Why hyperlocal won’t save newspapers (and what will)

Stack of newspapers

Newspapers are in a tight spot. Advertising revenues have been declining for 11 years straight, and classified ads have all but vanished in the face of Craigslist and eBay. The move online hasn’t been smooth for them, either. First, they gave away their product, hoping to make it up on volume with increased ad sales. That hasn’t exactly worked—for every $1 newspaper websites bring in, they have lost $25 in print advertising. The only bright spot is subscriptions, which have miraculously held steady. Many papers are trimming their publication schedules—the New Orleans Times-Picayune the most recently notable of them—leading many communities to fear the ultimate demise of important institutions.

Whenever a business or industry falls on hard times, people trip over themselves to propose turnaround plans. Newspapers are no exception, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to be left out of the fray.¹ My diagnosis? Too many newspapers have placed their bets on intensely local coverage, or hyperlocal as they call it in the biz. That’s a mistake. To remain profitable, they need to concentrate on a particular topic instead of a geographic region.

That epiphany occurred to me Christmas morning over a bowl of cereal at my in-laws. I was flipping through the Houston Chronicle when I noticed the paper had branded their energy coverage, FuelFix. Not the best name, but it’s a sound idea. Houston is a major hub for the oil and gas industry, and Chronicle reporters have spent years, even decades reporting on it. Who else would be so positioned to cover the industry?

The Chronicle isn’t the first paper to experiment with trade-specific coverage. The New York Times has done the same thing with financial firms and DealBook, to much success. By providing consistent, nearly obsessive coverage of an industry, both papers attract new readers and new advertisers interested in reaching a targeted audience.

Those two data points made me realize that most papers have it all wrong, at least as far as profitability is concerned. Hyperlocal coverage will never be profitable enough. On a local level, there’s simply not enough news worth paying for. Try too hard and you end up with stories like this. Subscribers will never fill the void—there simply aren’t enough people willing to pay for local news, especially when they can get the basics on TV, for free.² Hyperlocal won’t attract enough advertisers, either. The local advertising pie just isn’t that big.

This is where trade publication sections like FuelFix and DealBook come in. Revenues from their higher ad rates (and, yes, maybe even new subscribers) can subsidize the rest of the paper. It’s a new twist on an old model. In the past, classifieds and legal notices kept the rest of the paper afloat. Today, trade sections can serve the same role.

New York and Houston aren’t the only cities with papers that could benefit from a trade publication model. The Detroit Free Press already closely covers the auto industry, but it could do more. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel could dig deep into manufacturing. The Chicago Tribune might look at commodities or financial firms outside of New York. The San Jose Mercury News and the San Francisco Chronicle could step up their tech coverage, too. There’s a lot of competition in that sector already, but it is highly profitable. And if that fails, there’s still a chance for them in biotech. Not all papers can follow this model, but having some survivors is better than none.

With profits from the trade side, newspapers could continue covering the less profitable—but arguably more important—stories. It makes business sense, too. Without the rest of the newspaper, the trade section loses some of its credibility. It would be just another trade publication.

This plan isn’t problem free. Like in the past, advertising-editorial conflicts could scuttle the whole experiment. But unlike other proposed new business models, that devil is well known. Newspapers have managed such conflicts by erecting firewalls between advertising and editorial sections. The same could be done with trade sections by separating the two newsrooms. Even better, papers could spin them off the trade sections into wholly-owned subsidiaries and let the profits flow back to the regular news side. It might be enough to let newspapers live to die another day.

I have my reasons for wanting venerable papers to survive. For one, I worked as a science reporter for Chicago Tribune in the summer of 2008. In my childhood, I spent many mornings and evenings reading the local papers. And as an adult, I’ve come to appreciate the importance of print journalism—there are simply some stories better told and better remembered in written form. ↩
I’d be surprised if the other option—providing deep insights on the news—would change the equation, at least on a local level. ↩

Photo by jeffeaton.

When everyone lives in a city

The future?

Here’s a fun thought experiment. Plot the population of the world since 500 BCE. Now plot the population of the 50 largest cities over that same time. If you distill equations to describe the two trends, you’ll notice the lines cross. At some point in the future, your models predict that the population of the 50 largest cities will overtake the world’s population. Clearly that’s impossible.

What those trends are telling you is that cities are growing faster than rural areas, something we already know. But if you take that thought experiment to its mathematical extremes, you’ll see it’s possible that there comes a point when—boom—everyone lives in a city. Rural dwellers—poof—cease to exist. Suddenly, we’re all children of the concrete jungle.

