urban decay

84 results back to index


pages: 491 words: 141,690

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

The American legal system must have consistency if it is going to work for the people, but when the world watched bankers steal billions of dollars from the American taxpayers and walk around as if they are gods, it creates a feeling of hopelessness in the public that there might just be two sets of laws: one for them, and another set for everyone else. Deliberate Urban Decay Is there urban decay in the United States? Have a tall glass of water in Flint, Michigan, walk down the street at night in Trenton, New Jersey, or go buy a house in Detroit for $1, then it will be obvious that the destruction of the inner cities began long ago. It was a pre-planned event designed to fill the cities with heroin, crack cocaine, and guns, while removing all disposable income, working- age fathers, and what little hope was left.

The Most Dangerous Company in the World An Idea So Good That It Has To Be Mandatory The Club of Rome The Trillion Dollar Lie Crumbling Infrastructure Regulating Government Stupidity PRE-WEAKENING OF THE BUILDING Playing a Rigged Game Globalization and the Amazon Economy Rise of the Eastern Empire Profiting From the Big House Deliberate Urban Decay Rules for Radicals IDENTIFYING THE SUPPORT COLUMNS Destroying Critical Thinking We Don’t Need No Education The Death of American Exceptionalism Rights, Not Privileges The Military-Information-Terror Complex The Fear & Death Administration (FDA) Control Alt Delete The Legalization of Lies RIGGING THE DETONATORS The American Printing Press in Action Before Coronavirus (BC) Terrorists in Nice Suits Economic Darwinism The Athlete’s Foot of Washington D.C.

The people decide what dreams and stories they do and do not buy – going right back to the Original Sins. Original Sins The American Empire has already been quietly dismantled well in advance so as not to raise the alarm bells that could wake sleeping dogs. Think a decline in morals and values, urban decay, government transparency, and most pervasively, the gradual removal of freedom. The most logical question is “why”? Why must the American Empire fall? The answer is relatively simple. The people in charge are going to bring this beast down on purpose to destroy the citizens that they have no respect for, to reset their fraudulent central banking system that has come to the end of its functional lifespan, and to hide their numerous and horrendous crimes against humanity… and then offer their solution.


pages: 248 words: 73,689

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Today, the decline of formerly prosperous cities in the ‘Rust Belt’ of the United States and other old industrial heartlands is fuelling a politics of resentment and rage. Inhabitants of these communities have found themselves struggling to make ends meet amid downward spirals of joblessness and urban decay. Meanwhile, elites in booming cities like New York, San Francisco, London and Paris have enjoyed soaring incomes. The resulting disillusionment has given rise to Trumpism and Brexit, and fuelled populist resentment against mainstream parties across Europe and the Americas. In the previous chapter, we explored how the rise of empires was associated with a centralization of power and wealth in imperial capitals.

Since the 1980s, however, economic activity has concentrated in a small number of major cities such as New York, San Francisco and Chicago, while many formerly thriving cities and towns have been left behind. Cities like Detroit, Cleveland and Milwaukee, once among the richest in the country,16 have entered seemingly intractable cycles of urban decay, with high rates of poverty, deteriorating public finances, decaying infrastructure and widespread crime. Income per capita in St Louis has fallen from 90 per cent of the level in New York in the late 1970s back down to 67 per cent.17 The urban-rural income gap has also surged to historic heights, as numerous rural centres have found themselves wrestling with joblessness and stagnating incomes.18 The decline in the tyranny of distance through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries helped to spread economic opportunity across the United States, and turned the economy into a network of many thriving cities and towns.


pages: 281 words: 86,657

The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City by Alan Ehrenhalt

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, British Empire, crack epidemic, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Frank Gehry, gentrification, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, land bank, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, megaproject, messenger bag, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Peter Calthorpe, postindustrial economy, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional

Environmental Protection Agency, February 2009. 7 “I woke up this morning”: Lyrics from the song “Gentrification Blues,” by Judith Levine and Laura Liben, 1982, quoted in Tom Slater, “A Literal Necessity to Be Replaced: A Rejoinder to the Gentrification Debate,” International Journal of Urban and Economic Research, March 2008, p. 216. 8 “The bear pit of gentrification debates”: Rowland Atkinson, “Gentrification, Segregation and the Vocabulary of Affluent Residential Choice,” Urban Studies, November 2008, p. 2634. 9 What is new in the past decade: See, for example, Lance Freeman, There Goes the ’Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), and Jacob L. Vigdor, “Is Urban Decay Bad? Is Urban Revitalization Bad Too?” National Bureau of Economic Research, working paper 12955, March 2007, www.nber.org/papers/w12955. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Abbott, Carl. Greater Portland: Urban Life and Landscape in the Pacific Northwest. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.

Wall Street Journal, December 13, 2010. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. “Housing the Olympics: Atlanta 1996.” U.S. Housing Market Conditions, Summary, Spring 1996. Vigdor, Jacob L. “Does Gentrification Harm the Poor?” Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs, 2002, pp. 133–82. ——. “Is Urban Decay Bad? Is Urban Revitalization Bad Too?” National Bureau of Economic Research, working paper 12955, March 2007. Wolfgang, Laura. “The Sheffield Neighborhood: North Side’s Mini Melting Pot.” Midwest Magazine, Chicago Sunday Sun-Times, July 23, 1972. Wyly, Elvin, and Daniel Hammel. “Commentary: Urban Policy Frontiers.”


Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity Into Prosperity by Bernard Lietaer, Jacqui Dunne

3D printing, 90 percent rule, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, clockwork universe, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, conceptual framework, credit crunch, different worldview, discounted cash flows, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, liberation theology, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, Occupy movement, price stability, reserve currency, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban decay, War on Poverty, working poor

Rabot is the poorest community in the entire region. Most of the population lives in low-income apartment buildings in one of the most densely populated localities in Europe. Well over 20 languages are spoken, with Turkish the most prominent. Rabot suffers from high unemployment and the usual symptoms of urban decay, which have profound effects, both physical and metaphysical. In 2009, one of the authors was asked what could be done to improve the area. The starting point was a survey to find out what residents wanted for themselves. Many, particularly those living in high-rise apartment buildings, wanted to have access to a few square yards of land for gardening, growing vegetables, and flowers.

See Alchemy Transportation, 126–128, 201, 218–219 Trash, 141–142, 143, 145, 165–166 Treaty of Maastricht, 231n14 Triangle, 171 Trickle-down economics, 217 Trueque club, 182–184, 183 Trust, 19–20, 46; creating community, 171–172; in Friendly Favors, 132; WIR and, 100 Tutoring, 82 Twister, 156–157 Two-body problem, 30– 31 Uang kepeng, 189, 237n4, 237n5 Underclass, 216 Unemployment, 15–18; college and, 226–227n13; JAK bank and, 113; LETS and, 76; Nazi Party fueled by, 180; Patch Adams Free Clinic and, 164; in Rabot, 151; in Weimar Republic, 236n10; Wörgl and, 175–178 UN Happiness Resolution, 131 Union, 16, 119 United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), 144 260 INDEX Unit of account, 58; money defined as, 28; professionals describing, 1–2; time as, 80– 81. See also Terra Trade Reference Currency University, 153–154, 193, 226–227n13 Unused resource, 59– 60, 80, 92, 120–121; in Curitiba, 142, 144; Terra and, 137 Upper class, 29, 50 Urban decay, 151 Urbanization, 103 Uruguay, 121, 124, 126–128 Value neutrality, 9, 46– 47 Velocity of circulation, 63– 64, 68– 69, 101–102, 178 Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility (VBSR), 102–103 Vespasian, 197–198, 238n23 Veteran, 171–172 Victim, 78–79 Virtual reality, 57– 58 VISA, 192 Visiting Nurse Ser vice, 83 Volunteer, 34, 120 Voting, 147, 193 Voucher currency, 170 Wales Institute for Community Currencies, 160 War, 34 Wära, 175–176, 178–179 War on drugs, 134 Water rights, 187 Weimar Republic, 236n5, 236n10 Whitewashing, 198 WIR, 5, 74–75, 99–102, 235n12 WIR Bank, 100 Wispelberg School, 156–157 Wispos, 156–157 Women, 20, 205, 222–223 Word of mouth, 111–112 Wörgl, 175–178, 177, 180–181 Work, 219–220, 239n10 World Bank, 144, 188 World War I, 178–179 World War II, 99, 119, 153, 181 Writing, 24 Youth Advocate program, 83 Zeitgeist, 2 Zumbara, 82 Zutu, 207 ABOUT THE AUTHORS Photo credit: Rick Cummings.


Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age by Lizabeth Cohen

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, benefit corporation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, charter city, deindustrialization, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Lewis Mumford, megastructure, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent control, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

But Ed Logue retained for life a special feeling for his first design partner, Paul Rudolph. Margaret Logue attributed their connection to “the chance occurrence of the two living in the same university community and sharing a focus on urban problems early in their careers and early in the recognition of urban decay.”136 Both Logue’s and Rudolph’s personal papers contained clippings about the other, suggesting that they kept track of their respective careers. At their last known public meeting, a conference at the New School in New York City titled “Rethinking Designs of the 60s,” Logue acknowledged Rudolph with warm affection.

And it is noteworthy that the esteemed architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, a self-described “unrepentant modernist,” praised Logue for “put[ting] up little houses in the rubble on Charlotte Street that symbolized hope and renewal when the South Bronx had become the poster child for terminal urban decay. You could say they were the right thing in the right place at the right time.”68 More than anything else, the shift from the publicly subsidized housing that Logue had been able to build with federal urban renewal funds in New Haven, Boston, and New York State to projects more dependent on the private marketplace affected the architecture of what got built.

In a 1983 speech to the National Housing Conference, he railed against the now reigning philosophy of “Let the market forces prevail.”97 Stephen Coyle, a successor of Logue’s at the helm of Boston’s BRA who would go on to run the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust, visited Logue in the South Bronx that same year and felt he was witnessing “the master builder surrounded by urban decay, with the federal government abandoning [him].”98 Filling part of the gap left by the retreat of the federal government and performing a novel role that connected private-sector funders to nonprofit recipients was a new player in the world of urban redevelopment: the “third sector,” dominated by foundations.


pages: 332 words: 91,780

Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity by Currid

barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Donald Trump, income inequality, index card, industrial cluster, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, place-making, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, prediction markets, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, rolodex, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Fry, the long tail, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, winner-take-all economy

By the following summer, Kennedy was on the cover of übercool fashion magazine NYLON and featured in newspaper articles and profiles in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times and in various other mainstream media. She appeared in a music video rocking out to Good Charlotte’s “Keep Your Hands Off My Girl,” which became one of the most widely viewed Internet videos of all time.1 Kennedy signed on as the face of makeup company Urban Decay and she became friends with all the young starlets from Paris to Lindsay Lohan to Samantha Ronson. She became one of the most popular girls on MySpace (over 20,000 friends) and developed an active Twitter following (some 23,000 followers as I write this). Along the way, Hunter and Kennedy broke up.

Sontag, Susan Sotheby’s South Beach (Florida) Southern California, University of South Korea South Park (TV show) So You Think You Can Dance (TV show) Spears, Britney; bad behavior of; celebrity residual of; comments on blog postings on,; economic impact of; paparazzi and; volume of media mentions of Spears, Jamie Lynn Spice Girls; see also Beckham, Victoria Spielberg, Steven Spitzer, Eliot sports; celebrity residual in; networks in; relative celebrity in; see also baseball; football; soccer Sports Illustrated Sports Network SPPS Clementine Springsteen, Bruce Stallabrass, Julian Staller, Ilona (Cicciolina) Starbucks starlets Starr, Freddie Starr, Ringo Star Search (TV show) Star Trek TV shows and movies Stiller, Ben Streep, Meryl Stuckism art movement Studdard, Ruben Studio 54 (New York) Style Rookie subcultures Submission (film) Sudan Summers, Harvard Sun (tabloid) Sun Country Classic Sundance Film Festival Sunday Times supermodels superstar effect Surowiecki, James Sutton, Willie Szymanski, Stefan tabloids; American Idol winners in; Aniston in; bad behavior coverage in; British; covers; events covered by; Hilton in; Indian; paparazzi and; publicists and; sports stars in; superstar effect and; among top two hundred best selling magazines talent; in art world; celebrity residual versus; geography of stardom and; networks and; relative celebrity and; Star Currency and Talese, Gay Talley, André Leon Target stores Tate Modern (London) Tatler magazine Tavistock Group Taylor, Elizabeth Teixeira, Mark Teller, Juergen Tequila, Tila Texas Rangers Thakoon fashion house Thousand Years, A (Hirst) Timberlake, Justin Tipping Point, The (Gladwell) TLC TMZ Tokyo; World Cup in Tonight Show, The Topshop Torre, Joe Torvalds, Linus Total Request Live (TRL) trainers Transformers (film) Treasury bonds TriBeCa Film Festival Tron (film) Tron Guy Trump, Donald Trump, Melania Tucker, Ken Turner, Graeme Turner Prize Tussaud, Madame (Marie Grosholtz) Twentieth Century-Fox Twilight Saga films Twitter Underwood, Carrie Ungaro Union Square Cafe (New York) United Kingdom; art scene in; awards shows in; fantasy war games in; film premiers in; political elite in; press in; publicists in; reality TV in; sports celebrities in; see also London United Talent Agency Universal Pictures Urban Decay US Weekly; casual shots of stars in; circulation of; endorsement deals announced in; mentions of Winslet versus Aniston in U2 Vaccaro, Sonny Van Gogh, Theo Vanity Fair magazine; Oscar party hosted by Vaughn, Vince Verardi, Vincenzo VH1 Vicious, Sid Viper Room (Los Angeles) Virgin brand Vogue magazine; online Voltaire von Furstenberg, Diane Von Teese, Dita Walker, Kara Walk of Fame (Hollywood) Wallace, David Foster Wall Street Journal Wal-Mart Warhammer Warhol, Andy Warhol Economy, The (Currid-Halkett) Washington, D.C.


pages: 356 words: 91,157

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It by Richard Florida

affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, Columbine, congestion charging, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, plutocrats, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, young professional

Why had the city exploded into racial turmoil and entered into such a steep decline? Why had the factory where my father worked closed down? My early experience of that original urban crisis left a deep imprint on me. When I went off to Rutgers College that fall, I found myself drawn to courses about cities and the urban issues of race, poverty, urban decay, and industrial decline. When I was a sophomore, my urban geography professor, Robert Lake, gave us an assignment to tour Lower Manhattan and chronicle what we saw. I was transfixed by the incredible urban change that was under way in SoHo, the East Village, and surrounding areas, captivated by the energy of the streets and of the artists, musicians, designers, and writers who lived and worked there.

As I pored over the data, I could see that only a limited number of cities and metro areas, maybe a couple of dozen, were really making it in the knowledge economy; many more were failing to keep pace or falling further behind. Many Rustbelt cities are still grappling with the devastating combination of suburban flight, urban decay, and deindustrialization. Sunbelt cities continue to attract people to their more affordable, sprawling suburban developments, but few are building robust, sustainable economies that are powered by knowledge and innovation. Tens of millions of Americans remain locked in persistent poverty. And virtually all our cities suffer from growing economic divides.


pages: 327 words: 88,121

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community by Marc J. Dunkelman

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, Broken windows theory, business cycle, call centre, clean water, company town, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Brooks, delayed gratification, different worldview, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, helicopter parent, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, invention of movable type, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Richard Florida, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban decay, urban planning, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Finally, each community needed a dense concentration of residents—a critical mass that would keep streetscapes lively.22 Jacobs’s approach was soon followed by more academic studies. Several decades removed from the Dickensian world of early twentieth-century American metropolises—and in the aftermath of the urban decay wrought, in some circumstances, by the successive riots of the late 1960s—Claude Fischer, a sociologist at Berkeley, decided to take a second look at the Chicago School’s assumption that the bonds of community were undermined by the process of industrialization. What he found largely contradicted the conventional view.

