leg of my journey. I took off from a pre-dawn Nashville and landed in La Guardia on a gray and rainy New York morning. Then it was on to Pittsburgh where I would cool my heels in the airport for several hours.
I was feeling fatigued and nigh delirious as I tried to find ways to pass the time at the PIT airport (I even ate some Primantis). There was a prevailing sense of liminality, being in between journeys, and having arrived back at my point of departure but not going home, remaining in the liminal space of the airport. I started exploring the airport and at one point took an escalator to an area I had never been in before. It turned out to be the location of PIT’s Interfaith Reflection Room. The room was unoccupied so I spent some time taking in the space. Among other religious objects there was a shelf with a selection of devotional or sacred texts representing a variety of faiths. I picked up the resident copy of the Bhagavad Gita and flipped to a random page for some inspiration before leaving.
When I finally departed from Pittsburgh it was back to La Guardia where I had been only hours earlier. Conditions in New York had cleared up since that morning.
I also got to take in aerial views of the New York nightscape when continuing on to Maine by way of D.C.
Upon arriving in Bangor around 1 AM I was reunited with my friend whom I had last seen in the Pittsburgh bakery during the pandemic outbreak. We stood there in the cold remarking on the unbelievable fact that it had been nearly two years to the day since we’d last seen each other, and we finally shared the embrace that had been deferred that day in the bakery.
In Tennessee it had truly felt like spring, with temperatures getting into the 70s F. But in Maine it was still winter, with cold temperatures and ample snow. It was my first time being in this part of the world (my previous experiences of New England did not extend any further north than Boston) and I had not packed appropriately since I had to pack warm weather and funeral clothing in the same small bag that I was carrying on to Maine with. It was cold but also beautiful: the nights were truly dark in a way that felt like a distant point on the globe, and the days frequently featured layers of fog hovering over the frozen ground. I had been looking forward not only to taking in the general environs but especially to visit some of my friends’ favorite haunts from their time in Maine, and to enjoy some local fare. The first place they took me was the Eagle’s Nest, their favorite local spot for lobster rolls. (In addition to being my inaugural visit it was also the baby’s very first restaurant experience, and he was a trooper.)
The small restaurant features a picture window overlooking the Penobscot river, which was still littered with ice floes this time of year.
Despite the soy face in this photo, I assure you that it is lobster in the roll, and it was delicious.
Our next outing involved a drive out to Bar Harbor, a New England resort town that only existed for me as a vague spatial imaginary in the same vein as Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard. In addition to reuniting with my friends and meeting their baby I was also excited to reconnect with their fur baby who sat with (on) me for the drive.
It was decidedly the off-season in Bar Harbor: streets and sidewalks were mostly vacant, and the majority of shops were closed up with signs posted saying "see you in the summer."
A few places were open for business, including Ben & Bill’s Chocolate Emporium. It was far too cold and blustery for ice cream to be appealing but we popped in to get coffees and pick up some fudge for later in the trip.
The Ben & Bill’s workers were wearing t-shirts that advertised “lobster ice cream” which I assumed to be a cheeky joke. Upon inquiring, however, we learned that it was very much a real offering.
They offered us a sample of the lobster ice cream and of course we had to try it. (In this next photo it’s the ice cream tub with the lobster claw on top.) It was good, with more of a buttery flavor and a hint of lobster aftertaste.
Despite the cold and strong winds it was an otherwise beautiful day and easy to imagine the town bustling during the warmer months.
In any place I’m drawn to reading the local culture as expressed in graffiti tags and stickers on street signs. One of the local voices that stood out to me in Bar Harbor was DADBODY who was well represented throughout the main drag. (When I had been in Nashville the previous week my mom gave me updates on VERN, a graffiti name that appears frequently on highway overpasses and road barriers in the area. It’s a name we had noticed during our travels when I was still living there and so mom likes to give me updates on when VERNs have been painted over or when new ones appear.)
We continued along into Acadia National Park which has been one of my friends’ favorite natural refuges during their time in Maine. It did not feel like a beach day to me (my first experience of New England beaches was cold and did not offer much in the way of shelling or sea life), but we had a picnic lunch on the sand anyway.
