Tag Archives: cities

Railways and plutocrats

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This is a bit off-topic i.e. isn’t an economics book, but I enjoyed Iain Sinclair’s latest, [amazon_link id=”024114695X” target=”_blank” ]London Overground: A Day’s Walk around the Ginger Line[/amazon_link]. It’s an absolutely characteristic dyspeptic take on what’s happening in the unfashionable parts of London, the places linked by the tarted-up, more-or-less linked-up overground rail lines where Londoners can afford to live, if they’re lucky, pushed ever-further out by the tide of foreign plutocrat money drowning the housing market, leaving swathes of the city deserted because of the absentee landlords.

[amazon_image id=”024114695X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]London Overground: A Day’s Walk Around the Ginger Line[/amazon_image]

Sinclair’s work is an acquired taste but I love it. This is not one of his best – not up to [amazon_link id=”0141014741″ target=”_blank” ]London Orbital[/amazon_link] standard –  but it does feature one of my favourite things, a Victorian-built railway. Sinclair writes of the “functional elegance of Victorian arches” – indeed. And then there’s the anger, the anger, about the money: “Dirty money was never so bright, so blatant. So protected by the politics of no-nothing quiescence.” This week the Chancellor of the Exchequer said we should stop the banker-bashing; but I’m with the Governor of the Bank of England, saying there had been ‘ethical drift’, and the time really has come for the money people to regain their social licence to operate.

Heatwave

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There are terrible stories emerging from India, suffering an intense heatwave – such as this one from Vice News: Poor people are most affected as hundreds die in Indian heatwave. The story links to a study reporting an increase in the number of urban heatwaves over the period 1970-2012; and now more than half of us live in cities.

Reading these reminded me of Eric Klinenberg’s amazing 2002 book [amazon_link id=”0226443221″ target=”_blank” ]Heatwave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago[/amazon_link]. The first warning of impending heatwave was broadcast on Wednesday 12 July 1995; the next day the temperature soared to 106F and the ‘heat index’ to 126F. Roads buckled, trains derailed, city workers sprayed the bridges with water to maintain the structures. People opened fire hydrants and water pressure around the city fell. “The body’s  defenses can only take about 48 hours of uninterrupted exposure to such heat before they break down,” Klinenberg writes in the opening chapter. So from the Friday many people started falling ill. The heatwave lasted until 20 July. There were so many deaths (over 700) that the city had to store bodies in refrigerated trucks in the parking lot of the morgue.

[amazon_image id=”0226443221″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (Illinois)[/amazon_image]

Of course, extreme weather is a natural disaster, but its incidence is uneven because of social, economic and cultural structures. Klinenberg studied the ‘excess’ (i.e. above normal for the place and season) mortality rate in different parts of the city. Not surprisingly, poor people suffered the highest ‘excess death’ rate. The eye-opening thing about the research, though, is that some low income groups had a far worse experience than others. Matching districts for employment rates and average incomes, there was a higher death rate among African-American than among Hispanic people. Because the city authorities responded too slowly, because public services were poorly equipped, vulnerable people such as the elderly and those living alone had only their families and neighbours to rely on, and those social structures were at the time more intact among the recent Hispanic immigrants. Of the 700 who died over those few days, 41 ended up unclaimed by any relatives.

“This book has shown that extreme exogenous forces such as climate have become so disastrous partly because the emerging isolation and privatization, the extreme social and economic inequalities, and the concentrated zones of affluence and poverty in contemporary cities create hazards for vulnerable residents in all seasons,” he writes. None of which has changed anywhere in the 12 years since the book was published. He identifies as causes for concern the increase in the number of people living alone, growing spatial inequality separating social groups, the huge social distance between city governments and the people they serve, and the fact that we have government by PR with few mechanisms for holding the authorities to account on results.

The book ends with a plea to understand the consequences of natural disasters as societal events. That lesson is hardly ever put into practice, unfortunately.

Grass roots

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There’s an interesting evaluation of Jane Jacobs in The Architectural Review, arguing that her fabulous book [amazon_link id=”067974195X” target=”_blank” ]The Death and Life of Great American Cities[/amazon_link] misses the real target in attacking ‘planners’ instead of developers, and discounting the scope for state involvement. This made conservatives fond of her, essay author Sharon Zukin argues. But it concludes warmly: “Jacobs’s challenge to maintain the authenticity of urban life still confronts the fear of difference and the hubris of modernising ambition. At a time in which local shopping streets are the target of attacks against a broader alienation, we urgently need to connect her concern with economic development and urban design to our unsettled social condition.”

[amazon_image id=”067974195X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Vintage)[/amazon_image]

The essay cites the famous ‘sidewalk ballet’ in the second chapter in [amazon_link id=”067974195X” target=”_blank” ]The Death and Life[/amazon_link]:

“Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations.”

Echoes of course of that other grassroots philosopher Adam Smith. Not only: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest,” from [amazon_link id=”1505577128″ target=”_blank” ]The Wealth of Nations[/amazon_link], but also this from [amazon_link id=”0559612168″ target=”_blank” ]The Theory of Moral Sentiments[/amazon_link]:

“The man of system…is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it… He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it.”

