placemaker's Xanga

Sunday, June 01, 2008

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 13:47:56 GMT

The no-brainers of sustainability

I've been thinking a lot about sustainability lately. It's a funny term, too. Everyone uses it but I'm not sure that everyone agrees on what it means. So before I go any further I'm going to define what it means to me.

Sustainability is both a practice and a mindset. As a mindset, it predisposes an individual, neighborhood, municipality, or government to look around and ask whether the can continue to perform their daily operations in the same way over a long period of time (by "long" I mean beyond the current generation). As a practice, it involves assessing whether operations can continue on as they are, and taking steps to streamline them and make them more efficient while accounting for the resources efficiency might require. The primary goal of sustainability (to me) is to get communities to the point where they can function well with the smallest possible social-environmental footprint.

It's not an easy goal. In the US, it might not even be a reasonable goal. But in light of the fact that our primary sources of energy are limited and are subject to geopolitical contest, it's an absolute necessity. Granted there's plenty of debate about the reality and causes of global warming and peak oil, and the more I read about both, the less I know about either. Regardless, I feel very strongly that we have a responsibility to make our resources last as long as possible (ideally, we should use only renewable energy sources), and to tread lightly on the planet. There's no way we can survive as a species if we can't do these two things. Maybe it's just an ingrained practicality coupled with a desire to live comfortably on my part (I am a Taurus after all), but I've held this position since middle school -- which was when I first learned about renewable and nonrenewable energy.

Compared to much of Europe, the US is in a precarious position when it comes to attaining sustainable communities. The explosion of suburbia in the 1950s -- which was fueled (no pun intended) in large measure by the ready availability of homegrown, cheap oil -- has wreaked havoc on our cities and small towns. To put it simply, setting up suburbia as the socially desirable place to live was an epic mistake. The chief consequences of suburban living are the need to commute long distances to work (generally alone, by car), and the social isolation that results from living in detached homes (the main features of which are their massive garage doors) on culs-de-sac in neighborhoods where people have no need to interact with one another because they're all commuting to different workplaces for different companies, sometimes in different towns.

The first point becomes overwhelming when you look at the statistics. According to the US Census Bureau (click here for the PDF; see Table 1 on page 3), by 1990 86.5% of workers over the age of 16 were commuting to work in a car, van, or truck -- and only 13.4% of the total carpooled. Which means that 73.2% of all American workers over the age of 16 commute by car (or van or truck) alone. According to the 2000 census, that figure has continued to grow: 75.7% of American workers commuted alone (by contrast, a whopping 1.2% walked or rode a bicycle to work). That's just under 100 million cars on the road -- just under a third of the total American population. Interestingly, between the 1990 and 2000 censuses, there was a 2.5% increase in commuting alone, and all other forms of transportation to work decreased (with the exception of those who worked at home -- which increased by a fraction of one percent).(*)

When we look at travel time, it just becomes depressing (see Table 2 on page 5 of the same document). According to the 1990 census, average travel time to work (excluding people who worked at home) was 22.4 minutes. By 2000, the average travel time was 25.5 minutes. Travel times like these suggest that people generally don't work where they live.

Just for kicks, let's calculate the average number of car-minutes per day. Keep in mind, this calculation only accounts for commuting time. It doesn't include the amount of driving we do when we run errands, go out to dinner, catch a movie, and so on. Let's take the number of people who commute alone to work every day. That's 97,102,050 people -- and presumably the same number of cars, vans, and trucks. Now let's multiply that by the average travel time to work, which is 25.5 minutes as of 2000. Keep in mind that if driving time is normally distributed (and it's close enough in this case), this calculation should give us a reasonably accurate picture because the tails on either end of the distribution should more or less cancel out. The number we get here is 2,476,102,275. That's nearly 2.5 million car-minutes every day. That's 41,268,371 car-hours and 15 car-minutes. Which works out to about 1,719,515 and a half car-days. And this represents the amount of commuting we do in a single day.

I don't know about you, but I can't even imagine this number.

