“Many creative writers keep journals; the sociologist’s need for systematic reflection demands it.” -C. Wright Mills

Carlin Romano writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education about his fear that by 2020 professors will stop assigning full books. The tendency when developing syllabi is to cram as much as possible into them. This means trimming longer pieces down to manageable chunks. Romano opposes this movement into twitterature.

Oddly, I find myself inclining in the same direction. As I start to put syllabi together, I find myself more willing to cut out many additional perspectives and readings one might also consider and focus in on a narrower set of concerns. To some extent, every syllabus requires this kind of editing, of course, but I’m beginning to think that students might understand more by covering less material more deeply. And this semester I will be experimenting with that. My students will read the entirety of Piven and Cloward’s Regulating the Poor over three weeks. I want to give them a longer historical view over poverty policy in the US and am yet sufficiently unfamiliar with the book to know what can be cut (if anything). So we’ll be exploring the whole darn thing.

I’ll have to be sure to poll the students on their experience.

The more I think about Romer’s charter city idea, the more I grow interested in new towns. They are employed throughout the developing world as ways to relieve the pressures of rapid urbanization, e.g., in Cairo. I must learn more.

Two articles by tech entrepreneurs in essence revisit Anna Lee Saxenian’s Regional Advantage. The comparison here is between Silicon Valley and New York, rather than Boston, to address claims that NYC is a new hotspot for tech.

In the first article, Matt Mireles from SpeakerText lists the financial and technical reasons for moving to the Bay Area (basically lack of depth and inability to understand tech startups). The second article, Antonio Garcia-Martinez identifies the cultural elements that underlie these more technical reasons. The Bay is Better.

[Update: For an urbanist take, Mike Gurstein on whether or not attempts to replicate Silicon Valley should even be made.]

For those of you who like your cities like your video games.

An article from Slate on the history and near future of moving walkways.

n+1 has an article suggesting that:

It would add a nice dialectical twist to the future history of our period if it could be said that, around the time the post-Maoist Chinese took up shopping, the post-bubble Americans turned to studying Marx.

This article by Benjamin Schwartz lambastes Sharon Zukin, Michael Sorkin, and Jane Jacobs’ middle class view of the gentrifying neighborhoods they fetishize, specifically the West Village of the 1950s. It’s excellent. Basically, he accuses all three of idealizing a particular neighborhood at a particular point in time  and striving to freeze that tumult into a theatrical setting (Disney-esque?) for the enjoyment of them and their white collar friends. All the while, they ignore that the conjunction they find so appealing was a result of the broader economic processes that hastened its disappearance. He makes the useful observation that they rightly decry the acceleration of neighborhood transition.

Some fun quotes:

Whatever the merits of the opposing positions, one of the proponents of renewal was surely prophetic in arguing in 1961, “If the Village area is left alone … eventually the Village will consist solely of luxury housing This trend is already quite obvious and would itself destroy any semblance of the Village that [Jacobs and her allies] seem so anxious to preserve.”

In their analyses of each, it’s clear that they pine for—and mistake as susceptible to preservation—the same sort of transitional moment Jacobs evokes in Death and Life, when an architecturally interesting enclave holds in ephemeral balance the emerging and the residual. Such neighborhoods still contain a sprinkling of light industry and raffish characters, for urban grit, and a dash of what Zukin calls “people of color,” for exotic diversity. Added to the mélange are lots and lots of experimental artists (for that boho frisson) and a generous but not overwhelming portion of right-thinking designers, publishing types, architects, and academics, and the one-of-a kind boutiques and innovative restaurants that will give them places to shop and brunch.

Mostly, though, such political solutions seem quaint: all this bellyaching about authenticity and lost soul. Sorkin and Zukin, sentimental progressives, need a bracing dose of Marx. Manhattan is the primary locus of global capitalism, the most voracious force for change in history. Best to pick a different place to try to render fixed and solid that which inexorably melts into air.

I believe I overheard after my defense that Lance will be taking over the director position from Bob. Might have misheard.