3quarksdaily

Aftermath: Pakistan Elections 2013

by Omar Ali

The May 11th elections in Pakistan represented the first time that a civilian regime completed its term in office and held elections in which power will be transferred democratically to a new civilian regime. In a country where the security establishment has a long history of throwing out elected regimes and manipulating results, this in itself was an important landmark. For this (and for very little else, unfortunately) we can thank President Zardari and his coalition building skills and stubborn determination.

For my pre-election predictions, see here. For immediate post-result thoughts, see here. 

In the short election campaign the Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf (PTI) of Imran Khan captured the imagination of the newly educated and elite classes but it did not have the time (and/or the ability) to catch up with the pre-poll favorite, the PMLN. The superior and far more detailed groundwork done by the PMLN while it ruled Punjab for 5 years, its stronger slate of candidates, its relatively energetic performance in the Punjab government, and Mian Nawaz Sharif’s improved reputation, (along with a PPP collapse) led to a PMLN landslide in Punjab. This has practically given the PMLN  a simple majority in the national assembly in spite of having only a handful of seats outside Punjab. The newcomer PTI will form a coalition government in KP; PPP, with or without MQM, will rule again in Sindh; and Balochistan remains a unique case, completely outside the national mainstream.

With daily bombings by the Taliban keeping a check on the ANP, PPP and (to some extent) the MQM, and with an insurgency and its frequently vicious suppression going on in Balochistan, traditional campaigning was mostly confined to Punjab. There, an almost millenarian excitement took hold of the middle class in the course of the PTI campaign; This phenomenon was most visible on social media and in the better neighborhoods of urban centers. Meeting each other at coffee spots and snack bars and pushing “like” buttons on each other’s facebook pages, the newly energized middle class supporters of Imran Khan managed to convince themselves that a complete root and branch renovation of Pakistan under brand new leadership was on the cards.

Never mind that Imran Khan’s had not told anyone how the great 90 day transformation would be carried out in terms of actual mechanics and workable solutions. Or that Imran Khan’s actual candidates (in a parliamentary system, constituency politics matters) were a motley collection of turncoats, inexperienced youngsters, Islamists (a good number made their bones in the Islami Jamiat Tulaba, student wing of the Jamat Islami and not known for handling opponents with kidgloves),

NGO stars and not-so-clean real estate manipulators was ignored. Unaware that this excitement had not really reached all voters, these newly politicized young people were taken aback when results did not match expectations and loudly complained about electoral rigging. But there is no indication that there was any nation-wide systematic manipulation by the establishemnt of the sort that has happened regularly in past elections. Small-scale local rigging did take place (and possibly some  late-night administrative shenanigans did take place in Punjab once trends became clear) but compared to most past elections, this one was relatively clean in Punjab. Since most PTI voters were not involved in past elections, they don’t have any benchmark with which to compare this election and remain convinced that they were robbed. But given the fact that PMLN has probably won fair and square on most seats and even PTI enthusiasts have little concrete proof of extensive rigging, these protests will fade soon in Punjab.

The same cannot be said of Karachi; there, the MQM has been accused of extrensive ballot-stuffing and other irregularities.  While PTI did not make any serious campaign effort in the MQM strongholds, they did put up a strong campaign in NA250, where a lot of the super-elite lives. When the election commission failed to conduct a fair election even in that seat the PTI broke a longstanding Karachi taboo and openly protested against the MQM.  MQM chief Altaf Hussain made a threatening speech from London in response and on Saturday a prominent member of the PTI women’s wing was shot dead in an apparent target killing.

While no one has claimed responsibility and the police (as usual) have no leads, Imran Khan made the unusual move of publicly holding Altaf Hussain responsible for this murder. The resulting confrontation between the PTI and the MQM has raised the hopes of all those in the country who think the MQM needs to be cut down to size and its mafia-like hold on Karachi has to be defanged. But that may be easier said than done. More on this later. .

In terms of government formation, the post-election landscape seems more or less clear. PMLN will form governments in Punjab and at the center. PTI will form an islamist-leaning coalition in KP and will get a chance to show what their promises of radical change mean in practice. There will be a weak coalition of doubtful legitimacy in Balochistan, where the army will continue to call the shots. In Sindh, the PPP will form the government and most likely will take MQM along for the sake of peace. But what happens after that? A few guesses from a distant observer:

1. The rigging allegations in Punjab will come to nothing. PMLN will rule unchallenged for now. Barring any sudden deterioration in the security situation, they will push ahead with many development projects. They also need to improve law and order and to avoid administrative high-handedness, but given their record, may not do as well in these areas. The inevitable result will be that even if they are able to retain the loyalty of most voters, there will be resentments and complaints that will create openings for opposition parties. PTI and PPP will now have to struggle to define one of them as the main opposition. PTI may look like it has the advantage right now, but PPP is not without strengths. IF it recasts itself as a left-of-center social democratic party and does some creative politicking on behalf of poor people (instead of having Manzoor Wattoo hunt for “electables”)  it will not face real competition for that space from the Paknationalist-middle class focus of the PTI. Whether it can actually do so under current leadership is an open question. PTI may settle into the role of main opposition (and therefore have a reasonable chance in the next election) but their problem is their broad but shallow coalition and its millenarian tendencies. While this kind of vague and image-heavy nationalist and religious revivalism can be an advantage in a one-time go for broke effort, this quasi-religious mission is not the best formula for long term electoral success. We will have to wait and see if PTI matures into a real party or remains a one-hit wonder. 
2. Imran Khan’s provincial government in KP will face the Taliban problem from day one and will be unable to solve it. Some people think the security establishment wanted this regime in KP so that they can better manage their dealings with "good" and "bad" Taliban as the American effort in Afghanistan winds down. But even if they did make such plans, it doesnt mean their plans will lead where they want. They will be unable to control the bad taliban and will be unable to decisively separate the good taliban from them. And if the plan for Afghanistan is for "our taliban" to take over smoothly once the Americans leave, then that too is not going to happen. In the end, the security services will have to fight both the good and the bad taliban on behalf of the Pakistani elite. They may not want to do so, but they will not have a choice in this matter. There may be relative peace for a few months as negotiations proceed, but war will inevitably follow. The Jihadist project is not compatible with globalized capitalist economy and when push comes to shove, the Pakistani elite will pick global capitalism over Jihad. The days when both were on offer from the same American shop are over. 
3. While the PTI regime in KP will not be able to deliver on its promise of peace, they still have the chance to show some improvement in governance and corruption. That will require Imran Khan to appoint good people (like he did in Shaukat Khanum hospital) and then let them work unencumbered by various crackpot ideas about jirgas, Scandinavian Islam and elected police officials. And it will require smooth cooperation between the Jamat Islami and PTI without accepting all of Jamat’s own collection of crackpot Islamist ideas. These are big challenges, but if PTI can stay away from some of their own impractical or dangerous talking points (they dont have to abandon them in public, just ignore them in practice), then they may deliver improved administration and become a real party with a long-term future.
4. Karachi is a migraine for all concerned. First of all, we should be clear that there is no question of PTI “taking on” the MQM in Karachi on its own. PTI has no armed operatives and no mafia-skills. They can collect everyone’s sympathy and still get nowhere. The only way this confrontation tilts towards PTI is if the state is willing to fight MQM on their behalf. But that has issues of its own. The police and judiciary in Karachi is currently politicized, corrupt and ineffective. They will not be able to do this job on their own. This means that if there is a confrontation between the state and MQM, the army and its intelligence agencies will be involved or MQM will win. And the "agency" way of “getting it done” in Pakistan usually involves causing a split in the targeted party (e.g. by engineering a revolt in the party or maybe even getting Altaf Hussain arrested in London in connection with the killing of Imran Farooq ), setting off a turf-war on the streets, and then using extra-judicial executions and disappearances to manage the resulting violence. They have no other script. But these are inherently risky operations and the intelligence agencies have such a long and convoluted history of meddling in Karachi that by now even they dont know who will fight who on whose behalf. Since neither the PMLN nor the army, can afford a risky operation in Karachi while busy fighting Taliban, its probalby not going to happen in the near future. Even if they do try it, it will not be the quick restoration of law and order so desired by many who are currently sick of the MQM. It will be chaotic, it will be violent, and it will not end soon. And given rumors of links with British intelligence and the "international community", Altaf Hussain may not have run out of options yet. So the more likely scenario is that PTI’s more elite followers will be permitted to openly challenge the MQM in some areas (a big change in itself) but there will be no grand operation and no sudden restoration of rule of law in Karachi. IF Nawaz Sharif and the army prove to be miracles of far-sightedness and maturity, then maybe in a few more years MQM will be pushed towards either becoming a more normal political party, or be defanged by careful use of improved law-enforcement in Karachi.  All that without alienating Mohajirs as a community or carrying out extensive kill-and-dump operations and crudely executed gang-on-gang manipulations. One can always hope, but there is no quick fix. 
5. PMLN will try to get off to a smooth start with the army. They are not suicidal and they have matured enough to avoid hasty confrontations. But at the same time, they know they have to get the army under civilian control in the long run. And the army knows that too. IF leadership on both sides is very mature, they can learn to share power as well as real-estate and mining profits. It would be a miracle, but why not pray for miracles? This one is needed more than most in Pakistan.  Given the past records of both parties, there are grounds for being pessimistic, but after minimal deliberation, I am going to make an optimistic prediction: I predict that Nawaz Sharif will not face another military coup. There will be strains and stresses, but the civilian government will remain in place and will slowly increase its control over the armed forces.
6. Relations with India will improve under Nawaz Sharif. There will be no grand deal to solve all problems but trade and travel (and "optics") will be normalized quickly. Nawaz Sharif understands the economic benefits of normalization and the army is starting to realize that in this war of a thousand cuts with India, we have mostly cut ourselves. There will be resistance and setbacks but progress will continue. People believe the army will re-energize the Kashmir Jihad or launch a new Mumbai-style attack, but I dont think the great powers (including China) are in any such mood. Without their tacit approval, the risks are too high. The PTI, led by chief spokesperson Shireen Mazari, may parrot the traditional paknationalist line on this issue, but as long as Nawaz Sharif is delivering better governance and economic performance, the public will remain unimpressed with “betrayal of Kashmir” and other slogans of the "defense of Pakistan council".
7. Nothing much will change in Balochistan. This is sad and undesirable, but that does seem the most likely scenario. The Baloch separatists are too few to actually pull the province out of Pakistani hands by force (unless assisted in a big way by NATO, which doesn’t seem likely to me). At the same time, the army and its agencies operate almost exclusively on the kill-and-dump frequency, with no sign of finesse or any desire to compromise. Transitioning to full civilian rule seems very difficult and will be a Nawaz Sharif miracle if it happens. It probably wont.
8. ANP has been mauled in KP, but this does not have to be the end. As the Taliban continue their violent ways and the "play both sides" strategy falls apart, there will be an opening again for a Pakhtoon nationalist progressive voice. Of course, if the Talibs win (which cannot happen unless the Pakistani state has allowed it to happen) this will have to be movement led from abroad for a while, but even in that case, public support for the ANP will only increase with time. They will need to be available to take advantage of that.

All in all, the elections are a step forward. People voted in large numbers, proving once again that the Taliban propaganda against this “heathen system of government” is not getting much traction. The Zardari regime, for all its faults, managed to get Pakistan to this point and deserves appreciation for this achievement. The rigging allegations and various administrative irregularities have dented the image of this election but a more energetic and forceful elections commissioner next time can repair credibility in the heartland without a big problem. Miracles of various sizes (see above) may be needed in Karachi and Balochistan. Miracles will also be needed to bring the war with the Taliban and the war with India to simultaneous closure. If the PMLN can deliver a more capable regime and restore the economy (doable) and some of the miracles happen, we may be in a much happier place by 2018. If not, we may still hope for more of the same. The one thing we cannot afford is a revolution (Islamic, PTI-Paknationalist or Marxist-Leninist..the last is not on the cards but comrades are still around and appreciate the plug). We dodged a bullet this time and with luck we may get away next time as well. 

The Folly of Perpetual Victimhood

by Jalees Rehman

I grew up in a culture of guilt. One of the defining characteristics of post-war Germany was the "Vergangenheitsbewältigung", a monstrous German word that describes the attempts to come to terms with the horrors of Nazi-Germany and World War II. How could Germans have abandoned all sense of humanity and decency? Why had millions of German actively or passively engaged in the mass murder of millions of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, socialists and so many other minorities? This Vergangenheitsbewältigung resulted in a deep-rooted sense of collective shame and guilt, one which transcended the generation which had lived through the war and even engulfed Germans born after the war and Germans with immigrant backgrounds, whose families obviously had no historic link to the atrocious crimes committed in Nazi Germany. We did not feel blameworthy in the sense of having to answer for the Nazi crimes, but we did feel that the burden of history had foisted a responsibility on us. We felt that it was our responsibility to be continuously vigilant, watching for any signs or symptoms indicating a recurrence of right-wing extremism, anti-Semitism, fascism, racism, militarism, nationalism, discrimination or other characteristics of Nazi Germany. Our obsession with collective introspection at times became so excessive that it paralyzed us, such as when we developed a general paranoia of expressing any form of German patriotism, because it might set us on a path to Nazism. Many Germans also had near-hysterical responses to any discussions about genetic engineering, because it evoked haunting memories of Nazi eugenics. But despite these irrational excesses, I think that we Germans greatly benefited from our post-war soul-searching which helped us build a mostly peaceful country – no small feat, considering our past.

Roughly one decade ago, "mirror neurons" were among the hottest items in neuroscience research. These neurons in the brain of an individual were thought to fire upon observing behaviors in other individuals: When I see someone eating a delicious piece of chocolate, my mirror neurons fire and help create a proxy sensation or awareness in my brain that mirror the observed behavior so that I might have some sense of eating the chocolate myself. If this were true, mirror neurons would play a central role in generating a sense of empathy. Newer scientific research has questioned whether "mirror neurons" truly exist, but there is little doubt that our brain has some neurobiological substrate that enables empathy, even if it does not consist of the exact same set of anatomically defined neurons as has been previously suspected. I therefore still like to use the "mirror neurons" metaphor, because it aptly evokes the image of a neurobiological mirror in our mind. I would like to extend that mirror metaphor and also propose that our mind might contain "guilt neurons", which fire when we observe some degree of resemblance between ourselves and perpetrators of crimes. Part of being immersed in the post-war German tradition of collective guilt and soul-searching is that it endowed me with ultra-sensitive hypothetical "guilt neurons". When I hear about a tragedy or crime, I not only feel the natural empathy with the victims, but in a reflex-like manner ask the question whether I bear some degree of responsibility – not blame – for this tragedy and crime and how to best work towards preventing it in the future. This "guilt neuron" activity is strongest when I sense that the perpetrator is a member of an in-group that I also belong to, such as crimes being committed by fathers or husbands, by Germans, by scientists or physicians, by Muslims, by people with a South Asian heritage and so forth.

When Anders Breivik in Norway committed his mass murder in 2011, I felt a very deep sadness, because I could really empathize with the victims and their families. He killed teenagers and young adults attending a youth camp of the Social Democratic party. His victims could have been my children, and a couple of decades ago, I might have attended a similar youth camp in Germany. My guilt neurons were silent – I did not feel much of a responsibility because I had little to nothing in common with the perpetrator. He despised everything that I supported – diversity, feminism, progressive-liberal thought and the environmental movement. But I felt that there were people who ought to have felt some degree of responsibility. His manifesto quoted extensively from far-right bloggers and authors in the United States and in Europe, who seemed to have shared his world-views. Does this mean that everyone promoting anti-immigrant or far-right views in Europe and the US should have been blamed for the deeds this mass killer? Of course not! They did not directly provide him with the weapons and they did not ask him to murder the social democratic youth – but shouldn't one take some responsibility for promoting hateful messages that denigrated immigrants, Muslims and citizens with progressive-liberal thoughts? The responses of the far-right politicians and authors who might have unwittingly influenced Breivik were quite disappointing. Instead of undergoing an introspective analysis, the far right just issued perfunctory condemnations, stating that they would never have endorsed the murders. The politicians and far right bloggers continued to engage in their hateful rhetoric, even tried to seize the opportunity to portray themselves as unfairly maligned victims. The Breivik acts of terror did not seem to have activated the "guilt neurons" of the far right.

The week following the Boston Marathon bombings on April 15, 2013 was a very sad week for me. Boston is one of my most favorite cities in the world. It is the first US city that I ever visited. I spent many months there when I was a student in the 1990s. Boston eased me into American culture by cushioning the culture shock that Europeans experience when they first visit the US, mostly because it reminded me a lot of my home town Munich, famously known as the "Weltstadt mit Herz" ("city of the world with a heart)". Like Munich, Boston is wonderfully suited for long city walks. The Bostonians were extremely hospitable and friendly. I remember seeing beautiful sunsets in Boston, spending hours in the wonderful bookstores in Cambridge and Boston and being thrilled by the plethora of universities and their libraries in the Boston area, which seemed like an endless treasure trove of knowledge. I was thus devastated when I saw the tragedy of the bombings unfold – more or less live on the Internet and on Twitter revealing painful descriptions of victims who had lost their limbs at a marathon. I was haunted by the image of the young boy Martin Richard holding up a sign which said "No more hurting people" in 2012 – only to be murdered in the subsequent year at the Boston Marathon bombings. The idea of this beautiful city, normally bustling with activity and creativity, being forced into a lockdown because of some psychopathic killers was heartbreaking.

On Friday morning, I heard the news that the perpetrators had been identified; two Muslim immigrants with Chechen origins. They were brothers, the older one - 26 year old Tamerlan Tsarnaev - had been killed in a shoot-out. The younger one - 19 year old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev - had not yet been captured and an ongoing manhunt was still paralyzing the city of Boston. There were vague reports of "Islamist connections" of the older brother based on his alleged Youtube video playlists. The younger brother was a college student at the University of Massachusetts and had a Twitter account with the handle @J_tsar, from which he had sent his last tweet on April 17, two days after the Boston Marathon bombing. His last tweet was a re-tweet of the conservative Muslim cleric, Mufti Ismail Menk: "Attitude can take away your beauty no matter how good looking you are or it could enhance your beauty, making you adorable." Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's last self-authored tweet was "I'm a stress free kind of guy", one day after the bombing – both tweets seem rather cynical in the context of someone who had helped inflict so much suffering. His Twitter feed of the past months was a combination of mindless blather, evoking the traditional cliché of the banality of evil, but it also contained a number of tweets which indicated that he saw himself as a Muslim, even quipping about how Muslims at his mosque thought he was a convert to Islam instead of being born a Muslim.

The specific motives of the two brothers were not yet known when the news broke. Did they murder and maim their fellow citizens because they felt it was consistent with or even mandated by their view of Islam? Was it a political statement regarding the war in Chechnya and they just happened to choose innocent civilian targets in Boston because it was easier than planting bombs in Chechnya or Russia? Were they psychopaths seeking notoriety and infamy without any specific religious or political goals? Were they aided by a terrorist organization or acting as individuals?

Multiple Muslim organizations and prominent Muslims strongly condemned the Boston Marathon bombings, expressed their condolences for the victims and made it very clear that such acts of terror were inconsistent with Islam. Muslim organizations routinely issue such statements when Muslims commit acts of terror, but the question remains whether such statements are enough. Since I possess overactive German guilt neurons, I feel that as members of the Muslim community in the US, we have a deeper responsibility to undertake an introspective analysis and explore why US Muslims engage in forms of violence. Some might argue that there is no need for such introspection, since we do not yet whether the motives of the Tsarnaev brothers were in any way linked to Islam. Even apart from the Tsarnaev brothers' motives, US Muslims need to understand that there is an unfortunately high level of tolerating suicide bombings or violence against civilians. A Pew survey conducted in 2011 revealed that 13% of US Muslims thought suicide bombings or violence against civilian targets could be justified to defend Islam (rarely justified: 5%; sometimes justified: 7%; often justified: 1%). The Pew survey compared the results to those obtained from surveying Muslims in Pakistan, of whom only 7% felt that such violence could be justified in the name of Islam. Sadly, this degree of acceptance of suicide bombings or violence against civilians among US Muslims has not budged since 2007. This suggests that there is a disconnect between US Muslim organizations (which categorically condemn all attacks against civilians) and the US Muslim community.

Even though the 13% represent a small minority within the larger US Muslim community, they might be the ones who are most likely to be radicalized and it is thus important to understand what motivates them to endorse suicide bombings and violence against civilians. One hypothesis that can be explored is whether the Muslim self-perception of collective victimhood may contribute to their willingness to endorse violence. During the past 15 years that I have lived in the US, I have noticed that in Friday sermons (khutbahs), discussions, lectures, articles and books, American Muslims often perceive themselves as collective victims. Khutbahs routinely end with prayers for people in need, but in my experience, there is a rather one-sided portrayal of the global Muslim community as victims - khateebs (khateeb = person who gives the Muslim Friday sermon or khutbah) frequently mention the plight of Muslims who are oppressed and persecuted in regions such as Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir or more recently, Burma. However, there is little mention of prayers for victims in situations where Muslims are the primary perpetrators, such as is the case when Sunni Muslims murder Shia or Ahmadiyya in Pakistan, or when they kill or persecute Christians, Jews or atheists. The buzzword "Islamophobia", which is not really a phobia in the psychiatric sense, is frequently used to depict Muslims as victims. There are many cases of anti-Muslim hate speech and discrimination, but the haphazard use of "Islamophobia" to bludgeon legitimate criticisms of Muslims or Islam is rendering this term useless. An exaggerated "Islamophobia" view of the world also perpetuates the one-sided portrayal of Muslims as victims instead of promoting a more balanced view, one which would also include some discussion of anti-Western hostility that is found among Muslims ("Occidentophobia", incidentally is also not a true "phobia").

Is there any evidence that such a sense of collective victimhood could affect one's moral judgment? A remarkable study conducted by the social psychologists Michael Wohl and Nyla Branscombe lends credence to this idea. In a paper entitled "Remembering historical victimization: Collective guilt for current ingroup transgressions" published 2008 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Wohl and Branscombe examined the acceptance of Israeli acts of violence against Palestinians by Jewish Canadians. Using a web-based questionnaire, they surveyed Jewish Canadians in two different conditions, one which included showing the participants a website that reminded them of the Holocaust and the suffering of Jews and one condition in which participants just saw a neutral website. Importantly, participants who were reminded of the suffering of Jews in the Holocaust (prior to answering the questions) experienced significantly less guilt about Israeli actions against Palestinians. In a different set of experiments, Wohl and Branscombe then asked Americans how they felt about the harm inflicted by American troops on Iraqis. The American participants felt far less guilt regarding the American attacks, when the participants were reminded of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Interestingly, they also felt less guilt about the Iraq war when they were reminded of the Pearl Harbor attack. This suggested that it was not a causal link between September 11, 2001 and Iraq that had made them endorse American violence, but merely the sense of collective victimization - independent of whether the perpetrators were the Japanese military or Muslim terrorists.

Considering these data, it might be important to study whether Muslims who are continuously reminded of historical or ongoing collective victimization - being victims of "Islamophobia" or of military actions in Palestine, Kashmir or Chechnya - could promote a justification for violent acts, quite similar to the participants studied by Wohl and Branscombe. Conversely, a more balanced and realistic view of history and current affairs which would depict Muslims as both, victims and perpetrators might lower the likelihood of Muslims endorsing violence.

On the Friday after the Boston Marathon bombings, prior to heading to the Friday sermon, I wondered whether the newly disclosed information that the bombers were US based Muslims would help promote a process of soul searching in the American Muslim community. Unfortunately, the twitter feed of one of the most popular English-language Muslim blogs, MuslimMatters.org, known for its überconservative or right-wing ideas, did not suggest that this would occur. Some of its tweets and re-tweets on Friday morning suggested an all-too-familiar reaction of American Muslims. The religion of the Tsarnaev brothers was supposedly not relevant and had no bearing on the attacks; "only the perpetrator is responsible for the crime"; "If it wasn't you, then don't feel guilty. Do not take the burden of others upon your shoulders when they are wrongfully placed there"; and there were tweets about how Muslims might need to be vigilant about potential "Islamophobic" backlashes: "Please contact your local CAIR chapter if you experience any type of violence as a result of the tragedy in Boston: cair.com."    

The idea that somehow "only the perpetrator is responsible for the crime" is puzzling since we routinely look at context of a crime. When Adam Lanza went on a shooting rampage, murdering children and terrorizing an elementary school, American society did not just respond with "only the perpetrator is responsible for the crime". There was an extensive effort made to re-evaluate gun laws and the mental healthcare system, and there was a general shift in the public opinion on gun control. It may be important to clarify the difference between "blame" and "responsibility". As a society, we should take responsibility to help each other and care for each other, and when we fail to do so, there is no shame in taking responsibility for that failure. That does not necessarily mean that we are all to "blame" for the acts committed by the Tsarnaev brothers or by Adam Lanza. Also, there is no need to expect that only Muslims have a responsibility to act in response to the Tsarnaev crimes. One should explore all the factors that resulted in the tragedy, such as failures of law enforcement to detect the planned plot, addressing how they accessed the weapons and training that enabled them to commit their crimes or whether there had been warning signs that could have alerted family members, friends and colleagues. Muslim soul-searching is just part of the greater soul-searching process that involves society-at-large in response to the tragedy.  

As I headed towards our Friday khutbah in Chicago, I wondered whether the khateeb would broach this difficult subject. The first part of the khutbah was about Moses and David, and how these two prophets should be our role models because they exemplified steadfastness in their faith, gratitude and prayer, thanking God even under most difficult circumstances. The second part of the khutbah specifically addressed the Boston bombings. The khateeb strongly condemned the terror attacks, and said that Muslims are never allowed to kill innocent civilians. He then explained the horrors of the Chechnyan war and how Muslims suffered at the hands of the Soviet and Russian military. However, instead of an analysis and introspection addressing how we could help reduce the recurrence of such acts, the khateeb indicated that he wanted to mention one other event in this context. He said that after the Boston attacks, an interfaith service had been planned and that the initially proposed Muslim representative had been vetoed by some members of the Boston community. The objection to this particular choice stemmed from the suggested imam's alleged ties to Islamist groups. A different Muslim representative was then chosen for the Interfaith service. Our khateeb then made a rather bizarre statement in a defiant tone and said that Muslims should choose their own leaders instead of allowing "Zionists" to make decisions for the Muslim community! Rather than look in the mirror and think about potential reasons for why some US Muslims justify violence with religion, Muslims were again being portrayed as victims of alleged "Zionists". The promising first part of the khutbah had focused on Moses and David and emphasized the shared Abrahamic traditions of Islam, Judaism and Christianity, but the same khutbah had ended with the spreading of unnecessary conspiracy theories and regurgitating the image of the victimized Muslims. I left the khutbah with a heavy heart.

In the subsequent days, I observed how Muslims attempted to downplay the Muslim connection of the Tsarnaev brothers but I also saw how right-wing, anti-Muslim American groups began asking for massive profiling of Muslims merely based on their faith or ethnicity. We need to move beyond the two extremes - the one-sided portrayal by anti-Muslim hate-mongers of Muslims as purely evil perpetrators and the equally one-sided portrayal of Muslims as perpetual victims. We can then achieve a balanced and honest view of the role of Muslims in American society with a realistic and equitable distribution of responsibilities and expectations.

As with most unfathomable crimes, there are probably many factors that come together, there is no one single all-explanatory cause. The vast majority of supporters of far-right ideology do not go on shooting rampages like the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik did. The vast majority of homes containing an arsenal of guns do not give rise to child murderers such as Adam Lanza. The vast majority of Muslims who watch Islamist Youtube videos do not commit terrorist attacks. In all of these cases, we have to carefully analyze the risk factors that lead to the tragedies and work together to reduce the risk of recurrences. I do not want to live in a libertarian heaven with dormant "guilt neurons", where everyone is exclusively responsible for their own actions and where we can expediently shrug off any responsibility for the suffering of fellow humans or for the crimes committed by others. The strength of a society depends on the willingness of its members to engage in introspection and shoulder responsibilities.

 

Image Credit: 1) Auschwitz-Birkenau from Wikipedia, 2) Boston Sunset (Foto by walknboston via Flickr) 3) "La Reprodution Interdite" (Painting by René Margritte, Photo by Ronald Rugenbrink via Flickr)

Note: A brief excerpt of this article was first published in German as "Die Ewigen Opfer" on the blog of the German Progressive Muslim Forum Muslima Aktiv. 

Little Brothers, Total Noise and Trickster

by Misha Lepetic

"At the end of the day, someone is going to be right."
~Brian Williams, NBC Anchor

Because terrorism in the United States is an (astonishingly) infrequent phenomenon, the April 15 bombing of the Boston Marathon demands of us to make "sense" of it. But at the same time, it is this infrequency that tempts us to draw grandiose conclusions about What It All Means and How Everything Is Different Now. This species of sensemaking should be considered distinct from, say, the kind that goes on in societies that are frequently targeted. Within the context of Pakistan's 652 bombings in 2012, Rafia Zakaria considers a primary purpose of  journalism to be the enactment of "rituals of caring, made so repetitious by the sheer frequency of terror attacks; …in preventing the normalization of violence and senseless evil, they keep a society human." Mercifully, this is not the case here. We probably have the luxury of a few months until the next attack, so let us ponder what the Boston Marathon bombings "want" to tell us.

Were we offered a weary reminder of the racism that always seems to be lurking just below the surface of American society? Indeed. Further proof of Americans' abiding ignorance of geography? Check. A prime opportunity for yet another efflorescence of conspiracy theorists? Yawn. Please tell us something new.

Actually, in the case of Boston, conspiracy theory is a pretty good place to begin. The deepest conceptual failure of conspiracy, as an ontological mode, is its presupposition of a larger, unifying order. Since a benevolent conspiracy is not a conspiracy but really just a miracle – and a conspiracy that is indifferent to us is, by definition, impossible to discern – the fact that conspiracies are also evil is entirely redundant. The goal of identifying (and then wallowing in) a conspiracy, is not so much about the subsequent pursuit of justice, as it is about the reassurance that the world is not chaotic; that however you might detest its presence and seek to escape its influence, there is a deliberate design.

The problem is originary: we are sensemaking creatures. In this light, conspiracy is only our most extreme indulgence of that bedrock behavior. The only thing better than every thing meaning something, is if the meaning of every thing belongs to the same something. But confronted with the immediacy of the Boston bombings, the need to quickly interpret – or, more accurately, create – some kind of meaning is difficult to resist, and technologies, old and new, for better or worse, stood ready to lend a perhaps dubious hand.

**

Philosopher Rick Roderick, in a 1993 lecture entitled "Habermas and the Fragile Dignity of Humanity" makes a brief, telling aside: "in the late 20^th century, we are in a situation where interpretation has never been more difficult." Citing television as an example of an object that resists interpretation, he goes on to assert that:

Orwell was a pie-eyed optimist…Orwell's vision of a horrible future – a boot stomping on a human face forever – is a utopian image because he assumed there would be resistance, and human faces. Both of which may turn out to be false. 1984 is not a book that scares me anymore.

Of course, Orwell's worldview in 1984 was shaped by the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and little else, since tuberculosis had claimed him by 1950. Conflict was mostly militarized, explicit and even formalistic; claims of social control were predicated upon the ongoing existence of such wars. Authority physically manifested itself in the form of Franco and later Stalin – whom Orwell found particularly odious – and the accompanying state security apparatus. Resistance was to be rubbed out mercilessly, through surveillance, interrogation and betrayal not only of individuals, but of language itself. But resistance still existed as an oppositional force.

For Roderick, born the year before Orwell's death, this kind of explicit resistance had been subverted. Consider the advent of television: as a one-way broadcast medium, television was the perfect conduit for the population-wide, normalizing activities of post-war consumer culture: material prosperity, entertainment and advertising. This is what Roderick means when he thinks of television as "closed" to interpretation; it is a fundamentally Foucauldian view. And he was largely right, at least while the near-monopolistic broadcast model remained ascendant. But in the same way Orwell could not have anticipated the utter dissolution of resistance as he conceptualized it, pre-Web commentators ought to be excused for not anticipating the way in which commercial communication technologies created the conditions for the collapse of those very same models.

However, one didn't have to wait for the advent of the Web to see television threatened. Television had already sowed the seeds of its own collapse with the rise of cable and the 24-hour news cycle. Pioneered by CNN, which launched on June 1, 1980 (you can watch the utterly banal first minutes of CNN's life here), its insatiable appetite for news was not without unintended consequences. Two years prior to Roderick's comments, CNN had had a watershed moment in its coverage of the first Persian Gulf War, when it was the first network to provide a live feed of the pre-invasion air war. Decisionmakers found themselves laboring under the so-called "CNN effect:" the always-on nature of cable news artificially increased the pace of decisionmaking, and put politicians and even the military in a constant, reactive crouch. While the extent of the effect is debatable, 24-hour cable news should nevertheless be seen as a touchstone in the progressive tightening of feedback loops between those reporting and those making the news. This performative action of the former upon the latter – that is, the idea that "we journalists are performing journalism all the time, and therefore you decisionmakers must be performing decisions all the time, too" – has been further exacerbated by the rise of dozens of competitors to CNN. Which, only logically, leads us to ask whether there is enough news to keep up with the demands made by these entities.

**

The Boston bombings provide one answer. The yelling about How Everything Is Different Now has generally revolved around social media's decisive insertion into this system of loops, and how social media has brought in a third constituency, namely, everyone else (that is, everyone who has a internet access and the savvy to use and exchange information on said social media platforms).

For a good while CNN's coverage of Boston consisted of false leads, idle conjecture or stupefied filler, later provoking this absolute drubbing from Jon Stewart. The networks in general saw their thunder stolen by Twitter, and Reddit and 4Chan mounted their own crowdsourced "investigations". People were tracked down, identified and terrorized through their Facebook pages. A Saudi student, injured by and running away from the blast, was apprehended by a "citizen" and declared virtually guilty by the New York Post and Fox News. An already-missing student fingered by Reddit's "Redditors" – themselves anonymous – fared better only because he had committed suicide in the Providence River sometime prior to the Marathon itself. For its part, the New York Post's pièce de résistance of yellow journalism included a photo allegedly lifted from one of the Reddit pages.

Finally, the Tsarnaev brothers were identified by the FBI not through any state-owned surveillance apparatus but from footage captured by a Lord & Taylor department store's security cameras. It's worth noting that there are only 60 CCTV cameras in Boston that are controlled by the police – for now. It was an army of Little Brothers that did the job instead, with varying degrees of effectiveness, but, it must be emphasized, with no lack of enthusiasm.

But things got even messier. As the manhunt progressed, NPR and many others  began retweeting the Boston Police Scanner, to the point where the Boston Police Department politely asked them to stop, in fear of giving away tactical positions. For their part, the BPD were afraid that they had a real psychopath on their hands, since they had retweeted sentiments such as "I will kill you all as you killed my brother" from what turned out to be a fake Twitter account (which, in a bizarre act of faux posterity remains up).

How do we make sense of this mess? As a way forward, I cite James Gleick's clear-headed commentary in New York Magazine, who in turn references David Foster Wallace. If there ever was a keen observer of our culture, it was Wallace. In his guest editor's introduction to The Best American Essays 2007, he intimates a society immersed in an ever-accelerating

…rate of consumption which tends to level everything out into an undifferentiated mass of high-quality description and trenchant reflection that becomes both numbing and euphoric, a kind of Total Noise that's also the sound of our U.S. culture right now, a culture and volume of info and spin and rhetoric and context that I know I'm not alone in finding too much to even absorb, much less to try to make sense of or organize into any kind of triage of saliency or value. Such basic absorption, organization, and triage used to be what was required of an educated adult, a.k.a. an informed citizen—at least that's what I got taught. Suffice it here to say that the requirements now seem different.

Total Noise is a total nightmare for Wallace, who was the apotheosis of the close reader. It is represents the sheer impossibility of being able to judge the value of anything, of no longer being able to understand what difference any difference might ultimately make. The limitation of Wallace's perspective is that it doesn't take into account the purposive nature of all that noise. It may, in the aggregate, be noise, but every squawk was created for a reason. Every speck of noise was shot off into the ether of cyberspace on the tiny rocket engine of someone's agenda. Some of these reasons, such as the installation of the Lord & Taylor security camera, were incidental, and others, such as the fake Tsarnaev account, channeled the trickster.

Tricksters are not fools. Both may be Jungian archetypes, but let us be clear on the difference. As Helen Lock writes:

The trickster, however, is not playing. He is not confined to his own sphere of activity, "playing the fool," he is a trickster in the world at large. He actually is immoral (or at least amoral) and blasphemous and rebellious, and his interest in entering the societal game is not to provide the safety-valve that makes it tolerable, but to question, manipulate, and disrupt its rules. He is the consummate mover of goalposts, constantly redrawing the boundaries of the possible. In fact, the trickster suggests, says Hyde, "a method by which a stranger or underling can enter the game, change its rules, and win a piece of the action" (204). Unlike the fool, the trickster aims to change the rules of the "real" world; he is the lowly outsider who is at the same time powerful enough to transform and reconstitute the inside, or indeed to obliterate the existence of "sides." …The trickster pushes the limits of the unorthodox in order to transform reality—and as such is distinct from, in many respects the opposite of, the fool.

In this sense, trickster is present in the creators of fake Twitter accounts, and, no matter how well-intentioned, the witch-hunters of Reddit. And, at the same stroke, the Tsarnaevs themselves squarely occupy this role. They may have not thought through their attack, or rather its aftermath, but they were not, in the Jungian sense, fools. Look at what, all together, they have wrought. Gleick, in his commentary, "found the ecosystem of information in a strange and unstable state: Twitter on the rise, cable TV in disarray, Internet vigilantes bleeding into the F.B.I.'s staggeringly complex (and triumphant) crash program of forensic video analysis. If there ever was a dividing line between cyberspace and what we used to call ‘the real world,' it vanished last week."

Of course, the Tsarnaevs' goal was not to rewrite any information landscape but to kill and maim as many people as possible. But as far as individual bits and pieces go, there is very little that is unprecedented. About ten years ago, I was empaneled on grand jury here in New York City, and one of the indictments we handed down was based on incidental security camera footage – exactly the same sort that proved to be the Tsarnaev brothers' undoing. Regarding the thin membrane separating cyberspace from reality, connoisseurs of the Evil Bert meme will recall how Bert wound up alongside Osama bin Laden on posters handed out at a 2001 demonstration in Bangladesh. And Twitter accounts updated by real fugitives while on the run, such as software entrepreneur and accused murderer John McAfee,  quickly spawn their own fake counterparts.

Nevertheless, if there is anything new to be gleaned from this, it is the speed with which it is happening. Boston perhaps set a new record for the sheer amount of information generated, of whatever quality. And the media is indeed indispensable to anyone willing to set off a pressure cooker full of nails. As anthropologist Scott Atran writes in Foreign Policy, "their threat can only match their ambitions if fueled way beyond actual strength. And publicity is the oxygen that fires modern terrorism…Terrorists are directly responsible for violent acts, but only indirectly for the reaction that follows… the media is increasingly less a public service devoted to this task than a competitive business that believes it best succeeds through sensation, which violence privileges."

But even this is a mischaracterization of the kind of media landscape that has established itself. When has media ever solely, or even primarily, been about public service? And now, when barriers to entry to participating in – or simply obfuscating – the media landscape have been all but removed, what phenomena will we witness when the next terrorist attack visits our shores?

Here, then, is a proposed scenario. On the occasion of the next bombing, likely at a public event, there will be some, as-yet undefined critical mass of Google Glass users present (sorry, critics, it's coming), along with whatever competitor products have been released in the meantime. Uploading video and audio in realtime, they will be guided by members of Reddit, InfoWars, Anonymous or some similar happy-go-lucky vigilante network posing as a social media community. They will likely already have personal drones in the air at the event (no need to order online – the availability of personal drones is demonstrated by the accompanying photo, which  was taken today at the Barnes and Noble on 86^th and Broadway). A manhunt fueled by hashtags, hacked DMV databases, or disabled smart-city traffic light systems will take place. Moving quickly enough, it may outrun not just the media but law enforcement itself. Digitally distributed vigilantism will become the story itself. At worst, we will see the world's first social media-sponsored lynching. (See Patrick Farley's unfinished web-based graphic novel "Spiders," begun around 2002, for a possible future war created by such nicely messy, embryonic growth).

None of these things might come to pass. It is far likelier that what will actually transpire will be stranger still, and much more ambiguous. But one thing is certain: we have come a long way from fearing a society of command-and-control repression (à la Orwell or the conspiracy theorists), or a society of normalized self-policing, which is what Roderick and Foucault envisioned. As a result of our desire to live in a world of which we can make sense, we have created one in which the trickster is ascendant. And the trickster does not play sides.

Pakistan Elections 2013: The view from afar

by Omar Ali

If all goes well, Pakistanis will go to the polls on May 11^th to elect a new national assembly and all 4 provincial assemblies.  The Pakistan People’s Party was the largest party in the outgoing parliament and under the guidance of President Asif Ali Zardari, successfully held together a disparate coalition regime in the face of multiple challenges to complete its 5 year term of office. Unfortunately, that huge achievement is almost their only major achievement in office. While things were not as absolutely abysmal as portrayed by Pakistan’s anti-PPP middle class (rural areas, for example, are better off economically than they have ever been), they are pretty awful.  Chronic electricity shortages (inherited from Musharraf’s Potemkin regime, but still not fixed), galloping inflation, widespread corruption and endless terrorism have tried the patience of even the most devoted PPP supporters and make it difficult for the PPP to run on their record. There are a few bright spots (including a relatively well run welfare scheme called the Benazir income support program) and with Zardari deploying his coalition building magic, it is not a good idea to completely rule them out.  Still, they are clearly not the favorites in the coming elections. The middle class excitement (especially in Punjab and KP) is all about Imran Khan, while more serious pundits seem to be betting on Nawaz Sharif and his PMLN. Being out of the country, I have little direct knowledge of what retail politics looks like on the ground; but there is such a thing as a long-distance view and I am going to take that view and try and make some predictions. We will know in 3 weeks how out of touch I really am.

If you do want to look up what is happening on the ground in detail there are several excellent sources available, for example:  Saba Imtiaz’s election watch, the Dawn newspaper’s election page (including an interesting motor cycle diary from Tahir Mehdi as he motors across Pakistan), an election page from journalist and public intellectual Raza Rumi and last but not the least, the wonderful young team at fiverupees.com, who don’t have a lot of coverage yet, but do have writers who prefer carefully checked facts and data to mere opinion.  

On to predictions:

1. No one will win a thumping majority. This one is easy. The early favorite PMLN is strong in Punjab, has a presence in KP (mostly Hazara) and a useful alliance in Baluchistan, but little hope in Sindh. With Punjab alone having 148 out of 271 general seats, they will probably win the most seats in the NA but it still may not add up to a decisive majority.
2. PMLN will easily form the next provincial government in Punjab. PPP will still be the second largest party in Punjab. PTI will be third.
3. PPP will win most seats in Sindh, but it will lose some seats in the Sindhi heartland where it has had a decisive majority in almost every election.  MQM will win its usual Sindh Urban seats. PPP will win Lyari once again in spite of all its mistakes in the last 5 years. By making up with the PAC, Zardari has pulled this rabbit out of the hat after things looked decidedly shaky for the PPP in Lyari. Incidentally, in the process he has also nominated perhaps the most interesting female candidate in this election (who is likely to win her seat).
4. Imran Khan’s PTI will win around 10 seats in Punjab. It may do better in KP (but there are only 35 general seats in all of KP, so “better” is not going to be enough at a national level). In Sindh his party has completely abandoned urban Sindh to the MQM and is unlikely to win any seats in rural Sindh (except one that his party vice president Shah Mahmood Qureshi may win as an independent because of the hold of hereditary feudal Pir’s (spiritual leaders) in the area; which is truly ironic since Imran Khan’s main appeal is as a “new” kind of politician and his party’s only hope in Sindh is the most regressive kind of feudal politics). MQM will hold on to its dominant position in urban Sindh.
5. The heroic ANP, facing the wrath of the Taliban alone and without any serious protection from the “deep state”, will still manage a few seats in KP. JUI-F (still regarded by many foreign observers as a “pro-Taliban party”, though the reality may be more complicated) will win a few, PTI will win a few, and PMLN will win a few, and so on. PTI supporters are very hopeful of a major sweep in this province, but my long distance ill-informed guess is that while they will win seats, they will not be able to manage a sweep. My reason for saying this is that the province is in many ways the most politically diverse in the country. It consists of many different regions, many ethnicities, many languages and an electorate that is more politically savvy than people give them credit for.  It’s true that things are in something of a flux because the province is the epicenter of the jihadist insurgency and there is a serious contradiction between deeply rooted religious loyalties of the general population and the need to engage in a bareknuckle contest against militants who claim to be more loyal to that religion than anyone else.   This clash has created serious problems in the mind of the Pakistani middle class everywhere, but perhaps more so in KP than elsewhere. This severe cognitive dissonance is a major factor in creating support for Imran Khan’s blend of Islamic nationalism and Swedish social democracy, but that surge is not going to carry him to the landslide he needs.
6. To sum up: no one will win it all. PMLN will be the single biggest party and the much maligned PPP will be second. PTI will get maybe 30 seats. The end result will be a coalition government and this one may not last the full 5 years. This will be more like a transitional election that will set the stage for more mature politics in the next term. And it will do so because Zardari was able to get a civilian regime to complete its term and hopefully, to hold elections and transfer power. If the army can be kept out of direct politics this time it will finally begin to sink in that no savior on horseback is going to magically transform the nation. THIS is all there is. These politics, these parties, these elections, these compromises. That realization may well be the best thing to come out of this election. The elected regime itself (probably PMLN, but if PTI cuts enough into their support, maybe even PPP) will be no great miracle and will not have a very decisive mandate, but its very existence will be step forward.  