I was unable to track down figures that would allow me to make comparable calculations for the UK (though I did find this PDF, which provides some interesting information) and parts of Europe, so I can't do the kind of broad comparative analysis I'd like to do. My guess, however, is that vast differences in both infrastructure and residential arrangements would produce somewhat smaller figures (adjusted for population) outside the US. (If anyone has access to comparable data and wants to run the numbers, I'd love to see the results.)

The point, however, is this: in the post-industrial era, in the US especially, our most basic lifeways are not sustainable. Living in the suburbs and commuting to cities and new exurbs might be nice when you can afford it, but in the end it's not worth it. They talk about a raging epidemic of obesity in the US, and a visit to any mall here will confirm it. We're sitting on our asses in our cars, driving nearly half an hour to work, struggling to afford the financial cost of commuting (not just gasoline, but also car maintenance), eating prepackaged foods the preservatives and origins of which we don't stop to ponder.

Add to this malaise the fact that most of us work in a town other than the one in which we live. The social and community toll of this is insidious and destructive. Let me give you an example: one of my colleagues at my current job lives in a suburban town in the region and drives into Troy (a sadly neglected 19th century industrial city) every day. He hates Troy -- in large measure because the city is the stomping ground of a politician he despises, but also because Troy has earned a reputation as a depopulated, filthy, crime-ridden rat hole. And while parts of the city merit this description to some degree, crime levels have decreased noticeably over the last several years and its downtown is slowly regaining a sense of vibrancy as new businesses (including an excellent local independent bookstore) have filtered in and new institutions (e.g., the monthly Troy Night Out) attract more attention.

My colleague doesn't care about any of this. He has focused his intense dislike of said politician and his scorn for state agencies (we work for one) into his hatred of the city. And what it works out to is this: he works there but doesn't live there, so he doesn't give a damn about it. The city in which he works does not involve a community of any consequence to him. I would not be surprised in the least if this were the case for many commuters: "Yeah, I work there, but I wouldn't want to live there. It's a rat hole. I do my best to get the hell out of there before rush hour begins, and I sure as hell wouldn't want to walk around there because I'd get shot." Alternately, if they work in strip malls and office parks, there's no need to even make the comment: they couldn't live in the area if they wanted to.

The issue is that we have spent far too much time, energy, and money separating our places of residence from our places of business. We are dependent on cars, we no longer walk or bicycle as a matter of course (think about all the money we spend as a nation on gym memberships and exercise equipment), and because we're such a mobile society we no longer have any community attachment or involvement in either place. Not only is our way of life unsustainable, but it's also making us unhealthy and miserable. Something has got to change.

I had the good fortune of living in Boston for four years after college. While my circumstances weren't ideal by any stretch of the imagination, and while it's a very expensive place to live, I found myself taking the T and walking -- as means of getting to work, as well as running errands and entertaining myself. There is something to be said for feeling like a part of a place -- not just because you sleep there at night, but also because you have to exist within it, as a vulnerable and observant organism that can develop relationships with local businesses rather than an automaton protected in a hermetically sealed modernist box with air conditioning and stereo sound.

What I learned from that experience is that there are things -- real things we can do to build sustainable communities. It requires a willingness to make some substantial changes in how we live, but in the end these changes are for the best -- environmentally, socially, economically, and psychologically. So without further ado, here's my list:

Live in the same municipality where you work. That may mean moving to a small town, exurb, or city. The consequences of this are a substantial reduction in your daily commute, a substantial reduction in the amount of fuel you consume (and thus economic savings), a better sense of what a place offers, and a direct involvement in your community.
Use public transportation, walk, or ride a scooter, motorcycle, or bicycle to work. The consequences of this are better health, economic savings (mass transit is usually less expensive than commuting alone; walking is free), and a better knowledge of the businesses, organizations, and history of your local community.
Shop at independent businesses and locally owned chains in your town. Why bother driving out to a big box store half an hour away to save a dollar on something that was made in China, when you can get the same item locally. The dollar you save on the item probably went directly to your transportation costs, and the money you gave that big box store is probably benefiting a corporate headquarters in another state. The consequences of shopping at locally-owned businesses are that you begin to build mutually beneficial relationships with people in your community, and the money you spend stays right at home.
Don't bother buying things just to own them. Status symbols are for hacks and wannabes. Buy things you know you're going to use, not things (like an H3) that make you look cool (read: like a complete ass) to your neighbors. The consequences? You find the less crap you own, the freer you feel. (I say this from experience. I feel chained by all the crap I own, and I'm making a concerted effort to get rid of as much of it as I can before I move in a month).
Speaking of neighbors, get to know them. I don't mean knock on their door and offer them a plate of cookies. I mean, say hello in the street. Have a block party. Go out for a drink. You have to live with these people, and it's better to make friends than enemies. The consequences? You might find someone to walk with, someone to watch your cats while you're away, someone you can share books with, or someone you can talk to about movies, local eateries, and other haunts. Knowing your neighbors is the basis of community.
Patronize your local arts. Even here in the backwoods of the Capital District we have a number of arts oriented establishments and events. It's nice to get out and see what people are thinking. And to turn of that damned television for a couple of hours.
Reuse plastic shopping bags, and buy a few canvas ones when you can. Waste not, want not.

As with recycling, the more people who engage in these practices, the bigger the impact we have. Some of these constitute big changes for people, but you don't have to start at the top. Do what you can within your existing framework first -- then add to it as you go. You don't have to become a community activist to live a sustainable life, or to make your community a better place. You just have to be willing to take the time to get to know it -- and to live within it.

* Note that only 4.7% of workers used public transportation according to the 2000 census. I would hazard an educated guess that the bulk of that figure represents people who live in urbanized areas and who work in the same town where they live.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Tue, 20 May 2008 16:27:16 GMT

The importance of place (identity)

On the way to school this afternoon I heard a story on WAMC that talked about how some municipalities in Ulster County, New York are considering consolidating services for the benefit of the taxpayers. There's an interesting bit at the end here, which I'm transcribing for the sake of convenience (I'm not sure how long these links stay active):

But there's always a bit of caution as towns worry about losing their identity. And when county legislature chairman David Donaldson enthusiastically predicted that in ten years Ulster County will look nothing like it does today, there was a moment where some in the audience looked at each other and clearly wondered what that might mean.

That is, some of the residents are concerned that by consolidating services like snow plowing, their own villages and towns might somehow lose some aspect of their character or uniqueness. Although the story itself had little interest to me, I was struck by this idea that sharing public services changes the identity of a place. I thought it a simple but poignant reminder that people are very much attached to the places where they live.

What I suspect most people don't think about is that it isn't just the place that holds such importance for them; it's the identity of the place. It's how people perceive it, it's reputation -- that is, it isn't just the spatial arrangement of streets and buildings, it isn't just the relationship between one municipality and the surrounding towns; it's the way people think about the place that is so incredibly important to the people who live there.

The importance of place identity is especially visible when you think about what incites arguments between people about place. It's less often about things people actually do in or to a place (e.g., outsiders vandalizing a public building) than what people say about it that matters. People are proud of places, proud of their hometowns, their countries -- often to the degree that they are willing to overlook or minimize the flaws of their proclaimed home in favor of exaggerating its better qualities. Note that they are not actually doing anything to improve the place they're championing; they're merely talking about it. And talk, be it self-congratulatory bragging or casual trash talk, is thus intimately connected to both reputation and identity.

Think about this the next time you feel angry about someone insulting your town -- or proud when they tell you how beautiful it is. Ask yourself whether what you're talking about is the place itself or how it's perceived. And remember that in the end, identity is just as important as place.

Baudrillard and post-modernism...

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 17:40:59 GMT

...or is it postmodernism (no hyphen)? I'm always partial to non-hyphenation, but there I've just contradicted myself. In any case, this entry is supposed to be primarily about Simulacra and Simulation and postmodernism in general, but I can't promise either great intellectual insight or an ability to stay completely on topic.