., 15, 50, 56, 187, 190 Chinatown Bus effect and, 47 gerrymandering and, xvi, 182–87, 189 of 2012, 7, 37–38, 184–85 Elks Lodges, 44, 116 e-mail, xi, 8, 109–10, 125, 145 End of History, The (Fukuyama), 230–31 England, xii, 81, 82, 157, 158, 166–67, 179, 194 entrepreneurialism, 82, 164 ethnicity, 32, 79, 147, 148, 231, 237 ethnic tensions, 4, 39 Europe, 81, 226, 230, 232 evangelism, 42, 71 evolution, 90–91 expectations, 30, 60, 70–71, 82 Facebook, 37–38, 45, 48, 108, 114, 124–25, 140, 145, 148–49, 152, 190, 194, 219 faith, loss of, xv, xvii, xviii, 14, 181–82, 193, 195 family, 70, 119, 125, 129, 139, 194 affirmation and, 104–7 extended (traditional), 12, 15, 16, 26–27, 68, 97, 106 health care and, 201, 210 income inequality and, 21–22 nuclear, 16, 26, 32, 84, 145 in Saturn model, 95, 96 single-parent, 26, 30–31, 43, 105, 216 Farmer, Paul, 64 fathers, 12, 106, 131 of author, 132–33, 134, 240 fax machines, 16, 35, 74 fear, 71, 84, 119, 128, 157, 233, 235 of hitchhiking, 133, 134, 135 homosexuality and, 42 quality of life and, 50–52, 55–57, 60 Federal Express, 147–48 Ferguson, Niall, 229 Fiddler on the Roof (musical), 69–70 filibuster, xvi, 182, 185, 188, 191, 248n Filter Bubble, The (Pariser), 37 Fiorina, Morris, 139 First Wave society, 16, 20, 31–32, 233 Fischer, Claude, 87, 88, 105, 106, 128–29, 237–38 Fishkin, James, 192–93 Florida, Richard, 83, 175 food, 51, 58, 62, 79, 136–37, 202 brain and, 90–91 see also agriculture Ford, Gerald, 47 Fortune, 4–5, 14 Fowler, James, 96 Fox News, 184, 187–88 France, 80 Franklin, Rosalind, 161 Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner), 7, 133–34 freedom, 25, 26, 43, 49, 52, 60, 67, 82, 102, 161, 207 French and Indian War, 157 Friedman, Thomas, xiv, 17–21, 24, 141–42, 151–52, 240 friends, 8, 12, 24, 25, 91, 95, 99–100, 101, 119, 120, 122, 124, 152, 194 affirmation from, 102–3, 104, 107, 110, 111 agreement of, 148–49 health care and, 201, 210 Fukuyama, Francis, 230–31 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 52 Gans, Herbert, 144–45 Gates, Bill, 10 gay marriage, 42, 50, 69 GDP (gross domestic product), 17, 53, 99, 180, 198, 227, 230 gemeinschaft, 86 General Social Survey, 105, 119–20, 260n–61n generational succession, 135 genetics, 160–62 genius, 159, 160, 162 Genovese, Kitty, 84–85 Georgetown University, 118 gerrymandering, xvi, 182–87, 189 ghettos, 128 Gingrich, Newt, 14, 15 Gini coefficient, 22, 23 Girls (TV show), 30 Gladwell, Malcolm, 6, 91–92 globalization, 17–18, 20, 50, 138, 141, 152, 221 global village, 16, 142–43 Google, 37, 194 government, U.S., xii–xviii, 52, 67, 200, 234 dysfunction of, 181–90 French government compared with, 80 health care and, 201–5 public frustration with, xiv–xvii, 181–83, 195 urban decay and, 127 Graduate, The (movie), 4, 28, 30, 248n Granovetter, Mark, 168–69, 266n Great Depression, 60, 68, 85, 202–6, 210, 226 Greatest Generation, 51, 70 Great Migration, 40–41, 43, 137 Great Recession, xv, 54, 55, 62, 106 Great Society, 210, 255n Gresens, Mr., 220–22, 225 grit, 5, 6, 216–25 Grove, Andy, 10 Guest, Avery, 118 Gutenberg, Johann, 162 “habits of the heart,” 81, 89, 115, 138, 258n Habits of the Heart (Bellah), 65–66, 141, 258n Hampton, Keith, 118–19 Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), 222, 224 health, health care, 101, 197–211 costs of, 198–200, 204–5, 206, 209–10 public, 197, 199, 204 quality of life and, 31, 51, 52, 57–60, 204 Hearst, William Randolph, 188 heart attack, 58, 200, 207 Heckman, James, 223 helicopter parent, 106 Henry, Peter Blair, 179–81 history, 51, 59, 67, 68, 230–34 affirmation and, 109, 110 of American community, 79–89 Dunbar’s number and, 94 Tofflers’ view of, 15–16 hitchhiking, 132–35 Hoffman, Dustin, 28 homogeneity, 46–47, 135, 147–48, 189, 191 homophobia, 42, 43, 51 homosexuality, 42–43, 87, 88 hospitals, 197, 199–204, 206–7 House of Representatives, U.S., xvi, 182, 184–85, 186 Hout, Mike, 237–38 Hughes, Charles Evans, 187 Hunter, James Davison, 69 hunter-gatherers, 16, 92, 142, 144–45 Hussein, Saddam, 67 Hutterites, 94 identity, 20, 42, 74, 130, 146 immigrants, 79, 82–83, 88, 232 income, xv, 21, 147, 180, 216, 227 discretionary, 55 inequality and, 21–24, 31 national, 21–22, 54 online communities and, 250n working women and, 27, 28 independence, 28–29, 30, 52, 57, 60, 106, 138, 151 of elderly, 197, 203, 207, 208–9 individualism, 65–66, 73, 74, 102 networked, 111 industrial paradigm, 14–15, 26, 82, 84–87, 170–71, 233 Industrial Revolution, xiii, 4, 16, 85, 86, 127, 138, 166, 201 inequality, economic, 21–24, 26, 31 information, 6–8, 18, 21, 26, 138, 260n brought together in a new way, 159–66, 209 Chinatown bus effect and, 35–38 information technology, 13, 16, 125, 141–43, 187, 209 affirmation and, 103–4, 108, 109–10 online communities and, 114–15 infrastructure, xiv, xv, xvi, 11, 25, 45, 194, 236 decay of, 229, 230 health, 200–201, 203–4, 206, 210 Inglehart, Ronald, 67–69, 73 inner directedness, 5–7 inner-ring relationships, see intimate relationships innovation, xiii, xvii, xviii, 158–75, 209 intellectual cross-fertilization, 158–68 interdependence, 17, 85–86 intermarriage: educational, 43–44 racial, 68 Internet, 10, 18, 36, 37, 121, 125, 146, 250n interracial marriage, 68 intimate relationships (inner-ring relationships), 92, 93, 96, 119–20, 137, 138–39, 145, 238 affirmation and, 103–7, 110, 112, 115 Chinatown Bus effect and, 42–46 health care and, 201, 204, 210 see also marriage iPhones, 160, 231 Iraq, 67 isolation: intellectual, 176 social, 73, 87, 113, 115, 118–19, 122, 127, 149, 207 Issacson, Walter, 164 Italy, 17, 163 It Gets Better Project, 43 Jackson, Kenneth, 40 Jacobs, Jane, 85–88, 127, 166–68, 170, 176 Jamaica, 179–81, 191 James, LeBron, 8–9 Japan, 226, 233 Jews, Orthodox, 98–99 jobs, 18–20, 23, 24, 27, 29, 30, 131, 139, 170–71, 235–36, 260n–61n affirmation and, 104–5, 107 assembly line, 53, 85 exporting of, 197–98 service, 18–19, 53, 132, 138, 236 Jobs, Steve, 10, 64, 160, 164–65 Johansson, Frans, 163, 168, 172 Johnson, Lyndon B., 127, 187, 210 Johnson, Steven, 159 Kahneman, Daniel, 13 Kelling, George, 150 Kelly, Mervin, 164 Kennedy, Robert, 206 Kenner, Edward, 158, 159 Kentucky, 147–48 Kerry, John, 47 Keynes, John Maynard, 53 Khrushchev, Nikita, 56 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 24, 46, 108–9, 128, 238 King, Stephen, 123 Kiwanis Club, 44, 45, 116 “Knowledge Is Power Program” (KIPP), 222, 223, 224 Koestler, Arthur, 158–60, 162, 166 Krebs cycle, 220–22 Ku Klux Klan, 111, 146 labor, labor unions, 14, 19, 20, 23, 53, 180, 181 leadership, xv, xvii, 23, 101, 108–9, 182, 186, 191 Leave It to Beaver (TV show), 34–35, 51 legislative districts, manipulation of (gerrymandering), xvi, 182–86, 189 Lehigh Valley, 170, 171 leisure, 53, 104–5, 139 Levin, David, 223 Levitt, Steven, 133–34 Lexus and the Olive Tree, The (Friedman), 141, 151–52 LGBT rights, 24, 42–43 libraries, 18, 36, 37 lifespan, longevity, 17, 31, 57–60, 62, 199, 204–5 Lincoln, Abraham, 228 Ling, Richard, 122–23 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 231 LISTSERVs, 114, 151 Little House on the Prairie (TV show), xii, 247n lobbyists, 183, 187, 229 Locke, Richard, 165, 172 Lonely Crowd, The (Riesman), 5–6, 7, 65, 141 Loose Connections (Wuthnow), 239 Lorain, Ohio, 79–80, 135 “lord of the manor” community, xii–xiii, 81 Lowery, Rev.


pages: 309 words: 96,434

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty First Century City by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, call centre, crack epidemic, credit crunch, deindustrialization, East Village, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, race to the bottom, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban renewal, white flight, white picket fence, World Values Survey, young professional

In Italy, France and Germany legislation had been passed to restrict large stores and favour smaller shopkeepers.12 In Britain things got so bad in the end that the policy of encouraging out-of-town superstores was actually reversed in the mid-1990s by the unusually far-sighted Conservative secretary of state, John Gummer. So it was out-of-town development, as much as decline in industry, which contributed to the perception of a rotting inner city. What really happened is far more complex than the appealing message that, following years of urban decay, the ‘urban renaissance’ transformed city life. The decline of the inner city and the ‘renaissance’, which is based on discredited ‘trickle-down’ economics, were not so straightforward, because trickle-down produces a very uneven pattern of growth, even when the boom and bust cycle is in an upswing.

Alongside shopping, the city’s ambition to reinvent itself as a centre for the global financial services industries initially went from strength to strength, with investment banks Kleinwort Benson, the Bank of New York and Citigroup all opening offices. Manchester, it seemed, had transformed itself, via ‘Madchester’, from industrial grime and decline to ‘the’ British city outside of London. Manchester seemed the perfect example of a city which symbolized the trajectory of progress proclaimed by the government, from urban decay to urban renaissance, and it was soon anointed New Labour’s favourite city. The love affair reached new heights when the party broke with ninety years of political tradition, abandoning failing Blackpool in favour of the upbeat image of Manchester as a more suitable venue for its annual conference in 2006.


pages: 349 words: 95,972

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford

affirmative action, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Erdős number, experimental subject, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, game design, global supply chain, Googley, Guggenheim Bilbao, Helicobacter pylori, high net worth, Inbox Zero, income inequality, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, microbiome, out of africa, Paul Erdős, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telemarketer, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche

But more pertinent, it was our eagerness to believe what his fraudulent study was telling us—to overestimate the ill effects of mess, to imagine that tidying up would have profoundly transformative effects on our moral selves, rather than just make our morning commute more pleasant—that led to its generating so much publicity. Not all messes have redeeming features: a train station that isn’t strewn with litter is more pleasant than one that is. It’s worth sweeping the platforms. But tidying up isn’t going to turn us into better people. • • • The story of the “broken windows” theory of urban decay is another example of how we instinctively overestimate the benefits of tidying up certain kinds of urban mess. The theory was proposed in an influential article in The Atlantic Monthly in 1982 by criminologist George Kelling and political scientist James Q. Wilson. Kelling and Wilson argued that small signs of disorder led to the breakdown of community norms and, eventually, to serious criminality.

The psychologist Philip Zimbardo is mentioned by Kelling and Wilson: He arranged to have an automobile without license plates parked with its hood up on a street in the Bronx and a comparable automobile on a street in Palo Alto, California . . . The car in Palo Alto sat untouched for more than a week. Then Zimbardo smashed part of it with a sledgehammer. Soon, passersby were joining in. Within a few hours, the car had been turned upside down and utterly destroyed.27 Interesting, but it is a stretch to build a theory of urban decay on what happens after one psychologist takes one sledgehammer to one car in one California city. The truth is that social science has not been able to muster much support for the broken windows theory of policing, nor for the idea that it deserves credit for breaking New York City’s crime wave in the 1990s.


The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities by Mancur Olson

barriers to entry, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, collective bargaining, correlation coefficient, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, full employment, income per capita, Kenneth Arrow, market clearing, Norman Macrae, Pareto efficiency, Phillips curve, price discrimination, profit maximization, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, search costs, selection bias, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban decay, working poor

Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, and Leeds completed the list in 1801. York, the third largest city in 1600, was the seventeenth in 1801; Newcastle, the fifth largest city in 1600, was the fourteenth in 1801, as indicated by table 5. 1.4 Even before 1601 there was concern about the "desolation of cytes and tounes." Charles Pythian-Adams's essay on "Urban Decay in Late Medieval England" argues from a mass of detailed, if scattered, figures and contemporary comments that the population and income of many English cities had begun to decline before the Black Death. Though Pythian-Adams finds that the decline of certain cities may be offset by the expansion of others, we are left wondering why so many towns declined while others grew.

Miriam Kohan (New York: Harper and Row; London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), pp. 439-40. 4. M. J. Daunton, "Towns and Economic Growth in Eighteenth-Century England," in Philip Abrams and F. A. Wrigley, eds., Towns in Societies (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978). p. 247. 5. Charles Pythian-Adams. "Urban Decay in Late Medieval England," in Abrams and Wrigley, Towns in Societies, pp. 159-85. 6. Domenico Sella, Crisis and Continuity, The Economy of Spanish Lombardy in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 136. On these matters see, for example, Jan De Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crises (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1976); Dudley Dillard, Economic Development of the North Atlantic Community (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1967); Henri Pirenne, Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1936); and Douglass C.


Pocket Stockholm Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, cashless society, Kickstarter, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, sexual politics, urban decay, walkable city

Off to the right is Whyred ( GOOGLE MAP ; %08-660 01 70; www.whyred.se; Mäster Samuelsgatan 3; h10am-7pm Mon-Fri, to 5pm Sat, noon-4pm Sun; dÖstermalmstorg), beloved for men's sweaters and women's shoes, among other things; next to that is the relatively new BLK DNM ( GOOGLE MAP ; %08-678 83 00; www.blkdnm.com; Mäster Samuelsgatan 1; dÖstermalmstorg), with its painfully hip jackets and other clothing by designer Johan Lindeberg. 4Cow Parfymeri A great place to pick up gifts to bring home, Cow Parfymeri ( GOOGLE MAP ; %08-611 15 04; www.cowparfymeri.se; Mäster Samuelsgatan 9; h11am-6pm Mon-Fri, to 4pm Sat; dÖstermalmstorg) is a cool cosmetics temple with a trendsetting range of perfumes, sticks and shades. Pick up rock-chic cosmetics from Urban Decay and Vincent Longo, or spray yourself silly with hard-to-find fragrances from Paris and New York. 5Espresso Stop By now you're probably ready for a break. The lovely Bianchi Cafe & Cycles ( GOOGLE MAP ; %08-611 21 00; www.bianchicafecycles.com; Norrlandsgatan 16; h11am-10pm Mon-Sat; dÖstermalmstorg) is an ideal spot for an espresso and a pastry. 6Kungsgatan You'll pass by all manner of retail outlets here, both local and global, including the fun outdoor market and food hall at Hötorget.


pages: 415 words: 119,277

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places by Sharon Zukin

1960s counterculture, big-box store, blue-collar work, classic study, corporate social responsibility, crack epidemic, creative destruction, David Brooks, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, mass immigration, messenger bag, new economy, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Despite the influx of young people, or “studentification,” longtime residents felt they benefited from this kind of upscaling. Neither did residents complain about residential gentrification. Because new apartment houses took the place of factories and other commercial buildings, some of which were already partly empty, few residents were displaced. Moreover the BID repeatedly evoked a narrative of narrow escape from urban decay, representing the area’s earlier incarnation as unsafe despite its low crime rate compared to other districts of the city. For all these reasons most neighborhood residents and community organizations did not speak out against privatization. Instead, they credited the BID for Union Square’s “dramatic turnaround.”20 The issue that finally stirred protest was the BID’s long-simmering plan to renovate a stone pavilion that had been part of the old speakers’ platform at the north end of the park and transform it into a white-tablecloth restaurant.