My friend has a personal code where if he visits the beach, he doesn’t leave until he has had his feet in the ocean. In his mind, he hasn’t properly been at the beach unless he’s been in the water. In this cold weather I thought his creed seemed extreme but I was eventually won over by his logic. When would I next have the opportunity to take a dip in Maine coastal waters? We doffed our footwear and waded into the surf.
It was frigid but invigorating.
Further into the park we visited the iconic Bubbles.
Back in town my friends took me to some of their other favorite local fixtures, including Mason’s brewpub.
It was an opportunity to enjoy some more local grub and pick up additional merch to commemorate my trip (check out the newly acquired Bar Harbor sweater).
We also stopped by some Bangor landmarks such as Stephen King’s house. I had expected it to be a nondescript residence but was pleasantly surprised.
On the final night of my visit we had a night in where we played a game of darts and also got in a round of Pandemic to commemorate one of our last times together two years earlier.
My departure from Maine was another pre-dawn flight. We said our goodbyes and I wished my friends well with this next chapter of their lives. And we traded admonitions to not let another two years go by before we were together again.
The following considers how varying aesthetic valuations of urban order and disorder have influenced U.S. urban policy. The history I trace here focuses on one salient case: the “broken windows” perspective of urban disorder and its implementation through policing practices by the New York City Police Department. Broken windows theory began as an academic discourse proposing a causal connection between visible neighborhood disorder (i.e. litter, graffiti, and the eponymous “broken windows). As such, this perspective effectively criminalized low-income and economically disinvested city communities. The perspective was enthusiastically adopted by New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who implemented a sweeping “Quality of Life” initiative in the 1990s that purported to put the broken windows principles into practice. This history is significant for the consideration of urban aesthetics and justice that is the theme of this essay. The history of the broken windows theory’s pathologizing perspective and eventual transformation into policy application demonstrates how aesthetic judgments about urban spaces have served as the foundation for regimes of policing and law enforcement.
The broken windows theory of urban disorder was a significant influence on urban sociology and criminology for decades, and the implications of its approach to disorder can be seen today. In an article titled “The Urban Unease” (1968), J.Q. Wilson reacted to the U.S. urban riots of the 1960s with a view of cities rooted in the tensions between order and disorder. In one example, Wilson suggested that “the process whereby neighborhoods […] have been formed in the large cities might be thought of as one in which order arose out of chaos to return in time to a new form of disorder” (p. 32). Wilson offers a pragmatic understanding of community buttressed by appeals to rationality, stating “concern for community” is less about the need for belonging “than the concerns of any rationally self-interested person with a normal but not compulsive interest in the environment of himself and his family” (p. 27). The behaviors inspired by rational concern for community, Wilson argues, should not be interpreted as conformity or prejudice, but rather as the development of “a range of sanctions to employ against others” in order to “regulate the external consequences of private behavior” (p. 29).
Wilson eventually developed these ideas of neighborhood disorder into the broken windows theory, first outlined in an article written with collaborator George Kelling (1982). The authors encapsulate the broken windows perspective by stating “if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken” (p. 2, emphasis in original). As with broken windows that go unrepaired, the authors argue, “’untended’ behavior also leads to the breakdown of community controls” (p. 3). Wilson and Kelling are not exclusively interested physical manifestations of disorder such as litter, graffiti, and buildings in disrepair, but present a larger argument that visible disorder (whether stemming from the built environment or from individuals inhabiting it), if left unchecked, will spread throughout a neighborhood. In the broken windows article, the “urban unease” of Wilson’s earlier essay develops from a general anxiety into pronounced fear. Wilson and Kelling posit a connection between disorderliness, fear, and crime. Visible disorder on the streets will cause neighborhood residents to “think that crime, especially violent crime, is on the rise, and they will modify their behavior accordingly” (p. 3). As a response to this fear of crime, they argue, “people avoid one another, weakening controls” (p. 4) and allowing the spread of disorder. The avoidance of others and the neglect of disorder in the neighborhood necessitate intervention from outside of the community, and for Wilson and Kelling that intervention must come from the police, as the authors state that “[although] citizens can do a great deal, the police are plainly the key to order-maintenance” (p. 9).
