(Untitled)

[motive_nuance]

Reading this Times piece about a freegan commune in Buffalo reminded me of Amsterdam. In one sense, it's a handful of people squatting in the ruins of a once-mighty civilization - a port city now bypassed and forgotten. But they can still sustain a non-impoverished lifestyle from the table scraps of the world that took its place. (In this case,

Comments

[the_macnab]

Yikes. You can tell that I grew up in the Rust Belt. I think of that as how cities normally look. Sad, fucked-up cities at that.



Or Newark's city hall:



(The last section of that article is the nut graf. And while I have problems with its method, it got this right at least.)

[motive_nuance]

I believe you sent me that one before. Was the nut still solid when you were there?

[the_macnab]

Oh yes. Newark has been rotting for more than forty years, even as other parts of the greater New York area--Hoboken, Bayonne, Jersey City--have enjoyed some of the gentrification that spilled over from Manhattan's appreciating rents. The city has a very high crime rate, one of the nation's highest childhood-poverty rates, vast swaths of abandoned buildings and several highways carved through what once was the downtown. It also saw virtually all of its industry disappear. Newark is smaller than Detroit but it shares that city's near-total collapse. And there's also the history of the race riots--Newark and Detroit had the two worst of any northern cities in 1967. Those solidified white flight and shunning of the city for a generation.

(Per that article, the single biggest problem with his metrics is that he automatically assumes that density is a bad thing. In fact someone pointed this out in a letter to the editor the following month, and Louis responded by saying that it was absurd to think that density could be a good thing, because "overcrowding" is "the root of almost all urban problems." This is classic modernist city-planning talk, straight out of the 1910s. That thinking was what helped create suburban sprawl and gutted so many American city centers. It's also a large part of why, say, San Jose and Tulsa rank so high in his list.)

[motive_nuance]

Also, what's wrong with that city hall? It's been cleaned recently, and the stonework still looks pretty crisp. (I thought the vacant parking during daylight hours might be what boded ill, but then I remembered all those empty spots outside the CogSci building when I was leaving the lab at 7 p.m. on this weekend summer evening.)

[moiety_tx]

I suspect what's wrong with it is primarily that it's in Newark.

[the_macnab]

^
|__ This.

Also it has been cleaned recently, yes. And hoboy if you stood in front of it and swiveled around, you'd be feeling some cognitive dissonance.