If the social life of the streets is truly important, the state should make sure that all the men and women who use the streets have affordable rents so they can continue to live in their neighborhood. It was easier, at the end of the past century, to see the shards of both origins and new beginnings in urban decay. Though few city dwellers want to return to those years of abandoned houses and dangerous streets, reclaiming our origins in the small scale of old buildings, the low rents of working-class neighborhoods, and fewer corporate names would take us a long way toward regaining that era’s strong sense of authenticity.


pages: 587 words: 119,432

The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall by Mary Elise Sarotte

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, conceptual framework, Deng Xiaoping, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, hindsight bias, Mikhail Gorbachev, open borders, Prenzlauer Berg, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, urban decay, éminence grise

In a moment of hubris, Honecker had once speculated about proposing Leipzig to host the Olympic Games. This statement would have been risible had Honecker not been serious. Jahn, Radomski, and Schefke decided that Honecker’s unwise proposal provided an excellent opening to alert the world to the environmental and urban decay in Leipzig. Radomski and Schefke grabbed the video cameras smuggled to them by Jahn and headed south from East Berlin to Leipzig to film an undercover mini-documentary. Their video included not just images of crumbling buildings blackened by pollution but also interviews with brave, disbelieving Leipzigers willing to say on camera that it was unthinkable that the city could host an Olympics.

., 56 Kochemasov, Vyacheslav, 52, 100–101, 102, 110, 111 Kohl, Helmut, 8, 91, 128, 179 adding territory of GDR to FRG, plan of, 170 and announcement of travel law, reaction to, 122–124 Basic Law, Article 23, allowing new states to join FRG and, 170–171 and Berlin Wall opening, response to, 158, 163–164 election 1990 and, 170 on Honecker, and use of force vs. reforms, 22, 178 and post-Cold War Europe, political structure of, 169–171 refugee crisis and, 25, 26–27 and travel law, draft of, and credit and Berlin Wall opening, 98 Kontraste (television program), 57 Krenz, Egon, 26, 164 and Berlin Wall, opening of, 150 and Berlin Wall, opening of, responsibility for, 177, 178 and Berlin Wall opening, inaccurate information to Gorbachev regarding, 160–161 and Berlin Wall opening, response to, 159–150, 161 and border shootings, ambiguous orders regarding, 16 closure of Bertele’s office and, 94–95 conciliatory rhetoric of, 89–90 on dependency on Western credit, 90 and emigration, and hole variant, 101–102, 103, 105 fate of, after German reunification, 175 fortieth anniversary of founding of PRC and, 43–44 as general secretary of SED, 88 hard-currency slush fund and, 90 and Honecker, coup against, 52–53, 55, 71, 72, 78, 82, 87–88 Leipzig ring road march and, 52–53, 71–72, 73–74 and Leipzig road ring march (October 9), SED recovery from success of, 81–82 New Forum and, 95 November 4 demonstration (East Berlin) and, 95–96 Politburo resignation plan of, 103, 111 Tiananmen Square massacre and, 43–44 on travel and emigration, 17–18 travel concessions of, 90–92 and travel law, and text on permanent emigration and temporary travel, 111–114 and travel law, draft of, 91–92, 93, 95, 100 and travel law, draft of, and free elections, 98 and travel law, Schabowski’s announcement of, 115 Kristallnacht, 114 Krolikowski, Werner, 103 Krüger, Hans-Joachim, 106–109 Kühirt, Theo, 75–76 Kusnetz, Marc, 116–117, 128–131, 151, 166 Kuwait, 179 Kuzmin, Ivan, 157, 158 Kvitsinsky, Yuli, 163 Labs, Helga, 115 Lamprecht, Jerry, 116, 130, 152 Lange, Bernd-Lutz, 55 Lässig, Jochen, 38, 51, 59 Lautenbach, Robin, 145 Lauter, Gerhard, xxiv, 114, 176, 179 and Berlin Wall, opening of, 156 and travel law, and text on permanent emigration and temporary travel, 107–109 and travel law, draft of, 93–94, 96–103, 105–109 and travel law, instructions for announcement of, 109 Lauter, Hans, 94 Leary, Mike, 40 Legal proceedings/investigations, and crimes/abuse by East German regime, 174–175 Legalization of political opposition, instructions to ignore, 19 Leipzig churches in, 89 (see also specific churches) environmental pollution/urban decay in, 47, 57 Leipzig protests/demonstrations, 32–47 activists vs. Nikolai Church leaders and, 32, 34, 37–41 disarmament rallies and, 34 dual-track decision of 1979 and, 34 escalation of use of violence (September/October) and, 44–47 and fortieth anniversary of founding of GDR, crackdown on, 44–46 May Day march (1989) and, 41 and Monday evening demonstrations, in outdoor forum, 39–41, 42–47 and Nikolai peace prayers, activists’ expulsion from, 38–39 and Nikolai peace prayers, activists’ resuming of inside, 41 and Nikolai peace prayers, politicization of, 32–33, 34–35, 36, 37–41 police responses to, 43 street music festivals and, 33, 36 and trade fairs, media coverage of, 33–34, 57 use of force and arrests during, 49–50 See also Protests/demonstrations Leipzig ring road march (September 25), 44 Leipzig ring road march (October 2), 45 Leipzig ring road march (October 9), 46–47, 49–82, 68 (map), 73 (photo) “Appeal of the Six” and, 55, 72 crackdown plans/preparations for, 50–55 draftees as riot police at, 54–55 Eastern Knot and, 70, 71, 72, 74 foreign media coverage of, 50 holding pens for detainees and, 53 “information smugglers”/underground journalistic network/covert courier service and, 56–66 Nikolai Church preparations for, 66–69 Nikolai prayer session and, 53, 54 number of protestors/activists at, 71–72 police and paramilitary organizations’ plans for, 51 and protestors and their publicizers, symbiosis between, 80 protestors’ appeal for nonviolence at, 55–56 secret filming, film smuggling and broadcasting of, 77–81 and security forces, equipment, and weapons, 50, 53, 54–55 and security forces, threat of violence against, 74 SED secretaries’ appeal for nonviolence during, 69 SED secretaries’ plans for use of force during, 70–74 size of, 75, 76 Soviet troops and, 52 stand-down order and, 74 start from Karl Marx Square, 69–70 Stasi and, 51, 75 success of, 75–78 success of, and party leaders, recovery of, 81–82, 87–89 violence against protestors at, and hospital treatment, 53, 54 Leipzig ring road march (October 16), 73 Leipzig ring road march (October 30), 89 Leipzig street music festivals, 33, 36 Leipzig trade fairs, 33–34, 57 Leipziger Volkzeitung, 45–46 Lemme, Udo, 106–109 Leonhardt, Peter, 139 “Let-off-steam solution” (permanent expulsion from East Germany), 141, 144 Liberal Party (FDP), 25 Literature, forbidden, at Environmental Library (East Berlin), 60–61 “Looking for Freedom” (song), 155 Luther, Martin, 33 Magirius, Friedrich, 35 and Wonneberger, removal of, as coordinator of peace prayers, 38–39 Maizière, Lothar de, 170, 171 Markkleeberg, 53 Marshall Plan, 6 Mascolo, Georg, 146–147 Masur, Kurt, 33, 55, 71, 72, 75 Maximychev, Igor, xxiv, 101–102, 109–110, 120, 156–158, 159 fate of, after German reunification, 176 Mazowiecki, Tadeusz, 23, 122, 123, 163 Meckel, Markus, 95 Media coverage, 181 and border opening, announcement of, 145 of border openings, 127–128 foreign, of Leipzig ring road march (October 9), 50 of Leipzig trade fairs, 33–34, 57 and travel law, Schabowski’s announcement of, 113 (photo), 114–119 See also specific broadcasters/broadcast networks; news agencies; television news programs Memorials to Berlin Wall opening, 183–184 Berlin design competition, 2007, 2010, 184 and nationalism and triumphalism, 183 Merkel, Angela, 147, 150 Meyer, Wolfgang, 112, 114, 115 Michaelis Church (Leipzig), 49, 68 Mielke, Erich, 42, 129 and border shootings, ambiguous orders regarding, 16 distribution of fire extinguishers, blankets, water buckets, chemical means of defense and, 89 and Gorbachev’s reforms, disapproval of, 22 and Honecker, coup against, 87–88 Leipzig ring road march and, 51, 71 on Leipzig ring road march (October 9), 77 “shoving” by security forces and, 61 and Stasi files, instructions to destroy, 172 suggestion of resignation and, 89 and travel law, draft of, 100 and Vienna accord, instruction to Stasi to hinder implementation of, 19 Ministry for State Security.


pages: 935 words: 197,338

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

The two never again set foot inside the company that they had founded. Bosack, once described by Lerner as an “alien,” went on to fund efforts to discover extraterrestrial intelligence.[87] Lerner channeled her energy into a successful cosmetics brand called Urban Decay, which challenged the “Barbie” aesthetic of the beauty-industrial complex. One Urban Decay product was a nail polish named Bruise. It was a fitting coda for a fighter. The firing of Cisco’s founders became part of Valley mythology. It was supposedly the moment when venture capital revealed itself in all its ruthlessness. Valentine himself did much to feed this story line, cultivating the image of the tough guy who canned people.

Rowe Price, 289, 346, 349 Trump, Donald, 402, 403 Tsai, Joe, 226–27, 228–29, 232–33 Tsinghua University, 238, 242 Tung, Hans, 225 23andMe, 313, 383 Twilio, 333 Twitter, 12, 211, 298, 307, 385, 452n TX-0 (computer), 19, 28 Tyson, Mike, 347 U Uber, 349–71 Andreessen Horowitz’s investment, 353–55, 378 Benchmark Capital’s investment, 172, 349–56, 358–71, 372, 380, 440n, 458n, 459n blitzscaling, 357–59, 362, 364, 385, 387 in China, 362–63, 364 Didi Kuaidi, 362, 363, 364, 459n Founders Fund and, 211, 444n Greyball, 365–66, 369, 459n Gurley’s attack and resignation of Kalanick, 366–69 Gurley’s critique of, 361–63, 373 IPO, 372–73 Menlo Ventures investment, 354, 355–57, 368 Son’s investment, 370–71 toxic culture of, 360, 365–66 UberX, 357–58 Ungermann, Ralph, 107–8 Ungermann-Bass, 107–8, 113, 129, 203, 432n unicorns, 13–14, 289, 296, 303, 304, 372, 414 Gurley’s critique of, 361–63, 373, 458–59n WeWork, 342, 343, 346–47 Union Street Railway, 24 Unity, 309, 313 university endowments, 62, 416n Sequoia’s Heritage funds, 321, 333–36 University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), 73, 75 University of Chicago, 49 University of Illinois, 20, 144–45, 200, 237 University of Virginia, 216 Urban Decay, 117 Usenet, 436n UUNET, 132–44, 148, 175, 179, 286, 436n V Vacuum Foods, 25 Valentine, Donald, 60–66, 79–80, 97 Apple investment, 83–87, 90–91, 96, 160–61, 428n, 430n Atari investment, 62–63, 64–66, 80, 96, 379, 426n background of, 60–61 Botha and, 306 Capital Group, 425n, 426n Cisco investment, 113–19, 131, 158, 379, 435n Facebook investment, 194–95 founding of Sequoia, 60–62 fundraising, 61–62, 92, 394 Horowitz compared with, 296 retirement of, 160, 304 stage-by-stage financing, 60, 66, 80 Yahoo investment, 160 Vassallo, Trae, 269–70, 271 Veit, Stan, 82–83, 87 Venrock, 51, 71, 86–87, 88, 90–91, 229 venture boom, 93, 96–97, 111 venture-capital mindset, 14 “venture capital,” use of term, 418n venture hubs, 15, 18, 95–96, 391–92 Viaweb, 191–92, 217, 218–19 viral marketing, 443n Vivendi, 159 VKontakte, 274–475, 287 volatility selling, 415n W Waite, Charles P., 31 Walker’s Wagon Wheel, 54, 96, 106, 432n Wall Street Crash of 1929, 24 Wall Street Journal, 226, 296, 339 Walmart, 12 Wang, Jeff, 332–33 Wang Laboratories, 423–24n Wang Xing, 242–48 Warner Communications, 66, 80 Washington Post, 182, 402 Washington Post Company, 188, 258–60 weak ties, 95 WEB, 203 Webvan, 178, 184 Weinreich, Andrew, 20 Welch, Jack, 364 Wellfleet Communications, 112, 118 West, Donda, 235 West, Kanye, 235 WestBridge Capital, 321 Western Association of Venture Capitalists, 27, 51, 419n WeWork, 342–49, 371–73, 457n Benchmark Capital’s investment, 172, 342–49, 353, 371–72, 457n governance and corruption issues, 343, 344–45, 359 IPO process, 372–73 JPMorgan Chase’s investment, 343–44 Son’s investment, 346–49, 370–73 super-voting rights, 344, 346, 359, 371–72, 373 Wharton School, 161, 244, 287, 290 WhatsApp, 304, 307–8, 314, 388 white-hot risks, 70, 75, 76, 80, 88, 128, 266, 383 Whitman, Meg, 167–69 Whitney, John Hay, 25–26, 29, 418n Wikipedia, 317 wild-man risk, 59 Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, 329 Wirehog, 195, 196, 207, 219, 254, 260 Wolfe, Josh, 382–83 Wolfe, Tom, 52–53, 56, 57 Wolff, Stephen S., 436n World War II, 18, 25, 28 World Wide Web, 19–20 Wozniak, Steve, 82–85, 86, 90, 100 Wu, John, 232–33 X X.com, 201–7 Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), 82, 96, 99, 100 Xiaomi, 224, 383 Xi Jinping, 302–3, 395 Xoom, 306, 313 Xu, Kathy, 235–37, 239, 245–46, 279 Y Yahoo, 149–61 Draper and, 150, 152, 341 Google and, 181 IPO, 156, 157, 438n, 439n sales and marketing, 153–54, 438n Sequoia Capital’s investment, 150–54, 155–56, 160–61, 170, 173, 206, 440n Son’s investment, 155–60, 175, 277, 347, 348, 439n Viaweb acquisition, 191 Yahoo Japan, 159 Yale Law School, 226 Yale University, 150, 225, 226, 334 Yandex, 287 Yang, Jerry, 150–60.


New Localism and Regeneration Management by Jon Coaffee

glass ceiling, Kickstarter, place-making, post-industrial society, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal

But many of these initiatives were oriented to developing land and property. Enterprise zones, from 1980, were “managed” (if that is the right word for a programme whose philosophy was not to intervene) directly by the civil service. The urban development corporations, also charged with reviving areas of urban decay, the first also in 1980 but an important group delayed till 1986, had boards of directors from the private sector, but little involvement of local authorities or community groups. The city challenge companies that ran from 1992 to 1998 did involve, as board members, local councillors and representatives of organisations active in the areas concerned.


pages: 368 words: 120,794

The Ten Million Dollar Getaway: The Inside Story of the Lufthansa Heist by Doug Feiden

air freight, Ayatollah Khomeini, large denomination, planned obsolescence, urban decay

Similarly, when Tony Ducks heard that his orders had been carried out and that there was one more entry in the police blotter, he would shake his head sadly, and his voice would be tinged with disapproval: “We live in a jungle.” Even the most hot-headed young prosecutor would be hard pressed to prosecute on the basis of that, for Tony Ducks’ attorneys would be quick to point out that their client was merely offering a social commentary on the alarming pace of urban decay. “You’ll read about him in the papers,” Tony Ducks had said, and those seven little innocuous words were enough to touch off a mob bloodbath. Stacks Edwards lived in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens. So did Two-Gun Tommy. Tony Ducks lived up in Whitestone, at the other end of the borough, exactly 9.1 miles away as the New York City pigeon flies.

