Stultitia Delenda Est

I’ve never totally understood the loathing that many residents of Great Cities bear towards tourists. Most residents of DC, NYC, London, etc. bear a dislike for tourists on a level usually reserved for feral skunks or racist in-laws. It’s as if having the temerity to come experience of one of the important sites of human ecology automatically pegs you as a cretinous moral cripple who would kick puppies if they weren’t too stupid to puzzle out how their legs work.

I think that urban residents should instead see tourists as half intrepid explorer, half enthusiastic novice. These people have come to our beloved cities to figure out what makes them special, and we should be glad that they’ve chosen to do so. Our cities are awesome and we should share them with the same glee that we share our favorite music, jokes, or *Merlin Mann voice* “turns out” factoids.

I know, tourists move slowly and gawp and all pose for the same (stupid) pictures. They block the sidewalks. They don’t “do” the buses and trains right. They take up tables at your favorite restaurant and crowd your favorite bar. I dig. I don’t like having to wade my way through the cattle press that is Pike Place Market, either.

But I love that people are experiencing Pike Place for the first time. It really is one of the coolest places in the country and I want everyone to have the change to experience it. I don’t like that Seattle Center is crowded with out-of-towners on nice days, but I really like that out-of-towners get to experience one of the best public spaces west of the Mississippi. It annoys me that everyone takes the same stupid shot of the space needle from Kerry Park, but I’m glad they get to see our amazing skyline.

So fellow urbanites: please tone down the hipster-y disdain when it comes to tourists. They don’t “do” our city right, but only because they haven’t learned how yet. And they’re here to learn about all the things that make us love our city as much as we do. Stop thinking of them as the dumb, porcine animals that make the city harder to navigate, and start thinking of them as members of today’s lucky 10,000.

Literally everything about this article infuriates me.

Skywalks are badass. One of the very few things that Spokane (my former home) does right that every other city fucks up is its downtown skywalk network. It’s possible to get from one side of downtown to the other entirely using interconnected skywalks. This keeps you off the streets, out of the way of bikes and cars, and out of the inclement weather. Skywalks make cities more walkable and comfortable for pedestrians while also easing the flow of bike and car traffic. They are made of architectural magic and win.

Of course, it also doesn’t help Atlantic Cities that the hero of their article is this catastrophizing asshole:

“I’m not typically the activist type,” says Joe Baur, a 26-year-old writer who moved downtown two years ago and has now started a group called OurCLE to fight the skywalks. “I’m more a satirist. But this is like – well, you may not like kids, but if you see a kid about to touch a hot stove, you’re going to stop them.” Baur says Cleveland is that kid, and the skywalk is the hot stove.

First of all, being a satirist is like being powerful or good in bed; if you have to tell people you are, you ain’t. Secondly, what right does he have to ask the city to deny developers the right to improve their buildings and make life easier and more convenient for their customers?

Baur &co claim that the skywalk would: “…deaden the neighborhood, make residents more vulnerable to crime, and block sightlines of other historic buildings in the neighborhood.”

Making an urban core more “walkable” (a term I loathe for its connotations), i.e. making it easier for people to ambulate to their destination, with a good network of skywalks is as likely to enliven the neighborhood as not. This has definitely happened in Spokane. The skywalks and the businesses along them have a constant flow of foot traffic, and it allows people to easily access the parts of downtown they want to get to, in any weather. Downtown Spokane typically isn’t dead, even in rain, snow, or sweltering heat. If I had to guess, even if skywalks don’t enliven the city, they won’t deaden it either, and they will definitely make pedestrians more comfortable and increase vehicle traffic flow. Secondly, I can’t even see the argument for increasing crime rates. Do people turn into slavering criminals when they’re suspended 20 feet off the ground? Finally, skywalks have a very low profile and most are made of glass. Any views this skywalk would block would only be blocked in the most technical sense of the word.

Of course the ur-argument against anti-skywalk hysteria is the same as it is with any of the weaksauce anti-property-rights crusades in modern cities: lack of evidence. There is exactly zero evidence that the skywalk will have any negative impacts on the commons, or the neighborhood, much less evidence showing that the externalities are of such a magnitude as to warrant legally forbidding a developer to do what they want with their own property.

Skywalks are good for pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists, especially in dense urban cores. The only arguments against are the fashionable, evidence-free preferences of the Chattering Class segment of urbanism. So here’s hoping that Baur and his ilk lose their fight against skywalks and spend more of their time satirizing rather than trying to shit on property rights.

