Sunshine Recorder

The great lesson of SimCity, the fact the game was built to display, is the delight of city life, of urbanity in general. Even failing cities are beautiful in SimCity. Their streets are straight and well kempt, their deserted building zones are clean and peaceful and full of possibility. The colors are bright but not garish: the water blue, the land a flat green, the roads a soothing gray. The view the player has of them is from exactly the right height: close enough to see the bustle of the cars and trucks, the charmingly repetitive irregularity of the buildings, but too distant to see crime, pollution, frustration, or failure as anything more than slightly disheartening abstractions. It looks a bit like an animated tourist map, complete with color-coding, oversized landmarks, and a peculiarly American inattention to parking. The public mood can plummet, but there is never any depiction of the human suffering endemic to even successful urban areas. Pollution is tracked, but it has no long-term consequences.

Even when you are starting the settlement of the area entirely from scratch, what you are founding is always, and can only really be, a city, even when it has the population of a village. The vast fields and relative isolation and independence of rural life are essentially impossible to create in any sustainable way, and there is never any sense of a natural world displaced by the arrival of the metropolis. And though something reminiscent of suburbia can arise, it is an oddly antiquated, citified version of it, without the isolated residential enclaves and diffuse, distant commercial centers that often characterize it these days. It’s a vision of the city as existing somehow independent of its inhabitants: a city of buildings, not people; a city serenely, joyously inhuman.

More fundamental than this, though, is the very particular worldview that animates all the SimCity games. The world Wright gives his players is one defined by a constant flickering interplay between progress and equilibrium, a gentle utopia of possibility. Decay is never a real threat. His cities never die, and if left to their own devices they pretty much go on as they were. The closest thing to failure is a genial sort of rut, an inability to make the city grow and progress the way you’d like; excepting perhaps the aftermath of a nuclear power plant melting down, there’s never an irreversible collapse. Without extreme, juvenile levels of incompetence, you can’t fail to make or maintain a city, you merely fail to make that city great. It’s a commonplace that many urban planners found their vocation in childhood games of SimCity—and this at least rings true, for the game is nothing if not inspirational. Its world is infinitely soothing, its consistent message one of safety, surmountable challenge, hope, and stability.

The appeal of such fictional peace does have its limits, as it turns out. One can begin to suspect that all thriving cities look pretty much the same, that even the most successful equilibrium is simply boring. The popularity of “disasters”—the calamities, ranging from fires and airplane crashes to, in the more baroque later versions, locust swarms and U.F.O. attacks, that the player can purposely inflict on his city, or allow to occur randomly—bespeaks this creeping boredom. But it points as well to a desire to demonstrate the strength and elasticity of the world’s stability. These disasters are designed to be manageable. There is a never an unfixable problem, never a ruin that can’t be cleared and rebuilt. It is an almost comically American vision, a pure product of the Reagan dream: zero history, infinite future.

The best answer to SimCity, and its only challenger as the most interesting simulation game, is just across the way from it at the MOMA exhibition: Dwarf Fortress. It is not so much SimCity’s monstrous offspring as its gifted, maniacal, extremely worrisome younger brother. Officially titled Slaves to Armok: God of Blood, Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress, this bizarre, brilliant game by a Texan named Tarn Adams (working almost entirely on his own) has been a public work-in-progress since 2006, in which time it has, according to a 2011 New York Times Magazine profile of its creator, been downloaded about a million times. If SimCity is the video game as toy—inviting, open-ended, and subtly but unmistakably limited—Dwarf Fortress is the video game as folk art masterpiece: eccentric, over-the-top, and oddly affecting.

25 years after William Julius Wilson changed urban sociology, scholars still debate his ideas. Is anyone else listening?

Jacqueline lived in one of the most toxic environments in urban America. If you’ve seen The Wire, HBO’s series about crime and punishment in Baltimore, you can picture daily life in her neighborhood on that city’s West Side. Drug dealers. Junkies. Shootings. Her high-rise housing project felt like a concrete cell. Jacqueline, a single mother with a sick child, was desperate to escape.

Then she got a ticket out. In the mid-1990s, Jacqueline volunteered to participate in a far-reaching social experiment that would shed new light on urban poverty. The federal government gave her and many others housing vouchers to move out of ghettos—with a condition. Jacqueline (a pseudonym used by researchers to protect her privacy) had to use the voucher in an area where at least 90 percent of the residents lived above the federal poverty line.

