Archive for November 12, 2007

Why don’t New Yorkers drink coffee?

November 12, 2007 / Wendy Waters / 8 comments

Planetizen has a link today to some intriguing research into the average caffeine consumption levels in various American cities.  They looked at all sources of caffeine, not just coffee, however the coffee category intrigued me the most.

It came as no surprise that people in the birthplace of Starbucks, Seattle/Tacoma, consume the largest amounts of coffee.  What I found odd was that New Yorkers drink among the lowest amounts of coffee (and also the lowest amounts of cola).  Somehow I would have thought that a city known for “energy” would have citizens consuming coffee.  Instead, it’s Seattle, known for being laid back, where everyone is buzzed.

Anyone have a theory on this?

From NeedCoffee.com:

Most Coffee Consumption, Regular coffee & specialty coffee drinks:
1. Seattle/Tacoma
2. Boston
3. Houston
4. Chicago
5. Miami

Least Coffee Consumption, Regular coffee & speciality coffee drinks:
1. Dallas/Ft. Worth
2. New York
3. St. Louis
4. Atlanta
5. Philadelphia

Category: urban lifestyles /

Remembering veterans

November 11, 2007 / Wendy Waters / One comment

Most cities have numerous memorials to soldiers killed in wars. In Canada and many parts of Europe, the most significant are typically honoring those citizens lost during World War I.   In many cities everything will stop today, November 11, at 11 AM at these memorials to remember (the 11th hour, of the 11th day of the 11th month when World War I, “the war to end all wars” officially ended).

In Canada, today is Remembrance Day.  In the US it is officially Veterans Day, although when I lived there, nothing seemed to occur on November 11 — it wasn’t a holiday and nothing happened in remembrance. But maybe in some cities events do happen.

As we do every year, we’ll be going down to our local war memorial, in a park 3 blocks away. Hundreds of people from the community gather; various politicians and city leaders and other organizations’ representatives lay wreaths; and various children’s groups prepare to march.

It’s somewhat of a throwback to another era, watching the kids march. Boy scouts, girl guides, and various para-military youth organizations line up and parade down the street. Wars of the early 20th century were about organizing masses of people, whether soldiers in the field or citizens at home in factories. In the 21st century, everything seems far more complex — the aims of the wars and battles are sometimes poorly defined (by both sides); identifying “the enemy” can be challenging; and the rules of engagement are ever changing.

But our friends, neighbors, relatives and fellow world citizens continue to die in armed conflicts. Let us remember.

Category: communities, urban history /

Pedestrians fight for their sidewalks

November 10, 2007 / Wendy Waters / No comments

Pedestrians in Athens, Greece are fighting to take back their sidewalks. From a fascinating article in the Herald Tribune:

“Step on a sidewalk or try crossing any street here, and chances are you’ll instantly feel like the prey of a safari hunt,” said Vassilis Theodorou of the Hellenic Association of Road Traffic Victim Support. “This is the only place in Europe where the golden traffic rule — that pedestrians have the unconditional right of way — is so brazenly disrespected.”

In Athens alone, swarms of scooters race down crowded sidewalks. Pedestrians struggle to circumnavigate construction debris, torn-up pavement and mounds of refuse. The greatest impediment, however, is the fleet of vehicles that each day mount the city’s approximately 1,200 miles of tree-lined sidewalks or other walkways to park.

A group of people known as the Street Panthers prowl the city at night looking for illegally parked cars on sidewalks and elsewhere, and slap a bright orange sticker on them that depicts a donkey saying “I park where I want.”   Another group of citizens known as the Peeze (for pedestrians rights) organizes regular walks to take back the sidewalks.

The organized initiative may or may not change scooter and car driver behavior. But it’s a great example of citizens coming together to solve a problem. Cities are complex and governments lack the resources to solve every issue, even if there is the will (which isn’t always the case). When citizens from a broad range of backgrounds come together to solve a problem, it helps generate community. As I’ve written before, tension gives people a reason to talk to each other. Collaboration helps to forge bonds – even if victory is illusive.

Category: communities, public spaces, transportation, Uncategorized /

Duck and cover: bomb shelters as urban heritage

November 8, 2007 / Wendy Waters / 4 comments

A debate rages in Edmonton about whether a bomb shelter should be preserved as a heritage building. As you can see from the picture, it’s not very pretty to look at. However, preparing for a nuclear attack is part of world urban history.