Many things can go wrong in Pakistan. Many already have. There is likely to be very hard fighting against the Taliban in the years to come. There will be a civil war in Afghanistan that will involve Pakistan one way or the other. There may be new tensions with India. There may be an economic collapse. There may be an unusually serious act of terror in a great power (e.g. the USA, China, an EU country or Russia) that leads to severe consequences for Pakistan. And all of that may happen with a middle class still confused between Jihadist Islam and “Western” democracy.  But it is also possible that none of this may happen. That things will drag on for years as various serious contradictions are slowly resolved. In short, there is a fighting chance that these struggles will take place in a Pakistan where the system and its continuity are being taken for granted. That will be a step forward.

Btw, this is how things looked in 2008

 

…And Thanks For All The Fish

by Misha Lepetic

"Fish is as natural in Fulton Market as they are in their own briny element."
~Harper's Magazine, 1867

Followers of the New York City food scene have recently been galvanized by yet another all-too-predictable brawl between, on the one hand, real estate developers and the city and, on the other, scrappy entrepreneurs bent on preserving another endangered aspect of New York's urban heritage. In this case, the contested site is the Fulton Fish Market, whose fishmongering operations had already decamped to the Bronx back in 2005. Since then, two sizable waterfront buildings have remained astonishingly, unconscionably empty. In the meantime, the New Amsterdam Market, founded by Robert LaValva, has grown its following with increasingly successful seasonal, weekly markets, conducted in the shadow of the old fish market for the last seven years.

Not only has New Amsterdam Market been steadily expanding since its 2005 inception, but LaValva's vision is decidedly more ambitious: to re-occupy the former market buildings and create an urban market as worthy of New York as Reading Terminal Market is of Philadelphia, as La Bocqueria is of Barcelona, or as Les Halles once was of Paris. This unstoppable force has, unsurprisingly, run into the immovable object of what we may call the "city-developer complex."

But in order to understand what it would take to recreate the Fulton Market, it is instructive to look back to its genesis. Markets tend not spring wholly formed from the minds of expert city planners, visionary mayors, or magnanimous philanthropists; nor do they manifest themselves in some sui generis manner from self-organizing associations of merchants. They are messy affairs, constantly contended and never fully secure. What, then, drives the creation – and maintenance – of a successful urban market?

Fulton Market's site on the East River, in retrospect, seemed to be the perfect place for a market. As a tidal strait, the East River was much freer of the ice floes that plagued shipping on the Hudson; it furthermore had the advantage of facing Brooklyn, whose incipient ferry service was about to create New York's first commuting class. But the origins of the market, usually dated to 1822, reach much further back, to 1695, and to a site a few blocks south, known as the Fly Market. As David Allgeyer writes in "The Tip of The Island:"

"Vley Market"…came to be used for a trading center which was developing in the general area known as "Smit's (Smith's) Valley." "Valley" was shortened to "Vley," and eventually "Vley" became corrupted [albeit appropriately] to "Fly." [It] became the main trading center for the townspeople with Long Island farmers. In the late 1700's two pavilions were erected for the merchants [sic] activities during inclement weather. The one at the foot of the slip was a fish market. At the foot of the slip were steps leading down to the water level, where a dock for the Long Island Ferry boarded passengers. Apparently the Ferry to Brooklyn also used the dock [for] some period of time. (pp121-2).

Despite this seemingly sensible evolution, the Fly Market was situated over an open sewer, which made summertime operation difficult; moreover, the vendors wanted to get closer to the docks where the new ferry to Brooklyn had been operating since 1814 – the cartage fee was eating into their profits. Certainly by 1815 the idea had been floated, and by March of 1817 the state legislature had empowered the city to take possession of the land. However, the city dragged its heels until the following incident, as documented in Thomas Farrington De Voe's richly detailed (and delightfully chatty) 1862 compendium The Market Book: Containing a Historical Account of the Public Markets of the Cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Brooklyn [etc].:

Early in 1821, a large fire took place in Fulton Street, Front Street, and Crane's Wharf, which destroyed all the wooden buildings on this site. This induced the Mayor to call a meeting of the Board on the 29^th of January of that year, for the purpose of deciding the question, "Whether or no a public market shall be erected on this site." The Gazette of that date says: "The late conflagration has exposed to view this beautiful spot of ground, which has so universally been considered as the most eligible of situations for a market, and which has already been actually vested in the Corporation for the purpose of a market." (De Voe, 488ff)

Thus it was thanks to a tabula rasa – of however dubious a provenance – that the Fulton Market had its start. Even then it was a struggle to get the market opened: further cajoling and browbeating of the City Council was needed to persuade it of its duty to erect a public market in an area where the value of real estate was rapidly climbing. In fact, the Council enlisted several lawyers to argue that it was under no obligation to build what it promised on the land that had been so conveniently cleared for it. Nevertheless, Fulton Market opened for business on January 22, 1822. 

But in case anyone might think this was an urban market mecca, à la Union Square's now-famous Greenmarket, Robert Greenhalgh Albion, writing in "The Rise of New York Port" (1939), quotes a Glasgow printer as noting that the slips, "being completely out of the current of the stream or tide, are little else than stagnant receptacles of city filth; while the top of the wharves exhibits one continuous mass of clotted nuisance, composed of dust, tea, oil, molasses, &c., where revel countless swarms of offensive flies" (p221).

Business was not without its rambunctious aspects, either: the initial 1822 auction of stalls had been boycotted by the butchers due to the greediness of the council, and when one of their profession crossed the picket line he was unceremoniously seized, thrashed and tossed into the East River (De Voe, p493). Nevertheless, as the city evolved, so did its port, and the supply of fresh fish, oysters and other seafood continued unabated, of which Fulton Market rapidly became the epicenter. Soon enough it had become nearly the largest in the city, second only to Washington Market; as an example of its prodigious supply, by 1867, the anonymous writer for Harper's Magazine featured in the epigraph above was able to report that, thanks to the Market, "with regard to oysters, about 250,000 are daily eaten in New York during the "R" months; about 25,000 per diem during the remaining months of the year."

**

And yet more overpowering than the smell of fish was the smell of money. The city's foot-dragging in 1821 as it sensed more lucrative revenue opportunities for the land dedicated to the market would be not be the last time such preferences emerged. As Philip Lopate writes in his excellent introduction to Barbara Mensch's book of photographs chronicling the Fish Market's twilight years:

[In] April 4, 1857, a Tribune editorial had argued…that it made more fiscal sense to close the downtown markets and sell the property to realtors:

The ground occupied by Washington Market is estimated to be worth $385,000; Fulton Market, $210,000. A more accurate estimate, at present values, would make the aggregate near a million dollars – certainly as much as that including the wharf and dock rights. The markets are now far away from their customers; dwelling and boarding houses have been generally abandoned in their vicinity, and… the people who still resort to these markets would be more generally accommodated if they were removed a considerable distance uptown; the city would profit largely by selling these sites, and the rush and crowd of Broadway below the park would be sensibly relieved by withdrawing the thousands of carts and wagons which necessarily throng around the present markets (pp9-10).

Aside from being exquisitely prescient of the Fish Market's future, this is illustrative of a larger truth. Cities have traditionally held little concern for the means by which the populace feeds itself. Usually,  things are left to just manage themselves, unless there is good money to be made from taxing alcohol and other kinds of conspicuous consumption. It is only when waves of cholera sweep the slums are efforts made to clean up the drinking water supply; similarly, it is only when the streets are clogged with vendors that prevent the effective transaction of "business" (as if the purchase of foodstuffs is not business at all) that permanent spots for markets stand a chance of being created.

During the 1930s, NYC Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia presented one model for doing so: he "made it a mission to eradicate "pushcart evil", calling it "a blemish on the face of the city" that must be removed. He envisioned a brighter, cleaner Lower East Side that erased any vestiges left from its ethnic immigrant past. Under LaGuardia's leadership, new laws forbade any goods from being sold on the street." Instead, he organized several indoor markets around the city, including the Lower East Side's Essex Street Market, and La Marqueta in East Harlem, among six others; four are still standing today, more than seventy years later. However, it also bears mentioning that those vendors who could not afford the indoor fees became unemployed.*

In the meantime, Fulton Fish Market had turned to wholesale as well as retail, thus further cementing its vital position. The trade was so profitable, in fact, that all other, non-seafood vendors had been bought out; the Mob, too, smelled the money sometime in the 1930s and began making its own inroads. But, improbably, the venue remained, with its absurd hours (the best time to get fish was when you'd finished clubbing downtown, around three or four in the morning), even more absurd characters (I dearly enjoyed hanging out with Annie around the time I moved to the City, about 13 years ago), and a general atmosphere of unsurpassed crankiness and camaraderie. It was probably the last place in Manhattan where you could walk up to a couple of guys warming themselves over a trashcan fire and cadge a smoke off of them, and wind up shooting the bull for an hour.

Eventually, with the Disney-fication of South Street Seaport, these practices were squeezed out of existence, one by one. Which leads us to ask, why should something like this have persisted for so long? Philip Lopate proposes a sort-of answer:

Quick to innovate, New York will then conservatively attach itself to a physical status quo, however cumbersome and even ugly, so long as it is reassuringly familiar. Two reasons may be proffered: first, the large immigrant population often prefers casual, under-regulated work environments; second, the town being a famously difficult if exciting place to live, the typical New Yorker does not expect comfort, proudly adjusting to crisis or hassle through a mixture of resilience and resignation (pp1-2).

I wonder, however, if this is still the New York that exists today. Certainly Fulton Fish Market, as I have sketched it above, is gone, and gone forever. Now situated in a state-of-the-art facility in the Bronx, the peanut-gallery/jury of the fishmongers themselves is still out as whether any of this was a good idea. Not that there is any going back. If anything, Bloomberg's New York seems intent on pushing anything unpolished and wholesale into the periphery, if not beyond the city limits. It seems as if the only kind of "urban market" that can open these days in New York is the likes of an overpriced gastro-fantasyland such as Eataly, a place where you will never be in doubt to whom to give your money.

While these are no longer gritty, vaguely intimidating places but shiny, welcoming temples where there is simply no room for someone like Annie, this is not the axe I want to grind here, as tempting as it might be. The more important issue is how this development closely mirrors the larger shift, that cities are now largely perceived by policymakers as sites of consumption, and not of production or interaction. And yet, in all this time the task of feeding the city has not changed one whit.

Which brings us back to the future of New Amsterdam Market. What future would that be? I refer readers to other, more capable commentators on the ins and outs of the recent political process, which, shall we  say, is about as sausage-y as sausage-making gets. LaValva's vision is what is compelling: a vibrant regional food hub for farmers and producers; retailers and wholesalers; tourists, restaurants and regular New Yorkers alike. This is not an attempt to reproduce the grungy flair of the original market, but it definitely is not a further step in the ongoing homogenization of New York, and many other cities. It is, if anything, a valiant attempt to reweave the urban and rural fabrics.

But without the overt pressures that drove planners and officials to create markets in the past – whether they were rioting butchers, caroming pushcarts, or other public health hazards, real or imagined – it is difficult to see what inspiration will impel our recalcitrant officials to forego the kind of alliances that have proven so fruitful in the recent past. These days, more than ever, it is a big money game. The kind of money that people cannot really visualize (although films like Battle for Brooklyn and My Brooklyn are a good start, and deserving of a separate post). The kind of money for which people are willing to be very, very patient. Indeed, the developer who a week ago said "If I got $300 a square foot [in commercial tenants' rent], I'd be very happy…we want to charge as much rent as we can..." reminded me of 1821, when, nearly 200 years ago, almost no market came to be built at all. And yet, stranger things came to pass.

 

____________

*Incidentally, for seven years I lived across the street from a produce shop that was owned by one of Brooklyn's last horse-and-cart vendors. Even for Jimmy's obituary, the Times couldn't resist quoting its earlier (less gentler?) self:

Of course, not everyone looked upon the peddlers kindly. The New York Times wrote (somewhat sneeringly) in 1884: "Is there any satisfaction at all in buying the freshest and greenest vegetables from a lank-haired dirty fingered peddler who probably never saw a fifty-acre farm in his life?" It continued: "They all sell at poor people's prices and get poor people's custom, but they have no more in common with the mob and rabble around the auction wagons of the vendors than they have with a wholesale grocery house in West Broadway."

Pakistan and Its Stories

by Omar Ali 

I recently wrote a piece titled “Pakistan, myths and consequences”, in which I argued that Pakistan’s founding myths (whether present at birth or fashioned retroactively) make it unusually difficult to resist those who want to impose various dangerous ideas upon the state in the name of Islam. The argument was not that Pakistan exists in some parallel dimension where economic and political factors that operate in the rest of the world play no role. But rather that the usual problems of twenty-first century post-colonial countries (problems that may prove overwhelming even where Islamism plays no role) are made significantly worse by the imposition upon them of a flawed and dangerous “Paknationalist-Islamic” framework. Without that framework Pakistan would still be a third world country facing immense challenges. But with this framework we are committed to an ideological cul-de-sac that devalues existing cultural strengths and sharpens existing religious problems (including the Shia-Sunni divide and the use of blasphemy laws to persecute minorities). Not only do these creation myths have negative consequences (as partly enumerated in the above-linked article) but they also have very little positive content. There is really no such thing as a specifically Islamic or “Pakistani” blueprint for running a modern state. None. Nada. Nothing. There is no there there. Yet school textbooks, official propaganda and everyday political speech in Pakistan endlessly refer to some imaginary “Islamic model” of administration and statecraft. Since no such model exists, we are condemned to hypocritically mouthing meaningless and destructive Paknationalist and Islamist slogans while simultaneously (and almost surreptitiously) trying to operate modern Western constitutional, legal and economic models.  

 

This argument is anathema to Pakistani nationalists, Islamists and neo-Islamists (e.g. Imran Khan, who believes a truly Islamic state would look something like Sweden without the half-naked women) but it is also uncomfortable for upper class Leftists educated in Western universities. Their objections matter to me because they are my friends and family, so I will try to answer some of them here. These friends have pointed out to me that:

1. India is not much better.

2. The US systematically supported Islamists in Pakistan and pushed for the suppression of leftist and progressive intellectuals for decades.

3. Colonialism.

About the India objection, I believe that objection misses the point. The Indian subcontinent is all a work in progress. Every nation has miles to go. We are by far the largest repository of REALLY poor people on planet earth. Indians (defined as anyone belonging to the wider Indian genetic and civilizational cluster, hence including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri-Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan) are the most numerous population group on earth (outnumbering the Chinese by hundreds of millions) and living standards in greater India are barely ahead of “sub-Saharan Africa” (which admittedly includes South Africa, so the category is rather heterogeneous and misleading) and social and economic problems are correspondingly huge.

Culturally too, it is a remarkably heterogeneous and variegated civilization (though still recognizably “Indian”) and the modern Indian state is very far from being a model for anyone. While its founding myth and ideal are positive ideals (multicultural, secular, democratic India) its actual practice is frequently very far from those ideals. But if and when India approaches its ideal, it will have improved. And its ideal draws upon the same vast storehouse of experimentation and theorization to which every other modern country and culture contributes and from which they all draw their lessons. That India is not much better is expected. But it is swimming the same river as everyone else and with time, may swim better. It may even contribute some original ideas of its own to the great (and frequently bloody and unjust) ongoing project of human social organization in the 21^st century CE. But what is (ostensibly) being attempted in Pakistan is something different. IF the “ideology of Pakistan” propaganda is taken remotely seriously then something not yet in existence elsewhere is to be created in Pakistan. This will be something religious, Islamic, republican, democratic, socialist, capitalist and fair (all elements may not apply). In principle one must concede the possibility that Pakistan and its leading intellectuals will craft something new, different and better than anything that exists elsewhere in Europe or Asia today. In practice one can take one look at said intellectuals and well, enough said.

The US has indeed played a large (and usually negative) role in Pakistani politics (and continues to play a large role). But while US imperial intervention is a fact of life, it is not (and has never been) omnipotent or omniscient. Many countries have maneuvered from a position of dependency to one of near-independence. Pakistani nationalism and its supposedly Islamic ideal are neither a necessary result of US intervention, nor its best antithesis. The Pakistani bourgeoisie can and should dump both and still figure out how to manage US intervention.

Colonialism I will leave to the post-colonialists. There are limits to what can be discussed on a highly educated liberal blog without getting lost in translation.

Finally, a recent concrete illustration of how the founding myths work to alter the direction of events in Pakistan.

A couple of days ago, prominent journalist (and Islamist Paknationalist) Ansar Abbasi wrote a front page “expose” in the daily “The News”, owned and operated by the supposedly modern and forward looking “Jang Group” (the largest media group in Pakistan). In this article, he announced that the Punjab government (led by the right-of-center Pakistan Muslim League-N; a party that is no stranger to using Islamist and Paknationalist propaganda) had deleted some “Islamic” chapters from the 10^th grade Urdu language textbook for 2013. His litany of complaints included the following

The second chapter in the old edition was on ‘Ideology of Pakistan’ written by Dr Ghulam Mustafa Khan. This important chapter highlighted the basis for the creation of Pakistan and endorsed that the country was created in the name of Islam, to make it an Islamic state, has been replaced by a new chapter on ‘Princess of Paristan’ (Paristan ki shahzadi) written by Ashraf Saboohi.

… Poetry of a Indian poet Firaq Gorakhpuri has been included in the text book and the poet is presented as a hero awarded by the Indian and Russian governments.

 While the title page of the book contains the picture of Allama Iqbal, it does not contain any poem of the great poet of Islam and Pakistan. Excluding extremely impressive Islamic poetry, the new text book, however starts with a Hamd (praise of Almighty Allah) and Naat (praise of Hazrat Muhammad — PBUH).

 Keep in mind that this is a textbook meant for the Urdu language class, not the Islamic studies or Pakistan studies class. One day after the publication of this attack (and its amplification on social media, especially by supporters of Imran Khan) chief minister Shahbaz Sharif ordered the “Islamic chapters” reinstated. It took less than 24 hours for matters to be corrected. 

Cricketer and philanthropist Imran Khan has recently become very popular among young people educated through these textbooks. His current policy is to be all things to all people and his manifesto is progressive and liberal and completely skips the topic of Islam and the so-called ideology of Pakistan. While it is unlikely that he will overcome various hurdles and become the leading party in the coming elections, even if his party were to somehow sweep into power it will never be able to resist demands couched in the idiom of Islam and Pakistan. This is because neither he nor his fans have any vocabulary with which they can counter arguments that are obviously in line with orthodox Islam and behind which looms the specter of blasphemy and apostasy. Within their circles, some of these people can and do have conversations about modern Islam and the need to counter “extremism”, but when someone like Ansar Abbasi becomes aggressive, they will have to back down.In fact, their fate is likely to be worse than Shahbaz Sharif's because they want to achieve their modern Scandinavian Islamic state without resort to “dirty politics” or hypocrisy. It is very hard to square that circle with resort to dirty politics and hypocrisy…without them, it is likely to be impossible.

(Listen from the 1:20 mark onwards)

Finally, it is not my claim that there is something essentially barbaric about “Islam” which makes an “Islamic” solution impossible. Islam is what Muslims make of it. It has been made many things in the past and will be made into many things in the future. But intellectual development in orthodox mainstream Sunni Islam has been moribund for centuries. This is partly due to the unusual success of blasphemy and apostasy memes that were meant to protect orthodoxy from criticism but have also made it sterile. I do not think that this is a permanent state of affairs. There are already glimmers of change. Much more will happen as orthodox controls loosen. But the time frame of that renaissance and the immediate needs of the Pakistani state do not coincide. For now, we have to stay away from Islamism or we are going to end up with Munawwar Hassan’s Islam. That’s just how things happen to be at this point in history.

History was old and rusted, it was a machine nobody had plugged in for thousands of years, and here all of a sudden it was being asked for maximum output. Nobody was surprised that there were accidents… (Salman Rushdie, Shame)

The paintings are by Punjabi artist Shahid Mirza.

The Land of Oz

by Misha Lepetic

"I never knew I had an inventive talent until phrenology told me so.
I was a stranger to myself until then."
~Thomas Edison

The question of expertise is a fascinating and vexatious one. Who gets to be an expert? More accurately, who is allowed to be an expert? And what happens when expertise is, for lack of a more polite term, betrayed by one of its own? A recent New Yorker article pillorying Dr. Mehmet Oz provides some interesting lessons in this regard.

Most expertise, it can be reasonably argued, is cultivated and deployed within the context of occupational professions. For the purposes of created a baseline for the following discussion, let’s define a profession as “an organized body of experts who apply esoteric knowledge to particular cases.” This is according to Andrew Abbott, whose The System of Professions (1988) is the current sociological heavyweight when it comes to theorizing about professions.

Abbott contends that, in order to theorize this phenomenon effectively, sociology must look at professions in a holistic manner: prior research, which focused on the structure and function of individual professions, missed the larger point that the success or failure of any given profession was largely contingent upon the results of “interprofessional competition.” That is, when considered in isolation, professions make claims concerning their relevance for addressing social needs through the formation of associations, credentialing, the courting of favourable regulation, and so on. However, when viewed as a larger social phenomenon, it is apparent that these claims are subject to constant contention by other professions. There is, in fact, an ecology of professions.

As an example, while one might consider alcoholism to be an objective phenomenon centered around the over-consumption of drink by an individual, the subjective nature of alcoholism as a social phenomenon has been viewed alternatively as a moral or spiritual problem, a medical disease, a legal matter, and as a mental disorder. Respectively then, the responsibility to treat alcoholics was claimed by the clergy, doctors, lawyers and police, and psychiatrists. What is worth noting is that these professions actively partook in poaching the objective phenomenon at hand from one another. When a particular profession failed to deliver results, an opening was created for another group to take over, thereby adding to its social legitimacy and influence.

Abbott is very precise about what signals the vulnerability of one profession to another. Professions are, in the most generic sense, proficient at diagnosing problems within their domain of expertise, inferring various winning scenarios, and prescribing appropriate treatments. One profession can attempt to claim territory from another if the former fails to control all three of these phases. While accurate diagnoses and measurable, successful treatments are obviously essential, inference is particularly vulnerable. Constituting the profession’s internal work, inference connects diagnosis to treatment, and can be thought of as chains of analysis and decisionmaking, which ought to be neither too short (leading to ‘deprofessionalization,’ or in today’s world, automation via computers) nor too long (implying irreproducibility of results).

Paradoxically, professions that can revisit specific problems for an unspecified number of “second chances” are particularly vulnerable to this kind of competition. Consider the luxury that doctors have when treating a patient with high cholesterol over the course of many visits, versus military strategists, who have only one opportunity to fight a single battle. While the doctor can tinker with various drug regimes, the strategist has only one chance to triumph in a confrontation that is unique and unrepeatable. In this sense, a surfeit of second chances presents any competing profession with subversive opportunities, such as when a patient hears of a new treatment and demands that his doctor prescribe it. Thus a large portion of the profession’s claims to cultural legitimacy may come under threat. As Abbott writes in The System of Professions,

Societies have little time for experts who lack cultural legitimacy, irrespective of their success rates. This issue ultimately undid the homeopaths in their competition with regular medicine, although medicine’s recent narrowing of its legitimation to science and technology has proved dangerous, since late twentieth-century cultural values increasingly conceptualize health as quality of life (p54).

This thought, written 25 years ago, sets the stage nicely for the above-mentioned New Yorker article.

 

*

In “The Operator,” Michael Specter profiles Dr. Mehmet Oz, known to fans of Oprah Winfrey as “America’s Doctor,” as riding the wrong side of the tracks of popular medicine by breathlessly entertaining “experts” (read: quacks) and “miracle cures” on Oz’s wildly popular TV show. In turn, Oz defends his self-appointed responsibility, “because the currency that I deal in is trust, and it is trust that has been given to me by Oprah and by Columbia University [where he practices surgery], and by an audience that has watched over six hundred shows.”

Oz maintains that “Western medicine has a firm belief that studying human beings is like studying bacteria in petri dishes. Doctors do not want questions from their patients; it’s easier to tell them what to do than to listen to what they say. But people are on a serpentine path through life, and that is the way it is supposed to be.” In his incarnation as “America’s doctor,” he inhabits precisely the gap that Abbott identified above, where complementary medicine addresses itself in a sympathetic way to the desire patients have for “quality of life.” As such, he combines a charismatic presence with a media-savvy show that impacts the health decisions made by millions of Americans.

While much of his advice is entirely sensible, he also takes the opportunity to promote theories and products that are, at best, lightly supported. This is what Specter cannot countenance: “When he tells his audience, with no credible evidence, that red palm oil may reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, is he empowering people? Or is he encouraging them to endanger their health with another ‘miracle’?”

At points, Specter can barely contain his incredulity. “How was it Oz’s ‘biggest opportunity’ to introduce [osteopath Joseph Mercola,] a guest who explicitly rejects the tenets of science? …I was still puzzled. Either data works or it doesn’t…Surely you don’t think that all information is created equal?”

But is precisely Abbott’s lengthy “chains of inference” and “second chance” opportunities, so characteristic of medical practice, that provide the opening for Oz’s guests to make the claims they do (e.g., that vaccines can cause AIDS). If medicine has given up on its collective bedside manner and retreated behind the chart and microscope, the alternative medical professions will smell the weakness and unhesitatingly pounce. As Oz himself says, “It becomes difficult for us to agree on what we think works, since so much of it is in the eye of the beholder…It’s my fact versus your fact.”

*

We have seen this movie before. Writing in the American Sociological Review a few years before Abbott published his book, Thomas Gieryn postulated that scientists engage in ideological boundary-making for at least three reasons: when the discipline is attempting to make claims on new territory; when consolidating still-tenuous claims; and when secured territory is under threat, for example by defunding. Gieryn illustrates the second scenario by recounting the power struggle that occurred between anatomists and phrenologists in early 19^th-century Edinburgh.

Since its founding earlier in the later 18^th century, phrenology had gained great popularity. Nevertheless, the more established scientists saw phrenology as a distinct threat, not least because it promoted itself as a complete science – more complete, in fact, than any other. Phrenologists for example felt capable of reforming prisoners and finding the most suitable employment for them; they promised even a greater understanding of Christianity. This constituted a distinct threat to anatomists, who concerned themselves solely with physiology, and their academic colleagues, the moral philosophers. That the church would not be pleased to see “science” incurring on its own turf was also a not-insignificant factor. But most importantly, it was the upstart discipline’s “democratic ideal of certifying truth by popular opinion [that] challenged the authority of scientific experts.”

The anatomists mounted a campaign to discredit phrenology. Articles appeared in the Edinburgh newspapers attacking it, especially for its religious and political ambitions. William Hamilton, an adversary of the phrenologists, conducted experiments, using the scientific method, to disprove phrenology’s scientific claims, He even asked George Combe, its most ardent proponent, to “produce a single practical anatomist who will consent to stake his reputation on the truth of phrenology…Combe replied that “experts” could not serve as dispassionate judges of phrenology because most had previously expressed their contempt for it” (Giervyn, 798). All in all, the anatomists made short work of phrenology:

George Combe was denied the chair of Logic at Edinburgh University; phrenologists were not allowed to use the lecture halls at the Edinburgh School of Arts; phrenological issues were rarely admitted to the proper forum for scientific debate, the Royal Society of Edinburgh; Combe was not allowed to form a “phrenological section” in the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Selected phrenological ideas were incorporated into the legitimate science of physiological psychology without admitting Combe to the scientific community, thus avoiding threats to professional authority.

Here the anatomists’ actions anticipated Abbott’s notion that academia is the most direct route to cultural legitimacy for any profession, including science. More cynically, they were not shy about appropriating what worked for themselves, but stripped of any incriminating ideology.

*

Oz’s adversaries may take cold comfort from this study, however. The fact that Oz has emerged from within the profession itself brings up the interesting case of what happens when an exemplary representative of a profession “strays” from the jurisdictional claims of his métier and clearly, deliberately invites, as per Abbott, interprofessional competition. Nevertheless, he is, by all accounts, a motivated teacher and scholar who has published hundreds of papers; a fine surgeon who has performed thousands of open-heart procedures; an alpha male thriving in a profession populated only by alpha males. It’s just that his side-gig isn’t building ships in bottles.

By his own admission, Oz is on a crusade to break down the barriers that maintain the hard-won claims that medicine has come to enjoy in this country. For the moment, there is little the profession can do to stop him – in this era of instant media and communication, there is no lecture hall from which to ban him. One need only witness Glenn Beck’s recent post-Fox successes to understand how little exile matters to those whose audience has achieved a critical mass.

Quixotically, in this case, the profession at risk seems to have resigned itself to using  journalism as its best available enforcing mechanism – a tactic that, putting it mildly, attaches its own set of problematics. For Michael Specter is himself neither a doctor, nor a scientist, and the New Yorker is not a peer-reviewed journal. This kind of bourgie tut-tutting cannot really touch the plane of popularity on which Oz is operating.

More problematic, however, is the fact that the media is itself guilty of exactly the same kind of breathless glorification of most any kind of science that will sell papers, ad space, personal information, or whatever passes for currency in journalism today. Reporters are expected to produce regular features about our inevitable progress towards freedom from disease or just plain discomfort, so if there is a “study” that affirms something exciting, it will find its way onto the front page of the science section, if not the front page itself. Scientists are in turn all too happy to publicize their findings, however tenuous they may be, since university administrators reward visibility with more funding. 

For their part, industry groups are thrilled at the prospect of skyrocketing demand for, say, red palm oil, oatmeal or anything else. If it's a new pharmaceutical, drug companies and doctors are happy to have something new to prescribe. And years later, when follow-up studies refute or negate or trivialize these findings, there is no one to take the call, because that is simply old news, and who wants to hear that we really don’t know much more than we thought we did? Specter may be an angry-yet-noble enforcer for the positivist cause, but his colleagues across the board ought to accept the responsibility for having created a world in which someone like “America’s Doctor” is not just a possibility but an inevitability.

Some notes on the Shia-Sunni conflict

by Omar Ali

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” (Karl Marx)

Shia killing in Pakistan started in earnest in the 1980s and proximate causes include the CIA’s Afghan project, the Pakistani state’s use of that project to prepare Jihadi cadres for other uses, the influence of Saudi Arabia and modern Takfiri-Salafist movements, the rivalry between Iran and its Arab neighbors and so on. Some aspects of this (especially in light of the history of Pakistan) are covered in an article I wrote earlier . Here I want to discuss a little more about the historical background to this conflict. The aim is to provide a brief overview of how this conflict has played out at some points in Islamic history and to argue that if both Shias and Sunnis are to live amicably within the same state, the state needs to be secular. The alternatives are oppression of one sect or endless conflict. 

The origins of the Arab empire lie in the first Islamic state established in Medina under the leadership of the prophet Mohammed (this historical narrative has been criticized as being too quick to accept the various histories generated a century or more later in the Ummayad and Abbasid empires; skeptics claim that the early origins of the Ummayad empire and its dominant religion may be very different from what its own mythmakers later claimed. But this is a minority view and is not a concern of this article).  The succession to the prophet became a matter of some controversy (primarily on the issue of Ali’s claim to the caliphate) and tensions between prominent companions of the Prophet eventually spilled over into open warfare (the first civil war). This  civil war had not yet been finally settled when Ali was assassinated and  Muavia, the Ummayad governor of Syria, managed to consolidate his rule over most of the nascent Arab empire. Ali’s elder son Hassan, eventually renounced his claim and settled terms with Muavia, leading to a period of relative peace. But when Muavia died and his son Yazid took over in the Ummayad capital of Damascus, there was a challenge from Ali’s younger son Hussain. This ended with the famous events at Karbala, where Hussain and most male members of his extended famly were brutally killed by a large Umayyad force. Supporters of Ali and opponents of the Ummayads (the two categories were not always synonymous) launched a series of revolts against various Ummayad rulers, including several led by different members of the extended family of Ali (and by extension, by Hashemites; since in tribal Arab terms, this was also a struggle between the Hashemite clan and the Ummayad clan). During this time the supporters of Ali and his family (Shia means partisan, as in partisan of Ali) developed their own version of Islamic history in which Ali was the rightful successor to the prophet and his right was usurped by the first three caliphs. They also developed various notions about the special status of Ali and his family. Yazid and his Ummayad successors were thus  (with varying intensity) regarded as illegitimate rulers and various Shia groups formed natural foci of opposition to Ummayad rule. 

This Shia resentment became one of the forces co-opted by Abu Abbas As-Saffa in the Abbassid revolt against Ummayad rule; but Shia claims were quickly cast aside once Abbassid rule was established. The Abbassids, in spite of Hashemite origins and their initial use of Shia resentment to mobilize support for their revolt, soon settled on a broadly Sunni identity and much of what we now recognize as classical Sunni Islam was created by scholars working in Abbassid times (sometimes with official sanction, at other times in spite of official persecution). Shias themselves split into various sects with doctrinal differences as well as differences about the line of Imams recognized as authentic, but they all shared some notion of the special status of Ali and his descendants and of the illegitimacy of all or most Ummayad rulers. They also adopted (but in some cases, later toned down or discarded) theological notions that were sometimes very distant from mainstream Sunni Islam. 

These early conflicts provided later rulers and revolutionaries with contrasting identities that could be cynically used or sincerely adopted to differentiate themselves from rivals or to revolt against them. These conflicting groups were not always the same as they are today because neither Shia nor Sunni identities were exactly what they are today. e.g. twelver Shias were not always the most prominent Shia sect; In the 10th century, it was the Ismailis who ruled from Egypt as the Fatimid caliphate, and there were several Zaydi Shia Kingdoms when the twelvers were relatively invisible. The twelvers themselves adopted some very harsh public rituals of condemnation of the first three caliphs in early Safavid times that were not standard in previous centuries. But whatever the exact form, there were always recognizably Shia and Sunni groups with distinct historical and religious narratives. These conflicts created rival versions of crucial historical events that became deeply embedded in Islamicate historiography and popular culture.  Differences were not always violent and in larger multicultural empires they could be suppressed or subordinated to the needs of statecraft.  A syncretic ruler like Akbar (the great Moghul) could appoint a Shia as his chief judge (though not without resistance); but the divisions existed and could be exploited by anyone who wished to conspire against such an appointment. Thus, this particular judge ended up as one of the five martyrs of Shiaism when his rivals got the upper hand in the time of Akbar’s more orthodox successor Jahangir.

Within the core Arab and Persian heartland of Islam, the distinction between Shia and Sunni acquired a rather different edge when the Safavid dynasty conquered Iran and imposed twelver Shiaism as its state religion, distinguishing itself from the Sunni Ottoman empire in the process and making Shia Islam an integral part of Persian identity. Their prolonged clash with the Sunni Ottoman empire included a healthy dose of anti-Sunni polemics, and vice versa. So successful was this fusion of Persian and Shia identities that even when the Safavids were replaced by a Sunni emperor (Nadir Shah) who made an effort to bring Iran back towards Sunni Islam, this effort had very little success.  

But Ottoman-Safavid polemics were mild compared to what was brewing in Arabia. The 18th century Islamic reformer Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahab was virulently anti-Shia. Driven not by the pragmatic needs of statecraft but by the logic of a true believer, he insisted that the theological deviations of Shiaism and their historical role as rebels against the authority of the early Islamic empires put them outside the pale of Islam (he had similar views about Sufis and most other Muslims, following the same logic of purity and “one truth, one religion, one law”). His followers mined the propaganda of past conflicts (propaganda that naturally included the creation of holy traditions and archetypal “historic battles”) to create a narrative of Shia-hatred that is unmatched by any other sect of Islam. In the Wahabist version of history, Islam was a united, theologically pure, crystal clear divine project that was supposed to literally conquer the world. Its followers set out on this divinely appointed taks and were going from conquest to conquest until civil war erupted in the reign of the 4th caliph (Hazrat Ali) thanks to the machinations of internal enemies (including the Yemeni Jew Ibn Saba… a story that is vigorously contested by Shias). In this version of history, Shias are not just another sect within Islam. They are the enemy within. At best, they are dupes who are unwittingly serving the interests of infidels; at worst, they are conscious enemies of true Islam who need to be eliminated if Islam is to successfully fight off the infidels and conquer the world. 

This narrative was not created denovo by Wahab. A thousand years of Shia and Sunni polemics had left a vast store of opposing propaganda narratives from which Wahab picked out the juiciest parts and gave them a special edge. His followers have since been instrumental in inserting this unusually harsh version of shia-hatred into the broader salafist movement.  When Wahab formed an alliance with the Al-Saud family in Arabia, this alliance created the first Saudi state in 1744. Fighters from this state captured Karbala in 1801, destroyed shia shrines and massacred local Shias in large numbers. They then captured Mecca and Medina from the Ottomans, but in doing so they over-reached and their state was destroyed by Mohammed Ali Pasha (Ottoman governor of Egypt). But they rose again and then again to become the modern kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Though the ruling family of Saudi Arabia (like most ruling families in history) prioritizes its own rule over any theological niceties, their alliance with Wahabi theologians and the position of Wahabi orthodoxy as the official ideology of the Kingdom has made intense Shia-hatred a feature of Saudi religiosity. 

When the Saudis found themselves suddenly rich with oil wealth the state as well as private citizens were eager to promote their version of “true Islam” all over the world. At the level of the state, the ancient conflict between Persians and Arabs was also easily cast in Shia-Sunni terms, especially after the rise of  Shia theocracy in Iran.  Thus the spread of Salafist ideas in mainstream Sunni discourse was driven by both parties in Saudi Arabia: true believers promoted these ideas because they sincerely believed them to be correct and “Islamically necessary”; cynical statesmen promoted them because they saw them as a convenient tool with which to attack Iran and Iranian influence (the Iranians did the same on their side).  

The almost pathological hatred nurtured by Americans and the Shia Iranian theocracy against each other, and the longstanding relationship of the US with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States led to American support (or toleration?) of virulently anti-Shia groups, at least until those groups turned their guns directly on Americans.  Some observers would go further and insist that the US and Israel actively support Shia-Sunni conflict and play more than just a permissive role in the process. But irrespective of the truth of such theories, the fact remain that there is a long hisory of conflict and it is very likely that Wahabi-influenced Salafists would promote their lethal brand of Shia-hatred with or without assistance from the CIA, the Saudis (or any other state aiming to become the dominant Arab power in the region) would find it convenient to add a Sunni-Shia edge to their propaganda against the Persian enemy, and Iran would act as a patron of Shia causes, especially where these overlap with the needs of Iranian state policy.  

The point of reciting this history (in briefest outline) is that this conflict has deep roots in Islamic history and can be easily exploited, particularly when religion is actively mixed with politics, especially in states that lack deep “secular” foundations and institutions. Conflict is not everywhere inevitable. If states become secular and secular discourse dominates, then the fights will be over other things (there will still be fights, that much is given) and perhaps they will not be as apocalyptic as religious wars can become. Domestically too, a secular state could suppress or bypass such conflicts. It would see competition for power between different groups using different ideologies, but religious civil war is orders of magnitude more horrific than the world of democratic elections and their associated politics; where the bare minimum basis of such electoral politics and associated administrative institutions already exists, as in Pakistan, that system is hugely superior to fighting to the death to establish a theocratic state.  

If the state withers away (as it has in Somalia) then there will be no choice. Nature abhors a vacuum, so order will eventually be established by  some local armed militias or some sufficiently resourced and motivated outside power. In Islamic countries that will mostly mean armed Islamist militias organized on sectarian lines (fantasies of Western university-based anarchists notwithstanding). With the US experience in Afghanistan and Iraq in front of us, and with Chinese imperialists not yet ready for prime-time, its unlikely that outside powers will step in except in the most oil-rich or the least populated regions. 

There is another alternative in theory: Instead of a secular state, we could have an “Islamic state” that manages to governs with popular consent and with relatively transparent methods of organizing politics and trasnferring power from one group (or person) to another. For various reasons, I think that is not a real possiblity in this day and age. Some facsimile of a democratic state has been established in Iran by the Shia clergy, but even this (far from satisfactory) system is impossible to conceive in a state that is not overwhelmingly dominated by one sect, where that sect is not Shia, and where that country is not named Iran. The Shia clergy in Iran are the most sophisticated Islamic clergy on the planet (leaving aside tiny sects like the Ismailis). NO Sunni clergy can manage that feat, not even the latest great White hope of Sunni Islamism, the Turkish Islamists. Their state will do well as long as its European-style secularist structure is intact. If they manage to undermine that, they will cook their own goose. Without a detailed argument, this is just a bald assertion, but it seems a very plausible one to me. 

Where the state has large Shia AND Sunni populations, or where there is a large non-Muslim minority, modern secular democracy is by far the better alternative. Islamization involves working through the accumulated detritus of 1400 years of Shia versus Sunni polemics. Even if there are no other religions present, any state that wishes to create an authentically “Islamic” system  will face the task of generating a fresh and innovative synthesis while having millions of individuals, dozens of parties, and several outside powers avoid the temptation to start a violent confrontation based on existing medieval sects and salafist fantasies. Given the current state of Islamist discourse,  this seems so unlikely that its not even worth trying. This is a sweeping judgement. but I am happy to put my money where my mouth is. I am willing to bet that NO Muslim country will be able to create a functioning “Islamic” system, clearly distinct in spirit and substance from current secular models, established without harsh suppression of minorities and irreligious people; and I mean suppression by currently fashionable mainstream standards, not to speak of sky-high academic Left-wing standards. 

The peculiar history of this process in Pakistan was discussed in my earlier article, but is worth reiterating as an instructive example. In colonial India, Muslims were focused on their position vis-a-vis the Hindus and the British, so Shia-Sunni rivalries did not take center stage in politics. A Shia led the movement for Pakistan with minimal notice being taken of his Shiaism and many other Shias enthusiastically participated in the ruling elite in the new state (including army chief Mohammed Musa, Presidents Yahya Khan and Asif Zardari and Prime ministers Zulfiqar Bhutto and Benazir Bhutto).   But problems lay buried deep in the foundations of the new state.  Was Pakistan an “Islamic state” or a secular state for Indian Muslims? The “secular state for Muslims”option has its own problems, but the “Islamic state” option is pretty much fatal.  This issue did not take center stage right away; the early ruling class was a mix of North Indian Muslim leaguers (superficially Westernized Muslim elite of North India, primarily UP-ite in the early days), Punjabi turncoat politicians, British colonial bureaucrats and mid-level military officers who were suddenly promoted from colonel to general and found themselves in possession of an army and then a state.  The short-sighted politicians who created the state were soon eclipsed by wilier bureacrats, who in turn learned the truth of Chairman Mao’s dictum that power grows from the barrel of the gun and lost primacy to semi-literate military officers.  But all parties were clueless enough to imagine that the arrangements of the British Raj could be kept going forever, with vaguely defined Pakistani nationalism added on as a unifying  cement instead of “loyalty to King and country”.   After Hindus and Sikhs had been mostly driven out, and East Pakistan had been “lost”, the new Pakistan seemed quite manageable. 

But the tiny shoots planted in the “Objectives resolution” in 1949 and the anti-Ahmediya agitation in 1953 had been nurtured by Islamists in and out of government for many years and started to bear fruit in 1974. Bhutto was pushed into declaring the Ahmedis as non-Muslims by an Islamist agitation; a decision most Shias, secure in their own status as fully Muslim citizens of a Muslim state, probably regarded as perfectly legitimate. But it has not taken forever to find out that “first they came for the Ahmedis” now they are coming for the Shias. 

When General Zia took over in 1977 and started Islamizing the state in earnest, the sophisticated scions of the permanent establishment (pucca sahib types like Agha Shahi and General Yaqub) may have regarded General Zia as a country bumpkin, but (perhaps because there were no such instructions from the US embassy?) they never uttered a word of warning. Meanwhile the CIA arrived bearing Jhadist  gifts in connection with their Afghan project and the Saudis sponsored jihadist madressas all over Pakistan. The “moderate faction” of the Pakistani army permitted Jihadist militias to operate outside the law because “higher objectives” were in view.  The smaller but more clear-sighted, Islamist faction did the same knowing that one day these militias will help to transform Pakistani society itself. Virulent anti-Shia propaganda exploded out of these madressas (some regularly visited by senior state functionaries and openly funded by beloved Saudi donors) alongside the general’s desired Kashmiri Jihad and strategic depth in Central Asia. For the first time, the cry of “kafir kafir shia kafir” became a routine part of the madressa-jihadi landscape. Since this landscape is well away from the world of upper-middle class Pakistanis, the significance of this slogan didn’t really register on Western trained Sunni intellectuals (the most educated of whom are still grappling with imperialism and the “crisis” created by the fall of the Soviet Union). But it has registered in blood on the minds of the Shia community. And unless the state reverses course (which is no longer possible without significant violence), this poison will comprehensively tear the nation apart. 

The point of this example is that all this could have been avoided as long as the state was more or less secular, or only pretended to be “Islamic”. But once Islamization was firmly on the agenda, it could not escape the question of “whose Islam”. And in a world where the “truest” Sunni Islam comes from Saudi Arabia and Shia Islam from Iran, that question leads inevitably to violence. A society in which polarization of Shia versus Sunni was historically not as intense as it is in Iraq or Iran, moved closer to the Islamic mainstream and became one of the leading battlegrounds for this clash. In a secular state, all this shia-sunni tension would be a relatively minor police matter (as it is in India). In an “Islamic state” it cannot avoid becoming much more.