But he moved slowly, warily though his mansion, because he was quite shaken up over a few incidences of random violence in recent months. It was all very upsetting to his health, he said. When the news of the Flatlands Tony hit reached him, he closed his eyes and sadly shook his great, gray head. It was just one more example of urban decay. “We live in a jungle,” he said. Jimmy the Gent was also disturbed by the killings—genuinely so. He had, after all, lost some pretty good drinking buddies. But he had no say in these matters. Even though he had planned the raid on Building 261, it didn’t belong to him anymore. It was all decided elsewhere.


pages: 422 words: 131,666

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back by Douglas Rushkoff

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, AOL-Time Warner, banks create money, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, big-box store, Bretton Woods, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Google Earth, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, market bubble, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, peak oil, peer-to-peer, place-making, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social software, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

Housing Authority lent money to private corporations for slum clearance, while giving local municipal governments authority over whether and where to build public housing. No one wanted a housing project near his own community, so the corporations and municipalities used the financing to tear down any slums near expensive suburbs and rebuild them as projects back in the city. Urban decay got worse, and the suburbs got even more segregated. If money had been put toward rehabilitating existing slums instead of tearing them down and building new ones, it might have created fewer construction jobs and lower profits, but it would have also prevented this very rapid redrawing of the residential map for the benefit of white suburban property values and the developers who exploited them.

Instead of working with one another to create value for our communities, we work against one another to help corporations extract money from our communities. When the city of Buffalo, New York, lost dozens of factories to outsourcing along with their manufacturing jobs, it became a national leader in bankruptcies, foreclosures, and urban decay. Over 108 collection agencies have opened to address the problem in Erie and Niagara Counties, hiring over 5,200 phone operators to track down and persuade debtors like themselves to fix their credit. As interest rates on these debts rise to upwards of 40 percent, more wealth is transferred from the poor to the rich, from the real economy to the speculative economy, and out of circulation into the banking ether.


pages: 479 words: 140,421

Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss

activist lawyer, back-to-the-city movement, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Broken windows theory, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, food desert, gentrification, global pandemic, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, plutocrats, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Skype, starchitect, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, young professional

The story of the battle for New York’s soul is here in the South Bronx: deindustrialization and the loss of working-class jobs, redlining, white flight, the creation of slums, Robert Moses’s meat axe cleaving neighborhoods with the Cross Bronx Expressway, white backlash, planned shrinkage, benign neglect, and “the Bronx is burning.” In the 1970s, the area became synonymous with urban decay and violence, Fort Apache, the jungle. An “international code word for our epoch’s accumulated urban nightmares,” in the words of South Bronx native Marshall Berman, it was the no-man’s-land to which Ed Koch’s brave pioneers would never dare venture. Joe Flood, author of The Fires, reported: “Seven different census tracts in The Bronx lost more than 97% of their buildings to fire and abandonment between 1970 and 1980.”

We want to absolutely encourage as many services as possible to follow us into the South Bronx.” To revitalize the Bronx, city leaders gave the borough its own High Line. Of sorts. Built in 1848 and closed around 1970, the elegant steel and stone High Bridge spans the Harlem River, connecting the Bronx to upper Manhattan. In 2015, reclaimed from urban decay and scrubbed clean, it reopened to pedestrians and bicyclists. Immediately, the High Bridge was compared to Chelsea’s High Line. At the reopening, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. said, “Downtown may have the High Line, but uptown we have the High Bridge.” The Post announced, “Finally, Uptown Gets Its Own High Line.”


pages: 162 words: 51,445

The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. S Dream by Gary Younge

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, immigration reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight

From sit-ins and freedom rides we have gone into rent strikes, boycotts, community organization, and political action. As a consequence of this natural evolution, the Negro today finds himself stymied by obstacles of far greater magnitude than the legal barriers he was attacking before: automation, urban decay, de facto school segregation. These are problems which, while conditioned by Jim Crow, do not vanish upon its demise. They are more deeply rooted in our socio-economic order; they are the result of the total society’s failure to meet not only the Negro’s needs, but human needs generally. That’s not to say that King made no effort to shift the terrain of the debate.


pages: 197 words: 49,240

Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders by Reihan Salam

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bonfire of the Vanities, charter city, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, gentrification, ghettoisation, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, job automation, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, megacity, new economy, obamacare, open borders, open immigration, race to the bottom, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, two tier labour market, upwardly mobile, urban decay, working poor

And in the summer of 1991, riots broke out in Crown Heights after an Orthodox Jewish man crashed his car into the home of a Guyanese immigrant family, killing the family’s young son. These incidents were only the most vivid manifestations of a general sense that the city was coming undone. Throughout these years, violent crime was terrifyingly high, and Brooklyn, my native borough, was a watchword for joblessness and urban decay. In The Bonfire of the Vanities, one of Tom Wolfe’s characters memorably described Brooklyn’s remaining bourgeois enclaves as little white Hong Kongs amidst a sea of black and brown poverty. These were years when New Yorkers of all colors fled the city in droves, and those of us who remained feared that class and racial conflict might at any moment spin out of control.


pages: 172 words: 48,747

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America by Sarah Kendzior

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, clean water, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, gentrification, George Santayana, glass ceiling, income inequality, independent contractor, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, payday loans, pink-collar, post-work, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, the medium is the message, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

“I need the brilliance of color to get close to people, to stir up a sense of life experience and heighten their sense of presence,” Grosse proclaims. “People,” in Grosse and Thomas’s formulation, are not those who actually live in north Philadelphia and bear the brunt of its burdens. “People” are those who can afford to view poverty through the lens of aesthetics as they pass it by. Urban decay becomes a set piece to be remodeled or romanticized. This is hipster economics. Influx of Hipsters In February, director Spike Lee delivered an impassioned critique—derisively characterized as a “rant” by U.S. media outlets—on the gentrification of New York City. Arguing that an influx of “… hipsters” had driven up rent in most neighborhoods—and in turn driven out the African-American communities that once called them home—he noted how long-dormant city services suddenly reappeared: “Why does it take an influx of white New Yorkers in the south Bronx, in Harlem, in Bed Stuy, in Crown Heights for the facilities to get better?


pages: 613 words: 151,140

No Such Thing as Society by Andy McSmith

"there is no alternative" (TINA), anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, call centre, cuban missile crisis, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, Farzad Bazoft, feminist movement, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, illegal immigration, index card, John Bercow, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Live Aid, loadsamoney, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sloane Ranger, South Sea Bubble, spread of share-ownership, Stephen Fry, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Winter of Discontent, young professional

But after a few tumultuous days, it all seemed to fizzle out, in the quiet euphoria of the royal wedding, leaving the authorities to argue over what, if anything, the riots said about British politics. On 13 July, Margaret Thatcher visited Toxteth, saw the wreckage, but did not see anyone driven to desperation by joblessness and urban decay. She saw a pleasant enough city centre ruined by its feckless inhabitants. She recalled: The housing there was by no means the worst in the city. I had been told that some of the young people got into trouble through boredom and not having enough to do. But you had only to look at the grounds around those houses with the grass untended, some of it waist high, and the litter, to see that this was a false analysis.

Of their second album, More Specials, one critic wrote: ‘The second side is curious, disorientating and quite unclassifiable . . . brave and perverse’.15 On tour, arguments erupted between members of the group, fuelled by drug abuse, and their gigs threatened to degenerate into violence because of their rash practice of encouraging fans to storm the stage. In Cambridge, fights broke out between fans and security guards, after which Dammers and the group’s vocalist, Terry Hall, were arrested for incitement and fined £400 each. The constant tension, the chaos and the scenes of urban decay that they witnessed on tour evidently put Dammers in a grim frame of mind, and spurred him to produce a song full of desolation and impending doom called ‘Ghost Town’, which topped the charts in July 1981. Twenty-one years after its release, a writer in the Guardian asserted that it ‘remains the most remarkable number one in British chart history’.16 Jerry Dammers had assumed that success would put an end to the nearhomicidal in-fighting among the members of the band, and that the others would acknowledge him for the extraordinary artist that he undoubtedly was.


pages: 1,324 words: 159,290

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, Ford Model T, garden city movement, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, power law, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, Skype, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, working-age population

Decennial censuses show London’s population growing from nearly 1.1 in 1801 to 8.6 million just before World War II and then declining to 6.8 million by 1981: the continuation of that trend would have reduced the capital to only about 2.1 million by 2050 (Smil 2019a). But the new wave of international immigration (part of the post-1980 globalization) lifted the total to 8.2 million by 2011. Similarly, New York, once the synonym for economic retreat, urban decay, and depopulation, has been revitalized by post-1990 immigration. By 2015 nearly 38% of the people living in the five boroughs were foreign born (the largest groups coming from the Dominican Republic, China, Mexico, and Jamaica) and they provided 45% of the city’s labor force (NYC Planning 2017).

In the early 1720s food required about 80% of the family income; four decades later the share was still about 75% even among big-wage earners, with less than 15% spent on clothes. Earnings increased in the 19th-century cities but the progress toward consumer society was slow. Perrot and Guerrand (1990) describe crowding, slums, peripheral shantytowns, and rapid urban decay that brought little improvement for masses of new migrants as observers wrote about workers living like animals. Conditions remained primitive in many villages: houses with thatched roofs and rickety outside staircases to access the upper floor that were as much workshops and storage rooms as dwellings.


pages: 219 words: 63,495

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

If crime in specific areas reaches epidemic proportions it might at some point make more sense to turn the whole area into an informal prison rather than attempting to identify, then export troublemakers to secure facilities elsewhere. Other possibilities might include the tagging on all residents by postcode or perhaps once again building prison ships or creating prison countries. “Traditionally, problems of urban decay and associated issues, such as crime, have been seen as domestic issues best dealt with by internal security or police forces. That will no longer be an option.” Richard Norton, Naval War College Review People power But it’s not all bad news. If governments or aid agencies cannot provide food, water, shelter or other necessities, people will often organize these things for themselves.


pages: 216 words: 69,480

Sweetness and Light: The Mysterious History of the Honeybee by Hattie Ellis

back-to-the-land, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, New Urbanism, the scientific method, urban decay

In his 1977 installation Honey Pump at the Work Place, Beuys pumped honey in transparent pipes around the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany. Here, during the hundred days of the artwork, people from all over the world and from many walks of life—economists, community workers, musicians, lawyers, actors, trade unionists—discussed issues such as nuclear energy, urban decay, and human rights. This was Beuys’s Free International University, and it was about changing the world: the ideas being discussed should pump through society just as the honey circulated the building. The meaning of such “actions” relied on the ideas behind them, and the pieces later displayed in museums—photographs, blackboards of scribbles spray-fixed for posterity—are remnants of almost shamanistic events.


pages: 282 words: 69,481

Road to ruin: an introduction to sprawl and how to cure it by Dom Nozzi

Boeing 747, business climate, car-free, congestion pricing, Donald Shoup, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, New Urbanism, Parkinson's law, place-making, Ray Oldenburg, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, skinny streets, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, urban decay, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, zero-sum game

Surface parking lots take up valuable city land where there could be stores, offices, civic buildings, or plazas—uses that commonly add energy to a downtown, help provide the verticality needed to form outdoor rooms, and bring in more property tax revenue. Surface parking, by contrast, has a deadening effect. If Richard Ratcliff was right when he said that “[i]n a healthy city there is a constant replacement of less intensive uses by more intensive uses,”4 a city with a growing proportion of parking is a sign of urban decay.Until the recent past, the regulations in nearly all cities required at least “X” number of parking spaces per square foot of retail or office, which in fact far exceeded demand except on a few major shopping days. However, developers increasingly tend to oversupply parking—often exceeding even the generous requirements of most communities.


pages: 182 words: 64,847

Working by Robert A. Caro

carbon footprint, desegregation, Ford Model T, ghettoisation, rent control, Southern State Parkway, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty

The residents of the apartment houses that bordered the mile-long excavation on both sides—perhaps one hundred buildings—began to move out, and as more and more moved one of the principal reasons for staying—friends who lived near you—began to vanish, and so did the sense of community. Still more tenants disappeared from East Tremont. Some landlords were happy to see them leave the rent-controlled apartments, and replaced them with welfare families, who demanded fewer services and moved more often, so that rents could be raised more often. The gyre of urban decay spiraled and widened, faster and faster, and more and more residents began to move. East Tremont became a vast slum. I spent many days and weeks, terrible days and weeks, walking around that slum. I had never, in my sheltered middle-class life, descended so deeply into the realms of despair.


pages: 265 words: 74,941

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work by Richard Florida

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, deskilling, edge city, Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford paid five dollars a day, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, McMansion, megaproject, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, young professional, Zipcar

As…I drove through it, I saw the images of the postapocalyptic city to which we’ve all become accustomed: the deserted streets, overgrown lots and empty storefronts with boarded-up windows and faded signs for long-closed stores and restaurants like Pick ’n Party, Jet King Chop Suey and African hair braiding. As familiar as these images have become (just punch “Detroit” and “urban decay” into YouTube to see them), it’s only when you’re actually riding around Detroit and can see that this goes on for block after block, mile after mile, that the profundity of this idea—the death of a city—really sets in. When work disappears, city populations don’t always decline as fast as you might expect.


pages: 224 words: 73,737

Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain's Underclass by Darren McGarvey

basic income, British Empire, carbon footprint, deindustrialization, do what you love, Donald Trump, gentrification, imposter syndrome, impulse control, means of production, side project, Social Justice Warrior, universal basic income, urban decay, wage slave

Even the monstrosities that gave rise to the gritty stereotype weren’t all bad. But enough of them were – or still are – bad enough that their reputation, fair or not, precedes them. Like many hapless eras of human endeavour, it’s easy to look back in hindsight and sneer at those who naively approved a building programme that would come to symbolise urban decay and social dereliction: the idea of stacking poor people vertically, which probably seemed rather clever in the mid-20th century, when decades of population growth, fuelled by consecutive industrial revolutions, was the curtain raiser to a new rotating cast of social problems that would characterise poverty for decades to come.


pages: 246 words: 76,561

Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture by Justin McGuirk

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, dark matter, Day of the Dead, digital divide, Donald Trump, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, facts on the ground, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Leo Hollis, mass immigration, megaproject, microcredit, Milgram experiment, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, Silicon Valley, starchitect, technoutopianism, unorthodox policies, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, value engineering, Washington Consensus

At the height of the attempts to extradite Escobar to the US in the early 1990s, he was waging a campaign of terror against the state in Medellín, killing hundreds of policemen and setting off car bombs every week. In 1993, the year Escobar was killed, the homicide rate was an unprecedented 311 per 100,000 citizens. What was extraordinary about Medellín was that throughout this period the city was still booming – this was not the violence of economic and urban decay. On the contrary, narco-profits were filtering into the economy through money laundering and property speculation. But one of the inevitable effects of the violence was a deeply segregated city. It affected everyone, but for those in the central and southern districts the northern comunas were literally a no-go zone.


pages: 303 words: 81,071

Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan

3D printing, augmented reality, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, driverless car, fake news, Free Software Foundation, friendly fire, gentrification, global supply chain, hydroponic farming, Internet of things, Mason jar, messenger bag, off grid, Panamax, post-Panamax, ransomware, RFID, rolling blackouts, security theater, self-driving car, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, surveillance capitalism, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning

It was then he started to really pay attention, to pick out tones and sounds, to understand form and structure. Dark afro futures were made real, musical stories with life breathed into them. Before the crash it had seemed impossible to separate Bristol from drum and bass; afterward the connection was pure logic. A soundtrack for celebrating the urban decay of the twenty-first century, for dancing in the new ruins of industrial civilization, translated now as a soundtrack for everyday life. It was also the default option now, in many ways, Tyrone understood. He never denied the reality of that, never tried to kid himself. In many ways this was the last music on record, the last throw of urban energy and expression before the shift came.


pages: 316 words: 87,486

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

It should not surprise us that the liberal class regards the university as the greatest and most necessary social institution of all, or that members of this cohort reflexively propose more education as the answer to just about anything you care to bring up. College can conquer unemployment as well as racism, they say; urban decay as well as inequality. Education will make us more tolerant, it will dissolve our doubts about globalization and climate change, it will give us the STEM skills we need as a society to compete. The liberal class knows, as a matter of deepest conviction, that there is no social or political problem that cannot be solved with more education and job training.


pages: 284 words: 85,643

What's the Matter with White People by Joan Walsh

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, banking crisis, clean water, collective bargaining, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, full employment, General Motors Futurama, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, mass immigration, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Clinton headed to Los Angeles to tour the scenes of destruction with Representative Maxine Waters, who represented the area in Congress. Whereas President Bush denounced the “anarchy” as “purely criminal” and never bothered to visit, Clinton blamed the Reagan-Bush administrations for “more than a decade of urban decay,” intensified by federal spending cuts. After Bush press secretary Marlin Fitzwater blamed the unrest on “the Great Society,” Clinton shot back, “Republicans have had the White House for twenty of the last twenty-four years, and they have to go all the way back to the sixties to find somebody to blame.