That’s what Michael Batty, a well-known urban planner and geographer, noticed when he ran through those same hypotheticals. Specifically, he calculated that by 2092 all the world will be urbanized according to those trend lines. Of course that won’t happen, and he acknowledges that. The world’s population will, at minimum, be equal to the sum of its cities, and I’m 100 percent certain that at least a handful of people will still live in the country, either by choice or chance. But Batty’s idea bears consideration. What would the world look like when, as he puts it, “all the world’s a city”?

The United Nations currently estimates the world’s population will reach 10 billion by 2100, just a few years after mathematics suggests we could all be living in cities. Now, that’s not to say the Earth would be covered by one massive city. Cities may be expanding outward faster than their population growth would warrant, but 10 billion people spread across all continents but Antarctica would live at a density of about 190 people per square mile (74 per square kilometer). Hardly a city.

But what if our notion of a city changed? A single definition is already maddeningly difficult to nail down. Take New York City, for example. It has about 8.2 million people within the polity, but the greater region has over 22 million. Where does New York really end? Houston and Tokyo, on the other hand, encompass too much. Each political entity contains vast tracts of undeveloped land. It’s clear that political boundaries aren’t adequate. So instead, what if we think of a “city” as a collection of conurbations not connected by geography but by social and economic ties, as Batty suggests? In an age of plane travel and high-speed rail, physical continuity isn’t necessarily a requirement.

With this new definition, it is possible for all the world to be one city. The Earth doesn’t have to be covered in conurbation; rather, everyone simply has to live in urban areas, and those urban areas must be sufficiently connected so as to behave like a single city.

Already metros and their regional governments cross existing political boundaries. New York City is a perfect example. And at the other extreme, there are cases like Tokyo where city governments have essentially absorbed their hinterland equivalents. (We see this all the time in the United States with combined city and county governments—New York City, San Francisco, and Lexington, Kentucky, to name a few.) These mergers grew out of necessity, and it’s easy to see the same happening in a hyper-connected world. As more and more cities join the global cluster, as Batty calls it, the pressure to coordinate will rise.

It’s possible, then, that the first true world government could emerge from this collection of cities. It would be fitting. Already mayors from around the world meet to discuss common problems, and on issues like climate change where national governments have fallen flat, they have taken the lead. But it would still be a shift of epic proportions. It wouldn’t happen overnight, but at a certain point it would be inevitable. Cities could choose to sit on the sidelines, but the benefits of joining the global cluster would be too great to ignore. Eventually, nearly everyone on Earth would count themselves a resident of the One City.

The world as one city would surely be a different place. The relationship between a city and its hinterland would be tested. Indeed, what would become of the hinterland? It would certainly be smaller—although the One City wouldn’t smother the planet, it would still have an enormous footprint. The hinterland would remain inhabited by scattered few who choose to live there, perhaps living their quiet lives amongst robotized farms. A great schism between the city and the hinterland could develop. But there could also be a reconciliation. Governments could reconfigure to cope with the changing landscape, both literal and figurative. Instead tension between the city and its hinterland, there could be cooperation fostered by a sense of shared fate. So goes the city goes the hinterland, and vice versa.

Regardless of how it all plays out, a highly urbanized global population will add nearly 6 billion people to cities that only hold about 3.6 billion today. That’s growth of almost 280 percent in less than a century. Such a percentage isn’t unprecedented—between 1900 and today, the world’s urban population grew by more than 1600 percent—but the raw numbers will be. To accommodate those people, cities will have to remake themselves like never before. It’s a daunting challenge, and as I stated in my last article, we’ll need a science of the city that’s equally formidable.

Sources:

Batty, M. (2011). When all the world’s a city, Environment and Planning A, 43 (4) 772. DOI: 10.1068/a43403

United Nations. 2011. “World Urbanization Prospects, the 2011 Revision.” Accessed October 8, 2012.

Photo by kevin dooley.

Planet of the Cities

If the world’s population lived like…

Marchetti’s constant, or why the 30 minute commute is here to stay

Shanghai Transrapid maglev

“How far should you live from work?”

I pondered that question a few weeks ago after perusing American Community Survey data compiled by Charlie Gardner. It showed that most people in most metro areas in the United States tended to commute about 30 minutes each way to work, give or take a few. That adds up to about an hour of commute time per day. As I looked into it further, I found a lot of research that corroborated the surprising similarity of people’s commute times.

But in all ten research papers I used to footnote that article, I was missing one. Eric Fischer pointed me toward a 1994 treatise—for lack of a better term—by Cesare Marchetti. He posited that one hour per day is as long as people have been willing to travel. Ever. Since the dawn of human society.