It’s unlikely that Jacqueline had heard of William Julius Wilson, but the experiment that would change her life traces its intellectual roots in part to the Harvard sociologist’s 1987 book, The Truly Disadvantaged. Wilson upended urban research with his ideas about how cities had transformed in the post-civil-rights period. Writing to explain the rise of concentrated poverty in black inner-city neighborhoods after 1970, he focused on the loss of manufacturing jobs and the flight of black working- and middle-class families, which left ghettos with a greater proportion of poor people. And he examined the effects of extreme poverty and “social isolation” on their lives. The program that transplanted Jacqueline, Moving to Opportunity, was framed as a test of his arguments about “whether neighborhoods matter” in poor people’s lives.

Twenty-five years after its publication, The Truly Disadvantaged is back in the spotlight, thanks to a flurry of high-profile publications and events that address its ideas.

Researchers who have followed families like Jacqueline’s over 15 years are now reporting the long-term results of the mobility experiment. The mixed picture emerging from the project—”one of the nation’s largest attempts to eradicate concentrated poverty,” in the words of the Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson—is feeding a broader discussion about how to help the urban underclass.

Families that moved to safer and better-off areas “improved their health in ways that were quite profound,” including reductions in obesity and diabetes, says Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard economist who is principal investigator of the project’s long-run study. They showed less depression, Katz says, and “very large increases in happiness.” Yet the program failed to improve other key measures, like the earnings and employment rate of adults and the educational achievement of children.

At the same time, two sociologists influenced by Wilson are publishing important new books that mine extensive data to demonstrate the lasting impact of place on people’s lives. The first, published in February by the University of Chicago Press, is Sampson’s Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect.Among his many findings, Sampson shows that exposure to severely disadvantaged areas hampers children’s verbal skills, an effect that persists even if they move to better-off places. That handicap is “roughly equivalent to missing a year of schooling,” according to research he conducted with Stephen Raudenbush and Patrick Sharkey.

The second book, Sharkey’s Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality, forthcoming in January from Chicago, explores how neighborhood inequality spans generations. Sharkey, an associate professor of sociology at New York University, writes that “over 70 percent of African-Americans who live in today’s poorest, most racially segregated neighborhoods are from the same families that lived in the ghettos of the 1970s.” In other words, “the American ghetto appears to be inherited”—a finding with implications for policy.

But as scholars break new ground, is anybody listening? Not since the early 1960s has poverty received so little attention, says Christopher Jencks, a Harvard professor of public policy. Among sociologists, he says, optimism that they will make a political impact has waned.

Even Wilson, perhaps the best-known scholar of urban ghettos, has seen his political influence decline. I caught up with the professor in Washington one recent morning before he gave a speech about The Truly Disadvantaged at a symposium held by a progressive think tank. Wilson is a youthful 76-year-old with a neat mustache, a trim build shaped by 10 hours a week of exercise, and a clinically precise speaking style honed over decades of talking to the press about combustible topics. Sitting in the lobby of a hotel not far from the Capitol, Wilson recalled how he once had a direct line to the president as Bill Clinton’s informal adviser. Whenever he e-mailed policy advice, he says, Clinton would respond with a handwritten note within two weeks. On affirmative action, for example, Wilson recommended using the term “affirmative opportunity.” The next thing he knew, Clinton was in the news discussing “affirmative opportunity.”

Wilson influenced the current president, too. Barack Obama has said that he “was inspired to apply to Harvard Law School because he heard a presentation by William Julius Wilson on the devastating effects of de-industrialization on poor urban blacks, and wanted to get himself into a position to do something about it,” according to The New Republic. Wilson discussed issues of race and class with Obama and served as an adviser to his 2008 presidential campaign. Yet Wilson has had no direct contact with the president since he took office.

When I ask whether that bothers him, Wilson declines to discuss it. But another prominent sociologist, Douglas S. Massey, is blunt. “We feel kind of marginalized,” says Massey, referring to scholars of social issues. The Princeton professor finds it ironic that “you elect the first black president, and he doesn’t want to raise racial issues and downplays those issues.”

Another day, another proposal for a new Chinese city. The 1.3 square-kilometer Great City, designed by Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill will be a massive new development that is completely sustainable, affordable, and, most strikingly, car-less. The masterplan, which has been planned for 80,000 people, will be built around a massive transit hub at its center, with all destinations to be within a few minutes walk, a planning innovation that would make “Great City” China’s (and the world’s?) first pedestrian-only city.

Before drawing up blueprints, Smith and Gill had to find the perfect setting for this new, 320-acre green city. They discovered a plot outside the city of Chengdu with plenty of buffer landscape including forests, valleys, and bodies of water to integrate into the city. After delineating local farm land for its preservation, the designers meticulously drafted plans that partitioned the site into several zones, reserving 15 percent of the land for parks and green spaces, dedicating 60 percent to construction, and saving the remaining 25 percent for roads and walkways.