Matt Brown, writing at the excellent Londonist blog, dares to ask the question:

Rather than continuing to update the increasingly cluttered Tube map, might we one day ditch it entirely? Could a souped-up journey planner ever have a persuasive number of advantages over a static map, enough to render the old way of doing things obsolete? Could our generation’s Tube map be the last?

His analysis is definitely worth a read.

This represents the trips of the 3.1 million transit riders in Greater London, on Wednesday, 11 May, 2011:

Bluer pixels represent riders inferred to be at home, redder pixels are riders at their destination, and greener pixels indicate riders in motion. This visualization is the work of Jay Gordon, and represents just one day in the public transit of one of them most vibrant cities on the planet.

I love living in a city. I had four hours of phone screens this morning (by the way, my team is hiring) so afterwards, I went for a wander to stretch my legs. In the span of 45 minutes, I discovered that there’s a tunnel from Rainier Square to Union Square, saw a guy moonwalking down the street like it was his primary mode of transport, and found an excellent lunch place called Cafe Abodega.

Good show, Seattle. Good show.

A Frenchmen tries to race a subway train between two adjacent stops.

I’ve often wondered about this in London. Some of the tube stops in London are close enough together that it’s possible to leisurely stroll from one to another more quickly than going by tube, so clearly this is a game that can be played on easy mode. But this anonymous Frenchman’s inaugural run shows that there are some challenging, but possible, courses in this exciting new urban sport.

I’m reading a very interesting book by Peter Hitchens about the history of modern policing in Britain. The book is called The Abolition of Liberty and it focuses primarily on the differences from early British policing in the 19th and early 20th century in contrast to the modern policing system. So far, Hitchens has identified two major inflection points in the policing in the 20th century. The first in the 1920s with the start of sweeping prison reforms, and the second in the 1960s with the move from foot patrol (so called “bobby on the beat”) policing to “unit beat” or responsive policing that increasingly put officers in cars dispatched from central stations.

The argument that I found most interesting about this second shift is that it fundamentally changed not just the mode of policing, but the purpose. Police officers went from a primarily preventative organization whose officers were tightly ingrained in the community and whose job was to deter crime in their beat area to being a reactive force more like a fire department who only showed up after crimes had already occurred.

Hitchens makes the argument (though I have a few minor quibbles with the way he reports numbers) that this was in part responsible for the increase in crime in England, and especially London, in the latter half of the 20th century. Arrest rates have risen, but so has total crime, since an important preventative stop-gap has been removed and replaced with a reactionary force that can only ever catch criminals after the fact.

Hitchens’ engrossing explanation for this shift from beat policing to more reactionary policing got me interested in the manpower requirements of the old beat policing system. I decided to try and estimate how much manpower would be required to assign one officer to every quarter square mile in the city, 24 hours a day, assuming 8 hour shifts. I picked quarter square mile beats, since I think this is about the maximum territory that a careful, observant human being can reliably patrol once every hour. This makes for a square space about a half mile or roughly six city blocks on each side.

Based on the land area of Seattle listed in Wikipedia, I came up with a manpower requirement of 1,140 patrol offices, or 160 fewer officers than the SPD currently employs. The 1,300 total officers almost certainly includes non-patrol officers who I would expect to make up the majority of the force. Of course, a main point of Hitchens’ argument is that by placing more officers out on foot or bicycle patrols, you actually need fewer officers in support or investigative roles because of the deterrent effect of having so many officers embedded in the community.

I honestly don’t know if beat policing would work in a city like Seattle. I think it would probably would better in the denser, downtown districts, and many of those are already subject to occasional patrol by officers on bicycles. I do find Hitchens’ argument that getting officers out of cars and on foot in high-traffic areas probably makes for better relations with the public and may well have a deterrent effect, but I do wonder about the scaling and efficacy of 100%, 24-hour coverage.

Still, the simple idea that there’s an officer patrolling every neighborhood would make many opportunistic criminals think twice about committing crime, and may very well reduce response times to crimes in progress.

I should note that, despite a number of high-profile instances of discriminatory policing and undue use of force the past few years, it appears that all three metrics helped by beat policing (police/public relations, crime rates, and response times) are improving, according to this Slog post from last year. The Slog also notes that SPD ” … managed to divert 19 officers to non-emergency beats like foot and bike patrols.”