At least, that’s what Marchetti hypothesized. He did have some data to back it up, though it wasn’t his own. It was Yacov Zahavi’s. Zahavi was a transportation engineer who consulted for the U.S. Department of Transportation and World Bank in the 1970s and early 1980s. As part of his work for the DOT, he came up with what he called the Unified Mechanism of Travel Model, or UMOT. Zahavi produced a string of reports and papers on UMOT, which he hoped would shake up how transportation planning was done in cities.

In the process of developing UMOT, Zahavi collected many juicy tidbits of data. One observation was that as people earn more money, they spend an increasing percentage of their income on everyday travel, up to about 13 percent. That number seemed to be both a hard ceiling and firm floor once households earned above a certain amount (about $50,000 in 1976). The richer you got, the more you spent in real terms. But the percentage remained the same.

Another bit—the one that inspired Marchetti—was that people in the United States and the United Kingdom traveled about 1 hour per day. (Astute readers will notice that a 30 minute commute to work—the number most studies have settled on as the “average” commute—adds up to precisely that amount at the end of the day.) Zahavi also noticed that even though some people could travel faster—by car rather than bus, for example, they still spent the same amount of time traveling. They just traveled farther to work—a trend which more recent studies have also uncovered.

Zahavi’s data is compelling, but in Marchetti’s hands it quickly became a universal constant. If so many people in Zahavi’s study (mostly in the developed world of the 1950s and 1960s) traveled the same amount per day, Marchetti reasoned that humans must have an innate desire to travel at most and at least 1 hour per day. Boom. Marchetti’s constant.

Zahavi’s data wasn’t the only leg he had to stand on, though it certainly was his sturdiest. Cave men and Greek villages were another. Marchetti pointed out, “Walking about 5 km/hr, and coming back to the cave for the night, gives a territory radius of about 2.5 km and an area of about 20 km². This is the definition of the territory of a village, and … this is precisely the mean area associated with Greek villages today, sedimented through centuries of history.”

Marchetti—not one to think small, apparently—then used his new universal constant as a jumping off point to explore the future of tomorrow. How fast would a transportation system need to be to serve a city of 100 billion people? An average speed of 150 km/h sounds about right. Can you turn Switzerland into one giant city? Sure, so long as you run maglev trains in sealed tunnels sucked free of atmosphere. What about if you linked Paris and Casablanca with a maglev, too? “[A] woman in Casablanca could go to work in Paris, and cook dinner for her children in the evening.”

Not a man to leave a logical extreme unreached, Marchetti realized that at some point in the future everywhere on Earth will be 30 minutes from your front door. “With mach-7 airplanes and matching Maglevs, a world city is also possible. The assimilation of the technologies in political terms, however, will take some time.”

Details. In the meantime, enjoy your 30 minute commute.

Sources:

Marchetti, C. (1994). Anthropological invariants in travel behavior, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 47 (1) 88. DOI: 10.1016/0040-1625(94)90041-8

Zahavi, Yacov. 1976. “The Unified Mechanism of Travel (UMOT) Model.”

Photo by Lars Plougmann.

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How far should you live from work?

Tell me how much you drive, and I’ll tell you where you live

Drive a lot? Housing density may not be to blame

Responsive urban design

Cityscape

We’ve been planning cities for almost as long as they have existed. Archaeological evidence suggests the ancient Egyptians did so 5,000 years ago. Hippodamos, considered by many to be the father of urban planning, imposed street grids on every ancient Greek city that would let him. Since then, we’ve been busily drawing, revising, and otherwise fussing about how best to design our cities.

It turns out we may have it all wrong. Or at least wrong for today’s cities. Urban areas have always been in constant flux, but we’re now demanding far more of them than before. They’ve never housed, transported, or employed so many people. To cope, cities have been changing at an astonishingly rapid pace. The results can be inspiring—as they are in Seoul, Singapore, and Tokyo—or depressing—just look at anywhere with extensive slums. In some cases, it seems urban planning is up to the task. In others, it’s not.

Where it falls flat, urban planning’s failings aren’t necessarily the fault of the designers. Too often planning is focused on minutiae—ordinances, regulations, zoning, setbacks, and so on. Even when it tackles bigger problems like economic growth, it doesn’t necessarily consider the city as a whole.¹

The solution, according to Michael Batty, an urban planner and professor at University College London, is infusing planning with science. Systems science, specifically, where bright minds and complex mathematical models try to digest the entirety of a system, like a city. It’s no simple task. IBM is just one company throwing billions of dollars and tons of silicon at the problem. What they’ll get out of it is anybody’s guess, but they seem certain they’ll get something. Cities are overflowing with collectable data. It’s making sense of it that’s difficult. The possibilities it presents is what I think is going drive us to rethink city planning.