pages: 312 words: 84,421

This Chair Rocks: A Manifiesto Against Ageism by Ashton Applewhite

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Downton Abbey, fixed income, follow your passion, ghettoisation, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, obamacare, old age dependency ratio, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning, white picket fence, women in the workforce

If you’re old, you’re not good; if you’re paraplegic, you’re not good; if you’re black, you’re not good.”36 These lines are never more clearly drawn than during natural disasters, when poor people, people of color, and older people die in disproportionate numbers. Chicago’s 1995 heat wave claimed 729 lives. Most of the victims were olders living in the heart of the city, isolated by urban decay, afraid to open doors and windows and unable to afford air conditioning. Blacks were more likely to die than whites, who were more likely to die than Latinos, who tend to live in densely populated neighborhoods and face less isolation. Of the nearly 1,000 people who died when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in August, 2005, almost half were seventy-five or older, and more than half of those were black.


pages: 270 words: 82,332

Rich and Pretty: A Novel by Rumaan Alam

East Village, Etonian, family office, Joan Didion, Mason jar, urban decay

Sarah’s surprised Lauren picked up. She’s usually harder to get. “I was just thinking about you. That’s so weird. But so perfect.” “Good things, I hope.” “The greatest, actually. Do you remember our Goth phase? Please tell me you remember our Goth phase.” “That hardly qualifies as a phase,” Sarah says. “We bought some Urban Decay and went to a Nick Cave show.” “We were so dark and mysterious.” Lauren laughs. Sarah shrugs, forgetting Lauren can’t see it. “Adolescence is a dark time. We were experimenting.” “It’s funny to think about. It was unlike us. It was unlike you. You were . . .” Lauren trails off. “I was . . . ?”


pages: 340 words: 92,904

Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars by Samuel I. Schwartz

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, car-free, City Beautiful movement, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Enrique Peñalosa, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the wheel, lake wobegon effect, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, longitudinal study, Lyft, Masdar, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, oil shock, parking minimums, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, skinny streets, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, TED Talk, the built environment, the map is not the territory, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, Wall-E, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

The miles of uninterrupted driving Risse described were, in 1897, intended for horse-drawn carriages; that is, a bridle path. By the time the Concourse opened, in 1909, the automobile age was well begun. By the 1940s, America was embracing it like nowhere else on Earth. That’s when another “through motor route” transformed the borough for which the Grand Concourse had been emblematic into a shorthand proxy for urban decay, and became an enduring symbol of the conflict over the ownership of America’s roads. The intersection between the north-south Grand Concourse and the east-west Cross-Bronx Expresswaya would come to represent not just one battle over the City Beautiful, but a rallying cry in a decades-long war.


pages: 313 words: 92,053

Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life by Colin Ellard

Apollo 11, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, classic study, cognitive load, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, Dunbar number, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Lewis Mumford, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, megastructure, mirror neurons, Mondo 2000, more computing power than Apollo, Oculus Rift, overview effect, Peter Eisenman, RFID, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, sentiment analysis, Skinner box, smart cities, starchitect, TED Talk, the built environment, theory of mind, time dilation, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen

An epidemiological study,” published in the Journal of Affective Disorders (2013, Volume 150, pages 1019–1024). 4Florian Lederbogen and a long list of collaborators including Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg published a groundbreaking article on the effects of urban stresses on amygdala activation titled “City living and urban upbringing affect neural social stress processing in humans,” in the journal Nature (2011, Volume 474, pages 498–501). A readable summary of their findings along with related material can be found in an article by Allison Abbott titled “Stress and the City: Urban Decay,” in Nature (2012, Volume 490, pages 162–164). 5Allison Abbot’s Nature article, cited in the previous note, also provides a short summary of the work by Jim van Os on mental pathology and geotracking. 6My discussion with Ed Parsons appeared in Land Rover’s magazine Onelife (2014, Issue #28, pages 40–43) Available at: http://www.landroverofficialmagazine.com/#!


pages: 306 words: 94,204

Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter

back-to-the-land, crack epidemic, David Attenborough, dumpster diving, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, haute cuisine, hobby farmer, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Mason jar, McMansion, New Urbanism, Port of Oakland, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rewilding, Silicon Valley, urban decay, urban renewal, Whole Earth Catalog

All these people out on the street—they were characters I had never met in Seattle, or in our more suburban house in the Oakland hills. I was curious, and yet I had to admit it: they scared me. Could I really live here? Walk around the streets without worrying about getting mugged? The place was a postcard of urban decay, I thought as we turned down 28th Street. Cheetos bags somersaulted across the road. An eight-story brick building on the corner was entirely abandoned and tattooed with graffiti. Living here would definitely mean getting out of my comfort zone. We came to a stop in front of a gray 1905 Queen Anne.


pages: 509 words: 92,141

The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt, Dave Thomas

A Pattern Language, Broken windows theory, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, c2.com, combinatorial explosion, continuous integration, database schema, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, Ford Model T, Free Software Foundation, general-purpose programming language, George Santayana, Grace Hopper, higher-order functions, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, Kaizen: continuous improvement, lateral thinking, loose coupling, Menlo Park, MVC pattern, off-by-one error, premature optimization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, revision control, Schrödinger's Cat, slashdot, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, systems thinking, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, traveling salesman, urban decay, Y2K

Yet there are other projects that, despite enormous difficulties and constant setbacks, successfully fight nature's tendency toward disorder and manage to come out pretty well. What makes the difference? In inner cities, some buildings are beautiful and clean, while others are rotting hulks. Why? Researchers in the field of crime and urban decay discovered a fascinating trigger mechanism, one that very quickly turns a clean, intact, inhabited building into a smashed and abandoned derelict [WK82]. A broken window. One broken window, left unrepaired for any substantial length of time, instills in the inhabitants of the building a sense of abandonment—a sense that the powers that be don't care about the building.


pages: 334 words: 93,162

This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America by Ryan Grim

airport security, Alexander Shulgin, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Burning Man, crack epidemic, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, failed state, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, global supply chain, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, new economy, New Urbanism, Parents Music Resource Center, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, women in the workforce

But they do show that during the peak of the eighties cocaine panic, the number of people using the drug recreationally remained relatively small. Critics of the Reagan-era response to drugs see these data as proof that the cocaine hysteria was cooked up by politicians and the media. It’s easier to blame poverty and urban decay on drugs and lock up the people than it is to treat the problem, goes the argument. And while there was certainly no shortage of scapegoating, the rise of cocaine in those years was a very real phenomenon. Although occasional use was declining—as it was for all drugs at the time—the number of people using an awful lot of the drug was increasing.


pages: 333 words: 86,662

Zeitgeist by Bruce Sterling

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, cotton gin, Frank Gehry, Grace Hopper, informal economy, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, jitney, market bubble, Maui Hawaii, new economy, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, rolodex, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Y2K

He was dragging them from the booze-sticky depths of their private realms, and into the Christmas-twinkling light of a greater awareness. Each time the lighter flared, they leapt out of their alcoholic shrouds. Teeth gone, bearded lips slack. Windburns from a lifetime of sheepherding. Grizzle and grease, the dust, the smell. Scarred eyelids, spiked eyebrows. Caries, vitamin deficiency. Rural decay, urban decay. Then—right before him—here was the man. The man who looked more like the others than the others could ever quite look. He had a face that was a distillation of all lost, invisible faces. He possessed a deep, pristine air of loss, a sense of disconnection so final and complete that there was an eerie joy to it, like poetry in a dead language.


pages: 252 words: 13,581

Cape Town After Apartheid: Crime and Governance in the Divided City by Tony Roshan Samara

conceptual framework, deglobalization, gentrification, ghettoisation, global village, illegal immigration, late capitalism, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, structural adjustment programs, unemployed young men, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, working poor

This simple and recurring truth only reinforces how powerful certain articulations of race, youth, and masculinity can be when combined in contested, tense, urban spaces; it is at this intersection that the governance of security is most volatile but, perhaps, also most productive. The meaning of black youth, from this perspective, is not entirely uniform across city spaces; rather, it shifts with the setting. In the city center, street children figured prominently and, relative to their numbers, disproportionately as ideological markers of urban decay and danger during the early days of the Cape Town Partnership, portrayed by proponents of downtown revitalization as urban terrorists. Their demonization in the English-language media and by renewal officials reached such a pitch that street children, and the AIDS orphans increasingly blamed for swelling their ranks, were referred to as a looming threat not only to the city center, but to the entire urban social fabric.


pages: 326 words: 88,905

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges, Joe Sacco

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate personhood, dumpster diving, Easter island, Exxon Valdez, food desert, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Howard Zinn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban decay, wage slave, white flight, women in the workforce

Through her efforts, Lawrence obtained some affordable housing,25 but the damage was done. Economic segregation is the new, acceptable form of segregation. And it turned New Jersey into one of the most segregated states in the nation. Mount Laurel, seized by developers, became a haven for whites fleeing urban decay. Its original inhabitants could no longer afford to live there. The blacks were driven from their land, forced into squalid internal colonies such as Camden. “Camden, I would say, is a casualty of capitalism,” Father Doyle said as we sat one afternoon in his rectory. “It’s what falls off the truck, and can’t get back on the truck.”


pages: 325 words: 89,374

Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing by John Boughton

British Empire, deindustrialization, full employment, garden city movement, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, laissez-faire capitalism, Leo Hollis, manufacturing employment, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Russell Brand, starchitect, systems thinking, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, young professional

We need to counter these pernicious negative stereotypes … We are not going to be bullied into giving up good sound insulation, light, views and space because of exterior neglect and delays in re-housing growing families due to current housing scarcity.6 A potent symbol of the stigmatisation of the Aylesbury Estate (though here it merely stood as a cipher for all such modernist, multi-storey estates) was the Channel Four ident, first deployed in 2004, which presented a truly dystopian vision of its ‘streets in the sky’, recreated here with every imaginable trope of urban decay as litter-strewn, graffiti-laden, dank and threatening. The residents later produced their own more positive portrayal of the estate’s decks and community in rebuttal.7 Of course, it wasn’t Shangri-La. How could it be, given all that had happened to council housing since 1979? It was officially rated as one of the poorest inner-city areas of the capital and, while around one-third of residents had lived on the estate for over twenty years (an important reminder of the settled and ‘respectable’ community which persisted on demonised council estates), it had increasingly come to house a disadvantaged population, disproportionately from the black and ethnic minorities.


Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime by Julian Guthrie

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Bob Noyce, call centre, cloud computing, credit crunch, deal flow, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, game design, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, new economy, PageRank, peer-to-peer, pets.com, phenotype, place-making, private spaceflight, retail therapy, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, Teledyne, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, UUNET, web application, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

Which is how Eve came into being—and how Rao and Naficy found themselves in the Menlo conference room, with Sonja and her fellow VCs awaiting their pitch. The two women told the group that they had secured online distribution agreements with a range of high-end brands, from Versace, Bvlgari, Calvin Klein, and Elizabeth Arden to Urban Decay, Club Monaco, and Hard Candy. They had hired industry leaders, including former Glamour beauty director Charla Krupp, to provide an editorial point of view on must-have products for women. They had also picked up the do’s and don’ts of deal making: When visiting executives at Chanel, for instance, they made sure to wear only Chanel makeup and nail polish.


Norman Foster: A Life in Architecture by Deyan Sudjic

air gap, Alan Greenspan, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, low cost airline, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, Murano, Venice glass, Norman Mailer, Pearl River Delta, Peter Eisenman, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, three-masted sailing ship, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban renewal, white flight, young professional

Even Yale’s gymnasium is built in exuberant gothic style, and it comes equipped with a tower not much less imposing than that of Durham Cathedral. It is, in short, a university that might have been imagined by Ralph Lauren. But beyond its gothic zone, New Haven in Foster’s day was suffering from the early symptoms of the urban decay that Jane Jacobs identified in her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities: a rotting centre and spreading affluent suburbs. Away from the security of the city lights and the campus police it would become a troubled place to live after the race riot of 1967. There were whole streets in New Haven in which the only functioning buildings were adult cinemas.


pages: 299 words: 87,059

The Burning Land by George Alagiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, fear of failure, gentrification, land reform, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, pre–internet, urban decay, white flight, éminence grise

Yeoville was almost as old as the city itself, established in the 1890s as a lofty refuge from the dirty, chaotic and sometimes violent gold-mining town that was growing out of the veld below. Like much of the area around it, Yeoville had been through a familiar cycle of nineteenth-century gentility, fifties edgy chic and late-twentieth-century urban decay. Now it was a melting pot of African sounds and customs, a home for traders and traffickers alike. There was always talk of a renaissance and a few brave souls, like the trekkers of old, were taking a bet on its gentrification and moving in, not least because they couldn’t afford to live anywhere else in the city.


pages: 357 words: 94,852

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, antiwork, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collective bargaining, Corrections Corporation of America, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, energy transition, extractivism, fake news, financial deregulation, gentrification, Global Witness, greed is good, green transition, high net worth, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, tech billionaire, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

Trump had always dreamed of making his mark in Manhattan, and with the debt crisis he saw his big chance. The opening came in 1976, when the famed Commodore Hotel, a historic midtown landmark, announced that it was losing so much money that it might have to close down. The city government was panicked at the prospect of this iconic building sitting empty, broadcasting a message of urban decay and depriving the city of tax revenue. They needed a buyer, quick, and the mood was sufficiently desperate that, as one local television broadcast put it, “beggars can’t be choosers.” Enter Trump, proto–disaster capitalist. Partnering with the Hyatt Corporation, Trump had a plan to replace the Commodore’s classic brick facade with “a new skin” of reflective glass, and to reopen it as the Grand Hyatt Hotel (this was in the brief window before the future US president began insisting that all his developments bear his name).


pages: 441 words: 96,534

Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution by Janette Sadik-Khan

autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, business cycle, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crowdsourcing, digital map, Donald Shoup, edge city, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, fixed-gear, gentrification, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, megaproject, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, self-driving car, sharing economy, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

Instead of designing streets from afar and focusing on moving car traffic, planners need only look to the street and follow its use to find the solutions for its problems. “There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city,” Jacobs wrote more than half a century ago; “people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.” But instead of launching an urban renaissance, Death and Life was accompanied by years of urban decay and depopulation. White flight brought urban disinvestment as millions of city dwellers fled to suburbs, taking their taxes with them. Combined with the loss of industry and manufacturing within cities, the mass abandonment starved transportation infrastructure and slowed development within cities.


pages: 281 words: 95,852

The Googlization of Everything: by Siva Vaidhyanathan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data acquisition, death of newspapers, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full text search, global pandemic, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pirate software, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, single-payer health, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, web application, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

The Bangalore lawyer and media researcher Lawrence Liang describes this and other major cities in India, such as Hyderabad and New Delhi: “This urbanism in India has become a significant theatre of elite engagement with claims of globalization. . . . Imprints of the media industry like multiplexes, malls, and lifestyle suburbia go hand-in-hand with the cries of urban decay and pollution, and managing populations that are increasingly restless in the new arrangements.”59 And as 140 TH E G OOGL IZATION OF THE WORL D the media scholar Ravi Sundaram has said, “Cities are being actively remapped” in India. “You have sections of the city that are meant only for the elite, with their own power supply, air conditioning, and private security.”60 So although a small, but growing segment of Indian society is firmly embedded in the cosmopolitan flows of culture, knowledge, and power as a result of the remarkable investments of the past twenty years in India, the poor pay a disproportionate price and receive an inadequate return.


pages: 363 words: 101,082

Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources by Geoff Hiscock

Admiral Zheng, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bernie Madoff, BRICs, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

India will have close to 600 million people living in its cities and towns by 2030, according to a 2010 McKinsey report.13 The urban infrastructure required to cope with 68 Indian cities with populations above 1 million is of a massive scale: McKinsey estimates $1.2 trillion of capital investment is needed to ensure future urban dwellers are not condemned to the life that is the norm today for many inhabitants of India’s biggest city, Mumbai: slums, poor water and power services, bad roads, transport gridlock, and general urban decay. In July 2009, a retired Indian civil servant named Ashok Vichare became something of a media star when he took delivery in Mumbai of the first Tata Nano, an Indian-built super-cheap small car with a 624cc engine and fuel economy of just 4 litres per 100 km. But even with the frugality of the Nano and other economical cars in India, automotive demand is so strong that the country’s oil consumption is destined to rise to about 4.2 million barrels a day by 2020, up from 3.1 million in 2011.