If Hitchens is correct, this diversion of officers towards regular non-car patrols may have something of a sympathetic effect in which an increase of beat policing reduces crime, freeing up more officers for beat policing, further reducing crime, etc.

As a libertarian Urbanist, I have a love/hate relationship with the Atlantic Cities blog. On the one hand, it does often alert me to interesting new urban developments or deliver me my daily dose of city-porn. On the other hand, many of the posts are so ignorant, sophistic, and biased towards deeply flawed priors that they make eyes hurt just reading them.

Allison Arieff’s recent interview with Alex Marshall definitely landed in that other handed.

To be fair, Ms. Arieff’s interview was actually excellent. She did a great job of giving her subject ample space to elucidate his ideas and asked simple, pointed questions to steer the interview onto novel ground not directly related to her subject’s new book. The fault of this terrible post lies not at Ms. Arieff’s feet, but at those of her interlocutor, Mr. Alex Marshall. Mr. Marshall manages to cram impressive volumes of ignorance and bad thinking into a fairly brief conversation.

The ignorance begins right from the off when he states this deeply flawed premise: “Well, obviously cities are economic entities. To survive, a city or a region has to make money; it has to export more than it imports, in dollar terms.” This just an urban distillation of the classic protectionist horseshit that economists have been fighting against for hundreds of years. Mr. Marshall, let me introduce you to the principle of Comparative Advantage. Free trade improves economic conditions for both parties, even in the presence of “trade imbalances”. Put a different way, imports are not costs and exports are not benefits, rather both are trades that, in a free system, improve the lot of both people engaging in the trade.¹

Mr. Marshall also commits a compositional fallacy here, apparently attributing to cities the sort of economic capabilities and requirements that human beings have. Cities, after all, are incapable of trade. What we mean to say when we talk about trade between cities or countries is that trades occur between the citizens of one such entity and the citizens of another. The “trade” that a city does is not on behalf of the city, but on behalf of some resident thereof. The benefits derived accrue to the people involved in the trade. The city thrives not as a result of the trade, but as a result of the prosperity of its citizens.

A more intellectually offensive notion occurs somewhat later in the interview when Marshall asserts the central thesis of his book: “Sure, this human interaction [in city economies] takes place, but it shouldn’t obscure what makes it possible, which is government. … Both cities and economies emerge as overt political acts. They are constructed things.”

Except that trade and “economic activity” predate government as we know it by tens of thousands of years. Evidence of trade in the Mediterranean (in the form of the shells of the snail genus Nassarius²) goes back at least 82,000 years. The trade in regional goods probably goes back farther. In fact, there’s good evidence and compelling arguments that patterns of specialized trade are one of the primary advantages that allowed human beings survive and thrive from their very earliest days.

So markets predate government and effects cannot predate causes. Additionally, markets exist and flourish even today outside government control. Black and gray markets (or “informal economies” if you prefer) makes up almost half the economic activity in some parts of the developing world (such as Pakistan) and over a fifth in many of the developed nations.

So not only do market economies predate their supposed cause, but even today they outside the purview of the entity which is supposed to be necessary for their existence. So far from being necessary for the existence of markets, governments are neither necessary nor sufficient for the existence of healthy markets.³

The final damning argument against Marshall’s thesis though, is that he commits the category error of assuming that governments have the ability to design markets. No person or organization has such an ability because the informational problems involved are completely intractable. Per Hayek, the information encoded in prices in a free market cannot be accurately replicated or divined in any other way. Any attempt to do so will, at best, make markets less efficient and may actually prevent them from functioning at all.

Marshall’s poor reasoning isn’t limited to markets, though. On the topic of cities, Marshall is in equally poor form. He makes much ado about the fact that cities are corporations, ignoring that, until very recently, the incorporation of a city was nothing like the incorporation of a company and that even today, the various “city corporations” like that of London, differ in both structure and intent from the sort of corporations Marshall seems to be talking about.

This kind of equivocation again leads Marshall to imagine government possessing far more power than it does, when he says: “I would like us, the electorate, to remember that corporations are entities created by the state, and which can be rearranged and reconstructed however we the polity decide.” Never mind that such a statement carries with it a morally repugnant endorsement for the tyranny of the majority, it has a deeper problem that he conflates the legal entity with the physical one. He then simply asserts that since the government controls the legal entity that we can restructure the physical entity (the city) to our whim. Marshall seems to think that incorporation breathes some kind of life into the golem that is the polis, giving the bestower of such life control over its actions.

