Interplace

Hello Interactors,

This has been a wild week in our neighborhood. It was a car enthusiasts dream. Too bad our family’s biggest car enthusiast, my son, was busy working his summer job. It was guys like him that got America hooked on cars. And now our planet is cooked. Is it a lost cause?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

GET A HORSE

Flying down the freeway I see a woman climb out of the sunroof of her car. She’s alone. A semi-truck pulls alongside as she leaps from the car onto the bed of the trailer. Pulling alongside the car in front of her, I see the driver put on a black blindfold. He crosses his arms across his chest like he’s preparing for a collision. Just then, the truck in front of him slams on their brakes. His car comes to a screeching halt as does the woman’s empty car behind him. The man lifts his blindfold, stares into a camera mounted on his dashboard, and gruffly states, “I guess it works.”

This isn’t a stunt I watched on Tik Tok, but a Hyundai Genesis ad from 2015. It starts with a voiceover from the sacrificial stuntman in the lead car, “The challenge is to show the driver assist features in an exciting way. But you guys, it seems, are a little hard to excite. Maybe the only way is to put our own lives on the line. Proof, through jeopardy.”

Our neighborhood was blocked off this week to film a Genesis car commercial. Nothing this dramatic, they just drove their luxury cars around the block. They descended a hill that features an unobstructed distant view of the Seattle skyline beyond a glistening blue Lake Washington. Fancy cars in a fancy suburb. A suburb whose name features prominently on the Costco toilet paper most of you wipe your fanny biscuits with – Kirkland. Maybe we’re not so fancy after all, but our neighborhood does have nice views.

We didn’t see stunt doubles hurling themselves from the sunroofs of luxury cars that day. In fact, we barely saw a single human being. The windows were tinted black, and the streets were empty, except for the police and production assistants. I stepped on the sidewalk to walk down the street and got yelled at by a Kirkland cop. “SIR! PLEASE BACK OFF THE SIDEWALK!” They, like the drivers, were being instructed by the commercial’s director on a walkie-talkie from inside a customized SUV. It had a massive camera boom stretching from the roof over the front end – like a carrot dangling in front of a mule.

The truth is, it’s not just car commercials that wish there were no pedestrians on the street. Anytime any of us get behind the wheel of a car we wish the streets were free of people. And bikes. And, yes, other cars and busses too. It’s no wonder most every car commercial features a single driver on a smooth open road…void of people and cars. What bliss. No worries, no conflicts, no delays, just me on my street going between my house and my Costco to hoard my toilet paper.

But believe it or not, people needed to be convinced automobiles were useful – let alone desirable. It wasn’t a car commercial that convinced them of this. It was their neighborhood car enthusiasts. People needed to be convinced of the promise of new machines. Innovation doesn’t just sell itself. Sociologists who study social movements say innovations that shape society are framed by “ideological activists who exploit political opportunities to mobilize resources.” They participate in what sociologists call ‘meaning-work’ which demonstrates their ideology as being meaningful, valid, and appropriate.

New industries become broadly legitimized only after these industry activists are successful in converting radical concepts into something useful. Elements of a larger belief system must be framed in the context of daily life. So, automobile clubs organized events that demonstrated the benefits of the automobile. This idea was taken from bicycle clubs of the 1800s who used bicycle races to demonstrate the utility, reliability, and health benefits of cycling. Most automobile clubs were born out of bicycle clubs. Both were elite modes of transport using the latest industrial technology. The first automobiles were simply motorized quadricycles. Those motors were especially useful for getting up a hill.

Biking up hills is hard. Biking for long distances requires endurance. And what happens if your bike breaks down? Reliability of both bikes and horse carriages was a big deal. These challenges of everyday life were just what automobile industry activists (i.e. automobile clubs) needed to demonstrate the benefits of an automobile. So, they organized demonstration events that included hill climbs and races pitting one car maker against another to see which was the fastest and most reliable.

The first was on Thanksgiving of 1895 financed by the Times-Herald. Eleven cars were invited, five showed up and only two managed to finish the event. The winner was awarded $10,000 ($350,000 today) and it went to the Duryea Brothers –America’s first automaker. Their gasoline car topped out at 8MPH in below freezing temperatures…in the snow. Reminding people of the challenges of taking a horse and buggy through the snow, the Times-Herald reported that the car made it “through deep snow and along ruts that would have tried horses to the utmost.”

But these events weren’t universally convincing. In 1896, an event organized by the Rhode Island State Fair Association featured an electric car. The Riker Electric won the race and $5,000 but the crowd was underwhelmed. They began chanting, “GET A HORSE. GET A HORSE. GET A HORSE.” That refrain became a popular expression used to make fun of automobile drivers. For years people would yell as they passed, “GET A HORSE!”

By July of 1905, the publication Horseless Age, declared the beginning of the American dominant car culture. After a national reliability event by the American Automobile Association (AAA), The Glidden Tour, they reported that it “proved the automobile is now almost foolproof. It has proved that American cars are durable and efficient...it has strengthened our belief in the permanence of the motor car.’’

A year later, in 1906, Munsey Magazine also declared the end of making fun of the automobile by writing, the “uncertain period of the automobile is now past. It is no longer a theme for jokers and rarely do we hear the derisive expression ‘Get a horse.’” And three years later, in 1909, Charles Duryea atoned that the “novelty of the automobile has largely worn off.” Soon Ford started pulling out of demonstration events and became the first mass produced reliable car in the world. The belief system of those early innovation activists had taken hold. Their meaning-work was done. They had demonstrated and convinced the public that their once radical inventions were more useful, usable, and desirable than horses, buggies…and bikes.

THE GENIE GETS OUT OF THE BOTTLE

With the public convinced and nationwide reliability events tapering off, automobile activists turned their attention to roads. The Good Roads Movement had been around since the 1880s and was started by a bicycle club, the League of American Wheelman. But in 1910 that organizations efforts were overshadowed by the Automobile Association of America (AAA). By the 1920s, automobiles were competing for space with streetcars that were ubiquitous in cities big and small across the country. Streetcar systems were so vast you could almost traverse the country by streetcar city to city. But for the first time, funds and space for public rail infrastructure had competition. Should tax dollars be spent on developing and maintaining rail for trains and streetcars or roads for bikes and automobiles?

Meanwhile, large motor coaches were also being produced. One of the first manufacturers and operators in America was John D. Hertz of Hertz rental car fame. He had been operating busses in Chicago since 1916, and in 1923 started the Yellow Coach Manufacturing Company, a subsidiary of another popular name, the Yellow Cab Company. He went on to start other companies with visions of bringing busses and busing to all of America.

In 1925 General Motors (GM) bought a controlling stake in Yellow Coach and changed the name to Yellow Truck and Coach Manufacturing Company.  Then, in 1926 Yellow Coach purchased the struggling New York Railways Corporation with the idea of converting it to a bus company. By 1930, the depression put added pressure on the competition for infrastructure funds. Financially struggling streetcars companies were often forced by local governments to lease street access and pay for rail maintenance and services (like snow removal). Companies were also sometimes forced to cap fare prices to protect lower income residents from getting priced out of public transportation by private firms. By the 1930s most streetcars were worn down and their companies bankrupt. It made them easy prey for companies like General Motors to buy them out.

And so they did. GM started a subsidiary called United Cities Motor Transport (UCMT) with the sole purpose of buying out streetcar companies and converting them to bus lines in small cities. They succeeded in Saginaw, Michigan, and Springfield, Ohio and then tried Portland, Oregon. But the American Transit Association, a public transit advocacy group, stepped in and the UCMT was forced to dissolve in 1935. But it didn’t stop General Motors. That same year they converted a streetcar in New Jersey to a ‘trackless trolly’ – a bus attached to an electric wire that could detach to pick up passengers in lower populated areas. An idea that is alive to this day.

The conversion from tracks to wheels was catching on. In 1936, two brothers in Minnesota who had been modestly busing school children and miners since 1920, either decided or were ‘encouraged’ to expand. They announced a reorganization of their company, National City Lines, "for the purpose of taking over the controlling interest in certain operating companies engaged in city bus transportation and overland bus transportation."  

That same year, 1936, this tiny outfit bought 13 streetcar companies in three states in the Midwest. They pushed westward and south to three more states in 1937. They also formed a subsidiary in Oakland, California called Pacific City Lines (PCL) with the intention of converting streetcar operations on the west coast to bus lines. In 1938 they approached GM’s Yellow Coach company to help finance further expansion. By 1939 they had secured funding from not only GM, but  Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Trucks. By the end of 1939, just three years after owning and operating a couple rural busses in Minnesota, National City Lines took control of 29 local streetcar and public transportation companies in 27 cities across 10 states. By 1947 that grew to 46 systems, 45 cities, and 16 states.

That also marked the end of the buying spree. In 1947 they were indicted on these two counts of conspiracy by the Federal District Court of Southern California: 'Conspiring to acquire control of a number of transit companies, forming a transportation monopoly' and 'Conspiring to monopolize sales of buses and supplies to companies owned by National City Lines.' In 1948 the case was appealed by the U.S. Supreme Court and they ordered the case be moved to the Midwest in the Federal District Court in Northern Illinois.

A year later, in 1949, General Motors, Standard Oil of California, Firestone and others were convicted of conspiring to monopolize the sale of buses and related products to local transit companies controlled by National City Lines and other companies. But they were acquitted on charges of conspiracy to monopolize the ownership of streetcar and other public transportation companies. GM was fined a paltry $5000 ($62,000 today) dollars for their involvement. Their treasurer, also the director of Pacific City Lines was fined $1. That almost seems like a wink and nod more than a punishment. That one man single-handedly dismantled a $100 million electric public transportation system up and down the west coast of the United States.

In Los Angeles alone, 280 million passengers a year were using the electric streetcar system. They were forced into buses or cars – if they could afford them. By 1953, just four years after the great General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy people were already complaining of traffic in LA. Within a decade, nearly four million cars were crawling around the Los Angeles Metropolitan area. The era of automobile dependency in the United States was in full swing. And there’s no getting that genie back in the bottle.

SAFETY FOR WHOM?

The CEO of GM, Alfred P. Sloan, wasn’t just pooling money with his cronies to buy out electric streetcar companies. Back in 1932, the same time he was conspiring to monopolize, he also created the ‘National Highway Users Conference’. He filled it with automobile, oil, and highway construction executives as a non-profit lobbying group intent on bringing an end to the government funding of mass transportation. This resulted in the creation of the U.S. Highway Trust Fund which was then used to fund the creation of the U.S. Interstate Highway System. Between 1952 and 1970 the U.S. government spent nearly two billion dollars on highways. Rail systems got just one quarter of a million.

1970 also marked the year the ‘National Highway Users Conference’, ‘Automotive Safety Foundation’, and the ‘Auto Industries Highway Safety Committee’ were merged to form the ‘Highway Users Federation’. In 1995 the name was changed to the 'American Highway Users Alliance’ which to this day is “dedicated to more successful and aggressive issue advocacy on behalf of the highway community.” They went on to lead a “successful national lobbying, media and grassroots advocacy campaign to enact legislation officially designating and funding the National Highway System.” A year later, in 1996, Al Gore, the Nobel prize winner for climate change advocacy, keynoted their 40th anniversary conference. An inconvenient truth.

This organization was also the member of the Global Climate Coalition from 1989 to 2001. This was the largest climate policy group in the world. It was an international coalition that opposed actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and challenged the science behind climate change. They also played a significant role in the United States denying ratification of the 1992 Kyoto Protocol.

In 2004 a former U.S. Federal Highway Administration staffer, Greg Cohen, became the CEO of the organization. He was behind the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users, better known as SAFETE-LU. This George W. Bush administration bill included funding for the purchase of land in Illinois for freeway expansion. Bush worked directly with the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, on the bill. It turned out Hastert owned the very land slated for freeway expansion. The celebration of the passing of the bill was held at the headquarters of the road construction equipment maker, Caterpillar.

Four months later Hastert enjoyed a 500% profit in the sale of his land and his net worth went from $300,000 to over $6 million. Hastert went on to be convicted on felony charges, but not for swindling taxpayers’ dollars. He was sent to prison for serial sexual molestation of young boys. He is the highest-ranking U.S. elected official to serve a prison sentence. Will Trump dethrone him? Just last April, the former Highway Alliance CEO, Greg Cohen, received an award by the ‘Road Gang’ (as those in the organization like to call themselves) for his “significant, exemplary contributions to the highway industry.”

In 2009 the ‘Road Gang’ opposed the American Clean Energy and Security Act. This was the first U.S. bill passed by a branch of the U.S. Federal Government intent on curbing heat-trapping gases responsible for the climate crisis. The ‘Road Gang’ said the “bill will dramatically raise the price of highway fuel through a hidden tax” and that it may “raise the price of gasoline by 77 cents over the next decade.” Worse yet, they worried “none of the revenue raised will be spent on highways.”

These caustic climate curmudgeons, car conspirators, tire tycoons, and oil and gas goons are the modern-day automobile enthusiast club. In sociological terms they are ideological activists who exploit financial and political opportunities to mobilize resources. For over a century their ideologically vacuous, homogenous, and one-sided promise of automobility is alive and well but it is also killing us – even as it perpetually promises to save us.

Yet we still need demonstrations to convince us. Now safety and reliability are demonstrated by professional stunt drivers filmed on a smooth open road. Desirable luxury automobiles are filmed in a bucolic low-density suburban neighborhood void of cars and people. Ironically, our Kirkland neighborhood was planned and designed in the 1800s – complete with alleys designed to hide buggies, bikes, and carbon belching Buicks. Streets were public spaces where kids could play, and neighbors talked to one another. As car enthusiasts took over so did city planners and city councils hellbent on accommodating there promises. Now these enthusiasts are our elected officials, city planners, and civil engineers. In their mind, most of them anyway, the only meaningful, valid, and appropriate use of the street is for cars. A place where to be safe you need Hollywood production assistants on every corner and a cop in the intersection yelling, “SIR! PLEASE BACK OFF THE SIDEWALK!” It makes me want to yell back, “GET A HORSE!”

Hello Interactors,

There have been huge advances in how food is grown over the last decade. A new revolution in agriculture. It just may be coming at the right time. The world’s population is skyrocketing, and more and more people are pouring into cities. We’ll need more food and more ways to make it accessible and new techniques look promising. But at what cost?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

A BERRY BIG PROBLEM

The red dot caught my attention; hidden in the soil of a bed once forgotten. Rain drops wiggled on the fervent green leaves as I lifted the cold pale yellow-green vine with ease. It was hugging its red friend in the shadows of the sun. My fingers surrounded the plump little ball as I tugged it loose of its clutches. On to my tongue enveloped in warmth as my teeth clamped down in the darkness. A cool and wet sugary burst lit my mouth with summer’s first gift. No sooner did the strawberry’s sweet secretion burst were my eyes darting for another with thirst.

In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass, she reminds us that strawberries are like “gifts simply scattered at your feet. A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present.”

Like the naturally occurring strawberries of her childhood, my strawberries just appeared one year. Probably a gift from a bird. Or, more likely, a rabbit. Most years the rabbits beat me to their splendor, but not this time.

I get nostalgic around gardens. I’m not sure why. I never much liked being hunched over in the sweltering humidity pulling weeds and picking beans as a kid. Bugs buzzed erratically – irritably itchy inching near my ears. Heat seeking mosquitos swarmed my sweaty shins poking their needle through my white knee-high tube socks searching for red blood. But there’s pride in growing your own food and there’s no denying it’s better for you and better tasting.

We always had a large garden in our backyard. Sometimes we’d have a plot in a field in the country next to a small farm. Most of those small farms are being sold off to large commercial farmers these days. The small-town rural agriculture of my Iowa childhood in the 70s and 80s gave way to large-scale rural agriculture. The Green Revolution was just gaining speed.

Between 1960 and 2000 the world’s population doubled while the output of cereal grains like wheat, rice, and corn tripled. And it did it by only increasing croplands by 30%. Improvements in genetics, fertilizers, pesticides, and mechanization were fueled by increased private capital and tax-funded public subsidies. Globalization and the Green Revolution enabled unprecedented growth in rural agriculture. Crops could easily be shipped to markets and cities far from where they were grown. For the first time, wheat produced in Mexico found its way into bread sold in Tokyo.

These advances lowered the price of food and provided much needed relief to a growing world population. But it came with a cost to the environment and biodiversity. Unchecked, it will only get worse. The world’s population is expected to grow exponentially until 2050 and over 70% will live in urban areas. To feed all these people will require 56% more food than what was produced in 2010. That means an additional 593 hectares of cropland – an area the size of India.

But if we were to reverse the Green Revolution and rely on smaller organic farming practices, even more land would be needed as yields are mostly smaller. It’s believed two to three times as much land would be needed to produce as much wheat, corn, and potatoes as the conventional agriculture of today. If the world switched to organic farming using current areas of croplands only one half of the world’s population could be fed.

Meanwhile, the world also needs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Ten percent of which comes from agriculture – including soils and rice production, 27% percent transportation – including the transport of food and grain around the world, and 24% from Industry – including the petrochemicals needed for Green Revolution farming. We also need to use less water. The UN says agriculture accounts for 70% of the world’s freshwater. In dryer areas (like Arizona) that number increases to 90%, due to water extracted from rivers (like the dwindling Colorado River), and aquifers (like the declining Ogallala).

In 2007, these worries increasingly came into focus. Within four months the price of wheat inexplicably doubled, rice prices tripled, and corn shot up 50%. Food riots broke out for the first time since the 1970s. Egypt put their army to work baking bread. Rice hoarders in the Philippines were threatened by sentences to life in prison. This marked the end of the Green Revolution as we knew it. Just as the world had grown accustomed to seemingly guaranteed cheap food, a new dynamic had set in.