PS: The artist is Sabir Nazar (http://sabirnazarpaintings.blogspot.com/). This is his depiction of the martyr Sarmad (http://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/S/Sarmad/index.htm)

A Parched Future: Global Land and Water Grabbing

by Jalees Rehman

“This is the bond of water. We know the rites. A man’s flesh is his own; the water belongs to the tribe.”                Frank Herbert - Dune

Land grabbing refers to the large-scale acquisition of comparatively inexpensive agricultural land in foreign countries by foreign governments or corporations. In most cases, the acquired land is located in under-developed countries in Africa, Asia or South America, while the grabbers are investment funds based in Europe, North America and the Middle East. The acquisition can take the form of an outright purchase or a long-term-lease, ranging from 25 to 99 years, that gives the grabbing entity extensive control over the acquired land. Proponents of such large-scale acquisitions have criticized the term “land grabbing’ because it carries the stigma of illegitimacy and conjures up images of colonialism or other forms of unethical land acquisitions that were so common in the not so distant past. They point out that land acquisitions by foreign investors are made in accordance with the local laws and that the investments could create jobs and development opportunities in impoverished countries. However, recent reports suggest that these land acquisitions are indeed “land grabs”. NGOs and not-for profit organizations such as GRAIN, TNI and Oxfam have documented the disastrous consequences of large-scale land acquisitions for the local communities. More often than not, the promised jobs are not created and families that were farming the land for generations are evicted from their ancestral land and lose their livelihood. The money provided to the government by the investors frequently disappears into the coffers of corrupt officials while the evicted farmers receive little or no compensation.

One aspect of land grabbing that has received comparatively little attention is the fact that land grabbing is invariably linked to water grabbing. When the newly acquired land is used for growing crops, it requires some combination of rainwater (referred to as “green water”) and irrigation from freshwater resources (referred to as “blue water”). The amount of required blue water depends on the rainfall in the grabbed land. For example, land that is grabbed in a country with heavy rainfalls, such as Indonesia, may require very little irrigation and tapping of its blue water resources. The link between land grabbing and water grabbing is very obvious in the case of Saudi Arabia, which used to be a major exporter of wheat in the 1990s, when there were few concerns about the country’s water resources. The kingdom provided water at minimal costs to its heavily subsidized farmers, thus resulting in a very inefficient usage of the water. Instead of the global average of using 1,000 tons of water per ton of wheat, Saudi farmers used 3,000 and 6,000 tons of water. Fred Pearce describes the depletion of the Saudi water resources in his book The Land Grabbers:

Saudis thought they had water to waste because, beneath the Arabian sands, lay one of the world’s largest underground reservoirs of water. In the late 1970s, when pumping started, the pores of the sandstone rocks contained around 400 million acre-feet of water, enough to fill Lake Erie. The water had percolated underground during the last ice age, when Arabia was wet. So it was not being replaced. It was fossil water— and like Saudi oil, once it is gone it will be gone for good. And that time is now coming. In recent years, the Saudis have been pumping up the underground reserves of water at a rate of 16 million acre-feet a year. Hydrologists estimate that only a fifth of the reserve remains, and it could be gone before the decade is out.

Saudi Arabia responded to this depletion of its water resources by deciding to gradually phase out all wheat production. Instead of growing wheat in Saudi Arabia, it would import wheat from African farmlands that were leased and operated by Saudi investors. This way, the kingdom could conserve its own water resources while using African water resources for the production of the wheat that would be consumed by Saudis.

The recent study “Global land and water grabbing” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2013) by Maria Rulli and colleagues examined how land grabbing leads to water grabbing and can deplete the water resources of a country. The basic idea is that when the grabbed land is irrigated, the use of freshwater resources reduces the availability of irrigation water for neighboring farmland areas, i.e. the areas that have not been grabbed. This in turn can cause widespread water stress and affect the ability of other farmers to grow crops, ultimately leading to poverty and social unrest. Land grabbing is often shrouded in secrecy since local governments do not want to be perceived as selling off valuable land to foreigners, but some details regarding the size of the land grab are eventually made public. The associated water needs of the investors that grab the land are even less clear and very little is publicly divulged about how the land grabbing will affect the water availability for other farmers. In the case of Sudan, for example, grabbed land is often located on the fertile banks of the Blue Nile and while large-scale commercial farmland is expanding as part of the foreign investments, local farmers are losing access to land and water and gradually becoming dependent on food aid, even though Sudan is a major exporter of food produced by the large-scale farms.

Using the global land grabbing database of GRAIN and the Land Matrix Database, Rulli and colleagues analyzed the extent of land-grabbing and identify the Democratic Republic of Congo (8.05 million hectares), Indonesia (7.14 million hectares), Philippines (5.17 million hectares), Sudan (4.69 million hectares) and Australia (4.65 million hectares) as the five countries in which the most area of land has been grabbed by foreign investors. The total amount of grabbed land in these five countries is 29.7 million hectares, and accounts for nearly 63% of global land grabbing. To put this in perspective, the size of the United Kingdom is 24.4 million hectares.

The researchers calculated the amount of rainfall (green water) on the grabbed land, which is the minimum amount of water that would be grabbed with the acquisition of the land. However, since the grabbed land is also used for agriculture and many crops require additional freshwater irrigation (blue water), the researchers also determined a range of predicted blue water grabbing for land irrigation. For the low end of the blue water grabbing range, the researchers assumed that the land would be irrigated in the same fashion as other agricultural land in the country. On the higher end of the range, the researchers also calculated how much blue water would be grabbed, if the investors irrigated the land in a manner to maximize the agricultural production of the land. This is not an unreasonable assumption, since foreign investors probably do have the financial resources to maximally irrigate the acquired land in a manner that maximizes the return on their investment.

Rulli and colleagues estimated that global land grabbing is associated with the grabbing of 308 billion m³ of green water (i.e. rain water) and an additional grabbing of blue water that can range from 11 billion m³ (current irrigation practices) to 146 billion m³ (maximal irrigation) per year. Again, to put these numbers in perspective, the average daily household consumption of water in the United Kingdom is 150 liters (0.15 m³) per person. This results in a total annual household consumption of 3.5 billion m³ (0.15 m³ X 365 days X 63,181,775 UK population) of water in the UK. Therefore, the total household water consumption in the UK is a fraction of what would be the predicted blue water usage of the grabbed land, even if one were to use very conservative estimates of required irrigation.

The researchers then also list the top 25 countries in which the investors are based that engage in land and water grabbing. They find that about “60% of the total grabbed water is appropriated, through land grabbing, by the United States, United Arab Emirates, India, United Kingdom, Egypt, China, and Israel”. The researchers gloss over the fact that in many cases, land and associated water resources are grabbed by foreign investment groups and not by foreign governments. Just because certain investment funds are based in Singapore, UK or the United Arab Emirates does not mean that these countries are “appropriating” the land or water. In fact, many investment groups that are involved in land grabbing may have multinational investors or investors whose nationality is not disclosed. Nevertheless, there are probably cases in which land and water grabbing are not merely conducted as a form of private investment, but might involve foreign governments. One such example is the above-mentioned case of Saudi Arabia, in which the Saudi government actively encouraged and helped Saudi investors to acquire agricultural land in Africa. While perusing the list of the top 25 countries in which land and water grabbing investors are based, one cannot help but notice that the list contains a number of Middle Eastern countries that are themselves experiencing severe water stress and scarcity, such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates or Israel. Transferring their water burden to Africa by acquiring agricultural land would allow them to preserve their own water resources and may indeed by of strategic value to these countries. However, the precise degree of government involvement in these investment decisions often remains unclear.

The paper by Rulli and colleagues is an important reminder of how land grabbing and water grabbing are entwined and that land grabbing could potentially deplete valuable water resources from under-developed countries, especially in Africa, which accounts for more than half of the globally grabbed land. Even villagers that continue to own and farm their own land adjacent to the large-scale farms on grabbed lands could be affected by new forms of water stress, especially if the foreign investors decide to maximally irrigate the acquired land. There are some key limitations to the study, such as the lack of distinction between private foreign investors or foreign governments that are engaged in land grabbing and the fact that all the calculations of blue water grabbing are based on very broad estimates without solid data on how much blue water is actually consumed by the grabbed lands. These numbers may be very difficult to obtain, but should be the focus of future studies in this area.

After reading this study, I have become far more aware of ongoing land and water grabbing. Excessive commodification of our lives was already criticized by Karl Polanyi in 1944 and now that water is also becoming a “fictitious commodity”, we have to be extremely watchful of its consequences. The extent of land grabbing that has already taken place is quite extensive. An interactive map based on the GRAIN database allows us to visualize the areas in the world that are most affected by land grabbing since 2006 as well as where the foreign investors are located. The map shows that in recent years, Pakistan has emerged as one of the prime targets of land grabbing in Asia, while Sudan, South Sudan, Tanzania and Ethiopia are major targets of recent land grabbing in Africa. The world economic crisis and the recent food price crisis will likely increase the degree of land grabbing and associated water grabbing. The targets of land grabbing are often countries with fragile economies, widespread poverty and significant malnourishment.

As a global society, we have to ensure that people living in these countries do not suffer as a consequence of land grabbing deals. The recent “Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security” released by the FAO are an important step in the right direction, because they attempt to provide food security for all, even when large-scale land acquisitions occur. However, they do not specify water access and they are, as the title reveals, “voluntary”. It is not clear who will abide by them. Therefore, we also need a complementary approach in which clients of land grabbing investment funds ask the fund managers to abide by the FAO guidelines and that they maximally ensure food security and water access for the general population in grabbed lands. One specific example is that of the American retirement fund TIAA-CREF (Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association – College Retirement Equities Fund) which is one of the leading retirement providers for people who work in education, research and medicine. Investment in agriculture and land grabbing appears to be a priority for TIAA-CREF, but American educators or academics that use TIAA-CREF as their retirement fund could use their leverage to ensure socially conscientious investments. Even though land and water grabbing are becoming a major concern, the growing awareness of the problem may also result in solutions that limit the negative impact of land and water grabbing.

Image Credits: Wikimedia - Drought by Tomas Castelazo / Wikimedia - The Union of Earth and Water by Rubens

The Joy of Painting

by Misha Lepetic

No subject has hitherto been so much neglected by the profession
 to which the author has the honour to belong.
~Higgins, The House Painter, 1841

When we move into a new home or apartment, oftentimes the first thing we do (except for setting up the stereo) is to give most every surface a fresh coat of paint. This accomplishes several things. Obviously, there is the satisfaction of meting out a wholesale revisionism – the permanent occlusion, by the thinnest and yet most opaque and decisive means, of the previous inhabitants’ history or even presence. Paint fumes are redolent of fresh beginnings; their smell creates an almost Pavlovian reaction, celebrating a new start, or at least the thorough dismissal of what went before.

But in another sense, it is the first articulation of an implied contract between our new dwelling and ourselves. It is almost as if we are saying to all those empty rooms, “I will take care of you, and you will take care of me. As proof, here is my act of good will.” For those of us who like to paint before even moving in, it is our first, truly physical interaction with the space. We take its measure in a painstaking and intimate way, appreciating the true height of the ceilings, the idiosyncrasies (or shoddy workmanship) that has gone into correctly reconciling floors with walls. We wonder, too, when confronted with a vague and knobby detail, how many times it has been painted over by people, perhaps not dissimilar from ourselves. Inevitably, we leave spatters of paint that will haunt us for the remainder of our time there. But in the end, this act of tabula rasa is meant to broadcast our ownership of the place, in a way that is thorough, satisfying, and simultaneously public and private.

If these are the outcomes of a simple and oft-repeated ritual, then why not apply this kind of thinking to larger scales? It may seem to be a trivial suggestion, when one considers the fact that run-down urban neighborhoods are contending with extreme and persistent problems of economic degeneration, crime and social fragmentation. Budget cuts lead to curtailed services, and potholes, broken street lights and shuttered storefronts pile up in a seemingly irreversible, slow-motion car wreck. What could a few coats of fresh paint possibly do? Isn’t this just another elaborate form of denial, an almost literal act of whitewashing?

On the other hand, consider what would be a guiding principle of anyone attempting a revitalization of a beaten-down neighborhood: What is the smallest action that I can take that will have the greatest effect? There has been much discussion and praise of the movement towards DIY urbanism, or bootstrapping. I have written previously about strivers like Marcus Westbury in Newcastle, Australia, who are bringing nearly abandoned downtowns back to life using innovative financing schemes with virtually zero seed capital. And recently, interesting work has been done establishing the possibility that the simplest way to kick-start economic development in informal neighborhoods is to pave the streets. Conducted in the Mexican city of Acayucan, the study’s central finding noted that “while the price of paving the 28 streets in Acayucan came to roughly 11 million pesos, the land value increased roughly 12 million pesos — or 109 percent of the original investment.” While this is a great multiplier, paving streets is a complex business, costly to organize and prone to corruption. The idea here is to be even simpler than that – and what could be simpler than a few cans of paint? Yet, this story is as much about what paint can obscure, as what it can expose.

*

Edi Rama had been pursuing a career as an artist until his election as mayor of Tirana. Well, this is the short version, but it will suffice for now. One of his first edicts as mayor was to begin painting the city’s Soviet-era architecture with bright colors. Rama’s bold insight was to avoid committees, master plans or almost any planning at all. Crews would show up and paint a building with wild colors, following simple geometric schemes. Residents were rarely told that these crews were coming, and were certainly not asked for their permission, let alone the opportunity to choose colors.

In a 2006 documentary, Rama describes the problem with consensus: “It is not a matter of what color you may want to have the balcony; it is not a matter of what color you may want this or that building, because that would be a question of trying to add up all the tastes, and then finding the golden mean, which would be grey.”

The result, as told by Rama in a longer interview at the Tate Modern, was one of initial bewilderment. But over time, the scheme took hold. A two-question poll taken at the time illustrates the sentiment wonderfully. Asked whether they liked the initiative, 63% of the respondents said yes, and 37% said no. The second question, however, asked if respondents would want to see the initiative continue; 85% said yes, which means that roughly half of those who didn’t like the initiative didn’t mind it, in fact, continuing. People became impassioned and the painting of the city became the favorite topic of the city itself. As Rama recounts in the documentary,

There is a paradox here, because it is the poorest country in Europe, rife with problems, and I do not think there is any other country in Europe where people discuss so passionately and collectively about colors… This does not mean that it should also happen to other cities. It does not mean either that other cities should envy this city. It would make no sense for this to be in a city that establishes communications and relations with people in other ways quite natural and satisfactory for them, this is the difference.

Rama didn’t only intend to revitalize café conversation with the painting program. His was an artist’s act of provocation. The idea was to create controversy, debate, and therefore a sense of ownership, on the part of the citizenry, of the shared, lived urban condition (witness the complaint he received from a constituent and long-time anti-Communist, who objected to having his balcony painted red).

But Rama’s narrative also credits the use of paint as an essential element in the re-weaving of the urban fabric. Together with improved street lighting and newly planted trees, he recounts how shopkeepers on newly-painted blocks threw away their storefront grates, since they were no longer afraid of break-ins. And as a result of this safety, shopkeepers began paying their taxes, something previously unheard of. Additionally, they began pooling their own money to sponsor sidewalk improvements on their respective block. In the meantime, the program did not neglect its artistic roots, germinating an international conemporary art biennale. The first iteration saw international artists – not least, Olafur Eliasson – arrived to paint their very own buildings. The painting program had become successful enough to become a phenomenon worthy of its own curation.

This is a story that has found a willing audience in the international urban design community, and especially proponents of grassroots campaigns. The design community gets to tell and re-tell a story of urban revitalization against all odds, and with the unlikeliest of materials. The arts contingent gets to play with phrases such as the “avant-garde of democratization” (actually, Rama’s phrase for not asking anyone’s permission). There is no doubting the power of color, but in a certain sense this is the same power that prevents people from saying anything mean about kittens. This is because Rama had more on his plate than grey, Soviet-era architecture, and paint was only one arrow in his quiver.

*

What of the story of Tirana itself? Impoverished indeed, Albania nevertheless had a fairly peaceful transition from Communist rule in 1991 (it helped that its long-time dictator, Enver Hoxha, had died in 1985, and no one could credibly fill his shoes). For its part, Tirana was a city of approximately 230,000 people in 1990, but by the time Rama was elected a decade later, it had swelled to over 750,000. Much of this was due to rural-urban migration and the not-unusual narrative where the collapse of state support and/or restrictions drives much of the rural population into the city and the promise of a gray-market livelihood. The chaotic transition to democracy and a free-market economy did not at all encourage the propagation of law and order. For example, the country almost collapsed in 1996-7, as a result of Albanians’ enthusiastic discovery and embrace of savings and investment pyramid schemes.

In Tirana, the influx of migrants wreaked havoc on an already inadequate and crumbling housing stock. The result was a raging streak of illegal building. By 2000, large swathes of Tirana could be characterized as informal settlements. Part of Rama’s mayoral platform was the restoration of public space and parks, much of which had been decimated by informal building. So in addition to wielding a paintbrush, Rama also had a shovel (for planting trees) and a bulldozer (for getting rid of those settlements).

It's essential to understand that Rama did not inherit a city that had been undergoing a gentle, decades-long collapse – the usual post-Communist narrative that we often take for granted. He inherited a city that had seen its population triple in the course of a decade, on top of gently collapsing for decades. The mayor decided he had to break a few proverbial eggs in order to make an omelette, or at least a decent scramble.

One can literally see the results of this in the first documentary I cite. As the camera pans slowly across the freshly painted facades (shot, for some odd reason, in the middle of the night), there is a surprisingly deep setback between the camera, which is mounted on a car, and the buildings themselves. As the film moves into daylight footage, it is apparent that these setbacks are giant muddy bands that the citizens of Tirana have to navigate in order to go from street to shop and back. And here, in fact are where hundreds of houses and shops used to be. Except the only thing to be seen are brightly painted buildings – a small consolation indeed for those whose homes and livelihoods were summarily excised from the city. And, as is often the case when discussing clearance, where those people went is not discussed, or perhaps even known – although it’s reasonable to assume that they simply move to the periphery, where they establish a new cycle of informal settlements.

So it is somewhat ironic when Rama claims that the painting program has aesthetically unified much of the illegal building – additional floors, illicit balconies – that have sprung up over the years. This is illegal building that has been spared because it has grown from, or on top of, established building stock. Thus what is preserved is not necessarily even of better quality than what was cleared, either; it is saved simply by grace of its provenance.

Indeed, cities around the world have always had to accept this kind of building as a major characteristic of the urban fabric; Tirana is no different. But if we look past the drama and obfuscation described above, we find legislation, passed by the Albanian parliament in 2006, that provides a means by which these arrangements can indeed be formalized – and which involves the citizens themselves as key participants:

Citizens are invited to provide the government with information about their informal developments through a self declaration process. According to the legalization law, a 6-month period was given for Albanian citizens to declare their informal homes. Approximately 350,000 declarations were submitted, out of which 80,000 were multiple-dwellings, apartments and shops.

That is a significant proportion, given that the total population of the country is 3.2m. And while there is little here to inspire a bienniale, this is the slow and difficult work that needs to happen for a society to build a durable fabric.

I do not mean to cast Rama – or, by extension, other mayoral practitioners of “avant-garde democritization” – as unconditional villains in the urban drama. The just treatment of informal settlements and ensuing gentrification is a vexatious question. Mayors, as executives, make decisions that reverberate across hundreds of thousands of lives. Rama in particular had been faced with the urgent task of how to make a city livable. But even while granting the complexity of the situation, I can’t but rue that he dealt with it simply by slapping on a fresh coat of paint.

The state withers away in Pakistan

by Omar Ali

3 days ago the Pakistani Taliban raided an outpost of the levies, a paramilitary force recruited primarily from the Afridi tribesmen of the Khyber agency. Poorly equipped, poorly paid and left to stand on the frontlines of the war against the Taliban with little or no backup from the army, the levies lost 3 men and another 23 were captured. The next day the “local administration” spent a busy day contacting “tribal elders” to negotiate with the Taliban for the release of those poor men. But the talks failed and 

the captives were executed and their bodies dumped a couple of miles outside the city. This is not the first time the local Taliban have captured levies or other paramilitary forces and it is not the first time they have executed them.

On the same day, a related anti-Shia militant group blew up three buses carrying Shia pilgrims to Iran.

20 or so people were killed. Dozens more injured.  Again, this is not the first time such an act was commited. In fact scores of other pilgrims have lost their lives on that very road in the last few years and more will probably do so in the months and years to come.

There are literally dozens of such videos. In most of them the Taliban make speeches about the fact that these soldiers are working for the apostate Pakistani regime alongside the US and other infidel powers, and anyone who works for that regime will face the same fate. In the case of Shias the message is even simpler: they are heretics and they must all die. But the Taliban are not the only people doing the killing. There are several videos of Pakistani soldiers executing Taliban prisoners or beating them up. There are also videos of children killed by Pakistani or American bombing. There is a video somewhere of American soldiers urinating on dead bodies. Not as gruesome as some of the work done by Taliban videographers, but as Hamid Gul has repeatedly pointed out, the Americans are pussies.

War is hell. We know that. But what struck me about these news items was this: in both cases (the attack on Peshawar and the attacks in Mastung) the “local authorities” generally know where to find the attackers (they frequently negotiate with them, they send “elders” out to talk to them, the attackers don’t even hide their faces in most videos, large numbers of armed men don’t just drop in from the moon and disappear back into the mother ship, etc.). And these are certainly not the first such attacks, so the “authorities” have had more than enough time to find out that something is rotten a few miles from their provincial capital. Yet there is remarkably little response. The local deputy commissioner or political agent is not held responsible, nor do the various other local “law enforcement” mechanisms swing into action as if something terrible has happened. The army, armed with thousands of tanks and artillery pieces, stationed in tens of thousands in the same cities, proud of being the “seventh nuclear power in the world”, does not swing into action. Prime ministers and Presidents don’t fly in to take charge of the situation.

On the contrary, there is remarkable vagueness and confusion about what is happening and who is responsible for dealing with it. The provincial government (an elected regime that has lost hundreds of party workers to the Taliban, most recently the senior provincial minister) is not asked why they don’t do something because it is widely understood that they are not in charge and it’s not up to them to “do something”. The civil bureaucracy and police have no jurisdiction or else wriggle out with vague insinuations that it’s all in the army’s domain. The army, recipient of billions in US aid for “anti-terrorism efforts” and the institution that is de facto (if not de jure) responsible for tackling these killers is extremely vague about their identity.  In Baluchistan they pretend to have simply washed their hands of the whole matter. In KP (Peshawar) they say they are fighting “an amorphous enemy”, which presumably means they are off the hook.

There may be many reasons why the Pakistani army is so reluctant to fight the Pakistani Taliban. Lack of capacity is sometimes cited. Others believe it is complicity, not inability, which prevents any action. But this is not a post focused on why the army does or does not fight its former blue-eyed boys in the Jihadist movement. My point today is simpler: There is a state called Pakistan. It exists (whether it was a good idea or not is another story; you can see my views on that). It has a structure. That structure; corrupt, inefficient, “unequal, sexist, racist, neo-imperialist”, whatever, can fall apart. If it falls apart, you will have anarchy and civil war. Neither is a pleasant experience. And once that happens, it can take decades to settle on new arrangements.  What follows in the interim is usually extremely unpleasant. Humpty Dumpty is not put together again with kid gloves. Ask Chinese people who lived between 1911 and 1976 for details.

"Strategic depth" and the "leveraging of asymmetrical assets to support national policy priorities" is National Defense University level stuff. The neo-liberal world order and its disastrous consequences are arguments for which you need a university degree (and no, the “neoliberal world order” does not necessarily and automatically demand civil war and anarchy). But no state, not Leninist Russia, not Maoist China, not George Washington’s America, not the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, tolerated, AT ALL, the existence of free-lance bands of armed men. The illiterate (but capable) Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia understood this. Modern India, which is very much a work in progress and is as incompetent and corrupt a regime as any in Pakistan, seems to understand this. EVERYONE seems to understand, it but the Pakistani army high command does not? Don’t they teach this in National Defense University before they teach all about DIMEFIL and its importance in Pakistani Afghan policy?

I will digress here with a few words for my Westernized Pakistani Leftist friends (everyone else can jump ahead). Yes, yes, we all hate the neo-liberal new world order.  But dear well-meaning darling souls, if the shit hits the fan in Pakistan, it won’t be happening in some other country where we can cheer the revolution and its transformation of “power relations” while bemoaning its inevitable but understandable “excesses”. We are talking about this happening in Pakistan itself. We still have friends and family there.  Mummy and Daddy’s little house in Model Town, Uncle Jimmy’s pleasant little farmhouse in Bani Gala. Do keep in mind, they are also IN Pakistan.

Let me try and simplify this argument (all this directed at my Westernized elite liberal friends only):

1. All modern states are evil. All war is evil. All power is evil.

2. Colonial powers are evil. Western colonial powers were especially evil (if you don’t wish to apply the term “colonial” to the Russian or the Arab empire, I will accept that too). And US neo-colonialism is very very very especially evil.

3. We hate this evil way of organizing human society and would love to transcend it. We must transcend it. The sooner, the better.

4. But until we do so, or until someone else does so (lets be humble enough to recognize that if comrade Mao and comrade Lenin couldn’t do it with ruthless armed revolutionaries at their disposal, we are not likely to do it with a keyboard), there are a few elementary features that every state has to aim for, even if it does not immediately achieve them. If state A is unable to implement them in area X, then state B must do so very quickly after pushing out state A. Elementary stuff. The suppression of mob violence and non-state militias. Don’t do that and you have chaos and/or civil war and revolution on your hands.

5. It is hard to find an example of in which the sequence of chaos/civil-war/revolution led directly to a better life for the great mass of the people alive when the chaos set in.

6. It is especially important not to try this experiment in Pakistan. We are from Pakistan. What exists is bad, but it’s not hopeless. It can be improved. Break it and you will have a mess on your hands that is guaranteed to be worse than what exists today.

OK, back to the main point. I am not saying Pakistan’s ruling elite is already done for. They will probably act against these groups at some point after having made the job extra hard for themselves. And though the confrontation will be bloody and prolonged, the state will probably prevail in the end. Modern states are very resilient and are hard to defeat by non-state actors (another more powerful state chipping in, as in East Pakistan in 1971, is a different matter). Cuba comes to mind as an exception, but counter examples are far more numerous.

 In fact there are rumors that the army may have struck a new deal with the US that involves US approval for an army-backed “caretaker” regime.  Some new move is said to be afoot with Allama Tahir ul Qadri providing “moderate Muslim” cover, with the MQM and anyone else over whom the army (or, in this case, the London police) has enough leverage, lining up to “demand” a new caretaker regime. But the whole exercise smells too much of past interventions and lacks even the manufactured legitimacy that attended those attempts at nation building. I am not hopeful that any new “government of all talents”, especially one based on transparently false premises like the Tahir-ul-Qadri/MQM revolutionary wave, will solve our ideological conundrum. We all understand that it breaks GHQs heart to fight against the very forces they thought would lead them to conquests from Khorasan to Kashmir. And yes, it is difficult for many Pakistanis to accept that people sincerely committed to Islam and Islamic supremacy are now to be ruthlessly crushed by the country that prides itself as the citadel of Islam. But mistakes were made and karma is a bitch. Someone somewhere will have to bite the bullet. The point is that it will be no easier to do that with a new caretaker regime than it is with the (admittedly incompetent) Zardari regime.  Because the principal obstacle to taking decisive action is not corruption or mechanistic institutional weaknesses.  Corrupt and incompetent police forces and armies can still defeat major rebellions (with a little help from their friends. See Taiping rebellion in China). What is lacking here is will; it seems it’s very painful for GHQ to muster the will to act against Islam and the “ideology of Pakistan”. But as noted above, things have become so bad, they have become clear.  Pakistan’s ruling elite can either relinquish control in large areas or clear those areas. Controlled burn and other holding strategies that accept such a level of violence against state forces may have been a way to have our American aid and eat our jihadi cake too, but that whole strategy has now become non-viable. Negotiations and “peaceful solution” are beautiful ideals, but the other side is armed and ready to kill. No state can permit such force to remain active within its domain and appear not to care. To do so it to undermine the viability of the state itself. The viability of the Pakistani state may be just a theoretical problem for the Guardian newspaper, but its life and death for the Pakistani elite... OUR elite. If things fall apart, they will not be easy to put together again.

The choices are simple. The Pakistani state can permanently abandon large areas to armed forces that refuse to recognize its authority (and will then face the prospect of fighting these forces wherever the new border is drawn, since their ambitions are vast). Or it can re-establish control. Everything else comes after this first elementary choice is made. Its time to choose.

Finally, a few words for friends who think a post-Pakistan solution would be best.  How do you plan to get there? Between what exists now and what may exist after Pakistan is no more, lie civil war and massive disorder. And organized forces will have to fight it out in that transition. Which forces do you imagine doing that work, and why do you expect them to do it to your liking?

PS: On an unrelated note, I notice that Zizek has called out the poco crowd:

Also, I really hate all of this politically correct, cultural studies bullshit. If you mention the phrase “postcolonialism,” I say, “Fuck it!” Postcolonialism is the invention of some rich guys from India who saw that they could make a good career in top Western universities by playing on the guilt of white liberals.

 There is likely to be an urge among the more intelligent and established postcolonial types to let the matter go (as with states, there are elementary first principles in academic disputes and number one is the "mutual bullshit protection clause"). But in this realm I am with the revolutionaries. Don’t worry about collateral damage and self-inflicted wounds. Ignore the business about airing dirty laundry in public. Let Zizek have it with all keyboards blazing. I urge my "postcolonial-culture studies" brethren (and sisteren) to please respond to Zizek.  Harshly.

“There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

PS: thanks to Myra Macdonald, whose post inspired this one over the weekend. 

Friday Poem

Mid-life Christ

Is frankly disappointed by the gnomes
or apostles as he hears they style themselves
these days of receding gums and shorelines
in their soft-boiled rewrites of his very grain.

He mooches, half-working in the shade,
keeps taking the finished board, the flawed saw
outside, to check them in the light
that turns everything to a species of limestone.

What’s it going to take to persuade these people
that some things are meant to be a parable?
Must he drown upon a watery stroll,
rot upon a self-made cross?

He personally visited them all
after that last glorious rumour,
took Thomas to confirm there were no wounds
till he was blue in the ribs with proof.

And still they’ve spun it their several ways,
all the Jonah-come-latelies on a mission
to convert the light into a few believers
in that which they can only be and not believe.

Nothing spreads like the semblance of a truth.
Presumably Caesar would shut their mouths –
not that any fist puts out that Pentecostal glister
you get from never listening.

A lot of the old zeal has gone out of him these days,
like muscle tone or the falling water table.
He cycles a lot, just round the village,
just to keep in shape, really.

Says less and less, even to Adam
his deliberately illiterate son of a man.
.

by WN Herbert
from Omnesia
Bloodaxe Books, Northumberland, 2013

A Universal History of Online Iniquity

by James McGirk

“BREAKING: Confirmed flooding on NYSE. The trading floor is flooded under more than 3 feet of water.” It was a horrid thought, but Shashank Tripathi’s (i.e. Comfortablysmug’s) infamous Hurricane Sandy tweet had panache.

Tripathi mimicked the style of a breaking news tweet perfectly. The image of water sluicing into the New York Stock Exchange was too good to be true. An irresistible nugget of news distilling the potent emotions stirred by the storm: Sorrow for afflicted New Yorkers, fear for the future, the thrill of seeing history unspool in real time, and a dose of snickering glee at the idea of cuff-linked financiers wading through filthy water.

The cruelty and incendiary media appeal of Tripathi’s tweet was reminiscent of another notorious prank: the attack on the Epilepsy Foundation. On March 22, 2008, a horde of eBaum’s World users (a community devoted to online humor) logged onto the Epilepsy Foundation’s online forums, and plastered its pages with blinking graphics.

As despicable as deliberately triggering thousands of epileptic fits or enflaming a vulnerable community during a catastrophe may be, consider how hard it is to shock a contemporary audience with a piece of art or literature. As subversive texts go, these are arguably genuine artistic achievements, thrilling to witness in real time or read about afterwards.

It’s an aesthetic experience Sherrod DeGrippo, an information security expert who founded two of the world’s preeminent repositories of Internet drama, Encyclopedia Dramatica and OhInternet.com, compares to watching reality television. “I think that a lot of what is attractive about Internet drama is the combination of schadenfreude and superiority people feel when looking at it,” says DeGrippo. “Reality TV inspires a lot of the same feelings. The viewer thinks of himself as superior, but when examined, the viewer is obsessively voyeuristic.”

When Tripathi’s identity was revealed, he certainly looked like a real-life Omarosa or Wendy Pepper. Here was a hedge fund analyst who wrote a sex diary for New York Magazine reminiscent of Preppie Murderer Robert Chambers and managed a Republican campaign, spending his free time trying to rile people up during Hurricane Sandy: a despicable man, and deliciously so.

Tripathi apologized for his barrage of misleading tweets. Most of the delinquent denizens of eBaum’s World did not, however. Their anti-social behavior was unapologetically deliberate. They were—to use the correct Internet jargon—trolling.

“Trolling is a lot like graffiti,” writes essayist and Internet grey eminence Paul Graham (he founded Y Combinator). “Graffiti happens at the intersection of ambition and incompetence: people want to make their mark on the world, but have no other way to do it than literally making a mark on the world.”

Graffiti is an apt metaphor. It began as a diffuse, sub-literary phenomenon, and grew to become a permanent part of the global urban experience. To make the leap from anonymous malcontents scratching their names on the walls of Roman prisons to a graffiti “artist” like Jean-Michel Basquiat took millennia and a series of technological leaps and daring appropriations.

Christopher “moot” Poole created 4chan in 2003, an online image board that would become, according to NYU digital culture and folklore scholar Dr. Whitney Phillips, a “specially demarcated troll space.” There, tens of thousands of anonymous users interact in real time and together create a flood of never-ending nudity and subversive humor. It was the trolling equivalent of the cheap, portable spray-paint can.

“Pretty much all the people you encounter [on 4chan’s /b/ board] are trolls,” says Dr. Phillips. Ethical issues are cast aside. “Everyone (or almost everyone) is aware of the game and consents to playing.” But when 4chan’s users flock together for the Internet equivalent of a Viking raid they forget that “outside these specially demarcated troll spaces, people are NOT aware of the trolling game and therefore are NOT afforded the opportunity to consent. Trolls don't give targets the opportunity to say no, in fact tend to be triggered when they encounter resistance (the common trolling aphorism "your resistance only makes my penis harder" speaks volumes).”

Media attention is like sloshing gasoline on a fire. In a forthcoming academic article, Philips argues that: “trolls and mainstream media outlets, specifically Fox News, are locked in a cybernetic feedback loop predicted upon spectacle.”

Not only does media attention encourage trolls, it infuses their historical moments with images and vocabulary. “Trolls are cultural scavengers, fashioning amusement from that which already exists,” says Dr. Phillips. She describes a 4chan user who successfully trolled Oprah Winfrey’s online message board by posing as a pedophile. Oprah actually read his post aloud on the air:

“Let me read you something posted on our message boards,” she gravely began, “from somebody who claims to be a member of a known pedophile network: He said he does not forgive. He does not forget. His group has over 9000 penises and they’re all... raping... children.”

It was a trolling triumph. The message incorporated recognizable 4chan memes (the official slogan of Anonymous—an online hacktivist collective closely affiliated with 4chan—is: We are anonymous, We are Legion, We do not forgive, We do not forget, Expect us; while “over 9,000,” is one of the board’s most popular memes; as is anything having to do with pedophilia.) And a clip containing Oprah’s words was spliced with images of various troll memes and circulated.

There is no history on 4chan; nothing is archived. Any image, link, or message posted to the board will soon slip off the board’s front page and vanish unless users continue to “bump” the post or recycle its content.

If 4chan were the only “specially demarcated troll space,” whatever culture was created on it might never stabilize into something more significant. Moments like the Oprah’s trolling would be lost as soon as 4chan turned its attention elsewhere. So in 2004, 4chan and their Internet ilk began to use Sherrod DeGrippo’s Encyclopedia Dramatica as an archive for Internet drama they had witnessed online and that they created.

“The site started as a joke,” says DeGrippo. “A friend had placed an article on Wikipedia, only to have it swiftly deleted. So I threw a quick instance of Mediawiki up on my own server and put the article there. It was intended to just have the one article, but people started adding more and more.”

A Mediawiki (the software that Wikipedia uses) lets users simultaneously create and edit content online. This added another dimension to the experience of Internet drama.

“[Contributors to Encyclopedia Dramatica would] view and then create derivative works off of things they claimed to despise or mock,” explains DeGrippo. “Then those new, created artifacts began to take a life of their own and make a story of their own.”

Because items don’t vanish into the ether as soon as they are forgotten about, Encyclopedia Dramatica evolved into something more akin to a wild garden than the primordial ooze of 4chan’s /b/.

There is actually something resembling a coherent voice to the site. “For me, the voice of a lot of ED's content came from a sysop who went by the name of OldDirtyBtard,” says DeGrippo. “He was a British guy living in LA and a friend, very jovial. I preferred to assume everything written was in his accent, he killed himself in 2010.”

The Encyclopedia Dramatica page dedicated to OldDirtyBtard (Sean Carasov, a one-time Beastie Boys tour manager) contains a strange and touching tribute. There is a copy of his suicide note. A video of his memorial that sadly does not include “the first time in history that got rickrolled by a bagpipe player,” photographs of the man’s tattoos, and a link to his exploits under another moniker that he used to harass the Church of Scientology with (and who allegedly poisoned a feral cat he had tamed).

DeGrippo relinquished control of Encyclopedia Dramatica in 2011 (a mirror of the site continues to be updated and now includes a very unflattering page dedicated to DeGrippo). She has made a second repository, OhInternet, with a more advanced interface that tries to avoid the bloody and obscene “shock” content that infests Encyclopedia Dramatica.

What binds a community like Encyclopedia Dramatica together? “I think people just do things on the Internet until they're not fun anymore,” says DeGrippo. “I ran ED for 7 years, the user base and readership changed on a continuum. People would disappear and come back all the time. I think that's what is appealing about a lot of Internet communities, you can leave them, or they can change, but ultimately it's the same people in the same places.”

Clearly Shashank Tripathi craved community. He left hundreds of comments on the New York Magazine’s website and broadcast more than 67,000 tweets to his followers. His Hurricane Sandy tweet may have had panache, but like any clichéd villain, all he really wanted was for someone to pay him attention.

Shias and their future in Pakistan

by Omar Ali

Shias (mostly Twelver Shias, but also including smaller groups of Ismailis and Dawoodi Bohras, etc.) make up between 5 and 25% of Pakistan’s population. The exact number is not known because the census does not count them separately and pro and anti-Shia groups routinely exaggerate or downgrade the number of Shias in Pakistan (thus the most militant Sunni group, the Sipah e Sahaba, routinely uses the figure of 2% Shia, which is too low, while Shias sometimes claim they are 30% of the Muslim population, which is clearly too high).

Shias were not historically a “minority group” in the sense in which modern identity politics talks about “minorities” (a definition that, sometimes unconsciously, includes some sense of being oppressed/marginalized by the majority).  Shias were part and parcel of the Pakistan movement and the “great leader” himself was at least nominally Shia. He was not a conventionally observant Muslim (e.g. he regularly drank alcohol and may have eaten pork) and was for the most part a fairly typical upper-class “Brown sahib”, English in dress and manners, but Indian in origin.  He was born Ismaili Khoja but switched to the more mainstream Twelver sect; a conversion that he attested to in a written affidavit in some court. His conversion was said to be due to the Khoja Ismaili sect excommunicating his sisters for marrying non-Khojas.

In short, his position as a Shia was not a significant problem for him as he led the Muslim League’s movement for a separate Muslim state. Twelver Shias were well integrated into the Muslim elite, and in opposition to Hindus they were all fellow Muslims. The question of whether Jinnah was Shia or Sunni was occasionally asked but Jinnah always parried it with the fatuous stock reply “was the holy prophet Shia or Sunni?” This irrelevant (and in some ways, irreverent) reply generally worked because theologial fine print was not a priority for the superficially Anglicized North Indian Muslim elite. Their Muslim identity distinguished them from Hindus (and especially in North India, it was mixed with a certain anti-Indian racism, the assumption being that they themselves were “superior” Afghans, Turks, Persians, etc.). But foreshadowing the problems that would come later as the ideology of Pakistan matured, a Shia-Sunni distinction did arise when Jinnah died; his sister arranged a hurried Shia funeral inside the house, while the state arranged a larger Sunni funeral (led by an anti-shia cleric) in public.  This event and his own studied avoidance of any specifically Shia observance in his life, has led to claims by anti-Shia activists that Jinnah was in fact Sunni.  But years later, a court did get to rule on this issue and they ruled that he was Shia (property was involved). By the time his sister died in 1967, matters had become uglier and even an orderly Sunni funeral was not easily arranged.
Since then, things have become much worse. The leaders of the Muslim league in general and the great leader in particular seem to have thought that once a Muslim state had been founded, it would function as a kind of Muslimized version of British India. The same commissioners and deputy commissioners, selected by the same civil service examinations, would rule over the “common people” while a thin (and thinly educated) crust of Muslim landlords and other “Ashraaf” lorded it over them.

Having used Islam to separate themselves from their Hindu and Sikh neighbors, they might occasionally use it to strengthen the spirit of Jihad in Kashmir or carry out other nation-building projects but it was not seen as a potential problem. Some of them probably thought there would be something called Islamic law in Islamic Pakistan, but most of the push for sharia law came from mullahs who had strongly opposed Jinnah’s project on the logical grounds that no one as ignorant of Islam as Jinnah could possibly create an Islamic state…but they soon realized that this pork-eating, whisky drinking Shia had indeed done so, and they were then quick to move in and try to take ownership).

Jinnah and some of the other Westernized Muslims in the Muslim League (like their later descendant Imran Khan) do seem to have had the vague notion that a true Islamic state was a sort of social-democratic welfare state that was first introduced into the world by the Caliph Omar and then taken by the Swedes to Europe (see here for details regarding this belief).  Some others thought Pakistan would be a secular Westminster- style democracy, but one dominated by Muslims rather than Hindus (to which they added the common belief that Muslims are "inherently democratic" while Hindus are “caste-ridden”).

But the mullahs knew better. An Islamic state must have Islamic laws. And these laws are not going to be created de novo by some Westernized Muslims impressed by Scandinavian Social Democracy; a lot of them already exist. They were developed over hundreds of years in medieval times. And they are serious business. Very deep questions of legitimacy and authority were debated by the people who created those laws. Part of the Shia-Sunni dispute had to do with exactly these questions of authority and legitimacy.  As long as the state is British or Indian or ethno-nationalist, these debates are mostly history; if and when there is an Islamic renaissance they will no doubt be dredged up by the kind of people who insist the ten commandments are the basis of all Western laws, but that level of development has yet to occur in any Islamic country. Outside of Saudi Arabia, what we have right now is Western/colonial legal codes and state institutions with a smattering of “sharia punishments” thrown in for effect. But if you have created a state with no real basis except Islamic solidarity it doesn’t take long to start wondering how and when the state will actually become Islamic. And once you start down that path, you have to specify which Islamic law? Or you have to do the hard work of inventing a whole new set. The “new set” option is a step too far for the limited intellectual resources available to the Pakistani elite (and involves fighting past the apostasy and blasphemy roadblocks), so we are back to arguing about which school to follow.

 General Zia, who understood these matters better than the average Pakistani liberal, took his theology seriously. He favored hardcore Sunni schools of thought, though his exact allegiances are by no means clear. He also understood the importance of Saudi Arabia as a source of cash, and that may have played a role in his decisions (e.g.a senior official in his govt later claimed that he introduced the Islamic law of cutting off the hands of thieves purely in order to get short-term Saudi favor).  In any case, he introduced a series of “Islamic laws” one of which made it compulsory for all Muslims to pay Zakat (poor tax) to the state. Shia jurisprudence regarded this as a personal matter rather than a state matter and a very large number of Shias organized to demand that they be excluded from this law. This Shia movement was given some support by Iran (a message from Khomeini was read out to the largest gathering in Islamabad), a fact that has allowed some apologists to claim that all later problems are part of some sort of proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia (a claim that is thoroughly debunked here). While the Shias won that round and were exempted from Zakat, a line had been drawn that has continued to become darker and bloodier with time.

At ground level a lot of this was not due to any single organized conspiracy but involved the confluence of several factors: Islamization put the question of “whose Islam” on the table; Zia’s personal leanings led to support for anti-Shia factions;
Saudi Arabia inserted Wahabi-Salafi propaganda into the mix; The Shia response to the Zakat law and open (even if mostly symbolic) support from Iran helped opponents to label them Iranian agents; and modernization and modern education themselves led to a preference for modern (and fascist) versions of Islam in preference to folk Islam with its “superstitious” rituals and rather obvious multicultural colorfulness.

Newly rich Saudi and Gulf individuals wished to promote “true Islam” in Pakistan. Many individuals in Pakistan wished to be paid by Gulf and Saudi millionaires to do the same. While the actual madrassa cannon-fodder came mostly from poor families, the policy the promoted the same came from middle class military officers and their civilian collaborators. Modern education and economics had prepared the minds of many middle class Pakistanis (including many whose families were traditionally Barelvi Sunni) to accept Maudoodi-type “back-to-basics” modern Islamism.  Just like traditional folk Hinduism was rejected by Arya Samajis and other Hindu reformers, educated middle class Muslims in Pakistan were ready to reject folk Islam and strive for modernized purity. Thus,in predominantly Barelvi Pakistan, the majority of the new madrassas set up all over the country and paid for by Gulf money turned out to be hardline Deobandi, Ahle hadith and Wahhabi in sectarian orientation. 

