Month: May 2017
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Integration and the Kumbaya gap
Gentrifying neighborhoods produce more mixing, but don’t automatically generate universal social interaction. What should we make of that? In one idealized view of the world, economically integrated neighborhoods would have widespread and deep social interactions among people from different backgrounds. We’d tend to be color-blind and class-blind, and no more (or less) likely to interact…
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The hidden bias of big data
So-called smart cities have an achilles heel: data is biased by the status quo Streetsblog recently highlighted a new report from Houston’s Kinder Institute, evaluating bike and pedestrian road safety based on user-reported near misses. Kinder got 187 cyclists and pedestrians to record their travel for a week in March, and identify and describe situations…
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Cities and the returns to education
The more education you have, the bigger the payoff to living in a city A recent Wall Street Journal article painted the nation’s rural areas as its new inner cities, with high rates of poverty, limited economic opportunity and a range of social problems. While the aggregate data mask enormous variation in the nation’s non-metro…
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The Week Observed, May 26, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Dirt Cheap. A number of tech startups are exploring techniques for high density urban farming. In theory, new methods, like vertical farming in plastic tubes, can greatly reduce the amount of land and water needed to grow certain crops, and offers the advantage of much shorter distances to…
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Just ahead: Road pricing?
Trump’s infrastructure package would let states pursue road pricing A trillion dollars for infrastructure. That’s been the headline talking point for months about the Trump Administration’s policy agenda, but the details have been murky at best. A short white paper prepared for the campaign by now Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross sketched out a plan for…
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More debate on city revival
Is the urban renaissance over? Earlier this week, The New York Times published an op-ed from Jed Kolko–”Seattle Climbs but Austin Sprawls, The Myth of the Return to Cities”–offering up another iteration of his long running argument that the urban rebound is overstated. His key point: in the aggregate suburbs are growing faster than cities, and…
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Dirt cheap.
Why we’re very skeptical about urban farming. At City Observatory, we don’t tend to have a lot of content about agriculture. Farming is not an urban activity. But every so often, we read techno-optimistic stories about how a new era of hyper-local food grown in your neighborhood or very nearby, is just around the corner…
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The Week Observed, May 19, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Volunteering as a measure of social capital. Thanks to the work of Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone and more recently, Our Kids, there’s a growing understanding of the important role of social capital–the relationships and norms of trust and reciprocity–in making our communities and our economy work…
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Why America can’t make up its mind about housing
Here are two ideas that, if you’re like most Americans, you probably mostly agree with: Government policy should help keep housing broadly affordable, so as not to price out people of low or moderate incomes from entire neighborhoods, cities, or even metropolitan areas. Government policy should protect residential neighborhoods from things that might negatively impact…
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Volunteering as a measure of social capital
Volunteering is one of the hallmarks of community; here are the cities with the highest rates of volunteerism The decline of the civic commons, the extent to which American’s engage with one another in the public realm, especially across class lines, has been much remarked upon. Our report, Less in Common, explores the many dimensions…
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Key to prosperity: Talent in the “traded sector” of the economy
“Traded sector” businesses that employ well-educated workers mark a prosperous region At City Observatory, we regularly stress the importance of education and skills to regional economic success. Statistically, we can explain almost two-thirds of the variation in per capita income among large metropolitan areas just by looking at the educational attainment of the population. The strong…
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My illegal neighborhood
Editor’s note: City Observatory is pleased to provide this guest commentary by our friend Robert Liberty a keen observer of and advocate for cities. We first published this post in 2015, but its as timely today as it was then. by Robert Liberty For many years I lived in Northwest Portland, Oregon. It was…
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The Geography of Independent Bookstores
Which cities have the strongest concentrations of independent bookstores? Last week, we explored what we called the “mystery in the bookstore.” There’s a kind of good news/bad news set of narratives about bookselling in the US. After decades of decline in independent bookselling, many cities have seen a rebound by locally run stores. And while…
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The Week Observed, May 5, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Mystery in the Bookstore. In cities around the country, there’s been a noticeable rebound in the local bookstore business. After decades of steady decline, this is a pleasant surprise. One metric, the number of members of the national association of independent bookstores confirms this trend. But broader data…
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What patents tell us about America’s most innovative cities
Patents rates are a useful indicator of innovative activity The US is increasingly becoming a knowledge-based economy, and as a result, the markers of wealth are shifting from the kinds of tangible assets that characterized the old industrial economy (like huge factory complexes) to much more intangible assets (the creativity and innovativeness of workers and…
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The immaculate conception theory of your neighborhood’s origins
A while back, a columnist in Seattle Magazine, Knute Berger, expressed his discontent with modern housing development. As Berger sees it, today’s homebuilding pales in comparison to the virtues of early 20th century bungalow development: In a rapidly growing city where the haves have more and the have-nots are being squeezed out, the bungalows offer…
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Mystery in the Bookstore
Signs of a rebound in independent bookstores, but not in the statistics Lately, there’ve been a spate of stories pointing to a minor renaissance of the independent American bookstore. After decades of glum news and closings, there are more and more instances of independent bookstores opening or expanding. The American Bookseller’s Association points with pride…