A caveat before I delve into this morass: I am not a social theorist. Despite having earned a degree in anthropology, I never once took a class that covered social theory as an undergrad. Don't chalk this up to a poor requirement system on the part of my university; I concentrated in archaeology and hence was blissfully free of social theory so that I could spend my time learning how to date glass bottles and use drill bits to measure pipe bores (I'm not kidding). Those were the good old days, as they say...

But it is a morass, this thing we so lovingly call postmodernism. Or post-modernism. Or, if you're really clever and don't mind sounding like you're from LA, PoMo. As I feel I can make heads nor tails of some of this, I entreat you to join in, expand my knowledge, and correct me where I'm wrong!

Baudrillard and Simulation
We are living in hyperreality. That is, there is no longer a reality, just the simulacrum, a copy without an original. There was a reality, but that's long gone, and with it things like meaning, authenticity, God, truth. At least, this is the world according to Baudrillard, as I read him. In Simulacra and Simulation, he says wonderful things like this: "Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible" (p. 19), and that's enough to make my head reel.

How is it possible that there is no reality? How is it possible to have a copy without an original? Doesn't the existence (reality?) of the copy imply that there was at some point an original, even if that original has long since vanished? I hate to sound like the philosophers who argued the necessary existence of an unmoved mover, but simple linguistic analysis requires that if you use the term "copy" there is an implicit understanding that, once upon a time, there was an original to be copied. And this is where I start to think that something is not quite right with my dear friend Baudrillard. Or, at least, with his idea of simulation.

Long story short (I will spare you the hair-pulling, tooth-gnashing two weekends I spent with this book), here are my grievances with this concept:

It says nothing, first and foremost, about how one might recognize that reality is dead. It gives no way of differentiating between the original and the copy. If he can't do this, then he can't make the assertion. Gut feeling doesn't cut it in philosophy.
It seems to presuppose that somewhere along the line, a conscious choice to destroy reality was made -- but then it never indicates who might be responsible for this.
It says nothing about the fact that people aren't uniform in accepting or rejecting hyperreality.
It says nothing about when or how the shift from reality to hyperreality took place, much less why.

Baudrillard pulls some brilliant maneuvers on this little philosophical battlefield. He suggests, for example, that the Cold War is a hyperreal war, that the war in and of itself did not exist, that there wasn't really any adversity between the US and the USSR, that it was all, more or less, posturing played out in the media. And yet in his writing he implies that past wars were somehow real. As much as I can see his point, there's always a bottom line. And that bottom line, in this case, is that blood is blood, regardless of whether the conflict was created (or reified) by government or media.

He talks about socialization as though it was once real, as though it at one time referred to something pure, untainted by miniaturization or idealization. Yet I would argue that socialization has in fact always been about the ideal, that by his own terms, socialization has always at the very least aspired to the simulacrum.

He spends little time talking about place (which is a key interest to a great many geographers), yet when he does it's purely in reference to theme parks (Disney is one of his favorites), Los Angeles, suburbia. These, he says, are all simulacra. To a degree, I might agree. Disneyworld could be interpreted as a copy without an original in a sense; it takes historical and architectural elements, it twists them into something clean and moralizing and childlike, and it juxtaposes them in a way that they have never existed. And yet, not one rational person who visits Disney would ever believe in its existence independent of the desire to create a nonexistent place. It may be a simulacrum, but it is an obvious one.

Suburbs, on the other hand, exist because of a strange marriage between the auto industry, employers, and capitalism. They don't seek to emulate anything but themselves. They may be artificial, plastic, even unrealistic -- and yet they don't claim reference to anything. In my estimation, they are the essence of the worst parts of modernism, the parts that deny history and context precisely because they are self-aware. In the end, they are just as real as city centers. Enclosed shopping malls might have been a better choice on his part.

This is not to say that I reject Baudrillard or the value of simulation, simulacra, or hyperreality. I think there's a great deal of use in these concepts. Within the right context, they can be applied to great effect -- the internet, theme parks, politics, media. Even the scientific method is not immune: "Such is the watershed of a hyperreal society, in which the real is confused with the model, as in the statistical operation..." (p. 29). It has long been one of my grievances with positivist science that it holds the normalized model up and trumpets it as reality, paying more attention to its methods and to the normalization of data based on quanta rather than the whys and wherefores reality.