Urban planning has its origins in the design world, which is both a bonus and a handicap. Architects make natural planners—they design the buildings, why not have them design the streets, too? When those planners are enlightened designers, the results are attractive and livable cities. If they’re not? Well, we’ve all seen what happens when they’re not. But as much as good design has created great cities, I and others suspect it can’t deal with the coming challenges. Not on its own, at least. Good design can solve many problems, but it can’t solve them all. At some point, you need science.

The rate at which cities are growing and changing presents a problem for the traditional design-centric approach. Good design requires a thorough understanding of your problem. But these days, problems are appearing and evolving so quickly that we don’t have enough time to properly observe them.

Urban planning is at a crossroads, much like ecology was 50 years ago.² Planning is still largely descriptive and not very scientific, again, much like ecology was 50 years ago. Sure, cities gather hard data like traffic and sewage flows. Yes, they model projected growth and consider the social factors behind neighborhood demands. But urban planning lacks a unified, data-driven theoretical foundation.

That’s beginning to change. Michael Batty, Geoffrey West, Luis Bettencourt, and others are proposing data-driven theories and testing them, just like Robert MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson did in ecology back in the 1960s and 70s. Though these new urban theorists are trying to shake things up, they’re not trying to eliminate planning as we know it. Their science of cities won’t be a replacement for current planning, but a superset. Think of it as a grand theory to tie it all together, to make sense of why cities have evolved the way they did and how we can coax them to cope with 5 billion people.

The science of cities may be in its infancy, but we can see where it will lead. The first stage, the one we’re in right now, is descriptive. It involves gathering data, assembling huge models, and tuning them until we’re satisfied. Then we’ll apply those models, and see how the real world reacts. There will be some stumbles, but that’ll only give us more data to work with. Eventually, we’ll arrive at a theory of cities that’s universal and flexible enough that it can be applied anywhere. It will be a foundation that will underpin models that grind through piles of data and make sound, timely recommendations which designers can implement.

Getting to that last stage is important, I think. In many cities, it’s clear that we don’t know what to do with all these new urbanites. Even in cities where things appear hunky dory, cracks are beginning to show. Subways are crowded, freeways are jammed, and sewers are overflowing. Throwing money at temporary fixes will only get us so far. We need to dig deeper and develop a responsive urbanism,³ one that’s grand in scale and scientifically focused. We need to listen to what cities are telling us, decide what we want them to do, and plan accordingly.

Enlightened planners out there—and there are quite a few—can take umbrage with my characterization here. But they’ll admit that there are quite a few in their profession that dabble too much in the details. ↩
Though urban planning is behind the curve relative to ecology when it comes to mathematical and theoretical rigor, data gathering is one place where it’s ahead. We already have many data sets in hand along with the infrastructure to gather more. ↩
I’m thinking bigger than pop-up parks, an oft cited example of “responsive urbanism”. ↩

Sources:

Batty, M. (2008). The Size, Scale, and Shape of Cities, Science, 319 (5864) 771. DOI: 10.1126/science.1151419

Batty, M. (2012). Building a science of cities, Cities, 29 S16. DOI: 10.1016/j.cities.2011.11.008

Bettencourt, L.M.A., Lobo, J., Helbing, D., Kuhnert, C. & West, G.B. (2007). Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104 (17) 7306. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0610172104

Photo by MagnusL3D

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Can crowdsourcing save the city?

The last settler’s syndrome

Welcome to the future

As I’m writing this, it’s early in the morning and the mercury is already past 70˚ F. It’s raining here, like it has been on and off this entire week, much to the chagrin of many Coloradans, I’m sure. The rain is probably keeping the temperature down a bit, but once the clouds finish their job, we’re headed to a steamy high above 90˚ F. I’m not alone. A heat wave is currently baking much of the country, though unlike where I live, many regions haven’t been soaked with rain.

NASA/Jesse Allen

In southeastern Wisconsin, my parents say it hasn’t really rained there since Memorial Day. The prairie plants that dot their front yard—normally verdant even in dry weather—are wilting from lack of water.

Paul De Chant

One local farmer said he would need at least 3 inches of rain to save his crops.

Paul De Chant

Then there’s Florida. In in some parts of the state, Tropical Storm Debby has dumped over 26 inches of rain. Sinkholes have swallowed roads, and 50 miles of Interstate 10 had to be closed due to flooding.

DVIDSHUB

WalterPro4755

Back in Colorado, my sister says she has two reasons to be grateful for air conditioning—it prevents both heat and smoke from suffusing her apartment.

DVIDSHUB

The National Guard

U.S. Department of Agriculture

Heat isn’t the only culprit behind the wildfires. This year’s early snowmelt in the mountains—early by two weeks—is also to blame, scientists say. The bark beetles that have ravaged the state’s pine and spruce forests may also increase the odds of fire, but the interactions between bug and flame aren’t entirely sorted out yet.