In 1979, according to the World Bank, the percentage of global money going to food assistance peaked at 18%. By 2004 it had dropped to 3.5%. Private donations to relief efforts relaxed. They assumed the Green Revolution had cured worldwide famine. Governments reduced spending on agricultural research assuming hunger was a thing of the past. Farmers in developed countries also dissuaded their governments from assisting farmers in developing countries fearing competition. If poorer countries began providing for themselves, they’d miss out on selling to those markets.

The environmental movement had also gained momentum and status. Investors and donors began pressuring the Ford Foundation, the original seed funder of the Green Revolution in the 1950s, to reduce the use of petrochemicals in agriculture. Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, became frustrated when his effort to bring green-revolution practices to Africa was thwarted by protests by environmentalists.

Then, highly populated countries like China and India began reducing agricultural exports so they could feed themselves. In 2006, India even began importing food again. Renewed concern over food security inspired governments worldwide to re-fund agricultural research. Venture capitalists fed startups keen to apply new technologies to food production. Beginning in 2010, the number of academic research papers on agricultural innovation exploded with topics like “indoor agriculture, remote sensing, vertical agriculture, hydroponic, aeroponic, aquaponic and soilless agriculture, precision agriculture, and other novel technologies.” A second Green Revolution was unfolding.

BRINGING NEW MEANING TO GREENING

The second Green Revolution aimed to be a Green Green Revolution. The original Green Revolution was born out of the 1950s institutional patriarchy found in government, urban planning, civil engineering, and agricultural. They sought, and continue to seek, to centralize, industrialize, and capitalize. These efforts led to prosperity and food security for many, but they have also balkanized, disenfranchised, and ghettoized many places in the world. Glamorized westernized ways have meticulously metastasized. Colonized earthly crust, of countries with cautious distrust, find temporary prosperity crushed when exhausted land goes from soil to dust.

But the new Green Revolution, backed by a flux of venture capital greenbacks, hopes to bring agriculture’s ‘green’ sheen back. And like most high-tech ventures, these efforts are mostly urban. Researchers define Urban Agriculture as “the production, process, and distribution of food and other products by plant and/or livestock raised in and around cities to meet local needs.” By that definition, our family garden in suburban Iowa was a form of urban agriculture. My wild strawberries gifted here in Kirkland, Washington are too.

In fact, after our town’s founder and chief colonizer, the British industrialist Peter Kirk, failed at attempts in the 1800s to turn Kirkland into a steel town – the ‘Pittsburgh of the West’. Kirkland then became known as a farm town. Summer fruit would be packed onto a ferry headed to Seattle’s growing urban metropolis. Soon real estate companies sold Kirkland’s agricultural land to developers. Kirkland went from a source of urban agriculture to a Seattle suburb.

Seattle area farmland was also getting converted to suburban development. In the 1920s, the Picardo family, who had immigrated from Italy in 1890, secured 20 acres to continue farming. This acreage came to be called the Picardo Patch, or P-Patch. The city then bought the land in the 70s to preserve its use and the word P-Patch is now commonly used to refer to a community garden. The original P-Patch now boasts 259 community plots.

But one of the more popular, and controversial, P-Patches in Seattle sits atop a parking garage below the Space Needle. Called the UpGarden, it converts 25,000 square feet of concrete into 98 gardening plots. There have been recent attempts to sweep the dirt away, but intense community protest saved it. It even inspired a rededication last summer.

Both P-Patches are forms of urban agriculture researchers call Uncontrolled Environment Agriculture. They rely on the uncontrolled, or loosely controlled, variability of soil and climate conditions. The Picardo community farm resembles more traditional rural farming but in an urban environment. The UpGarden is a rooftop garden that mimics a traditional garden on the roof of a concrete parking structure. It also resembles a form of Controlled Environment Agriculture known as building-integrated agriculture.

These are typically enclosed greenhouse structures inside a dedicated or mixed-use building. They’re plant factories. They draw on the innovations cited in the growing body of research literature and are a form of what some call Innovative Urban Agriculture. In dense urban areas, where space is a premium, they take on the form of indoor vertical gardens.

These methods of indoor farming rely on less water and soil. In some cases, no soil at all. Hydroponic horticulture plunges roots to a small amount of nutrient rich water that can yield tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, strawberries, and lettuces. A similar method, aeroponics, suspends plants in the air and can be grown by misting them with nutrient rich compounds forced through high-pressure mist heads. Tanks or artificial streams of water can also be used to grow fish (like shrimp) and aqua plants (like seaweed). This is known as urban aquaculture. Hydroponics and aquaculture can also be combined to create aquaponics. These are systems that take nutrient rich water from aquaculture tanks to feed trays of hydroponic plants.

This method, although less high-tech, has been around for centuries. Since as early at 5 AD various forms of integrated polyculture rice-fish farming took place in Eastern Asia. Evidence of this practice existed well into 13th century China. Around that same time, the Mesoamerican Aztecs built islands, sometimes movable, on top of wetlands, shallow lake beds, and canals. These methods were used to meet personal, family, and local market needs. That’s as true of innovative urban agricultural in developing countries today as it was centuries ago

.The poorest people in the world today spend upwards of 85% of their household revenue on food. It’s hard to tell how much urban agriculture is done today to offset these costs. In our highly industrialized and globalized agricultural economy, there’s little interest – and thus little data – on agricultural techniques outside the norm. One 1993 study estimated 15-20% of the world’s food was produced by some form of urban agriculture. A more recent 2010 study looked at 15 developing countries and determined urban agriculture made up anywhere from 3-27% of their total yields.

While there are indeed individually motivated urban farmers in developed countries today, like in backyards, front yards, decks, empty lots, rooftops, and parking lots, most commercial innovative urban agriculture is motivated by social desire and market opportunity. Some claim hydroponic systems have the potential to grow 11 times more lettuce per acre than conventional means. One study suggests 1.5 times more tomatoes could be grown. And what about those little bursting red bundles of taste bud bliss? An estimated 13 times more strawberries could be grown through these new techniques.

And don’t count out rooftop gardens. If you happen to be blessed with the climate of Bologna, Italy, you could be growing heaps of food from the heat on your roof. One rooftop garden produced an estimated 12,000 tons of vegetables in a single year – enough to round out meals of 77% of urban dwellers. One study estimates that if the industrial rooftops of Montreal featured hydroponic systems, they could grow 277% of that city’s total demand – at a fraction of the cost. A 2011 study suggested a 20-story “SkyFarm” high-rise in Egypt, equipped with vertical aeroponic greenhouses on every floor, could produce 200 times as much rice as that country’s most productive conventional rice farm.

HOW HARMONIC ARE PONICS?

These statistics can cast innovative urban agriculture as a panacea. And it just may be. But the Green Revolution was also cast in those same terms. In fact, over the last two centuries societies have routinely been seduced by the promise of technology, the adoration of the individual “great inventor’ who will finally, once again, save us from ruin. People glamorize and valorize individualistic human accomplishment while disguising and patronizing community and environmental suffering. Hypnotized by success and desensitized to distress.

There is no doubt these new approaches to agriculture show great promise. They indeed use less water and land while producing more yield for less money. They are closed systems that can be optimized for efficiency. One aquaponic experiment featured a double recirculating system. One cubic meter of recirculated water could increase fertilizer efficiency by 24% compared to conventional aquaponic methods. It even managed to produce the same quantity and quality of tomatoes per cubic meter of water. As a bonus, that same quantity of water also produced 1.5 kilograms (3.3 pounds) of tilapia fish. But all systems come at a cost.  

These systems require buildings made of sophisticated construction. The growing supplies are made of plastics, processed metals, and synthetic fertilizers. Electricity to power their highly controlled climates, lights, computers, pumps, misters, and filtration systems must run around the clock and throughout the year. How clean is that electricity? Will increased yields induce profit seeking companies to package and ship even more food around the world? Few, if any, studies have been conducted on the upstream and downstream lifecycle costs of innovative urban agriculture.

Furthermore, this is all new. And while there are many successful greenhouse and hydroponic companies out there selling vegetables today, cereals, grains, and proteins are also needed to balance the food basket. Aquaponics hold promise for efficiently growing diverse nutritious foods, but commercial scale is in its infancy. A 2016 survey in Europe revealed that 75% of commercial aquaponic enterprises were built on or after 2010. Nearly half of the employees were researchers working at universities. One-third were government funded, one-fifth were true commercial endeavors, but only 12% had sold fish or plants in the previous 12 months.

Currently the U.S. leads in research and development of innovative urban agriculture. These investments seed similar efforts around the world in both developed and developing countries. There is no question these new forms of commercial agriculture will have an impact on how the world’s food is grown. But I also know the experience of eating that strawberry I plucked at my feet can’t be imitated. Sorry Driscoll’s.

Driscoll’s strawberries, the world’s leading strawberry producer, are genetically engineered to yield a certain experience. Their farmers, or “strawberry manufacturers” as Driscoll’s calls them, all adhere to a certain standard to uphold their vision of what a strawberry is supposed to be. They ship a billion plastic clamshells of strawberries around the world. They have a room at their headquarters in California filled with monitors that track every truck carrying their red, heart-shaped berries across North America. They have two weeks to get their product from harvest to destinations across the country and around the world. They are so popular in China, their price and availability influences international trade relations.

Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us that my opportunistic strawberry plant had “in fact been up all night assembling little packets of sugar and seeds and fragrance and color, because when it does so its evolutionary fitness is increased.” The more attractive nature makes that little bundle, the more likely an animal like me will eat it and spread its seeds. I guess to do my part to further this plant’s evolutionary fitness, I’ll need to poop in the nearby woods. Kids, don’t try this at home.

But the Green Revolution changed these uncontrolled evolutionary elements of agriculture. The Green Revolution turned food evolution into a controlled ‘Big Ag’ volution. Strawberries are now engineered and their seeds are dispersed by ships, planes, and trucks. Once consumed, they’re flushed into wastewater treatment plants.

The new Green Green Revolution, or Innovative Urban Agriculture, is the next stage in agriculture’s own technological evolution. But don’t forget, old fashioned residential and community gardens are part of it. But new technologies have the potential to maximize space, water, and energy to produce even more locally grown yummies. Perhaps we’ll even see Controlled Community Gardens.  

Maybe these new techniques could transform who we are, our relationship with our food, and how we interact at a local level. It’s up to us. Perhaps food production can be made local again. New forms of urban agriculture could be a gift. Like a backyard wild strawberry. As Robin Wall Kimmerer puts it:  

“It is human perception that makes the world a gift. When we view the world this way, strawberries and humans alike are transformed. The relationship of gratitude and reciprocity thus developed can increase the evolutionary fitness of both plant and animal.”

If done right, I might add, maybe even the evolutionary fitness of the planet and us all.

Hello Interactors,

We’re staying in Russia this week because the United States sticks with Russia. At least they used to. And boy did they need it. The famines that have swept through that region over the years have taken the lives of tens of millions of people. Even though Russia was home to the world’s leading seed expert. But the U.S. was always there to bail them out. If the U.S. fell into a food crisis, would Russia return the favor?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

SEEDS OF CHANGE YIELDS DEEDS OF THE DERANGED

Joseph Stalin liked Trofim Lysenko. He grew up poor far away from Moscow just like him. Stalin was from Georgia and Lysenko Ukraine. Both identified as proletariats. They despised the bourgeoisie imperialistic West. Including highly educated and trained scientists. Lysenko was a horticulturist, studied agricultural, and then worked in the department of physiology at the Ukrainian Genetics Laboratory. But he wasn’t like other scientists.

He devised his own homegrown, unproven experiments. He invented theories with pseudo-scientific names like “jarovization” or “vernalization” from Latin’s ‘vernum’ or spring. His claims became known as “Lysenkoism.” Other Russian scientists looked the other way. Russia’s most respected biologist, geneticist, and geographer, Nikolai Vavilov, thought Stalin’s new friend was a crackpot. It wouldn’t end well.

Lysenko got lucky with ‘vernalization’. He tricked wheat seeds into blooming early by treating them with moisture in cold temperatures as a way to produce yields in the spring. The trick had already been performed by American John Hancock Klippart in 1857, but Lysenko gave it a name. He also believed the deceived seeds from these plants would magically inherit the ability to do the same on their own.

His theory ran counter to empirical evidence and to the knowledge and experience of Vavilov. Vavilov worried Lysenko’s tricks, unproven theories, and over promises to Stalin and the Soviet government could lead to catastrophic errors and the worsening of the routine famines Russia was trying to escape.

But Stalin embraced Lysenko’s folksy and unorthodox ways. He believed in his salt-of-the-earth intuition and grew suspicious of the world-renowned and respected science of Nikolai Vavilov. Vavilov was the winner of the Lenin Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in science, and was respected worldwide. He traveled the globe successfully identifying the geographic genetic origins of cultivated plants. He guest-lectured and rubbed elbows with those Western imperialists Stalin despised. Vavilov also spoke poorly of the former Ukrainian peasant come pseudo-scientist Stalin had grown fond of.

In 1936 Stalin replaced Vavilov with Lysenko as the head of the Soviet Academy of Agriculture. Six years later, in 1941, Stalin sentenced Vavilov to execution on claims he was trying sabotage Stalin’s agricultural plans. His sentence was then reduced to a prison term. Vavilov, who grew up fearful of starvation in a village prone to crop failures and food rationing – a scientist who dedicated his life to eradicating famine – died in prison in 1943 of starvation.

Famines had been ravishing Russia for a century already. The large-scale farm practices of today started in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But missteps led to widespread famine, displacement, and environmental damage. Technological advancements allowed expansive grasslands to be converted to cropland around the world, including Russia, Australia, Argentina, South Africa, Canada, and the United States.

An explosion of European immigrants to the United States in the mid 1800s, together with The Homestead Act of 1862, pushed immigrants into prairies to the West and North. Some ventured into Canada. The Civil War ended in 1865 and four years later the Transcontinental Railroad was completed. Both increased the number of agrarian colonizers to the Great Plains.

But the climatic patterns in these areas played a role in the evolution of these plains. The grasslands are arid with periods of intense rainfall followed by drought. Settlers could be deceived into believing these rainfalls were routine only to witness periods of extreme drought. Farmers in the 1870s and 1880s witnessed regular rainfall only to see it disappear in the 1890s. Instead of consulting with Indigenous farmers on how they farmed the land for millennia, the colonists instead expanded area croplands and intensity to make up for short yields. Some used the land to graze cattle leading to even more elimination of the natural grasses needed to nourish and sustain the soil.

The U.S. government accelerated farm expansion by altering the Homestead Act to include larger plots of land. The rain returned in the 1920s which attracted another wave of farmers. Farmland in a section of northwestern Texas and eastern New Mexico doubled in the two decades between 1900 and 1920 and tripled in just five years between 1925 and 1930.  

Russia saw similar expansions of large-scale agriculture. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, groundbreaking research by soil scientist and geographer Vasilii Dokuchaev, the father of soil science, revealed for the first time the role climate and topography play in soil health. He went on to develop the world’s first soil classification system. Some farmers, including immigrant German Mennonites, adopted drought tolerant farming practices Dokuchaev recommended.

Meanwhile, most of Russia, like the United States, continued large-scale overly intensive farming techniques – though Russia lagged in mechanization. Both the United States and Russia, set on expansion, growth, and domination, gambled with the climate, soil, plants, and the crops they yielded. They ignored both emerging science and age-old sustainable practice that likely would have mitigated inevitable crop failure, famine, and long-lasting and long-ranging environmental and social devastation. Destruction so severe they compounded the effects of natural disasters.

Between 1921 and 1923 extreme droughts and winters led to plant disease, insect infestation, and soil erosion throughout the converted grasslands of Russia, Ukraine, and surrounding regions. Famine ensued causing millions to die of starvation. Ravaged by WWI and the Russian Civil War, the Soviet government, then under Vladimir Lenin, was forced to import food and organize relief efforts.

In 1921 Lenin called on the United States to help. The American Relief Administration, headed by future President Herbert Hoover, employed 300 Americans and a 120,000 Russians to provide relief. It was an extension to European relief from WWI. They provided daily meals for over 10.5 million people while also administering medical aid to typhus sufferers – a feverish epidemic claiming even more Russian lives.

GO GREEN

The relief from America worked. By 1923 the Soviet government was able to stockpile enough grain to organize their own relief efforts and the U.S. stepped away. But Russia continued to be hit with episodes of drought. In 1924 another wave hit and the Soviets were once again forced to organize relief efforts. Again, they stockpiled enough to make it through 1925 and 1926 only to be hit again in 1928. Convinced traditional farming techniques were unsustainable, the Soviet government initiated programs that mimicked industrialized farming techniques in the United States.

Another drought came in 1931 and 1932 and with it more famine. Joseph Stalin had risen to power amidst the Russian Revolution. Unlike Lenin, he refused support from the outside. By 1933, when food stocks began to rise again four million more people had died from famine. But the United States would have been in no position to help this time anyway. In 1930, widespread drought spread through the Great Plains stretching from Canada to Mexico.

The natural grasses that once protected soil from blowing away had either been tilled for crops or consumed by cattle. The Industrial Age had given way to industrial farming. A substantial gamble with colossal consequences. The Dust Bowl, or Dirty Thirties, a natural disaster compounded by poor agricultural practices and imperialist hubris, impacted over 100 million acres. It intensified the Great Depression. If the dust storms didn’t destroy homes and farms, failed mortgages and loans did. Between 1930 and 1940 nearly 3.5 million people evacuated the lands they had only recently colonized and practically destroyed. Including their native inhabitants.