As for environmental factors, Great City will certainly live up to its name. The development is expected to use 48 percent less energy and 58 percent less water than a comparable town its size. It should also produce 89 percent less landfill waste and 60 percent less carbon dioxide. In addition to these features, the city will employ “seasonal energy storage” which can carry over waste summer heat and convert it to power for winter heating and hot water.

The key to Great City’s green success, of course, is not just solar panels and parks, but also its urban planning. The distance between any location in the hyper-dense city to another will be only a 15 minute walk (or less). This eliminates the need for cars, as the town is also built around a mass transit hub that connects to Chengdu and surrounding areas in minutes. The surrounding green buffer is laden with pedestrian and bike paths that weave in and out of the landscape and through the city core.

The project, expected to be finished by 2021, will hopefully become home to about 30,000 families, totaling 80,000 people. “Great City will demonstrate that high-density living doesn’t have to be polluted and alienated from nature,” says AS+GG partner Gordon Gill, “Everything within the built environment of Great City is considered to enhance the quality of life of its residents. Quite simply, it offers a great place to live, work and raise a family.”

China’s megalopolises may seem impressive on paper, but they are awful places to live.  

In Invisible Cities, the novel by the great Italian writer Italo Calvino, Marco Polo dazzles the emperor of China, Kublai Khan, with 55 stories of cities he has visited, places where “the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells,” a city of “zigzag” where the inhabitants “are spared the boredom of following the same streets every day,” and another with the option to “sleep, make tools, cook, accumulate gold, disrobe, reign, sell, question oracles.” The trick, it turns out, is that Polo’s Venice is so richly textured and dense that all his stories are about just one city.

A modern European ruler listening to a visitor from China describe the country’s fabled rise would be better served with the opposite approach: As the traveler exits a train station, a woman hawks instant noodles and packaged chicken feet from a dingy metal cart, in front of concrete steps emptying out into a square flanked by ramshackle hotels and massed with peasants sitting on artificial cobblestones and chewing watermelon seeds. The air smells of coal. Then the buildings appear: Boxlike structures, so gray as to appear colorless, line the road. If the city is poor, the Bank of China tower will be made with hideous blue glass; if it’s wealthy, our traveler will marvel at monstrous prestige projects of glass and copper. The station bisects Shanghai Road or Peace Avenue, which then leads to Yat-sen Street, named for the Republic of China’s first president, eventually intersecting with Ancient Building Avenue. Our traveler does not know whether he is in Changsha, Xiamen, or Hefei — he is in the city Calvino describes as so unremarkable that ”only the name of the airport changes.” Or, as China’s vice minister of construction, Qiu Baoxing, lamented in 2007, “It’s like a thousand cities having the same appearance.”

Why are Chinese cities so monolithic? The answer lies in the country’s fractured history. In the 1930s, China was a failed state: Warlords controlled large swaths of territory, and the Japanese had colonized the northeast. Shanghai was a foreign pleasure den, but life expectancy hovered around 30. Tibetans, Uighurs, and other minorities largely governed themselves. When Mao Zedong unified China in 1949, much of the country was in ruins, and his Communist Party rebuilt it under a unifying theme. Besides promulgating a single language and national laws, they subscribed to the Soviet idea of what a city should be like: wide boulevards, oppressively squat, functional buildings, dormitory-style housing. Cities weren’t conceived of as places to live, but as building blocks needed to build a strong and prosperous nation; in other words, they were constructed for the benefit of the party and the country, not the people.

Even today, most Chinese cities feel like they were cobbled together from a Soviet-era engineering textbook. China’s fabled post-Mao liberal reforms meant that the country’s cities grew wealthier, but not that much more distinct from each other. Beijing has changed almost beyond recognition since Deng Xiaoping took power in 1978, but to see what Beijing looked like in the past, visit a less developed part of China: Malls in Xian, a regional hub in central China famous for its row upon row of grimacing terracotta warriors, look like the shabby pink structures that used to dot western Beijing. Yes, China’s cities are booming, but there’s a depressing sameness to what you find in even the newest of new boomtowns. Consider the checklist of “hot” new urban features itemized in a 2007 article in the Communist Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily, including obligatory new “development zones” (sprawling corporate parks set up to attract foreign direct investment), public squares, “villa” developments for the nouveau riche, large overlapping highways, and, of course, a new golf course or two for the bosses. The cookie-cutter approach is such that even someone like Zhou Deci, former director of the Chinese Academy of Urban Planning and Design, told the paper he has difficulty telling Chinese cities apart.