The National Guard

U.S. Department of Agriculture

Meanwhile halfway around the world in Siberia, wildfires have been raging uncontrolled for six months.

NASA/Jeff Schmaltz

Welcome to the future.

Why I can’t move back to Wisconsin

Forward?

I’ve often wondered if I would ever move back to my home state of Wisconsin. It’s not the logistics that phase me—I’ve lived in California, Illinois, and Massachusetts in the last three years. No, I’ve wondered whether the state could lure me and my wife with promising and satisfying jobs to complement the state’s kind people and bucolic countryside. Yesterday, I learned that will never happen.

It was yesterday that Governor Scott Walker survived a recall election. The contentious recall was spurred by his decision to strip public employees of their collective bargaining rights, the majority of whom are teachers.¹ Walker sold the move as a way to balance the budget, but really he was just codifying the shift in Wisconsin’s values that has occurred over the past few decades. It also betrays Wisconsin’s uncertainty about how to deal with the future.

Wisconsin, like many rust belt states, has had a difficult time finding its economic footing ever since off-shoring became de rigueur among manufacturing companies. It’s had a few chances since then, but none more promising than the biotech opportunity that slipped through its fingers. The University of Wisconsin was a pioneer in stem cell research. Had George W. Bush not restricted funding for stem cell research, Madison could have been an incubator for related startups, enabling the state to shrug off its manufacturing past. It was a rare glimpse of an alternate future. The loss of that future should have galvanized public and private investments in education and research to unearth the next big opportunity. Instead, Wisconsin gave up. Frustrated, it turned to a simpler and shorter-term solution—tax breaks.

What the state really needs is a complete economic overhaul. Tax breaks won’t accomplish that. That’s not to say tax breaks don’t have their place. They can entice established businesses to relocate. They can encourage existing ones to hire a few more workers. They can even help fledgling businesses gain a foothold. But they won’t create the kind of daring and brilliant entrepreneurs needed to reshape Wisconsin’s economy.

No one ever started a revolutionary company because of tax breaks. Disruptive companies are founded because someone has a fantastic new idea, not because the state offered them a few thousand dollars. They succeed because they can hire intelligent, well-educated employees, not because they are paid to increase headcounts. Such transformative companies don’t magically appear because of low taxes. They bubble up in places that value education and innovation.

Wisconsin is a state adrift. Where it used to be an agricultural and manufacturing powerhouse, today it is neither. It has no defining industry, no discernible direction. Wisconsin is trying to rediscover its economic muse, but it’s going about it in all the wrong ways.

Wisconsin could still find its way by pouring money into education. That in turn would encourage the sorts of crazy innovation that happens across the street from places like Stanford and MIT. By offering its best and brightest more than just friendly faces and a low cost of living, it could keep them at home rather than lose them to other states. These changes won’t happen over night—Silicon Valley’s success took years, even decades, to manifest—but they could happen.

Yet I know they won’t. Deep down, I know I will never be able to move back to Wisconsin.

Well, some public employees. Police and firefighters retain theirs. ↩

Photo by CindyH Photography.

Farming, circa 2050

Zenderpark, Flevoland, The Netherlands

Farms today look nothing like the farms of 40 years ago. Thanks to market and policy changes along with advances in technology, they’re larger, more mechanized, and more intensive. And while those factors will likely continue to affect farmers, there’s another looming on the horizon—climate change.

Agriculture has already seen the effects of a warming world. For example, in 2011 Texas suffered from the worst one year drought in its history. The parched earth cracked and burned, water holes dried up, and Texas’s iconic ranches lost 600,000 head of cattle. Economic losses topped $7 billion. Images of the drought are horrific. What Texas went through in just one year doesn’t portend well for the future of agriculture.

Farmers aren’t going to take climate change sitting down—they’re going to adapt. But what those adaptations will look like is less clear. A team of agronomists from Wageningen University in the Netherlands tried to predict what farms in one part of their country will look like in 2050. Though the study is region-specific, their results offer a peek at how farms in temperate regions might adapt over the next 40 years and what farmers in developing countries might do to avoid the pitfalls of modern agriculture in a warming world.

The researchers focused on farms in the Netherlands’ Flevoland province. Flevoland is, like much of the country, reclaimed from the sea. It grew out of the Zuiderzee Works project, which separated the inland Zuiderzee from the North Sea with a massive dam. The polders that make up Flevoland were specifically constructed to provide additional farmland. They were completed in three phases between 1942 and 1968.

The Wageningen researchers began by compiling data on various aspects of farms in the Flevoland, including their economic output, farming intensity, degree of specialization, and market niche (production-focused, conservation oriented, or entrepreneurial). They looked as far back as 1986 to see how Flevoland farms have evolved in recent decades and used that information, along with expert input, to tune a model that predicted how farms might change in response to global warming of 1–2 ˚C by 2050.