Prashan Ranasinghe has persuasively argued that Jane Jacobs’ writing on urban space and city life significantly influenced the development of Wilson and Kelling’s theory. In tracing an intellectual history of how Jacobs’ ideas have “traveled” across scholarly and policy discourses, Ranasinghe cites an increased interest in public disorder among crimonologists in the late 1970s, after the U.S. urban race riots and shortly before the appearance of broken windows theory. Concern with visible disorder had previously appeared in other scholarly theories and texts, including Jacobs’ landmark book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs emphasized the importance of both interpersonal connection and a plentitude of strangers in contributing to the safety of a neighborhood. The presence of diverse groups of people on the sidewalks, and thus “eyes and ears on the street,” contributes to a culture of “casual surveillance” that discourages visible disorder and criminal activity, increasing both the perceived and actual safety of the neighborhood. Jacobs’ notions of “casual surveillance” and the self-regulating activities among community members have significant parallels with Wilson and Kelling’s theories of Indeed, Kelling has said that his interest in studying disorderly behavior and conditions was directly inspired by reading Jacobs’ book, and stated in correspondence with Ranasinghe that “Broken Window[s] stands in a historical train of thought, the indebtedness of which to Jacobs becomes more clear over time” (p. 69). In Ranasinghe’s analysis, the “fundamental point of departure between Jacobs and Wilson and Kelling revolves around the reclamation of civility” (p. 74). As mentioned before, Wilson and Kelling considered police to be “the key to order maintenance,” capable of implementing the necessary sanctions and interventions beyond the capabilities of neighborhood residents. Jacobs presents a counter perspective in Death and Life, writing: “No amount of police can enforce civilization where the normal, casual enforcement of it has broken down” (p. 40).
Wilson and Kelling’s broken windows article proved very influential, and is credited with inspiring the implementation of policing practices implemented in cities throughout the United States. These policing programs have been referred to as “broken windows policing,” “zero tolerance policing,” and also, using Wilson and Kelling’s preferred term, “order maintenance policing”. In the 1990s, order maintenance policies based on broken windows theory were implemented by the New York City Police Department under police commissioner William Bratton and mayor Rudolph Giuliani. These policies were adopted as part of the city’s broader “Quality of Life” initiatives. During this period crime rates in the city decreased, and New York gained a reputation as one of the safest large cities in the country.
In a 1998 address titled “The Next Phase of Quality of Life: Creating a More Civil Society,” mayor Giuliani praised the benefits of broken windows theory and zero tolerance policing, saying “broken windows theory works”. Describing the theory as the view that “the little things matter,” Giuliani called broken windows theory “an integral part of our law enforcement strategy”. As an illustration of the policy’s effectiveness, Giuliani relayed an anecdote wherein NYPD officers saw a man “acting suspiciously,” then followed the man “for a time” until they witnessed him “recklessly jaywalking”. After serving the man a summons for the jaywalking offense, the officers learned that the man was wanted in connection with several robberies. This story, Giuliani says, is representative of the “continuum of disorder”:
People who insist on romanticizing the disorder of the past should realize that the reason they have the luxury of this nostalgia is that today things have improved. We didn’t become the City people most want to live in and visit by encouraging an atmosphere of disorder and disrespect for the rights of others. […] There’s a continuum of disorder. Obviously, murder and graffiti are two vastly different crimes. But they are part of the same continuum, and a climate that tolerates one is more likely to tolerate the other.