But let us not go too far with it. The phenomena Barry Glassner writes about in his book Culture of Fear could be wedded quite nicely to hyperreality: the media creating and reinforcing the myth of the Scary Black Rapist Waiting in the Alley to Attack White Women being a prime example of simulation. And yet even this is problematic: one could just as easily interpret this as the media oversimplifying actuality and running with the results. Hyperreality is useful in some circumstances, but it is too easy to get caught up in arguing that things are simulacra when we ought to be thinking about the behavior of people within them. (And here I won't go into whether it is possible for people themselves to be simulacra; that's going to have to be a blog entry of its own.)

The linchpin of my objections to hyperreality is this: people respond to simulacra just as they would to reality (unless they are aware of the difference, which Baudrillard argues they are not) -- so in the end, does it matter? Does it matter whether we're in the Matrix or in Zion, when we aren't capable of knowing the difference, when we live invariably as though we are within reality? To Baudrillard, it is impossible to transcend hyperreality because it is impossible to recognize it (and hence some of his objections to The Matrix as an interpretation of his theory, I suppose). If it is impossible to recognize, much less transcend, then the answer has to be, it doesn't matter.

And the beauty of all this? If we take postmodernism at face value, then any interpretation of a text is a valid one, and in the end it doesn't really matter what the author intended (look up the Sokal affair and Robert Hanley's take on it) -- which means that even if I have Baudrillard wrong, I also have him right.

The author is dead. Long live postmodernism.

Next time: more thoughts on postmodernism.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 11:16:10 GMT

Welcome back!

I can't believe it's been over six months since I last posted here. I'd like to apologize for that. Life got the better of me, and although I've been reading about some pretty interesting things, I just haven't been able to focus enough to write about them here. So consider this a starting over point of sorts.

A quick reintroduction:
For those of you who don't know me, I'm a graduate student of geography. I came to this discipline by way of anthropology, archaeology, criminology, and psychology. Having taken courses in almost all of the social sciences, I consider myself a social scientist on the broad scale and a geographer on the narrow scale.

Why geography? This is a question I get a lot. People have a conception of this discipline that revolves almost exclusively around what's called place-name geography -- making maps and putting places (cities, countries, rivers, mountains, oceans) on them. In reality there's so much more to geography than knowing where something is. In fact, it turns out to be a field that is perfect as a node for interdisciplinary work.

I could go on and on about the different sub-branches and sub-sub-branches of geography (physical, human, urban, GIS, and so on), but I won't. As much as the list approach gives people a rough idea of what we do, I think there's a better way to explain it that is less discrete and more holistic. And that is this: geographers study anything and everything having to do with space, place, landscape, territory, and scale. If you can use any of those words to describe some concept, chances are there's a geographer who studies it.

For my part, I study things that are less overtly geographical in the popular imagination. I'm interested specifically in the intersection of geographical concepts and psychology. I'm interested in first-person experiences of place, how places take on identities, how space and place interact, and how we talk about places as though they're living, breathing things. Some of what I'm interested in takes place primarily on the social (group) scale, but much of it happens at the psychological (individual) scale.

This also means that I read a fair amount of books and articles that originate in philosophy, social theory, and developmental (and cognitive) psychology. Sometimes it's difficult to keep up with it all, and sometimes the number of interconnections I see in my readings are overwhelming. Sometimes these relationships seem obvious, while at other times I'm left wondering how two (or more) completely different understandings of the world can ever be compatible. At times it feels like I'm slogging through a morass of words and ideas that are speaking past one another -- and yet at other times it feels like I'm on an Indiana Jones-style grand adventure.