It is worth repeating that the Anti-Shia polemic was not paramount in the minds of many of the geniuses who promoted these policies. In fact, many in the Pakistani middle class still have no clear idea of where the anti-Shia polemic is coming from. It was not part of our education. While Shias were a minority sect, their version of Karbala and the martyrdom of Husain was widely accepted and reverence for Ali and the house of Ali was part of most Sufi orders. Shia symbolism had spread well beyond the Shias and become part of the cultural heritage of educated Sunnis in South Asia. Certainly there were Ahle hadith and Wahhabi mullahs who were frankly anti-Shia, but even they tended to stay away from any direct criticism of Imam Hussein and his family. That this kind of reverence is not a universal feature of the Muslim word is not something that was even vaguely known to most Pakistani or Indian middle class Sunnis. That in Indonesia and Malaysia there is practically no sense of Moharram as a month of universal mourning is a surprise; that the Saudi Wahhabis have a well-developed anti-Shia polemic that brands the Shias as heretics, Jewvish agents and frank enemies of Islam was poorly understood.   

But the fact is the Saudi Wahhabis and their fellow travelers DO have such a story. When I first heard the Saudi version (from a Pakistani doctor who had converted to Saudi Islam and ran a “study circle” in our residential camp in Saudi Arabia) it was a bit of a shock.  It took a while for me to realize that his version of history was completely mainstream in Saudi Arabia. In this version, Islam (basically a military enterprise from day one) was spreading rapidly on its way to conquer the world, until a Jew named Ibne Saba helped to create a fitna (the first civil war) that sabotaged this first attempt at world conquest. This fitna is now known as the Shia sect and they have been sabotaging Islam ever since. I paraphrase of course, but this is not too far from what any pious Saudi or Gulf millionaire believes. It is therefore no surprise that they spend good money to teach Pakistanis these “truths” and some of them go on to support killers who take the next step and start physically eliminating Shias.

A second and only locally important economic factor was the fact that there were some prominent Shia landlords and power-brokers in Southern Punjab. Anti-Shia polemics combined in those parts with what the Marxists gleefully call “class issues” to fuel a hardline Sunni revolt against the local Shia elite in these areas.

But the third and most critical component of this perfect storm was the state policy of Jihad or “strategic depth”. The Afghan Jihad that effectively destroyed Afghanistan may have been a CIA project, but from day one it was supported and then hijacked by local actors who had priorities of their own. Cynical Saudis saw it as a way to send away religious zealots to “jihad camp”; Pious Saudis saw it as a way to spread true Islam to the benighted heathens; and GHQ saw it as a golden opportunity to get “strategic depth” in Afghanistan, to be translated later into conquest of Kashmir and projection of power (perhaps even an empire!) in Central Asia. As a result, the ISI got oodles of cash from the CIA and the Saudis (every American dollar was matched dollar for dollar by the Saudis) and had complete autonomy in who they handed it out to. They handed it out to the most hardline Islamist groups they could find. And the Saudis paid for the madrassas where hardline Islam was to be taught to future suicide bombers. That it included a healthy dose of anti-Shia propaganda was part of the package.  Even today, many Pakistanis who have not been directly involved in jihad and anti-jihad have no idea of the kind of ideological poison that was being injected into Pakistan’s Madrassa and Jihad underworld starting in the 1980s and accelerating through the 1990s under state patronage; and continuing even as the state itself became at least partially ambivalent about the cause. One visit to this site and others like it should help to put things in perspective.

Very early on, some of the anti-Shia groups started targeting Shias within Pakistan. Jhang in central Punjab was an early battleground, as were Gilgit, Kohistan and Parachinar. Zia’s regime is said to have actively helped set up the Anjuman e Sipah Sahaba (ASS), the primary anti-Shia militant group, probably as a way of getting political leverage against uppity Shias. Like many other inventions of general Zia (MQM being the most famous) the puppets soon escaped from state control (while continuing to receive help and protection from factions within the state). Ultra-militant offshoots of the ASS (offshoot or deniable-militant-arm, take your pick) like the Lashkar e Jhangvi (LEJ) had launched open war on all Pakistani Shiites by the 1990s. The state made some efforts to rein them in , but since the same militants were linked by common donors and patrons to other militants that were considered “good” by the state (as in Kashmir Jihadists, Taliban, etc.) this crackdown was always ineffectual and remains so to this day.

The level of violence has steadily accelerated over time. To get an overview of the violence, see here. This has now reached the point where I personally know well-established Shia doctors who abandoned their life in Karachi and escaped to the US because someone across the hall was shot dead in broad daylight because of his sect. This year, over 300 Shias were killed or injured in attacks during the holy month of Moharram. Since 2001, 700 plus Shia Hazaras have been murdered in Quetta city and its environs and over 3000 injured. In events that evoke the horrors of partition and 1971, Shias were taken down from buses in Kohistan and identified either using their names (there are some typically Shia names, though overlap occurs)

 

or the scars of self-flagellation many Shias have on their backs. They were then shot in cold blood. The term “Shia genocide” has been used and several op-eds have appeared in which prominent writers are asking where this will end.

So where will this end? Prediction is where the pundit rubber meets the road, so here goes:

1. The state will make a genuine effort to stop this madness. Shias are still not seen as outsiders by most educated Pakistani Sunnis. When middle class Pakistanis say “this cannot be the work of a Muslim” they are being sincere, even if they are not being accurate.
2. But as the state makes a greater effort to rein in the most hardcore Sunni militants, it will be forced to confront the “good jihadis” who are frequently linked to the same networks. This confrontation will eventually happen, but between now and “eventually” lies much confusion and bloodshed.
3. The Jihadist community will feel the pressure and the division between those who are willing to suspend domestic operations and those who no longer feel ISI has the cause of Jihadist Islam at heart will sharpen. The second group will be targeted by the state and will respond with more indiscriminate anti-Shia attacks. Just as in Iraq, jihadist gangs will blow up random innocent Shias whenever they want to make a point of any kind. Things (purely in terms of numbers killed) will get much worse before they get better. As the state opts out of Jihad (a difficult process in itself, but one that is almost inevitable, the alternatives being extremely unpleasant) the killings will greatly accelerate and will continue for many years before order is re-established. The worst is definitely yet to come.  This will naturally mean an accelerating Shia brain drain, but given the numbers that are there, total emigration is not an option. Many will remain and some will undoubtedly become very prominent in the anti-terrorist effort (and some will, unfortunately, become special targets for that reason).
4. IF the state is unable to opt out of Jihadist policies (no more “good jihadis” in Kashmir and Afghanistan and “bad jihadis” within Pakistan) then what? I don’t think even the strategists who want this outcome have thought it through. The economic and political consequences will be horrendous and as conditions deteriorate the weak, corrupt, semi-democratic state will have to give way to a Sunni “purity coup”. Though this may briefly stabilize matters it will eventually end with terrible regional war and the likely breakup of Pakistan. . Since that is a choice that almost no one wants (not India, not the US, not China, though perhaps Afghanistan wouldn’t mind) there will surely be a great deal of multinational effort to prevent such an eventuality.
5. Sadly, the Tariq Ali type overseas/Westernized-elite Left will play no discernible role in any of this. If we do (God forbid) get to the nationalist-Sunni-coup phase, Pankaj Mishra may find something positive in it (“strength” and the willingness to stand up against imperialism being a high priority for him) but events will not fit into that framework for too long.  

 

btw, the cartoons and the painting are the work of the highly talented Pakistani cartoonist and artist sabir nazar. http://pinterest.com/laiq/sabir-nazar-cartoons/

 Finally, do NOT watch the following video if you cannot stand graphic content. But its real and everyone is always telling us how important it is to face reality. I am not sure, and have not watched it all myself. But here it is

 

Notes from a Post-Diluvian City

by Misha Lepetic

All the strange things
they come and go, as early warnings
Stranded starfish have no place to hide
~Peter Gabriel, “Here Comes The Flood”

It is entirely unsurprising that much of the post-Sandy talk around New York City has coagulated around the ideology of the technological fix. The optimism that is encoded in this perfectly human response inspires us to emerge better, stronger and wiser from disaster. However, there is a further subspecies of this response, which I will call the monolithic technological fix. Thus, in the wake of catastrophe, we seem to focus our attention on answering the question, “What is the one thing that we could do to ensure that this will never, ever happen again?” In this case of New York City and Sandy, the answer to this question has manifested itself, in full deus ex machina glory, in the form of a sea wall. This brings up two distinct but entangled issues: whether it is a good idea, simply on the face of it, and what this implies for the urban fabric.

Concerning the first point, there are, of course, many opinions as to where said seawall(s) would go. The daftest involve skirting all of Lower Manhattan with a retractable 16’ seawall, which, aside from expressing a certain opinion of the outer boroughs, only works provided all subsequent storm surges agree to play nicely and remain under 16’. Columbia University’s Vishan Chakrabarti speaks for the most commonly considered solution, which would be a series of barriers meant to bottleneck any incoming surge around the general vicinity of New York Harbor: “I think we seriously have to think about doing this in three places probably – at the Verrazano, at Perth Amboy and at Hells Gate – to really protect the city.”

Perhaps most dramatic is the 2009 proposal made by an engineering firm called the New York-New Jersey Outer Harbor Gateway, which would essentially create a causeway stretching from Sandy Hook in New Jersey to the Far Rockaways. As hydrologist Malcolm Bowman notes,

“The thing about the Outer Crossing is that it could have a multipurpose function. It could act as a four-lane highway plus a rail connection between northern New Jersey and Long Island. It could be a very interesting New York City bypass as well as a rapid rail connection with Kennedy airport. You could even make it toll road to pay for it.”

A scenic way to JFK, of course, until it gets washed away by the Son of Sandy.

The problems with building these sorts of giant walls are myriad, and I will only mention the most obvious: The length of time it would take to design and construct a seawall of any appreciable effectiveness is, given today’s bureaucracy and expense, wholly incommensurate with the increasing frequency of these kinds of storms.

Consider the Thames Barrier, to which the New York Harbor project has most commonly been compared this last fortnight. This massive project, designed to keep the Thames from flooding central London, was begun in 1974 and opened 10 years later; a similar period was needed for Holland’s estuarine Oosterscheldekering, which is the only movable flood barrier larger than the Thames Barrier. The interesting bit is that both projects were initiated as a result of the same flooding event, the North Sea Flood of 1953, that delivered a storm surge not dissimilar to Sandy to England, Belgium, the Netherlands, and even Scotland. However, Oosterscheldekering was just one part of the complete Dutch defensive system, also known as Delta Works; the entire Delta Works was only completed in 1998. The Dutch are doubtless very happy that they have made it across the finish line in under half a century, but I ask readers to consider, in this day and age, with its significantly more straitened finances, monkey-barrels full of stakeholders, and generally incoherent state of urban governance, what shape a similar adventure would take in New York City. As a leading indicator, I need only refer to the ongoing work at Ground Zero. Including the design process, it essentially took the British 30 years to build the Barrier, and that was back when no one gave a shit about nebulous affairs like “fish and wildlife migration pattern disruption.” The most minimally feasible seawall plan for New York Harbor is at least an order of magnitude larger.

This is, of course, not to say that some sort of seawall protection won’t be built; $17bn, which is the current estimate but feels awfully conservative, has probably been squandered elsewhere for less. But let us consider the second point, which has to do with the social, political and economic consequences that such infrastructure will have on New York’s urban fabric.

*

Robert Frost gently reminds us that “Before I built a wall I'd ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out”. In this case, these seawalls only protect those who find themselves lucky enough to be lodged behind them. The rhetoric of “protecting New York City” is vague and self-serving, and ought to compel the question, “Whose New York City”? None of the three plans mentioned above would change anything for the residents of the Rockaways or other barrier islands. Moreover, if for example the water is indeed stopped by a seawall at the Narrows, it will have to find something to do with itself. It is likely that it will double back and form an even greater surge, promptly pounding the coastline nearest it, ie, the entire south side of Staten Island.

This then naturally raises the question of who is incentivized or even allowed to live where, and why. A seawall makes this explicit, and virtually permanent. This is the built environment at its most pointedly political. In fact, the essence of urban infrastructure is oftentimes its representation, or occlusion, of the political. Some may protest, saying that technology is fundamentally agnostic, that it can be used for good or ill but cannot be intrinsically political, but in fact there is nothing new about this. Langdon Winner, in his essay “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”, tells the following story:

Anyone who has traveled the highways of America and has gotten used to the normal height of overpasses may well find something a little odd about some of the bridges over the park ways on Long Island, New York. Many of the overpasses are extraordinarily low, having as little as nine feet of clearance at the curb. Even those who happened to notice this structural peculiarity would not be inclined to attach any special meaning to it. In our accustomed way of looking at things such as roads and bridges, we see the details of form as innocuous and seldom give them a second thought.

It turns out, however, that some two hundred or so lowhanging overpasses on Long Island are there for a reason. They were deliberately designed and built that way by someone who wanted to achieve a particular social effect. Robert Moses, the master builder of roads, parks, bridges, and other public works of the 1920s to the 1970s in New York, built his overpasses ac cording to specifications that would discourage the presence of buses on his parkways. According to evidence provided by Moses’ biographer, Robert A. Caro, the reasons reflect Moses social class bias and racial prejudice. Automobile-owning whites of “upper” and “comfortable middle” classes, as he called them, would be free to use the parkways for recreation and commuting. Poor people and blacks, who normally used public transit, were kept off the roads because the twelve-foot tall buses could not handle the overpasses. One consequence was to limit access of racial minorities and low-income groups to Jones Beach, Moses’ widely acclaimed public park. Moses made doubly sure of this result by vetoing a proposed extension of the Long Island Railroad to Jones Beach.*

 

The monolithic nature of the seawall will occupy a similar position. It will instantly communicate who is on the right and wrong side of the tracks. Beyond signaling people where they may and may not live, it may further signal that we (as a society, as a government) refuse to be responsible for those who choose to dwell outside of its protective embrace.

*

Speaking of protection, abetting this sorting-out exercise are insurance companies and their winnowing influence. It would not be difficult to make entire swathes of coastline uninhabitable simply by declaring them uninsurable, at least to those who could not pay. As Greg Lindsay presciently noted following the near-miss of 2011’s Hurricane Irene:

…just how long until large chunks of America’s coastline become virtually uninsurable, starting with Lower Manhattan? Some would say this is a good thing, a perfect example of markets appropriately pricing risk and (dis-)incentivizing people accordingly.

That someone would be economist Matthew Kahn, who told Lindsay, “The insurance companies could be our leading indicator of this change. We have to allow them to 'price gouge,' but are they gouging, or are they pricing new risk?” Kahn is back this time around, too, doing what classical economists do oh-so-well, which in this case is a “tough-love thought experiment” that asks how differently New Jersey might approach rebuilding if it knew it could not count on FEMA money. Obviously, since people can count on government handouts, they will continue to build in places that they otherwise would not dream of doing, were they required to avail themselves of their own funds. Since Kahn is an economist at UCLA, it would only be fair to see him apply the same logic to his hometown, vis-à-vis the prospects of any future seismic activity.

In any event, insurance companies are no chumps, and we are already beginning to see the long, long process of homeowners and insurers nickel-and-diming each other over claims. For example, how many people are aware of the “concurrent causation clause that has crept into policies in recent years[?] Here, insurance companies refuse to cover anything if one thing that causes damage (like wind) is insured but another (like a flood) is not and both seem to have happened at the same time.” As claims pile up, insurance companies – themselves no climate deniers – will bolster their business models and bottom lines for the really big payouts that they doubtless see coming on the horizon, as tornados and whatever else obviates the infrastructure built to fight yesterday’s battles. What better way to determine a policyholder’s premium than by their location in relation to the local seawall? Welcome to the climate change version of redlining.

However, the current state of affairs decidedly complicates matters. New York isn’t Lagos, and the water’s edge isn’t Makoko; waterfront property is not a place where poor people are forced to go because they cannot afford to live far enough inland, where there are real infrastructure and services. Nor do people build flimsy shacks on the beach, then wait for their federal handout when a storm sweeps them out to sea. Waterfront property, in the United States, is where you go once you’ve made it. This is a trend that has perhaps only caught real momentum in the post-War era, but it has showed no signs of slacking, not least because if there are enough “made” people, they will exert their influence:

For much of the twentieth century, insurance companies refused to write flood or hurricane policies for stilted houses perched precariously on Cape Hatteras or wherever, which angered wealthy political donors, who equate their life successes with owning beachfront property.

Enter the federal government into the realm of disaster indemnification, when Congress passed the National Flood Insurance Program in 1968, to mandate that vulnerable home owners in potential flood zones purchase adequate insurance that private companies were refusing to cover. Think of it as Obamacare for beachfront homes.

Although the legislation was designed to cover the undue risks of shore properties, it also gave the political parties a mechanism that would allow (for all those waterfront contributors) a building boom on hurricane-exposed barrier islands.

Talk about moral hazard! Here is a potent illustration that another aspect of seawall rhetoric – its ability to protect everything that ought to be protected – is already thwarted by many competing agendas. Climate change will be a slow and messy business. We cannot just throw up a wall and get back to getting on with the rest of our lives. And while many commentators and policymakers might want to see beachfront building drastically if not permanently curtailed, there are many constituencies that will not go quietly into that good night. While Sandy may have suddenly and permanently re-written the geography of the New York City waterfront as well as the New Jersey and Long Island barrier islands, the financial, social and political consequences will continue to mold the region for decades to come.

 

* I also refer readers to Adam Greenfield’s excellent extended meditation on the subject of political objects in the urban environment.

The Temporary City…Maybe

by Misha Lepetic

“This is what a million people looks like”
~Blood Diamond

The visual and journalistic rhetoric of refugee camps, as produced and consumed by the West, follows a well-known script. Following some armed conflict and/or natural catastrophe, tens of thousands star-crossed innocents cross into a foreign land with whatever they can carry, and into the waiting arms of whatever the (generally reluctant) host country has managed to jury-rig, along with the help of IRC or UNHCR or any of the other major players in the global humanitarian complex. Once the camps are established, they are quickly brought to capacity and then some, at which moment the journalists descend, documenting the misery, the helplessness and the usual hand-wringing on the part of all involved. We see how initial, optimistic talk of rapid repatriation by various officials eventually gives way to finger-pointing and panicky fund-raising as the temporary situation assumes increasingly permanent characteristics. Finally, unless or until famine or disease reinvigorate coverage of these sites, our awareness of these unhappy situations slips unnoticed into the collective memory hole.

However, there is another, far more compelling and humane way to view these camps, and that is as prototypical urban types. The various ways in which we define the urban, such as population density, non-agricultural economic activity, and reasonably well-defined boundaries, are conditions that are here amply met. And when one considers the ways in which people artificially conjure cities (consider a company town, built for the sole purpose of extracting a natural resource), then why shouldn’t we consider refugee camps to be cities? More importantly, if we do consent to think of them as cities, what is it that we can learn from them?

Consider, for example, the three refugee camps collectively known as Daadab, in northeastern Kenya. Founded in 1991 to take in Somali refugees from the then-new civil war, the camp is now the world’s largest, and is still growing after 22 years; the influx of new arrivals has been guaranteed not only by the still-unresolved civil war, but also by the added stress of two failed monsoons in the Horn of Africa. As a result,

Dadaab is now the third-largest city in Kenya, but there are no Kenyans living there. Instead, it is home to 450,000 Somalis in a camp that was built for 90,000 people. Refugees…are not permitted to leave the camp, because the Kenyan government wants them to remain refugees and not become illegal immigrants. The government also prohibits them from working.

This illustrates the paradox of the refugee camp and why, at first blush, it may seem counterintuitive to think of this form as a fundamentally, if prototypically, urban one. For one, the restrictions on the freedom of mobility violates our contemporary conception of the city: as a place to which people migrate in order to seek economic opportunity (I should note that this is debunked below). The additional perception of refugees as victims dependent on the largesse of both host country and humanitarian organizations – which, of course, operate under their own incentives that are not necessarily aligned with the long-term desires of the refugees – further removes them from the perception as independent actors.

And yet, as the case of Dadaab reveals, we really do have a city on our hands. The logistics of housing and feeding nearly half a million people are formidable, and to facilitate an organized approach the camp is laid out in a grid, with every family assigned an address. Even though it may be motivated only by pragmatism, this is de facto urban planning.

The grid layout, by seeking out the efficiencies generated by proximity, creates the conditions for a socialization that is specifically urban. This is particularly striking when one realizes that those being so “urbanized” are people who had, up until that point, likely lived in rural settings. And as the camps grow, infrastructure and services have to maintain pace, and schools and hospitals are founded at strategic locations in order to serve the population. There are also “internet cafes, pharmacies, auto repair shops, and bus depots.” On the other end of things, formal cemeteries have been established and the burial of the dead regimented.

Nor is this kind of behavior unique to a camp the size of Dadaab. As Bram Jansen notes when examining Kakuma, another Kenyan refugee camp (established in 1992) that recently exceeded its capacity of 100,000 has seen the firm establishment of a vibrant economy:

Refugees are often presented as a homogeneous group or as target groups for intervention – women, children, or the elderly. In Kakuma, however, other socio-economic strata have emerged, as there is a (visible and invisible) division of labour and livelihoods (merchants and their employees, the clergy such as sheiks and pastors and refugee leaders, incentive workers employed by the aid agencies, and those who receive remittances from abroad or have income and opportunities from Kenyan cities such as Nairobi). The refugees who are totally dependent on handouts can be seen as a form of poor ‘under-class’.

The disbursement of food, which is pretty much all we see when consuming journalism concerning the generic refugee camp, is really just a small part of daily life, and Kakuma’s residents are in no way entirely dependent on handouts from on high. In fact, rations are used as a means of exchange with the world beyond the camp’s boundaries:

The markets for fresh vegetables and goat meat are very large. The locals sell cattle, goats, camels, chickens and vegetables to the refugees, either through shops or directly to the refugees. Conversely, the refugees also sell their rations and small produce to locals (maize for sorghum for instance). Shops in the camp import a variety of products from Nairobi and the Dadaab camp, the only other UNHCR-run refugee location in Kenya, or even from overseas. Bicycles, clothing, suitcases, radios, cassette and CD players and a wide variety of household items are sold, including cosmetics and hygiene products. People have mobile phones and at the time of the study [2009] there were two internet cafes in the camp, whereas in the surrounding towns there were none.

Even in 2000 – that is, only 8 years after Kakuma’s founding – Marc-Antoine de Montclos and Peter Kagwanja noted that “Somali and Ethiopian refugees employ [local] children as domestic servants” (p214). Given this somewhat surprising turn of events, one might reasonably ask how the refugees get hold of the cash needed to participate in this kind of an economy. They are supposed to be penniless, after all.

One part of the answer is that the characteristics intrinsic to the camp itself serve to distort the local economy. For example, as Montclos and Kagwanja note, “Goods sold in the camp are indeed very cheap because refugees do not pay rent, food, health care or education for their children… The native populations have expressed discontent over the fact that apart from food sold at very low prices they are not deriving any advantage from the humanitarian aid” (pp215, 218). In effect, the Kenyan government and its NGO partners have subsidized the cost of doing business for the camp’s entrepreneurs. In turn, these economic actors have driven a number of Kenyan businesses out of the local market. This neatly illustrates the fact that maintaining such an artificial conurbation has many subtle and unintended consequences.

There is another way in which the camp’s residents secure income that is equally instructive. Another truism of refugee camp discourse is the idea that refugee camps are impenetrable, topped with razor wire and authoritatively cut off from the rest of the world by guards and checkpoints. All this, of course, serves to feed the idea that refugees simultaneously occupy the categories of both prisoners and helpless prey; it is a crucial aspect of the drama that we as Westerners feel must constitute the refugee camp experience. In fact, the boundaries of both Kakuma and Dadaab are more porous than such categories might first allow. As Jensen observed in Kakuma:

Refugees in Kenya (as in many other camps) are officially not allowed to work. Inside the camp, however, what is officially allowed in this respect and what actually takes place can differ greatly. The same applies to travel. While refugees are officially restricted to the camp, some can be seen departing for and returning from Nairobi, other Kenyan cities and even Sudan on a daily basis.

Of course, local populations are all too happy to provide bus service to anyone who can pay for it, and entering and leaving the camps is simply a matter of paying out a small bribe to the guards, assuming that one is observed coming or going in the first place. Ironically, ‘kakuma’ is a Swahili word for ‘nowhere,’ but Kakuma seems to be anywhere but nowhere. Like any other place that contains plenty of people living in close quarters, it is firmly rooted in the context of its place, and commerce will out. In fact, Jansen notes that Kakuma has become generally known as a place of opportunity, to the extent that in 2006 the camp saw an influx of 2000 Tanzanians, who, unlike Somalis and Sudanese, have much less reason to flee their country.

To be sure, I do not mean to paint an overly rosy picture of refugee camps. The fact is that new arrivals bring with them not much more than terrifying tales and misery. When they enter these socio-economic systems, they do so at the bottom rung. The systems themselves are doubtless cutthroat and in no way enjoy the protection of impartial courts or guaranteed bank deposits. And the further existence of the camps is entirely at the mercy of the Kenyan government and funding secured by the NGOs. If the camps were to close precipitously, hundreds of thousands of stateless persons would have to be repatriated, or would find their way into the slums of Nairobi. The cost would be enormous. But, as the longevity of these institutions suggests, perhaps the real task is to normalize the relationship between what is inside the camps and what is outside it.

Fortunately, this is being recognized in a belated but growing manner on the part of the bureaucratic apparatus. Back in Dadaab, UNHCR’s Henok Ochalla is one of the camp’s five managers. Recently profiled by Der Spiegel, he is one official who has taken the perspective of planning for the permanence of conurbanations such as Dadaab:

Ochalla is in the process of building a new city. The new extension [to Dadaab] will be the size of the German city of Tübingen, about 90,000 people, and it will come complete with schools, market squares and police stations…Ochalla has a map on his laptop of his future city, with street names like Hope Road, Unity Road and Friends Road. According to the plan, each family will receive a 10- by 12-meter (33 by 39-foot) plot of land. There are 18 sections, which are divided into nine blocks with 192 plots in each block. The plan includes mosques, child-friendly zones and health units. "Here," says Ochalla, pointing to pink rectangles on the map, "are eight elementary schools and a high-school. And then life begins."

Unsurprisingly, the Kenyan government is none too excited at the prospect of half a million Somalis establishing a permanent presence in Kenya, no matter how (superficially) sequestered they might be. Getting the permission to extend Dadaab has therefore been a constant tug-of-war. On the other hand, the Kenyans are likely too late anyway:

Eastleigh, a neighbourhood on the east side of [Nairobi], is home to an estimated 120,000 refugees. The majority are Somalis who have fled conflict and drought in their own country. Rather than head for refugee camps, increasingly they seek the anonymity and opportunities for self-reliance offered by the city. They are not alone in this choice – according to the UNHCR, the UN’s refugee body, more than half of the world’s refugees now live in urban settings.

The UN has estimated that Dadaab now houses 6,000 grandchildren of the original arrivals, whereas Eastleigh is doing quite well.  A more progressive – or even opportunistic – host government would surely be thinking about how to exploit this presence for Kenya’s own prosperity. Barring that, another option was phlegmatically proposed by a local when he remarked on Kakuma's importance: “We are nothing without these refugees, if they go, we’ll have to fly the Palestinians in.”

From "Innocence" to Mohammed Joyce

by Omar Ali

Postscript: Today, 9th October, (afternoon in Pakistan) the Pakistani Taliban sent a gunman (or gunmen) to shoot a 14 year old girl who had become an icon of anti-Taliban resistance in her area after speaking up for female education. Yes, Codepink darlings on your way back from a faux protest march to Waziristan, education! NOT LGBT rights. NOT even complete gender equality. Just the right to go to school and aspire to a role in public life. She is now fighting for her life in a hospital. Another schoolgirl was also shot in the attack. There are reports that the driver of the school van was asked "who is Malala?"; he reportedly tried to stave them off by saying he couldn't identify girls for an outsider (Codepink may wish to protest this attempt to use patriarchal codes of female "honor" to save her life). Details are still murky. The story may change in some ways. But whatever the details, the Taliban's spokesman has called newspapers and proudly taken responsibility. She was shot for certain things she said and kept saying. That's it. She had done nothing else. She had not gone topless or thrown paint at a congressman or organized a little study circle of Tariq Ali's Trotskyite world resistance. She had, in short, committed no other crime even in the eyes of the Taliban. Inability to publicly say what you believe out of fear of this kind of violence is the ultimate restriction on free speech. I know it's too much to expect Codepink to have a clue, but others may wish to keep this in mind while reading this article. (Yes, I am picking on Codepink. In fact, I want to pick on most of the postcolonial-upperclass-university-retard crowd... I know they are mostly irrelevant, but I still want to pick on them, so there. I am probably putting my own happy relationship with the Pakistani super-elite at risk but sometimes you have to upset your friends.)

The furor over the internet clip “innocence of Muslims” has once again brought the issue of blasphemy and free speech into the headlines. The movie (its really only a trailer, there doesn’t seem to be any movie at all) generated the usual “outrage” and inevitably, Islamists in a few countries used it as a wedge issue to advance their own agenda. In Egypt and Libya, matters were relatively quickly brought under control. In Egypt, where the issue was initially highlighted, the newly elected Muslim brotherhood government seemed to realize that this affair could allow the crazier Salafists to grab the political initiative, and therefore they tamped it down; In Libya it led to the killing of a popular US ambassador but then seemed to generate some real pushback among saner segments of the population (of course, given the precarious nature of law and order in Libya and the presence of multiple armed salafist gangs, this respite may be only temporary). But it was in Pakistan that the most violent reaction eventually developed, thanks in part to the ruling elite’s cynical attempt to get ahead of the Islamists by taking ownership of the issue and declaring a national day of outrage. As predicted, this national day of outrage gave license to various Islamist gangs to indulge in rioting and burning in some of the cities. Twenty or so people were killed and property worth billions went up in flames. There are still demonstrations going on here and there, including in supposedly “moderate” Muslim countries like Malaysia and Indonesia, but on the whole, this particular iteration of the blasphemy and outrage “cycle” seems to be reaching its natural end.

As expected, this rioting and burning also provided an opportunity for some American academics to make an ass of themselves in the national media, most sensationally on Slate. Why free speech is worth protecting and why even Muslims who feel offended by the movie should let such “insults” pass was also presented on various forum, with Slate, ironically enough, providing one of the better appeals to good sense in a piece by William Saletan. Some Muslims, including some fairly chauvinistic Muslim activists in the West also stepped up with appeals to stop the self-destructive outrage and do something more positive. While a number of these articles generated during this time are worth reading, if you are only going to read one, I recommend one that few people may have seen: Professor Ali Minai wrote a article on his blog and on brownpundits.com that is a real gem and must be read more widely. The whole thing (it’s a very short post) should be read in its entirety, but this quote gives a flavor of the argument:

We have no choice but to trust the wisdom of the crowds. The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is the best example of this trust. To think that it relinquishes all control over speech is a misunderstanding. Rather, it trusts that a responsible, civilized people can determine the proper norms of speech for their time and place through social, i.e., bottom-up, action rather than through rigid legal control – that society itself can regulate what expression is or is not acceptable, and impose societal sanctions to enforce this flexible, unwritten code. Protection of all expression thus creates a flexible mechanism rather than a brittle one, and is a stabilizing influence rather than a destabilizing one. Wisdom, in this case, lies not in choosing what others can(not) say, but to let them choose and live with the social consequences of their choice.

Even if we leave aside the compelling philosophical arguments in favor of free speech, there are purely pragmatic reasons why the particular “problem” of anti-Islamic blasphemy is impossible to regulate to the satisfaction of the rioters.

Some well-meaning people (and many other people who are just looking for a way to stop this particular irritation from interfering with their good life; a group in which we must include the various kings and prime-ministers of Muslim states) are arguing that we need laws to “regulate hate speech”.  And not only in their own domains, but in the United States (which remains a world leader in free speech) and other Western countries. Since even the most retarded of them are vaguely aware that a predominantly non-Muslim country is not likely to pass a law to only protect Muslim sensibilities, this demand is usually phrased as an appeal to outlaw ALL blasphemous speech against ALL religion or all prophets in ALL countries. This, fortunately, won't fly and let us count the ways:

1. What constitutes blasphemy? Is it whatever someone from the offended religion regards as blasphemy? Who speaks on behalf of each religion? What constitutes an accepted religion? Would insults directed at the flying spaghetti monster count? More seriously, does this mean no one can make fun of Scientology any more? What about Mormons and their magic underwear? What if only a few people are offended but they are very vocal? etc. etc. 
2. Who will enforce the law in Muslim countries? There are endless diatribes against the Jews, the Hindus, the Ahmedis, evangelical Christians, atheists, etc in every Muslim country. If any such law were enforced in Pakistan, we would see mass arrests of mullahs insulting the founder of the Ahmedi sect.. or do they now intend to stop blaspheming against Mirza Ghulam Ahmed?
3. The internet is notoriously hard to police as currently constituted and the threshold for blasphemy is rather low among the Islamists (retelling any of a hundred stories from orthodox Islamic texts can count as blasphemy if not handled with maximum care…the publisher of “Rangeela Rasool” (libertine prophet) was killed in Lahore in the 1920s for a book in which he took great care to quote nothing but orthodox Muslim sources. Obviously in that case it was not the specific stories (mostly accounts of the prophet’s various marriages and slave girls etc)  but the title and the (assumed, correctly assumed in this case) intent that constituted blasphemy in Muslim eyes. But while Muslims may feel they can always tell when blasphemy is being attempted, it is not hard to imagine internet warriors who manage to highlight the same stories, commit blasphemy, and yet break no law in the eyes of a non-muslim judge even if such a law were in place. What then?
4. The very existence of such a law and subsequent court cases in non-Muslim countries would provide vast opportunities for discussing exactly the sort of things best left un-discussed.  This is obviously not a problem in Muslim countries, where the threat of execution (by free lancers who have “deputized” themselves, if not by the guardians of the law) works fairly well to limit any and all remotely blasphemous speech (and where it is also easy to apply the law only to anti-Muslim blasphemy), but how would this work in a country like America? Even Britain, with its assertive and prominent Islamist minority, cannot stop internet discussion of embarrassing matters or even cartoons like the series “Jesus and Mo”. In  America the situation would likely be much worse from an Islamist point of view. A future Nakoula, hauled up to face a tribunal set up under the 28th amendment (the “prevention of blasphemy” amendment that would surely be necessary to permit such prosecutions) would use the court to discuss in lurid detail every episode that he drew upon to make his 14 minute blasphemous movie. Today, most non-Muslims probably have no idea how the various crude insults in that (extremely) crude movie are based on polemics and stories from classical Islamic literature. But any trial would become the source of blasphemous arguments that would far exceed anything that the movie itself could present. For this reason alone, the urge to “ban blasphemy in the whole world” needs to be thought about very carefully.

I am sure we can come up with dozens of further (or more relevant) practical objections to any effort at limiting such speech in non-Muslim countries. Matters are, of course, different in Muslim countries, where the blasphemy and apostasy memes are still practically useful to Islamists (even as they are obviously philosophically wrong for the kind of reasons Ali Minai identifies). But outside of that world, its only a matter of time before new movies, interviews and cartoons hits the airwaves. Muslims will just have to lump it and learn to ignore it. And in time, most Muslims will probably do exactly that. In fact, American Muslims have already learned to do exactly that (witness the lack of hysteria in the US Muslim community). This trend is irreversible.

At some level, many Muslims are now beginning to figure it out. For example, this particular movie was followed by cartoons published in Charlie Hebdo and another set was supposedly published in some Spanish magazine, yet the outrage is fading rather than increasing. Its not over yet by any means. Elites in various Muslim countries are corrupt and incompetent (of course, not just in Muslim countries) and some of their opponents are Islamist gangsters who will undoubtedly milk this meme whenever they can. But there is nothing the US government can do to completely stop all such insults (much as some elements of the US government are tempted to do so to keep various “friendly” elites in power). The thing to keep in mind is that the US doesn’t even have to be apologetic to its various Arab and Pakistani clients about this. Wringing their hands and telling Zardari or Abdullah that “our hands are tied by the first amendment” only makes them raise their price and whine more. The more practical attitude  is to tell them to use whatever bribes and beatings they usually use to stay on top and keep their Islamists under control. What choice do they have? Those elites need the US more than the US needs those elites. They will have to figure out a way to deal with this and the fact is, when push comes to shove, almost all of them will find a way.

And if they cannot? Then they are ripe for beheadings (or flight to Dubai) in any case and the US and its allies will have to look for other arrangements. The crucial fact is, they are not that fragile.

To sum up, while the episode has shown that blasphemy is still a live issue in the Muslim world, it has has also shown that the outrage can be contained where the elite is firmly in control; no one rioted in Saudi Arabia and even in Lahore, the police had things mostly under control. Where law and order has collapsed there are also bigger problems to worry about (as in Somalia; this was hardly the most important issue in Kismayo this month). Its only in the “cusp” countries where the corrupt elite is shaky and doesn’t have the various Islamist gangs under good control (meaning they riot even when they are not required to riot) that there is any serious risk of disorder. Even there, each episode has a definite half-life. After sacrificing a few cinemas and getting some people killed (not a very big deal for the elite in a country where 20 people can get shot every day in Karachi when there are NO riots) the elite usually re-establishes control. After a few more iterations it will not even be news any more.

In fact, I would go much further. I think historian Tom Holland is correct in stating (in an excellent short piece in the literary review) that

Yet the nervousness, perhaps, has been overdone. The unfortunate confluence of circumstances that saw Rushdie condemned to death for reasons of internal Iranian politics has long since altered. It is perfectly possible to publish a book that questions the fundamentals of Islam and live to tell the tale. No fatwa, for instance, has pursued Alom Shaha, who in The Young Atheist's Handbook fearlessly described his journey from the faith of his Bangladeshi parents to disbelief. Perhaps, then, if not a Muslim Ulysses, there is at the very least a Muslim Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man out there being written. For an author to question a religion need not be to dismiss it. On the contrary - it may be to weave it more tightly into the fabric of a literary culture than it would ever otherwise have been.

The “Orientalist police” may be all over him for saying things like “Muslim Ulysses” (using Western writers as the standard by which “the other” is to be judged” and so on) but his point is sound. The Muslim world is part of the larger world and it really IS one world. Cultural distinctiveness and peculiarities are real, but so are the common tendencies of modern life and one of those common tendencies is the exploration of historical and religious myths in literature, film, drama and poetry in ways that go far beyond anything seen in the pre-modern past in scale and variety. This trend exists among Muslims just as it does among everyone else; there is no way “Satanic Verses” is going to be the last attempt at dealing with early Islam in modern literature. Much more is coming.

And it will not all be “high literature”. A number of satirical writers have already taken to the intertubes with some great short pieces. For example, see the work of the prolific Hakim Hazik who writes almost weekly in viewpointonline.com (the titles alone are pure gold, go to the link to read his work).

Others are going further. Satirist Ahmed Asif’s hilarious (and hopefully inaccurate) view of the future of Lahore in lets fly Sunni. includes this description of the hero’s encounter with blasphemy law as it may exist in a future Pakistan that is determined to keep the beast of modern life at bay:

...As soon as I uttered the name, Muhammad, Wali kissed the tips of his fingers, and started mumbling a prayer, his eyes shut, his face serene and then slowly assuming increasing tension. Soon foam appeared on his lips. The traffic light turned green, but, oblivious to his surrounding, he kept his eyes shut, his lips moving. Cars honked in the back. The next thing you know that he yanked the door open, jerked himself off the seat and stepped outside, leaving the door ajar. Ignoring the now incessant honking, he knelt on the ground and went into sajda. I looked back anxiously, my heart pounding. The cars immediately behind us started to go in reverse and then the traffic started to move again, passing by our parked vehicle. By the time Wali came back and sank into his seat the light had turned red again.

“What was all that about?” I said, meekly.

Without saying a word, he opened his glove box and took out a knife–clasped. The blade snapped open as he pressed the end of it. He turned around and grabbed me by the collar, his eyes two balls of fire. He put the cold edge of steel on my throat. It felt sharp against my skin.

“Wali, are you OK. What happened to you? Take it easy buddy. I just got here,” I said. The whole thing was just too quick for me to even start experiencing the shock.

“You have uttered the name of You Know Who without the salutations; and, and–this is a crime punishable by death.” He pressed the blade further down my skin.

“Wali, come back to your senses. What’s wrong? Man, let’s move–The light is green. Let’s go. Please–Let’s have a talk on a cup of tea in the Fortress Stadium–I can explain.” Sweat appeared on my forehead.

“I’ve beheaded four nincompoops like you right here where you sit on your dumb ass, and you will be the fifth,” he said. The traffic light had turned red again.

“Aren’t you done then–I mean four is a pretty decent number–Come on now. Let’s cool it buddy,” I said.

“Mufti Sahib says, if I can get seven in total, my place is assured in the highest heaven,” he said, deliriously. “It’s been getting more and more difficult to encounter enemies of Islam like you.”

“Wali–Please, have mercy. I’ll do anything you say. Remember that old hag…”

“Shut up!” He grabbed the nape of my neck in his free hand, pressing the dagger into my skin. “What old hag?”

“That old hag which used to throw trash on You know Who,” I said. I felt the cold edge of steel cutting my skin.

The pressure suddenly got lifted. He looked into my eyes. The fury in his eyes melted like ice.

“So you know the story?”

“Yes I do–I know a lot of stories.”

“You damn well know that the story has cost me the seventh heaven?”

“Fifth,” I corrected him.

“You gotta get to fifth first before getting to the seventh?” he said, folding his knife and putting it back into the glove box.

“On what level you get the virgins?” I said.

There can be no doubt about the fact that Muslims in the US will soon be reading (and writing) an ever-growing list of novels, plays and even movies about Islam and the individual’s encounter with it (they have already started, but much more will come). And from this ferment, much that is useful will eventually emerge. The times they are a-changing...

The Smug Technocrats who will rule Tomorrow

by James McGirk

America should be more open than ever. Women and minorities are no longer excluded from high-earning professions and, if you are willing to take on the debt, a university education is more accessible than ever before. But if anything America is less egalitarian than it once was. The income gap between rich and poor has been growing since the 1970s. More worrying than that, a permanent class system seems to be calcifying into place: people born rich are getting richer, while the poor stay poor. America's elite has found a way to protect and perpetuate itself within what should be an inclusive system.

Sociologist Shamus Rahman Khan has a convincing explanation for how they do it. For his new book, “Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St Paul's School”, he spent a year doing ethnographic research, living among students as a tutor and conducting interviews at the exclusive boarding school in New Hampshire. “Elite schools exclude,” says Mr Khan “but today they frame themselves as doing so on the basis of talent.” Not necessarily money or good breeding, as many assume.

What defines talent is actually an arbitrary thing. When these students apply to university there is little to distinguish top applicants from one another, yet all want the academic boons such as research opportunities, close relationships with professors necessary for a postgraduate education, or the fast-track to elite employers. Attaining the highest board scores and grade point averages is no guarantee of admission, so decisions are instead made on the basis of narrative. A successful applicant must recommend him or herself through extracurricular achievement and other, squishier categories such as character and public service. All the more reason to be groomed at an elite secondary school that can foster students’ hobbies on top of their academic studies.

Elite secondary schools have, of course, been doing this for generations. What Mr Khan noticed is a shift in the attitude of students and teachers at St Paul's to accommodate a more egalitarian atmosphere. Wealth and good breeding is no longer enough, the new elite must create the illusion that they have worked hard for what they have achieved. As Mr Khan explains, “Elites of the past were entitled - building their worlds around the ‘right’ breeding, connections, and culture - new elites develop privilege: a sense of self and a mode of interaction that advantage them.”

The graduates of St. Paul’s have a special advantage over their peers. In a society riddled with gatekeepers, St. Paul’s graduates have refined their ability to network until it has literally become a reflex.

Mr Khan uses Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ease to explain how St. Paul’s grooms its graduates to feel comfortable ingratiating themselves into any social context. Ease suggests learning something so deeply that it becomes embodied, inscribed into the subconscious the way a champion football player need no longer be conscious of his dribbling a soccer ball across the pitch.

Khan demonstrates how both the curriculum and the school’s social events force St. Paul’s students to interact with their social betters and navigate through social hierarchies until it becomes second nature. This happens both formally and informally. Teachers live in student dorms and interact constantly, eventually learning to coexist and feel comfortable in one another’s presence.

At every stage in a student’s education a sense of triumph over adversity is fostered (despite graduation already being a foregone conclusion – barely anyone fails out).

And this sense of triumph extends far beyond the bounds of St. Paul’s. Students perceive one another as being not just above average but world-class, an illusion that is reinforced by a procession of prominent visiting speakers and class trips to prestigious locations.  Every St. Paul’s athlete was considered a potential Olympian; Mr Khan’s own pupils assumed he would one day win a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship.

Knowledge alone is no longer an important way of projecting status, says Mr Khan. In today’s Google-world it is not tricky to discern the difference between a Louis Vuitton suitcase and a Samsonite. Instead of memorizing facts, at St. Paul’s, the young elite are taught to employ “a kind of radical egalitarianism”, writing papers that draw parallels across disciplines.

People who cannot appreciate both “Jaws” and “Beowulf” seem wilfully narrow to the students at students at St. Paul’s. They do not realize that their ability to slither so effortlessly between disciplines is a consequence of their privileged backgrounds. To the young elite, someone who does not share their radical egalitarian attitude, and as a consequence fails in the meritocrcatic system, chooses to fail.