Again, Marshall misses that the event that he wants to ascribe to government (the creation of cities) postdates the alleged cause by thousands of years. The city of London’s “corporation” (again, this meant something very different from economic corporation until very recently) was formed over a thousand years after the founding of Londinium by the Romans. When it was formed (by charter from William the Conqueror) is was explicitly a recognition of rights and powers already in place.

Markets and cities do not exist at the behest and behalf of government. Both, though they undoubtedly profit from good governance, need only the voluntary human interactions for which Mr. Marshall has so little apparent regard.

¹ For more excellent refutations of this kind of protectionist claptrap, please checkout Don Boudreaux’s writings over at Cafe Hayek.

² Cf. Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist, pp. 53, 56 in the first Harper Collins hardcover edition.

³ Governments can improve the efficacy of markets in a variety of ways, but these ways do not include the direct control or regulation of the market. Governments that, e.g., ensure equal treatment under the law, strong protections for personal and property rights, and access to public institutions free of corruption do massively improve the health and functioning of markets.

Kuala Lumpur DAY-NIGHT from Rob Whitworth on Vimeo.

I love urban architecture, I think, in much the way that devout Christians love the architecture of Cathedrals. Skyscrapers and vast urban warrens of buildings are a testament to something universal and larger than myself. They evoke in me a sense of awe at our species’ power, accomplishments, and potentials. And being in the heart of cities always brings me to mind the immense creative energy of mankind and makes me hopeful for how we might harness that energy in the future.

The video above, by Singapore-based photographer Rob Whitworth does a good job of evoking that sense of frenetic energy. I’ve been planning for awhile to go with my eldest brother on an architecture tour of East Asia and Kuala Lumpur is high on the list of destinations. This video moves it up very near the top of the list.

I recently finished Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography. The book takes an interesting approach to the subject of London by presenting the user discrete views onto London. Each chapter turns the reader’s gaze to one aspect of the City and then follows that subject throughout London’s history. This technique gives Ackroyd a chance to not only tell tight stories about the City, but also to deftly build larger themes from smaller evidence without presumptuous declaration or relying on facts not entered into evidence.

These larger themes were for me the most interesting and most maddening part of the book. Ackroyd does an excellent job of showing the dogged persistence of City. Building and districts maintain their life and function for centuries, even as governments and even nations rise and fall around them. Districts are home to the same peoples and families for centuries. Place names of deeply obscure origin are suddenly explicated by the discovery of centuries-old artifacts. The City takes on the character of slow-tempered Mammon with near-infinite inertia. Conquest, destruction, plague, fire, and the slow crush of man’s pretensions to planning have all utterly failed to change anything about London’s basic workings. London just assimilates all these things in stride, heals its wounds in time, and goes on much as it did before.

The sociology of this phenomenon, even without Ackroyd’s pseudo-mystical psychogeography, is a fascinating subject and one that Ackroyd leaves largely unstudied. He points to this persistence of London’s life and purpose several times, but never really sits down to tease out his ideas on the subject. He instead relies on his historically longitudinal vignettes to make the case for a City of infinite will and with a body, life, and plan all its own.

When Ackroyd does stop briefly to speculate about London’s character writ large, it’s clear that he feels deeply ambivalent about the place. He’s quick to point out the armies of the poor that have occupied the city for its entire history. He seems to look down on the avarice and constant human energy of the City. He sees the city as a kind of monstrous other that eats its children and disregards anything resembling human decency. And yet, in the midst of that, he openly marvels at London’s beauty and majesty and revels in its ability to foster some of mankind’s greatest achievements and pursuits. London is a city so full of life and affirmation that even Ackroyd at his most cynical can’t help but quote Samuel Johnson’s famous line: “If you’re tired of London, you’re tired of life.”

And while you may never tire of London, you might tire of its Biography after five or six hundred pages. Towards the end of the book, some of the essays begin to retread territory and do get a bit shopworn and familiar. After seeing so many threads meticulously picked up, spun, laid out, and then left, I started wishing he’d take the last hundred pages or so to break from his form and at least try to tie a few of them together and to tease out some greater truths that he’d only hinted at in his many essays.

Ultimately, though, Ackroyd’s meticulous study of the many faces of London’s history is extremely valuable. Anyone who is interested in London as an entity or a historical force, or simply besotted (as I am) with the City as a place unlike any in the world, should definitely read it. Just be prepared for an army of small scenes and for Ackroyd to keep all his most important big ideas maddeningly to himself.