The model also took into account how the world will react to climate change. That part of the model was based on two scenarios developed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), specifically the A1 and B2 scenarios. The A1 scenario assumes climate change will be dealt with on a global scale. It predicts that globalization will continue, economic output will rise rapidly, technology will advance apace, and economic and cultural disparity between nations will decline. B2, on the other hand, assumes slightly lower population growth, intermediate economic growth, more regionalization, and more disparity between regions in technological advancements.

Under the A1 globalization scenario, the model predicted continued increases in farm size. Entrepreneurial farms—those that accepted tourists, for example—grew in share substantially, to about 24 percent. Farms with a conservation bent disappeared, and Flevoland’s focus shifted from root crops like potatoes to arable crops like wheat or soybeans. The regionalization scenario painted a different picture, in some respects. Farm focus was almost equally divided among production, conservation, and entrepreneurship. Farm size held steady with today’s levels, as did intensity and types of crops grown.

Though this study focused on one province in the Netherlands, it details some potential futures. What type of world we become—a globalized, tech-heavy A1, a regionalized B2, or some other vision of the future—will affect how farms adapt to climate change. Some aspects of the future are not entirely under our control—population growth remains an untamed beast, for example. But others are, like crop subsidies and technological progress. Policy has played an important role in the last 40 years, and there’s no reason to think that will change. That may seem depressing to some people—subsidies have discriminated against small farms, for example—but it can be heartening, too. Policy is something that remains under our control. That means we can still play a role in determining how we’ll get our food in the future.

This study also can also help non-temperate farmers prepare for climate change. By identifying where modern agriculture will likely fall short under certain scenarios, farmers in developing nations can better evaluate whether or not to adopt current methods. Many of them may have missed out on the Green Revolution—especially in Africa—but that may end up being beneficial. Just as some developing nations skipped land lines and went straight to cell phones, farmers unaccustomed to modern production techniques could adopt new methods, approaches that could better prepare them for a changing climate.

Source:

Mandryk, M., Reidsma, P., & Ittersum, M. (2012). Scenarios of long-term farm structural change for application in climate change impact assessment Landscape Ecology, 27 (4), 509-527 DOI: 10.1007/s10980-012-9714-7

Photo by Radio Nederland Wereldomroep.

Coaxing more food from less land

Small farms in modern times

The last settler’s syndrome

Log cabin

In my mind, my hometown will always be a city of 24,000 people. It’ll also be supported by three major manufacturing companies. And it’ll always have a certain, intangible something. Of course, today West Bend has 5,000 more residents despite the demise of all three manufacturers. And every time I return, that certain something isn’t quite the same either. It’s like waking from a dream I can’t entirely reconstruct.

Geographer Gilbert F. White would say I’ve got “last settler’s syndrome”. To me, the ideal West Bend is the city I remember from my childhood—really, from my middle school days when my friends and I explored every street in the city by bike. White would also say I’m not alone: “Each wants his particular town and country landscape to remain just as it was when he or she arrived. The most recent settler wants to be the last settler.”

One could argue that the settlement of the United States was driven in part by last settler’s syndrome, that the pioneer spirit is just a euphemism for the malady. Pioneers who saw their wilderness fill up with other settlers may have become disillusioned. The Ohio River Valley, for example, wasn’t the same after the first trees were felled. So people picked up and moved on. It instilled a distinctly American habit—moving west for new opportunities.¹ My own ancestors followed that well-worn path, moving from Ohio to Wisconsin in the late 1800s.

Seemingly everything in our lives is touched by the last settler’s syndrome, from our childhood homes to our neighborhoods to our favorite haunts. It can be a powerful, positive force—if John Muir hadn’t been afflicted by last settler’s syndrome, there probably wouldn’t be a Yosemite National Park. But last settler’s syndrome also can be problematic. Neighborhood quarrels can result when new transplants push for change. And while obstinacy can be good in some cases—Muir and Yosemite—it also can be a barrier.

Understanding the last settler’s syndrome—how it affects people, and more importantly, how it affects ourselves—can help us better understand where we live, whether that be cities, farms, or forests. It also can help explain why change is so accelerated these days: We’re a population that moves a lot. As of 2010, less than 60 percent of Americans lived in the state in which they were born, almost 30 percent were born in another state, and almost 13 percent were born in another country. How people defined “the way things were” used to evolve over generations. Today it’s on the order of years.

In an era of constant upheaval—where cities look nothing like they did a few years ago, let alone a few decades ago—we need to consciously disassemble our relationship with places and analyze them in parts. What should we keep? What should we change? What needs to change? It’s difficult to abandon the past, but the future will be nothing like we imagine. Things are going to change whether we like it or not.