Bernard Harcourt has been among the most vocal and persistent critics of broken windows theory. His book Illusion of Order (2001) presents a sustained refutation of the theory’s empirical underpinnings, application in policy initiatives, and ideological implications. Harcourt calls the empirical support for the success of broken windows policing into question, and suggests that factors other than policing practices were responsible for New York City’s crime drop. Harcourt’s theoretical critique of broken windows is explicitly Foucauldian, highlighting the problems of subject creation. The broken windows approach, Harcourt suggests, “fails to pay enough attention to the ways that social meaning may construct the subject and to how our understanding of the subject fosters certain disciplinary strategies” (p. 180). More recently, the broken windows approach and zero tolerance policing have been heavily criticized in relation to the NYPD’s controversial “stop and frisk” policy, and the 2014 death of Eric Garner during an encounter with NYPD officers.
The preceding history of broken windows policing is presented to demonstrate a connection between urban aesthetics and justice. This example shows how the privileging of certain aesthetic attributes over others has been used as the basis for policing and criminalizing urban populations. The era of the Giuliani mayoral administration is popularly associated with the “Disneyfication” of New York City, a range of transformations exemplified by the removal of sex shops and “red light district” elements from Times Square, and their replacement by corporate entertainment and retail centers. A less well known but equally significant outcome of these policies was the aggressive removal of homeless people from the public spaces in Manhattan. The “quality of life” and “zero tolerance” initiatives were deployed to systematically eliminate visible homelessness, a condition that was rhetorically equated with “visible disorder.” The connection between removing certain pathologized populations in the pursuit of a more aesthetically pleasing city is further demonstrated by the current trend of gentrification and displacement in U.S. cities.
References
Ranasinghe, Prashan. Jane Jacobs’ Framing of Public Disorder and Its Relation to the ‘broken Windows’ Theory. Theoretical criminology 16, no. 1 (2012): 63–84.
Wilson, J.Q. (1968). The urban unease: Community vs. city. The Public Interest, 12 (Summer), 25-39.
Wilson, J.Q. & Kelling, G.L. (1982). Broken windows: The police and neighborhood safety. Atlantic Monthly, 249(3), 29-38. PDF version retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/03/broken-windows/304465/
Wilson, J.Q. & Kelling, G.L. (2006). A quarter century of broken windows. The American Interest, 2(1). Retrieved from http://www.the-american-interest.com/2006/09/01/a-quarter-century-of-broken-windows/
Kingsway Telephone Exchange, photo by Bradley Garrett, retrieved from <http://tinyurl.com/q54z46r>
The researcher judged walkability using geographic information systems — essentially maps that measure and analyze spatial data.
“GIS data can tell us about roads, sidewalks, elevation, terrain, distances between locations and a variety of other pieces of information,” Watts said. “We then use a process called Space Syntax to measure these features, including the number of intersections, distances between places or connections between a person’s home and other possible destinations they might walk to. We’re also interested in how complicated a route is to get from one place to another. For example, is it a straight line from point A to point B, or does it require a lot of turns to get there?”
Watts said easy-to-walk communities resulted in better outcomes both for physical health—such as lower body mass and blood pressure—and cognition (such as better memory) in the 25 people with mild Alzheimer’s disease and 39 older adults without cognitive impairment she tracked. She believes that older adults, health care professionals, caregivers, architects and urban planners could benefit from the findings.
By studying 24 California cities with an array of street design characteristics and their associated health data, the authors find that living in cities with high intersection density—a measure of compactness—significantly reduces the risk of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease. A full-grid street pattern also is a factor in lower risk of obesity, high blood pressure, and heart disease, as compared with full treelike patterns.
If walkability has long been an “ideal,” a recent slew of studies provide increasingly compelling evidence of the positive effects of walkable neighborhoods on everything from housing values to crime and health, to creativity and more democratic cities.
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Walkability is no longer just an ideal. The evidence from a growing body of research shows that walkable neighborhoods not only raise housing prices but reduce crime, improve health, spur creativity, and encourage more civic engagement in our communities.
I spoke with Dr. Julio Bermudez, the lead of a new study that uses fMRI to capture the effects of architecture on the brain. His team operates with the goal of using the scientific method to transform something opaque—the qualitative “phenomenologies of our built environment”—into neuroscientific observations that architects and city planners can deliberately design for. Bermudez and his team’s research question focuses on buildings and sites designed to elicit contemplation: They theorize that the presence of “contemplative architecture” in one’s environment may over time produce the same health benefits as traditional “internally induced” meditation, except with much less effort by the individual.