“Privilege” is a convincing book and like most good sociological arguments it feels intuitive. Mr Khan sought out students, faculty and staff who did not quite fit in and by analysing why, he extrapolates his model. But as powerful as this study is, it wants for a bit of comparison and context. St Paul's is a boarding school - would an elite day school or even another boarding school have a different approach? And though Mr Khan's dissections of race and gender are exquisitely described, it would have been interesting to see comparisons drawn within the racial and gender categories he segments out - why expose the differences between rich and poor white students but not the rich and poor black students, for example.

And how do we know that the elite haven't always been a bit smarmy? There may be an answer soon. Though “Privilege” is limited in scope, Mr Khan's next project is not. Tentatively titled “Elite New York: A Sociological History”, Mr Khan plans to chart a history of elites in New York City, focusing on the Astor family's collection of personal papers, as well as embedding himself into elite culture by attending a series of formal events around New York. It seems Mr Khan is fond of the upper echelons - it all sounds a bit too fun for serious academic work. That said Mr Khan presents a powerful case for how something as democratic as the American system of higher education purports to be can be so deeply unfair to the vast majority of its citizens.

Schrödinger’s Detroit

by Misha Lepetic

Detroit turned out to be heaven, but it also turned out to be hell.
~Marvin Gaye 

Is Detroit alive or dead? It depends, I suppose, on your viewpoint, or what kind of attention you might be paying in the first place. In January, the New York Times previewed a brief little docu on scrap metal ‘salvagers’ in Detroit (or are they thieves? As always, this depends on your point of view). At any rate, it highlighted for me what are two emerging – and competing – narratives of Detroit. These two narratives – I’ll call them ‘ruin porn’ versus ‘our very own Berlin’ – provoke attention for two reasons. The first is the reminder that contradictory views can be maintained with equanimity within and about the same built environment. This is not so difficult to countenance, since cities do support many seemingly contradictory narratives. In fact, cities are exceptionally adept at this, and is one of the chief reasons what makes them so enjoyable. The second reason is more interesting, however, since it provides some insights into how we choose to look at cities.

Detroit’s ruin porn narrative has gotten lots of play over the years. I remember the first time I ever heard it, actually – as a punchline in the Kentucky Fried Movie, ca. 1977. Since then, as received wisdom would have it, Detroit has had plenty of time and opportunity to keep at this downward trajectory. More recently, art book browsers could enjoy a chorus line of weighty photo-essays appealing to our rubbernecking tendencies: please consider the fact that these three books were all published within the span of a year (although I have to ask, where is Robert Polidori when you really need him?).

Add to this list the Times’s featured doc-let, which is in fact a trailer for a feature-length effort called ‘Detropia’ recently shown at Sundance and soon to be premiering at the IFC Center in New York (I’m assuming that  ‘detritus’+‘topia’=‘Detropia’. Got that? Ok, good). This is dystopia at its finest: when it’s not dark, everything is grey, muddy, cold and generally nicely prepped for the end of the world. When they’re not pulling down decrepit factory buildings for scrap using badly outclassed pickup trucks, these Detropians are a grumpy, hard-scrabble lot that crack wise while warming themselves by a trash fire. I don’t know about the rest of the film, but the city depicted in the trailer is a place where I wouldn’t settle for anyone less than Snake Plisskin as my tour guide cum personal security detail. In any case, all our narrative is missing is some Chinese guy in a shiny suit peeling off a few hundred yuan as payment, and we would be all set for globalization’s last act.

*

However, we all know that hope springs eternal in the human breast. Our other thread is the resurrection  narrative, where scrappy Detroiters are rallying around their city, and rebuilding it in the spirit of a DIY revolution. It is particularly interesting to note the extent to which this narrative is about food and agriculture. Whereas the ‘ruin porn’ narrative is about disassembling and selling civilization for scrap, urban resurrection signifies that you’ve tumbled all the way down Maslow’s hierarchy and are starting to claw your way up all over again, which initially means having a place to sleep and something to eat. This is not a new narrative for Detroit, either. The first time I ever heard of urban agriculture was within the context of Detroit’s abandoned lots, sometime in 1998. More recently, its boosters have touted Detroit as the first city in the United States with the chance to be completely self-sufficient in terms of food production.

Even this story, however, has its ungainly bits. For example, how do its narrators accommodate the appearance of a financial-services entrepreneur who wants to convert a total of 10,000 acres of empty lots into productive farmland, and quick? Just as Detropia’s filmmakers may prefer the company of fly-by-night scrap thieves, grassroots advocates likely prefer the lot-by-lot approach: smallholders rebuilding the urban fabric, one bartered zucchini at a time. From this point of view, it is easy to be mistrustful of John Hantz’s ambition. But it gets much worse, since a key characteristic of our narrative – in fact, its ultimate promise and the guarantee of its success – is that abundance is always-already present. It is competition for resources that has put us on the road to our current state of perdition. Along comes Hantz, however, stating that Detroit "cannot create value until we create scarcity. Large-scale farming could begin to take land out of circulation in a positive way."

Hantz’s position, while obviously anathema to our story so far, ought not to surprise anyone. After all, Detroit is still located in the United States of America, with its accompanying respect for private property, enforcement of contracts, fiat money system, and all the rest of the accoutrements of late-stage capitalism. It’s not like Kevin Costner is delivering the mail to the good citizens of Detroit. Having a capitalist show up in the heart of the place and moment that a grassroots movement had just – just! – begun to call its own is, in fact, perhaps the most American thing of all.

But, like the soils of Detroit, contradictions within the resurrection narrative continue to bloom. In fact, urban agriculture is just the beginning for Detroit, since, once your belly is full, it’s time to make art.  Here is where conceptualizing Detroit as “our very own Berlin” passes Go and collects $200. It says something about our facile self-regard as a society that we accept (expect?) the media’s simplistic leapfrog from the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy to the top; why wait any longer to become the next TriBeCa? It occurs to me that there might be a few more steps between cultivating vegetables in your garden and cultivating artists in your gallery, but not much of that stuff in between makes for really good copy. Exhibit A here is  Richard Florida dressing up accountants as members of the “creative class” to give his über-theory the play it needed.

I am, of course, being unnecessarily waggish. Jane Jacobs, whose greatest gift to us was her endless supply of common sense, wrote of the importance of old building stock as vital capital for new ideas and commerce (187ff). The fact that Detroit has plenty of supply, low density and therefore low rents makes her prescription correct at this moment, even in the eyes of contemporary critics such as Edward Glaeser (who would doubtless welcome the eventual manifestation of people like John Hantz as proof positive of progress). And certainly no one disputes that it will take Richard Scarry’s full assortment of townspeople to establish a credible revitalization of any real duration. But – and this is the interesting bit – Detroit somehow inspires people to compare it to Berlin. Why is this? After all, Berlin is flat, spread out, not dense, cheap and therefore full of artists and designers. Both Berlin and Detroit were, in their respective heydays, economic powerhouses and centers of industrial innovation. Moreover, both cities are considered epicenters of techno music. So Detroit must be our Berlin, right?

*

Not really. This is more of a manifestation of our desire to make sense of our environment by finding patterns where there are none (a phenomenon also known as apophenia, a delicious word for a delicious concept). As Mitch McEwen writes:

If Detroit is being called the next Brooklyn or Berlin, it is possibly because we have not yet sufficiently understood what Brooklyn and Berlin are made of. We have not yet created the terms of assessment, parsed the mechanisms at work, so we must point from one thing to another, like a child calling every dog by the name of the family puppy. “Look, it’s another Fido, and another!”

In general, urban studies seems particularly susceptible to this sort of analytical roughhousing. For example, the Los Angeles School of urbanism sought to deep-six the older Chicago School by positing the urban form of Los Angeles as the future template for the global city. Indeed, the LA School has gained significant traction, to the point that I have even heard Karachi discussed in these terms. Really? Karachi?

The real reason for ebb and flow of various –isms, of course, can be located in the struggles between academics who vie for the directorships of various schools, institutes and centers, and the funding that usually accompanies such laurels. Anyone who can create – or even better, brand – a movement is sitting pretty indeed. Richard Florida’s catch-all “creative class” theory that I mentioned above is one such example; another is the recent brouhaha at Harvard’s venerable Graduate School of Design that led to the ascent of “ecological urbanism”.

Fortunately, thoughtful scholars such as Martin Murray (whose ideas around “post-modern urban forms” I have touched on here and here) and others have indicted the ease with which we commit these errors of pattern fabrication. Murray forcefully insists that each city ought to be understood on its own terms, and the quick comparison is only tempting and insidious. You can say that Karachi and Los Angeles both have terrible traffic, but you can’t say that that’s what makes them similar, without examining each city’s geography, transportation mix, and the various histories of planning, economics and growth. Such gestures, however, are easy and provide us with the added absolution of the need for further thinking. Traffic is traffic, but with this approach it remains symptomatic, superficial, and incomprehensible.

Returning to the comparison between Detroit and Berlin, then, we may then wonder if any of the following facts really ought to make a difference. For example, has Detroit ever been the capital of its nation, or been bombed and occupied by neighboring countries, or let alone recently emerged from a history of a wall that literally cleaved the city in half? Conversely, has Berlin laboured under the consequences of decades of white flight, the evisceration of its public transportation network, or the more-or-less irrevocable fade-out of a once-mighty industrial raison d’être? Could Detroit claim the mantle of the most multi-cultural city of its nation? And would Berlin’s citizenry or government tolerate the (very recalcitrant) private ownership of the city’s main train station? Doubtful: the Berlin Hauptbahnhof is, in fact, now the largest train station in Europe, and serves a population that is approximately 5 times the size of Detroit’s. In fact, that much-celebrated yardstick of urban success, density, tells us that these are very different cities: Berlin’s is almost twice that of Detroit. So, what was it that we were comparing, again?

These are a few fundamental differences that I conjured up in about two minutes of lazy thinking, and fact-checked in a few minutes more. But this also illustrates why we seduce ourselves with narratives, whether they are about ruination or resurrection. Difference is so ubiquitous and bewildering that we look for a story that will tie it all together. If the story is easy to follow and rewards some already well-trodden assumptions, even better. It is all too inviting, and generally inconsequential, to allow the story to supersede the reality.

But the disciplines that are intended to critique and intervene in our built environment are not so easily excused. The problematic around the “comparative” thrust of urban studies can be summed up like this: Does the significance of the similarities outweigh the significance of the differences? And how do you know? Most schools of thought do not bother to understand what difference a difference really makes. It gets even more contentious when those same schools of thought assert that they have identified the right similarities and differences. This matters because when you begin thinking that you know how things compare, you start creating policy, and then you wonder why something that worked in one city abjectly failed in another.

Beyond this, however, is the fact that urban policy never occurs in a vacuum, or merely at academic conferences. The people who are subjected to, refract, rebel against and resign themselves to policy and its consequences – they remain. Are we to not heed them and learn from their desire or indifference? In a thoughtful essay on what living among the “ruins” of a city like Detroit might truly entail, Jerry Herron writes:

I feel like Gibbon’s Petrarch, then: astonished at the seeming indifference of the local citizenry to Detroit’s monumental fragments, humbled at the discovery that after 30 years in the city I seem to know more about its crumbling relics than the natives do — many of them, at least. But these are not ruins from some distant age; they are distinctly mine; and I find it hard to recover Gibbon’s hearty self-satisfaction at the “supine indifference” of Roman natives. Here in Detroit, the city has been ruined by the same people who still inhabit it. So the question is, who understands better what the place really means: the person who tries to remember it, or the one who lets it go?

Oh, and something else that’s funny about this whole “Detropia” thing? Go to what you would think would be the film’s website and see what’s really there: a woman who bought a house, and is turning it into a home. This process involves both salvage and scrap, and gardens and renewal. It is also a pithy microcosm of the socioeconomic turmoil that will mark the struggle for progress in the United States for the foreseeable future, but I will let you explore that for yourself. In any case, what better narrative could anyone ask for?

Water-Car Fever

by Omar Ali

 

In late July 2012 Pakistan was gripped by water-car fever when an “inventor” named Aga Waqar (a diploma holder from Khairpur Sindh with very limited engineering or scientific knowledge) claimed that he had invented a “waterkit” that could be used to run any car (or other internal combustion engine) on nothing but water. The kit apparently consists of a cylinder that supposedly produces hydrogen from water, a plastic pipe that takes the hydrogen to the engine and a container in which water is stored. The cylinder is connected to the car battery. That’s it. The claim is that a secret process developed by Aga Waqar and his partners (one of whom is a software designer) uses “resonance” and “milliamps” of electricity to generate unlimited amounts of hydrogen to run the engine.

Prominent news-show anchors like Talat and Hamid Mir fell for it and social media was lit up with comments about Allah’s gift to Pakistan in Ramadan and demands to provide security to the inventor, who would undoubtedly face the wrath of “big oil” and imperialist powers as he tried to make Pakistan a water-fuelled superpower. A site generally thought to be affiliated with the security establishment published a detailed “SWOT analysis” that completely missed the point that this device was an impossibility on first principles and managed to hint at international conspiracies in the best Paknationalist fashion. Star postmodern columnist Ejaz Haider later wrote a densely worded op-ed arguing that science is not infallible and secular societies should not regard themselves as uniquely rational (or something like that, Ejaz Sahib’s postmodern columns are not easy to decipher).

But what happened at the official and scientific level in Pakistan was most unexpected (even for Pakistan): the federal cabinet appointed a subcommittee to look into the potential of the watercar. The minister for religious affairs promised that final details were being worked out and by 14^th August he would provide the nation with the gift of energy independence. A “director” in the ministry for science and technology appeared on television to announce that he was fully satisfied that the waterkit works. Pakistan's ambassador to UAE invited him to Abu Dhabi to demonstrate this scientific breakthrough.

Pakistan’s top “nuclear scientist” Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan came on TV to report that “I have investigated the matter and I at least am satisfied that this is not a fraud”. Another “scientist” who played a central role in assembling Pakistan’s nuclear bomb appeared on TV and said “of course its feasible” when asked if this was even conceivable in light of the laws of physics. Some senior people at the Pakistan Engineering Council supposedly “evaluated” the waterkit and concluded that it works (to their eternal shame, the HQ of the Pakistan Enginering Council was the venue of its most prominent televised debut). The chairman of the Pakistan Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (PCSIR) appeared on TV and tried to take credit for the fact that he had provided Aga Waqar with a rest-house and supported his work from the start. Dr Ata, a respected former minister of science (and an actual scientist, with hundreds of publications to his name) was the lone voice of reason on the first TV shows, but he was literally shouted down by the inventor and Hamid Mir, Pakistan’s most popular talk-show host, appeared to agree that Dr Ata was “jealous of Aga Waqar’s achievement” (he tweeted that some scientists were “acting like jealous women” and putting down Aga Waqar without giving him a fair hearing). The chairman of the Pakistan Science Foundation appeared in a press conference alongside Aga Waqar and announced that Dr Ata would be sued for trying to undermine the reputation of the water-car and its inventor.

Most people are not very scientifically educated and it is no surprise that many of them can be temporarily fooled by such claims. But in the age of the internet, even laypersons can use Google and if one does so, one can find an entire Wikipedia article dedicated to claims of water-cars. One look at that article should tell most educated people that this claim is likely to be fraudulent. Then these people have the option of asking an actual scientist and if they do so, anyone with basic science education should immediately figure out that what is being claimed here is a perpetual motion machine and such machines are ruled out by the first and second law of thermodynamics. Simply put, in principle, Aga Waqar can split water to produce Hydrogen and can burn hydrogen to run an engine but he cannot get more energy OUT of the hydrogen than the energy used to break water down TO hydrogen and oxygen. Keep in mind, the end product of the reaction is water. You start with water, break it down to hydrogen and oxygen, and recombine these to get water again. And (per his claim) you are adding no other energy into the system. And yet you can do this, and have enough energy left over to run the car? This is the classic description of a perpetual motion machine and nothing further needs to be investigated because it is simply impossible to build such a machine and violate the laws of thermodynamics (at least on our everyday scale of existence). That was exactly Dr Ata’s point. One does not need to investigate the actual mechanism to know that this is impossible. But multiple engineers, scientists and officials in Pakistan were willing to believe that such a miracle had happened in front of their eyes and did not even seem to understand what principles were being violated and what objections were being raised by Dr Ata.

It is perhaps not shocking that talk-show host Hamid Mir or Talat got carried away. All these anchors are scientifically illiterate and when responsible scientific authorities found the claims credible, what else could they do? That Ejaz Haider used this episode to advance some theory about cultural equivalence or the faillibility of science may reflect poorly on his knowledge of science (being unable to distinguish between the fallibility of secondary scientific claims and a fundamental aspect of reality like the law of thermodynamics) but such misunderstandings are not unheard of in postmodern circles in more scientifically advanced cultures either (in fact, he almost certainly learned his cultural studies from Western books). Nor is it embarrassing that many Pakistanis on the intertubes were willing to believe this claim and started dreaming of “superpower Pakistan” and demanding that the state provide immediate security to Aga Waqar because CIA-RAW-MOSSAD would surely try to kill him.

It is not even shocking that “nuclear scientist” Dr Qadeer had been fooled and managed to expose himself further by appearing on TV and defending Aga Waqar. Qadeer Khan is a national hero in Pakistan, but his status as a “scientist” is greatly exaggerated. He is a metallurgist who stole the plans for a Dutch gas centrifuge uranium enrichment facility and then worked (with several other people) to reassemble that facility in Pakistan using smuggled Western technology. That he and his team succeeded is a tribute to their persistence, to the resources the state was willing to commit to this effort, and to the skill with which General Zia was able to use the American-sponsored Afghan Jihad to avoid early US pressure on this project.

Dr Samar Mubarakmand (another “father of the Pakistani bomb”, at least in his own estimate) was not a surprise either. Like Qadeer Khan, his real achievement was persistence and perseverance, no original science was involved in copying a Chinese design to build a warhead. He is also the man who claimed that when he led the team conducting Pakistan's nuclear tests at Chaghi, a pot of chicken was cooked. There was only a little chicken in it, but when they started eating, the chicken just kept refilling. Dozens of people ate and still the same amount of chicken was in the pot. It was like Jesus with his loaves and fishes. Belief in the ability of Allah to suspend the laws of nature for the sake of Pakistan has thus already been demonstrated in his case.

But the chairman of PCSIR, the Pakistan Engineering Council, the Pakistan Science Foundation and the ministry for science and technology all jumped on the bandwagon. And now that the “inventor” seems to have backed off, NONE of them has lost his job (or his engineering or science degree). That, to me, is the truly shocking aspect of this story; that in Pakistan there is no functioning science base in the government sector; no institution that the state can reliably call upon to assess pseudoscientific claims. Many or all of these appointees are hacks appointed on political grounds, and even those trained in science have since spent their life in bureaucratic shenanigans, not science. They also live and breathe in a culture where the mythological foundations of religion are still taken literally by most people (and where those who do differentiate between myth and science are likely to face blasphemy prosecutions if they take their objections too vigorously to the public). Scientists may know that Jinns will not be able to power generators, but who will bell the cat when the president of the country decides to hold a conference on Islamic science and a nuclear scientist presents his paper on the use of Jinns to produce electricity?

Many of us genuinely expected that even in these circumstances, reality will intrude and at least the scientific institutions will retain some credibility. Unfortunately, water car fever may have shown otherwise.

For moment by moment comments, links and background, see http://www.brownpundits.com/2012/07/31/water-car-fever/ and http://www.brownpundits.com/2012/08/04/water-car-fever-begins-to-break-when-will-heads-roll/

A thorough review of the science and why this car is impossible: http://dawn.com/2012/08/03/bad-science/ 

 

 

At 21-30 onwards, Agha Waqar starts teaching Hoodbhoy about Planck and Black body radiation. You cannot make this stuff up. Amazing. Absolutely amazing.

The Hungry Games

by Misha Lepetic

Success comprises in itself the seeds of its own decline
and sport is not spared by this law.
~Pierre de Coubertin

As we helplessly hurtle towards the next inflammation of the Olympic Games, some notes on the effects of the Games on the built environment might be in order.

The Olympics may pretend to be the premier competition among nation-states, but their physical manifestation is always sited within the city. Given that cities are, by their very nature, already crowded places, something must give when, to paraphrase Joseph Conrad, the immovable object of the city meets the irresistible force that is the Olympic Games. Furthermore, once the Olympic hurricane blows through town, what are the long-term consequences?

This can be divided into three fairly discreet phenomena: the forced relocation of populations that suddenly find themselves “in the way” of breathlessly ambitious master plans; the design, construction and fetishization of dozens of state-of-the-art facilities for a few days’ worth of competitions; and the long, drawn-out consequences of deciding (or, more accurately, not deciding) what to do with these facilities once the athletes, media and sponsors have moved on to pastures greener.

Concerning the London Olympics, the British have wisely decided to avoid attempting to match the grandeur of Beijing’s opening ceremony, instead settling on a “pastoral theme”: as such, the opening salvo promises to be a melancholy spectacle of faded empire and is rumored to feature 12 horses, 70 sheep and 10 chickens. But neither are the British close to matching Beijing’s scale of disrupted lives and relocations, which was ultimately estimated by Reuters to be in the neighborhood of 1.5 million people. (It should be mentioned that eviction is not exclusively the provenance of the Olympics: the Azerbaijani government’s hosting of the 2012 Eurovision song competition was seen as a good opportunity to forcibly evict hundreds of people from the neighborhoods on or near the land for the new Crystal Hall.)

But moving beyond the pastoral overture, perhaps the defining aspect of London’s Olympic narrative is that of revitalization under the rubrics of “green” and “sustainability.” The British seem to be offering a riposte to the spendthrift exuberance of an ascendant, eastern empire and instead are embracing simpler times–or perhaps just austerity. Certainly there are intriguing aspects to the plan. For example, anticipating no further significant domestic evolution in the sport, the basketball arena has been designed as an explicitly temporary structure, and as such is meant to be disassembled fairly easily. While perhaps less kind to architects’ egos, this type of design could set an important precedent for future Olympic architecture. Following the end of the Games, the large pedestrian bridges over the River Lea will be narrowed to dimensions more commensurate with quotidian urban foot traffic. And there will be plenty of foot traffic, as the only option for arriving to the Games will be by public transport. Finally, vast portions of the 90-acre Olympic Park will be reverted to wetland, which will help mitigate London’s stormwater runoff problems.

So what’s not to love about this Olympic Park, “the largest new urban parkland in Europe for 150 years”? To hear Sebastian Coe, chairman of the London Organizing Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG, with the “P” curiously absent), talk about it, “the vision to regenerate the Lower Lea Valley's former brownfield areas into a "water city" of revitalized canals, waterways and green spaces” seems worthy of our unconditional support, if not outright adulation.

Except the fact is that, as I’ve hinted above, there is already something there. Newham is the East London neighborhood currently slated for this improvement. But before taking a closer look at Newham, we ought to declare the true subject of the narrative. It is not sustainability, or green-ness, or revitalization that is the enabler of these games; it is, rather, gentrification. And yet, the term itself has slipped. It is instructive to note the reasons for this.

Tom Slater of the University of Edinburgh, who is the academy’s resident avenging angel of gentrification, wrote in “The Eviction of Critical Perspectives from Gentrification Research” (Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2006) that “the perception is no longer about rent increases, landlord harassment and working-class displacement, but rather street-level spectacles, trendy bars and cafes, i-Pods, social diversity and funky clothing outlets.” That is, the subject of research and therefore awareness, is the arriviste population. On the other hand, what makes the process of gentrification possible is displacement; we simply cannot understand gentrification without understanding who–or what–has been displaced. Moreover, “it is difficult to find people who have been displaced, particularly if those people are poor.... By definition, displaced residents have disappeared from the very places where researchers and census-takers go to look for them.” In a very real sense, the identities and narratives of these individuals and communities are erased wholesale from the historical record.

I would further extend Slater’s critique to include the contention that the rhetoric of sustainability has been recruited for the the purpose of further obfuscating these uncomfortable truths. That is, when we say "sustainable urban renewal" we mean "gentrification," but what we really (still) mean is "displacement."

**

Back to Newham, then. Writing in a recent issue of Visual Studies entirely dedicated to exploring the consequences of the Olympic visitation, Jacqueline Kennelly and Paul Watt consider the socioeconomic background of Newham:

The east London borough of Newham has the youngest age structure in England and Wales; around 30% of Newham’s population are children and young people under the age of 20. Newham also has the second most diverse population in the UK, with 70% of residents being non-white. The 2008 School Census recorded 144 distinct languages spoken at home and Newham is thought to have the highest population of refugees and asylum seekers in London. The employment rate stands at just 56.2%, the lowest of any London borough, and significantly below the London average rate of 62.7%; the unemployment rate for minority ethnic residents in the borough (14.5%) is more than double that of the white population (6.7%). Not surprisingly, Newham has one of the highest rates of child poverty in London, and is one of the top 10 most deprived boroughs in London and nationally. (Kennelly & Watt, pp151-2)

Clearly, despite its diversity and youth (or perhaps of it) Newham could use a good, old-fashioned urban intervention. It is easy for us to be morally opposed to a profit-driven developer’s usurpation of a neighborhood when that neighborhood is described to us in a rich fashion, as was the case in Brooklyn vs. Rattner. But when a neighborhood remains undescribed, it is susceptible to an easy erasure. A community that cannot resort to the fairly clinical statistics mentioned above, let alone its own poets and pickle-makers, stands a poor chance indeed.

In the case of Newham, it is the discourse of sustainability that conveniently renders invisible its rich milieu. It is in the interest of planners, sponsors and lazy journalists to substitute the word “brownfield” for the above description. It is then cognitively facile for us to think of a “brownfield” as a category containing decrepitude, abandonment, pollution and perhaps a few bums pushing around shopping carts half-filled with scrap metal. It is also much more difficult to be asked to choose between an ecologically rich and restored wetland, etc, and the prospect of entire communities uprooted from their native geography, than to be asked to choose between that same community and a greedy developer. And it is especially difficult to choose when the community is not even considered by the media.

The purpose of Kennelly and Watts’s article is to provide exactly what Slater declares is missing from the dialogue: the voices of the about-to-be-dispossessed. In this case, the authors provided youth around the neighborhood with cameras and urged them to create photographic documentation of their homes and lives, and the changes that they see manifesting around them.

One of the most prominent developments in the Stratford area is Westfield Stratford City, a high-end shopping mega-mall, which will form the de facto entrance to the 2012 Olympics for 70% of visitors to the London Games…There was also considerable bewilderment on the part of the participants who did not understand why their neighbourhood, which they knew to be one of the poorest in London, needed such a large, expensive shopping centre. (Kennelly & Watt, p153)

It ought to be mentioned that Newham already has a mall. Even though Stratford Centre is smaller, its food court, 99p stores and chain stores are priced within the means of its residents, and the area’s youth socialize within the mall’s public spaces. However, Stratford Centre abuts the new mall’s property, and is closing down as a result of the new tenant’s arrival. In the meantime, those residents are left to ponder where they will be able to shop in their neighborhood, since many high street shops have been ramping up their offerings and prices in anticipation of the Games and their aftermath.

One possible answer to this, of course, is employment. In fact, employment opportunity is a regular canard held out by developers and officials in justifying costly projects, and the Olympic Games’s mega-renewal program is unsurprisingly not exempt from this. Estimates for permanent employment as a result of the new Stratford shopping complex range from 10,000 to 18,000 jobs. And yet, Kennelly and Watts note that the new shopping center suffered from the over-subscription to the tune of “12,000 people interested in 800 John Lewis positions, 10,000 people applying for 550 Marks and Spencer’s jobs, and 1400 applications for 150 Waitrose vacancies.” As a result, few local people have managed to secure work, making their imminent departure even more likely.

The additional pressure of rises in the prices of the housing market further anticipate the clientele that will be able to take advantage of London’s newest “urban parkland” and make it even less likely that the original inhabitants of Newham will stand much of a chance of enjoying that same parkland themselves.  Instead, many of the youth interviewed by Kennelly and Watts were left unemployed and waiting “in a state of limbo for an offer of scarce social housing.” One can virtually see the cycle of learned helplessness begin its long, slow trajectory anew.

Projects such as Kennelly and Watts’s are important qualitative records of how communities are sacrificed on the altar of regeneration. They are even more powerful when the words are the community’s own, spoken in its own voice. It may allow future investigators to establish the causes of some still-unmanifested social unrest. Decisions taken today sow the seeds for the failure of public housing tomorrow, but understanding the terms of displacement that drove people to these buildings in the first place is also essential. While it seems inevitable that many of Newham’s residents will soon be dispersed, the erasure of their stories is not guaranteed. The narrative of London–green, sustainable and revitalized–may once again carry the day, but other traces will remain.

So what is to be done? In the case of the Olympics, perhaps not much–the juggernaut rolls on, ever-expansive in its grasp. London will just have to hold its nose. Perhaps the best that we can do is the further dissemination of design practices like temporary buildings, in the interest of bequeathing a smaller footprint once the Games have ended their brief dalliance. In the meantime, it is instructive to look at other cities’ attempts at similar revitalization: Michael Kimmelman’s fascinating portrait of the resurrection of the Bronx River illustrates a tapestry of actions created by enterprising individuals and community groups; adroit city agencies are playing catch-up and recruiting interesting and germane work from landscape architects and designers. Together, these groups and the individuals they serve deepen the weave of the urban fabric and create resilience and opportunity that is economic, social and environmental. In fact, the South Bronx River seems to be evolving into exactly the “‘water city’ of revitalized canals, waterways and green spaces” that Sebastian Coe anticipates for Newham. But this is change that cannot be generated by the deus ex machina that is the Olympics of the 21^st century, whose every iteration removes the Games one step further from Pierre de Coubertin’s ideal.

Thus, New Yorkers can now breathe easy that in 2005 the International Olympic Committee overlooked their city for London (for that matter, so can Chicago). There is plenty to be done, and the work is slow and painstaking. But the task of city-making is too important to be left to the mercurial whims of a traveling circus, bound to leave town before the paint on the walls has even dried.

(final two pictures by Chris Dorley-Brown (2012): The Cut, Visual Studies, 27:2, 120-125)

A Tale of Two…oh, never mind

by Misha Lepetic

"Look - you're my best friend, so don't take this the wrong way.
In twenty years, if you're still livin' here, comin' over to my house
to watch the Patriots games, still workin' construction, I'll fuckin' kill you.
That's not a threat; now, that's a fact."
~Good Will Hunting

 

Culture warriors from the 1990s may remember Charles Murray, who rather stirred the pot with The Bell Curve, a highly contentious book co-written with Richard Herrnstein. The authors hypothesized, among other things, that not only intelligence but also its alleged heritability could be measured and used to explain differences in the success of social (or, perhaps, economic and ethnic) groups.* At any rate, Murray, who seems to be a refreshingly damn-the-torpedoes type of fellow, is back with another doozy, this time concerning inequality in America. But where is this America of which he speaks?

The inequality narrative is nothing new, of course. The Economist has been harping on the threat that income inequality poses for years now (I believe that this is due, in no small part, to that publication’s consistent undercurrent of Burkean anxiety). In 2009, Emmanuel Saez won the John Bates Clarke medal for illuminating how income inequality is not just increasing but is increasing at faster velocities for the more rarefied strata. And the Russell Sage Foundation recently released a pretty authoritative report on the matter, although I’m sure they won’t be the last to do so. And regardless of your opinion of it, the Occupy movement has brought the inequality narrative into the forefront of the “national conversation”, if such a thing actually exists.

But Murray is here to tell us that income inequality is just the tip of the iceberg: what we are really faced with is, as he puts it, “cultural inequality.” As he writes in a Wall Street Journal essay in support of his book, Coming Apart:

And the isolation is only going to get worse. Increasingly, the people who run the country were born into that world. Unlike the typical member of the elite in 1960, they have never known anything but the new upper-class culture. We are now seeing more and more third-generation members of the elite. Not even their grandparents have been able to give them a window into life in the rest of America.**

This isn’t really all that earth-shattering, but Murray introduces a few new angles. The first is his exclusive focus on the white demographic. I will return to the consequences of this choice in a moment, but let’s accept that, as seconded by his soft-ball fellow-WSJ reviewer, this was done “to avoid conflating race with class”.

The other, more interesting decision is that of a spatial narrative. Coming Apart sets up two opposing geographies: Fishtown is a traditional working class Philadelphia neighborhood, and Belmont an upper-class enclave outside of Boston. From a writerly point of view, it’s a great hook on which to hang a story. You would think, then, that Murray would go on to tell the story of how these two communities, while always differentiated by income, initially were not that different in terms of their social, cultural and religious values. Families mingled easily; social disparities were present but not exclusionary. Imagine the mise-en-scène of Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, then spend the next 50 years pulling that neighborhood apart, until you’re left with Good Will Hunting on one side of the tracks and Desperate Housewives on the other.

Except that’s not what Murray does. While the narrative itself, as constructed by his selection of socio-economic indicators (eg, marriage, education, employment, churchgoing, etc), is fairly unobjectionable, the geography is a fiction. Murray writes:

To be assigned to Belmont, the people in the statistical nationwide databases on which I am drawing must have at least a bachelor’s degree and work as a manager, physician, attorney, engineer, architect, scientist, college professor or content producer in the media. To be assigned to Fishtown, they must have no academic degree higher than a high-school diploma. If they work, it must be in a blue-collar job, a low-skill service job such as cashier, or a low-skill white-collar job such as mail clerk or receptionist.

People who qualify for my Belmont constitute about 20% of the white population of the U.S., ages 30 to 49. People who qualify for my Fishtown constitute about 30% of the white population of the U.S., ages 30 to 49.

So, while Fishtown and Belmont are, in fact, real neighborhoods, they have been stuffed with about half of the white population of the United States (ages 30-49). I really don’t know what to think of this kind of now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t approach. On the one hand, social science, when conducted on such a grand scale, is always challenged to be somewhat abstracted and scalable. Eliminating all kinds of variables to get to the heart of the matter - like controlling for class by disregarding race - is what puts the “science” into “social science”. Or so the story goes.

On the other hand, it is intellectually suspect to provoke readers’ empathetic responses by intimating a place when you really aren’t. The fact is that we are hard-wired to think in terms of place - it is a bit duller to have to prefix every statement with “In the aggregate, white people between the ages of 30 to 49…” On the other hand, it is much more compelling to visualize a single mother, pushing a pram down a Fishtown street.

This is, however, a trivial objection. More seriously, an analysis that is geographically non-specific offers great latitude when positing causes or consequences. You can’t - or don’t have to - point to the closure of a factory, or the construction of a new office park, as reasons why things do or don’t turn out, socially or economically.

To illustrate, let’s take up Murray’s narrative on his own terms. What, exactly, created this “cultural inequality”? Because he has exonerated himself of geography, Murray can invoke such macro-scale events such as “the rise of the welfare state”. In fact, following a serious and credible exposition, Murray trots out exactly these old chestnuts. This lamentation is then followed by a prescription to revive the Senecan virtues, which frankly fizzles into a conservative version of “Be excellent to each other”. Really? After all his hard work, that’s all we get? At least David Brooks, in his opinion piece on Coming Apart, understands that people sometimes need to be forced to get along:

I doubt Murray would agree, but we need a National Service Program. We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together, if only for a few years. We need a program in which people from both tribes work together to spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement.

Thus we have the stirrings of policy, but policy that is born without context - spatial or otherwise. Such a deracinated recommendation cannot result in anything but a myriad of unintended consequences - a sort of No Class Left Behind. Nor does it seem to fully grasp the forces that are continuing to perpetuate inequality, however you choose to define it. (As an example, please consider Ajay Kapur’s concept of “plutonomics”, but that is a post for another time).

By the same token, anyone is now just as free to posit his or her own theory of the causes of inequality. As Roger Lowenstein charitably puts it in his review for BusinessWeek, “Hereby a modest proposition is offered: Vastly diverging wages had something to do with it.” Thus, from the progressive liberal (and, come to think of it, Austrian) point of view, capitalism did exactly what it is supposed to do. It manufactured more choices for people who could afford to choose, and these choices compounded over the years. Sure, why not? In this frame, Louis CK’s take on banks is just as good an explanation as any, and generally more entertaining.

Moreover - and here is the real clincher - this lack of geographic specificity comes back to haunt Murray. It prevents him from discussing how these disparities of wealth have altered the built environment, and this is essential to the hope of understanding a problem that pretty much everyone agrees is serious and sticky. What is the physical difference created by living in an exurban gated community - which, along with shopping malls and widespread car ownership, effectively didn’t exist in 1960? It’s not like people are unaware of the importance of this. For example, since at least 1989, Evan MacKenzie has been describing the history and consequences of increasingly isolated, self-sufficient and indeed self-governing enclaves.

One simply cannot discuss segregation of either income or culture without asking, What are the consequences of this trend, and what are the perceived costs of reversing it? To be more specific, what needs to be offered to those living in gated communities, such that they will return to more mixed neighborhoods? Put even more bluntly - what’s in it for me? Elsewhere, I wrote briefly about Kristiaan Borrett and the successful examples of urban design in Antwerp:

Linking spatial policy with social policy is a powerful combination, but how does Borrett define success? Simple: “Success is when people who have the means to live in the suburbs move back into the city.”

Appealing to Senecan virtues - really some kind of daft noblesse oblige - holds little credibility here. The idea of a National Service Program pales in comparison to the power of people acting out of their own self-interest, which, come to think of it, seems to be what conservatives and libertarians like Murray ought to prefer in the first place.

Finally, I want to revisit the demographic question: Why white people? Or rather, What is it that we can learn from just focusing on this demographic? Christopher Chabris, writing some time ago in Commentary about the aftershocks of The Bell Curve, contended that Murray’s previous book 

set out to prove that American society was becoming increasingly meritocratic, in the sense that wealth and other positive social outcomes were being distributed more and more according to people’s intelligence and less and less according to their social backgrounds. Furthermore, to the extent that intelligence was not subject to easy environmental control, but was instead difficult to modify and even in part inherited, genetic differences among individuals, Herrnstein and Murray posited, would contribute significantly to their futures.

I don’t know if Murray is indeed turning his back on the meritocratic argument he thought he was making 18 years ago. It doesn’t help that he is focusing on a portion of our population that is declining, either. Unless this is his idea of an elegy, the intention behind the choice is far from clear. So I found it compelling that NPR recently covered a study done by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, itself no shrinking violet when it comes to free-market cheerleading. As NPR reports, Edward Glaeser and Jacob Vigdor

looked at Census figures and found the segregation of African-Americans has reached its lowest point in a century. Fair housing laws allowed African-Americans into white neighborhoods. Black people have moved into suburbs. White people have moved into formerly all-black center city neighborhoods which have gentrified.

To be clear, it’s not that racial differences have vanished in American neighborhoods. But the study concludes that entirely white urban neighborhoods, those with exactly zero black residents, have become all but extinct.

Heavens, that sounds like a real spatial analysis. It’s messy, not entirely conclusive but thoroughly grounded in some kind of place. But it’s not just the Manhattan Institute that is conducting this kind of research. Robert Sampson’s new book, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect, demonstrates that place continues to matter. Sampson works through and updates the Chicago School of urban sociology, and demonstrates that the art of understanding space on the neighborhood level is alive and well:

Logic demands that if neighborhoods do not matter and placelessness reigns, then the city is more or less a random swirl. Anyone (or anything) could be here just as easily as there. Identities and inequalities by place should be rapidly interchangeable, the durable inequality of a community rare, and neighborhood effects on both individuals and higher-level social processes should be weak or nonexistent.…

By contrast, the guiding thesis of this book is that differentiation by neighborhood is not only everywhere to be seen, but that it has durable properties—with cultural and social mechanisms of reproduction—and with effects that span a wide variety of social phenomena. Whether it be crime, poverty, child health, protest, leadership networks, civic engagement, home foreclosures, teen births, altruism, mobility flows, collective efficacy, or immigration…the city is ordered by a spatial logic (“placed”) and yields differences as much today as a century ago. The effect of distance is not just geographical but simultaneously social…

The similarity between Sampson’s and Murray’s indicators is striking, but the difference even more so: these indicators now belong somewhere. Once you abandon place, you cannot reconstitute it. An analysis bereft of place yields facile observations such as the one made by Brooks, in the same Times op-ed piece:

They live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive.

I would very much like Charles Murray to point out exactly what neighborhoods Brooks is talking about. But I doubt that he could; in Murray’s world, that bit was left behind long ago.

____
* Murray and Herrnstein’s work, to appropriate Douglas Adams, “made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” Unfortunately, Stephen Jay Gould’s classic takedown, printed in a November 1994 issue of New Yorker, doesn’t seem to be available online, but it’s not difficult to poke around and quickly find as many boosters or detractors as you like.

** For a general evisceration of Coming Apart, see David Frum’s long and excellent review. While Frum - nor, to my knowledge, anyone else - engages the spatial critique I make above, his passionate response addresses many, if not most, other aspects of Murray’s frame. And what better choice than a true conservative apostate to wield the axe?

Interlude in Brown?

by Omar Ali

Pakistan’s existing political and administrative system is based almost entirely on Western models. but the official national ideology is ambivalent or even hostile to Western civilization and its innovations. In the past this was less of a problem since “national ideology” was not very well developed (Jinnah himself was famously confused about what he wanted and while the Muslim League used Islamist slogans freely during the Pakistan movement, a number of its leaders and ideologues were happy to go along with vaguely left wing justifications for the state once they were comfortably in power after partition), but  ever since the time of General Zia, there has been a steady push to establish a particular Islamist version of Pakistani nationalism as the default setting. The process has not gone entirely smoothly and significant sections of the super-elite  intelligentsia remain wedded to Western left-liberal(and more rarely, frankly capitalist/”neo-liberal”)) ideologies while the deeper thinking Islamists tend towards Salafism, but it has gone further in the emerging middle class and within the armed forces. There, a superficially Islamist, hypernationalist vision has taken root and can be seen in its purest form on various “Paknationalist” websites.

This “paknationalism” is an extremely shallow and rather unstable construct. It is not classically Islamist but it regards Islam as the main unifying principle and ideological foundation of the state. In practice, it is more about hating India (and our own Indian-ness) that it is about any recognizable orthodox form of Islam. It is also very close to 1930s fascism in its worship of uniforms, authority and cleansing violence. People outside Pakistan rarely take it too seriously and prefer to  get their versions of Pakistani nationalism from more liberal interpreters, but the “Paknationalists” are serious and one of these days, they are going to have a go at Pakistan if present suicidal trends persist in the civilian elite.  Their interlude may not last very long, but it is likely to be exceptionally violent and may end in catastrophe.

Some idea of the ambitions and self-image of the Paknationalists can be gauged from a few recent examples; Pakistan's former ambassador to the United Nations, senior diplomat Munir Akram, penned a piece in “DAWN” on 27^th May in which he repeated the usual “Paknationalist” themes but went a little further than usual by explicitly suggesting that if the US picks a fight with Pakistan, it may face an “asymmetrical nuclear war”. This, unfortunately, is not an isolated example of an Ambassador Sahib wandering off the reservation.  Former director general of the ISI, Lieut. Gen. Assad Durrani, wrote a bellicose piece a few days earlier in which he suggested (among other things) that we could exchange Dr Afridi for Aafia Siddiqui and then give Aafia Siddiqui the Nishan e Haider (I am not kidding, check it out for yourself). Certified Paknationalist Ahmed Quraishi suggested that the CIA has been at war with Pakistan since 2002, though interestingly he also said that the CIA is doing this to “poison Pakistani-American ties”, (perhaps in a rogue operation not supported by the “good” or soft-touch faction of the US regime?).

 Earlier, Humayun Gohar of “In the Line of Fire” fame wrote an exposition on the rules of Jihad in which he argued that siding with the US in 2001 was good Jihad, but opening NATO supplies now would be a violation of the rules of Jihad. I could go on and on with this, but the bottom line is that the Paknationalist faction of the Pakistani state (let us assume that the state has other factions, as Ahmed Quraishi implied about the American state) seems genuinely upset at the US and is in a confrontational mood. This is evident not just from the fusillade of op-eds issuing from their favored mouthpieces, but also in actions like the refusal to open NATO supply routes, the well-timed sentencing of Dr Afridi and the acquittal of the Faisal Shahzad co-accused. 

But what is sending shivers up the remaining sane spines in Pakistan (see Nusrat Javeed’s superb column in the “Express”) is the fact that this confrontation is not going smoothly. These coordinated efforts could be read a sign of desperation, even of losing the script. Just see how the Afridi affair has proceeded:  First he was sentenced to 33 years in prison for treason and the words “waging war against Pakistan” were used. Trial and sentence were handed out in the tribal areas, using archaic British-era laws (the Frontier Crimes Regulations or FCR) with zero transparency (even the charges were not fully revealed when the sentence was announced). When this led to a backlash in the US (and ironically, just  as liberal American, British and Pakistani columnists had stepped forward to defend the right of the ISI to punish a traitor working for a foreign intelligence agency), the news suddenly changed. In a move worthy of a Lewis Carroll book, the charges upon which Afridi had been sentenced were revealed several days after the sentencing!  And lo and behold, he had not been charged with working for the CIA or running a fake vaccination scheme at all. He had instead been sentenced for being in cahoots with notorious Pakistani Taliban militant Mangal Bagh. That Dr Afridi had spent time in Mangal Bagh’s captivity and paid him ransom was apparently evidence of his “support for Islamic militancy”. This farcical move was instantly applauded in Paknationalist circles as a master-stroke, pulling the rug out from under the Americans (incidentally, also pulling it out from under the liberals who had just defended Pakistan’s right to arrest and prosecute a “traitor”) and, in the words of a prominent anchor, brilliantly changed the script and left the Americans with egg on their face (the doctor they were defending was a militant!). That nobody outside the Paknationalist webring was buying this crap was, of course, not noticed.  