Meanwhile, back in Russia, Stalin made another gamble in 1936. He bet on “Lysenkoism”. He believed it would solve the Soviet agricultural malaise sending the one man capable of potentially solving the region’s, maybe the world’s, agricultural problems to starve to death – Nikolai Vavilov. But soon came WWII and more geopolitical disruption in a Soviet Union still trying to figure itself out. And then, in 1946 and 1947, another Russian famine emerged. Again, Stalin refused aid and two million more died of starvation.

But little did Stalin know, many of the scientists that worked under Vavilov had hidden his seed collection and continued to conduct experiments in private. One esteemed plant breeder, Pavel Luk’ianenko, drafted off the work of Vavilov and bred a variety of semi-dwarf wheat seeds in 1950 that would change the course of Russian agriculture forever. By the time of his death in 1972 he was credited with breeding or co-breeding 15 different varieties of regionalized winter wheat seeds.            

His work was Russia’s contribution to a larger global Green Revolution, a systematic and coordinated effort in the 1950s and 1960s between genetically modified seed breeding, chemical fertilizers, land use policy, public and private capital, and mechanized technology that massively increased crop yields. The American scientist and Nobel Prize winner credited with birthing this revolution, Norman Borlaug, said in 2000 that

“Had the global cereal yields of 1950 still prevailed in 1999, we would have needed nearly 1.8 billion hectares of additional land of the same quality – instead of the 600 million that was used – to equal the current global harvest".

After Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev rose to power. Khrushchev was Russian but had ruled Ukraine for a decade. He witnessed struggling farmers endure famine and invented what he called “agro-towns” – small villages in remote rural areas with a library and stores where farmers could live and be better supported. But during the drought of 1946, he had to beg Stalin for aid after over-estimating Ukrainian crop yields. It was a fissure that cost him his post in Ukraine. However, his dismissal led to a position in Moscow closer to Stalin that surely cemented his rise to power seven years later.

One of Khrushchev’s first programs was “Virgin Lands”. He proposed the conversion of 25 million hectares of arid grasslands to croplands in Siberia and Kazakhstan. Within a year this region became a significant contributor to Soviet grain yields. But they soon diminished and in 1962 and 1963 came another drought. In an echo of the Dust Bowl, winds picked up and blew away most of the topsoil that had previously been secured by grassland. Again, a massive shortfall of wheat forced Khrushchev to seek foreign aid. Ten million tons of grain were imported from Canada and the United States. Quantities of this magnitude were likely the result of the crop yield successes of the Green Revolution. But they were also making up for the environmental failings of the Green Revolution.

NUT JOB

It can be hard accepting curses that can come with blessings. Such is the damaging and delicious duality of modern agriculture. We can’t seem to live with it, and we don’t dare try to live without it. But we do have a choice over how large-scale agriculture is implemented. This is unlike the effects of climate change where we can’t live with them, and we don’t have a choice to live with out them.

These historical environmental extremes that plagued the former Soviet agricultural lands continue to this day. In 2009, Russia was on course to export record amounts of grain. Then, in 2010, a wildfire brought on by severe drought turned acres of golden grain to ash. Vladimir Putin was forced to cancel exports. And like those before him, was forced to import food to stave off widespread famine.

Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and other surrounding countries continue to adjust to extreme weather patterns. Still, much of that ‘Virgin Land’ once converted to cropland over the past 50-60 years has been abandoned due to soil depletion brought on by large-scale intensive factory farming. Just a small fraction of the original ‘Virgin Lands’ are farmed in Kazakhstan today. But they continue to learn and adjust…as we all must.

The effects of climate change are global in scale, but differ in variety, intensity, and regularity at a regional and local level. So does the impact on people and place. As a result, responses to these effects must also differ in variety, intensity, and regularity. But intent matters. I’m convinced scientists like Vavilov, Lysenko, Luk’ianenko, and Borlaug were intent on saving people from starvation. They all witnessed firsthand real suffering of starving individuals and the loss of entire populations.

But I’m less convinced of the intentions of politicians like Stalin and Putin. I’m also skeptical of the intentions of Western coalitions backed by corporations who prioritize capital, political control, and short-term quarterly earnings. They seem more intent on feeding growing GDP figures than the starving figures of the emaciated. Stuff pockets of greed over hungry mouths to feed. Let the soils blow away, so long as the board boosts my pay. Shrink operating expenditures amidst rising temperatures. Large-scale government schemes feed delusional utopian dreams. Avoid political disruption by funding criminal corruption. Intention matters.

As an example, in 1947 the British Government wanted to increase peanut production to sell as oil on the world market. So, together with Unilever, then went to the East Africa territory of Tanganyika to convert the wooded plains to peanut farms. An area England had militarily occupied since 1916. No one involved in the project bothered to study the soil and topography. They had to remove Mvule trees to make way for croplands, but they didn’t account for their deep, stubborn, thirsty roots. Their tractors were ruined in the process. New tractors damaged the soil with their weight. Their engines were too weak to churn the hard soils.

In two years, they had only cultivated 16% of what they had planned. By 1951 the British government called it quits. They had spent six times the value of the crops they had grown. The director of the program was a former Russian who applied techniques of his communist past. Leaders at Unilever demanded immediate results to fit their revenue goals. Both of their approaches were insensitive to local people and place leaving it ravaged as they wrote off the loss and flew away amidst the arid soil they had unearthed. They abandoned the people and place most impacted by their imperialistic Groundnut Scheme.

A railroad was constructed to ship the elusive nuts to a harbor the British had built so they could float nut oil around the world. The port remains, but the rail was dismantled. The global transportation network is what allows those locally impacted by natural disasters to receive aid. Parts of Africa continue to be cut off from these networks.

But it were not for these networks, millions more would have died of starvation over the past 200 years. The U.S. and Ukraine blame Russia for clogging those very networks today. Meanwhile, Putin blames the West for blocking fertilizer and grain imports into Russia. Both are true. And it’s also true that Russian wheat exports were up 80% in April over last year and rose 27% in May. They just may be the winner in Wheat sales this year, unless another drought hits and the fields turn to fire. But if Russia was hit with a famine inducing drought, would Putin ask Ukraine and the West for relief? Would America offer relief? What if America is hit with a famine inducing drought? Would China and Russia come to our aid?

On June 27th, President Biden and members of the G-7 met in Austria to discuss a plan to massively invest in infrastructure throughout the developing world. They aim to thwart nonmembers like China and Russia from introducing future disruptions by controlling more infrastructure, like transportation. It’s a response to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Biden said,

“This isn’t aid or charity, it’s a chance for us to share our positive vision for the future…because when democracies demonstrate what we can do, all that we have to offer, I have no doubt that we will win the competition.”

That hubris reminds me of the British Groundnut Scheme. Will the West be applying lessons learned from the devastating and deleterious effects of centuries of colonization? Are leaders any more sensitive to the needs and desires of the local people and places these schemes are sure to impact? These investments are long overdue, and China has a head start, but they must be done with the right intentions.

Lack of adequate adoption of agricultural practice and needed infrastructure is what leaves regions most vulnerable to the negative agricultural effects of climate change. The way our food is produced, distributed, and sold heavily relies on transportation networks. The millions of people who were saved from starvation in the former Soviet Union is testimony to this fact. But responses also require acknowledgment, understanding, and support of local people and place…and their governments. Whether they share a common vision with the West or not.

People situated in their places possess the necessary local and practical knowledge and ingenuity needed to augment the abundance of science that rests on centuries of historical successes and failures. Capital investment from the West is needed and necessary, but not sufficient or welcomed should the intent be to strengthen power, bolster profits, and exploit people and land. In other words, to repeat history. To learn the lesson, past sins must not be repeated. Instead of killing people, animals, and plants in the interest of political ideology, we should seek their engagement and invest in their ecology. In the words of Nikolai Vavilov in 1932, nine years before Stalin issued his execution sentence:

“Many historical problems can be understood only because of the interaction between man, animals and plants.”

Hello Interactors,

This episode kicks off the summer season on the environment and our interactions with it and through it. I’m starting with food. Food is a big topic that impacts us all, albeit in uneven ways. It got me wondering about the global food system and how it’s controlled. Who are the winners and who are the losers? And why is there competition for nourishment in first place?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

АТАКА БОЛЬШОГО МАКА (ATAKA BOL'SHOGO MAKA)

Верните Биг Мак! Срочно верните Биг Мак. Мы требуем этого прямо сейчас. Прямо сейчас. Прямо здесь. Биг Мак!

(Vernite Big Mak! Srochno vernite Big Mak. Moy trebuyem etogo pryamo seychas. Pryamo seychas. Pryamo zdes'. Big Mak!)

“Bring back the Big Mac! Bring back the Big Mac. We demand it right now. Right now. Right here. Big Mac!” Holding a handwritten sign that read “Bring back the Big Mac” a protestor in Moscow took advantage of a press conference a couple weeks ago at the reopening of McDonalds under a new name. Albeit a bit tongue in cheek, he was demanding the return of one popular product not on the menu. The Big Mac name and special sauce are both copyright protected. But the new owner of the new McDonald’s, Alexander Govor – who was a Siberian McDonald’s franchise owner before buying the entire Russian chain – promised he’d find a suitable replacement for the Big Mac. As for a new name, I vote for Большая говядина (Bol'shaya Govyadina), Big Beef. Or given the new owners last name how about just Bol’shaya Gov – Big Gov.

Govor claims he paid below market price for the world’s most recognized fast-food chain and he’s already slashed prices. McDonald’s priced the double cheeseburger at 160 rubles ($2.95) but it’s now 129 rubles ($2.38). The fish burger was 190 rubles ($3.50) and is now 169 rubles ($3.11). The composition of the burgers stays the same as does the equipment, but they did add pancakes, omelets, and scrambled eggs to the morning menu. However, the golden arches are gone, and the name has changed to Vkusno & tochka's (Delicious and that’s it or Delicious, full stop).

After 32 years, that’s it for McDonald’s in Russia but it’s promised to remain delicious. Back in 1990 the American based company had to import all the ingredients to fulfill the promise of a true McDonald’s. It made for an expensive introduction of the American icon. French fries were a problem. The Russian potatoes were too small, so McDonalds had to import seeds to grow larger russet potatoes locally. Apples for the McDonald’s ‘apple pie’ had to come from Bulgaria. After three decades McDonald’s managed to source just about everything locally and ultimately employed 62,000 Russians throughout their operations. But those McDonald’s branded red, yellow, and blue uniforms have been replaced with just red ones. Judging from the lines and enthusiasm at the grand opening, I suspect the new MickeyD’s will continue to be popular…and delicious, full stop.

McDonald’s was popular in Russia from the day it opened in 1990. The Berlin wall had come down, perestroika was nearing its peak, glasnost embraced a blend of socialism and traditional liberal economics that allowed more U.S. companies to enter the former Soviet Union. It was the age of exceedingly fast globalization. A year after McDonald’s showed up Microsoft offered a Russian version of DOS. Just as I was starting at Microsoft in 1992, localized versions of software were flying on floppy disks around the world. By 1996 localized versions of Windows and Office 95 were on a computer on every desk a new McDonald’s was being built every three days. 1996 was the first year McDonald’s made more revenue from outside the United States than within.

And McDonald’s wasn’t just pushing their McMunchies on unsuspecting countries. Many were clamoring for their own MickyD’s. James Cantalupo, president of McDonald's International at time, said,

“'I feel these countries want McDonald's as a symbol of something -- an economic maturity and that they are open to foreign investments. I don't think there is a country out there we haven't gotten inquiries from. I have a parade of ambassadors and trade representatives in here regularly to tell us about their country and why McDonald's would be good for the country.'”

There were some who believed the proliferation of McDonald’s symbolized the spread of freedom and democracy. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times offered in 1996 a “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention -- which stipulates that when a country reaches a certain level of economic development, when it has a middle class big enough to support a McDonald's, it becomes a McDonald's country, and people in McDonald's countries don't like to fight wars; they like to wait in line for burgers.” There goes that theory. Though, Russians are still waiting in line for a burger…just not from McDonald’s.

I’m reminded of the “freedom fries” scandal from 2003. That’s when the Republican senator from Ohio, Bob Ney, changed the name of ‘French Fries’ to ‘Freedom Fries’ in three Congressional cafeterias. It was in response to French opposition to the American invasion of Iraq. The name was changed back in 2006 after Ney was forced to retire. He was implicated in a scandal involving a group of lobbyists that swindled $85,000,000 from Native American tribes. Ney was bribed by one of the guilty lobbyists. On the satirical Saturday Night Live news show Weekend Update, Tina Fey quipped, “‘In a related story, in France, American cheese is now referred to as 'idiot cheese.'"

SEEDS OF GREED

Of course, McDonald’s wasn’t the only multinational food company spreading fast food around the world. I, for one, was grateful to come across a Burger King on the Champs-Élysées in Paris back in 1984. It was my first trip to Europe and my 18-year-old palette wasn’t quite tuned to fine French cuisine. Truth be told, my 56-year-old palette isn’t either. I find French food to be highly overrated. I remember my 18-year-old self thinking that “Le Whopper” and Pepsi with ice, amidst pumping French disco, was both surreal and comforting.

Pizza Hut, Domino’s, and Taco Bell are found in all corners of the world today. Except Mexico. Despite many gallant attempts, Taco Bell can’t seem to crack the Mexican market. I suspect Mexicans find their interpretation of the taco insulting…and gross. But it’s not just fast food. Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, General Mills, Kellog’s, Kraft, and Mars are all American companies that make a plethora of processed and packaged products marketed as food. There are other multinational companies outside of the U.S. doing the same. Mexico’s Grupo Bimbo is where Thomas English muffins, Orowheat, and Sara Lee treats come from. They also own Colonial bread: a white bread that originated in colonized America by a Scandinavian immigrant and is now run out of colonized Mexico by the grandson of a Spanish immigrant who could pass as just another white billionaire CEO.

And who hasn’t heard of Switzerland’s Nestlé products? They are so big there’s a wiki page just to list their products. Chips Ahoy cookie anyone? What about the Anglo-Dutch company Unilever?  They bring us Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, Dove Bars, and Hellman’s mayonnaise. Have you ever had Nutella? That comes from the Italian company Ferrero. That single company consumes one quarter of the world’s supply of hazelnuts. Increasingly those nuts are coming from my neighboring state, Oregon. I love Oregon hazelnuts, so save some for me Ferrero.

This select group of companies produce, market, and sell most of the food around the world that is baked, canned, chilled, frozen, dried, and processed. Adding to the fat and sugar found in fast-food chains, they make dairy products, ice cream, meal replacements, bars, snacks, noodles, pasta, sauces, oils, fats, TV dinners, dressings, condiments, spreads, and an array of beverages. This gives them massive market leverage over the source ingredients produced by farmers around the world.

The very seeds needed to grow these crops are also controlled by a select group of multinational companies. The food policy advocacy group Food and Power reported:

“In 2020, the top four corporations, Bayer (formerly Monsanto), Corteva (formerly DuPont), Syngenta (part of ChemChina), and Limagrain together controlled 50% of the global seed market, with Bayer and Corteva alone claiming roughly 40%. And when it comes to genetic traits, this control is even more pronounced: Bayer controls 98% of trait markers for herbicide-resistant soybeans, and 79% of trait markers for herbicide-resistant corn.”  

Carlos J. Maya-Ambía, a professor of Political Economy and Agriculture at the University of Guadalajara in Mexico, uses an hourglass as a metaphor to explain the control these companies have over the food making process. Imagine the top of the hourglass are the world’s farmers producing edible plants and animals and the bottom are the world’s human inhabitants – consumers. Both are wide and round. The middle of the hourglass is relatively narrow. These are the few multinational companies mentioned above who control most of the flow from the top of the hourglass (the farms) to the bottom (our tables).

Because these seeds are engineered for largescale monoculture farm productions that these corporations require. They tend to rely on agrochemicals to achieve desired yields. It’s a short-term positive yield strategy optimized for quarterly earnings reports, but with severe long-term negative consequences. And guess who controls an estimated 75 percent of the global pesticide market? Those same top tier seed companies.

These chemicals are largely petrochemicals, so the fossil fuel industry also profits from global food production and consumption. These processes, genetically modified seeds, and chemicals no doubt have helped bring countless people out of poverty and starvation. Especially where increasingly harsh conditions make it hard to grow crops. But at what cost? These industrial scale schemes not only leach nutrients from the soil and pollute water supplies, but exposure to these chemicals can also cause neurological disorders, birth defects, infertility, stillbirths, miscarriages, and multiple forms of cancer.

Worse yet are the inequities. Many of these chemicals and genetically modified foods are banned in developed countries. Before Monsanto was purchased by Bayer, massive protests across Europe led to the company pulling out of parts of the EU. Those countries with the most organized farmer and consumer protests had the biggest effect. It’s testimony to the power of democracy and organized protest. But Monsanto, and companies like them, just move on to more willing governments or vulnerable people and places. They seek lands far away from the peering eyes of consumers with a conscience. Many of whom who sit there munching snacks, and tapping on their phones to make that next online fast-food delivery. Guilty as charged. Sad as it may be, when the exploitive interdependent global food system is out of sight, it’s also out of mind.

As Maya-Ambia puts it,

“the scenario becomes clearer if we consider agriculture as a global system and as a long global value chain, composed of several links where agents interact and connect with the whole economy, nationally and globally. Accordingly, the global economy is formed by a complex web of value chains, whose links are located in different places around the world. Therefore, it is correct to speak of…the global value chain of agriculture that does not begin at the production process, but rather with the appropriation of nature and the transformation of natural objects into economic inputs, including the current land-grabbing in several places by transnational corporations. Driven by profit, these corporations have appropriated land, resulting in disastrous ecological effects.”

He continues,

“These practices of appropriation and consumption have created a ‘new international division of labor’: the Global South has become the place of appropriation of nature and in some ways a type of dumping ground.”