The urban exploration crew I had worked with, the London Consolidation Crew or LCC, had long graduated from ruins and skyscrapers – it was the city in the city they were after, the secrets buried deep underground where the line between construction site and ruin is very thin indeed. The Kingsway Telephone Exchange was the crème de la crème, more coveted even than abandoned Tube stations or possibly even the forgotten Post Office railway we accessed in 2011.
Kingsway was originally built as a second world war air-raid shelter under Chancery Lane. These deep level shelters were, at one time, connected to the Tube and citizens would have undoubtedly taken refuge here during Luftwaffe bombing runs. In 1949 the tunnels were sold to the General Post Office where they became the termination for the first submarine transatlantic phone cable – the £120m TAT1 project. The system, meant to protect the vital connective tissue of the city in the event of terror-from-the-air (including nuclear attack), stretched for miles. It only had three surface entrances and contained a bar for workers on their off-hours, rumoured to be the deepest in the UK at 60m below the street. Although the government employed a host of people to maintain the tunnels, Kingsway was a spatial secret of state - part a trio of the most secure and sensitive telephone exchanges in Britain, along with the Anchor Exchange in Birmingham and the Guardian Exchange in Manchester.
Before most cables ran underground, all electrical, telephone and telegraph wires were suspended from high poles, creating strange and crowded streetscapes. Here are some typical views of late-19th century Boston, New York, Stockholm, and other wire-filled cities.
Wires over New York, 1887, via Retronaut, retrieved from <http://tinyurl.com/kb9dns2>
Auto campaigners lobbied police to publicly shame transgressors by whistling or shouting at them — and even carrying women back to the sidewalk — instead of quietly reprimanding or fining them. They staged safety campaigns in which actors dressed in 19th century garb, or as clowns, were hired to cross the street illegally, signifying that the practice was outdated and foolish. In a 1924 New York safety campaign, a clown was marched in front of a slow-moving Model T and rammed repeatedly.
This strategy also explains the name that was given to crossing illegally on foot: jaywalking. During this era, the word "jay" meant something like "rube" or "hick" — a person from the sticks, who didn't know how to behave in a city. So pro-auto groups promoted use of the word "jay walker" as someone who didn't know how to walk in a city, threatening public safety.
Between the mega-village and the cities that came later lies the formation of the state. Ultimately, this is the world of stratification buttressed through religion. With it came the creation of differing social groups and distinctions based upon rank or property. Yet, the acceptance of social specialization required a new view of the world, a new rhetoric in the McCloskeyian sense. And once that jump was made, benefits followed. Clustered people allowed for more trade and specialization of work, leading to more wealth, prestige and better equipped armies. While still a brutal world, cities had the potential for stability, but it came at the expense of radical equality.
But you can’t just flip a switch to reverse paper systems in place for hundreds of years, can you? Adobe first released its Portable Document Format nearly 20 years ago, yet many private companies, nonprofit organizations, libraries, law firms, courts — and yes, major city governments such as Chicago’s — have yet to embrace a world reliant on PDFs and devoid of paper records. Mayor Emanuel has agreed to change that. Or at least to try. In 2011, he announced plans to spend $20 million on efficiency improvements including changes to make the city less reliant on paper.
Will Mayor Rahm Emanuel change the way governments deal with paper? Or is the road toward a “completely paperless” government a long way off?
"Because urban planning has always been based on the gathering and exchange of information and – as a democratic process – on communication between different stakeholders, a change in the method of communication has a significant impact on decision-making throughout the process"
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The quote at the beginning of this post was taken out of a paper by Stefan Höffken and Chris Haller, who set out to research how new medias were used for urban planning matters. They are refering to geographer Manuel Castells’ and Clay Shirky‘s work to describe the change from uni-dimentional communication towards a many-to-many exchange sphere that, so Shirky, is on the verge of becoming ubiquitous. Höffken and Haller provide interesting insights in how different tools can serve certain goals and complement each-other by surveying urban projects and institutions or civil society mobilizations on urban matters as different as Tulsa municipality and the Mediaspree campaign in Berlin.