Add to this the comedy of errors being perpetrated around the issue of the resumption of NATO supplies and one has the distinct impression that that the Pakistani establishment doesn’t know what it’s doing;  are we haggling about price? Or about some principle? And what principle are we talking about? If Humayun Gohar is to be believed it is the principle of just versus unjust Jihad, but others have invoked more secular justifications for this blockade. In either case, psyops are not being managed too well. Even supporters are not sure which side is up. But to take this confusion as a sign that Pakistan will soon fold and sheepishly go back to Uncle Sam looking for petty cash may not be correct either. Pakistan is still a large, densely populated, productive land with many strengths. And the establishment still has cards to play. What we may be headed for is a “worse of both worlds” scenario; a confrontation where Pakistan is not strong enough to decisively defeat the Western world and reach the promised land, but is stronger than many outsiders imagine and gets into a prolonged and blood-soaked confrontation by stages such that it drags on for years and ends with anarchy and violence from Kazakhstan to Kolkata.

The security establishment and the new Punjabi Middle class it has nurtured are, in short, more capable than Irfan Hussein thinks, but less capable than THEY think. This is not a safe combination. The Germans, with Kant and Goethe under their belt, could commit national suicide in just 12 years and take 55 million people down with them. Our capabilities are clearly not at that level, but unlike North Korea we have a networked middle class, a large economy, and access to an Islamist ideology that has real historical roots and strengths.  The establishment may be delusional in its belief that the Western world is in the throes of a terminal economic crisis and China is about to rule the world with our JF17 Thunders flying in the vanguard, but the bombs and missiles are real. It could get very ugly. 

To circle back to the other side, one must emphasize that the Paknationalist narrative is NOT deep enough or solid enough to actually work. But it may be deep enough to make an almighty mess as it burns out.  And instead of moving away from their dangerous national narrative and learning to live with our actually existing cultures and history, the establishment is doubling down on the effort to create a new culture and a new history out of little more than wishful thinking and pictures of Jinnah and Iqbal. To most outsiders (and many insiders) it seems hard to believe that they are serious. But for the supporters of the deep state, the current disorder and economic crisis is entirely due to the corruption and mismanagement of the hapless Zardari regime and of “failed politicians” in general. Believing their own propaganda, these people are convinced that Pakistan's cooperation with the United States in the so-called war on terror and its pro-Western policies in general are to blame for all its internal and external crises; once the current coterie of corrupt and treacherous foreign agents is removed from power and corrupt politicians in general are sidelined or beheaded, the state will magically transform into an Islamic version of the People's Republic of China. It will be run by the best and the brightest of the security establishment and its chosen technocrats, cleansed of corruption, economically vibrant, and able to assert its strategic priorities in the region in the face of any and all hostility from India, Iran or NATO. That this is not even remotely close to the real situation of Pakistan is neither here nor there. Unless the corrupt and venal civilian regime is able to assert some level of control, matters may be headed into uncharted territory. Not because everyone in the military high command has gone nuts, but because there is just enough nuttiness around to slip into disaster.   We may be, as columnist Kamran Shafi says, in for a very tall high jump. Not for sure, but certainly “maybe”. And that is a very dangerous maybe. Behind the corruption and the material interests so beloved of leftists there is also a dream. And our “dream of the blue flower” may lead to dangerous places.

PS: Yes, I changed the title after this was posted. My original title was "things fall apart", then that got used elsewhere so i was thinking of another one and some late night connection between Chakwal sufi fascism and the Iron Guard suggested itself, but the differences are much greater than the similarities and by morning it didnt look like a good idea. Neither does this one? Perhaps. Suggestions welcome. 

Take The Skyway, Part 2

by Misha Lepetic 

There wasn't a damn thing I could do or say
Up in the skyway
~The Replacements

 

An empty downtown, with boarded-up shops and desolate sidewalks, is truly a sad sight to behold. It is also symptomatic of much larger forces, namely the flight from the urban core into the suburbs that wound up decimating the vitality of American cities during the second half of the 20^th century. Last month I argued that the urban form of the skywalk was a partial and misguided response to reviving the emptied-out downtowns of American cities. In most instances these structures, which sought to connect buildings without touching the street, were a prolonged, painful failure, because they further segregated street life and did not succeed in drawing people back into that urban core, at least in a way that could be considered dynamic and responsive to the larger needs of the urban fabric. In a sense, much was expected of skywalks, but in fact they were little more than a Band-Aid, and served to only exacerbate the problem through the fundamentally anti-social tendencies that underlie their design and use.

And yet, like any other urban form, skywalks are agnostic – what determines their success is not just their design and implementation, but also the problem that they seek to address. It is perhaps more accurate to say that skywalks, along with many other forms of intervention in the urban built environment, reveal the question that designers have posed themselves, believing that that question, whatever it might be, is in fact the correct and most pressing one. So, in the case of American cities, skywalks were employed to revive downtowns, and, generally speaking, failed. Other cities around the world have enlisted skywalks not because there is too little density, but because there is too much. Does this new context increase the possibility of success? In order to understand what a difference a difference makes, we first need to consider the forces that shaped cities in the West, and what the difference might be between this phenomenon and that of the global urban South.

The narrative describing the development of American cities can be retold as a narrative of excessive space. When energy and labour are cheap, economic logic drives growth outward; it is always easier to build on virgin ground rather than re-organize an existing built environment. This is especially true when urban areas are not bounded by geographic obstacles such as water or mountains – a condition true of most mid-Western cities and not a few coastal ones.

For much of history, the urban periphery was the provenance of the poor who could not afford to live within the cities, but the industrial revolution saw the rise of urban manufacturing and the densification of cities with a relatively new class: the urban working poor. It was with industrialization that the urban-rural divide was first thrown into sharp relief, and it did not take long for the cities to become overcrowded, unhealthy, and downright dangerous places. Consider Friedrich Engels’ description of Manchester, arguably the first truly industrialized city in the world:

Such is the Old Town of Manchester, and on re-reading my description, I am forced to admit that instead of being exaggerated, it is far from black enough to convey a true impression of the filth, ruin, and uninhabitableness, the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness, ventilation, and health which characterise the construction of this single district, containing at least twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants. And such a district exists in the heart of the second city of England, the first manufacturing city of the world. If any one wishes to see in how little space a human being can move, how little air - and such air! - he can breathe, how little of civilisation he may share and yet live, it is only necessary to travel hither. True, this is the Old Town, and the people of Manchester emphasise the fact whenever any one mentions to them the frightful condition of this Hell upon Earth; but what does that prove? Everything which here arouses horror and indignation is of recent origin, belongs to the industrial epoch. (The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844, p53).

But the consequences of industrialization also led to a tremendous outpouring of economic activity that included an unprecedented efflorescence of infrastructure, especially that of transportation. First railroads and then automobiles massively broadened the places where people could live and work in relation to the city. It is thus one of the ironies of industrialization that such activity simultaneously created both the reason and the means for the flight from urban centers.

This reversal of spatial logic was finalized once the automobile and its accompanying infrastructure assumed its hegemonic status. The suburbs were actively marketed to those consumers who could afford to leave the urban core as safe places adequately distant from the city and its reputation of stink and grind that has plagued it since Engels’s time. Those consumers, perhaps most iconically represented in America’s post-World War II generation, were easy fodder for developers and politicians, for whom easy profits and an ever-expanding tax base came to be seen as the sine qua non of national growth and prosperity. Given the geographic convenience of a seemingly limitless urban periphery, there was every reason to give up on cities and the shambles into which they had been transformed. When taken to its extremes, we end up with irrational outcomes such as exurbia on the one hand, and Detroit on the other. Corresponding responses to this gutting of the urban center also led to an increasing awareness of the need to fix it, or at least acknowledge it, and one might classify skywalks as one such half-hearted attempt to patch things up.

*

Shifting to the developing world, however, and a different narrative comes into view. The steady immigration into the cities has, for some commentators, recreated Engels’s nightmare of density. However, there are crucial distinctions. Labour is still cheap, and although energy and capital are somewhat more dear, a distinguishing difference is that the scale of growth is far beyond what was experienced in Europe’s and America’s period of industrialization. Unlike American cities in the late 19^th century (but perhaps not unlike Manchester’s initial growth spurt), the urban global South is growing so rapidly that these city administrations cannot build infrastructure quickly enough to provide urbanites with widely distributed water, sewage and electrical services; telecommunications are perhaps the most functional, but this is mostly because of investment made by the private sector. In terms of the development of transportation, these cities are still at the start of the S-curve that commonly describes the growth of automobile ownership, and as such continue to rely heavily on mass transit, which can take diverse forms, some of which are generally beneficial (such as bus rapid transit) or generally harmful (such as hordes of unregulated auto-rickshaws, etc).

As a result, there is still relatively little flight to the suburbs. Of course, this may change over the next decades as not only car ownership but the building of roads and highways creates more escape routes from the city (although one could argue rather persuasively that cheap gas is a thing of the past and this will stymie urban flight somewhat). Thus the problem encountered by planners in these cities is one of too much density, most dynamically represented by the conflicting modalities of pedestrians and drivers, and further exacerbated by the fact that sidewalks, where they exist at all, are likely poorly designed and clogged with street vendors, illegally parked vehicles and unauthorized spatial appropriations by bordering buildings. So it is perhaps (un)surprising that, in order to deal with this astonishing chaos, planners in some cities have come to a similar conclusion, and plumped for the creation of skywalks.

Mumbai is perhaps the most vocal proponent of Skywalk 2.0. Like Manchester, Mumbai got its head start on industrialization via the cotton trade – Manchester was in fact its principal trading partner. (It is an indication of the ongoing densification of the city that its 58 textile mills, once long abandoned, have seen their locations, now in the center of Mumbai, become extraordinarily valuable; indeed, the former Shrinivas Mill is now slated to be the site of the world’s tallest residential tower.) Mumbai’s metropolitan railway serves over 7 million daily riders; by way of comparison, New York’s subway serves about 5 million. With city streets increasingly straitened, planners saw the need to get commuters to and from the train stations and other “targeted” points of interest quickly and efficiently, especially since pedestrian deaths have been on the rise. The skywalks project was ambitiously slated for 50 skywalks and saw its first completed construction in 2008; since then another 35 have been built.  By August 2010, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority was proud to report that nearly 600,000 people were using the skywalks. Although this is still less than 10% of the ridership of the rail system, one ought to concede a certain amount of time for the system to mature.

Nevertheless, troubling signs have been emerging. Similar to the attitudes of American planners, there is an implicit mistrust of the street, which is unpredictable, incomplete and messy. It may be that planners want to decrease the number of pedestrians struck by cars; this is a noble undertaking. But as was the case in American cities, skywalks are in fact a design choice that deliberately dismembers the urban street: people who want to do Activity X are meant to use this infrastructure, whereas everyone else is left to go about their business as before. Principally, what this does not do is solve any of the other issues the street might already have. For example, it does not address the issue of street vendors, but it merely prohibits them from reaching possible customers who now walk above their heads. This does not mean that street vendors will pack up and go home. They may, however, become more aggressive in order to ensure their prior level of income. Furthermore, it is difficult to estimate the effect of removing a significant voice – that of the commuters – from the chorus of urban pedestrians and street-users who might otherwise campaign together for general improvements. Disassembling the street is an effective form of divide-and-conquer, and therefore of suppressing protest, complaint, suggestion and virtually every other form of civic participation.

It also creates entirely new issues, such as the fact that residents living several floors up suddenly find themselves eye-to-eye with newly elevated pedestrians. And even among pedestrians themselves, further inequalities are created by the skywalks. Consider, for example, the commentary of one Indian flâneure:

Getting off the skywalk at Bandra Station brings home a lot of realities about the way things are constructed in India. Though the skywalk offers a safer mode of travel for people, it cannot be accessed by the people who arguably need it the most—the disabled and the elderly. There are no ramps at all at any of the entry/exit points on the skywalk, and the staircase is relatively steep and uneven at places, making navigation a bit tricky even for a relatively fitter person like me. Why is our urban planning and development so discriminatory, not to mention so poorly planned?

Skywalks don’t come cheap, either – unlike the street, there is quite a bit riding on getting them right the first time, as well as maintenance, etc. In a wholly ironic clash of public transportation modalities, it recently emerged that three already completed skywalks would have to be destroyed in order to make room for Mumbai’s evolving metro line. Evidently, the metro line was originally meant to go underground, and design changes now place it aboveground. Whoops! Thus an infrastructure of limited application becomes an enormous albatross, and the design thinking needed to fix what has always been there, and what always will be there – the street – remains untapped.

*

So it seems fair to ask what role, if any, does an extensive network of skywalks have to play in the urban environment. As I suggested above, like any urban intervention, skywalks are built as an answer to a particular problem. Oftentimes, it is the way in which we choose to frame the question that determines the net success of our answer. In the case of American cities, the big question was, How do we revitalize abandoned downtown districts? The failure of skywalks to do so occurred because this, in fact, was not the question that designers were answering. Rather, they were answering the question, How do we get more people to more shops? Skywalks are, in fact, a terrific answer to this, much narrower question. By creating the human version of a system of pneumatic tubes, you measure your success by the effectiveness with which you move people from one place to another. Nevertheless, at the end of the day you will still have no good answer as to why the downtown district is still empty.

In the case of Mumbai, the question is, how do we keep pedestrians moving in a ludicrously overcrowded city?  Clearly, by not encouraging them to interact with anything that keeps them from getting to and from their destination – hence the preference for designing another set of pneumatic tubes. One may look at the statistic of nearly 600,000 people using the Mumbai skywalks every day as a successful metric, if that is what you are looking to measure. But if you are considering what is the cost of social interaction foregone, then a very different calculus takes precedence. In fact, the question that ought to persist first and foremost in the minds of designers is, What kind of a city do we want to live in?

One possible answer to this question actually does involve skywalks. Consider a project recently initiated by Carlos Leite. Leite and his collaborators in the Smart Informal Territories Lab have been working in the Heliopolis slum of São Paulo, where they have been developing approaches to enhancing informal settlements in ways that are minimally disruptive to the community. They have distilled down the question to an extremely elegant formulation:

How might we create public space that enhances [and] reinforces creative capacity [and] social interations, while strengthening informal networks within Heliopolis, without removing anyone?

One of the chronic difficulties that slum dwellers experience is the fact that getting around is not easy. Given the jumble of houses, lack of consistent streets and oftentimes poor access to the interior of large and irregular blocks, it is not hard to imagine why planners prefer the tabula rasa approach. However, another feature of Heliopolis is that it is built on fairly hilly territory – which is not surprising, since the area is prone to landslides and it is only in these high-risk areas that may be available to the urban poor. Leite’s innovation was to turn these idiosyncrasies from liabilities into assets, and a series of skywalks was the perfect way in which to do this. That is, the skywalks are open-air, and have many points at which one can enter or exit. They are designed not to funnel people towards commerce, or away from transportation hubs, but are meant to connect places. Designed in conversation with the community, their entire purpose is to enhance the entirety of what is already present, which is the city itself. In this sense, there may indeed be a future for skywalks.

Take The Skyway

by Misha Lepetic 

There wasn't a damn thing I could do or say
Up in the skyway
~The Replacements

Walking has been much in the news lately, or rather, how little Americans seem to be doing it. It’s obvious that walking is good for individual health, but what should perhaps be even more emphasized is the importance of walking for the overall health of the urban fabric. So, in addition to asking ourselves the question of how we can get people to walk more, we also ought to consider equally beneficial ways for designing the built environment, such that all this walking will bring about a result for society. Walking may be an end in itself, but if it is only considered as such, we forego the opportunity that it is a means as well.

The history of walking in American cities is one of the steady erosion of an activity that was so natural that its importance was almost entirely tacit. It is always amazing to realize how malleable our norms are: during the automobile’s first few decades, pedestrian fatalities were commonly greeted with criminal charges such as ‘technical manslaughter’. Drivers were viewed with mistrust, considered reckless and even represented class division. However, pedestrians became increasingly regarded as impediments to the velocity of modern life, and economic progress became increasingly associated with the automobile and the infrastructure that made its hegemony possible.

How did this change come about? As Sarah Goodyear writes in the Atlantic Cities blog,

One key turning point…came in 1923 in Cincinnati. Citizens’ anger over pedestrian deaths gave rise to a referendum drive. It gathered some 7,000 signatures in support of a rule that would have required all vehicles in the city to be fitted with speed governors limiting them to 25 miles per hour.

Local auto clubs and dealers recognized that cars would be a lot harder to sell if there was a cap on their speed. So they went into overdrive in their campaign against the initiative. They sent letters to every individual with a car in the city, saying that the rule would condemn the U.S. to the fate of China, which they painted as the world’s most backward nation. They even hired pretty women to invite men to head to the polls and vote against the rule. And the measure failed…The industry lobbied [for] the adoption of traffic statutes to supplant common law. The statutes were designed to restrict pedestrian use of the street and give primacy to cars. The idea of "jaywalking” – a concept that had not really existed prior to 1920 – was enshrined in law.

This was the beginning of a long and effective campaign that saw walking legislated and planned almost out of existence. Even now, designers and planners are often hobbled by a perspective which continues to favour the automobile over pedestrian – most ironically, in the name of safety.

Regardless of the various prescriptions, guidelines and legislation meant to make streets more pedestrian and bicycle-friendly, the tacit assumption that emphasizes automobile flow has proven stubborn: non-drivers are clearly second-class citizens. For example, Charles Marohn, executive director of Strong Towns, provides a very funny but devastating meta-commentary of a tour of a new traffic interchange. A “diverging diamond” may seem like the name of a new and exotic financial derivative, but it is in fact a design innovation meant to improve traffic flow. While it accomplishes this quite handily, pedestrians, cyclists and even the blind are accommodated in a way that can only be characterized as grudging, to put it mildly.

*

However, it’s not just the monopolization of the street by the car that merits careful thinking about walking. There have been many other innovations of the built environment that have – perhaps unintentionally but nevertheless successfully – torn apart the urban fabric and therefore contributed to the decline of the culture of walking. Historically, we can locate this disruption of the city fabric as one of the consequences of architectural modernism. As Stephen Marshall writes in Streets and Patterns,

Modernism not only broke [the] relationship between movement and urban place: it reversed it. It proposed an inverse relationship between movement and urban place. The movement would now be the movement of fast motor traffic; the urban places would become tranquil precincts.

Nowhere is this made more explicit than in the Athens Charter, a manifesto of – perhaps not unintentionally – 95 theses, conceived in 1933 and published by Le Corbusier in 1943: “Traffic flow and its design is the primary determinant of city form.” By conceptualizing traditional street patterns as dysfunctional and best swept away, the scene was set for planners to divorce the transportation network from the rest of the city. Furthermore, please consider another, intriguing passage in the Athens Charter:

Thesis 22: The suburbs are often mere aggregations of shacks hardly worth the trouble of maintaining.

Flimsily constructed little houses, boarded hovels, sheds thrown together out of the most incongruous materials, the domain of poor creatures tossed about in an undisciplined way of life — that is the suburb! Its bleak ugliness is a reproach to the city it surrounds.  Its poverty, which necessitates the squandering of public funds without the compensation of adequate tax resources, is a crushing burden for the community.  It is the squalid antechamber of the city; clinging to the major approach roads with its side streets and alleys, it endangers the traffic on them; seen from the air, it reveals the disorder and incoherence of its distribution to the least experienced eye; for the railroad traveler, excited by the thought of the city, it is a painful disillusion!

This passage allows us the insight that, speaking from the Jurassic of the pre-Levittown era, Le Corbusier could not imagine that the suburbs would take such rich advantage of the liberation of urban transit networks to decisively supplant the economic hegemony of the cities and thus starve them of their vitality. Depopulation of cities was not the only consequence of the flight to the suburbs. Equally devastating was the rise of suburban shopping malls, which, by successfully servicing nearby populations, obviated the traditional, commercial functions of “downtown”. Already by the 1950s, downtown districts saw their businesses failing. When added to the depopulated urban core, crime soared and city officials became desperate to find ways to bring people back to the heart of the metropolis.

*

Given the dismissal of the traditional urban street pattern as touched on above, designers were keen to pounce on brave new forms that would meet the demands of commerce and safety. One of these urban formations turned out to be the skywalk, the general term for any passageway that was meant for pedestrians but in fact was completely divorced from the street. The skywalk was seen as clean, easy to manage, and not in the least unpredictable or dangerous. It was, in a word, thoroughly modern.

Today, skywalks are most commonly thought of in terms of northern US cities, as an effective method by which pedestrians (that is, office workers) are protected from the elements. But seen through the historical lens, it is clear that the conception and implementation of skywalks was entirely keeping with modernist traditions. Thus it should be unsurprising to learn that skywalks are now generally considered to be failures of urban design, despite the fact that they manage to keep the lunch crowd warm on the chilliest February day.

Even by 1988, commentators such as Kurt Andersen were blasting the skywalk phenomenon:

In some fundamental ways skywalks are more perniciously anti-urban than the shopping malls they are intended to compete against. Good malls, like city streets, encourage lingering, serendipity; skywalks, however, are pedestrian freeways, streets distilled to the strictly utilitarian function of providing transit from Point X to Point Y, no detours allowed. In skywalks, there is none of the traditional city's invigorating mix of commerce and leisure, businesspeople and loiterers…Sam Bass Warner Jr., a Boston University urban historian, sees skywalks as a symbol of urban abandonment, not reinvigoration. They are, he says, "a sign that we've given up on the street. They treat the street as essentially an automobile place. That is going to make for a very poor downtown."

Andersen does note with some satisfaction that Hartford, CT was able to revitalize its downtown while rejecting the skywalk approach, and that “a 1982 Seattle ordinance prohibits any skybridge that blocks a vista or reduces street traffic – in effect, all skywalks.” In addition to their deracinating effects on the urban landscape, skywalks carry the additional risks of catastrophic engineering failures: in 1981, the collapse of a skywalk in the Kansas City Hyatt Hotel was, until 9/11, the country’s deadliest structural failure, with 114 lives lost (although some might claim that, at least in China, sidewalks carry their own risks).

It seems that today these lessons are being taken to heart, but, as with anything involving the built environment, what was done can be undone, if slowly and painfully. If we fast forward to recent times, a 2005 article in the New York Times documents the dissatisfaction of various mayors and city councils with these extensive infrastructures. While I hasten to add that correlation does not equal causation, the article notes that “Des Moines began building its three miles of skywalks in 1982, arguing at the time that the $10 million program would save the city. Twenty-three years later, city officials blame the skywalks for the ghostly still sidewalks and ground-floor vacancy rates of 60 percent.”

In some cases, a city is powerless to remove these structures, since “many were built with a mix of public and private money and are now owned, maintained and guarded by the office towers through which they run.” (This points to a further wrinkle: the hours skywalks are open, as well as access to the buildings that provide entry and exit to the skywalks themselves, are not determined by public officials.) In the case of Minneapolis, the issue of private ownership is impeding Mayor R.T. Rybak’s progressive vision of a return to integrated city streets. Since skywalks allow building owners to charge 5%-10% more rent, their refusal to go along with any dismantling may lead the city to compromise, for example, by connecting skywalks to the street via elevators.

Nevertheless, the expensive prospect of re-weaving the urban fabric is underway in certain places. In 2002 Cincinnati created a master plan to begin dismantling its skywalks, and that program is proceeding apace, albeit on a case-by-case basis. Cincinnati officials were prescient enough to conjoin this action with a thorough renovation of Fountain Square, which is now one of the city’s pre-eminent urban spaces. St. Louis demolished a 4-story skywalk that had held one of its great vistas hostage – and threw a party as the mayor took a first crack with the wrecking ball. Even perennially cash-strapped Baltimore has recently plumped for a $2m skywalk demolition. In every case, city officials maintained that the skywalks had become obstacles to the reinvigoration of their downtowns.

*

This checkered history commends itself to other cities looking to implement skywalks. While designers, planners and officials in the US have – one hopes –  learned their lessons from the mid-century failures of modernism, the application of urban forms spawned by modernist approaches nevertheless continues apace in other parts of the world. This then gives us the opportunity to ask what, if anything, might be different this time around? In the case of skywalks in particular, designers must recognize that they are creating a total environment, one that is very much the antithesis of city streets that promote serendipity and dynamism. Assuming recognition of this knowledge, we hope that the advantages, in terms of connectivity, etc, created by the skywalk is a benefit that – somehow – manages to offset the cost of removing people from the street. Indeed, the same critical lens should be applied to any innovation of urban form.

In the second half of this article, to be published next month, I will look at skywalk projects in places such as Mumbai, Dubai and São Paulo, and examine whether they measure up to these standards. In the meantime, if anyone is familiar with other such projects, I would be glad to know about them and include them in the follow-up.

The City And The Land

by Misha Lepetic

Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land.
~ John Steinbeck, "The Grapes of Wrath"

 

Received wisdom relies on simple categories to survive and persist. In this sense, certain numbers are repeated until they are virtually canonical. If we could come up with a taxonomy of success for statistics, we might consider the convenience of numbers that freeze flows of population, money or goods into easily retained averages, devoid of the nuances of space or time. I may, for example, agree with the statement that “500 people arrive in Mumbai every day” if whoever responsible for this statement could point me to the set from which this average was derived – was this from 2000 to 2008? Or maybe it was from 1997 to 2011? Let’s consider other aspects that the datum is implying: Are these people migrants who are truly moving to the city, or are they on a long, seasonal loop that takes them back to their villages, or, even more inconveniently, other cities? And could someone please tell me where the city of Mumbai begins (or ends)? Inconvenient truths are both temporal and geographical, but when we are attempting to impress our audience we tend not to speak in graphs but in talking points. This is the peril of a successful statistic.

By the same token, “255 people born every minute” is a nice, smooth number, and not difficult to remember for those uncomfortable moments when the cocktail party conversation needs a nudge. The lazy acceptance of such a statement demonstrates our contentedness with the notion that this is something that is happening consistently, not unlike the comfort we get from looking at a flowing stream: every time we go back to the stream, there it is, still flowing. In a Heraclitean sense, if I dip my toe into that stream of newborns today, they will certainly be different than yesterday’s stream, but it will still be 255. This is comforting. Until, of course, it becomes 256, or 325. But we will have to wait to be told that, too.

Was the seven-billionth person born in Manila on October 31^st, 2011? Absolutely – if you are the parents of Danica May Camacho. Declared so by the United Nations, the organization did her the further favour of swooping down on her delivery room, scholarships in hand for the lucky newborn, like an international development version of Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. (Danica’s parents may want to take heed of the experience of Adnan Nević, the title-holder of Six-Billionth Person of this particular celebrity circuit, whose cradling by Kofi Annan at his birth hasn’t exactly led to a silver spoon in his mouth). But for those paying attention to the vagaries of demographic estimation,

Even the best individual government censuses have a margin of error of at least 1 percent, said [Gerhard Heilig, chief of the population estimates and projections section of the United Nations Population Division], which would translate in the global aggregation to “a window of uncertainty of six months before or six months after Oct. 31.” An error margin of even as little as 2 percent would mean that Monday’s estimate of seven billion actually was 56 million off (which is more people than were counted in South Africa).

By the same token, I am wholly prepared to believe the notion that, “as of 2008, 50% of the global population lives in cities,” if the United Nations could only define for me what constitutes a city (or was that fateful moment set to happen in 2005, as reported in 2005?). Is the city defined as its urban core, or does it involve the surrounding metropolitan area? Richard Saul Wurman famously defined Tokyo in (at least) six different ways, including boundaries determined by postal delivery, utility service, administrative districts, or population density, among other measures that, our intuition tells us, ought to line up together somehow, but instead lead to radically different geographic delineations. At least we can agree that Tokyo is a proper city – a mega-city, even. Ought we then define a “city” by the density of its population? In that case, Tokyo ranks only 50^th, and Mumbai reigns supreme – at least by some measures. But at what point does a city stop being a city?

As it happens, the UN does not have a definition for a city, which is probably just as well. However, it does define “urban area” according to a dizzying array of country-specific factors. If you live in Panama, you are an urban dweller if you live among “1,500 or more inhabitants with such urban characteristics as streets, water supply systems, sewerage systems and electric light”. In Albania, “towns and other industrial centres of more than 400 inhabitants” will help you make the cut. And if you are Cambodian, the only requirement is “towns”, the definition thereof being unspecified, but likely left to the Cambodian authorities to determine as they see fit. Once you realize that this is the methodology involved in generating the above assertion, it’s much easier to just stick with the idea that half of us live in cities, and that more of us are moving to cities every year, simply because there are more of us in general, generally speaking.

Obviously, there’s a fine line between being entertaining and sounding knowledgeable versus being pedantic and boring, so this is perhaps a good moment to apologize to any readers who see me tending towards the latter. (My goal, in fact and hopefully, is to be both pedantic and entertaining.) But one could also say that there is a fine line between being right and being wrong. When facile truth-claims such as the above are actually subjected to observation, our linguistic wave function, metaphorically speaking, collapses.

***

Why this matters lies in the follow-up to the statement that we now live mostly in urban areas: “It is expected that 70 percent of the world population will be urban by 2050”. Aside from providing urban planners and designers with the rhetorical dry powder required for maintaining a high level of employment into the foreseeable future, this number moves us from the domain of stating a simple factoid – no matter how problematic – to making a claim about the future, which is rather more contentious, since claims about the future are invitations to policy.

On one level, this claim is of great utility to corporations like IBM, who are making enormous bets on successfully manufacturing the need for cities to create vast, IT-driven command-and-control structures that will allow city administrators to ostensibly manage the infrastructures of cities, or at least of those cities that are willing to pay for the hardware and algorithms needed to run such meta-infrastructures. On another level, this claim is also of convenience to politicians to instate certain kinds of change they would like to see: Arundhati Roy asserts that “the home minister of India has said that he wants 70% of the Indian population in the cities, which means moving something like 500 million people off their land.”

Conflating trend with policy has its obvious dangers: What if the trend is wrong, or weaker than anticipated? Are we really to believe that any one individual, city or state is capable of planning that far in advance? Rather, this conflation indicates another assumption in our facile acceptance of the first claim – that people are moving to cities because they want to.

This imputed desire is a fairly unexamined bit of boilerplate, endlessly repeated in the media. A common example may read: “In Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, hundreds of millions of people are rapidly moving from rural areas, where they practiced peasant agriculture, to cities”. You get the distinct feeling that the “peasantry,” thunderstruck by some ambiguous revelation, have collectively laid down their hoes and, gazing towards a distant, shining metropolis, hopped on the nearest mule and set off, whistling like some freshly minted college graduate bound for Manhattan: “If I can make it there…”

In the meantime, Roy continues:

“That [migration] cannot be done without India turning into a military state. But in the forests of central India and in many, many rural areas, a huge battle is being waged. Millions of people are being driven off their lands by mining companies, by dams, by infrastructure companies... These are not people who have been co-opted into consumer culture, into the western notions of civilisation and progress. They are fighting for their lands and their livelihoods, refusing to be looted so that someone somewhere far away may "progress" at their cost.”

Regrettably, Roy is not being the least bit dramatic here. The roots of this particular phenomenon go back to 2007-2008, where a spike in the price of many staples precipitated food riots in 22 countries (unsurprisingly, like most civil unrest, many of these riots occurred in cities). Following these events, governments understood that securing food supplies was going to be essential for stability and security, if not democracy. Hence the catalysis of what was an already emerging trend: the long-term leasing of agricultural lands from willing governments with alleged excesses of such land. Both governments and private entities ranging from South Korea to Kuwait have since engaged in massive transactions that seek to secure food production for their populations.

To give a sense of the scale at which this is unfolding, the Economist estimated that, by May of 2011, 80 million hectares had been transacted, “more than the area of farmland of Britain, France, Germany and Italy combined”. Over half, or 50 million hectares, were in sub-Saharan Africa. In many cases, the leases approach 10% or 15% of the available land in a given country, and at prices generally impossible to beat: “In sub-Saharan Africa land is being leased for up to 100 years at average prices of USD $800 to USD $1,000 per hectare yearly; six times cheaper than in Brazil or Poland, and over twenty times cheaper than Germany.” (The Land Security Agenda, p10).

As Roy implies above, these arrangements have not been received kindly by the people who suddenly find themselves disenfranchised. In Madagascar, a 2009 deal put together by the government and South Korea’s Daewoo Heavy Logistics would have put fully a third of the country’s available land under Daewoo’s control for, literally, generations. This led to the swift fall of Madagascar’s government, and the cancellation of that and several other large land deals. But Madagascar has been the exception. Most governments in sub-Saharan Africa have relied on authoritarian measures to clear the land of people who may have no official title to the land, since “only 2-10% of land across Africa is held under formal land tenure, which is normally just in urban settings”. The fact that those smallholders have been farming and grazing their livestock on that land for centuries before the current crop of nation-states even existed obviously holds little water. In fact, Ethiopia’s government, not known for its light touch to begin with, has earned the baleful gaze of human rights groups for its project of “villagization”, which is really just a thin veneer for forced relocation that is already causing its share of misery and rising violence. Can an insurrectionary guerilla movement be far behind?

Unsurprisingly, any local benefits have been thin on the ground, if at all evident. Even the Economist, which in 2009 chose to reserve judgment, in 2011 conceded that

When land deals were first proposed, they were said to offer the host countries four main benefits: more jobs, new technology, better infrastructure and extra tax revenues. None of these promises has been fulfilled.

Locals usually regard jobs as the most important of these. But so far they have been scarce, and only partly because many projects are not yet up and running. In Mozambique, the World Bank found, one project had promised 2,650 jobs and created a mere 35-40 full-time positions. A survey by Thea Hilhorst of 99 smaller projects in Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger reported “hardly any” rural job creation…And when there are jobs, foreign investors often bring in outsiders to staff them, leading to “conflict or accusations of cheating”, according to the World Bank…At the moment, land-grabbing foreigners seem to be creating islands for themselves, cut off from the poverty-stricken countryside.

Not only that: in a supreme irony that perhaps best sums up the entire situation, The Economist also noted that Saudi Arabia spent almost as much money on agricultural investments in Ethiopia – to grow food for its own consumption – as the UN World Food Program was spending on food aid in Ethiopia.

Thus food insecurity seems to be perpetuating itself on a global level. Supply chains are being stretched even more thinly, as nations grasp for guarantees that food shortages will not threaten the stability of their home governments. Nations and private actors are ever more entangled in transnational contracts, while local populations are displaced and incited to rage and rebellion. In the meantime, all of this unfolds under the unwarranted assumption that cheap energy will continue to be available to grow (in the form of fertilizer) and move (in the form of transportation networks) those crops to their intended destinations.

It is justifiable to consider this state of affairs as late-stage capitalism being take to its logical conclusion. Cities – wherever they might be – need to be fed. If the costs can be made to work, then it does not matter where the food comes from. In this sense, it is a small step from strawberries in January to African land grabs. In another sense, however, we may also look at it as a consequence of the way the West has developed its perception of the function of the built environment. In a paper on urban agriculture in Africa, Kenneth Lynch cites Luc Mougeot:

Mougeot (1994) argues that the definition of ‘city’ as non-agricultural is a Victorian invention.  He cites archaeological and historical records that clearly show that agriculture was an integral part of the urban scene until the late 19th century.  During the Victorian period, laws were introduced in many European cities to exclude agricultural activities, mainly on the grounds of concern about public health.  This approach to city management was subsequently transferred to the administration and planning of colonial cities.

Urban agriculture may be making a cosmetic comeback in the West, with scrappy farmers tilling the soils of Detroit, and hipsters raising heritage chicken breeds in Williamsburg. But given the scale of imbalances we see occurring globally, it will be a long time before this legacy is undone. Westerners would do worse to look south, and see how these problems are being solved in an elegant fashion that seeks the re-integration of the urban and rural fabrics. For example, Bogotá recognized that nearly 67% of its food comes from small farmers located around the city, and yet farmers’ incomes were failing. Working with Oxfam, significant efforts were made to open up key locations in the city for regular farmers’ markets. As a result,

…as of December 2009, the Mercados Campesinos project had benefited more than 2,000 producers with less than 5 hectares of land each. Their total sales over three years have been worth more than $3m. These sales have represented a real benefit for small producers: monitoring…has shown that the average net increase in prices for farmers is 64 per cent.

As a result of the markets’ success, the participation of the small producers’ association was encoded into the official Bogotá Food Policy, and the association has gone into discussions for distribution of its produce with Corabastos, the company with “the greatest power in the country to set food prices and…a key actor in preventing small producers from achieving greater power in markets. However, in a groundbreaking tactical alliance, [Oxfam] encouraged the company to use its influence with local politicians, pointing out that it risked losing out itself if the Mayor’s Office excluded it from the food supply plan. This was the first time that small producer organizations had formed a tactical alliance with this company.”

Perhaps what we should be measuring is the resilience with which a single geographic entity - the city and its surrounding rural environs - can respond to the needs of its own people. Then we might say, with a modicum of pride, that 500 people arrive in Mumbai every day, and they are all fed.

Get On The Bus

by Misha Lepetic 

“In the dime stores and bus stations,
People talk of situations,
Read books, repeat quotations,
Draw conclusions on the wall”
~ Bob Dylan

Cities ceaselessly fascinate because of the problems they have solved over time – grand socio-infrastructural dilemmas such as property rights, water, sewage, electrification. But as cities grow and evolve, these solutions in turn generate new problems, or intensify existing ones, in ways that are both unpredictable and banal. Indeed, for cities to continue growing in any sense of the word, this will remain a permanent aspect of their discourse, and a precondition of their success. It would not be much of a stretch to say that, given global trends of urbanization, the ability of cities to continue planning and designing their way past new problems is not just essential for their own survival, but for that of humanity itself.

Within this context, mobility must rank as a problem par excellence. Commentators have described slums as “cities that have failed to solve their mobility problem”. The free and rapid flow of people and goods is essential to the dynamic nature of any urban setting; and while the developed world looks on China’s growth with a mixture of awe and trepidation (and hope that they will keep buying our debt), it is also true that the media greets reports of things like a 10-day traffic jam with a certain amount of Schadenfreude. Amateurs! (On the other hand, the fact that there were no incidents of road rage reported during this traffic jam may have something to teach us about the virtues of a certain national temperament. Once, we too had a sense of humour about this.)

At any rate, the design problem is simple: How do you get people to use public transport more effectively?

 Another way of putting it is: What is wrong with the public transportation that we already have? Taking the bus system as our focus, most people can come up with a quick list of why travel by bus is so painful: it takes too long to get on, too long to get off, and too long to get from where you got on to where you get off. The designers behind Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) looked at each of these issues and designed for each problem. To get people on the bus faster, the bus stops are freestanding enclosures which are entered by turnstile. Since the driver isn’t responsible for ticketing, all doors can be used to admit or discharge passengers. Also, by raising the station platform to the level of the bus doors, passengers do not need to navigate steps. Best yet, buses are given their own lanes, with a completely separate semaphore system, some of which are now controlled by computers to maximize flow. This allows buses to come and go extremely quickly and should be considered the heart of any BRT system’s success.

While BRT may sound like a particularly Scandinavian invention, it was in fact first put into use in Curitiba, Brazil. You might say that things like BRT happen when you elect an architect and urban planner to be the mayor of your city – in this case, Jaime Lerner (if Lerner had only implemented BRT, his renown would have been richly deserved, but there’s plenty more he has contributed to Curitiba). It’s also worth noting that BRT has been around since, oh, 1974.

BRT has since spread to many other cities, especially in the developing world, that are finding themselves choked by growth. Estimates vary, since implementation of BRT is dependent on the unique characteristics of each city, but by some estimates there are currently over one hundred BRT projects going on around the world.

The argument for BRT is not merely one of efficiency, but also one of public health. Eduardo Behrentz of the Universidad de los Andes has studied Bogotá’s growth and its experience with BRT, first begun in 1999. With 7 million people spread over 500km², Bogotá by some measures ranks as the world’s 9^th-densest city (by comparison, New York City clocks in at #114, despite some recent first-world whinging by the New York Times). Behrentz makes a simple argument: since respiratory illness, which is the main cause of infant mortality in Bogotá, incurs $1bn of public health costs every year alone, targeting air quality will bring forward tremendous benefits. Furthermore, he estimates that every dollar that goes to mitigating air pollution carries an ROI of 8:1. Getting rid of this pollution means identifying its source, and Behrentz locates a big chunk of it in the bus fleets trundling around Bogotá.

On the face of it, the current transport mix in Bogotá is 53% public transport, but the important detail is that BRT only accounts for 11%, despite the fact that it claims the lion’s share of PR (meanwhile, Curitiba, with its mature BRT system, commands the attention of 70% of commuters). The remaining 42% are private operators driving around whatever will keep its wheels on long enough to make the next run.

According to Behrentz, of urban air pollution, fully 40% of particulate air pollution comes from the 42% of non-BRT public transit options. As another example, the table at right shows the reduction of exposure to airborne pollutants along Mexico City’s BRT corridor. Thus, while all vehicles contribute to air pollution, the buses’ use of high-sulfur diesel is one of the major factors, and the fleets themselves are perhaps more accessible candidates for regulation.

There is also an urgency to Behrentz’s advocacy. According to his research, Bogotá is at the beginning of the S-curve that characterizes growth of private vehicle ownership in cities. Curiously, this S-curve seems to hold true for any city, which allows Behrentz to posit that, by 2040, private vehicles will overtake public transport as the dominant form of transportation in Bogotá. More importantly, these trends are almost impossible to reverse: as a warning, he points to the battle against motorcycles and mopeds, which he considers already lost by Asian cities.

BRT is also extraordinarily cheap, which is what you want when you are talking about major construction interventions in a city’s existing infrastructure. While estimates vary wildly and are in accordance with the agenda of the source, it’s not unreasonable to say that development of each kilometer of BRT, including designated lanes, can be 4-20 times less than a kilometer of light rail, and 10-100 times less than a kilometer of heavy rail. There are, of course, myriad ways in which to measure anything, so initial capital costs must be taken into account as only part of the total project’s benefits.

Indeed, BRT, like any design intervention, hides plenty of costs, and not just in terms of initial capital outlay, or construction-based inconvenience. Inevitably, the drive to centralized, competition-less efficiency pushes many existing economic participants out of the market and upends what may be fragile social landscapes.

An instructive example is Johannesburg’s experience. In 2009, its BRT implementation was plagued by striking minibus taxi drivers that eventually turned violent. Given that we are talking about South Africa, it should not be surprising that an intervention the scope of BRT played out over familiar fault lines.

The city’s first challenge was to win over the formidable minibus taxi industry, which moves 14 million people daily in a nation of 49 million, far more than the bus and rail systems combined. It is perhaps the country’s greatest success story of black entrepreneurship, though with a history of ruthless violence. Experts estimate that hundreds, if not thousands, of people have died in “taxi wars” to control routes.

For their part, wealthy white enclaves weren’t too keen on BRT as a perceived threat to their property values. Raucous town meetings reasserted old South African stereotypes, which was most unwelcome on the eve of the World Cup. This is not to say that Johannesburg’s authorities were not aware of the issue even prior to the roll-out:

From the project’s beginning in 2006, the city chose to negotiate the 12-year bus operations contract with local affected taxi operators instead of opening a competitive tender. Taxi operators affected by BRT routes could exchange their operating licenses for equity in the new bus operating company, and compensation would be on a per kilometer basis instead of per passenger as many taxi drivers are accustomed to.

More importantly, Johannesburg’s BRT consistently undercut minibus rates, so many drivers and entrepreneurs were driven out of business – competition had already driven their rates to subsistence levels, and they were no match for the subsidized pricing of the BRT. Perhaps the benefits are still worth it – as I said, it all depends on how you want to measure things. And yet, despite an uncomfortable co-existence since then, I must deliver an ironic coda. In September of last year, it was the turn of the BRT drivers to stage an 8-week strike, crippling the system as drivers demanded a doubling of their pay. 

Thus it is possible to view the stresses created by each BRT project in light of the subject city and its historic context. In the case of Bogotá, the ongoing success of BRT is still not guaranteed, in part due to the city’s own economic success. Additionally, existing fleet owners have mounted their own resistance to its expansion. As José Salazar Ferro writes in Megacities-Urban Form, Governance, and Sustainability, Bogotá’s BRT has seen a

…decrease in the number of daily passengers: 1.4 instead of 1.5 million/day in July 2007. This has caused a profitability problem and an increase in the cost of tickets. [There has also been] a considerable increase in the construction cost per kilometer, from US$5 million dollars during the first phase to over US$15 million dollars in the second.

There have also been delays in the integration of the Transmilenio system with the other bus systems, a program which involves tariff integration and taking out of service nearly 50% of the present bus fleet. The transport industry has political power which it has used to delay urgent decisions. Technicians have not managed to build a viable integration scheme from the technical and political point of view (p342).

This points to an inconvenient truth about BRT. Bogotá has 85 kilometers of BRT lines, which, as efficient as these lines are, constitute a fraction of the required daily commute for a city of 500 square kilometers. Thus, it’s not surprising that, like Johannesburg’s minibus drivers, some of these small operators were offered as compensation the opportunities to continue providing transportation to commuters in the form of feeder lines to the main BRT routes. However, this is beginning to feel a bit of a shell game – on the one hand we have definite benefits in terms of BRT itself, but a lack of consideration for the ripple effects on economic growth and employment. Do scrappy entrepreneurs have the right to bemoan the encroaching ‘socialization’ of the public transit sector?