FAIR TRADE LAY BARE

Many of the same places these powerful corporations exploit are also the first to be hit with food insecurity. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Association (FAO) reported last year that “the number of undernourished people in the world continued to rise in 2020. Between 720 and 811 million people in the world faced hunger in 2020.” This includes 480 million people in Asia, 46 million in Africa, and 14 million in Latin America. Food insecurity has been climbing steadily over the last six years. One in three of the world’s 2.37 billion people do not have adequate access to food. This isn’t a supply issue. The world has enough food to feed everyone. This is about fair access.

Many of the same people responsible for producing food exported to more developed countries are the one’s who reap the smallest rewards from the value chain. The smallest share of value goes to those farmers in developing countries. And the smaller the farm, the worse the effect. This fact is revealed by observing stagnating long-run trends of producer prices compared to rising consumer prices. These prices are controlled through governance schemes that squeeze the middle of the hourglass. Firms can exert extreme market power, leverage advanced financial and technological mechanisms, influence local, regional, and state leadership, and assert a particular cultural influence. My Parisian “Le Whopper” influenced the culture of the Champs-Élysées. American fast-food culture in Russia lives on in the new ‘Delicious’ McDonald’s. Full stop.

Inequities are also found in the devastating effects of industrialized agriculture at the hands of these powerful firms. Large swaths of sensitive and diverse habitat in developing countries are violently destroyed – like in the Amazon. They’re making space for more croplands and pastures to grow more food and animals, to make more food products, that are sold to increasingly affluent populations who are rising out of poverty in search of the famed Western consumer lifestyle. This only further destroys the land and water making living conditions in these already poor areas even more stressed. As criminal as it is to live poor in a developed country like the United States, it’s not nearly as worse as living poor in unfairly exploited countries. Especially when it comes to acute food insecurity.

On the other hand, living in developed countries – or desiring to adopt a similar lifestyle – comes with a higher risk of death by obesity…in large part due to fast and junk food. In 2021 the World Health Organization reported that worldwide obesity has tripled since 1975. More people in the world are likely to die of obesity than malnutrition. And because the globalization of high calorie junk and fast-food production exists to drive prices as low as possible, it makes it more accessible to poor people in both developing and developed countries. This puts poorer people at higher risk of both malnutrition and obesity.

Naturally occurring factors, like the pandemic and a changing climate also unfairly impact those most vulnerable. As does war. How naïve to believe countries with a McDonald’s would never take arms against one another; that French fries, freedom fries, would somehow united the world. Russia and Ukraine have proven otherwise. Conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America have resulted in millions of people fleeing for safety and starving in the process. Many of whom were farmers. Much of the food needed to feed these refugees historically came from Ukraine and Russia but that is all at risk now.

But American farmers might be able to help. In a rare bipartisan partnership on Capital Hill, just this week President Biden signed into law the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 2022 (OSRA). U.S. agricultural shippers complained to the federal government that the world’s top ocean carriers unfairly denied them container space. Shippers on the West coast found it more profitable to return empty boxes to Asia so they could be re-loaded for the next round of more profitable exports back to the U.S. Of course, this is all fed by increasing consumer demand by overconsuming Americans. But these interruptions made it difficult for farmers and shippers to predict when their time sensitive goods should be delivered to ports before they spoiled.

But with the passing of this law, ocean shippers are required to report to the Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) how many exports they’re loading and from where. The bill also includes rules that determines what makes a denial to export agricultural goods unreasonable. Maersk, Mediterranean Shipping Co., and Transfar Shipping have already offered container space for U.S. agricultural shippers and others are soon to follow. Hopefully, food grown in America can stand a better chance of making it to those in most need in Asia, Africa, Latin America and beyond.

The world seems to be swimming in so many crises that the word has somehow lost urgency. But between war, climate change, and economic inequalities the global food system needs transformation. Here are six ways the FAO believes the global food system could be made more healthy, sustainable, and inclusive:

* Integrating humanitarian, development and peacebuilding policies in conflict-affected areas.

* Scaling up climate resilience across food systems.

* Strengthening resilience of the most vulnerable to economic adversity.

* Intervening along the food supply chains to lower the cost of nutritious foods.

* Tackling poverty and structural inequalities, ensuring interventions are pro-poor and inclusive.

* Strengthening food environments and changing consumer behaviour to promote dietary patterns with positive impacts on human health and the environment.

These steps read a lot like the steps McDonald’s took 32 years ago after entering the Russian market. The introduction of fast-food chains was believed to be a peacebuilding exercise in a conflict-affected area. Freedom fries brought hope and russet potatoes to Russia. McDonald’s scaled up a resilient food system by investing in local farming. They optimized food supply chains within the region. Impoverished Russian’s adjusting to a post communist reality were given jobs growing McDonald’s produce, delivering goods, and working in restaurants. They strengthened the local food environment and changed consumer behavior. And while McDonald’s may not be the healthiest food, not the healthiest habit, it may have been better than what was offered before and it certainly made people happy.

“Delicious and That’s It” just might make it even better. It could be their menu alterations make it a healthier version of McDonald’s. They’ve already made it cheaper. But judging from the Hugo Boss shirt one customer was wearing at the grand opening in Moscow, I have a hunch the new MickeyD’s just might be an elite treat. Still, they may be on to something. Perhaps this is a model that could be used in other places. Maybe more globetrotting fast-food restaurants and junk food producers should be selling out to the locals.

Pizza Hut in Japan already offers squid as a pizza topping, but maybe a Japanese owned franchise would result in even more localized interpretations of a food that originated in Italy. After all, flatbreads exist in a variety of forms all over the world. Imagine مناقيش بيتزا (Manakish pizza), pisa bing 披薩餅 (Bing pizza), or a Catalonia coca? They could all be made with local ingredients, sourced from smaller sustainable farms, sold in locally owned franchises, employing local residents with wages high enough to live on. Who knows where the next Big Mac could be invented? Maybe Russia. Bol’shaya Gov anyone?

Hello Interactors,

Where, how, and when people work continues to shift. Meanwhile, scores of people are moving to urban regions in search of opportunities. Some of which are more accessible than others. It’s putting stresses on how cities plan, how we move, and what kinds of freedoms are afforded and to whom. But hidden in the complexities of societies are patterns of hope.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

REMOTE CONTROL

The workplace will never be the same again. What it becomes won’t either. But don’t tell Elon Musk. He threw a temper tantrum last week accusing employees at Tesla of slacking off working from home. In a company-wide email he became the over-controlling parent and grounded everyone. He wrote, “Everyone at Tesla is required to spend a minimum of 40 hours in the office per week” and that they “must be where your actual colleagues are located, not some remote pseudo office.” He claimed had he not been on the factory floor “working alongside” his employees that Tesla would have “long ago gone bankrupt.” I’m sure every factory floor worker he has replaced by a robot might have something to say about that.

Some work does require a physical presence. Teeth cleaning comes to mind. But there is something to coming together physically that is hard to replicate online. There are also many kinds of service jobs that require a physical presence, though some of those are getting replaced by robots. Last year, a Dallas restaurant turned to a Robot called Bella when they had trouble filling waiter jobs. The owner said, “They don’t complain and they’re happy to do it!” It even happily sings Happy Birthday.

But even white-collar jobs require some together time. I heard one academic say he worked two years during COVID on a joint research project over Zoom. When the team finally came together physically, they accomplished more in a single day than they did in those two years.  

Every company from Tesla to Target are feeling the reverberations of pandemic induced workplace alterations. Even Microsoft, a company that has long envisioned the promise of hybrid-work, is struggling through a new rhythm and workplace model. Mandatory in-office strategies like Musk tried aren’t practical. Even senior leaders are choosing to move to remote locations. Meanwhile, some high-tech teams were already distributed around the world. Despite these trends, companies continue to build new office space. Cranes loom on the horizon all around Seattle. While some of these high-rises will be housing, much of it is office space. What will they do with all this space?

I met a new friend last week who is trying to figure that out. She works as a product designer for a company headquartered in Rotterdam called MapIQ. They build software and services that allow companies to optimize the space they have. She’s been busy conducting research. She talks to employees, facility managers, IT departments, human resources, and corporate realtors who are struggling with a new workplace reality. She told me one of the most acute issues for facility managers is space utilization. These companies pay a lot of money to have attractive and effective workplaces. Seeing them empty is troubling financially but also psychologically. She said, “Employees are struggling to know when it is best to come to the office. They don't want to be the only one at home in a hybrid meeting and they don't want to be in an empty office either.”

Facility managers are scrambling to find ways to make the most of what they have. She said one popular outcome is subletting workspace. But even subletters will only use it occasionally and sporadically. They use software and sensors to better manage who is using it, when, and for how long. This was not how these buildings were designed and not how these companies were envisioned to be run. MapIQ has identified five trends emerging in the workplace:

* The office as standard. Most all employees work four or five days a week in the office.

* Local hybrid. Most people work two or three days a week in the office.

* Remote friendly. Most employees are in the office only once or twice a week.

* Remote first. Working in the office is completely optional with no geographic requirement.

* Fully distributed. There is no office at all and everyone works wherever they want.

The nature of work in the foreseeable future is decidedly different than the past. It will take some time for optimizations to emerge. Meanwhile, how will this affect our built environment and how cities plan? Our roads, rails, wires, and spires, boulevards, buildings, drains and ditches were all planned and produced with a certain permanency and predictability that surrounds our economies, societies, and psychologies. These features of the physical and social landscape were assumed to be towering rocks anchored and resolute. But it turns out it was a mirage. They are made of sand and the winds of the pandemic has created a sandstorm. What shape these forms of fortune take is unknown and possibly unknowable.

The landscape of living amidst this storm is hard to predict and control. The best way to know what direction we’re headed is to look where we came from. Only then can we understand how we got here. A lot has changed in how and where we live. Since the end of WWII, the world’s population has more than tripled. Over half alive right now live in urban areas and nearly three-quarters will by 2050. North America is one of the most urbanized regions in the world. In 2018 82% of the population lived in urban areas. And it’s growing every day. Europe is 74% urbanized and their cities are also growing. Half of the world’s population lives in Asia and half of those live in urban areas.

Not all regions grow at the same rate. The fastest growing areas are projected to continue to be in low-income and middle-income nations. Thirty-three of the fastest growing countries between 2000 and 2020 were in Africa. Twelve were in Asia. But urbanization is both a blessing and a curse. Access to better public health, nutrition, and education improves the lives of those who suffer most, but puts increased strains on housing, transportation, energy, and other infrastructure systems. This is having widespread, varying, and compounding impacts on all who live in urban areas. But these growing pains are not equally felt by all. Understanding these sensitivities will be necessary if we’re going to find ways to solve them.

SUPER SIZING THE SUPER RICH WITH SUPERLINEAR WEALTH

Urban scientists have found naturally occurring mathematical patterns in growing cities. They mimic power-laws found across a diverse array of cities just as they do across plants and animals. For example, as cities grow in population their GDP, number of patents, and productivity grow at a predictable scale. However, congestion, crime, and contagious diseases also predictably grow. Doubling the size of a city will increase wages, wealth, and innovation (as measured by number of patents) by roughly 15 percent. But so will garbage and theft. Population growth has a predictable superlinear positive and negative effect on urban areas. It’s the great paradox of urbanity.

There are big advantages to scale. With each doubling of population there’s also a 15 percent savings in total length of rail lines, electrical lines, water lines, and roads. This sublinear effect predictably leads to a city of 10 million people needing 15 percent less infrastructure than a city half its size. It pays to grow.

But these numbers, as predictable as they are, can also be misleading. Whenever population datasets get crunched and averaged the analysis ends up crunching the realities of the average person. Hidden in the convenient clustering of ‘low-income‘, ‘middle-income’, and ‘high-income’ are varying degrees, durations, and directions as diverse as those lived experiences of the people behind the numbers. This realization has led some of those same urban scaling researchers to scrutinize their own findings. Increased wealth disparities, for example, got them wondering. If wage growth is so predictable compared to urban growth, and more people are predictably moving to urban areas, why aren’t all wages predictably growing?

They wondered if there are similar scaling laws that predict income inequality based on city size. How are incomes different among the rich and the poor compared to the size of the city? After adjusting for cost-of-living differences, are poor people in a big city better off than poor people in a small city? Are rich people richer the bigger the city?

To answer their questions, they broke down income brackets into percentiles. Traditional economic inequality research looks at dispersed distributions across income or wealth. Meaningful individual differences are hidden in these distributions. What they found is the wealth of the poorest 10% scales almost linearly with population size. In contrast, the top 10% shows superlinear growth. This means poor folks moving closer to the city in hopes of becoming wealthier may find themselves to be continually poor compared to those in higher income brackets. The rich get richer, and the poor stay poor.

They conclude that “much has been written about the apparent increasing gains of large cities, such as greater GDP, higher wages, and more patents per capita.” But in the end, “the increasing benefits of city size are not evenly distributed to people within those cities.” For example, they found the ratio of housing costs to income is a function of city population size. The poorer the income brackets, the greater the proportion of income is spent on housing. This results in sharp increases in costs with city size. Meanwhile, in the wealthiest brackets the proportion of income spent on housing stays level.

So whatever superlinear growth in GDP, innovation, and wage growth that comes with increased city size is highly concentrated in the upper income brackets. Existing research in urban scaling and innovation points to empirical evidence that these gains are due in large part to the increase in social interactions and sharing of ideas. Larger and more diverse pools of people co-located in urban areas results in an explosion of creativity, opportunity, and resources. The accumulation of shared knowledge and passion only increases the potential for innovation.

This theory is found in the work of economist Karl Polanyi. In his landmark 1944 book, The Great Transformation, Polanyi gives this concept a name: embeddedness – those who share a common social context have an embedded relationship that drives a desire to provide for one another. Stanford economic sociologist, Mark Granovetter, reaffirmed the idea in his oft referenced 1973 paper, “The Strength of Weak Ties.”

And one of the most influential economists in the 20th century, Austrian turned American, Joseph Shumpeter, described these acts of economic invention and innovation as ‘creative destruction’. For every new innovation that brings increased wealth another must be destroyed or devalued. Capitalists celebrate it as the unfortunate inevitability of social and economic progress while Socialists deride it as the inevitable annihilating force of capitalism.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in their 1848 Communist Manifesto that,

“Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells… In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.”

This grim prognosis from one of Capitalisms only inciteful critics is, sadly, all too relatable these days. Marx would not at all be surprised to hear there’s now empirical evidence to back his 174-year-old theory. But he would probably also be shocked to see China rising as a global superpower by combining elements of Capitalism with Socialism. Markets seem to have a way of formalizing Polanyi’s notion of embeddedness. He believed we all have the desire and creative ability to contribute to each others success and well being as part of our livelihoods. It’s not just goods and services that need exchanged but also values, moral concerns, and relationships. But to do that we must remain connected.

CONNECTING THE DOTS TO FREEDOM

Those urban scaling researchers hypothesize that one of the reasons income inequalities are so pronounce and unfairly propagated in our wealthiest cities is because the various income brackets have become increasingly geographically and socially segregated. Like ecosystems, the less diversity there is the greater the propensity to collapse. These researchers warn that urban regions that “inhibit mixing between diverse populations, will underperform with respect to income scaling.” If lessening income inequality is a goal, the research suggests “cities that are better mixed, allowing diverse parts of the population to be exposed to one another, should be overperforming with respect to urban scaling.”

Connecting diverse sets of people across urban regions seems a more productive, and fun, way to tackle income inequality than redistribution of wealth through a government program. Ricardo Hausmann is the founder and Director of Harvard University’s Growth Lab. They uncover international growth diagnostics and develop economic complexity research methodologies. In a recent interview he said,

“In my mind, the real solution to inequality is not so much redistribution as inclusion – as incorporating people into the possibility of mixing what they are…that leads to a very different agenda for inequality reduction. Do you send people a check or do you connect them to the urban transport network?...Do you connect it to the labor market? Do you connect to the schooling system?”

He was joined in this interview by J. Doyne Farmer. He is the Director of Complexity Economics at the Oxford Institute of New Economic Thinking. Farmer points out that when economists look at the distribution of productivity, they commonly use a statistical technique that lops off a chunk of a giant tail of the distribution curve that is seemingly inconsequential to their analysis. This gives them a distorted point of view of productivity. And to underline Hausmann’s point about the importance of diversity needed to be connected, he said, “that there's a huge diversity out there” hidden in the fat tails those distribution curves. He adds, “And we really have to cope with that because it's inherent to the economy.”   

The question is, how connected physically do people have to be, how often, and for how long to achieve optimal productivity gains? These are questions being asked by companies around the world and firms like MapIQ are there to help answer them. But how many of these companies are already segregating themselves from the socio-economic diversity of their headquarters, satellite offices, or shared urban and suburban workspaces?

Arjun Ramani, a Stanford economist and journalist for The Economist, said last year in an interview by Leesman, a leader in workplace research, that “people are now willing to live an hour away in exchange for a bigger house, because they don’t have to commute in every day.” He believes it’s leading to the ‘donuting’ of cities which I mentioned may be occurring in Des Moines, Iowa. Ramani also reminds us that in the 1800s 40% of workers were working from home. He said, “working from home was quite common. Workers would go into a city or to a market to get raw materials and goods and return home to work – for example in the manufacture of clothes.”

Today that just may be a 3D printer in a suburban garage or a rural toolshed, but the materials would probably be delivered to their door or flown in on a drone. But there’s no question some segment of jobs will require a more centralized physical presence. I’m not yet ready to have my teeth cleaned by a robot, though it looks like that also may be around the corner too. Even farming is moving toward robots.

Regardless of what kind of job is available or desired or how much physical presence needed, there is little question getting more people connected – regardless of where they live – increases the odds of diverse interactions. My own experience tells me, and mounds of research supports, diverse collections of people and ideas yield unexpectedly miraculous outcomes. It’s not always easy or pleasant working with people of differing backgrounds, beliefs, and inclinations, but out of contention come good ideas.

