Archive: Jan 2009

Planetizen links to a New Urban News article reporting on a study which finds that cities built in California before 1950 have safer raods than those built after 1950. The authors, Wes Marshall and Norman Garrick, find that post 1950 cities:

tend to have more “dendritic” networks — branching, tree-like organizations that include many cul-de-sacs, limiting the movement of traffic through residential areas. They also don’t have as many intersections.

They suggest these “dendric” networks actually lead to greater travel speeds which in turn cause more fatalities. “Connected” grid-like streets are less likely to lead to fatal accidents because the heavier traffic leads to lower travel speeds.

The PBS show E2 (E Squared) had a compelling look at the transformation of Bogota, Colombia during the tenure of Enrique Penalosa. It’s worth a look to see how the transformation of space can impact social behavior. Through the development of green space, libraries, public parks, and pedestrian friendly streets, Penalosa helped transform Bogota into a public city. One key thing Penalosa did was shut down major thoroughfares on Sundays for pedestrian foot traffic (see picture below)

Could you imagine this happening in an American city. What do we lose as Americans with our emphasis on automobile travel and car friendly streets? I recognize a hint of misplaced, misty nostalga in my view, but it strikes me that our spaces in the U.S. (particularly my space in Thousand Oaks, California) could stand to be rethought with an eye toward reclaiming space for the commons.

I had an interesting discussion in my California politics class today. We read Samuel Huntington’s article/screed in Foreign Policy on “The Hispanic Challenge” the United States faces as a result of what he thinks is unabated immigration from Mexico and other Latin American countries.

In the article, Huntington cites Miami as a city where assimilation is not required because the ethnic enclave created by the city’s Cuban/Latin American population is self-sufficient. I noted, having been born and raised in Miami, that Huntington was correct on one count: in Miami proper, Spanish is the public language. I compared that to my experience in California where even in predominantly Latino areas of Los Angeles, English still pervades as the public language . What explains the difference? We talked about the historical patterns of migration between the two groups. Miami was largely a tourist destination in the late 1950’s, so Cuban Americans had a largely blank canvas from which to create an ethnic enclave. That, the assistance from the federal government as political refugees led there to be diminished pressure to make English the public language of Miami.

Mexican-Americans migration to Southern California, on the other hand, has accelerated in recent years (Los Angeles was the “Whitest” city in the U.S. in 1940). The pressures for this group to assimilate has historically been stronger than for Cubans. Mexican-Americans have been in a constant battle for resources with other racial/ethnic groups and have been subject to traditional racial hierarchies and the pressure to conform to a Whiteness and Americanness standard that Cubans have largely been able to elide.

I’ve found it an interesting experience to go to restaurants in Los Angeles and order in Spanish only to have the waitress/waiter answer me in English. That would never happen in Miami.

I came across this tidbit while doing a paper on how Latinos use social networking sites. This quote is from a press release announcing a new social networking site called BabySpotLatino.com:

A new report from Forrester Research shows U.S. Hispanics are active online social networkers. Three thousand online Hispanics were surveyed, and results showed 69% of Hispanic’s, compared to 42% of non-Hispanics, were characterized as spectators, meaning they peruse what others do, suggesting that this is a level where interactivity starts to increase. 40% of Hispanics, compared to 12% of non-Hispanics, were characterized as creators, meaning they actively pursued social networks by blogging, uploading photos and videos and creating personal web pages.

If this is true, this is a big difference in how Latinos and non-Latinos use the web. Assuming these numbers are valid, why do Latinos engage in more social activity online than non-Latinos? I’d guess that much of it has to do with differing notions of family, individualism and the role of friendship networks. Help me unpack this intellectual suitcase 🙂

Sometimes when you have nothing to say, you shouldn’t say it.

The ten most enlightened suburbs – Utne Reader via Planetizen

Great Ta-Nehisi Coates post on homophobia in Hip-hop

Indian views of Slumdog Millionaire – via Freakonomics Blog

Critique of recent “Twin Studies” in Political Science – via Monkey Cage blog

Patrick Ruffini on the Right’s grassroots blogging efforts via TechPresident

Not sure if it has academic value, but it sure makes me laugh!

Actually I don’t know of a public figure that has been as public (if you can call anything Colbert’s character does as “public”) about remixing his creative content. The possibilities of the peer to peer revolution are apparent when we talk about creative/artistic content, but the prospects for political content are harder (not impossible) to find. They do exist (go to the Sunlight Foundation’s page for some good examples). But these projects need mainstream vehicles to promote their existence.

I hope that in the coming months we see some creative (and public) remixing of Obama’s creative commons content. Annotating the material on WhiteHouse.gov and the newly created recovery.gov with annotation tools like Diigo or a mashup of where stimulis money is going using Google Maps might provide some useful results.