The Rough Guide to New York City by Martin Dunford

Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Sedaris, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, market bubble, Michael Milken, Multics, Norman Mailer, paper trading, post-work, rent stabilization, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

| Morningside Heights 201 O Harlem and north HARL E M AND NORTH | Harlem he most famous African-American community in America (and, arguably, the birthplace of modern black culture), Harlem languished as a low-rent, high-crime neighborhood for much of the mid-twentieth century, justly earning a reputation as a place of racial tension and urban decay. Over the past couple of decades, though, things have begun to look up, and it is far less dangerous than it once was – indeed, some pockets are among the more up-and-coming areas in Manhattan. Many local observers worry, however, that the influx of investment may come at too high a price in the long run, diluting or wiping out the district’s unique Afro-American spirit and history.

The low prices make it worth a detour. Ricky’s 590 Broadway, between Houston and Prince sts T212/226-5590; 267 W 23rd St, between Seventh and Eighth aves T212/2060234. New York’s haven for the overdone, the brash, and the OTT (think drag-diva favorites and plenty of lurid wigs). Stocks cool brands like Urban Decay and Tony & Tina as well as a house line of products. Additional locations (sixteen of them) around the city. Sephora 555 Broadway, between Prince and Spring sts T212/625-1309; also 597 Fifth Ave, at E 48th St T 212/980-6534, Wwww.sephora .com. “Warehouse” of perfumes, make-up, and body-care products all lined up alphabetically so everything’s easy to find and you don’t have to pester any sales people.


pages: 378 words: 110,518

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

There were numerous street-corner banks. It was a world of work, saving and great social solidarity. Smashing that solidarity, forcing wages down, destroying the social fabric of these towns was done – originally – to clear the ground for the free-market system. For the first decade, the result was simply crime, unemployment, urban decay and a massive deterioration in public health. But then came financialization. The urban landscape of today – outlets providing expensive money, cheap labour and free food – is the visual symbol of what neoliberalism has achieved. Stagnant wages were replaced by borrowing: our lives were financialized.


pages: 319 words: 106,772

Irrational Exuberance: With a New Preface by the Author by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, banking crisis, benefit corporation, Benoit Mandelbrot, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, demographic transition, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, experimental subject, hindsight bias, income per capita, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahbub ul Haq, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Milgram experiment, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, open economy, pattern recognition, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Small Order Execution System, spice trade, statistical model, stocks for the long run, Suez crisis 1956, survivorship bias, the market place, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, uptick rule, urban decay, Y2K

The confidence inspired by the Kennedy economic program led some to conclude that the country was entering a “new economy” in which “businessmen can enjoy reasonably continuous prosperity indefinitely” and that there was “more justification for confidence” in monetary policy than in times past.24 The Kennedy initiatives were expanded on by the “Great Society” program of his successor, Lyndon Johnson, beginning in 1964; Johnson’s program set as its primary goals nothing less than an end to poverty and urban decay. In the 1960s, the theory that the stock market is the “best investment” was prominent: “Investors feel that stocks are the best investment medium—as a hedge against possible inflation, as a means of participating in the future growth of business.” “Investors seem to be betting that inflation will accompany recovery—and that common stocks, even at present prices, represent the only real hedge.”25 At that time, investors believed that if inflation broke out, the stock market would go up, rather than down, as is now commonly thought, and that therefore the prospect of inflation was a reason to own stocks.


pages: 399 words: 116,828

When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor by William Julius Wilson

affirmative action, business cycle, citizen journalism, classic study, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, declining real wages, deindustrialization, deliberate practice, desegregation, Donald Trump, edge city, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, jobless men, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, school choice, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, work culture , working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

.… Their bleak environment nurtures values that are often at radical odds with those of the majority—even the majority of the poor. Thus the underclass minority produces a highly disproportionate number of the nation’s juvenile delinquents, school dropouts, drug addicts and welfare mothers, and much of the adult crime, family disruption, urban decay, and demand for social expenditures. However, it was not until the early 1980s, following the publication of a series of popular books written by conservative analysts, that the arguments made in this article were widely covered in the media. In a political atmosphere created during the first term of the Reagan administration, when the dominant ideology of poverty and welfare was strongly reinforced, conservative analysts rushed to explain the apparent paradox of a sharp rise in inner-city social dislocations after years of sweeping antipoverty and antidiscrimination legislation, beginning with the Great Society programs and the civil rights legislation of the Johnson administration.


pages: 550 words: 124,073

Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century by Torben Iversen, David Soskice

Andrei Shleifer, assortative mating, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, confounding variable, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, full employment, general purpose technology, gentrification, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, implied volatility, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, invisible hand, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, means of production, middle-income trap, mirror neurons, mittelstand, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, passive investing, precariat, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban decay, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

Inner-city neighborhoods decayed as plants closed, causing a significant uptick in crime, with the fortunes of surrounding towns that supplied the industrial centers declining in tandem. The term “rust belt” is a fitting metaphor for the areas most affected by deindustrialization. In response to urban decay, better-educated and higher-income families migrated to the new suburban enclaves that promised safety, better schools, and better infrastructure. Urban malaise and the associated process of suburbanization is described in a large literature in economic geography and sociology. But for all the gloomy predictions at the time, the trend was reversed (Power 2016).


pages: 416 words: 121,024

How to Murder Your Life: A Memoir by Cat Marnell

Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, East Village, Frank Gehry, impulse control, Joan Didion, messenger bag, Norman Mailer, period drama, pez dispenser, Rosa Parks, Russell Brand, urban decay, walkable city, Wall-E, Zipcar

Weren’t those . . . the Everclear dudes? Walking right by. That’s when I realized the GERMS station was set up between the dressing rooms and the main stage . . . “You’re good to go,” the GERM told me. “Can I rest here for a little while?” I said sweetly. I was wearing Shabd’s minuscule X-Girl hot pants, Urban Decay nail polish, ice-blue Hard Candy glittery eyeliner, and a Bikini Kill “YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH” T-shirt from Smash! in Georgetown. “I still don’t feel good.” “Sure,” the medic said. “Don’t leave this cot, okay?” I nodded. And that’s what I did: stayed put, and observed the celebrities from a respectful distance.


Lonely Planet Cyprus by Lonely Planet, Jessica Lee, Joe Bindloss, Josephine Quintero

Airbnb, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, centre right, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Kickstarter, urban decay

Its main suppliers – the grocers and butchers of Ayios Antonios Municipal Market – are just a stone's throw away. The small menu features piadina (Italian pizza-style flatbread), steaks, fish and meat dishes (the oven-roasted duck is delicious), as well as quirky artisan burgers. NICOSIA MASTER PLAN In an effort to preserve the historic fabric of the Old City, combat the urban decay creeping into neighbourhoods within the Venetian walls and foster trust between the capital's two divided communities, the Nicosia Master Plan was founded in 1979. The project was initially conceived to help solve the Old City's serious infrastructure problems, which had been further magnified by division.


pages: 519 words: 136,708

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3:32 pm (or thereabouts) when the infamous Pruitt-Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grâce by dynamite.’25 Built in the 1950s, the Pruitt-Igoe project became in the 1960s and 1970s a symbol of the racialised decay of inner urban cores and white flight as the middle classes rushed to the suburbs. Redlining, deindustrialisation and the growing emergence of racialised ghettos in Pruitt-Igoe and similar projects allowed mainstream media to demonise such places and their inhabitants. Pruitt-Igoe thus emerged as a symbol of urban decay, collapse and hopelessness. Its spectacular erasure was widely used as shorthand for a period in the US where ‘those who lived in cities no longer cared for them, and those who lived elsewhere feared and detested them.’26 The fact that communal housing was widely deemed to chime with socialist thinking didn’t help.


pages: 578 words: 141,373

Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain by John Grindrod

Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, garden city movement, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Martin Parr, megastructure, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, Right to Buy, side project, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, young professional

Instead of the tightly packed back-to-back slum housing, they recommended a radical European solution: ‘a proportion of lofty blocks of flats, placed well enough apart for groups of trees, with terraced houses disposed in regular but not monotonous form, the whole interspersed with open space.’33 In 1947, this district became the Stepney-Poplar comprehensive development area. The CDAs were a new government initiative to speed up the planning and rebuilding of large areas of urban decay. A bright young team were brought in to inject radical new ideas: Arthur Ling, senior LCC planning officer and fervent communist split the vast East End district into eleven neighbourhoods, along the lines of the new town ideal; Harlow mastermind Frederick Gibberd joined him in June 1949 to develop what would become the centre of the first neighbourhood, Chrisp Street Market, in the newly named Lansbury estate; and sociologist Margaret Willis was hired to canvass the existing residents.


pages: 483 words: 143,123

The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters by Gregory Zuckerman

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, man camp, margin call, Maui Hawaii, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Peter Thiel, reshoring, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Timothy McVeigh, urban decay

By the 1970s, Mitchell was reading the work of Dennis Meadows, a scientist who recommended ways to slow global growth to reduce the impact a growing population was having on finite resources. He also became an advocate for sustainable energy technologies and food sources. Focused on preventing urban decay from taking place in Houston and elsewhere, Mitchell visited troubled neighborhoods around the country, such as Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant and the Watts area in Los Angeles. “All of our cities are in trouble,” he said in an interview at the time. “The concentration of the disadvantaged and the flight to the suburbs of the middle-class whites—that’s destroying all our cities.”


pages: 436 words: 76

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management

As Moses built, traffic grew until his highways were as congested as were the roads before. The Cross Bronx Expressway turned once thriving communities into areas of dereliction. When Governor Nelson Rockefeller finally maneuvered him from office in 1968when Moses was almost eighty years old-the city he had shaped so dramatically was in a spiral of decline, stricken by urban decay and financial crisis. Planning in British Electricity ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• Absolutism of authority is part of the problem. In Soviet Russia and Communist China, as at Wang Laboratories and the Ford Motor Company, decision making was personalized and undemocratic. In New York, Robert Moses, an unelected official, gathered autocratic power in an environment of ostensible democracy.


pages: 464 words: 127,283

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

A massive mash-up, it would synthesize “all the indicators that we have block by block and infer the probability that an undesirable outcome will result.” While Chicago’s effort looked at real data, not some abstract model, there was an eerie similarity to the cybernetic missteps of the 1960s that tried to compute urban decay. But Tolva wasn’t entirely seduced by data. He understood that it is nothing more than a diagnostic tool: “A single data point that does not tell you that a house is going to fall into blight but [the index could signal] that there is a higher than normal probability that it will be in disrepair.”33 The data could then be used as an input when allocating revitalization funds or directing social workers to trouble spots.


Howard Rheingold by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Alvin Toffler, Apple II, bread and circuses, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, commoditize, conceptual framework, disinformation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, experimental subject, General Magic , George Gilder, global village, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Ivan Sutherland, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, license plate recognition, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Great Good Place, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, urban decay, UUNET, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

Perhaps the public conviviality that Paris is famous for is the real thing that others seek, and for which they find only a substitute, a simulacrum, in virtual communities. The question naturally arises, as Popravka pointed out, whether the communion kind of virtual community has the same potential in a place where people commune in the still-vital heart of their city, or whether the suburbanized, urban-decayed, paved, and malled environment of modern America is a necessary condition for the proliferation of virtual communities. Certainly, that is the implication of the theories of the French philosopher and social critic Baudrillard, who sees electronic communication as part of the whole web of hyperrealistic illusion we've turned to, in our technologically stimulated flight from the breakdown of human communities.


pages: 512 words: 131,112

Retrofitting Suburbia, Updated Edition: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs by Ellen Dunham-Jones, June Williamson

accelerated depreciation, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, call centre, carbon footprint, Donald Shoup, edge city, gentrification, global village, index fund, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, knowledge worker, land bank, Lewis Mumford, McMansion, megaproject, megastructure, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, postindustrial economy, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Savings and loan crisis, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, skinny streets, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 6. 2 Becky Nicolaides, “How Hell Moved from the City to the Suburbs” in The New Suburban History, ed. Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 80–98. 3 Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 206. 4 Historian Paul Mattingly seconded Fishman’s point: “Suburbia has become more than a convenient foil to explain urban decay and a culture of narcissism; it has become a cultural canon that often resists contextual data supporting a different perspective and a different landscape.” Paul H. Mattingly, “The Suburban Canon over Time,” in Suburban Discipline, ed. Peter Lang and Tam Miller (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), 38–51. 5 Sam Bass Warner Jr., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston (1870–1900) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962, 1978). 6 Barry Checkoway, “Large Builders, Federal Housing Programmes, and Postwar Suburbanization,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 4:1 (March 1980): 21–44.


pages: 510 words: 138,000

The Future Won't Be Long by Jarett Kobek

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Donald Trump, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, Future Shock, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, quantum entanglement, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban decay, wage slave, War on Poverty, working poor, young professional

The second bedroom, farther back, was shared by two girls from South Korea, Sun-Yoon and Jae-Hwa. They’d both adopted American names. Jane and Sally, respectively. It fell on Jane to try and keep the suite clean, but some places are too old. Even the carpeting rotted with mold. What could one girl do against decades of urban decay? —Welcome to 6B, said Adeline. We went into her tiny room. The floor was bare linoleum. Adeline’d covered her walls with images and photos. Famous people, fashion photographs, cheap reproductions. A poster of Max Ernst’s The Robing of the Bride. I didn’t recognize it. Another announcing performances by Siouxsie and the Banshees at the Hollywood Palladium on June 6 and 7.


pages: 407 words: 135,242

The Streets Were Paved With Gold by Ken Auletta

benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, business logic, clean water, collective bargaining, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, social contagion, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working-age population

And even these did not represent a failure of ideology or people, since, according to this view, Rockefeller and municipal politicians were just being selfish. The main culprits were Washington and the banks. A similar approach is taken by Richard S. Morris, an otherwise intelligent political activist and consultant to liberal Democrats. The “real villains of the urban crisis,” he writes in Bum Rap on American Cities: The Real Causes of Urban Decay, are not “liberals” but the robber-baron federal government and greedy bankers. He adds, “Liberals are, indeed, taking a bum rap” because New York’s crisis is “not the result of any error in direction or approach.” Former Lindsay administration officials blame “the system” or the “ungovernability of cities”—when they’re not blaming Washington.


pages: 575 words: 140,384

It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO by Felix Gillette, John Koblin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, Exxon Valdez, fake news, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, Keith Raniere, lockdown, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, out of africa, payday loans, peak TV, period drama, recommendation engine, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Durst, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, WeWork

At the time, Simon was on the verge of publishing his second nonfiction book, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, which chronicled the impact of the drug trade and the city’s ineffective war on drugs on one block in West Baltimore. Simon reported and wrote the book with Ed Burns, a former city homicide officer. Having watched up close as NBC turned his first book into a prime-time drama, Simon initially believed there was no way anybody in TV would touch The Corner. He suspected its depiction of drug addiction and urban decay would be both too cerebral and too grim for broadcast television. But seeing what Fontana was doing with Oz got Simon thinking. Maybe HBO would be interested? “Oz was a revelation to me,” says Simon. Simon reached out to Fontana to see if he and Barry Levinson might want to team up again to work on The Corner.


The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York by Caro, Robert A

Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, benefit corporation, British Empire, card file, centre right, East Village, Ford Model T, friendly fire, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Right to Buy, scientific management, Southern State Parkway, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Crossing the ten-lane truck road, wider than a football field, was even more of a problem because the traffic lights never seemed to allow enough time for anyone not in the best of health to get across. Sunset Park families began to do their shopping in stores that were not on Third Avenue. Once the avenue had been a place for people; Robert Moses had made it a place for cars. And as the avenue's roadway became more crowded, its sidewalks began to empty. The vicious gyre of urban decay began—and widened. Because there weren't as many people shopping on Third Avenue, there weren't enough to support the avenue's stores and restaurants—not even the half of the stores and restaurants that remained after the widening. One by one they began to close. Because there weren't as many stores and restaurants, people began doing their shopping and dining out elsewhere, and then there were even fewer people on Third Avenue.

In 1951, with the nonwhite population of East Tremont already substantial and clearly going to increase further, the Association of Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Associations of New York—considering building a new Y to replace the Clinton Avenue building—had decided to determine whether or not the investment would be worthwhile, and had conducted the most detailed survey of East Tremont residents ever made. Its conclusions were clear. Negroes might come. The Jews would stay. For more than twenty years, the pressure of urban decay and blight had been pressing on the neighborhood, but for twenty years, the neighborhood had held. Leave it alone, and it would continue to hold. By 1952 there were 775,516 Negroes and nonwhite Spanish-speaking people—a full 10 percent of New York's residents—in the city. And, as the Irish had done a century before and the Italians and Eastern European Jews half a century before, these immigrants from the South and from the Caribbean were continuing to pour into the city by the thousands and tens of thousands.