The company plans to partner first with Boston, sharing quarterly anonymized trip-level data with the city in a model that Uber says will become its national data-sharing policy. The data will include date, time, distance traveled and origin and destination locations for individual trips, identified only by zip code tabulation area to preserve privacy. Once held by cities, this information will be open to records requests, meaning that the public (and researchers) will have access to it, too.
Such data could help cities keep tabs on Uber and, for example, which neighborhoods the company is serving. Uber says, though, that it's primarily offering the data so that cities can better understand themselves.
A redesigned Los Angeles parking sign, retrieved from <http://tinyurl.com/nu5tr2z>
Sylianteng first tried to redesign parking signs when she was living in LA and applying to grad school, in a project she called “To Park or Not to Park.” She reduced the usual jumble of signs and regulations to a single, holistic panel, which looked a lot like a Google Calendar – it was a grid of days of the week, broken into hours. The blocks of time when a parking spot was valid she shaded green, the blocks of time it was invalid she shaded red. She also simplified the rules she illustrated, working off the principle that people would much rather adhere to an overly restrictive regulation than get a parking ticket.
[...]
Her prototypes provoked a lot of commentary, discussion, and praise. She used this feedback to improve her designs. She printed out new prototypes, and taped those up. The feedback validated some of her central assumptions, among them: (1) a lot of current parking signs were very confusing, and (2) people didn’t care why they could or couldn’t park somewhere, they just didn’t want to be ticketed.
The writing of social history needs to keep in mind the motivations and individual agency of the people participating in events as they happen. In interview after interview, people were aware of the larger structural forces, and yet made choices and actions in contradiction to expectations. Again and again we spoke with people who beat the odds, who pushed back against racism, and took it upon themselves to change circumstances and in many cases succeeded.
Similar semantic shifts are being attempted, with varying degrees of success, throughout the rest of London. Intrepid developers have discovered “Tyburnia”, an undervalued stretch of real estate between Paddington Station and Hyde Park. Meanwhile, the “Knowledge Quarter” is an attempt to rid King’s Cross of its association with prostitution by emphasising the new preponderance of cerebral institutions there. You could call it “brain-washing”. The Knowledge Quarter, incidentally, is one of 21 “Quarters” in London; there are also a dozen or so new “Villages”. Neighbourhood rebranding is often the linguistic leg of gentrification and, as such, follows a predictable pattern: “Villages” assert their legitimacy by emphasising community, while “Quarters” lend a gravitas to whatever noun they follow. Both have a cleansing effect on the associations that came before them.
Remember a few years ago when television went digital and everyone had to get adapters or new TV sets? When that happened, what once were television channels became simply channels, a bulk of empty bandwidth that could host any variety of transmission. The Federal Communications Commission named it Super WiFi. The policies to regulate it are yet to be written, and a chorus is imploring the FCC to leave a large part of the spectrum open, or “unlicensed,” instead of auctioning it off. Those advocates tend to refer to the spectrum in spatial terms — a group of Stanford University economists likened the spectrum to a public park, a resource everyone should have access to. Mary Ellen Carroll speaks of it similarly. “It’s like public land,” she says. “It’s like Yosemite.”
SimCity's homeless people are represented as yellow, two-dimensional, ungendered figures with bags in tow. Their presence makes SimCity residents unhappy, and reduces land value. Like many other players, Bittanti discovered the online discussions when he was searching for a way to deal with them.
At first, players wondered if they were having so much problems with the homeless in their cities because of a bug in the game. Like many of 2014's big-budget games that launched in broken or barely-functional states, SimCity originally would only work if players connected to EA's servers, which repeatedly crashed under the load of players. It seemed possible that the homeless problem in SimCity was simply a mistake.
"Has anyone figured out a easy way to handle the homeless ruining those beautiful parks you spend so much money on?" asks one player on EA' site. "Create jobs, either through zoning or upgrading road density near industry, that helped me a lot," another player suggests.