It's also hard to imagine how we become more connected amidst increasing geographic segregation, political polarization, religious ideology, and economic disparities. This may be today’s most perplexing social dilemma. It seems each opportunity to come together is met with an excuse to move apart. Meanwhile, there are powerful forces alive today bent on suppressing individual freedoms. And yet we live in a time when personal freedoms to choose where to live and where work are reignited. But those freedoms are not afforded to all which is an unjust outcome of an unjust history. And so the struggle continues.

It’s sometimes hard to remain optimistic as the sand dunes of our institutions are shaped by the unpredictable storms of change. But hidden in the complexities of distribution curves, growing populations, and the shifting sands of urbanity are predictable patterns that offer us clues – kernels of clarity and certainty; pathways to pursue, and lessons to learn. It’s the certainty we need if we want to uphold our freedoms.

When Polanyi wrote about the great transformation occurring in 1944 it was during a dark time. He started the book during the depression in the 1930s and had lived through political and economic upheaval in England. A world war preceded his writing, and the book was published during a second. He recognized the complexity of society and spoke of the freedoms that come with it.

In the final chapter titled, Freedom in a Complex Society, he writes,

“Uncomplaining acceptance of the reality of society gives man indomitable courage and strength to remove all removable injustice and unfreedom. As long as he is true to his task of creating more abundant freedom for all, he need not fear that either power or planning will turn against him and destroy the freedom he is building by their instrumentality. This is the meaning of freedom in a complex society; it gives us all the certainty that we need.”

Hello Interactors,

I ended up walking almost six miles in two days last week that included two trips by bus and light rail. I’m always surprised by the rich experience that comes with choosing to walk, bike, or bus. But it’s not always pleasant. A car is comfortable, quiet, and convenient but can be experientially anemic. I’m fortunate to have these choices. Not everyone does. And what choice they do have can be unfair and even dangerous. Is that the American way?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

DO THESE ROADS MAKE ME LOOK FAT?

She slammed on the brakes and my bag slid to the floor. My knees slammed against the seat leaning inches from my kneecaps. Just as I grabbed my bag, she floored it. Careening around the curved onramp I felt the gravitational pull suck my head tight against the window as I struggled to right myself. As she merged with flowing traffic on the freeway I saw her glance in the rearview mirror. She wore dark, reflective wrap-around sunglasses and a grimace. Teeth clinched, she pressed the accelerator to the floor. She was on a mission. And I was along for the ride.

I generally cut bus drivers some slack. They don’t have it easy. These herky-jerky driving patterns are often due to the strict schedule they’re incented to keep. Frequency and ease of access to bus stops are two of the more effective ways to get people to use transit. For those who can’t afford a car, or are unable to drive, walking, biking, or bussing is the only real affordable alternative to getting around. There are some, like me, who own a car but sometimes choose to walk, bike, or bus. After all, America is the ‘land of the free’ where we freedom of choice.

But those choices are not equitable. American cities and our countryside were planned by men who favored a single mode of transportation: cars. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it quickly turned out to be good for some, bad for most, and worst for the environment and our health. Charlie Chaplan once said one of the ironies of life is doing the wrong thing at the right moment. America’s transportation history is riddled with irony.

Cars and roads are not categorically bad. But too much of a good thing often is. Besides, not everyone can, should, or wants to own a car and yet the ‘Made in America’ landscape and economic structure dictates you must. If not, then you must suffer the inconveniences, inequalities, and risks that come with a lack of equitable choices. If you’ve ever visited or lived in a city or country with equitable, convenient, and comfortable transportation choices (I’m looking at you Switzerland) you can see the possibilities. It’s a choice. And America, the land of the free and home of the brave, is, ironically, afraid to choose freedom of choice when it comes to transportation.

Which exposes another irony of American transportation. Those who most covet and defend their independence from society and the government – and thus choose to isolate themselves away from dense urban areas and in private vehicles – are thus dependent on the whole of society and the government to finance, design, build, and maintain their roads and vehicles. Both of which rely on government subsidies that make such choices economical in the first place. And in a final twist of the irony knife, most of the natural resources, parts, materials, and manufacturing come from socialistic governments they despise. And they’re made by ethnicities many of them fear, but are also granted more transportation choices than they are.

America’s insistence on car ownership is in a sense, pardon the pun, autocratic. And given the amount of government subsidies flowing to the auto and fossil fuel industry, especially when they need bailing out, can make America look pretty socialistic. I just wish we could all get a return on those investments the government made to private companies using our public tax dollars.

The truth is, we are all dependent on forms of socialism (i.e. economy, military, utilities, transportation, and communication) and capitalism (i.e. free markets, freedom to enlist, freedom to go off-grid, freedom to choose transportation, and freedom to choose a mobile carrier). They can, and do, coexist to varying degrees. But restricting the ability to viably and equitably move within and between our communities to a single choice feels like an impingement on freedom. And yet the number one symbol of American freedom, prosperity, and democracy around the world is the automobile. Car symbolism may be one of the biggest determining factors for America’s addiction to the autocracy of automobility.

No sooner were the post World II freeways built were they filled with American made automobiles. Bucolic car-dependent suburbs filled with carbon consuming contraptions purchased by affluent consumers (mostly white men) swept up in a euphoric post-war economic boom. Hollywood was releasing movies depicting glamourized ideals of American suburban life. The car served as a literal and metaphorical vehicle for the virtues of freedom, independence, comfort, power, speed, and exhilaration. It propagated this myth: car ownership brings social superiority, security from the ills of society, and a path to the future. And yet reality told a different story. Just below the famous Hollywood sign in Los Angeles where these movies were being made traffic jams were forming as early as 1950.

Just as these new car owners were about to buy their second vehicle some wondered if indeed the wrong decision was made at the right time. People were dying in violent car related deaths, roads were clogged during rush hour, and skies turned yellow with smog. So they made more wrong decisions at the right time by building even more roads. In 1955 the social and urban historian and critic Lewis Mumford wrote in the New Yorker,

“Most of the fancy cures that the experts have offered for New York's congestion are based on the innocent notion that the problem can be solved by increasing the capacity of the existing traffic routes, multiplying the number of ways of getting in and out of town, or providing more parking space for cars that should not have been lured into the city in the first place. Like the tailor's remedy for obesity—letting out the seams of the trousers and loosening the belt—this does nothing to curb the greedy appetites that have caused the fat to accumulate."

For decades the fat kept creeping and the belts keep loosening. The greedy appetites of car owners, urban planners, and civil engineers proved insatiable. Then came the 1973 oil crisis and inflation. Gas imports plummeted, prices climbed, and commuters sought alternatives. Carpooling became popular again after first being introduced during World War II as a gas rationing strategy. One poster from this era read, “When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler.” Imagine this government issued roadside billboard today: “When you ride alone, you ride with Putin.”

DROWNING IN A POOL OF DEPENDENCIES

But the 1970s saw both the reintroduction of carpooling and its peak utilization. Still, transportation experts knew it reduced the number of cars on the road and thus eased congestion. So they studied ways to incent people to keep doing it. In 1977 two civil engineers from Boston published a paper that analyzed various carpool incentives. Their paper continues to be referenced by researchers 45 years later…probably because not much has changed.

Their four main findings were:

* Carpooling “incentives” will attract transit as well as drive-alone commuters. However, the potential area-wide increase of ride sharing is small; therefore decrease of Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) is small.

* Auto “disincentives” are far more effective than carpooling “incentive” in increasing ride sharing and transit use. However, these policies are less acceptable to the public and therefore less likely to be implemented.

* Therefore, a coordinated programme package of both “incentives” in increasing ride sharing and “disincentives” could effectively increase carpooling and reduce congestion, VMT and fuel consumption. In particular, significant parking incentives and disincentives appear to be the most effective way of increasing carpooling.

* Carpooling strategies directed at work trips result in increased auto travel for non-work purposes because of increased auto availability during work hours for non-working members of a household. The increased non-work VMT offsets by approximately one third the reduction in work VMT.

They also introduced a transportation choice hierarchy describing the long, medium, and short range travel-related decisions. Long range decisions are major locational decisions like a change in a workplace, residential location, and the type of house chosen. Medium range include the decision to buy a car which is “highly interdependent” on the “usual mode of travel” to work (i.e. owning a car is highly correlated with your decision to use it every day). And short range decisions are “non-work travel decisions.” They note the “frequency, destination, and mode” for these trips should be considered alongside other transportation choices in the household. This is evidenced in the non-intuitive conclusion of number four above. Namely, congratulations on carpooling, now your stay-at-home spouse or partner will be driving more than you think - and possibly more than your commute.

We can see how the urban planning and design of the built environment can impact these decisions. Deciding where to live is a long range decision impacting transportation choice. Not everyone can afford a car or afford to live where cars are necessary for commuting. At the same time, people may work where a car is not needed, like next to their employer, but can’t afford to live there. Such is the case in Seattle right now. So they’re forced to live where they can afford to live, but not make enough money to own and operate a car. Not all of these places are well served by transit which limits their freedom of choice and unduly burdens them relative to other more affluent members of society. Therefore, car ownership, socioeconomics, and the built environment all play a role in the decision to use a car get around.

‘Socioeconomic status’ influences ‘where to live.’ Both ‘socioeconomic status’ and ‘where you live’ can each independently influence ‘car use.’ For example, someone may be able to afford to own a car but not the gas needed to use it. Somebody else may have enough money to own many cars, buy much fuel, and drive excessively. In addition, a person may live where a car is not needed and thus use it less. Or they may live far from work and use a car every day.

However, while ‘socioeconomic status’ influences ‘where to live’ and both of those factors independently influence ‘car use’ they also influence the decision to own a car in the first place. And this factor, ‘car ownership’, is emerging as a primary mediating factor in ‘car use.’ That is, even if someone can afford to live in a dense urban area full of places to walk to, including a job, just the fact of owning a car plays a nonsignificant role in the decision to use it or not. Consequently, while cities increasingly are making plans to densify and make their cities and towns more walkable and bikeable, if residents happen to be car owners these changes in ‘the built environment’ may not change their patterns of ‘car use.’ Especially if they’re affluent enough to not be greatly impacted by the cost of car ownership.

There’s another important mediating factor often overlooked in transportation research. It may also be the most influential, the most deep seeded, the hardest to pin down, and the hardest to change: the psychological attachment and addiction to cars.

The University College of London transportation professor, Peter Jones, offers graduated distinctions of car dependency among people and society. Starting from the top:

Car-reliant trip: Alternative forms of motorized transport are not available and the journey distance is too long for walking or cycling

Car-reliant activity or journey - Difficult to make the journey in a different way because of purchases (goods) and/or complex multidestination trips

Car-reliant lifestyle - Impossible to access a given destination by other transport mode than car

Car-reliant person - Unable to use other transport than car

Car-reliant society - High levels of car use among population, necessity of car to participate in essential social activities

Car-convenient society - Car is most convenient choice

Car-dependent person - Car is statement of status or linked to self-esteem or personal identity

Car-addicted person - A car “fanatic,” whose life revolves around cars

FEARS, FRIGHTS, FLIGHTS, FIGHTS, AND RIGHTS

Stefan Gössling of Lund University in Sweden take these one step further offering a distinction between “real” and “perceived” dependencies in his 2017 book called The Psychology of the Car. He says, “’real dependencies’ refer to basic life needs.” These include the need to “commute to work, to shop, to visit a doctor, see friends and family, to transport goods, to participate in social work, go to church, or to make leisure trips.” The car is treated like an appliance for utilitarian purposes. In contrast, “’perceived’ car dependency arises out of emotions involved with the car, or where alternative transport is considered ‘dysfunctional…’” For example, the anxiety that can come with determining the right bus, scheduled times, bus fare or getting on the wrong bus and getting lost. Some are fearful being around controlled environments patrolled by security. Others fear confrontations with people with mental health issues, drug and alcohol addictions, or being trapped in smelly, noisy and claustrophobic spaces.

Gössling reminds us there are many fears and phobias that can trigger fright-flight-fight responses which results in car use becoming an addiction in itself. In America, where guns are prevalent, homelessness is rampant, and drug addiction and alcoholism is on the rise there are many reasons to be afraid and anxious. Cars, like guns, can make people feel safe and protected, even though they are both the most dangerous weapons there are.

Gössling suggests fear or anxiety and safety or security aren’t the only psychological concerns wrapped up in transportation choice and car addiction. There is also identity and social status, trauma, and even obesity. He notes obese people are even more reliant on cars even though their condition would benefit from walking or biking. Even if it was to a bus stop…if there is one.

Automakers tap into these insecurities with advertising and car design. They know a bigger car can make people feel safer, elevate them above others and boost inferiorities. They reflect and signal power, size, and strength which are all recognized as symbols of superiority throughout society…and the entire animal kingdom. Attempts by the government to impede on any of these psychological crutches is therefore viewed as a threat to their identity. Smaller, slower cars are deemed inferior. Wimpy. Raising prices on gasoline, car tabs, or parking by authorities is a threat to their perceived superiority and control. Encouraging the use of public transit diminishes their social standing. Building dense housing near single family residences threatens their independence and increases the odds of awkward social encounters that may trigger fear and anxiety prompting grasps for safety and security.

And yet, we can’t keep loosing the belt because it is only making us fatter. Besides, most residents in most cities oppose street widening. We have a fixed amount of space for cars and trucks with an increasing number of urban residents. The only answer is fewer additional cars on our roads and less car use by current car owners. We also need those with unhealthy attachments and addictions to face their fears.

Policy makers and politicians know backlash comes from threats to these very real and complex socio-psychologies. Public interventions are threats to private habits, regimes, identities, and values. Many cities have progressive plans to tip the transportation and land use balance, but executing these plans can trigger very real deep-seeded fear that leads to fierce opposition. It’s easier to just loosing the belt than hit the gym.

But experts agree changes to the built environment are necessary if we’re going to save ourselves from increased congestion and pollution. We need to make all neighborhoods more walkable and shoppable. Everyone should insist on a grocery store within a 10 minute walk. To make these businesses work in our capitalistic reality, requires more customers. More customers can only happen when there is more dense housing – even if it’s duplexes, triplexes, and townhomes.

Exurban and rural residences should insist on some form of public transit even if it’s on-demand. For example Denmark offers, in coordination with AARP, a “coordinated demand responsive transportation system” that “keeps older Danes, especially those living in the rural areas, aging in place.”

But solutions don’t have to come from the government. Recently the New York Times featured a story about a carshare coop in New York called “The Drivers Cooperative”. They are “a driver-owned ridehailing cooperative” where “drivers make more on each trip, all profits go back to drivers, and drivers have democratic control over the decisions that affect their lives.”

If this reeks of socialism don’t tell one of the reddest and most rural and sparsely populated states in the country, North Dakota. They enjoy some of the fastest internet speeds in the country due to their high-speed broadband ‘community network’ that is a federal tax exempt cooperative. It’s also generally cheaper than the competition. It may be hard to imagine now, but farm cooperatives in America were once hotbeds of socialist ideals and ideas. That independent and pro-social spirit just may be rekindling in rural America. It could bring new meaning to the ‘red’ counties of America. Greetings comrades.

Changes to the built environment are necessary, but not sufficient. Socioeconomic inequities have to be rebalanced. The human right to move about this world should not be impeded by ability, race, religion, ethnicity, or social status. Safe, secure, accessible, comfortable, and efficient transportation must be made equal for all members of society.

But the psychology of car owners must not be overlooked. Car ownership is the key mediating factor in whether it is used and by how much. Policy makers can’t ignore the psychological needs, real and perceived, of car owners. Car addicts will resist change so long as they feel threatened by it. This requires communication strategies that don’t antagonize, diminish, or create cognitive dissonance among them.

Those cities successful in shifting norms and behavior of car owners combine multiple approaches. First and foremost they make infrastructure changes that improve conditions for cycling, walking, and transit. They also do what those Boston researchers and engineers suggested in 1977 to most effectively induce carpooling. They impose restrictions on car use.

But they are also mindful of the psychology of those attached and addicted to cars. They appeal to car owners by using values they can relate to like speed, efficiency, relaxation, and cost. When cycling, walking, and transit is improved and endorsed using these rational values social norms and habits indeed shift. As these changes demonstrate reductions in congestion their adoption and acceptance grows. Fewer cars on the road also means less noise, cleaner air and water, fewer deaths, and happier, healthier people which are things everyone wants.

As professor Jones in London says,

“We need to work out what society we want to live in, and build the connectivity that delivers that vision (think healthy, socially cohesive, compact, local).”

What I found last week walking with my friends around Seattle is a city built for cars. That was the society people wanted to live in back in the 1950s and 60s. But I also found the light rail was at capacity during off-peak times, cyclists were flowing down protected bike lanes, ride-share bikes and scooters were rolling, and we saw parts of the city unseen from a car. We walked and talked, giggled and wriggled, and trudged up some stairs. We hunted for haunts and restaurants as the rain moistened the air. And on the way home I glanced out the window from the “bus-only” lane. I peered into the cars stuck in traffic waiting for my “bus-only” light to change. What I saw saddened me. There they sat; single occupants in a single car, but not one single smile. They were surely comfortable in their safe and silent spaces, but what should we make of those sad and lonely faces?

And then suddenly I was thrown back in my seat. That bus driver had a schedule to keep.

Hello Interactors,

There’s but a short window of time

It’s time to get those seeds in the ground! If you have the space. The state of Iowa, where I grew up, has this as their slogan: ‘A Place to Grow’. But those places are being displaced by homes at a record pace.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

GROW BABY GROW

We bought our first corn on the cob this week. It’s from California. Growing up in Iowa we didn’t see corn until late summer. To get corn stalks to be ‘knee high by the fourth of July’ meant getting the seeds in the ground by the end of May. That’s now. Iowa farmers have been stressed out these last couple weeks. The planting window was closing fast and the state was getting unseasonable rain and cold temperatures. Ten days ago one farmer in northeast Iowa said he could ride his boat across his fields.