This may be a facile critique leveled by the conservative side, but I think it misses the point. Let’s stick to Behrentz’s first imperative, which is the increase in public health by the reduction of urban air pollution – a classic application of public goods to public policy. BRT may reduce diesel-generated airborne particulate matter at its location, but does it prevent the expansion of unregulated, private fleets into the urban periphery? Especially given the rates of growth that Bogotá is experiencing, it seems reasonable to expect that there will always be new customers to provide the demand.

In order for the gains to be real, further engineering is needed. Since BRT can only be instituted in specific parts of the city, some kind of regulation over all public transit is needed. But instead of a centralized approach that espouses, in Behrentz’s words, “a single authority; unified fare collection; modal integration; and no competition within the market,” city authorities need to be able to access the privateers with incentives as well as regulation.

If clean air is the ultimate desired outcome, a successful program might reward access to more profitable routes to owners who upgrade their old buses’ engines to cleaner burning fuels. A medallion system similar to New York City’s would serve to keep tabs on the private fleet. Privateers who choose to remain outside the system would be pushed to the less profitable routes, or penalized for infractions. This provides incentives for each operator to “go legit”. In this way, the private sector might come to see BRT as an ally and not a state-sponsored juggernaut bent on destroying their livelihoods. What is being measured here is not just public health, or economic growth, but the maintenance and deepening of the social urban fabric. This, I would submit, is the ultimate definition of sustainability. And I wouldn’t be surprised if this was something that perhaps even occurred to Jaime Lerner, many years ago.

How To Implode A Myth

by Misha Lepetic

“If you design with a view to optimize anything, it is bound to end up suboptimal, because it can’t cope with change. This applies as much to political constitutions, universities and buildings”
~ Jeff Mulgan

Recently I had the good fortune to catch “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” at the IFC Center here in New York. The docuementary is a fascinating corrective to the perception that when we talk about failed public housing, we are talking about failed architectural design. The documentary makes liberal use of the above 1972 picture and footage, which has become visual shorthand for, as Alexander von Hoffmann writes:

…an icon of failure. Liberals perceive it as exemplifying the government’s appalling treatment of the poor. Architectural critics cite it as proof of the failure of high-rise public housing for families with children. One critic even asserted that its destruction signaled the end of the modern style of architecture.

There is much to be said about the story of Pruitt-Igoe. Its history, and the narratives and ideologies that are woven around that history, constitute a microcosm of how we choose to perceive many aspects of architecture, urban planning and public policy during the 20th century. Unsurprisingly, such a grand flameout was bound to attract grand pronouncements, since there was something for everyone to cherry-pick for his or her own agenda.

The genesis of a housing development as large as Pruitt-Igoe was made possible by the United States Housing Act of 1949, but flight to the St Louis suburbs was already in motion. Postwar migration from the South, in the form of the Second Great Migration, re-filled that urban core with poor families that could not afford much better than the tenant buildings run by slumlords. However, even this migration was not sufficient to re-inflate the population of the City of St Louis, which would peak at 857,000 in the 1950 census. Currently standing at 319,000, the 63% loss in population has left the city at roughly the same size as during the 1870 census. Even more remarkably, the St Louis Metropolitan area – the destination of urban flight – saw its population grow from 400,000 to well over a million in the same 60-year span.

It is against this backdrop that we must examine the design decisions made by planners. In a 1991 article that partly inspired the documentary, Katherine Bristol writes:

In 1950 the St. Louis Housing Authority commissioned the firm of Leinweber, Yamasaki & Hellmuth to design Pruitt-Igoe. The architects’ task was constrained by the size and location of the site, the number of units, and the project density, all of which had been predetermined by the St. Louis Housing Authority. Their first design proposals called for a mixture of high-rise, mid-rise, and walk-up structures. Though this arrangement was acceptable to the local authority, it exceeded the federal government's maximum allowable cost per unit. At this point a field officer of the federal Public Housing Administration (P.H.A.) intervened and insisted on a scheme using 33 identical eleven-story elevator buildings.

The planners had placed a huge bet that the 57-acre site would accommodate even greater densities than the slums they were replacing. At the same time, funds for the maintenance, repairs and cleaning of the development were intended to come from income generated from rents. Pruitt-Igoe’s occupancy, however, topped out at 91% only three years after its 1954 opening, and by 1973 only 800 people were living in a complex that had originally been designed for 15,000. Additionally, as Michael Kimmelman writes in the New York Times:

[Among] the factors conspiring against the project [were]…unfathomable welfare rules stipulating that no able-bodied man could live in a home where the woman received government aid. A night staff from the Welfare Department patrolled apartments searching for fathers to evict.

Further budgetary constraints saw the axing of children’s playgrounds and the use of substandard construction materials. Finally, Pruitt-Igoe was originally "zoned" for one-third occupancy by whites and two-thirds occupancy by blacks, but during the project’s construction the Supreme Court passed down its desegregation ruling. This had the ultimate effect of turning all of Pruitt-Igoe into housing for poor African-Americans.

All of these factors converged to obviate the project’s chances of success, and Pruitt-Igoe became the byword for public housing failure. The result “was a housing project that represented to its tenants a system of powerful control because it encoded racist messages by isolating and containing a population that was 98% African-American.” These decisions have little to do with the actual design of the buildings themselves, and yet the revisionist history that has since accrued to Pruitt-Igoe has focused on this almost exclusively. Bristol’s article is particularly interested in dismantling the myth that:

For most architects the entire story can be reduced to a one-line explanation: the design was to blame… With all the attention being paid to the project's design in the early 1970s, a strong associative link was forged between architectural flaws and Pruitt-Igoe's deterioration. In 1965 James Bailey had taken care to point out that two of the major causes of the deterioration of Pruitt-Igoe were chronically inadequate maintenance and the increasing poverty of tenants. By 1972 these crucial elements of the story had been all but forgotten in the rush to condemn the architecture. It is the privileging of these design problems over the much more deeply embedded economic and social ones that constitutes the core of the Pruitt-Igoe myth.

It is remarkable that, despite the known history, it is this narrative that emerges. In fact, one of Pruitt-Igoe’s architects, Minoru Yamasaki, was recorded in the Journal of Housing as stating that “the low building with low density is unquestionably more satisfactory than multi-story living… If I had no economic or social limitations, I’d solve all my problems with one-story buildings.” (quoted in Bristol, p169). If anything, architects were guilty of passivity in the face of institutionalist pressures, bureaucratic ignorance, and budgetary and resource constraints.

The apotheosis of this attitude was Charles Jenks’ epitaph, hinted at above, that “Modern Architecture died in St. 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.” It’s natural to want to remove failures from our sight – we don’t like to be reminded about how badly things can turn out. (Nor had Yamasaki seen the last of the revolt against Modernism, since Al-Qaeda proved to be far harsher architectural critics than the likes of Jencks.) Of course, the real, socio-economic factors responsible for this and other “design failures” otherwise imputed to Modernism cannot be dynamited away quite so easily.

*

However, what interests me about this narrative is the opportunity to think about resilience. As is clear from Pruitt-Igoe's genesis, wagering on what a built environment is meant to accomplish is a fairly permanent proposition. Even a design optimized for a particular moment in time may become obsolete as old needs recede and are supplanted by new ones. The unpredictability of the city is such that one can never anticipate what those needs might be. As Keynes’ (unfortunately apocryphal) aphorism goes, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” So, how might we introduce this kind of thinking into design and architecture? That is, how do you build something in a way that allows you to change your mind later on?

This may seem difficult to envision from the point of view of the built environment, so let me introduce a metaphor from another field. There are several serious contributions that software development has introduced to the field of innovation: use case modeling; object-oriented development (inspired, in part, by the architect Christopher Alexander’s writings on pattern languages); and lean startup methodologies. The latter, developed by Eric Riess, attempts to develop a more empirical approach to innovating in a startup. For example, he asks how we can aggressively shorten the time that it takes to identify and develop a product, as well as the customers that might be interested in that product. Of Riess’s palette of tools, I am especially thinking of what he calls the MVP, or Minimum Viable Product.

As he defines it, “the minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.” This is an especially powerful concept, since it expressly seeks to de-fetishize the idea that designers must work to construct a perfect product, or object, that ultimately no one might want. Rather, it emphasizes process andthe identification of ways in which we can learn about what it is that we are supposed to do next.

In the case of the built environment, it may be difficult to imagine how this might be possible. After all, bytes are easier to move around or delete than bricks; also, there are fewer regulations and institutions to navigate. However, a minimum viable product for a city has already been taking shape in the form of pop-up structures, whether they are cafés or commercial spaces. Cheap structures can be erected quickly for a variety of functions. If they are efficacious, these structures can become permanent, or they can melt away on a seasonal or some other basis. Pop-up parks can also occupy spaces that are awaiting development (although these spaces, like Duarte Square, may in turn find themselves the subject of occupation).

The larger point is to determine what works in an urban space. It is not just guerilla artists and fly-by-night entrepreneurs whose interest is served here: New York City’s Department of Transportation has been encouraging restaurants to sponsor pop-up cafés as a way for sidewalks to function as gathering places. Interestingly, the DOT requires the sponsoring restaurants to allow people to gather, regardless of whether they buy anything from the establishment. In the same way, the DOT has been putting up small parks around traffic intersections in Manhattan, and judging whether the attention they receive ought to qualify them for more permanent placement. It is much easier to paint a few extra lines, throw out a few tables and chairs and, based on what happens, determine if this is in fact the space where a park’s utility would trump the constriction of traffic lanes. In essence, this is urban design’s minimum viable product.

*

Still, there is a difference between creating temporary commercial spaces and addressing the needs of housing. To answer this, we have to go to Iquique, Chile, where Alejadro Aravena’s architecture practice has been developing an exquisite solution to the problem of over-determined housing design for the poor. As quoted from a summary of a recent talk he gave:

The problem is this: the informal settlement has a finite size, and too many families living upon it. Within the constraints of the budget, they could build:

• A few medium size houses – and then most people would have to leave, as there would not be enough houses for them.
• Many tiny houses – but still not enough, too small, and these houses would be difficult to “expand” as families' needs grew.
• Highrise buildings – which the inhabitants refused to contemplate, and which could also not be “expanded.”

The Elemental project’s solution was this: the project would plan for the “medium” size houses, but build only half the house.  They would plan (and build) in such a way that more units could fit in, and that the families could easily expand into the “missing” half when they were able to do so. Elemental built a system of row houses in which half of every unit is missing. But because they have built the part that requires the most expertise and investment – the load bearing structure, the roof and so on – the inhabitants could expand into the missing voids at a later stage – in any way they liked. This also dealt with the pervading problem of social housing – the uniformity and lack of individuality.

Thus, Aravena’s group understood and worked with the limitations – budgetary and otherwise – that were being imposed on their design. In fact, they turned these limitations into points of strength: few architects have the courage or insight to allow their tenants to become co-designers, despite the fact that the benefits of this are gradually being proven worldwide. At the same time, please note that the consultations with the future residents of the Iquique settlement revealed much the same misgivings about living in a highrise as Pruitt-Igoe’s architect expressed almost 40 years earlier. If nothing else, this is illustrative of both the constancy of the human condition, as well as the persistence of design problems. However, the real progress in this case is that neither the architect nor the residents were passive players before more dominant institutional forces, such as the role played by St Louis Housing Authority in the 1950s.

Even the larger urban environment could stand to benefit from such agile thinking. During the design competition to rebuild the World Trade Center, a group of designers led by Rafael Viñoly came together to propose a daring design: a lattice-work evocation of the twin towers that would be mostly hollow. Part of the purpose behind the latticework was to create ample space for future designers and stakeholders to create new constructions that would be appropriate for the needs arising at that time. I honestly don't believe the proposal had a chance of being chosen, but it is a striking riposte to the idea that skyscrapers, which might be considered the leading indicators of our built civilization, are not necessarily required to be subject to the same kinds of centralized planning that constituted one of Pruitt-Igoe's most serious weaknesses. That this design was proposed on the ruins of Yamasaki’s greatest buildings is an irony that should not be lost on us.

As for Pruitt-Igoe itself, all that remains is a brownfield that has mostly reverted to urban forest. But it is curious that few of its interlocutors spend time imagining the site's future. Even the documentary ends by dwelling on its wild and overgrown state as a cautionary tale, although perhaps threatened by “future development.” Indeed, Pruitt-Igoe has, since the early 1970s, been the burial ground of many proposed re-development schemes. Nevertheless, brave souls have launched a new design competition on the 40^th anniversary of the initial demolition. The organizers of the competition feel it is their responsibility to finally lay these ghosts to rest:

No design intervention has ever been staged that would reconcile the remains of Pruitt-Igoe with our contemporary consciousness. If the site registers, it registers as an emptiness whose meaning is ripe but unarticulated to those who live or pass near it. Shall the site ever be liberated? Or is its current condition already an important monument to the memory of the site?

Each city deals with its wounds in a way that is fundamentally reflective of the temperament of its citizens and the institutions they create. I wonder whether this temperament has shifted sufficiently to allow the creation of outcomes that may make a real difference in the way we collectively weave our urban fabric. As a final note, I was tormented throughout the writing of this essay about where I had seen the footage of Pruitt-Igoe being dynamited. And then I remembered: Reggio and Glass's morality play, condeming our hubris on a civilizational scale, has not lost any of its poignancy, or timeliness.

On the Areopagitica: Why Milton’s Defence of Free Speech Remains Almost Unsurpassed but Not Secular

by Tauriq Moosa

As per various stories emerging concerning censorship, I thought it a good time to consider one of the greatest documents defending free speech.

In 1643, the English Parliament instituted the Licensing Order. This meant pre-publication censorship on all printed writings, including and aiming mostly at newspapers. This followed the abolishing, two years earlier, of the Star Chamber, which according to Kevin Marsh, “had been the monarchy's most potent tool of repression for centuries: a court that held secret sessions, without juries, and produced arbitrary judgments... all to please the king.” This blanket censorship, however, disappeared, requiring Parliament to take some action, thus the Licensing Order. But the next quilt of authority was simply knitted from the frayed threads of the previous.

Arrests, search and seizure of books, book burnings and all other classical depictions of authoritarian hatred were the outcome of this Order. The Stationer’s Company, a guild of booksellers, printers and so on, and established by Queen Mary in 1557, was put in charge of dealing out this Order. Hindsight makes those fires brighter and stupidity greater and fear lesser; curled pages to us invite anger at oppression, but in the eyes of the moralisers, it meant something called order.

The great poet, John Milton, delivered a speech in 1644, called Areopagitica (or, its full title Areopagitica: A speech of Mr. John Milton for the liberty of unlicensed printing to the Parliament of England). In it, he made an impassioned plea that rings out today, calling for free thought, speech and reason, for “when complaints are freely heard, deeply considered and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty attained, that wise men look for.”

His most powerful argument is encapsulated in what is surely one of the most beautiful sentences ever written:

A man may be a heretic in the truth, and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.

Here, Milton cut to the heart of the problem.

Belief is not knowledge, it is merely a belief or a formation of viewpoints on a particular subject. Belief backed by evidence, reason, engagement, self-criticism is the ideal of any thinking person – but we cannot expect all our beliefs to follow suit, though we ought, as much possible, to be testing our beliefs against these forms of self-engagement, since we could be wrong.

Milton highlights that even if a belief be absolutely true – “the planet is not on the back of a tortoise” – it is the basis of that belief that highlights whether one is a heretic or not. If your basis of belief is because some pastor or assembly dictates the belief, then anything can be believed. A pastor could claim that condoms increase the spread/danger of AIDs, an assembly could determine that public spending on stem cells is wrong – but no one should accept that just because the pastor or assembly has so determined.

If a group of people decide that a particular piece of writing violates what they consider appropriate morals, attitudes or views, they will then censor that piece of writing, whether through complete obliteration or, worse, modification tailored to the tastes of the mindful moralisers; its existence is one aspect but it is also the idea’s distribution that concerns censors. An idea or viewpoint’s contrarian view will be locked inside its author’s head, forced to rot, since it is denied the sustenance of fellow minds. This is the goal, in any case, of every form of censorship.

But it doesn't work.

The “heresy” that Milton refers to is not Biblical antagonism; it’s not defying the orders of the ruling religious authority (though obviously that’s the definition we assume). Milton’s heresy is about complete domination of thought.

Truth and understanding are not such wares as to be monopolized and traded in by tickets and statutes and standards. We must not think to make a staple commodity of all the knowledge in the land, to mark and license it like our broadcloth and our woolpacks.

Milton, however, must not be viewed as a secularist, fighting to untangle religion's root in political decision-making. He was not against the status quo and indeed was simply advocating that if a view or opinion truly is against the status quo, then so be it. This blasphemy however can be discovered afterwards and the books can be done away with then: blasphemy will reveal itself, so should not concern us before since we might end up lumping in legitimate, albeit controversial, inquiries which could benefit us all, among the things we ought not to see or to have been produced in the first place. The Areopagitica is filled with justifications based upon Bibilical mandates to seek out “God’s work”, in order to understand him. His suggestion was that works should not be censored before publication. There will be many failures and offences, he said, “ere the house of God can be built.”

It is this that makes Milton's argument seem strange. After all, Milton has just indicated that one ought not to believe based on an appeal to authority – but is defending free speech because God has said so. However, Milton can overcome this by indicating that the purpose of life is to discover his god’s purpose, which can only be found by constantly engaging with ideas, forcing them apart, seeking what is true. Indeed, the idea of knowledge leading to proper engagement also made it easier to separate good from evil, since, as Milton says, “good and evil… grow up together almost inseparably.” Milton claims that to fight Adam’s curse, humans require better knowledge overall, despite knowledge being the basis of the curse. In order to know good, Milton says, we must know evil.

Therefore the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer what which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian.

There is little wonder then that Milton’s most famous character is his Satan, in the celebrated long poem Paradise Lost. Satan and what he embodied is so potent, Alasdair MacIntyre says, that this character alone “brought Blake over to the devil’s party, and has been seen as the first Whig.” Satan’s motto is, after all, Non Serviam, which, continues MacIntyre, is “not merely a personal revolt against God, but a revolt against the concept of an ordained and unchangeable hierarchy.”

The point being that the fight for individual liberty means the distancing from the security of larger dominance. Security does not necessarily mean safety though: it only means one is not in danger of intrusion - like having one’s views, opinions and therefore life upended by radical alternatives (that, possibly, might be better). The point being that overarching infringement on individuals was done for the purposes of maintaining, as we have seen, “order” (for the common folk - also known as "power" for the rulers). Satan upset this order as set by god by “rebelling” – though this is in itself quite a complicated matter – but forever served as the catalyst for thought against overarching domination – even if, as all domination claims, it is for the individual’s own good because he is part of a larger group. Milton was evidently in two minds about it, but saw the necessity in both areas.

The beauty of the Areopagitica is that it eloquently outlined and began a conversation from the lips of one of our greatest word-users. Even if, as I’ve highlighted, Milton only began a conversation for free thought - and did so within the narrow confines of religious thought - Milton was spurned on not by anti-religious sentiments but by what he perceived to be a twisting of the very religious sentiments which should make humanity curious, knowledgeable and able to engage with varying and new concepts. Milton feared that due to our inherent ignorance, which can only decrease (or increase if we want to take a Socratic stance, given our awareness of our ignorance) with more knowledge, we are not even in the right position to know whether something should be banned or censored:

He who thinks we are to pitch our tent here, and have attained the utmost prospect of reformation that the mortal glass wherein we contemplate can show us, till we come to beatific vision, that man by this very opinion declares that he is yet far short of truth.

How does someone know that we need not attain more knowledge, simply because the idea appears heretical? Milton’s worry, though apt, was driven by the desire to learn more so that humanity could be closer to God. Milton thought therefore opposing knowledge acquisition was to, essentially, oppose humanity's most important mission, since“he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.”

Only God is so infallible, Milton could claim, as to know what is and is not allowed to be considered. Humans, being infallible and ignorant and full of sin, would be going against their very nature and design to deny knowledge, since they would be claiming to have that knowledge anyway: how can we know if it is good or bad unless we know what it is!

The irony should be obvious now: Humanity’s fall was supposedly through its acquisition of knowledge in the Garden. For Milton, the fruit of our failure becomes the seeds of our salvation.

The reason for highlighting Milton’s motivations and justifications is to not allow us to paint a secular portrait of this religious man. This does not discredit his brilliance, talent and genius, nor should it lessen the power of the Areopagitica. But in order to know our history of fighting for freedom of thought and speech, we should consider one of the most important documents to be the Areopagitica. But in so doing, we should be as fully aware of its origin and justifications as possible. As Milton himself tried to do, knowing an origin can help clarify a path for the future.

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The Areopagitica remains one of the best documents for freedom ever conceived. But, one that remains central to me, will have to be a little book by another John, published in the same year as Darwin’s Origin of Species, called On Liberty.

Perceptions of Freedom: Some Geographies of Urban Protest

by Misha Lepetic

There are only two kinds of freedom: 
your freedom to do what you like, and 
our freedom to determine what kind of a society we want to live in.
~Gerald Frug 

One phenomenon that the Occupy Wall Street movement has crystallized in remarkable fashion is the unapologetic negotiation of the physical occupation of urban space. But before considering the context within which OWS has been operating, and what its successes and challenges may be, it is instructive to look into the deeper history of public space in New York. While some observers have examined how the spatial reality of the city, as presently constituted, influences the ability of its citizens to assemble and, implicitly, protest, I would submit that said spatial reality is really a symptom of not just physical geography, but also the landscape of legal precedents, political negotiations and accretions. This is an enormous – and enormously interesting – topic, so I will attempt to limit my remarks to the history of New York as seen through its street grid, its negotiation of what appear to be rights, and the intersection of political and commercial reality.

Thus it is a timely coincidence that 2011 marks the anniversary of the original “grid” plan, as conceived by the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811. Prior to its adoption by New York, street-grid planning had already had a long history – consider, among others, Francisco Pizarro’s original plan for Lima, Peru, conceived in the mid-16^th century. The grid was seen by planners as an attractive alternative to the messy results of “organic” growth, that is, growth that lead to narrow alleys, winding streets and tortuous property claims. Such bottom-up density also made the broader provision of services difficult, and seemed to encourage the spread of disease and crime. Thus an authoritative master plan was the perfect means to sweep away the accumulated social and economic flotsam and jetsam that came with the decades of  thousands of citizens scrapping and scraping for economic survival/prosperity over decades. (This tendency to overly treasure the act of tabula rasa continues to manifest itself today, most frequently as usually disastrous slum clearances in the cities of the developing world).

However, these same planners were confronted with a dilemma: by creating cleaner city layouts, the same designs that encourage mobility, commerce and interaction may, at the same time, encourage unwanted assembly, whereby citizens congregate in order to air grievances, hold strikes and generally foment the kind of unrest that might bring down a government. It is one thing to be all in favour of freedom of assembly or expression, but quite another to embody those rights within the built environment itself, no matter (or especially) what UNESCO might hold dear.

In the case of New York at the beginning of the 19th century, the mere suggestion of a master plan was enough to raise the hackles of existing merchants and landowners. This is wholly unsurprising: students of urban history will recall that, immediately following the Great Fire of London in 1666, Sir Christopher Wren surveyed the heart of London, much of whose medieval heart had been cauterized by the blaze. His new plan was sensible and dramatic, creating new axes that linked significant monuments by broad boulevards. Submitted to Charles II an astonishing 10 days after the fire, its implementation was subsequently torpedoed by the merchants and landlords whose properties would have been endangered by the redevelopment (see Barnett, pp5-8).

Initially, the city government of New York fared no better in its attempts to coax landowners into accepting any sort of a master plan. Perhaps not quite cognizant of the history lesson that not even the King of England could stand in the way of such a fractious lot, the municipality resorted to the authority of the State Legislature, which appointed a commission of the great and the good. As stated by the exhibition The Greatest Grid, currently on display at the Museum of the History of New York:

Commissioners Gouverneur Morris and John Rutherford were wealthy residents of the New York City area with long histories in land administration and business affairs. Albany resident Simeon DeWitt was among the most accomplished surveyors in the country. But we have no record of why these commissioners were chosen, who selected them, or how they worked together. We have only their published Remarks and their plan, submitted on March 22, 1811.

The commissioners’ most important decision was to make a rectangular city, rejecting the circles, ovals, and star-shaped plazas that were found in European cities and at home in the nation’s new capital of Washington, DC. They envisioned a city of “right-angled houses… cheap to build and… convenient to live in.” Acknowledging the high price of Manhattan real estate [already?! –Auth.], they wanted to maximize the development capacity of the city and reserved a limited area for public purposes. Reflecting the commissioners’ real estate orientation, these functions were mostly located on unlikely building sites: the reservoir and observatory on rugged, rocky terrain; the market on a salt marsh. Their plan was both visionary and practical.

Clearly, the plan’s “practicality” favours a commercial orientation for the city. Concern with public spaces was minimal – as an example, the design competition for Central Park would only be won by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1858. In fact, public spaces had to be wrested from the grid, one by one. Surprisingly, it was the larger landowners, like Samuel B. Ruggles, who advocated for their value:

The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 preserved three early roads – the Bowery, Broadway, and Bloomingdale Road – and called their elongated, irregularly shaped intersection Union Place (referring to the “union” of these roads). In 1830, the owners of the property around Union Place, including Samuel B. Ruggles, petitioned the Common Council to enlarge the area for public use. The lobbying effort was successful, and in 1831 Union Square, as it was renamed, became an official public space. (exhibition notes, The Greatest Grid)

It is interesting to note how many of New York’s public spaces are naturally carved out of the inverted triangles that are formed by Bowery and Broadway’s rude shanking of the grid. But it is even more important to realize that New York’s planners had little concern for what we would today consider a well-rounded approach to the city. Even the contemporaneous ideal of the Monumental City as espoused by Wren and later Haussmann, let alone L’Enfant’s radial complexification of DC’s own Cartesian grid, were shunted aside for the commercial benefit of a rapidly growing city. This gesture has been admiringly remarked upon by European commentators as varied as Le Corbusier and Rem Koolhaas as a particularly pure example of planning. But on the whole, New Yorkers were, it seemed, content to leave the physical manifestation of the new Republic’s constitutional ideals to its younger, swampier cousin down south.

*

At a recent discussion hosted by the Center for Architecture here in New York, a large and diverse panel considered, from multiple perspectives, how OWS has raised the issue of what freedom, if any, people have to assemble in the city. I would like to recapitulate two perspectives, in order to illustrate the conundrums that OWS or any movement like it, will face not just now but for the foreseeable future of assembly in New York.

Lisa Keller, an urban historian and author of Triumph of Order: Democracy and Public Space in New York & London, continues our thread of how the original grid plan has left a lasting legacy, as she recounted a recent conversation with a “high-level New York official” concerning his “options” regarding the occupiers of Zuccotti Park (35 minutes ff., all transcriptions mine and edited for length and clarity):

You could go back to 1811, because it was that grid that started our problem. In their wisdom, our city fathers…decided that land was too valuable to leave as public open space. In fact, commercial development trumped everything else. When I was editing the Encyclopedia of New York City…I added an entry on “squares” and if you look at it you’ll see the first listing ever done of squares in New York – except they’re not really squares. We don’t really have squares in New York. We have something we call squares, but they’re actually parks. New York City squares are not like squares in Europe, or London, which is what my comparative study is about; they are very different.

When I was in City Hall, speaking to this high-level official – and I do think back on that conversation, because I knew from the conversation that [Zuccotti Park] would be cleared in a matter of days - I knew he was looking for some desperate straws to pick at. But one of the things that I said to this gentleman was, ‘Free speech and protest in New York City is America’s great NIMBY. It is the group home; it is the homeless shelter. We all think it’s a great idea – we all believe in it – but nobody wants it there in front of them. Nobody wants it on their street.’

Here are a few evergreens about public speech that most people don’t realize. The people in Zuccotti Park kept saying “It’s my right to have free speech.” In New York State in 1872, they passed a law that said, if you have 20 or more people [assembled], you have to get a permit. That followed the Draft Riots, [which] really was precipitated by the Orange Riots of 1871. Very few people know about this law. So, you can’t really have free assembly. Secondly, free speech was not a guaranteed First Amendment right until 1925, with the Gitlow decision… Everything we’re doing today, including Zuccotti Park, was more or less written in stone by 1900, [where] the principles were established where we can and cannot go, and public parks are one of the places where we cannot go. Almost since Day One they have been limited in terms of political access. The right of protest in New York City has historically been a relative one.

Whereupon Keller goes on to contrast the difference between tolerance for this kind of protest versus tolerance for commercial activities, such as street fairs, parades, movie shoots, etc etc. Particularly salient is her comparison that, in 2004, 750,000 people were allowed to demonstrate in London’s Hyde Park, whereas no such gathering was allowed to take place in Central Park. It bears mentioning, too, that Hyde Park is also home to the famous Speakers’ Corner, perhaps the only truly protected physical location for free speech in the entire world – and that in a country that, famously, has yet to codify its own constitution.

*

What of Zuccotti Park itself? Didn’t the organizers choose wisely, as the old movie saying goes? As landscape architect Lance Jay Brown noted during the same panel, its proximity to both City Hall, the Financial District, as well as easy access to many bus routes and subway stations made it exceptionally well-suited for “occupation.” Furthermore, the size of the park is so small that it creates tremendous intimacy very quickly, and even a small group can make it seem full. Indeed, when it was fully occupied with several hundred protesters and their jury-rigged infrastructure, it seemed ready to burst.

However, by far the most important aspect of Zuccotti was its status as a so-called “bonus park”, or publicly owned private space (POPS). As Nate Berg writes, “It’s a corporatization of the public square of yore that’s somewhat symbolic of the larger systems the demonstrators are protesting. It also raises some questions about what’s allowable in a public space that’s technically not owned by the public.” So while the phrase “publicly owned private space” sounds like a paradox of Epimenidean proportions, it nevertheless turned out to be a crafty insertion of protest into a built environment that, as we have seen above, seems to provide little, if any opportunity to physically do so.

Speaking at the panel, sociologist Gregory Smithsimon noted that their creation, in 1961 (another anniversary year!), established the precedent that:

Bonus plazas…are really spaces that are trades – the public gets a square foot of plaza and the developer gets up to ten square feet of additional usable office space [in the form of higher buildings]. Public space is [also] a space where social conflicts get negotiated. To give you an example, the occupiers did not want to negotiate with the Bloomberg Administration. They were driven by anarchist [principles], and anarchists don’t make demands. They just do stuff themselves, right? They don’t demand that you clean up Wall Street, they say, ‘we’ll occupy it, we’ll take it over ourselves.’ That’s why there were no demands. But the Bloomberg Administration said that they needed to clean up the park, or that the occupiers would be shut down – so [the occupiers] cleaned it up. Then the Administration said that the gas-powered generators were too dangerous, and so they got pedal-powered generators. The Administration said that they needed someplace to go to the bathroom, so they got port-a-potties. There’s this ongoing negotiation, and I think that what’s unfortunate is the use of police force terminates that democratic discussion. It would have been a very interesting discussion if the Administration had said, ‘We want you to leave, what would it take?’ Would that be a tax on the 1%? Affordable housing? A jobs program? Regulating the banks?

The thing that is particularly interesting about bonus plazas as a type of public space is that they are “leading indicators.” You can see the shape of the city to come first represented in these bonus plazas. In 2008 I wrote an article noting a sense of hubris in the new public spaces, that developers thought that there would no longer be conflict in these spaces, but conflict in these spaces is exactly what happened. If you understand public space as a conflict but the person building it does not, it’s very easy to come in and take that space over. (54 minutes ff.)

As a consequence of OWS, Smithsimon expects hearings that will subject bonus plazas to greater regulation – perhaps in the form of more restricted hours, which is a privilege that developers have been asking for since the law’s passage (ironically, the city has never trusted developers to maintain “reasonable” opening times, hence most POPS have remained open around the clock).

However, the dialogue that OWS has opened up may, even here, be of benefit. He noted that before William Whyte’s work in the 1970’s, developers could get away with building any kind of park and still receive their building bonus. Whyte realized that while no design restrictions at all would result in failed design, heuristics concerning linear feet of seating, minimum number of trees, etc, could give us better outcomes. Whyte also knew that too many restrictions would fail us as well. He intuitively understood the generative and incomplete nature of city life, and how good design creates the setting for these qualities. In this same regard, Smithsimon’s points out our responsibility to attend these hearings, in order to advocate for different kinds of activities that go beyond the “passive use” that has determined much of the fate of “public space” in New York. By advocating different kinds of active use, the hope is that New Yorkers will regain rights to the city that were withheld from them 200 years ago by the act of the Commissioners' Plan of 1811. Referring back to UNESCO’s Urban policies and the right to the city:

The right to the city is a vehicle for urban change, in which all urban dwellers are urban citizens; it creates space in which citizens can define their needs but, in order to appropriate substantive citizenship, citizens must claim rights of participation, and allow others the same rights.

I cannot think of more necessary rights than the ones to speech and assembly. If OWS helps designers and planners recapture this right for the urban public, it will have done much good indeed.

Thanks to Rachel Signer for OWS photo and general OWS inspiration.

Beyraja: from 1947 to 1971 and beyond...

by Omar Ali

“agli wari beyraja peya tey chhadna nahin...” (the next time anarchy occurs; don’t miss your chance...)

The dream of a violent and destructive “revolution” that will “sweep away this sorry scheme of things entire and remake it nearer to heart’s desire” may or may not be an old idea. Some think it is derived from the apocalyptic visions of various Judeo-Christian cults and prophets, others that it is a relatively new idea that arose in post-enlightenment Europe and got exported to the rest of the world. Whatever the case, it is an idea that permeates modern millenarian ideologies like communism, and from that fecund source it has found its way into Islamism and dozens of other ideologies that yearn for total transfromation rather than incremental change. We in the subcontinent have not yet seen an organized premeditated revolution akin to the Russian or Chinese experience, but in the 20^th century, we did see at least two episodes of very violent and sudden re-ordering of affairs, once in 1947 and then in 1971.

Neither episode was marked by anarchy in every corner of the subcontinent; the anarchy of 1947 was especially concentrated in West Pakistan and East Punjab. Many terrible massacres and crimes occurred in other parts of North India and Bengal, but Punjab was by far the worst hit and the most totally transformed.  In West Pakistan, countless prosperous Hindus and Sikhs lost lands and businesses and moved to India (or died in the attempt). All this property was then reassigned to new owners. Keep in mind that urban property in particular had been heavily concentrated in the hands of Hindus and Sikhs. e.g., all of Anarkali bazar in Lahore was in Hindu hands prior to partition and on the main road (Mall road) there was only one Muslim-owned building (Shah din Building). Almost all cinemas and other valuable commercial property were owned by Hindus and Sikhs. Evacuee property boards were set up to try and bring some order to this process but the administration was as virginal as the state. A very small number of Muslim officials suddenly found themselves in the position of deciding the fate of property and assets worth billions. In the ensuing scramble, the most enterprising, the best connected, and the least scrupulous managed to grab vast wealth and opportunities, while millions didn’t even realize the full significance of what was happening.

Terrible massacres and riots were not just the result of deep religious hatreds or the sudden eruption of primal human savagery; enterprising crooks took advantage of the anarchy of partition to get rid of competitors and anyone whose property looked ripe for plucking. As matters stabilized, terrible crimes and atrocities disappeared into the black hole of memory and the new elite got busy embellishing its own mythology of “deliverance from the Hindu yoke”, with little mention of how this “deliverance” involved the looting of existing property and the takeover of institutions and positions suddenly left vacant by the departure of the Hindu and Sikh elite.

As far as I know, no one has published a detailed look at how many of the current Pakistani elite are composed of descendants of those who vaulted into elite status in 1947, but the proportion cannot be insignificant. And the effects of partition did not just include the upward mobility of some and destruction of others; everyone paid a price when long established traditions vanished overnight and the urgent ambition of the newly rich combined with shallow nationalism and millenarian fantasies to define the new world.  An anecdote from someone who failed to grab the opportunities available may be a better guide to how these events were assimilated into new values; an old man in our village in West Punjab was near death in 1970 and like most people in our village, was dying after a lifetime of poverty and hardship. He had become incoherent but a few minutes before the end, he suddenly became lucid and grabbing the hand of a younger relative, passed on this deathbed advice:  “agli wari beyraja peya tey chaddna nahin...” (the next time anarchy occurs; don’t miss your chance...). Beyraja (absence of Raj) here refers to the time in 1947 when, for a few months, every property owned by Hindus and Sikhs was suddenly there for the taking.  He, like most people, had missed his chance. He did not want his younger relatives to miss the next one.

Property was also suddenly available in East Punjab, where Muslim peasants were being driven out in a very systematic campaign of intimidation and massacre. The exchange was not equal in terms of property because the Sikh cultivators who were driven East had lost more than they could get from Muslims moving West, simply because Sikhs in West Punjab had held more land than Muslims in East Punjab. But even so there was always opportunity for the better connected and more ruthless to edge out those who lacked the necessary entrepreneurial drive.  The Hindu commercial class driven into India was even less likely to find commercial property worth a tenth of what they left behind. In their case, their subsequent entry into the Indian elite may have owed more to hard work and the enhanced drive of those driven to take refuge in another land, but again, the results cannot have been equally distributed. Many a gentle soul may have floundered in poverty while those with greater drive and ambition leapt ahead. And for all of them, “winners” or “losers”, the psychological impact of partition cannot have been entirely benign. One under-examined impact is the way both Indian and Pakistani migrants lost their connection with their old culture as they left the land where that culture had been born and bred. The subsequent success of modern “fundamentalist” and nationalist ideologies in migrants on both sides, and their continued migration to a hundred other countries after the first migration shook them loose, also owes something to the events of partition.

The events of 1971, while very different in their causes and in the mechanics of transfer of power, ultimately involved anarchy and violence at levels similar or greater than those seen in partition. Known prominent Awami League sympathizers were obviously targeted at the start of military action in East Pakistan, but it was the Hindus in East Pakistan who became the primary victims of a policy that can only be described as ethnic cleansing. It is common for both Pakistan and Bangladesh to underplay the “Hindu-centric” aspect of this policy (for different reasons), but its impact was dramatic. Practically the entire Hindu population of East Pakistan was forced to escape to India. Most of them ended up in pathetic refugee camps and the death toll from disease there was much greater than the death toll from bullets and bombs in East Pakistan itself. Come December, they could go back to BD, but even though the Awami League had a relatively secular outlook and may have been genuinely willing to welcome them back, getting back valuable property was not always easy.   Army action had been accompanied by extensive looting and in many cases the looters were locals, working with or without the Pakistani army. Urdu-speaking migrants from Bihar and North India who were ideologically aligned with the Pakistani army took the lead in many cases, but as in any period of anarchy, local Bengali “entrepreneurs” were also able to step forward and this part of the story is not as well-advertised.

In any case, the Urdu-speaking migrant population did not enjoy its opportunity for loot, plunder and local domination for too long in East Pakistan; with the Pakistani army’s surrender on December 16^th, they suddenly found themselves on the losing side in a civil war, which is never a happy place to be. Hundreds, probably thousands, were massacred within a few days while others found refuge in overpopulated, disease-ridden camps, where some are living to this day, waiting for Pakistan to take them back.  Now it was their turn to lose property and positions and naturally there were Bengali entrepreneurs around to take advantage of these opportunities. In some cases, these Bengali entrepreneurs were the same people who had loyally served the Pak army in its 8 month long crackdown and now managed to switch sides in time. A researcher interviewing Bengali rape victims many years later asked one of them why she did not try to get justice for her suffering? She replied that the same person who took me to the Pakistani army camp in 1971 is the local MP today. Where would I go for justice? A new elite was born in BD, just as one had been born in West Pakistan at partition. And some of those joining the club were as enterprising and unprincipled as the ones who heard opportunity knocking in 1947 and grabbed it with both hands.

The point is not to rake up bygones or blame one country or one nationality or to besmirch the name of a particular ideology or religion. It is just to point out that in all such events, when the dust settles it is not only (or not even mostly) the ideologues and true-believers that have changed position in society; enterprising crooks take advantage and move up, and many gentle souls find themselves sliding down the socio-economic ladder. The populations targeted for cleansing are very variable; Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Bengalis, Punjabis, aristocrats, feudals, whatever…and their crimes, real and imagined, always loom large in propaganda. But all too often, “rivers of blood” are just that; rivers of blood. The price is very high and the reward unevenly and unfairly distributed. As millenarian excitement rises again in Pakistan and the dream of a new “revolution” takes hold in the middle class, it is worth keeping some of this in mind.The revolution, if it comes, may not be what they were looking for...

"A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery..."

How Not To Write: Maniza Naqvi's Piece on Hitchens

by Tauriq Moosa

I had chosen not to write extensively about the late Christopher Hitchens, since his contributions to my life’s betterment is of no real interest to anyone save my future biographers. And in looking at Maniza Naqvi’s piece on Hitchens I am, in fact, still not focused on Hitchens but on a point much broader: using colourful language in place of arguments is unhelpful to, I think, everyone. To be clear and upfront, I adored Hitchens’ work but that is, in fact, irrelevant to why Naqvi’s piece is a thin piece of tripe that stays afloat on nothing but its own hot air and strained eloquence. This is the type of thing Hitchens attacked: obscurity dressed in eloquence, masking hollow ‘arguments’. Indeed, try and read the first sentence of her piece and see if it makes sense. Come back to me if you know what she's trying to say.

To summarise the entire piece: Ms Naqvi did not like Hitchens. The end.

It is one of many ‘critical’ pieces following his recent death. However, I find it doubtful you will acquire better critical pieces now that the great man is dead than were written while he was alive. No insight can, I think, be gained on his arguments now that his corpse is cold, except that critics can be certain that they will receive no brilliant and biting counter-attacks.

Naqvi’s piece contains things like:

This type of thinking is hitched to a fine pitch for the American audience, in the packaging and selling, in my opinion, of a slimy toad: the blow hard, alcoholic—poser, social climber, wannabe—the unoriginal mediocre cheerleader of war and mass murder who made a career of being draped in mounds of other peoples’ books and supposedly having been himself well read and writing well, all the while being a fraud—and an Iago to America’s Othello.

Oh, I see what she did there! Using colourful language and phrasing, Ms Naqvi managed to write an entire piece without saying anything. Even when dissected, this cumbersome paragraph tells us something extraordinary: Someone didn't like someone else. The world just became dimmer.

The toad, an inebriated toxic decay wrapped inside the blubber of mid life crisis, appeared to himself, a legend, from a bar stool smoky view of the mirror. So he hitched his sense of self to some confusion with Dorian Gray.

On and on. There is nothing to use, nothing to point at. Her whole essay is itself nothing but a fog of eloquence hiding the shrivelled entity of hatred mewling in the corner. An entity that is not interesting and entirely boring to anyone seeking some kind of increase in knowledge.

It’s nothing but character attack, after character attack. So what if he was an alcoholic and smoker? So are many great people, who, like Hitchens, still managed to produce work that, unlike Naqvi's piece, stimulated thought (even if one disagreed). What does she mean by mid-life crisis?

I am consciously not trying to make a ‘tone argument’ – that is, to say her ‘tone’ is right or wrong or bad, etc. The problem is not her tone. People can write in whatever way they wish. The main problem is the essay is entirely tone.

That is, it contains no sustained argument or point; sentences crash into full stops, like rough seas into rocks. By its sheer force of emotion we are meant to… what? Agree? But, what are we supposed to agree with? That Ms Naqvi disliked Hitchens? Sure, I can agree to that. But who cares? Many people disliked and hated him. It makes no more impact on me than that people read astrology columns.

The piece drones on, using “Hitch” and “hitch” as both the man and the verb. Because that is, you know, so clever and has never been done before. It’s colourful and dramatic and belongs in an emo-kid’s diary, not an essay that is expected to convey something of substance.

I’ve read many of the pieces praising Hitchens and those criticising. You can disagree with both, since both types contain his arguments and views on the world. They tell us why the writer in question admired or criticised Hitchens. There are things we can do with these pieces. With Ms Naqvi’s piece we can do nothing but feel the pounding of her attacks: it’s like being hit with a hollow hammer, since it’s mainly irritating but you can see what she's trying to do.

Again the main problem is that she can sustain several hundred words because the whole piece is entirely colourful language. Execution is not really her problem, it's her substance. She has nothing to provide the world in this piece. I don’t care whether someone adored Hitchens or hated him – I’m interested in why and what arguments moved people either way. I care about this for every public figure. Personal feelings bore me, as they should everyone.

This flaccid piece deserves condemnation; not for its attack on Hitchens but for its insult to our time, mortality and intelligence. It is as childish as it is regrettable. This is not what one expects from adults, but from those who think they’re ‘deep’ and recently stopped using fractions when giving their age. The fewer pieces of writing that make up for their lack of substance with forced eloquence the better. We wouldn’t have so many postmodernist posers and professors (not mutually exclusive), we would have a better conception of what constitutes an actual argument, and so on. I don’t think one should never publish one’s feelings on things -- but for goodness’ sake, make it interesting; make is sustainable; give us something to chew on that’s not made of lukewarm air.

It reminds me of Hitchens’ mother saying the only true sin is to be boring. If so, what a sinner we have here.

(In a joyful moment, her piece did produce the best comment I've ever read on the Internet by A.C. Douglas: "Since when has 3QD accepted articles written in crayon?")

Taking it underground

by Misha Lepetic

If you shut up truth, and bury it underground, it will but grow.
~Emile Zola

The underground – and particularly the urban underground – has always been a preferred site for writers and commentators to project their dystopian visions. After all, the underground has always implied illegality or illegitimacy – the underworld, while in reality transacting its business on the street or in skyscrapers far above it, has never ceased to be associated with the concealed nature of the subterranean.