I'm coming back to this blog because this semester I'm working on my thesis. I've spent far too much bandwidth over on my personal blog talking about the things I'm reading for school. Yet in some ways, I've spent far too little bandwidth talking about this stuff. So this is why I'm here. For the next few months, this will be my sounding board for my research. I'm going to rail about authors I don't like, and rave about those I do. I'm going to ask questions that I can't answer. And, if you're at all interested, I'll engage in all manner of discussion of these subjects here.

So stick around.

Next entry: Baudrillard and post-modernism

Monday, June 04, 2007

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 13:29:46 GMT

Group Geoblog.

I've become involved in a group geography blog over on Blogger (sadly Xanga doesn't have the capability to handle team blogging, or else we would have done it here). It's called Geographical Eclectica and it's brand spanking new. In all likelihood I'll end up cross-posting most of my stuff from there to here, but it's worth checking out because the other contributors have really interesting things to say about geography in all its glory. I've been slow in blogging anything of substance lately--I'm not giving this place up, but it'll probably be a few weeks before I manage to put enough words together to say anything interesting. In the meantime, keep your eyes open and your finger on the button.

City and woman

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 14:10:23 GMT

I'm reading chapter 3 of Putting Women In Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World by Domosh and Seager for an essay I'm working on. I just stumbled across this passage which, despite its length, I'm going to quote in full:

We seem to be caught between two opposed images of the city: one offers the city as an exciting and fulfilling place for women (and hence "good" for women), and the other offers a potentially dangerous place (and thsu "bad" for women). Suburbs, too, are portrayed in contradictory ways: on the one hand, they are portrayed as more safe than cities, and therefore "better" for women; on the other hand, they are presented as spatial traps, where women get stuck in domestic roles with no way to escape (and therefore "bad" for women). (p. 68)

As I think about this passage, I'm reminded of a chapter written by Dolores Hayden titled "What Would a Non-sexist City Be Like? Speculations on Housing, Urban Design and Human Work" (which appears in a couple of edited volumes, including one by Rendell, Penner, and Borden called Gender Space Architecture). In it, Hayden talks about the ways that labor unions and corporations collaborated just after WWI to enhance (intentionally or not) the sexual division of labor by making private residences sites of conspicuous consumption populated by appliances and housewives whose (unpaid) job it was to manage the house and its environment to make it pleasing to male workers returning from shifts in socially alienating and psychologically stunting inner-city factories. Or something like that.

Looking at these two pieces side by side, I wonder whether the image of the city as a dangerous place, unsafe especially for women and children, was borne of an unconscious desire to maintain the cult of domesticity. If society could prevent women from living and working--especially alone--in cities, it could retain a massive unpaid labor force that contributes to a modernist ethic of consumption. Hence, stories of cities as dark, scary places are brought into the home, reinforcing the concept of man-as-breadwinner or man-as-inherently-strong, housewives feel safe in the suburbs and grateful for that safety, and all of it feeds back into itself. What is hidden in this text is the implicit assumption that cities potentially mean freedom for women; as long as cities are portrayed as dangerous, housewives will not think to escape the relative safety of their suburban homes, conventional marriages, and unpaid (and thankless) labor.

I'm not entirely sure that I agree with this interpretation, but it's food for thought. Combine all this with Macek's book Urban Nightmares--films from the second half of the 20th century onward reinforce the concept of city as dangerous, with white, sensitive, suburban males of controlled violence as heroes. I have to chew on this a little more, but I find it all quite interesting.

Introduction

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 17:02:11 GMT

Welcome to my little experiment in academic blogging. I can't promise this site will be updated often, nor can I promise that it will always be interesting, but I do promise that I will do my best to make it relevant.

My intent for this blog is to post semi-regular musings on issues relevant to the little corner of human geography described in my profile. Some posts will be purely academic, some will be responses to things I'm reading, and some will discuss the implications of articles found in popular publications.

I am resolved to actually use tags in order to make it easier to search for posts. Comments are very welcome, as I enjoy discussion.

Legal notice:
If you ever see anything posted here that you want to incorporate elsewhere, please send me a message through Xanga and give credit where it's due. I reserve all rights to all blog posts and comments I make; as far as I'm concerned any comments posted by anyone else are the property of whoever posted them.