Today, no one seems to worry about a nuclear attack. Maybe we all believe that either one is unlikely, or that we won’t likely survive anyway — or both. But for decades in the 20th century the cold war between the US and Soviet Union generated legitimate fears of a nuclear attack, and everyday people as well as city governments tried to prepare to survive the fall out.

Many houses had their own shelter. We found one in our house about six years ago — while renovating we discovered a crawl space from a basement storage area into what could best be described as a cave. Inside were several gallons of water; canned food (from Woodwards, a store that closed in 1982), two Flintstones mugs, and a yellowed, crumbling newspaper from 1980.

Governments also created shelters for the masses. In Moscow, for example, the metro system is designed to double as one giant underground shelter. Switzerland, according to Wikipedia, had the largest amount of shelter space per capita in the world. Schools and other buildings were designed to double as fall-out protection; many families had their own sizeable shelter attached to their homes; and the country continually had enough food and water stockpiled to nourish the entire population for two years! Today in Switzerland many bomb shelters have been converted into such uses as wine cellars and workout gyms.

In 1953 the Houston government designated the L&C Cafeteria as a bomb shelter for 1000 people. By 1968 the city had 464 public fall-out shelters, created under a federal program. The only problem was that apparently very few members of the public knew the shelters’ locations. While the supplies involved were apparently given away in the 1990s, I’m curious about the bomb shelters themselves.

Back to Edmonton, I’m hoping they keep the bomb shelter as a piece of urban heritage. And, I’d like to see them leave it as the cold, steel box that it is — rather than beautify it. The fear, tension, and belief you might need a fall-out shelter (or might die at any moment in a nuclear war) were such a big part of life during the cold war. Just like other world wars, we need to remember the cold war.

Category: public spaces, urban history /

Top 3 reasons to read “The Warhol Economy”

November 7, 2007 / Wendy Waters / 3 comments

Preliminary thoughts on Elizabeth Currid, The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art and Music Drive New York City (Princeton University Press, 2007). A more formal review will follow in a few days.

Planners, economists, urban politicians, and anyone interested in how cities work — and how the arts work in a city — will find something fascinating in Elizabeth Currid’s new book. Here are three reasons to pick up a copy:

1. To understand the place of New York’s artistic culture in the city’s economy and society.
Currid makes a compelling argument (in Chapter three) that New York’s national and global pull as a city does not come from its finance and business management cluster. Using location quotient methodology and other evidence she illustrates that other cities easily rival New York in their concentrations of management talent. By contrast, New York is unmatched is in the concentration of artists, musicians, fashion industry specialists, and the media industry (writers, illustrators, editors, publishers), what she collectively calls the cultural economy.

She also offers an interesting urban history lesson, illustrating how during times of recession and decline in other areas of the city’s economy in the 1970s and 1980s generated space for artists. Rent became cheap and creativity boomed as artists could live more cheaply. Eventually this outpouring of creativity fostered a vibrant economy that now sets music, art, fashion trends for the world.  More recent real estate price increases and gentrification is making it more challenging for the New York arts scene as many cannot afford to live in the city.

2. To experience an in-depth case study of how an economic cluster works in a city.

Currid has done one of the most thorough jobs I’ve ever read of detailing how a cluster works at the micro level where people cross over related industries (graffiti artist and fashion designer, for example), cross-pollinate ideas, and work through word of mouth.

She draws the reader into the complex social scene that supports the creative economy in New York. Artists, musicians, fashion designers, and their media supporters and critics run in the same social circles, attending the same gallery openings or indie band concerts, and frequenting the same night clubs (like the famous CBGB).  People and their ideas cross-pollinate in the social, informal milieu.

“[Creative] industries operate horizontally, engaging with each other through collaboration, sharing skill sets and labor pools, and reviewing and valorizing each other’s products — and much of this often begins in the informal or social realm. Film directors and musicians hanging out at SoHo House or the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institutes’s annual gala that mixes high fashion with high art and has every A-list celebrity, designer supermodel and tastemaker in attendance.  Creativity is so fluid that cultural producers from one industry move seamlessly into another (e.g., Claw as graffiti artist and fashion designer; Beyonce and her boyfriend Jay-Z as hip-hop superstars and fashion designers).”