BTW….speaking of here is an interesting slideshow tracing the evolution of WhiteHouse.gov. HT: James DeHaan

Forbes has a list of America’s most wired cities.

1. Seattle
2. Atlanta
3. Washington, D.C.
4. Orlando, Fla.
5. Boston, Mass.
6. Miami, Fla.
7. Minneapolis, Minn.
8. Denver, Colo.
9. New York, N.Y.
10. Baltimore, Md.

Since 2007, Forbes has measured cities’ wired quotient by computing the percentage of Internet users with high-speed connections and the number of companies providing high-speed Internet. Since many urban residents access the Internet by wi-fi, we also measure the number of public wireless Internet hot spots in a particular city

This strikes me as a poor way to determine whether a city is truly “wired.” A better measure would come from how cities and their residents use the technology. An emerging area of research focuses on the development of augmented cities.

Here a good description of the augmented city concept:

Augmented Space and Augmented Reality attempt to fill physical space with additional electronic and visual information. In contrast to Virtual Reality, were physical space becomes irrelevant, Augmented Space and Augmented Reality aim to use technologies to melt together digital and physical space. (Manovich 2002)

Has anyone come up with a good index for the level of city augmentation? Probably a bit too theoretical for Forbes. Anyway…here are some good articles on the concept.

Wellman, B. (2001). “Physical Place and Cyberplace: The Rise of Personalized Networking”. In International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25(2), 227-252. Oxford: Blackwell.

Aurigi, A. (2006). “New Technologies, Same Dilemmas: Policy and Design Issues for the Augmented City”. In Journal of Urban Technology, 13(3), 5-28. London: Routledge.

Mitchell, W. (2007) Intelligent Cities. UOC Papers
.

Cool uses of Web 2.0 to augment the inaugural experience courtesy of students in my Internet and Politics course. HT: Ryan Kushigemachi and James DeHaan.

Flickr Photo Download: Before & After: WhiteHouse.gov

Search Inside Obama’s Inaugural Speech

By the Numbers: Inauguration Day’s Impact on Social Media

The crowd captures the inaugural moment for CNN

Gene Koo has an interesting observation about Obama’s rhetorical style:

By using complex constructions that resist distillation, Obama minimizes out-of-context critics, although he cannot mute them (witness the “bitter” comment).

Koo suggests his rhetorical style allows him to bypass traditional media that relies on sound bytes to distill arguments and to speak directly to the American people. Personally, I think the bigger constraint for the media is that Obama’s presentation of self defies easy caricature. Pundits haven’t been able to settle on an salient frame from which to attack him….yet. remember, the McCain campaign struck brief gold with “The One” ads that painted him as a celebrity. Were it not for the economic collapse, that meme might have stuck. It is fun to have a major political figure that flummoxes the mainstream media.

If any of you are looking for a good text on race, ethnicity and American politics (of which there are very few), my colleague (and fellow Cuban) Jessica Lavariega Monforti has co-edited a volume that you might want to examine. She’s an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Women’s Studies at the University of Texas – Pan American. The book is called Black and Latino/a Politics: Issues in Political Development in the United States (2006 Barnhardt and Ashe). She describes the rationale for the book below:

As students of urban, racial, and ethnic politics in the United States, we are intimately aware of the fact that very few issues embraced by U.S. officials and institutions over the past quarter century have excluded considerations of race and ethnicity, but this fact is not reflected in the literature of mainstream political science. We wanted to create an edited volume that speaks to this problem by looking at the intersection of race, ethnicity, and political development in the U.S.

In Black and Latino/a Politics, we have included chapters on identity, empowerment, political and social issues, political participation, black-brown coalitions, and public policy. Our hope was to produce a text that was comprehensive in nature, so we also included issues of gender and urban politics as well as analyses of institutions and organizations within these communities of color. There is no more important story to be told than the struggle by Blacks and Latina/os for power in the face of a multitude of constraints that seek to undermine the full flowering of Black and Latina/o strength in the political process.

The processes of governance, the distribution of political power and resources in society, and the emergence and movement of ideas in this country have been profoundly influenced by the existence, beliefs, thoughts, and behaviors of Latinos and Blacks. In other words, Blacks and Latinos have been active participants in the political development of this nation-state and the political institutions therein.

Inherently it seems as though we are headed toward a point in time where critical decisions about the future of Latino and African American political development will be made. New leaders will surface, new relationships will be cultivated, and old relationships may be reinvented to deal with some of the same trials and tribulations that the African American and Latino communities have been confronting for over 400 years. At present, it seems clear that we have a unique opportunity to again change the face of politics in the United States. For better or worse we have been able to determine why — but the questions of who, when, how, and where remain unanswered.