Such is the life of a farmer. But the weather turned in their favor this week. They’ve been busy. On May 23rd the USDA reported 86% of Iowa’s corn crop had been planted and 47% of seeds planted earlier are already sprouting. But corn, soybeans, and oats are all behind schedule. Let’s hope the wacky weather patterns don’t wreak havoc on these weathered wonder-workers. I like my corn tortillas, tofu, and oat milk. Though, most Iowa grains and soybeans are fed to livestock, not people.

And we know people like their burgers and bacon. Increased commodity prices are the number one reason some farmers give for why farmland value in Iowa is through the roof. Last year a farmer in Eastern Iowa’s Johnson County made headlines when he sold 40 acres of two 80-acre tracts for $26,000 per acre. That’s over $2,000,000 for 40 acres (the equivalent of 20 soccer fields).

But that pricey southern most 40 acres is comprised of Klinger soil – a claylike sandy substrate formed by glacier tills. This soil is perfect for the native prairie grass but crops struggle. So this opportunistic farmer decided to plant a more profitable crop that has no agricultural value at all. Houses. He sold the worst soil for the most money to a developer who is expanding the sprawl of a nearby small town city called Swisher; population 914. It’s a 15 minute drive south of Iowa’s second largest city, Cedar Rapids.

The conversion of farmland into housing developments is a common sight across Iowa. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) does an agricultural census every five years and the last one was done in 2017. The 2022 version is due later this year. From 2012 to 2017 Iowa lost 2,533 farms. That leaves 86,104 farms remaining. There were over 10,000 more farms in 1997 and nearly 20,000 more when I left Iowa in 1984. The amount of land dedicated to farming shrank by 59,000 acres.

Much of this reduction is from consolidation. The number of large farms (>2000 acres) grew 15% to 1,892 over five years. By comparison, there were barely 300 large farms in 1987. From 2012 to 2017 large farms had gobbled 10% of up mid-sized farms (500-999 acres). Small farms (fewer than 9 acres) grew 36% to 9,120. That’s a big jump in five years, but only 1000 more than 30 years ago.

These figures from the USDA tell the story of farmland consolidation across Iowa since the 1980s. But to get a picture of how farmland sold to developers contributes to the sprawl of urban areas, more and more researchers are turning to satellite imagery. In 2018 two researchers from Iowa State University were lead authors on a paper demonstrating novel image processing techniques for mapping the dynamics of urban growth. They took a series of satellite images from 1985 to 2015 of a region encompassing the Des Moines Metropolitan Area. They then trained software to differentiate between the natural and built environment by looking at the color of the pixels in the images. Pixels turning from looking ‘natural’ to looking ‘urban’ over time revealed a growing gray blob of concrete known as urban sprawl.

They found, with 90% accuracy, that the Des Moines Metropolitan Area urban boundary more than doubled between 1985 and 2015. Over those thirty years the area grew linearly from 58 square miles in 1985 to just over 135 square miles in 2015. Most of which, of course, was farmland. At this growth rate, it will continue to double again every 30 years.

Area growth like this is usually the result of an increasing population. The Des Moines Metropolitan Area is no exception. From 2010 to 2020, the population in this area grew 17% from 606,465 to 709,466. You might imagine the city of Des Moines being at the heart of this growth given it’s the center of the metropolitan area, but you’d be wrong. Of the top ten most populated cities in the area, Des Moines proper grew the least at 5.3% and has been relatively flat for decades. The fastest growing city from 2010 to 2020 was a town just north of Des Moines called Grimes. It grew a whopping 87%. Another town to the north, Ankeny, was second at 49% and my home town, Norwalk, just to the south, grew the third fastest at 43%.

These are some of the fastest growing cities in the country. Impressive. Until you consider the overall population of the state of Iowa only grew 4.8% compared to the U.S. population rate of 7.4%.

It's a curious fact that the Des Moines Metropolitan Area is growing in population at a rate far greater than the state is. This means Iowans are 1) moving to metropolitan areas from rural areas, 2) between cities within a metropolitan area, or 3) to another state all together. I reached out to a friend who recently moved from West Des Moines to Des Moines after they became empty nesters. He said they didn’t need as big a house and wanted to be closer to restaurants and entertainment. His wife added that they looked at surrounding suburbs but the house in Des Moines offered the best value.

I then contacted another friend who sells real estate in the area. She told me people are obsessed with new construction. Her clients repeat the same refrain, “I want a new kitchen with granite countertops, white cabinets, and a tile floor.” My friend has an eye for houses with good bones and an affinity for mid-century classics. She tries to sell their vision to her clients by fixing up these older homes, but there’s little interest. She said, “It’s like so much else in their life. Out with the old, in with the new. Why fix it when a new one will due?” So she spends a lot of time driving to the fringes showing new construction in cities like Grimes, Ankeny, and Norwalk.

THE RADICAL, THE DYNAMICAL, AND THE MEGLOMANIACAL

The hollowing out of city centers as people move to the fringes, the ‘donuting’ of metropolitan areas, is common. Especially in the Midwest. Detroit gets all the attention, but the rust belt is filled with them. It occurs in cities around the world.

In 1969, a professor from the MIT Sloan School of Management, Jay Wright Forrester, developed a theory and computer model for this phenomenon in a booked titled Urban Dynamics. If you’ve ever played the computer game SimCity then you have Forrester to thank. The game is built on his model. We have many things for which to thank Forrester. He helped to invent random access computer memory (RAM). He was also a pioneer in computer graphics before computers; he figured out how to get a ball to bounce on an oscilloscope screen. And the current reverberations of supply chain perturbations is called the Forrester Effect as described in his 1961 book called Industrial Dynamics. Forrester is thus the founder of the field of system dynamics – the study of nonlinear behavior of complex systems over time. And cities are indeed complex systems…mostly due to the complexities of human behavior.

Forrester’s book was groundbreaking but also controversial. To validate the theory with an actual city, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) – which was also five years old at the time – sponsored a two year study. Four cities were chosen as cites in 1971 and they were all within a 40 mile radius of MIT. The first experimental city was Lowell, Massachusetts.

Louis Alfeld was the Director of the program. In 1994 – on the 25th anniversary of the publishing of Urban Dynamics – he reflected on the execution of the experiments and the lack of progress since. The effect of human behavior on complex systems is apparent even in the administration of the study. HUD assigned the harshest critics of the theory to be on the committee which complicated things from the start. Alfeld recalls,

“Although we attempted to engage the committee in a constructive dialogue concerning the model’s utility, the members had neither the time nor the inclination to study system dynamics. Criticisms concerning data and validation techniques displaced issues of system structure and user needs. Neither side understood the other’s point of view.”

Because HUD committee members were trained in traditional economics and only trusted well-cited existing academic literature, they continually dismissed and rejected every premise of systems theory. It prompted Forrester himself to respond with these words,

“It is unfortunate that you have not found it possible to spend more time with us in order to better understand system dynamics and its application to the dynamic modeling of social systems. Many of the issues you raise seem to rest on assumptions that reflect practices in other kinds of modeling but which do not apply in the same way to system dynamics models. In fact, the strength of system dynamics arises from these differences.”

In contrast to HUD’s skepticism, Forrester and Alfeld found the leadership at Lowell to be more open to these theories. Their city was in decay after falling ungracefully from a century of manufacturing success. Their buildings were crumbling and the city faced a persistent 12% unemployment rate. They were eager to try something new.

One of the foundations of urban dynamics centers on available land as a resource. Defined as a nonlinear function, it says the rate of construction is constrained by the amount of land on which to build. New cities start out with abundant land, but being the first company to build comes with risk. Will employees follow? Will the resources be available to turn a profit? But one building can attract more buildings and if all goes well the competition for good land increases and growth, fueled by demand, explodes. This in turn inflates the price of attractive available land. Inflation then slows growth until all the land is consumed and new construction halts. Over time these buildings decay, businesses fold, and the city begins to decline economically and socially as people and customers leave. The only way a city constrained by space can maintain equilibrium in this closed system is to tear down old buildings and build anew on existing land. This was the fate Lowell faced.

The city government enacted policies that reflected the theory of urban dynamics. They created incentives to local companies to remodel existing buildings and expand business. They took steps to curb further deterioration of existing housing left vacant by affluent residents who fled. This in turn made more housing accessible to lower income residents who rushed the city like a flood. These policies resulted in strict codes that forced a refurbishing and reinvestment in the city.

After two years Lowell showed signs of improving. Alfeld and the city were encouraged to keep experimenting. But HUD had encouraged the city to set the parameters of the model to mimic metrics from Lowell’s previous historic economic boom the century prior. Falling short of these expectations in two years, the committee was not convinced Forrester’s theory of urban dynamics resulted in sufficient enough of an improvement to continue.

Hard quantitative evidence these traditional economists demanded was indeed lacking, in part due to HUD’s inability to operate a mainframe. But in the end the committee seemed more interested in the numbers than in the positive qualitative effects evident in the city and its residents. As Alfeld grimly summarizes,

“The interface gap between model and critic contributed to the communication gap. In the final accounting, neither our success in Lowell nor our outpouring of reports and papers could bridge that gap. HUD judged that we had nothing to offer and urban dynamics dropped out of academic sight, its potential contribution to resolving America’s urban crisis ignored for the past quarter-century.”

THE AGING ARIAN AGRARIAN

The Des Moines Metropolitan Area is not space constrained like Lowell, Massachusetts. And while the city of Des Moines has reinvigorated the downtown area, the seemingly unlimited surrounding land availability and patterns of sprawl reveal no intention to contain the sprawl, protect farmland (or natural grassland) and reinvest in what is already built. This will likely lead to each inner concentric ring of the donut hole to age and decline just as the city of Des Moines did. This will create a larger donut hole in the center as the outer perimeter of the donut continues to encroach on more and more prime farmland. Land that is owned by dying farmers.

One Iowa State University study revealed that “in 2017, over half the farmland (60 percent) in Iowa was owned by people over the age of 65. This was five percentage points higher than in 2007, and twice the level in 1982. In addition, farmland owners who were 75 years or older owned a record 35 percent of all acres in Iowa as of July 2017.”

A 2021 study showed that “Iowa farmland owners are older than the general population. On average, the full-time and part-time farmers in [the] study were 62 years old. The retired farmers were, on average, 77.7 years old, and the non-farmer owners were 68.7 years old.” Non-farmers can include surviving spouses who don’t farm or off-farm heirs to the land. Also, “Of the farmland [] analyzed, 29.5% was owned by full-time farmers, 12.9% by parttime farmers, 22.7% by retired farmers, and 34.9% by non-farming owners.” With 60% of farmland owned by soon-to-be retirees and a sizable portion of 35% owned by heirs who’d rather have the money than to farm, what does this say about the future of farming in Iowa?

Iowa, and the country, has a farming succession problem. One study suggests that lack of knowledge transfer and co-creation of crop yields will be one of the biggest challenges facing the foodscape of the Midwest. But when it comes to succession strategies, the Iowa farmers in this study,

“were on average motivated strongly by social factors—e.g., desires to maintain agrarian cultures, rural communities, and family farms. (It is worth mentioning that these sentiments could be colored by the fact that these were also established growers—e.g., those privileged by policies like the Farm Bill—who were well capitalized and could afford to focus on non-economic factors.)”

That’s not to say these farmers haven’t suffered economic hardship. And the economics of farming are complicated and messy. But this researcher found new farmers to more interested in the sustainability of the land and in farming than those who inherited a farm. Those farmers are now looking to retire and their children typically aren’t interested in farming. The author continues,

“Intergenerational knowledge transfer, from one generation to the next (though not necessarily within the same family), is a critical element in the creation of foodscapes populated with farms of all scales and commodity profiles and by farmers from diverse socio-economic backgrounds, including farm/nonfarm backgrounds, genders, sexual orientations, ethnicities, and religions.”

This requires building communities that welcome this kind of diversity, which most do not. People from Myanmar is one of Des Moines fastest growing minority groups, but an ethnic minority advocacy group says,

“It's very challenging. I talk to my friends on the coasts. People (without family here) don't want to move to Iowa…In Iowa, we don't have investments and resources for immigrants, for refugee-led, community-based groups."

There are groups trying to help. For example, The Practical Farmers of Iowa have been working since 1985 to “equip farmers to build resilient farms and communities.”  Also, there’s the Women Food and Agriculture Network whose “mission is to engage women in building an ecological and just food and agricultural system through individual and community power.” Many of those fast growing small farms in Iowa fit the profile of these groups. It’s an encouraging sign for the health and diversity of small scale farming in Iowa.

But there are only 600 minority farmers in Iowa. What are the odds these aging white male farmers of selling their property to a Myanmar farmer or an ambitious woman graduate from the Iowa State College of Agriculture? How likely is an aging retiree willing teach a black family from the south with farming experience how to grow soybeans in Iowa?  If a farmer isn’t willing to co-create or sell their farm to a first generation farmer who isn’t a Christian white heterosexual male who’s interested in perpetuating the ‘old-boys club’, then they’ll likely just sell it to another aging white male farmer like them. This will further consolidate Iowa farmland that will likely end up in a trust fund for their heirs. Many of whom will wait for the expanding urban gray blobs to reach their land and then they’ll likely cash in on a $2,000,000 offer from a real estate developer.

And with 81% of Iowa being white, with an estimated 90% of them living in the suburban fringes away from what little diversity there is in Des Moines, you can bet the person buying that newly built white home with granite countertops will be as white as their kitchen cabinets. At the same time, it’s great these families found a good home. I grew up on fertile Iowa soil as part of Norwalk’s first round of sprawl and it benefitted me.

Either way at least the seeds got in the ground on time. They can eat that yummy corn on the cob this summer with their hamburger made from Iowa beef. It will all take place on a grassy lawn that once grew the corn they’ll be eating…or the corn that fed the cow in their burger. Come to think of it, maybe their corn will come from California too…and the hamburger.

Hello Interactors,

Most people think roads were planned, designed, and built for cars, but that’s not true. They’re public spaces intended to bring social and economic benefit by increasing mobility. Economically they’re successful, but socially they not only are failing us…they’re killing us.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

WALKING AND BIKING TO DEATH

Today is “Bike Everywhere Day” in the Seattle area. Once known as “Bike to Work Day”, it would typically inspire an estimated 20,000 people to grease the chain, pump up the tires, strap on the helmet, and tepidly merge into the smooth, rolling polluted river of concrete nestling up alongside menacing machines of masculinity hastily rushing to work. Commuting patterns have been disrupted by Covid the last couple years. But with the League of American Bicyclists declaring May as “Bike Everywhere Month” commuting to and from work isn’t the only reason to slide onto the saddle. If you dare to do so.

According to the CDC, “bicycle trips make up only 1% of all trips in the United States. However, bicyclists account for over 2% of people who die in a crash involving a motor vehicle on our nation’s roads.” It’s important to note the CDC use the human-centered word ‘bicyclist’ to describe the victim but an object-oriented word ‘motor vehicle’ to describe the killer. It’s not the motor vehicle’s fault these people died, it’s the fault of motorists. As gun enthusiasts like to remind us, ‘guns don’t kill people, people do.’ The same is true for cars and both machines can be violent killers. The CDC report “Nearly 1,000 bicyclists dying and over 130,000 injured in crashes that occur on roads in the United States every year.” But that’s only those reported. Most cyclists, especially in disadvantaged communities, don’t bother reporting crashes. And not all police nor hospitals report or rate car-related bike and pedestrian injuries consistently…if at all. And different sources report different numbers.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission reports “425,910 emergency department-treated injuries associated with bicycles and bicycle accessories in 2020.” The National Highway Traffic Safety Administrations reports “932 bicyclists were killed in motor-vehicle traffic crashes in 2020, an 8.9% increase from 856 in 2019.” The U.S. Department of Transportation announced this week that 43,000 people died on roadways in 2021 – the highest since tracking began in 1975.

That’s a 10% percent increase over 2020. Pedestrian fatalities were up 13% and bicycle fatalities were up 5%. They note that during Covid speeding offenses climbed causing a 17% increase in speed-related fatalities between 2019 and 2020 and a 5% increase prior to 2019. It’s unclear how speed factors in the increase in pedestrian and bicyclist deaths during this time, but there is no denying that speed kills.

The Transport Research Laboratory out of the UK compared multiple datasets of ‘pedestrians killed’ by the ‘front of a car’ (again comparing people to an object) to better understand the relationship between speed and risk of fatal injury to pedestrians. They concluded

“The risk increases slowly until impact speeds of around 30 mph. Above this speed, risk increases rapidly – the increase is between 3.5 and 5.5 times from 30 mph to 40 mph.”

This applies to cyclists as well. Choosing to bike on roads in America comes with a risk of dying that is nearly five times greater than choosing to drive a car. And the odds of dying in a car accident are already relatively high – 1 in 101 – the eighth largest risk just behind suicide and opioids in 2020.

The ugly truth is the ongoing and rising deaths and injuries to cyclists and pedestrians at the hands of motorists is a seemingly necessary cost to uphold the freedom, comfort, and convenience of automobility that many enjoy. Our political and public administrative services care about saving lives, but evidently not if it means changing road designs, land-use policies, travel patterns, restricting access to some roads, or – heaven forbid – creating viable ways to ditch the car should you choose.

But this country did once care about saving lives on the road. As the post-WWII boom in cars and roads continued to balloon so did car-related deaths. Federal, state, and local governments rallied to make cars and roads safe for motorists. The same is true for new bikes purchased for baby boomers. When kids were getting injured and killed on their bikes in the 60s and 70s due to poor design and construction, consumer protection agencies cracked down on manufacturers and the federal government almost made it illegal to bike on the street.