Currid insists that the reliance on a social scene to keep the cultural economy going is unique to this cluster.  While she briefly acknowledges the social informal networks in other clusters, she downplays its importance outside the culture cluster.  However, you can replace the gallery openings in Currid’s treatment with a golf course or the box suite at a hockey or football game and the process is remarkably similar.  The movers and shakers in other clusters meet casually at these sporting venues as well as a particular watering hole to see if they can do a deal.
3. To understand the process of how global fashion trends germinate in New York and reach around the world – or why the upper middle class white kids in a suburb near you wear jeans hanging off their butts (designed in New York ghettos to emulate black prison wear) while listing to gangsters’ rap music on their iPods.New York’s importance is everywhere in our daily lives. The clothes we and our families wear, the music we hear, and many other goods we consume daily come from the New York cultural economy. Currid illustrates how New York’s cultural economy generates trends that then spread across the country and around the world.

***

The book contains much more pertaining to the economic development of cities. It also invites some tough probing questions. Stay tuned for a subsequent review…

Category: attracting talent, book reviews, communities, economic development, planning policy, urban history /

Comparing cities through surnames

November 3, 2007 / Wendy Waters / 7 comments

The last names of individuals in a metro area or a country can be surprising. Until today I never knew the most common last name in Canada is Li. Not Smith, as it is in the USA. Smith is number two in Canada.

The USA-Canada contrast is interesting: Looking down the top ten list of Canadian surnames, two are usually of Chinese origin (Li and Lam – #1 and #3 incidentally), three are English, three are French, and two are more ambiguous — Martin is both a French and English last name, and Lee can be English or Chinese or Korean. The USA’s top ten list are all English names — however in some individual states such as Florida and New Mexico hispanic names are frequent in the top ten list, as would be expected from the history of settlement in what is now the USA. The multi-lingual Canadian surnames arguably reflects a more multi-lingual and multi-cultural heritage in Canada. But Canada today is a very urban nation, and each major city is quite different in its heritage.

Taking a look at cities across Canada, there are some contrasts.

The top ten names in Metro Vancouver, according to the Vancouver Sun, are primarily Chinese and Asian:

  1. LEE
  2. WONG
  3. SMITH
  4. CHAN
  5. BROWN
  6. KIM
  7. CHEN
  8. JOHNSON
  9. WILSON
  10. GILL

Given Vancouver’s Pacific Rim location, this is not surprising. I should add, that in Metro Vancouver people of European descent still outnumber people of Chinese origin (the latter representing about 17% of the population), however there are fewer dominant European last names, perhaps reflecting origins among many non-English European countries as well as the frequency in China and Korea of certain surnames. Looking at last names is just one lens through which to view a city and it doesn’t reveal everything, we should note. Yet contrasting this list with other cities does reflect differences.

Here are Toronto’s top ten surnames, taken from a different source:

  1. Lee
  2. Smith
  3. Wong
  4. Chan
  5. Brown
  6. Patel
  7. Li
  8. Chen
  9. Kim
  10. Williams

Toronto’s list is similar to Vancouver’s. Gill (which is common in India and #10 in Metro Vancouver) doesn’t appear, but Patel, another Indian name does on the Toronto list. Otherwise, the two are quite similar.

For a contrast, look at Calgary:

  1. Smith
  2. Brown
  3. Lee
  4. Anderson
  5. Johnson
  6. Wong
  7. Wilson
  8. Jones
  9. Taylor
  10. Miller

The only non-anglo name here, Wong, doesn’t show up until the sixth position (edit to add that the name Lee in third place likely contains people of both European and Asian decent – thanks MA for spotting this). From this list one could (correctly) conclude that Calgary’s heritage is less international and more anglo-Canadian.

For the United States I searched via Google for the common surnames in a variety of cities, but could not find similar lists. They do exist at the state level if you follow the instructions here.

What would be really interesting, would be to see the same lists 10, 20, and 50 years ago, but I couldn’t find any. Some cities have changed a lot. Indeed in the United States, a survey of the surnames of home buyers in various states changed dramatically between 2000 and 2005.

In California, New York, New Jersey, and Florida, 20 percent of home buyers last year were new to this country. The top five surnames of home buyers in 2000 were: Smith, Johnson, Brown, Williams, and Miller. Five years later, Smith, Johnson, and Williams were still in the top five, joined by Garcia and Rodriguez. In California, in 2005, the top five surnames among home buyers were all Latino….In Nebraska, the fourth most common surname of home buyers is Nguyen.

While this doesn’t tell us about cities, per se, it does show the way examining surnames can offer an intriguing snap shot of what is happening in a region, or even an activity like home buying within it.

Category: demographic stats, diversity, urban history /
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