Hoover, Herbert, 182, 281, 293, 345, 380, 409 Hopkins, Harry, 363, 453, 456, 516 Hopper, Hedda, 1034 Horace Harding Expressway, 6yh, Horizon, 1028 hospitals and health clinics, 261, 265, 274, 324, 328, 491, 614, 640, 642-3, 644, 757, 759, 772, 795 housing: general information: condemnations, 6, 6n, 777, 779, 891, 962, 967, 973, 980, 1013-14; funds for, city, 768; funds for, federal, 610, 611, 704, 717 (see also housing: Title /); funds for, state, 610, 611, 717, 758, 759, 768, 802, 804, 805; high-density, 898, 941-2, 945-6, 958; La Guardia and, 610-13; liberals and, 758, 762; low-income, 6-7, 20, 328, 449, 610, 655, 700, 704, 717, 767, 796-7, 805, 830, 855-6, 862, 882, 962-3, 969, 972-3, 974; luxury, 6, 20, 1014; middle-income, 802, 890-1, 892-3; RM as Emergency Housing Chairman, 764, 765-6, 768; RM's control, 7, 700-1, 706-7, 765-6, 796-7, 777, 802, 804-5, 830, 891, 1060; RM's philosophy, 610, 765, 767, 777, 805, 882, 1060-1, 1151, 1158; RM's plans for, 1151-2, 1153-4; RM's power grab, 610-13, 777; projects, 7, 345, 768, 796-7, 802, 862, 882, 891, 904, 962-3, 969, 972-3, 974, 1018; public authorities and, 627; shortage, 766, 768, 786, 801, 848, 855, 860, 862, 880, 1152; social philosophy of, 777, 1151; state, 261, 408; for UN, 772, 774; urban decay, and RM's public works, 520-5, 749, 860-1, 880-3, 888-90, 893, 963-6, 969-76, 1007; welfare, 893; see also N.Y.C. Housing Authority Title I, 12, 1060-1; corruption and honest graft in, 718, 726-7, 965, 979-82, 1006-13, 1014, 1016-18, 1040-54 passim, 1062; Democratic Party and, 965, 979-82, 1006-13, 1017-18, 1040, 1045-8, 1050; housing, 6, 704, 777, 805, 830, 890-1, 961, 962, 980-1, 1014-15, I 018 , 1024, 1060-1; RM's control of, as Slum Clearance Chairman, 12, 707, 718, 726-7, 74i, 752, 777-8, 805, 830, 872, 961, 962-3, 979-8o, 982-3, 988, 1000, 1006-25, 1040-63 passim, 1091; RM's falsifying facts on, 963, 967, 968-9, 972-3, 976, 977, 979; RM's records, 967, 977, 1008, 1040-5; neighborhood decay from, 963-6, 969-76, 1007; N.Y.C.


pages: 547 words: 148,799

Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan

call centre, land reform, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, urban decay

Erik looked at her in silence for a while. Then he went to the window and tugged back one of the ragged curtains. Outside, something had been set on fire and it painted leaping shadows on the ceiling above where he stood. Shouts came through the thin glass pane. ‘Yes,’ he said softly. ‘I know what you mean. You mean this. Urban decay, as only the British know how to do it. And here I am, fifty-seven years old and stuck in the middle of it.’ She avoided his eyes. ‘It’s just so civilised back there, Dad. There’s nobody sleeping on the streets—‘ ‘Just as well, they’d freeze to death.’ She ignored him. ‘—nobody dying because they can’t afford medical attention, no old people too poor to afford heating and too scared to go out after dark.


pages: 526 words: 155,174

Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson

carbon credits, different worldview, dumpster diving, energy security, full employment, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kim Stanley Robinson, McMansion, megacity, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, urban decay, Works Progress Administration

Or whether trained labor will be the real shortage.” “I guess we’ll find out.” “That’s a good thought.” And young Henry grinned. Evening in the park, and Frank buzzed Spencer and joined him and Robin and Robert at a new fregan house. East, into a neighborhood he had never been in before, a kind of border between gentrification and urban decay, in which burned or boarded-up buildings stood mutely between renovated towers guarded by private security people. An awkward mix it seemed, and yet once inside the boarded-up shell of a brownstone, it proved to be as sheltered from the public life of the city as any other place. Home was where the food was.


pages: 547 words: 160,071

Underground by Suelette Dreyfus

airport security, Free Software Foundation, invisible hand, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Loma Prieta earthquake, military-industrial complex, packet switching, PalmPilot, pirate software, profit motive, publish or perish, RFC: Request For Comment, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, zero day

In the early 1840s, Friedrich Engels had worked in his father’s cotton-milling factory in the area, and the suffering he saw in the region influenced his most famous work, The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848. Manchester wore the personality of a working-class town, a place where people often disliked the establishment and distrusted authority figures. The 1970s and 1980s had not been kind to most of Greater Manchester, with unemployment and urban decay disfiguring the once-proud textile hub. But this decay only appeared to strengthen an underlying resolve among many from the working classes to challenge the symbols of power. Pad didn’t live in a public housing high-rise. He lived in a suburban middle-class area, in an old, working-class town removed from the dismal inner-city.


pages: 717 words: 150,288

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism by Stephen Graham

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", addicted to oil, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, DARPA: Urban Challenge, defense in depth, deindustrialization, digital map, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, edge city, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Food sovereignty, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Global Witness, Google Earth, illegal immigration, income inequality, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, loose coupling, machine readable, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, megacity, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, one-state solution, pattern recognition, peak oil, planetary scale, post-Fordism, private military company, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart transportation, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, white flight, white picket fence

He invokes what geographers call a process of rescaling – a reorientation away from globe-spanning revolutions in high-tech warfare, and towards a dominant concern with the spaces of streets, favelas, medinas and neighbourhoods. This parallels the increasing preoccupation of military and security forces with the microgeographies of domestic cities. ‘Traditionally, problems of urban decay and associated issues, such as crime’, writes Norton, ‘have been seen as domestic issues best dealt with by internal security or police forces. That will no longer be an option.’82 The Bush administration’s language of moral absolutism was, in particular, deeply Orientalist. It worked by separating ‘the civilized world’ – the ‘homeland’ cities which must be ‘defended’ – from the ‘dark forces’, the ‘axis of evil’, and the ‘terrorist nests’ alleged to dwell in, to be situated in, and to define Arab cities, which allegedly sustain the ‘evil-doers’ who threaten the health, prosperity, and democracy of the whole ‘free’ world.83 The result of such imaginative geographies has been the a-historical and essentialized projection of Arab urban civilization.


pages: 530 words: 147,851

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism by Ed West

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Bullingdon Club, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Santayana, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ralph Nader, replication crisis, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, twin studies, urban decay, War on Poverty, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

Besides which communism was hardly very sexy by this point, represented not by Che but the hard-faced Politburo geriatrics who would turn out for their annual May Day events looking like living corpses, old, tired men addicted to vodka and surviving on dialysis machines. How could anyone say these mirthless half-dead bureaucrats with their failed ideas were the future? In contrast the United States that decade seemed as magical as those West Berlin toyshops, filled with colour and sound, hairspray and shoulder pads, dynamic films and music. Even its urban decay and squalor was sort of glamorous and exciting. The country seemed to have regained its confidence in this age of cheesy action films with Rocky, Rambo and John McClane beating up various Ruskis, Germans and Arab pantomime villains, not to mention Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun fighting the Ayatollah and Gaddafi.


Discover Caribbean Islands by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Bartolomé de las Casas, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, food miles, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, transatlantic slave trade, urban decay, urban sprawl

Architect Jacob Gelt Dekker took a run-down neighborhood in Otrobanda and created a village-like hotel complex. Eating & Drinking Mundo Bizzarro Caribbean $$ map Google map (9-461-6767; 12 Nieuwestraat, Pietermaai; mains US$8-20; 11am-late) The anchor of Pietermaai, the ground floor opens to the street. Inside it’s got a faux look of urban decay which is countered by the fine food. Upstairs there’s a bar with fab mojitos and live music Wednesday to Saturday. Plein Cafe Cafe $$ map Google map (Wilhelminaplein 19-23, Punda; meals from NAf10; 7:30am-11pm; ) This Dutch cafe and its neighboring twin are so authentic that if it were –1°C (30°F) and raining, you’d think you were in Amsterdam.


Lonely Planet Southern Italy by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, Google Earth, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, land reform, low cost airline, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, Pier Paolo Pasolini, place-making, post-work, Skype, starchitect, urban decay, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

In the old town, head up the winding, charmingly dilapidated Corso Telesio, which has a raw Neapolitan feel to it and is lined with ancient tenements and antiquated shopfronts, including shops housing a musical instrument maker, a Dickensian shoe mender and shops selling traditional crafts. Enlivened by an ever-changing gallery of street art, the side alleys are a study in urban decay. At the top is Cosenza’s 12th-century cathedral (%0984 7 78 64; www.cattedraledicosenza.it; Piazza del Duomo 1; h8am-noon & 3-7.30pm). Head further along the corso to Piazza XV Marzo, an appealing square fronted by the Palazzo del Governo and the handsome neoclassical Teatro Rendano (%0984 81 32 27; Piazza XV Marzo; tickets from €5).


pages: 655 words: 156,367

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

“The bleak environment” of concentrated poverty in which they lived “nurtured values” in them that were “often at odds with those of the majority—even the majority of the poor.” This underclass was producing “a highly disproportionate number of the nation’s juvenile delinquents, school dropouts, drug addicts and welfare mothers, and much of the adult crime, family disruption, urban decay and demand for social expenditures.”50 Technically the term “underclass” could be used to describe the poor of any color. Ken Auletta tried strenuously in his bestselling 1982 book, The Underclass, to deploy it in racially neutral ways. But its usage in the United States in the 1980s was coded black.


pages: 606 words: 157,120

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

But if the goal is to come up with better, more sustainable, and ecologically friendlier ways of parking, and even of managing transportation as a whole, then the Santa Monica scheme fails, for it optimizes the efficiency of only the local—not the global—system. That is, if it gives us citizens who don’t normally reflect on their parking and driving habits, then the scheme might still be considered a failure, even if it leads to more efficient billing of parked cars. Such unreflective attitudes toward transportation have given us both urban decay and climate change. We can postpone thinking about seemingly trivial everyday issues for only so long—eventually, they will come back to haunt us. Victorian Trains and Montana Huts In a way, various smart systems like the one in Santa Monica suffer from the same problem as self-tracking: if quantification gives us an opportunity to save three gallons of water without questioning how this water gets into our bathrooms to begin with, then perhaps the savings are not as significant as we believe and maybe they even detract from our seeking more innovative ways of reforming the water system.


pages: 569 words: 165,510

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business climate, call centre, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, first-past-the-post, food desert, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, meme stock, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, Paris climate accords, pension reform, QAnon, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, Steve Bannon, The Chicago School, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, young professional

The coronavirus’s apparent jump from an animal host to humans somewhere around Wuhan in China was perhaps just one consequence of environmental degradation as mankind continued to encroach on global ecosystems. Climate change further raised the specter of a permanently shifting Rust Belt across America—a swath of economic blight and urban decay that would no longer be confined to the country’s former industrial regions. As some places in the United States became more risky or difficult to live in because of rising sea levels and more frequent catastrophic “weather events,” people would have to move. This would compound the dislocation from deindustrialization and economic downturns since the 1980s and put new demographic pressure on regions and resources outside the climate danger zones.


pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

And that nationalizing impulse intensified after World War II, he noted, “reaching its peak in LBJ’s Great Society. This period of expansive liberalism saw the federal government assume responsibility for problems that had previously been left mainly to states and local authorities: racial injustice, poverty, illness, gender inequality, urban decay, educational inequity and pollution.” Geopolitics also pushed things up to Washington, D.C., which had to finance and sustain a global Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. Plus, you had the need for real expertise from the federal government for solving new, complex industrial-age problems.


pages: 607 words: 185,487

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott

agricultural Revolution, Boeing 747, business cycle, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, deskilling, facts on the ground, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, post-Fordism, Potemkin village, price mechanism, profit maximization, Recombinant DNA, road to serfdom, scientific management, Silicon Valley, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

In her telling critique of planning, Jacobs is frequently tempted to naturalize the unplanned city rather as Hayek naturalizes the market. 107. Ibid., p. 138. 108. Some of Jacobs's insights appear to be behind the early stages of recuperation in a few blighted sections of New York City's South Bronx, once a synonym for the worst in urban decay. A combination of refurbishing existing buildings and apartments, promoting mixed-use development and urban homesteading, making small loans more readily available, and keeping to a modest scale appears to have facilitated the creation of viable neighborhoods. 109. Quoted in ibid., pp. 336-37.


The Simple Living Guide by Janet Luhrs

air freight, Albert Einstein, car-free, classic study, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, compound rate of return, do what you love, financial independence, follow your passion, Golden Gate Park, intentional community, job satisfaction, late fees, low interest rates, money market fund, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, passive income, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, telemarketer, the rule of 72, urban decay, urban renewal, Whole Earth Review

After World War II they were called victory gardens, and again they provided a food source during a time of shortage. Today community gardens are popular because of concern for the environment and concerns about our food. The greatest impact, however, on the growth of modern community gardens has been from people who want to halt the rise of urban decay. A vacant lot is a haven for crime, graffiti, garbage, and disease. They’re making people every day, but they ain’t makin’ any more dirt. —WILL ROGERS Rose Murphy writes in Green-Up Times, a publication of the New York Botanical Garden, “It takes serious commitment and endless hours of hard work just to get the garbage off the lot.


pages: 725 words: 221,514

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, banks create money, behavioural economics, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, David Graeber, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, double entry bookkeeping, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, means of production, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit motive, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, seigniorage, sexual politics, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, upwardly mobile, urban decay, working poor, zero-sum game

Sharma, J. P. 1968. Republics in Ancient India: c 1500 – c. 500 BC. Leiden: E. J. Brill Sharma, Ram Sharan. 1958. Sudras in Ancient India. Delhi: Mohtial Banarsidas. _____. 1965. “Usury in Medieval India (A.D. 400-1200).” Comparative Studies in Society and History 8 (1): 56-77. _____. 1987. Urban Decay in India c. 300- c.1000. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal. _____. 2001. Early medieval Indian society: a study in feudalisation. Hyderbad: Orient Longman. Shell, Marc. 1978. The Economy of Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. _____. 1992. Money, Language, and Thought. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.


Rough Guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area by Nick Edwards, Mark Ellwood

1960s counterculture, airport security, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, Day of the Dead, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, period drama, pez dispenser, Port of Oakland, rent control, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, transcontinental railway, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Ravers, Deadheads, and other Bay Area riffraff wander in and out of the plot. | Books 411 San Francisco on film S an Francisco is a favorite with Californian filmmakers, the city’s staggering range of settings and chameleon-like geography making an often economical choice for the director who needs sunny beaches, swirling fogs, urban decay, and pastoral elegance all at once. Thrillers, in particular, seem to get good mileage out of the city; Hitchcock loved it, while the ridiculous gradients are almost ideally suited to the car chases that Hollywood loves so much. Below is a list of the obvious and not-so-obvious films made about or in California’s most beautiful city.


pages: 796 words: 242,660

This Sceptred Isle by Christopher Lee

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, failed state, financial independence, flying shuttle, glass ceiling, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Northern Rock, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, urban decay

In this period, the middle of the fifth century, there were great forests almost everywhere. The Weald at that time ran from Kent to Hampshire: 120 miles long and 30 miles deep. Where there wasn’t forest, there were often marshlands. There were roads, almost 5,000 miles of them, left by the Romans yet the towns were crumbling. It would be called urban decay today and it had started before the Romans left. The Britons, and the Saxon invaders, were rarely stone masons; they left no record of knowing much about repairing the buildings and cared even less. The great Saxon churches, many surviving today, came much later. If we have doubts about Gildas, we have fewer doubts about the importance of the clues to this period found in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People by the Venerable Bede – the first British historian.


pages: 1,233 words: 239,800

Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design by Matthew Carmona, Tim Heath, Steve Tiesdell, Taner Oc

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Arthur Eddington, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, City Beautiful movement, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, East Village, edge city, food miles, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, global supply chain, Guggenheim Bilbao, income inequality, invisible hand, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, land bank, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Masdar, Maslow's hierarchy, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-oil, precautionary principle, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Florida, Seaside, Florida, starchitect, streetcar suburb, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the market place, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, zero-sum game

The main part of this chapter thus sets out and discusses some of the key elements. BOX 11.1 Birmingham, UK: Re-inventing Through Urban Design Victoria Square, Birmingham) Birmingham has long been the UK’s exemplary urban design case study. Post-war re-building of the city centre in the 1950s and 1960s made it Britain’s first ‘car city’. Urban decay in the 1970s and 1980s, exacerbated by the strangulation of the city centre inside its ring roads, led to the first serious attempt in the UK to consider a city from an urban design perspective. The urban design strategy that emerged in the early 1990s prioritised making connections across the city (for pedestrians), understanding how people used and read the city from a ground-level perspective, exploiting the city’s heritage and distinctive qualities, and, once again, creating a city for people rather than cars.