Why else is California so populous? I kid, I kid. Or do I? ↩

Sources:

Nielsen, J. M., Shelby, B., & Haas, J. E. (1977). Sociological carrying capacity and the last settler syndrome Pacific Sociological Review, 20 (4), 568-581

U.S. Census. 2011. Lifetime Mobility in the United States: 2010.

White, Gilbert F. 1986. The Last Settler’s Syndrome. in Geography, Resources, and Environment: Volume 1. Robert W. Kates and Ian Burton, eds. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Photo by anoldent.

Wilderness housing boom challenges conservation

The woods that were

Can crowdsourcing save the city?

The City 2.0

TED is currently in full swing, and the program this year has an entire section devoted to the city. Fitting, given that this year’s TED Prize went to a city-centric project, one that hopes to crowdsource ideas to solve urban problems and reinvent cities. It’s predictably named The City 2.0. The site has a flashy splash page, but the innards still need some work—tapping in my current city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, sent me to a generic index page that encouraged me to “get connected” with other aspiring urban planners in my area, but responded to my clicks with little more than a broken Google Maps interface and some “COMING SOON” dialog boxes. For now, it’s long on pizzazz and short on details.

The TED Prize website fortunately has more on what The City 2.0 hopes to accomplish:

For phase I, the website (www.thecity2.org) will focus on helping individuals in forming cross-disciplinary groups to:

determine the issue they want to tackle (i.e. traffic, lack of trees);

determine a solution;

develop an action plan;

work to implement the solution;

share the story of their success or failure with others.

Companies and organizations will be able to offer their tools to site users for use in executing their action plans. Ten micro grants of $10,000, coming out of the $100,000 TED Prize money, will be awarded in July 2012 to ten local projects that have the best hope of spurring the creation of their City 2.0.

To be clear, that’s $100,000 to be equally split among ten groups. Not a lot of money to tackle problems that probably need millions, even billions, of dollars thrown at them. Thankfully, there’s more:

As the site continues to grow and the overall platform grows we expect to:

expand the functionality for individuals to connect and act;

develop and design templates for knowledge sharing between new ideas formulated on the site and preexisting projects;

build out our resource section with new local and global partners;
introduce technology solutions for non-web based communities;

expand our financial incentive program with larger grant offerings for active projects

establish local and/or global gatherings on the City 2.0.

That’s a little better. This part of the project should have a longer-lasting impact than the small pot of grant money. Local civic groups often don’t have the skills or wherewithal to build a connected platform to publish their ideas and solicit feedback. The City 2.0 could provide that. But soliciting ideas is just the beginning. Many other hurdles stand in the way, and from what I can see The City 2.0 doesn’t propose how to address them.

The most obvious barrier is money. The City 2.0 acknowledges that to be successful it needs “companies and organizations willing to offer empowering resources” and “financial support”. It seems to me they are simply hoping companies and philanthropists will step forward and reward the best projects. That’s papering over a big problem.

The next issue is how to choose the best project. The City 2.0 says in its intro video that it will “combine the reach of the crowd with the power of the cloud”. Both crowdsourcing and the cloud are hot topics these days. Crowdsourcing in particular can give people a voice who otherwise may not have spoken up, and it leverages the law of big numbers to extract a handful of singular, stand-out ideas. But the real problem with crowdsourcing solutions for cities is more fundamental than that: Who decides which ideas to implement?

Lior Zoref, a crowdsourcing advocate, gave a TED talk this year about the wisdom of crowds in which he was joined on stage by an ox. After the gasps died down, he asked everyone to guess the weight of the animal and submit it to a website. At the end of his talk, he announced the average of the audience’s guesses: 1,792 pounds. The real weight of the cow? 1,795 pounds.

It is an impressive demonstration, but one that doesn’t sell me on the crowd’s ability to reinvent the city. That’s because crowd wisdom cannot apply to projects like The City 2.0. With the ox’s weight, there is one right answer. The crowd’s wisdom can be unambiguously verified. But with ideas and concepts like those solicited by The City 2.0, there is no right answer. And you certainly can’t distill an “average” idea from them all. Ultimately, a panel will have to pick the winners and losers. Those panelists will have enormous sway over the outcome of The City 2.0. If they are experts in their field, what’s to say the winners will be revolutionary, or even substantially different from their own work?

If winners are picked by popular vote—which I highly doubt—that, too, is no guarantee that the most promising proposals will be selected. People don’t always know what they want. “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups,” Steve Jobs once said. “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” There may be wisdom in crowds, but genius is usually confined to individuals.