It was a bike enthusiast out of Davis, California, John Forester, who fought for a cyclist’s right to use public roads. But as a confident cyclist, and self-proclaimed engineering expert, who prided himself on his ability to ride in traffic, he advocated for ‘vehicular cycling’ which meant treating a cyclist more like a motorist than a pedestrian. He even claimed protected or separated bike lanes were more dangerous than riding with traffic. He was making that claim up until he died in 2020.

But he mostly was a bike snob who didn’t want to be burdened with having to share space with kids and slower everyday cyclists on a bike path, so he made it his lifelong ambition to tank efforts to build safer bike infrastructure. Though, it was elite bicycle enthusiasts like him we have to thank for the existence of paved American roads in the first place.

A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN

“Every person has an equal right to travel on the highways, either on foot or with his own conveyance, team, or vehicle. This right is older than our constitutions and statutes … The supreme rule of the road is, Thou shalt use it so as to interfere as little as possible with the equal right of every other person to use it at the same time …”

This was written in 1897 by a patent attorney named Charles Pratt. He was one of three men who started the League of American Wheelman (L.A.W) in 1880. Now called the League of American Bicyclists, they’re the leading sponsor of today’s “Bike Everywhere Day.” Pratt was joined by a bike importer, Frank Weston, and writer, adventurer, conservationist, Kirk Munroe. Together they grew the L.A.W. to become one of the most influential and powerful organizations of their time. They are also the originators of America’s paved roads.

In 1888 the L.A.W. members voted to fund the National Committee for Highway Improvement. Their first publication served as a textbook for road construction called, Making and Mending Good Roads & Nature and Use of Asphalt for Paving. Fifteen-thousand copies were printed and sent to state legislators as well as county, city, and town officials. But they also solicited bike manufacturers and dealers, road construction and pavement companies, and equipment manufacturers. Asphalt and pavement companies eagerly offered their support and financial contributions to the effort.

One of the members of the L.A.W., Civil War Colonel and bicycle manufacturer (who later made electric cars), Albert Pope, was one of the most eager supporters of what became the ‘Good Roads Movement.’ In 1889 he offered an upfront contribution of $350 with an offer to fund whatever was necessary to build good roads writing: “Go ahead with the work…and we will pay the whole or any part of the expense you desire.”        

If this sounds like a bunch of wealthy cycle enthusiasts coming together to design, fund, and build public roads across America, it is. Recall this is the same model used to build the rail system across the United States in the 1840s. Federal or state funding, or government sponsorship of any public transportation, was not on the minds of elite power brokers of the 19th century…or the 18th century for that matter. Road and highway design, construction, and maintenance was believed to be the job of local governments in partnership with private parties. One L.A.W. member from New York, A.J. Shriver, wrote in 1889 that federal funding of roads was “Socialistic” and thereby “unconstitutional.”

But these beliefs and attitudes were largely coming from wealthy urban elites. Bicycling, after all, was something the privileged class enjoyed as a kind of hobby. But in the rural countryside attitudes were different. Most farmers were responsible for maintaining the roads along their property and believed they ‘owned’ them. They were also leery of wealthy city-slickers offering opinions on how ‘their’ roads were to be designed, used, and by whom.

The L.A.W. drafted legislation in 1889 calling for a state tax to fund the highway commission for the creation of maps and plans for the construction of ‘good roads.’ The legislation was adopted by nine states, but failed to garner the necessary votes. Farmers were speaking out against this infringement on ‘their’ property. One Michigan farming coalition wrote, “The farmers must bear the expense while bicyclists and pleasure-riding citizens will reap the larger benefits.”

The defeats at the state level sent the L.A.W. back to the drawing board. They realized they needed a different approach. Their president wrote, “We must concentrate first on education, then agitation, and finally legislation.” They created a monthly publication that was an “Illustrated Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Public Roads and Streets” that hit a peak circulation of 75,000 copies by 1895.

In 1898 the L.A.W. then published a 41-page book titled, Must the Farmer Pay for Good Roads?. They mailed 300,000 copies to farmers and members of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It worked. The book’s author, Otto Dorner, later wrote in The Forum magazine that,

“… the farmers of the United States are beginning to thoroughly appreciate the need [for] better highways; and the work of the League of American Wheelmen in the direction of State aid is receiving much support from the more progressive among them … The Farmers’ National Congress … [commended] the efforts of the League of American Wheelmen to bring about the general introduction of the State Aid system.”

The Model T was just around the corner, but it was the bicycle and bicyclists that made that corner. In 1902 these words appeared in a magazine called The Automobile:

“The effect of the bicycle on road improvement has been … phenomenal in the past 10 and 15 years …” …Directly and indirectly the bicycle has been the means of interesting capital in road building to the extent of millions of dollars, and of spreading abroad more accurate and scientific data concerning road construction than was ever before done in so short a time. The bicycle practically paved the way for automobiling.”

IT'S ONLY FAIR

Cyclists today get little gratitude for the early lobbying efforts to build smooth, safe roads. But it should also be noted that these early wealthy and influential cycling enthusiasts quickly became motoring enthusiasts. Henry Ford tends to get all the credit for automobile manufacturing, but it was the early bicycle manufacturers who converted bike factories to car factories. Henry Martyn Leland, before he created Cadillac and Lincoln, was making bike transmission parts for Colonel Pope’s bike company. A car, after all, is just a glorified motorized quad-cycle.

Men like these are often portrayed as the protagonist in the power and glory of the early story of bikes, but women rode too. And it wasn’t just high-society women biking either. In 1872, Louise Armaindo, set the American long-distance record, covering more than 600 miles in 72 hours. In 1890, Kittie Knox became the first African American woman to become a member of the League of American Wheelman. She didn’t stop there. She became a successful bike racer and became the first woman to be seen racing in ‘bloomers’ instead of a skirt. Sadly, she still faced fierce discrimination. And while the bicycle plays a huge role in the liberation of women, and a symbol of the suffrage movement, women are still fighting for recognition, acceptance, and necessary leadership opportunities in a the current burgeoning cycling movement. They are also unrepresented in determining the design and use of our roads.

Not much has changed since the 19th century. The design of motorized and non-motorized vehicles, and the transportation infrastructure they require, is still very much dominated by Western, mostly white, men. Just as those early bicycle and pavement businessmen came together around the L.A.W. to “organise capital accumulation, advanc[e] elite entrepreneurial agendas, and consolidat[e] urban regimes”, so too are today’s, mostly white male, CEOs of automobile, oil and gas, chemical, concrete and asphalt, and road construction companies.

And they’re all in collusion with legions of civil engineers, elected officials, and administrative workers at the federal, state, and local level to provide a transportation system that perpetuates our insatiable need to make more money to buy more things; this requires more roads to move more people and more things by car or truck; which in turn creates more waste, more pollution, and more traffic-related deaths.

This approach to planning public land has led to uneven urban and suburban development, perpetuated ethnic and race privilege, and is rooted in attitudes and beliefs stemming from a culture of patriarchy. As a group of transportation researchers out of Belgium observe,

“…how across strikingly diverse cities, urban regimes hide and legitimize these logics by applying the discourse of sustainability, framing infrastructural investment as a largely technical and rational response to the problems of congestion or low quality of public space. Instead, approached critically, transport is an essentially political issue of distributing social and spatial benefits and costs of urban development.”

That’s from their February 2022 paper, Moving past sustainable transport studies: Towards a critical perspective on urban transport. They call for a critical assessment of the study of transportation, adding that such a “perspective departs from analysing and juxtaposing specific transport modes (e.g. airplanes and private cars against public transport) and related lifestyles (e.g. mass tourism, suburban life and work against cycling and walking), and instead demonstrates their role in sustaining socio-economic structures that enable the capitalist mode of producing urban space and society. Therefore, in sum, being critical about transport means analysing it as a key component of capitalism.”

They go on to prove their point by querying existing transportation research for terms like “capitalism” or “capitalist”, “neoliberalism”, “feminism”, and “race” and find there are few results. The words “equity” or “equality”, and “gender” return just 2% of existing publications found in the hundreds of thousands of leading academic transportation and mobility journals. In the larger corpus of over six million Social Science publications the percentage of reports with those three words doubles to 4%.

They also point out “unravelling and analysing power and ideology underpinned and reproduced by transport in urban settings is by no means an exercise that hinges on a particular theoretical lens (Marxist, anarchist, feminist etc.) or focuses on a specific social group or factor (class, gender, ethnicity and race, age). But they nonetheless remind us that any critique of a system that has led to a climate-crisis and obscene income disparities has to be grounded in some social theory “because investigated facts are the result of human actions displayed within a given society.”

Only with this analytical lens, they write, will we be able to “rais[e] the fundamental question of whether the role of public transport is to provide a public service to its passengers, or rather to generate profits for its shareholders.” We should also raise the question of whether we want to continue to use public land in the form of streets to be a place where too many people fear they will die or become injured. Is that a necessary price for our social system?

Richard Van Deusen, an interdisciplinary researcher of the interaction of people and place writes: “Public space must be understood as a gauge of the regimes of justice extant at any particular moment.”

Is the comfort, convenience, and luxury of car-oriented travel patterns worth interrupting in the interest of improving the lives we live, the air we breath, and the water we drink?  And for all those who are forced to live where a car is needed to earn a living wage, or those with impairments, where are the plans for fair, equitable, and just transportation and/or housing alternatives?

When the freedom to choose comes with nothing to lose, the costs of social and spatial benefits diffuse. Escape the snare, get out in the air, let’s make our roads more fair. Equitable places in our public spaces means biking and walking everywhere. That may sound utopian, but as Geographer Don Mitchell once wrote,

“Utopia is impossible, but the ongoing struggle toward it is not.”

Hello Interactors,

Cities are sprawling, the climate crisis is appalling, left and right are brawling, and politicians are stalling — leaving many in a corner bawling. It’s enough to lead some star-gazing billionaires to want to colonize space. But we planned for this with cunningly precise maps. Have we always been this dim? The evidence suggests yes and no, opinions vary on why, but scaling laws offer clues on calculating a plan.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

GET ME OUT OF HERE

I am not a happy camper. I’m only really a happy camper when I’m far away from other campers – whether they are happy or not. It’s been awhile since I’ve camped, but I prefer solitude when seeking solitude. But as regional populations grow and more people are also seeking solitude, it’s harder and harder to ‘get away from it all.’

Car-camping definitely doesn’t do it for me. Especially now that most everyone has a phone blasting music through a Bluetooth speaker. I’ve seen some campers with solar panels, a satellite dish, and a TV blasting the news or sports. As night falls, and the alcohol comes out, I imagine I’d be laying there wondering where the nearest hotel is. And as the sun rises the kids start crying, hangry parents begin yelling, and cars fire up as people start heading out…presumably to get some rest.

I admit it’s more fun when you’re with a bigger crowd of family or friends. The revelry is more tolerable when it’s coming from within your circle. Sure that one uncle may be a bit obscene, but he’s family. These kids running around may seem obnoxious, but weren’t we all? I can imagine indignantly brushing off our loudness with, “at least we’re laughing.”

I remember as a kid growing up in Iowa camping with a friend and his family in their spacious camper-trailer. They had been doing it years and had made friends with other camper-trailer families. They’d roam together from campsite to campsite over the camping season. On the first night, around dinner time, I remember being handed a wooden spoon and sauce pan. My friend’s dad looked at me holding a skillet in one hand and a hefty metal BBQ spatula in the other, and said, “Just follow me.”

He stepped out of the trailer and started banging the spatula against the skillet. I followed along with the rest of the family playfully pounding my pot. It was then I realized we were being subsumed by a cacophonous cavalcade of culinary clanging campers. As we descended upon the campsite of an unsuspecting family, I realized I was participating in some kind of tribal ritual. It turned out this was their first night camping in their shiny new trailer; another member of the tribe, initiated. After everyone retreated back to their campers for a proper use of utensils, we regathered again; but this time around a common fire. We shared and prepared ingredients for another North American tribal ritual – S’mores.

The desire to come together around a campfire in the great outdoors is as old as Homo sapians. The welcoming ritual I participated in signaled cooperation; it acknowledged a trust between people who were not blood related. It’s an interaction of people and place that consecrates a common bond that is strong enough to incent people to repeat this ritual of cohabitating, and sometimes confabulating, around a fire.

These people share common ideals, backgrounds, desires, and sometimes even food. But for our prehistoric hunter-gather ancestors, the gathering and sharing of food was the top priority. The concentration of other families and tribes in a common space evolved to be a worthwhile endeavor. Close proximity with cooperative individuals resulted in sharing knowledge. Locals could offer advice on growing or gathering edibles and how best to hunt animals. (or assemble S’mores)

Labor could be divided, exchanges could be made, and rich – though often simple and informal – socio-economic systems could flourish amidst the interaction of people and place. Soon bonds are formed, breeding between families occurs, and the circle grows. Evolution rewarded this agglomeration of people and commiserate growth of a concentric area of shared space. It formed the basis of permanent human settlements, so long as balances were struck.

Over-crowded campsites, like contemporary cities, can be annoying. People are loud, some are rude, violent or selfish, and others steal – and anyone can spread illness and disease. Conflict is inevitable. Eventually, individuals and small groups decide to break away from it all. They set out to make temporary camps far away from concentrated populations of people. They may roam and hunt and gather for themselves making temporary settlements along the way. Sometimes they’d form their own settlements, while other times remain mobile. Evidence of this exists around the globe and across the history of humankind.

For centuries researchers have been uncovering evidence that leads to these theories. They’ve uncovered community plans, maps, and descriptions of place. Archeologists, anthropologists, and ethnographers have written countless descriptions and interpretations of found artifacts, ecologies, and environments from research sites around the world. Over the years these fields have agreed on what they call a ‘settlement scaling theory’ – a systematic study of the conditions leading to the population dynamics of human settlement. Research demonstrates that there are traits and conditions universally common to all of humanity, but that there are also cases of particularities and uniqueness as well.

SCALE IN PLACE OR SCALE YOUR SPACE?

Recently an interdisciplinary group of archeologists and urban scientists decided to contribute quantitative evidence to these theories of settlement scaling. So they compile a database of over 1000 different ethnographic studies conducted and published over centuries from around the world. In February of 2022, they published a paper called Scaling of Hunter-Gatherer Camp Size and Human Sociality that proposes a mathematical model that can be used to measure human population dynamics of settlement.

They derived and observed three mathematical scaling relationships looking at both settled and mobile hunter-gatherer societies.  

* Super-linear Growth: As concentrated populations increase it induces a greater than proportional increase in the area of the settlement. Imagine a campsite growing in population and needing to expand to make room for others.

* Linear Growth: When populations remain equal (or nearly equal) the area remains equal. For example, the number of campers and the size of the site remains constant.

* Sublinear Growth: Despite a population growing, the area remains the same or shrinks.

The first two are easy to imagine, but the last one less so. If we speculate these laws could be loosely applied to our current cities, it’s easy to point to examples where the footprint of a city grows or stays the same as the population grows or stays the same. But populations growing within an existing footprint is rare. I suppose one great example is Hong Kong. They built high into the sky to house a growing population and dug deep into ground to transport them with multiple levels of trains – all while keeping the perimeter of the city proportionally relatively constant.

A more ancient example offered by the researchers was found right here in the Pacific Northwest. The Haida, Kwakiutl, Nootka and Tlingit people along the Northwest coast all built permanent or semi-permanent settlements with growing populations despite the area of their settlements growing accordingly. They write,

“Mollusk collecting, harvesting of salmon and acorn stocks, organized communal hunting of sea mammals or terrestrial large game, gathering of nuts and berries, developed storage technologies, and a variety of sociopolitical and ritual institutions enabled societies on the Pacific Coast of North America to support semipermanent or permanent settlements that were inhabited for multiple years. The sublinear relationship between population and area observed in these settlements suggests that in larger settlements houses were spaced more closely together, contained more people per house, or both.”

This should be a rallying cry to density advocates everywhere!

These researchers claim to have included plan maps of settlements as part of their data collection, though I’m not certain how they were interpreted or coded. Sadly, most prehistoric maps are lost. Countless maps have been made by humans throughout history sketched in the dirt with a stick, marked on bark with charcoal, or inked onto animal skin. Often times maps were intended to be ephemeral or kept secret. While there are archeologists who confidently claim the rationale and meaning behind these prehistoric plan maps, some cartography historians claim they often lack the necessary surrounding evidence to be convincing.

One of the oldest examples is of what archeologists have interpreted to be of a settlement along a river that are etched in the tusk of a Mammoth dating back to the Ice Age 25,000 years ago. Found in 1966 in Ukraine, the ‘map’ features four shapes that are thought to represent dwellings along the Ros River. But cartography historian Dr. Catherine Delano-Smith finds it difficult “to see a close resemblance between the features scratched onto the bone and the excavated mammoth bone dwellings whichever way the drawing is oriented.” In other words, it’s unclear whether this is really a map.

A better candidate for a true surviving prehistoric map are the plan view maps from the Stone Age, roughly 12,000 years ago, in the petroglyphs of Mont Bégo in the Maritime Alps of Southern France. According to Delano-Smith these maps satisfy six or seven of the ten criteria needed to be considered a plan map by cartography historians: “Two (at least) hut signs; five enclosures (or four enclosures, one with a path across it); and three land-use signs (two forms of stippling and unstippled areas).”

But another Neolithic map found on two walls in Turkey helps boost evidence of prehistoric plan maps. Delano-Smith notes that,

“It would be difficult to see in this rectangular pattern anything of cartographic relevance were it not for the extraordinary resemblance of the rectangles in the wall painting to those drawn by the archaeologists as part of their excavation plan.”