Lonely Planet Scotland by Lonely Planet

always be closing, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, country house hotel, demand response, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Ford Model T, gentrification, James Watt: steam engine, land reform, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, retail therapy, rewilding, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban sprawl

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Dundee was one of the richest cities in the country – there were more millionaires per head of population here than anywhere else in Britain – but the textile and engineering industries declined in the second half of the 20th century, leading to high unemployment and urban decay. In the 1960s and ’70s Dundee’s cityscape was scarred by ugly blocks of flats, office buildings and shopping centres linked by unsightly concrete walkways; most visitors passed it by. Since the mid-1990s, however, Dundee has reinvented itself as a tourist destination, and a centre for banking, insurance and high-tech industries, while its waterfront has undergone a major redevelopment.


Lonely Planet Scotland by Lonely Planet

always be closing, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, country house hotel, demand response, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Ford Model T, gentrification, James Watt: steam engine, land reform, Neil Armstrong, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, retail therapy, rewilding, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, tontine, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban sprawl

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Dundee was one of the richest cities in the country – there were more millionaires per head of population here than anywhere else in Britain – but the textile and engineering industries declined in the second half of the 20th century, leading to high unemployment and urban decay. In the 1960s and '70s Dundee's cityscape was scarred by ugly blocks of flats, office buildings and shopping centres linked by unsightly concrete walkways and most visitors passed it by. Since the mid-1990s, however, Dundee has reinvented itself as a tourist destination, and a centre for banking, insurance and high-tech industries, while its waterfront is undergoing a major redevelopment.


The Rough Guide to New York City by Rough Guides

3D printing, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crack epidemic, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, greed is good, haute couture, haute cuisine, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, machine readable, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, paper trading, Ponzi scheme, post-work, pre–internet, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Scaled Composites, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, young professional

Mon & Sun noon–6pm, Tues–Sat 11am–7pm. Ricky’s 590 Broadway, between Houston and Prince sts 212 226 5552, rickysnyc.com; subway N, R to Prince St; map. Plus several other locations. New York’s haven for the overdone, the brash and the OTT (think drag favourites and plenty of lurid wigs). Stocks cool brands like Urban Decay and Tony & Tina as well as a house line of products. Mon–Sat 10am–9pm, Sun 11am–8pm. Sephora 555 Broadway, between Prince and Spring sts 212 625 1309, sephora.com; subway N, R to Prince St, #6 to Spring St; map. Plus several locations downtown. A cosmetics wonderland where the perfumes, make-up and body-care products are systematically organized and everything is at the ready for sampling and dabbing on your friends.


pages: 1,006 words: 243,928

Lonely Planet Washington, Oregon & the Pacific Northwest by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, British Empire, Burning Man, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Day of the Dead, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, intermodal, Kickstarter, Lyft, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, remote working, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, trade route, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

Olympic Sculpture ParkPARK (map Google map; %206-654-3100; 2901 Western Ave, Belltown; hsunrise-sunset; g33) F This ingenuous feat of urban planning is an official offshoot of the Seattle Art Museum and bears the same strong eye toward design and curation. There are over 20 sculptures to stop at and admire in this green space that sprawls out over reclaimed urban decay. You can also enjoy them in passing while traversing the park’s winding trails. Views of the Puget Sound and Olympic Peninsula in the background will delight anyone looking for some great pictures for social media. 1Capitol Hill & First Hill Frye Art MuseumMUSEUM (map Google map; %206-622-9250; www.fryemuseum.org; 704 Terry Ave, First Hill; h11am-5pm Tue, Wed & Fri-Sun, to 7pm Thu; p; jFirst Hill Streetcar) F This small museum on First Hill preserves the collection of Charles and Emma Frye.


pages: 893 words: 282,706

The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time by Hunter S. Thompson

anti-communist, back-to-the-land, buy low sell high, complexity theory, computer age, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Francisco Pizarro, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, job automation, land reform, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, urban decay, urban renewal, urban sprawl

In order to be a "realtor" in Louisville, a real-estate agent has to be a member of "the Board," which does not accept Negroes. Warders is a member of the Washington-based National Institute of Real Estate Brokers, which has about as much influence here as the French Foreign Legion. Louisville, like other cities faced with urban decay, has turned to the building of midtown apartments as a means of luring suburbanites back to the city center. In the newest and biggest of these, called "The 800," Warders tried to place a Negro client. The reaction was a good indicator of the problems facing Negroes after they break the barrier of outright racism.


Scotland Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

agricultural Revolution, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, country house hotel, demand response, European colonialism, Ford Model T, James Watt: steam engine, land reform, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, Piper Alpha, place-making, retail therapy, smart cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, tontine, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban sprawl

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Dundee was one of the richest cities in the country – there were more millionaires per head of population here than anywhere else in Britain – but the textile and engineering industries declined in the second half of the 20th century, leading to high unemployment and urban decay. In the 1960s and ’70s Dundee’s cityscape was scarred by ugly blocks of flats, office buildings and shopping centres linked by unsightly concrete walkways – the view as you approach across the Tay Road Bridge does not look promising – and most visitors passed it by. Since the mid-1990s, however, Dundee has reinvented itself as a tourist destination, and a centre for banking, insurance and new industries, while its waterfront is currently undergoing a major redevelopment.


pages: 913 words: 265,787

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apple Newton, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, experimental subject, feminist movement, four colour theorem, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gregor Mendel, hedonic treadmill, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, income per capita, information retrieval, invention of agriculture, invention of the wheel, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lake wobegon effect, language acquisition, lateral thinking, Linda problem, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Necker cube, out of africa, Parents Music Resource Center, pattern recognition, phenotype, Plato's cave, plutocrats, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sexual politics, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, Turing machine, urban decay, Yogi Berra

The other challenge comes from the fans of a new field called the theory of complexity. The theory looks for mathematical principles of order underlying many complex systems: galaxies, crystals, weather systems, cells, organisms, brains, ecosystems, societies, and so on. Dozens of new books have applied these ideas to topics such as AIDS, urban decay, the Bosnian war, and, of course, the stock market. Stuart Kauffman, one of the movement’s leaders, suggested that feats like self-organization, order, stability, and coherence may be an “innate property of some complex systems.” Evolution, he suggests, may be a “marriage of selection and self-organization.”


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

iii Dalal was one of the engineering students who oversupplied India in the period, graduating from the Soviet-supported Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 1972 before pursuing his electrical engineering doctorate (and resulting fortune) in Palo Alto. iv The couple divorced, and Lerner went on to found the iconically mordant Gen X makeup brand Urban Decay. v In her recent book, scholar Julie A. Turnock questions the Silicon Graphics PR claims regarding use of the company’s workstations on films such as Jurassic Park and Death Becomes Her, claims which have become accepted as fact. More likely, she argues, persuasively, those effects were accomplished on regular Macs.


pages: 879 words: 309,222

Nobody's Perfect: Writings From the New Yorker by Anthony Lane

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Apollo 13, classic study, colonial rule, dark matter, Frank Gehry, General Magic , Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Index librorum prohibitorum, junk bonds, Mahatma Gandhi, Maui Hawaii, moral hazard, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Great Good Place, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, urban planning

How much more interesting if Father Matthew had been the one with the guilty secret, with a little closed door at the back of his open mind, and if Greg had fallen in love with the housekeeper, or else—and this would have been the sharpest shock of all—if he really had been celibate. You might think that Priest is already brimming over with issues, but there’s more: on top of urban decay and gay clergy we get child abuse. (Don’t expect a repeat of The Boys of St. Vincent, though; these priests aren’t that bad.) A young girl comes for confession and tells Father Greg that she is being raped regularly, and secretly, by her father. Our hero is thus imprisoned in the oldest and clammiest of priestly dilemmas, the one that got Montgomery Clift in such a pickle in I Confess: How can you see justice done while preserving the sanctity and confidentiality of the confessional?


pages: 1,104 words: 302,176

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

Second, air conditioning made possible a massive move of American manufacturing to the southern states and indirectly sped the process by which inefficient old multistory factories in the old northern industrial cities were replaced by new greenfield single-story structures in the south. We return in the next section to the unfortunate consequence of urban decay in the northern industrial cities hardest hit by the exodus of manufacturing jobs—and with them a substantial proportion of the early postwar population. Room air conditioners are simple single-purpose devices designed to cool air and recirculate it. There are fewer dimensions of quality change, because there is no analogy to the multiple aspects of refrigerator quality.


USA Travel Guide by Lonely, Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, bike sharing, Biosphere 2, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, edge city, El Camino Real, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, intermodal, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mars Rover, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, Quicken Loans, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, supervolcano, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

OHIO FACTS » Nickname Buckeye State » Population 11.5 million » Area 44,825 sq miles » Capital city Columbus (population 733,200) » Other cities Cleveland (population 444,300), Cincinnati (population 332,250) » Sales tax 5.5% » Birthplace of inventor Thomas Edison (1847–1931), author Toni Morrison (b 1931), entrepreneur Ted Turner (b 1938), filmmaker Steven Spielberg (b 1947) » Home of sows, roller coasters, aviation pioneers Wright Brothers » Politics swing state » Famous for first airplane, first pro baseball team, birthplace of seven US presidents » State rock song ‘Hang On Sloopy’ » Driving distances Cleveland to Columbus 142 miles, Columbus to Cincinnati 108 miles Cleveland Does it or does it not rock? That is the question. Drawing from its roots as a working man’s town, Cleveland has toiled hard in recent years to prove it does. Step one was to control the urban decay/river-on-fire thing – the Cuyahoga River was once so polluted that it actually burned. Check. Step two was to bring a worthy attraction to town, say the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Check. Step three was to get grub beyond steak-and-potatoes. Check. So can Cleveland finally wipe the sweat from its brow?

(ie a government-backed plan, which would not force consumers to remain at the mercy of insurance companies). » Gallon (3.76 liters) of gasoline $3.88 » Car/bicycle hire per day $35/20 » Broadway show $100-300 » Major League Baseball game $30 » Dinner for two at top restaurant $200 » Highest point (in lower 48) 14,495ft (Mt Whitney, CA) » Lowest recorded temperature -80°F (Prospect Creek, AK) » Highest recorded temperature 134°F (Death Valley, CA) Big-City Appeal On other fronts, great changes were unfolding across the county, affecting many spheres of American life. The city, once regarded as a place of crime and urban decay, was now seen as a place where multiculturalism, the arts, and great restaurants flourished. Indeed cities had become greener, more livable and more appealing (shorter commutes, mostly car-free living). Americans – not just singles but families too – were moving back into the city. Some suburban areas, meanwhile, were beginning to adopt elements of urban living – many Americans wanted more than just a house in a sidewalk-free gated community.


Eastern USA by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, the built environment, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

OHIO FACTS »Nickname Buckeye State »Population 11.5 million »Area 44,825 sq miles »Capital city Columbus (population 733,200) »Other cities Cleveland (population 444,300), Cincinnati (population 332,250) »Sales tax 5.5% »Birthplace of inventor Thomas Edison (1847–1931), author Toni Morrison (b 1931), entrepreneur Ted Turner (b 1938), filmmaker Steven Spielberg (b 1947) »Home of sows, roller coasters, aviation pioneers Wright Brothers »Politics swing state »Famous for first airplane, first pro baseball team, birthplace of seven US presidents »State rock song ‘Hang On Sloopy’ »Driving distances Cleveland to Columbus 142 miles, Columbus to Cincinnati 108 miles Cleveland Does it or does it not rock? That is the question. Drawing from its roots as a working man’s town, Cleveland has toiled hard in recent years to prove it does. Step one was to control the urban decay/river-on-fire thing – the Cuyahoga River was once so polluted that it actually burned. Check. Step two was to bring a worthy attraction to town, say the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Check. Step three was to get grub beyond steak-and-potatoes. Check. So can Cleveland finally wipe the sweat from its brow?


Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health by Laurie Garrett

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biofilm, clean water, collective bargaining, contact tracing, desegregation, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, Drosophila, employer provided health coverage, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Induced demand, John Snow's cholera map, Jones Act, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, phenotype, profit motive, Project Plowshare, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, stem cell, the scientific method, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

New England Journal of Medicine 340 (1999): 618–626; Stevens, C., “System, Race, and Suspicion Promote Medical Disparities.” Detroit News and Free Press (December 10, 1995): Metro PI; and Wallace, R. and Wallace, D., “Origins of public health collapse in New York City: The dynamics of planned shrinkage, continuous urban decay, and social disintegration.” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 66 (1990): 391–434. 434. Low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, or LDL, was shown during the late 1970s and early eighties to be able to attach to the linings of blood vessels and arteries, forming plaques. These plaques, unless “scrubbed” away by HDLs (the “good” cholesterol), grew and compounded with time as more LDL-cholesterol entered the blood stream, its production by the liver fueled by ingestion of saturated fats.


pages: 1,797 words: 390,698

Power at Ground Zero: Politics, Money, and the Remaking of Lower Manhattan by Lynne B. Sagalyn

affirmative action, airport security, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, corporate governance, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, estate planning, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, high net worth, high-speed rail, informal economy, intermodal, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, megaproject, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, place-making, rent control, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, the High Line, time value of money, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, value engineering, white flight, young professional

Asserting Resilience New Yorkers with clear memories of the past did not have to dig deep to remember how the city struggled to emerge from the murky miasma of the difficult 1960s and the scary brush with municipal bankruptcy in the 1970s. New York and its serial crises made the covers of national magazines and journals; it was the poster child for urban decay, the apotheosis of the demise of city life, Exhibit A of the big bad city. These dark and gloomy decades loomed as an ever-threatening reminder of what would be if the city did not recover—in strength—from the devastating terrorist attack. Successfully rebuilding the Trade Center site—cost not a consideration—was a civic imperative.


Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein

8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business climate, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, death of newspapers, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equal pay for equal work, facts on the ground, feminist movement, financial deregulation, full employment, global village, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, land reform, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, oil shock, open borders, Peoples Temple, Phillips curve, Potemkin village, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, three-martini lunch, traveling salesman, unemployed young men, union organizing, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, wages for housework, walking around money, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

He promised “ ‘town hall’ meetings across the nation, where you can criticize, make suggestions, and ask questions,” and radio call-in sessions “during which I can accept your phone calls and answer the questions that are on your mind.” And he ran through a laundry list of policy goals: laws to prevent strip mining and oil tanker spills; measures to fight inflation, unemployment, urban decay, and welfare fraud. He promised to start his plan to reorganize a “confused and wasteful” government “at the top—in the White House,” with a one-third reduction in staff. He announced “a ceiling on the number of people employed by federal government agencies.” This was Carter the engineer. Then came the Baptist minister, preaching from the Book of Caddell.


pages: 2,323 words: 550,739

1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die, Updated Ed. by Patricia Schultz

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, country house hotel, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, East Village, El Camino Real, estate planning, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Mars Rover, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, out of africa, Pepto Bismol, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, sexual politics, South of Market, San Francisco, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, wage slave, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Duke Ellington, who forged what became known as the Harlem Renaissance, the first great flowering of black arts and letters in the U.S. But by the late 1970s, overcrowding, neglect, poverty, drugs, and violence had degraded the neighborhood into a symbol of urban decay. But in the late 1990s, Harlem again turned a corner, with an explosion of new businesses and block after block of historic homes slowly restored to their earlier glory. At the southern end is 125th Street, a vibrant retail corridor with national chains standing side by side with locally owned shops, restaurants, and offices—including those of former president Bill Clinton.