This model of endless fractal Beijings wouldn’t be so bad if the city itself were charming, but it is a dreary expanse traversed by unwalkable highways, punctuated by military bases, government offices, and other closed-off spaces, with undrinkable tap water and poisonous air that’s sometimes visible, in yellow or gray. And so are its lesser copies across the country’s 3.7 million square miles, from Urumqi in the far west to Shenyang way up north.For all their economic success, China’s cities, with their lack of civil society, apocalyptic air pollution, snarling traffic, and suffocating state bureaucracy, are still terrible places to live.

In 19th century London “toshers” roamed the sewers, searching for items of value. Biggest danger was not disease or death by suffocation but attacks by sewer rats.

To live in any large city during the 19th century, at a time when the state provided little in the way of a safety net, was to witness poverty and want on a scale unimaginable in most Western countries today. In London, for example, the combination of low wages, appalling housing, a fast-rising population and miserable health care resulted in the sharp division of one city into two. An affluent minority of aristocrats and professionals lived comfortably in the good parts of town, cossetted by servants and conveyed about in carriages, while the great majority struggled desperately for existence in stinking slums where no gentleman or lady ever trod, and which most of the privileged had no idea even existed. It was a situation accurately and memorably skewered by Dickens, who in Oliver Twist introduced his horrified readers to Bill Sikes’s lair in the very real and noisome Jacob’s Island, and who has Mr. Podsnap, in Our Mutual Friend, insist: “I don’t want to know about it; I don’t choose to discuss it; I don’t admit it!”

Out of sight and all too often out of mind, the working people of the British capital nonetheless managed to conjure livings for themselves in extraordinary ways. Our guide to the enduring oddity of many mid-Victorian occupations is Henry Mayhew, whose monumental four-volume study of London Labour and the London Poor remains one of the classics of working-class history. Mayhew–whom we last met a year ago, describing the lives of London peddlers of this period–was a pioneering journalist-cum-sociologist who interviewed representatives of hundreds of eye-openingly odd trades, jotting down every detail of their lives in their own words to compile a vivid, panoramic overview of everyday life in the mid-Victorian city.

Among Mayhew’s more memorable meetings were encounters with the “bone grubber,” the “Hindoo tract seller,” an eight-year-old girl watercress-seller and the “pure finder,” whose surprisingly sought-after job was picking up dog mess and selling it to tanners, who then used it to cure leather. None of his subjects, though, aroused more fascination–or greater disgust–among his readers than the men who made it their living by forcing entry into London’s sewers at low tide and wandering through them, sometimes for miles, searching out and collecting the miscellaneous scraps washed down from the streets above: bones, fragments of rope, miscellaneous bits of metal, silver cutlery and–if they were lucky–coins dropped in the streets above and swept into the gutters.

We’re looking at an older, complete neighborhood, to be sure. But there’s also something else going on:  there’s a great public space, and the buildings are of varied heights, widths, scales, and styles.  They are also varied in age, meaning that some older buildings were retained as newer ones came in. This is an example of what architect Liz Dunn, director of the Preservation Green Lab for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, calls “urban grain.”  In an interview with Julia Levitt, published on The Atlantic’s National Channel website, she elaborates:

“There are many possible interpretations of the phrase ‘urban grain’ or ‘granularity’ that have to do with the scale and composition of cities. A lot of work has gone into analyzing the street grid — for example, the size of blocks within a grid. I’m personally most interested in block-scapes, and the elements that coexist within a block or set of blocks.

“I think there is a set of attributes here that is both recognizable and useful for policy making. I think we could be measuring, for example, the economic and social activity that occurs on blocks that have a larger number and variety of skinnier buildings, compared to what you find on blocks occupied by large, homogeneous building fronts. Measuring how the pattern and mix of buildings impacts urban activity would provide a way to assign value to organic, incremental development that would be more quantitative than the cultural arguments for preservation, which would in turn inform land use policies. There are many win-win solutions for balancing urban grain with new development.”

While Dunn primarily considers the issue with respect to finding the proper mix of old and new buildings and styles, I think she’s on to something that also applies more broadly.  It may be more challenging to develop and zone blocks for variety, or to construct and implement public policy that fosters it, than it is to accept uniformity – and in this economy it’s challenging to do most anything with regard to real estate; but, if we fail to insist on the kinds of places that people instinctively love, we won’t succeed, and we won’t deserve to, either.  I’m not sure that some of the buildings shown at the top of the post aren’t just more sprawl in a vertical rather than horizontal form.

(Source: irishboyinlondon)