While Delano-Smith believes there is “no neat evolution from one type [of map] to another, either from prehistoric to historical contexts or even within the historical period,” she believes there are shared concepts and purpose of maps. This is as true for prehistorical maps as it is for, as an example, the historical medieval maps of Europe. And while there are few surviving maps from that period as well, we know more about the history that surrounds them.

Of the few maps of medieval cities that remain, they all share something in common with maps that had been made for millennia prior – they feature orthogonal grids. Even the Stone Age plan map found in Turkey conforms to a loose grid. Well before surveying was invented, it appears gridded plan maps were convenient ways to virtually slice and dice land. Mapmakers, and their patrons, need not even visit the site to determine how it was to be used. One such Medieval example is a 1306 plan map of the town of Talamone in Tuscany on the west coast of central Italy.

ESCAPE OR ENGAGE?

As the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance, 15th century city plan maps proliferated alongside burgeoning European cities. They, and other historical artifacts, offer cultural clues that suggest elements of settlement behavior consistent throughout human history. For example, in 1551 a new residential development called The Strada Nuova was requested to be planned by a clan of nobility in Genoa, Italy. They wanted a neat little enclave tucked into a hillside where they wanted to move “in the proximity of relatives and dependents to a residential area based on class rather than blood.”

Like suburban residential developments of today, these lots were drawn with generous amounts of room and were neatly arranged. These plots were designed by Bernardino Cantone, a city administrator who not only assessed the value of property but arranged them next to the streets he was also planning. You have to wonder if these wealthy elite suburbanites were wanting ‘to just get away from it all’ and escape with their friends from the riff-raff in the city center.

It could be they were also seeking protection. Forty-four years after The Strada Nuova was first designed, nobleman Pietro Battista Cattaneo came along and modernized and fortified development. Cattaneo brought a new approach to urban planning that was rooted in survey technology. His plans included specific dimensions and were oriented like a proper map complete with a compass rose. His transformation plan for the Strada Nuova Development is considered the oldest surviving example of a full city plan.

The complex and detailed city plans of the Renaissance are a graphical record of a built environment that a) affords privacy to concentrated settlements of unrelated people and b) regulates interactions between people and place. These two factors in the emergence of permanent settlement suggest to those urban scientists in search of scaling patterns a watershed moment “in human development that made possible the open-ended accumulation of social products, in the form of stocks of knowledge and goods.”

They “conclude that longer-term camps and eventually permanent settlements require both energetically and socially favorable conditions, which can be realized in different ways in different physical environments and through cultural/social conventions/structures. Failure to realize break-even (or better) levels of energetic and social production simultaneously will lead to periods of alternating group fission and fusion.”   

They also emphasize their mathematical models are just that – models. They warn against a polarizing of interpretations of human behavior that is hard to describe and explain mathematically. Nonetheless, their research, like the traditional research they drew from, “steers a course between claims of universality for common human social and cultural traits and claims of particularism and uniqueness for individual cases.”

I do wonder how these scaling laws relate to the fact European cities today continue to sprawl despite their populations declining. Have they failed to ‘realize break-even (or better) levels of energetic and social production simultaneously?’ Are we seeing an alternating from the ‘fusion’ of populations in these cities starting with the Renaissance to a recent ‘fission’ of settlements that are leap-frogging from the ill effects of the so-called Anthropocene? Or are elites just seeking another Strada Nuova?

And surely there’s something to be learned from those coastal tribes of the Pacific Northwest who managed to grow and prosper as a population and as a culture without increasing their footprint. Perhaps more investigations into urban sublinear scaling are what is needed for us to draw new plan maps of our cities to achieve sustainable living. If we don’t do something, none of us will be happy campers. We’re already becoming loud, rude, and annoying. And that’s before the alcohol. The plan maps of the 50s and 60s, their dependency on cars, the insistence of developing countries to emulate them, and a collective human desire to increase consumption and comfort in settlements worldwide has led to humanity exceeding the carrying capacity of our only campsite – planet earth.

There are some who want to escape and colonize Mars, but I’m sticking with the evidence and opinion of these researchers when they conclude that the societal costs of agglomeration, “must be overcome through social or technological innovations.” Those innovations include “property rights, food production, group rituals, political institutions, substantial shelters, and more.” Only when these transformations occur will the “open-ended densification [of] permanent settlements [] emerge.” Only then will we be happy campers.

Hello Interactors,

Do you ever walk through a neighborhood and wonder where all the people are? It happened to me last weekend. What’s worse, it was a 1960s planned development that reminded me of the suburb where I grew up. I don’t remember the streets being this quiet, but maybe these planned communities were meant to be this way. Or maybe we’ve changed. Or both.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

A DASH TOWARD THE PAST

There it sat in the driveway, a brawny black pickup truck with an NRA sticker in the rear window and TRUMP plastered on the bumper. The protruding chrome tailpipe was gaping wide. Black exhaust dust clung to its edges. Three late-model cars were parked askew in the front lawn. Two doors down and across the street I saw a pride flag hanging next to a Black Lives Matters sign that read, “WHITE SILENCE IS WHITE VIOLENCE.”

I passed more houses and heard a barking dog approaching angrily. It ran alongside a taco truck parked in a driveway with the name of a Mexican restaurant painted on the side. Two other cars were in the driveway and one in the lawn behind a chain-link fence that restrain the dog. I had walked nearly an hour in this suburban neighborhood and had yet to see a single human being.

I was at my son’s track meet last Saturday in a town near Tacoma called Federal Way. I had some time to kill so I decided to take a walk. I picked a green patch on Google Maps that appeared to go down to the water and headed off to explore. The sidewalk from the High School ended 50 feet from the parking lot and I never saw another. The streets were quiet in this 1960’s neighborhood scattered with single story ranch-style homes intermixed with two-story split-level boxes.

Melancholy reflected off of these beige, white, and brown painted homes. They all featured a yard, a driveway, assorted overgrown shrubs and a tree or two. These homes are identical to the homes I would run in and out of as a kid in small town suburban Iowa. They were all built as part of the post-war building boom during America’s economic heyday when ordinary, mostly White, middle class folks could buy into the American Dream.

This housing development was built to accommodate a booming population drawn to jobs at the Tacoma Port, nearby Boeing factories, lumber yards, and paper mills. As the 1964 King County Comprehensive Plan states,

“…certain areas in King County, such as Federal Way, will have a population boom partially due to the employment opportunities that exist or are contemplated in the Tacoma area.”

Development was happening so fast that in 1958 the State of Washington purchased a 300-acre swath of land at nearby Dash Point for $185,000 to make it a state park. That’s $1.7 million in 2022 dollars and about what you’d pay for a single home near Dash Point today. Indigenous people lived on these shores before being displaced to a nearby reservation as part of the 1854 Treaty of Medicine Creek. The Puyallup people are still fighting for access to surrounding private land to fish; their lawful right as written in the treaty. Most, if not all, treaties fail to honor Indigenous notions of shared use of land and resources that fly in the face of more self-centered and guarded Western ideals and philosophies of individual property ownership and rights.

The state’s 1958 purchase of the Dash Point property was from a company aptly named the “Modern Home Builders.” That same year natural gas pipelines were laid and fire hydrants were getting installed every 600 feet. In 1959 a sewer plan was revised to keep up with the rapid development.

In 1960 a 600-acre “Residential Park” began showing their 650 homes to buyers – many of whom were likely war veterans who were enjoying cheap government subsidized mortgages. Churches were being erected, bowling alleys were being laid, and ‘American Concrete’ had their grand opening featuring “Free Washed Sand for the Kiddies.”

This Federal Way neighborhood I was walking in wasn’t the only one going through this transformation in the 1950s and 60s. It was happening across the country. I grew up in one and benefited from it. It was easy for me to imagine these homes as brand new. I could close my eyes and smell fresh white American concrete, I could see kids riding their bikes, new cars pulling into the driveways, and smoke rising from the backyard barbeques. Life was good.

By 1966, when most of this neighborhood I was walking through was built, the U.S. stock market had peaked. Nobody would have believed it then, but this marked the beginning of a long slow economic decline. The stagflation of the 1970s and the area’s shift toward software in the 1980s and 90s froze much of Federal Way in the past. Beginning in 1990 with the Washington Growth Management Act suburban sprawl was curbed, then much of Boeing left the area, mills closed, and Western Washington jobs shifted from blue collar to white.

Meanwhile, today the tech industry continues to push home values across the region upward while most incomes remain stagnant. The median price of a home in Federal Way is $580,000 and has grown 16% year over year for the last five years. The estimated yearly median income between 2013-2017 was around $62,000 and the per capita income was only $30,288. That’s well below the 2020 median household income in the United States of $67,521 which had dropped from $69,560 the year prior. Federal Way may be lagging economically, but it is extremely rich with diversity. The Federal Way School District reports over 111 different languages spoken in family homes. But not in the streets where I was walking. Not a peep.

This is a common sight in many suburban neighborhoods, and this one was no exception. Though, seeing one to five cars per household led me to believe these people must be home. I can imagine each of these homes filled with people glued to a screen. But should they ever leave, they’ll surely get in a car given the walkability score of 22 out of 100. Besides, there aren’t many places of interest within walking distance. Unless, of course, you’re a walking fanatic like me.  

CURVESOUS CARTESIAN CUL-DE-SACS

This area, like so many others, was designed to be anthropocentric – it puts the individual self at the center. Just as cars do. America is made for cars and driving a car conjures a belief that the ‘self’ is most important. This is my car and my road so get out of my way. Automobile advertising repeatedly reinforces the image of being alone in comfort in a climate controlled moving cocoon made of metal and plastic. It’s hard to deny, a good car is comfortable.

And most of them comfortably reside at these single family homes which are also designed to put the ‘self’ and the ‘single’ family first. The handful of Christian churches I walked by also stress the power of the individual. The Bible’s Book of Genesis verse 1:26 states:

“God” said “Man” has “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

Does that not sound kind of creepy?

Civil Engineers and Urban Planners were, and still are, the gods who hold dominion over city plans that often encourage cities to creepeth upon the earth. Federal Way itself crept out of sprawling Seattle and Tacoma. Planners made sure to plan for demand and single family homes on a large piece of land is what people demanded…and developers happily lent a hand. These demands have not receded. The 1964 King County Comprehensive Plan addressed ‘Residential Land Use’ with these words,

“Over the years and especially after World War II, the continued construction and upgrading of highway facilities has consistently improved accessibility to major employment centers. Since there has been ample suitable residential land available in relation to the demand, the effect of improved accessibility has resulted in residential development being located farther and farther out from major centers of employment. From the earliest times of the history of King county, a larger percentage of its residents have shown a preference to living in single family dwellings as opposed to multi-family structures. They could always afford this preference.”

They noted that in 1960 Seattle used 36 acres per 1000 persons, but by 1964 were planning to double that to 72 acres per 1,000 persons outside the ‘Urban Area’ of Seattle. They said,

“In the past, the grid iron pattern resulted in more acreage in streets than recent development.”

And since the 1950s and the expansion of freeways and highways there would be less need for the grid and compact development. They said,

“In the future, a large percentage of the streets and highway system acreages will consist of freeway type facilities rather than local streets.”

And to make sure developers, for whatever reason, didn’t attempt to build more dense housing on these sprawling acreages they included language that protected residents who may resist such attempts. They draw special attention to “URBAN CENTER DEVELOPMENT” (their emphasis), They wrote,

“residential densities should decrease at greater distances from an urban center…Some areas of the County should be kept at a lower density even though close to an urban center. These areas include locations where a pattern of large lot sizes is already established or is desired and where residents need the assurance that the character of their neighborhood will be stabilized.” (my emphasis)

There is a discernable distaste for uniform Cartesian grids in the language of this plan. Part of the modernist post-war vision was to move away from compact urban development of the 19th century that favored neighborhood stores, modest property allocations, and use of public transit. Multi-family structures had connotations of poor, often ethnically diverse, residents which by today’s standards are read as thinly veiled racist and classist biases. The 1950s and 60s pushed for more rural and pastoral land use that attempted to blend a growing middle class into a natural landscape connected to a freeway.

They wrote,

“The grid form of layout, while easy to design on the drawing board, can result in inharmonious relationships with the site. It can, however, add clarity to an otherwise confusing street pattern, but should be used judiciously to avoid monotonous rows of houses.”

They instead called for more organic street and lot layout saying,

“Depending on topography or other natural features affecting street design…an infinite number of variations exist in the arrangement of lots and houses and can be used to take advantage of natural features of the landscape.”

The cul-de-sac is called out in the plan as one example to follow.

“A third general form may be called a court, cul-de-sac, or cluster, and features a grouping of buildings which have service orientation at the street but privacy to the rear.”

I grew up on on a cul-de-sac and can vouge for the design goals these planners set out to achieve. But we now know that these dead ends can lead to overly circuitous routes should people choose to walk, bike, or bus to their destinations. They were planning for the automobile as the only viable and desirable choice of transport.

“residential neighborhoods should be designed with long blocks in order to avoid excessive cross streets which are costly to construct and maintain…Pedestrian crosswalks should be required only where necessary such as through blocks over 900 feet in length or where access to a school, park, or shopping area is essential.”

While they did recommend providing a sidewalk on at least one side of the street, it read more as a suggestion than a requirement. Under a section titled, “Street Design Factors” they said this about sidewalks,

“Even though sidewalks may be used less for walking in residential than in business areas, their hard surfaces provide children’s play areas close to home.”

THE APPRAISAL OF THE SOCIO-SPATIAL

The words “close to home” say a lot about these city plans and the desires and demands of home owners and builders. These places were designed and engineered by professionals from ‘above’ using maps and diagrams. They remained detached from the people and places they were planning for. And the very ‘townscapes’ these people were designing were intended to detach the occupants of these spaces from the larger, messy, and complex society that surrounded them.

They made plans for homes with ‘privacy in the rear’ where children play ‘close to home’. Architects and builders designed structures that insured privacy – in the words of ‘High Modernist’ Le Corbusier – they were “machines for living.” These properties included ‘service orientation at the street’ that included a driveway leading to a garage where the other ‘machine for moving’ could be stored.

This methodically mapped, measured, and mechanized ‘mecca’ is the making of well meaning men dating back to Mercator. The 17th century father of Cartography used techniques of triangulation to turn the earth into a scientific measuring instrument. The centuries old Mercator projection, which distorts northern land masses to give priority to the Dutch sailing distances between them, is still the most popular and familiar projection used today.

Then came Newton who saw the entire universe as a kind of machine – “a container for objects and facts.” He married his Newtonian physics with Euclidean geometry. The philosopher Immanuel Kant, who also taught physical geography, argued “space and time were inner conditions of the human…ordered by logical categories.”

Starting in 1747, and over the course of 50 years, the Cassini family drew a highly precise map of France using geodesic triangulation – the first of its kind. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) expanded on these techniques to measure and delineate land across the United States. But theses topographical maps were also used for the erasure of certain natural elements and to eliminate certain people. After all, their primary purpose was, and still is, to wage war or defend against it. These maps also remain the basis for mapping, planning, and ordering urban areas in the United States to this day.

This Western anthropocentric, mechanistic, objectification of spaces, and the use of maps and drawings to represent them, is alluring and seemingly addictive. It’s also part of the reality of everyday urban life. Ali Madanipour, a Professor of Urban Design at Newcastle University, separates urban spaces into two dimensions: physical and social.

The ‘physical’ is what garners the most attention, probably because it’s most visible and easy to understand. The arranging and grouping of buildings is at the scale of an urban planner and politician, the form and function of buildings are the domain of architects and developers, and the patterns and construction of spaces in between these structures, like streets, alleys, highways, freeways, and parking lots, is the domain of the civil engineer.

These objects are arranged in space creating places where people interact with each other and the natural and built environment – the interaction of people and place. But these interrelationships extend to the people who build them and those who control how, when, and where they’re built. This complex, multi-dimensional, interconnected social dimension over space and time is hard to see, harder to visualize, and thus hardest for us all to understand.

Madanipour summarizes,

“A study of urban form therefore refers to the way physical entities, singly or in a group, are produced and used, their spatial arrangements, and the interrelationships, and also how monetary and symbolic values are attributed to them.”

The way men mapped and arranged the physical entities in that Federal Way neighborhood were produced for the monetary gain of developers, the city, county, and state. The symbolic values were codified in that 1964 King County Comprehensive Plan that encouraged interrelationships between individuals to be in the home, close to home, or in a car – all while guaranteeing the ‘character of their neighborhood’ would be stabilized.

It was all planned on a map that men loomed over like a god or a general staging a battle over territory. But they were also giving people what they wanted. Weyerhaeuser wanted trees for paper and profit, developers wanted stolen land in exchange for money, and people wanted what many believe is entitled to them: individual ownership of their land. After all, it’s written in the preamble of the U.S. Constitution – to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity".

The GPS I used to navigate these quiet curvilinear roads, carved into the earth then cauterized with concrete, is rooted in the same Western history of cartography, science, and philosophy that assisted in building its physical urban form. But the space I was visiting was not designed to be used as I was using it. That is why, to some degree, I didn’t see a single person. This environment was not built to foster interactions between people and place, but for cars to move individuals through space.

This place was designed for these people to be ‘close to home’ and in the home. These residents were probably socializing and forming interrelationships, but in a virtual environment. There were being entertained on a screen in their hand, on a desk, or on a wall. The culmination of combined technologies as old as their homes.

And when they did finally decide to leave their home, they likely tapped their destination on their phone. They climbed into their ‘machine for moving’, and were instructed to drive to clusters of physical structures of their choosing. They then glided on surfaces of ‘in-between’ spaces across America’s concrete places. The American dream financed by a loan. Blessings of liberty, that has left them alone.