  [amazon_image id=”0143105922″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Penguin Classics)[/amazon_image]   [amazon_image id=”B00JVST6CA” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Wealth of Nations[/amazon_image]

Venetian capitalism, 1515 and 2015

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I’ve had a short break to celebrate my 25th wedding anniversary, and we went to Venice. One of my books was Peter Ackroyd’s [amazon_link id=”0099422565″ target=”_blank” ]Venice: Pure City[/amazon_link], which has lots of interesting facts but is frankly a bit long and dull. I did enjoy, though, the sections about the Venetian economy. It was the engine of the world economy in the 16th century, a bustling, dynamic trading economy, built on a marsh with no natural resources apart from lots of fish.

Angus Maddison’s [amazon_link id=”B00BTM3SCU” target=”_blank” ]The World Economy: A Millennial Economy[/amazon_link] is excellent on this, and on the tides of economic history more generally; one of the fascinating things is how different places have had their moment. Italy’s was the during Renaissance, and look at it now. Maddison writes of the Venetian Republic: “It created political and legal institutions which guaranteed property rights and the enforceability of contracts. It was a pioneer in developing foreign exchange and credit markets, banking and accountancy. It created what was effectively a government bod market. … Its fiscal system was efficient and favorable to merchant profits and the accumulation of capital.” On the accountancy, Jane Gleeson-White’s [amazon_link id=”1743311494″ target=”_blank” ]Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance[/amazon_link] is a great read.

[amazon_image id=”0099422565″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Venice[/amazon_image]  [amazon_image id=”B00BTM3SCU” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Development Centre Studies The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective unknown Edition by Angus Maddison (2001)[/amazon_image]  [amazon_image id=”1743311435″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Double Entry[/amazon_image]

Venice was also the first centre of commercial publishing thanks to Aldus Manutius (there’s an exhibition on him now at the John Rylands library in Manchester). Ackroyd writes: “Printing was the first form of mass production technology, creating identical objects at identical cost.” Venice pioneered commercial printing and publishing, although the activity led to complaints that the technologically-driven abundance of books was making people less studious, a vulgarising influence. Sounds familiar!

One thing that intrigued me in Venice (the city, not the book) was the fact that the identity of the sellers of cheap handbags and selfie sticks in the streets has shifted. Last time I was there, five years ago, these men were mainly Senegalese. This time they were mainly South Asian. I wonder how these shifts happen? Of course, the city’s main trade these days is tourism, and all the services and goods that requires – like so many other beautiful places whose earlier economic function has vanished into the mists of time.

Beautiful - and redundant?

Beautiful – and redundant?

Not waving but drowning?

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“My argument, based on the experience of my years in the Chicago ghetto, is that the poor are actually more resilient and economically creative because they have much bigger obstacles to overcome,” writes Sudhir Venkatesh in [amazon_link id=”0141977396″ target=”_blank” ]Floating City: hustlers, strivers, dealers, call girls and other lives in illicit New York[/amazon_link] – in a reference back to his previous book, [amazon_link id=”0141030917″ target=”_blank” ]Gang Leader for a Day[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”0141977396″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Floating City: Hustlers, Strivers, Dealers, Call Girls and Other Lives in Illicit New York[/amazon_image]

Well, that rings true. The illicit economy manifests countless signs of creativity, enterprise, and the resilience of the human spirit. [amazon_link id=”0141977396″ target=”_blank” ]Floating City[/amazon_link] is not just a document about the lives of low income – and higher income – New Yorkers engaged in illegal economic activities; it is about the many connections between the legal and the illegal economies. He writes: “Global cities offered new social connections that could be monetized, above ground, and below in the black market.”

Chicago in the 1990s, the subject of the previous book, was a city of local neighbourhoods and dense, localized social connections. New York in the 2000s was becoming a city of new connections crossing all kinds of borders – the boundary between legal and illegal, the boundaries between social classes, breaking down, leaving individuals navigating new social networks with unfamiliar rules. [amazon_link id=”B00E54VDY4″ target=”_blank” ]The book[/amazon_link] concludes: “In the new world, culture rules. How you act, how you dress, and how you think are part of your toolkit for success. … The ability to cross boundaries is vital. New York forces multiple social worlds on you whether you like it or not.” Hence the floating between worlds – although more often sinking. As the Stevie Smith poem puts it, “I was much further out than you thought, and not waving, but drowning.”

The book is fascinating, and anybody with an interest in the illicit economy should read it. That ought to include all economists (although it probably won’t). The public conversation we have about the economy largely ignores the scale and pervasiveness of the shadow economy. From time to time it breaks through, as when the official statisticians announced they would include estimates of illegal marketed activity such as the drugs business and prostitution in GDP. On the whole, though, we politely ignore how big the whole thing is, from the scale of the international drugs and people trafficking trades all the way to rich folks with Swiss bank accounts looking for efficient tax arrangements, or companies that are ostensibly British but have a surprising number of Caribbean subsidiaries.

What I didn’t like about the book – and [amazon_link id=”0713999934″ target=”_blank” ]its predecessor[/amazon_link] – is the prominence of the author himself in the lives he documents. No doubt it is intellectually honest to underline the presence of the social science observer in the events he is observing, but for me he ends up sharing too much. I found it very uncomfortable, and was only partly reassured by the references to the university ethics committee. Having said that, authentic portraits of life on the margins of our global cities are welcome. And it’s a well-written and even gripping read.