I suspect it’ll take true genius to remake the city. We’ve been spinning our wheels in recent years, rehashing concepts of the city that have been around for decades, even centuries. Those ideas may have worked well in the past, but they didn’t have to contend with airports, globalization, or climate change. Today’s best solution may be unlike anything we have come to expect from cities.

I’m sure The City 2.0 will fund some great projects, but we won’t really know how they work until we really try them. Not small bits here and there, but big implementations. Trying on that scale takes money, and the only organizations with the money to do it are governments.

Does that mean it’s back to the old way, sitting through planning meetings and zoning boards? Maybe. Crowdsourcing is a great way to gather ideas, but implementing them takes community and persistence and enthusiasm. It’s possible that a website could create that community, but I’m skeptical—most social media tools piggyback on existing, real-world social bonds. I know I sound pessimistic about The City 2.0. I’m not entirely. I hope that the project will uncover a work of genius that would have otherwise been ignored, but I’m not holding my breath.

Photo from The City 2.0.

America's suburban future

Aerial view of Carrollton, Texas

If you think American cities are sprawling now, just wait until 2025. In that time, the U.S. population will grow by 18 percent but the amount of developed land will increase 57 percent. Up to 9.2 percent of the lower 48 could be urbanized by then. And while that number includes cities and the infrastructure to support them—roads, rail, power lines, and so on—that number does not include land impacted by farming, logging, mining, or mineral extraction.

That 10 percent of the lower 48 could be crawling with people is a stark reminder that our nation—while immense—is not immune to the pressures of development. It’s also acknowledgement that despite years of hearing about the resurgence of American cities, sprawl is still king.

Today, it feels like much of what drove the suburbanization of America since World War II has changed. Incomes aren’t rising nearly as fast as they did in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, when adjusted for inflation, incomes have stagnated or dropped in recent decades. Soaring gas prices and congested freeways have stolen some of the automobile’s glamor, too.

Yet two studies show that while the outlook in the U.S. may have changed, our desire for suburban living has not. The study’s results differ slightly—the 2004 paper says we’ll add 25.8 million hectares (64 million acres) by 2025, the 2009 manuscript says 22.4 million hectares (55 million acres) by 2030—but their conclusions are the same. American cities will continue to sprawl, adding more land per person than in the past.

In recent decades, the locus of suburbanization has shifted from the Northeast and Midwest to the South. With its warmer weather and lower costs of living, the South has grown faster than any other region in the U.S. since 1980. Development has been fueled by flat, cheap land and abundant freeways, which has pushed land demands well above the national average in some states.

That boom also meant the South was hit hard by the housing bust in 2008. But that doesn’t mean the market for suburban housing has disappeared. Living the burbs is still cheaper than the city, and since real incomes for most Americans have suffered in recent years, development will continue to chase lower land prices. The recession and housing slump may have put a damper on suburban development, but I’m guessing it’s just a temporary blip.

Another factor that should conspire against suburban development—higher gas prices—also doesn’t seem to have much of an influence. The 2009 study suggests development rates won’t take much of a hit from high fuel costs. To simulate rising gas prices, the study’s authors reduced the forecasted development rate in states where it was highest—primarily the car-centric South. Only 5 percent less land was converted from rural to urban uses.

It’s possible things could change—perhaps fuel costs will rise even higher, or maybe the home downsizing trend that’s in its infancy will mature. But I think we should prepare for a future filled with suburbs. In the South, where most of the development is happening, land continues to be cheap and easy to access. The same warm weather that drew many people there will also keep them in their cars. Nobody likes walking in the South’s sweltering summers, even if it’s just from the steamy parking lot to the over-air conditioned mall.

The question then is, how can we make the suburbs more environmentally friendly? Encouraging compactness would be a good start, even just at the subdivision level. Hopscotch development inflicts ecological damage well beyond its immediate footprint—there are many plants and animals that cannot survive surrounded by a sea of humanity. Dispersing job and commercial centers is another option, helping to reduce the number of miles people have to drive on a day-to-day basis.

In the end, though, we’ll have to push for more ecologically integrated development. We’ve seen small steps in that direction already—most new subdivisions must deal with run-off from rainstorms on-site rather than shunting it to an overburdened creek. It’s a start, but not enough to offset America’s suburban future.

Sources:

Alig, R., Kline, J., & Lichtenstein, M. (2004). Urbanization on the US landscape: looking ahead in the 21st century Landscape and Urban Planning, 69 (2-3), 219-234 DOI: 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2003.07.004

White, E., Morzillo, A., & Alig, R. (2009). Past and projected rural land conversion in the US at state, regional, and national levels Landscape and Urban Planning, 89 (1-2), 37-48 DOI: 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2008.09.004

Photo by La Citta Vita.

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