Some of these visions were purely fiction, but nevertheless instructive. Around the turn of the last century, two works come to mind: E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops (1909) imagines a techno-dystopia where the population not only lives almost exclusively underground, but physical contact is shunned in favour of an experience that is wholly technologically mediated. H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) held an even more gruesome intimation – the underground race of the Morlocks operated the machinery that enabled the peaceful and passive surface-dwelling Eloi to prosper; in turn, the Eloi served as an uncomplaining and plentiful food source for the subterraneans.

More recently, authors have mined the actual depths of our cities, and have constructed the world beneath our feet as a specific urban form. Some, like Margaret Morton’s Tunnel, are legitimate documents of underground misery. Others are largely fabrications that exploit our desire to believe that all sorts of unfortunate histories are unspooling themselves beneath our privileged lives. How could it be otherwise? All those homeless and crazy people have to go somewhere, and wouldn’t it be nice if they all congregated in their own communities, but had the tact to do it at a graceful remove from ourselves?

However, for architects and designers, what lies beneath the city is temptation.  Especially for cities that formerly had nowhere to go but up, and have exhausted that resource, there remains increasingly nowhere else to go, but down. Thus a new form is not being co-created out necessity and survival, as above, but is being deliberately designed. What kind of a new form is this, and what are its chances of success?

Keen observers such as William Whyte are wary of the consequences of even designing open spaces below the street level, let alone underground. In his supremely enjoyable and crystal-clear documentary, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, Whyte looks at what makes any urban public space effective. In the case of spaces recessed below the street, our abiding anxiety of leaving ground level discourages participation in what seem like otherwise well-designed spaces.

Unless there is a compelling reason, don’t sink [plazas] down or put them way up…Most sunken plazas are empty – or nearly empty – most of the time. The action is up top, on the street. But what about Rockefeller Plaza? It’s sunken and it’s very popular. So it is. But look carefully, and you will see that most people are up top, looking down. It’s an amphitheatre, and the people down below are the show…People looking at people, looking at other people.

But there is more to Rockefeller Center than the fabled skating rink and its gallery of gawkers. The underground shopping arcade, part of the original 1933 Art Deco plan, was, in 1999, characterized by the Times as mostly unsuccessful: “Since 1933 the Art Deco labyrinth has been traversed by millions of office workers, out-of-towners and subway shortcutters. But for years many shoppers and merchants have seen the concourse not as a potentially exciting retail universe underlying an architectural icon, but as something else: a basement.”

Much to the chagrin of preservationists, the developers went ahead with a redesign that destroyed much of the original Art Deco sensibility, although I must say that the aesthetic’s spirit remains intact. What is more germane, however, is to ask, Does the space work? In my opinion, it does not. Its labyrinthine character is still dominant and anxiety-inducing, and the ceilings are sufficiently low that one feels on one’s shoulders the weight of the skyscrapers above. Whyte’s cornerstone observation, that a successful urban public space facilitates what city-dwellers are most interested in doing – watching other people – is something that one can only engage when one leaves the concourse, heads up to street level, and joins the rest of the people watching the skaters. The best one can do in the concourse itself is shop, and scurry along, although most people seem to do only the latter.

 

Failed subterranean sites are not exempt from radical design triage; like any intervention, this triage is an ongoing feature of the ongoing discourse of urban renewal and redevelopment. This is as it should be. However, much of our pain seems to be entirely self-inflicted. The notorious razing of New York’s Penn Station led to the construction of Madison Square Garden and the unceremonious shoving-under of Penn Station, a design so awful that architect Louis Kahn died of a heart attack in its men’s room in 1974. It remains virtually unchanged today and hopes for converting the nearby post office are mired in red tape and budgetary crises. The only act of architectural destruction perhaps equal to the razing of Penn Station occurred in Paris in 1971, when the market at Les Halles, affectionately anointed by Zola as “the stomach of Paris”, was replaced by a street-level park and four floors of underground shopping. What was the consequence? Carolyn Steel writes in Hungry City that

the citizens of Paris…have had over three decades to lament the loss of Les Halles, the beauty of which put even Covent Garden in the shade. Its fabled glass and iron halls were demolished to make room for an underground shopping centre whose chief contribution to the urban landscape is a series of giant plastic tubes descending into a gaping pit: a desolate, crime-ridden wasteland in the heart of the city.

Like Rockefeller Center, Forum des Halles is in the heart of the city, and is co-located with a significant public transit hub, in this case the Châtelet-Les-Halles. But as with Rockefeller Center’s basement concourse, this confluence of factors is insufficient to guarantee its participation as a vital aspect of the urban fabric. The Project for Public Spaces, whose founding was inspired by Whyte’s work, lists the Forum des Halles on its Hall of Shame for public parks:

Forum des Halles is essentially a subterranean mall; it completely disorients you from the real city on the surface. To experience a city is to be aware of one place flowing into another, to encounter a staggering variety of stimuli continually flowing all around you. But traversing Forum des Halles is a deadening experience; every time through we have been gripped by the urge to leave as quickly as possible.

It is covered aboveground by a park that no one ever seems to visit, consisting of a fussy, unconnected set of elements. We encountered the ultimate sign of a failed space at one of the entranceways, where we found some of the most overt drug-dealing we have ever witnessed in Paris.

Paris has not stopped trying to fix Les Halles. In 2007, a design competition won by local architects promised a €120 million overhaul that would see shopping – if not the market – restored to the street level (although in this regard Barcelona’s Santa Caterina market sets the bar extremely high). While the project was intended to be completed by 2012, as of late 2010,

resistance has sprung up surprisingly to protect the adjacent garden, and is now threatening the whole redevelopment program.

Work was planned to start in May, but a court suspended it after a group of residents appealed against the destruction of the much-loved Lalanne garden, a rare oasis of vegetation in a city where green spaces are scarce.

"It's the destruction of a now mature garden. The felling of 343 trees in an urban environment really hurts," Gilles Pourbaix, the president of local residents' group Accomplir, told Reuters on the terrace of the Pere Tranquille cafe.

In this way, even a design widely acknowledged by the local community and government as a failure, manages to paradoxically generate the circumstances that further propagate its own permanence. One ought to also note that there is a significant difference between the idea of a ‘market’ and ‘shopping’ in the sense that the former is participatory and generative of the urban experience, whereas the latter revolves around consumption and is fundamentally transactional. Since the 1971 demolition removed the market (to Orly) and replaced it with shopping, one would do well to question whether any re-design could recapture the vitality that Les Halles once had (one can witness the same transformation being wrought with the displacement of the Fulton Fish Market in lower Manhattan; the replacement is indisputably shopping, and the area is the poorer for it. This difference and the ensuing loss is especially poignant when the New Amsterdam Market makes its weekly appearance nearby).

This dismal record, however, has not stopped people from trying to revive disused underground places. In Washington, DC, discussions are under way to pressgang a series of abandoned train tunnels beneath Dupont Circle back into service. Note the similarities to both Les Halles and Rockefeller Center: all three sites are in the center of their respective cities, and all three sites have access to an extremely busy public transit artery – in the last case, the Dupont Circle stop of the DC Metro. Nevertheless, the tunnels beneath Dupont Circle have already proven immune to development:

In the mid-1990s a developer named Geary Simon opened a dreary food court called Dupont Down Under in the 75,000 square-foot space, but the project was shuttered just 15 months later amid a flurry of lawsuits. After evicting Simon for failure to pay rent, the city ended up stuck in court on the matter for years, the lease eventually transferring to one of Simon's subtenants, a health club chain that opted never to develop the tunnels.

The hope of the groups intent on developing this area now rest on creating an arts and culture scene, replete with galleries, a performance center, eateries and the ubiquitous “major retail anchor.”

In New York, a similar effort is under way on the Lower East Side. With the runaway success of the High Line, the boosters of this project have craftily dubbed their project the Low Line. More interestingly, one of their proposals is to use fibre-optic cables to shuttle natural light underground, which, in conjunction with the 20-foot high ceilings, gives the space a fighting chance of providing the kind of fluid space that will allow for the kind of milieu that Whyte found successful.

But even a great design can be tripped up by funding shortfalls and bureaucratic complexities. For example, for the Dupont Circle project, “while the District of Columbia owns the tunnels themselves, many of the logical entrances to the underground space lay in the middle of small parks, like Dupont Circle itself, that are controlled by the National Park Service. And…there is no shortage of historic preservation forces ready to pounce on anything that doesn't conform to the classical ideal of the federal city.” In the case of the Low Line, the entire property is owned by the MTA, and the designers have received helpful news from a senior official, who simply stated, “We’re looking at it very seriously because we need the money.” At least on a city level, there are few things that focus the mind like a budget crisis.

The subtler peril of these projects, however, is the challenge that they extend to designers and citizens. To repeat the observation made by the Project for Public Spaces, “To experience a city is to be aware of one place flowing into another, to encounter a staggering variety of stimuli continually flowing all around you.” By definition, subterranean places are already segregated from the city. Few points of entry lead into a nearly complete isolation from the rest of the urban fabric (this was the genius of the High Line – it was already integrated into the city, and in a completely unique way. It was up to the designers to accentuate this attribute; there was no need to create it). This isolation incites designers to create a total experience, thereby denying the generative capacities of a market. In fact, the subterranean site conforms neatly into Martin Murray’s conceptualization of a postmodern urban form, which looks at cities as

characterized by the partition…into gentrified ‘renaissance sites’ of privatized luxury, on the one hand, and impoverished spaces of confinement where the poor, the ‘socially excluded’, and the homeless are forced to survive, on the other…The exponential expansion of such fortified enclaves as gated residential communities, enclosed shopping malls, cocooned office complexes and luxury entertainment sites offers a globally tested mechanism for the propertied middle classes to insulate themselves from the threats – real or imagined – to their physical security and sense of well-being. (p9)

While Murray’s concern is with the kind of security-obsessed enclaves springing up in emerging world-class cities like Johannesburg and São Paulo, it is apparent that the anxiety of going underground, inculculated in us as a species, that will likely lead to even greater security and surveillance in these environments. And it is certainly ironic that the class of undesirables documented by Margaret Morton might very well be the neighbors to – or perhaps even be displaced by – such developments. In the end, it might be useful to ask ourselves, What would be so undesirable about leaving these structures to humble but useful functions, such as growing mushrooms – or even just to the past itself?

The Case Against Santa

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

As we have noted previously on this blog, Christmas is a drag.  The holiday’s norms and founding mythologies are repugnant, especially when compared to its more humane cousin, Thanksgiving.  The story of the nativity doesn’t make much sense; moreover, it seems odd to celebrate an occasion that involved the slaughter of innocent children.  And the other founding myth - the myth of Santa and the North Pole - is one of a morally tone-deaf autocrat who delivers toys to the children of well-off parents rather than life-saving basic goods to the most needy.  But, when you think about it, the Santa myth is far worse than even that. 

To start, the Christmas mythology has it that Santa is a being who is morally omniscient - he knows whether we are bad or good, and in fact keeps a record of our acts.  Additionally he is somnically omniscient – he sees us when we’re sleeping, he knows when we’re awake.  Santa has unacceptable capacities for monitoring our actions, and he exercises them!  In a similar vein, Santa takes himself to be entitled to enter our homes, in the night and while we’re not looking, despite the fact that we have locked the doors.  In other words, Santa does not respect our privacy.  He watches us, constantly. 

This is important because the moral value of our actions is largely determined by our motives for performing them.  Performing the action that morality requires is surely good; however, when the morally required act is performed for the wrong reasons, the morality of the act is diminished.  Acting for the right reasons is a condition for being worthy of moral praise; and, correlatively, the blame that follows a morally wrong action is properly mitigated when the agent can show the purity of her motives. 

The trouble with Santa’s surveillance is that it affects our motives.  When we know that we are being watched by an omniscient judge looking to mete out rewards and punishments, we find ourselves with strong reasons to act for the sake of getting the reward and avoiding the punishment.  But in order for our actions to have moral worth, they must be motivated by moral reasons, rather than narrowly self-interested ones.   In short, under Santa’s watchful eye, our motivations become clouded, and so does the morality of our actions. 

The exclamation at the end of Santa Claus is Coming to Town captures the moral ambiguity that the Santa myth imposes on us: “You better be good for goodness sake.” Could there be a more confused moral prescription?  On the one hand, if the expression aims to exhort us to act on the basis of properly moral motives (for the sake of goodness itself), then the Myth of Santa undercuts our reasons to be moral.  Apparently, the account runs as follows: Santa keeps tabs on what you do and when you sleep.  He will punish or reward you on the basis of your performance.  So you should be good for purely moral motives.  The trouble, again, is that after having given a variety of non-moral, strictly self-interested reasons to act, it is a perfect non sequitur to conclude that we must act on the basis of purely moral motives.  In fact, if we’re right, the Santa myth undermines the idea that we should act on the basis of our moral reasons.  By accepting the Santa myth, then, we nearly ensure that we will not be good.  

On the other hand, the expression “be good for goodness sake” may be simply a form of emphatic interjection, like “Do your homework, for Chrissakes!” or “Exercise and eat right, for Pete’s sake!”  And in light of the story of Santa’s monitoring practices and the consequent rewards and punishments, this interpretation seems more in keeping with the overall Santa myth, and seems like a more psychologically plausible bit of advice.  This reading, however, embraces the usurpation of moral motivation.  It impels its listener to be bribed for good behavior; in fact, it places bribery at the heart of morality.

So far, we’ve presented a broadly moral argument against Santa.  He doesn’t respect our privacy, and our knowledge of that fact, in light of his role in punishing and rewarding us, distorts our moral motives.  Yet he seems to require that our motives be pure.  Santa is thus a moral torturer: he punishes those who are not good, and then imposes a system of incentives and encouragements that go a long way towards ensuring that everyone will fail at goodness.

To our moral argument there could be added a theological critique of Santa.  The problem with Santa Claus from a religious perspective is that he is presented in the mythology as a kind of god.  Like the gods of the familiar forms of monotheism, Santa is morally omniscient.  He rewards the good and punishes the evil.  Moreover, he performs yearly miracles of bounty that, at least by our lights, put Jesus’ miracle of the fishes and loaves to shame.  In other words, Santa Claus can be no mere man; accordingly, the Santa mythology implies a Santa theology.  And monotheists should be alarmed.  We know that Yahweh is a jealous god, and encouraging children to propitiate Santa with their moral behavior sounds very much like the sort of thing that makes a jealous god very, very angry.  Imagine Moses’ frustration with the Israelites were he to come back from the mountain to find them telling Santa stories instead of only worshipping a golden calf.  It seems to us that taking the first commandments seriously (the ones about worshipping only the god of Moses) should be a source of moral concern about the Santa myth.  Christian parents that embrace the Santa myth make idolaters of their children.

We, the authors, are atheists.  We deny Santa’s existence, and Yahweh’s, too.  The case we’re pressing against Santa here is analogous to the famous argument from evil.  (We think the argument applies to Yahweh, too; but that’s a different story.)  It works on Santa because he is a morally objectionable entity who is supposed to be intrinsically good, and intrinsically good yet bad entities do not exist.  There is, of course, much more to say about the moral case against Santa. To repeat: he uses his miraculous production capacities to make toys instead of things that contribute to lasting welfare; he uses his monitoring capacities to keep track of the things people do, but does not see fit to prevent morally horrible things, assist the victims of crimes, or report criminals to the authorities.  And so, not only does Santa Claus not exist, it’s a good thing, too.  The questions that remain are why the myth of Santa persists, and why a major holiday is partially focused on such a despicable character.

The Historic Task of the Pakistani Bourgeoisie

by Omar Ali

“In order to lay the material foundation of socialism, the bourgeois democratic revolution had to be completed.”

This sort of sentence could be heard in tea shops in Pakistan 50 years ago but now that the task is almost complete (OK, not exactly, since the bourgeoisie has had to use the military academy rather than the universities to carry out its great aims, but why quibble over mere details?) the phrase “historic task of the bourgeoisie” is now available to us to be reused in some new context. I propose one here: the historic task of the Pakistani bourgeoisie today is to defang the two-nation theory (TNT). You may complain “how the mighty have fallen”, but I am serious. The military academy being what it is, it has built up the modern Pakistani nation state based on an intellectually limited and dangerously confrontational theory of nationalism. The charter state of the Pakistani bourgeoisie is the Delhi Sultanate, but that conception lacks sufficient connection with either history or geography. Bangladesh opted out of this inadequate theory within 25 years, though its trouble may not be over yet. West Pakistan, now renamed “Pakistan” to obviate the memory of past losses, is now a geographically and economically viable nation state, but the military has failed to update the TNT and in fact, made a rather determined effort to complete the project using “militant proxies” in the 1990s. That project suffered a setback after Western imperialism (aka the military’s old paymasters) announced that free-lance Islamist militias were to be terminated with extreme prejudice. Somewhat to the surprise of the state department, the Pakistani elite seems to have taken its TNT commitment seriously enough to try and retain some militant options even while accepting “aid” to assist in their elimination. But these are temporary setbacks. The ideology in question is not compatible with regional peace or global capitalism and needs to be updated and brought in line with current requirements. This is now the great task of our under-prepared bourgeoisie.

History being nothing if not non-linear, the task will not be carried out in a straight line. Most adjustments will be made unconsciously or on the sly (which is the same thing as far as the outside observer is concerned; who are we to know what is or is not in the heart of man, or woman?). But the end state will be a nation that accepts its current borders and has no international mission beyond the usual buying and selling of onions to India and copper to China. The two-nation theory will remain enshrined in 6^th grade textbooks, but will mean no more than “manifest destiny” now means to Americans when they go to Wal-Mart to buy Chinese microwave ovens. In the light of recent “confrontations” with the United States and the rise of apparently Paknationalist leaders like Imran Khan, this may sound like a strange prediction, but fear not; one step forward, two steps back and somehow we are suddenly one step closer to the future, that’s how it goes and why should it go any different in Pakistan?

There is a “Somalia alternative”, but all loose talk of coming anarchy notwithstanding, Pakistan’s rising middle classes are making too much money to be allowed to reach that level of “low carbon footprint” eco-friendly freedom. Civil war and anarchy are not out of the question, but are nowhere as close as casual observation would suggest. Others suggest that the four (or five, or whatever) constituent “sub nationalities” of Pakistan will go their separate ways. But Pakhtoonkhwah, Punjab and Sindh are too closely integrated and mixed-up for that to be a viable alternative. The Balochis are indeed unhappy and may (with good reason) want to go their own way and sell their own copper and gold to the Chinese, but they are too few and the task of successful separation is too big. Some people think the US, known to be somewhat vindictive in defeat, will be “defeated” in Afghanistan and will take revenge by making this happen, but I see no realistic possibility of that either. Breaking up countries is hard to do and is inherently messy. It is going to be hard to even divide Afghanistan into 2 or 3 pieces, it will be almost impossible to do the same with Pakistan.

This then is my prediction: that contrary to all short-term indicators, the resilient and creative Pakistani bourgeoisie will indeed complete this task, though it will do so in messy and somewhat erratic fashion. Many members of the Pakistani bourgeoisie (including the highly Westernized overseas Left) may find this short article either incoherent or insane (or both), but I am willing to take bets. Lunch in Pak Tea House in 2030?

The (De)Merits of Pop Culture Conferences: Coyne and Tanner on the 'Jersey Shore' Academic Conference

by Tauriq Moosa

The gods of irony are smiling. I recently attributed the existence of the TV-show Jersey Shore as the closest thing to an insult I could fathom for myself, when comparing myself to Christians who regularly want things banned. Then, thanks to Jerry Coyne, I discovered my old friend – my seriously old and now obviously senile friend – academia has cozied up to said show, in order to get them young folk interested in “bigger questions”.

Not so long ago, the University of Chicago had an academic conference on Jersey Shore, where the various sessions discussed important topics like: “The Monetization of Being: Reputational Labor, Brand Culture, and Why Jersey Shore Does, and Does Not, Matter”, “The Construction of Guido Identity” and “Foucault’s Going to the Jersey Shore, Bitch!”. What are the merits of having conferences on pop-culture, where questions are discussed on metaphysics, ethics and “identity” (I still don’t understand that topic)? Anchoring these questions to pop-culture topics, like Jersey Shore, is like putting scented oils on a corpse, serving little purpose other than to keep our breakfasts down before we bury the whole mess and carry on with our actual lives.

Coyne certainly thinks it’s largely useless:. He says: “(1) I’m not a huge fan of academic pop-culture studies, which seem shallow, too infested with postmodern obscurantism, and bad in that they replace more substantive material that can actually make students think deeply about things. (2) Pop-culture courses seem to me to be an easy way for professors to attract students by tapping into their t.v.-watching and music-listening habits.”

Now those are two distinct points. The first part argues that pop-culture conferences are largely useless, a waste time and resources, too indulging in obscurantism, and replace actual learning with the illusion of grappling with profound subjects because the titles indicate “big questions”. The second part points out why such conferences exist at all and how professors can be comfortable teaching this with a straight face: it gets them students, therefore maintains income because more students would come to a course on Jersey Shore than just vanilla ones on Plato, etc. The second is a description and seems to me obviously true: It is one way to keep education alive, one way to secure oneself a regular job, and so on, by affixing your learning toward what your audience actually cares about.

Whether it is a good or even the best way to do so is another question, which, by assessing Coyne’s first point, we should come closer to answering. In the end, I do think there is a better way and I think it’s in fact more damaging if we indulge in what “the kids” are focused on rather than what they should be focused on.

Larry Tanner, at his blog Textuality, has written something of a reply to Coyne (actually that’s the name of the post). Tanner notes that Coyne only went to two lectures (which is two more than I would). Coyne summarised his views at the end, which only maintained his view on pop culture conferences. Says Coyne:

Waste of time and the money used to fund it. I know readers will contest this, and I did go to only two talks, but both were dire, boring, and completely unenlightening. It was a deadly combination of postmodern theory and pop culture. It’s harmless to talk about this, I suppose, but it’s a question of how to prioritize academic funds—and scholarship.

Tanner, looking at the program, which Prof Coyne was kind enough to share, says “the broad topics seem worthwhile.” I want to look at what Tanner says and see whether he manages to offer good reasons for us to take the conference even a little seriously, and therefore disagree with Coyne on pop-culture conferences in general. Each topic I'm numbering here is on the program which you can see over at Prof. Coyne's website.

1. “The Construction of Guido Identity”

Tanner on the topic “The Construction of Guido Identity” says: “I don't know much about Jersey Shore in particular, but a session that looks at the show's representations of masculinity, race, sexuality, and identity seems pretty interesting. What makes someone manly in that world? What importance is place on identifying as an Italian American?”

Again, I’ve never understood what identity studies are about and what it means. I say this and I live in South Africa. Having engaged with it for many years, I’ve found identity studies to be nothing but nonsense posturing as deep, complex, psychological questions. In the end, who the hell cares? I’m an ex-Muslim who studies bioethics, to change public policy on matters on euthanasia and organ donation, and I read too many comics – I’ve never considered what my identity is or means in the context of a society that is largely unemployed and uneducated. What I have considered is what those factors of unemployment and no education will do when I attempt to engage in political change on matters of medicine (since the majority of the very population I want to benefit might not at first understand my reasons for wanting medical practioners to kill their patients, legally).

But will engaging with what it means to, say, be a man in today’s world really be an important topic? I’m always hesitant about such topics since sometimes people want to take what should be a discussion as a platform to advocate how men (or women) should be; which I think is unfounded, since gender roles don’t make sense anymore with, for example, increasing acceptance of homosexual relationships and artificial insemination. Who cares “how” a man should be in today’s world? I don’t think it’s a relevant topic, but then that’s just me.

Furthermore, what does it matter what such ideas mean to Italian-Americans? Unless you want to discuss culture and politics, I’m not sure gender discussions are relevant. What conclusion could one possibly reach from this kind of discussion that is so important it would change our view on Italian-American men or vice versa?

Notice, all we’ve done here is focus on the topic and not its relation to Jersey Shore. If the actual topic is pointless and a waste of time, what advantage is there to adding the characters and interactions of this very stupid show? It seems to make it even worse.

2. “Morality and Ethics”

I know Prof. Coyne thinks this an important topic. Naturally, I do too given I’m doing a postgrad degree in it. Coyne would not say the topic of morality and ethics is pointless, but how it is discussed can be. And given that Jersey Shore and morality are as incompatible as science and monotheistic religion, we should not be surprised Coyne thinks this. Consider: The topic of whether euthanasia should be legalised is an important one. But this debate could be held by two over-emotional, first-year students and lead nowhere (I’ve even seen futile moral discussions with medical students I’ve taught and my colleagues who are medical practitioners). This, it seems to me, is what Coyne means: the discussion is futile even if the topic is legitmately important.

Tanner asks: “Again, the general topic [of morality and ethics] seems worthy of the humanities. Why not use a popular TV show to explore moral behavior and ethical dilemmas faced by the characters (albeit as edited by the show's producers)?”

Firstly, we disagreed that the first topic was worth investigating at all. The fact that it was discussed within a Jersey Shore context only highlighted how pointless the discussion was.

Secondly, as I’ve said, the way the conversation is conducted could make a legitimately important topic, like morality and ethics, inundated with myopic views and lead nowhere. A glance through that section (on Coyne’s website) shows that in fact two out of three discussions deal with Foucault. So there isn’t much diversity in the topic itself, let alone aspects that would appeal to those who know little or nothing about Foucault. Note that Foucault discussions tend to be often quite narrowly focused anyway, so it wouldn't even fit the criteria Tanner discusses.

Now to be clear, I can understand using certain examples from pop-culture to highlight important topics. I’ve just completed a chapter on The Walking Dead and philosophy (about why having babies is immoral), which should be coming out soon. Using familiar subjects can make discussing the overall topic enlightening to new people. My favourite modern philosopher, James Rachels, used various examples from literature and television to clarify his points. It’s simply a way, which, depending on your ability as a teacher, can either work or bomb. However, as I’ve highlighted, the very topic themselves in this conference seem poorly handled. As I was not there, I can’t say whether this is true but I find it hard to believe you could salvage a good discussion from these topics except to say why no one in academia should be wasting their time discussing them in the first place. Furthermore, staying within the bracket of "morality and ethics", if the majority of your topics concerns Foucault, I’d hardly call the entire topic morality and ethics.

I won’t say more, since I do think it possible – if I imagine very hard – that one could have a fruitful discussion on morality and ethics, using Jersey Shore. But I’m not convinced, given the actual discussion topics and the nature of the whole conference from what I’ve read.

3. Affect, Honor and Desire

Tanner says of this topic:

This is one session I would have liked to attend, especially the paper involving medieval Iceland. Ultimately, this session appears to want to understand how the characters of the show view their world. This understanding is the bread and butter of the humanities. We want to know the world just as Hamlet did, or just as Beowulf did, or just as Guinevere did. We want to capture the cultural perspectives that audiences in the past brought to their lives and to the artworks presented to them.

I have a short response to this: Why?

4. Guido Cultural Signifiers

Tanner says: “Another good session, if the paper titles are any indication. Surely, the people on the show have personalities and behaviors that appeal to viewers. Asking why this is so and looking for answers that go beyond pat stereotypes--well, these seem like good things to me.”

I don’t know what cultural signifiers are. I assume they are properties that indicate what constitutes a particular culture? Perhaps like the crescent moon and star signifies Muslim culture, red-white-and-blue signifies America, etc. Regardless, Tanner does have a point. It is good to know why millions of people would pay to watch mundane, untalented people go about getting drunk and acting idiotic. There are plenty of hypotheses: most people are comfortably bored with their lives and, lacking creative stimulus enjoy seeing "better" versions of themselves through the tanned, ripped abs of Italian-American people from New Jersey; the show is so unbelievably stupid, you watch it the same way you do a car-crash in slow motion, except the things breaking are people’s lives and what’s dissolving is time better spent elsewhere; and so on.

Whatever the reason, you could use that information to get those millions of viewers on to better, more important topics. For example, we can also ask why could Carl Sagan get the whole world fascinated with science? How does Richard Dawkins (and indeed, Jerry Coyne) do it?

These are legimate questions since here we actually have something the other topics appear to lack: data. Yes, information we can use. I’m not sure how many humanities students have heard about data and evidence – judging from my year of teaching them, not much – but here is a topic in which data and evidence could arise.

But um given that it’s about cultural studies and signifiers, I think it’s doubtful.

Conclusions

Tanner has raised at least one good point, but quite I think by accident. Coyne is right that these all seem rather boring or obscure, pointless and a waste; Coyne is not saying, for example, morality and ethics is useless but how it’s conducted surely matters. Similarly, if the topics in and of themselves are useless – as I’ve indicated – then its hard to see what use adding the Jersey Shore element could possibly add (make it more tanned, stupid, pointless, rough, dirty?)

Notice that despite my intense dislike for Jersey Shore, I’ve not said because the topics deal with Jersey Shore that that is why the conference was perhaps silly – I’ve even indicated I could imagine (because I have a wonderful, active imagination) using Jersey Shore to explain elements of ethics. All I’ve argued is that this conference seems to be just as Prof. Coyne has said. The topic could’ve been anything: the Darwin biopic Creation, The Dark Knight, Carnivale, LOST, etc., and my points would remain.

Tanner has said we discuss all manner of topics, like identity and sexuality and power in Shakespeare: we put it in the context of England at the time. This has historical importance, since we gain clarity of the time. By examining Jersey Shore, Tanner says, we can do the same.

But again: even if this conference was on Shakespeare, it still seems pointless. The danger with pop culture topics is that it allows more easily for nonsense topics to sift through. What could the lecture topic “Foucault’s Going to Jersey Shore, Bitch” possibly be about? You could put whatever you want there, perhaps qualifying it by mentioning Foucault in passing. (I find Foucault a fascinating writer about European history. I stop listening when he talks normative politics and ethics).

It is also good to see that Tanner agrees with Coyne that “most humanities scholars are taught, at least through imitation, to present the paper first and foremost, and worry very much less about connecting with an audience. This is unfortunate, especially since in our classrooms we are talking to our students and seeking to engage them as best we can.” Alison Gopnik has recently given an interview confirming this: that lecturing perhaps is not the best way to teach. Small groups, with active engagement, is better where it is possible to do so. This forces you, as the teacher, to be on your feet, asking questions and having a conversation. Of course there’s a place for lectures but even lectures should be, I think, tempered by trying to convey the information rather than as a display for your intellect. I would rather be thought dumb but coherent than smart but incomprehensible. Humanities, I’ve learnt, trains you to try be the latter – again the main problem is that it, like this conference, prevents the most important aspect of education - grappling with problems, failing, succeeding in arguments, discovering alternate views and so on - from arising.

In the end though, Coyne and Tanner’s view serve to engage us in this discussion on how education is best served. It seems to me, as does Coyne, that this is not a good way to do it. But then, what do I know?

Globalization / Human Reason

by Wayne Ferrier

Psychiatrists and psychologists have come to the rational conclusion that man is incapable of coming to a rational conclusion. To a certain extent there may be some truth to this. While we are still in the beginning stages of understanding our own minds, we do have three or four good theories on how our mind operates—though we are far from a comprehensive holistic understanding.

All in all many, if not most instances, of reasoning in man is what we call bounded rationality. Bounded rationality holds that when making decisions, the rational thought of individuals is limited by what information is available to them at the time they make decisions, the cognitive limitations of their minds, and the finite amount of time before a decision has to be made. Another way to look at bounded rationality is that, because decision-makers lack the ability and resources to arrive at an optimal solution, they instead simplify the choices available to them. Thus the decision-maker seeks a satisfactory solution rather than an optimal one.

In nature an animal that hesitates and remains indecisive is at a disadvantage to quicker thinking individuals—a deer stunned by car highlights too many times is not likely to survive very long. It makes sense that there are selective pressures from the environment to mold species capable of making decisions based on just a few facts and then choosing a decisive plan of action. Man is such an creature.

Besides bounded rationality, it is also held that man possesses a theory of mind. This is the idea that an individual understands that others may have a view of the world that differs from their own, or even that other's concepts of the world might be fallacious. Among social animals there may be an advantage to individuals that understand that others may not have all the facts and that they can be misled and deceived. And while this is a simplification of a theory of mind and perhaps not everything about this ability need be perceived negative, a theory of mind gives an individual the capability of deception, hence manipulation of others for the benefit of the self over others.

Recently some researchers are suggesting that reason evolved not to understand truth or even reality but that our reasoning ability evolved for the sole purpose to win arguments. Human rationality may be just the impulse to win debates. According to this view, bias and illogic are social adaptations that enable one to persuade and defeat others in arguments—certitude being more important than what the truth may actually be.
This theory of argumentation is strongly tied to well-known and long held concepts of human thought and behavior, in particular cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is when people are biased to think their choices are correct, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary that they are not.

 

Misinformation altogether

 

So when you add it up: bounded reason (quick decisions based on limited information); theory of mind and the view that others don't have all the facts and are thus fallible and fool-able; cognitive dissonance (that in spite of evidence to the fact that we might be wrong we think we are right); holding onto incorrect views of the world in spite of the facts; regardless of all this we argue on, purposefully filtering out contrary evidence and valuable information just so we can hold onto our cherished positions and manipulate others.

It is unfortunate but exceedingly interesting that decision-makers often adhere to immobile positions irrespective of the facts. But the adversarial-argumentative approach is a lose-lose proposition most of the time.

Science, which is supposed to be based on empiricism rather than on a priori reasoning, intuition, or revelation, is an ideal solution to the adversarial-only approach, but many so-called scientific voices are not trustworthy. For example, consider the argument concerning climate change. Engaging the scientific community in a discussion about climate change more often than not degenerates into Ad Hominems such as: “You're not scientific if you don't believe in global warming,” or “If you don't believe in global warming you probably don't believe in the law of gravity either.” Often instead of producing facts, we are told the time for discussion is over, that global warming is real and we need to act now, not question it anymore. Global warming is the only hypothesis in science, it seems, that skipped right over becoming a theory and somehow became a physical law in just a few short decades of research.

 

Major problems worldwide

 

Now here is a list of real problems, which I feel that bounded reason, cognitive dissonance, and irrational arguing are unlikely to solve; yet we need to address these issues if we are to survive and thrive as a species. Each problem is factual and is integrally entwined with the others, so that each problem affects all the others in a web of complexity. Our current system of thinking is inadequate to solve any of them satisfactory alone, let alone each woven together.

 

Climate

 

Regardless of climate change, global warming or no global warming, climate affects weather and weather affects agriculture. We no longer have a worldwide food surplus, in part because of bad weather and in part because of overpopulation. The rise of China and India and other countries has eaten into our surplus and just a season or two of bad weather has sparked ugly situations such as the Arab Spring. In addition, crisis such as the Arab Spring reflect intolerable social inequality, as well as the possibility of impeding starvation due to crop failure. Like dominoes the Arab Spring caused a rise in oil prices affecting western countries dependent of foreign oil. So here in the West we're feeling high fuel prices, high food prices, chronic unemployment, social inequality, and ineffectual government—and the weather isn’t fun either! So what causes all this? Simple, overpopulation; overpopulation can be tried to just about any major modern problem: disease, famine, habitat destruction, pollution, war, you name it; and if you believe in climate change via man-produced carbon emissions, also the weather.

 

Globalization and economy

 

It is getting hard to ignore that the time of nations is ending. It has been clear for a while that no nation exists on its own anymore, and what happens to one country affects everyone else. The United States never got out of WWII mode, it went right into the Cold War, and when that ended got into a lengthy and expensive war against terrorism; in that sixty-five year period, it ignored the creation of meaningful employment and living wage jobs. Instead it focused on supporting rising inequality and it failed to fix its malfunctioning educational system, which has left America's workforce poorly educated, unemployed or marginally employed, many are living in substandard housing, on the streets, in prison, or are just a paycheck away from living in the streets or in prison. How long do we wait before we have an American Spring? When the American economy finally collapses, so goes the rest of the world.

Inequality, low or no wage employment is leading to a massive brain drain in America. Then there is the crumbling infrastructure—left untouched since the brief economic boom after WWII. Here are meaningful jobs but nothing is being done.

In the meantime all we do is argue, but we don't listen, nor do we analyze.

A snippet from the NPR Radio Program WAIT WAIT. . .DON'T TELL ME says it best:

PETER SAGAL: It turns out, the reason human beings developed intelligence was not to be better hunters or better survive against other species, but to win arguments. See, the thing that has always puzzled people about human intelligence, how humans got so smart, is why humans are still so stupid.

(Soundbite of laughter)

PETER SAGAL: Because we continually believe things that are incorrect and behave irrationally. And so people evolved, it turns out, the ability to convince themselves they were right even when they were full of it. You see, that's the explanation.

MO ROCCA: That's interesting.

FAITH SALIE: Does this mean that politicians are the most evolved among us?

PETER SAGAL: Exactly.

(Soundbite of laughter)

 

A DOSE OF BILE

by James McGirk

When I heard the Federal Bureau of Investigation might have figured out the identity of seventies skyjacker D.B. Cooper I was really upset. Who among us hasn’t felt a smidge of sympathy for the outlaw? Well into my thirties, having finally completed my education and finding myself without short-term goals to strive for, a swelling waistline, and an unremarkable life unspooling before me, I can’t help but feel attracted to a life fueled by passion and brightened with sparks of decisive action, like leaping out the back of a Boeing 727 into a lightning storm. 

Actual crime is out of the question. I don’t want to hurt anybody, and my muscles have atrophied to the point were the thought of taking real life action is ludicrous, but as the dudgeon of white-collar work corrodes my body and seeps into my interior life I wonder whether there might be a way to fight back. Could living a life devoted to darkness and negativity act as a tonic, at least until the demon flows of testosterone ebb away?

What pushed me over the edge was reading “An Investment Manager’s View on the Top 1%,” an anonymous and possibly apocryphal investment manager’s account of his wealthy clients, written for the University of California Santa Cruz’s Who Rules America blog. In the United States an increasingly disproportionate fraction of the country’s wealth has accumulated in the richest sectors of society. The disparity itself wasn’t news to me, but I had never really considered what was inside of that top one percent.

Before reading the article, reaching that top percentile seemed like a feasible goal to me. I took it for granted that because I have degrees from snooty schools (granted both are in Writing, but I could always go back for a JD), reaching the highest echelons of society, i.e. making the required annual salary of $300K and accumulating a net worth of $1.2mm, seemed like realistic option to me. With a few years of hard work and a nice suit I thought access to the levers of society could be mine.

Turns out the top percentile is more spike than a plateau. The bottom half “largely include[s] physicians, attorneys, upper middle management, and small business people who have done well,” says the anonymous investment manager. “Most of those in the bottom half…lack power and global flexibility and are essentially well-compensated workhorses for the top 0.5%, just like the bottom 99%.” 

Power and global flexibility was I wanted (who wouldn't) but you have pay for the privilege. Above the half-million-a-year mark is where you start having real power, but these aren't the lawyers, doctors, consultants, or even the investment banking analysts churned out by my alma mater, those diligent folk earning six figures while grinding out 100-hour work weeks. These are the real bankers and brokers, and occasional real estate tycoon. Their average net worth streaks upwards, with the top 0.10% holding an average of $5.5mm and the top 0.01% $24.4mm. This type of accumulation takes capital and nearly all of it comes from “direct or indirect participation in the financial and banking industries.” Only those at the very peak can take advantage of tax dodges and exotic investment strategies. For the rest of us, “the American dream of striking it rich is merely a well-marketed fantasy that keeps the bottom 99.5% hoping for better and prevents social and political instability.” 

Now I can imagine buckling down and earning $300K a year but $24.4mm is a steep slope to climb. You would have to invent something ubiquitous or, more likely, expand an already substantial sum. My own net-worth would have to be yanked from a deepening puddle of red ink courtesy of my student loans. I would have chosen a more lucrative field than writing but it’s literally the only thing I can do. Trust me, I’ve tried. That’s why there is so much debt! But no matter how much I slide into my retirement account it is unlikely to swell to that size, and if I can’t be rich enough to influence the highest echelons of government then why bother working at all?

I am being facetious, but on some level I do need the illusion of being able to go all the way if I really got my act together. That’s why they tell American-born Americans they can be President some day. Without being able to fantasize about seizing absolute control over your destiny – the sort of control in America only an eight-digit earner can muster – then what is the point of working at all? Or to dilute the idea down to a point where I can actually pay my own rent, why should I affect happiness about my condition? Is it better to acknowledge the quagmire you’re stuck in, than grin and pretend it is a trampoline?

I have been told that exercise would soothe me, and there may well be some truth to that. As an adult I have entirely neglected the physical in my life. Once in a while I will scurry up a flight of steps but other than a strand or two of calf muscle I am all skin, bone, fat, and feverish brain. I suppose that “art” could be a solution, but all that taking two degrees in writing has done has ruined the one escapist pleasure I could enjoy without a throbbing headache the next day. And the closer you get to actually producing creative art or writing for a living, the more humiliating it becomes. You go from wanting to write a novel that will untangle the world to wondering how best to attract the attention of a publishing agent via Twitter. Then there are the fleshpots. But if you grew up in the 1990s like I did then all that flesh is blistered with oozing sores and more likely than not viewed from behind a computer screen.

Which brings us back to D.B. Cooper, who held a jumbo jet for ransom then hopped out the back midflight, and drifted down into the Pacific Northwest clutching a bag brimming with unmarked bills. He is either still on the lam or was sucked out into the middle of the Pacific Ocean and drowned. I like to think he landed safely. Hopefully he invested that money otherwise he wouldn’t even break into the top percentile. But I don’t think D.B. Cooper really cared—and honestly, neither should I. 

The Thirty-Third Internet Connection in New Delhi

by James McGirk

I never had a problem with Alaskan Senator Ted Steven’s oft-mocked remark about the Internet being a series of tubes. I saw it with my own eyes (metaphorically speaking) as a teenager growing up in New Delhi. The Internet was a feed of information that trickled in drip by drip, slowly increasing as we switched our faucets and eventually tapped into the municipal supply. My father was a foreign correspondent, which meant he had to send stories back home to be published. When we left “on assignment” to India he was issued with a bag of sophisticated telecommunications equipment. We plugged it in and became early adopters. 

Our first modem looked like a cross between a swimming cap, a spider, and a rubber truncheon. There were two cups that stretched over the mouthpiece and receiver of a standard analogue telephone. One contained a microphone and the other a speaker. The modem would whistle and hiss signals into the phone, and listen for responses. It was a crude but robust system, the only thing capable of working on lines that were filled with crackling static and echoes, and may well have been tapped. Entire sentences would be garbled by line noise, or more insidiously the changes could be almost invisible. A pound sterling inserted where a dollar sign once stood. 

Dad’s squealing octopus of a modem might have made things easier for everyone else, but it tossed a sabot into the gears of my imagination. Before we had left, he had taken me on a tour of his office and the printing press below. Communications made sense to me afterward. The newspaper was like a factory: an office space above filled with glowing amber terminals and stuttering typewriters and piles of important paper being fed to the machines below. The presses were magnificent, booming and huffing and spattering ink at rolling reams of paper. I could easily imagine the process as an unbroken chain extending across the world, see a pale English editor with a phone clenched between his shoulder and ear, transcribing dad’s story click by click into a typesetting machine to be turned to molten lead, slotted into a drum, dunked in ink and pressed onto fresh newsprint a hundred times a minute.

I had seen computers before. In the past Mom and Dad, who were both journalists, had been issued clunky old Amstrads and Tandys, but those didn’t seem that different from the typesetting machines and dumb terminals back at headquarters. Dad’s new laptop was more like a porthole into a parallel universe than a word processor. It had memory, a temperamental beige lozenge that could be switched on and off with catastrophic consequences. The interface was also different. There were programs and applications nested in one another; navigating around the system you got a sense that you were indeed navigating; traversing an alien logic, and each time you learned how to run some program or subroutine it gave you the most satisfying synaptic kick. 

We were terrified of change and subject to the home office’s budgetary whims, which meant upgrades were infrequent. But I was beginning to learn a new vocabulary of clock speeds and RAM, and wasn’t the only one. We lived beside Nehru Place, an information technology enclave with a crowded bazaar that sold everything from ink stamps to enterprise-level computing solutions. The market’s advertisements provided me with an easy gloss of the state of the art. Each month the market would sprout new billings touting the latest processors, at first 80286 processors capable of a blistering 16MHz then 386s, 486s and eventually Pentiums. Even the drawings changed. The hand-painted computers and peripherals changed from cartoonish televisions complete with knobs protruding from curved screens to angular, almost menacing monitors and towers and keyboards containing the correct number of keys. 

My first direct encounter with computer ‘telephony’ came from a friend’s dial-up bulletin board system (a.k.a. a BBS). I forget what he called his. No doubt something disproportionately macho. A brief Googling revealed “The POISON Den” and “The TWILIGHT Zone” as the names of two of his contemporaries. I would dial in occasionally but it was more fun to see him run it. Several hours a day he monopolized one of the family phonelines to allow strangers to call and log-in. Most visitors were guests and afforded access only to the most banal files and chat boards, while a select few were given special titles and privileges, such as a secret stash of password cracking programs and R-rated pictures of Baywatch star Erika Eleniak. As Sysop, the most exalted of ranks, my friend had access to the entire system, unimaginable power for a 14-year-old boy to wield; and wield it he did, occasionally booting off a lowly user just for the rush.

I started to think of the space inside his BBS, which in real life wasn’t much more than a second computer, as something not too different from Nehru Place. A single road leading into the center that was frequently congested. A ground floor of wares that were accessible to all, even guests, while getting into the towers above was limited to businessmen and others who belonged there. Lording over it all, godlike, was the Sysop, who could tear it all down and build it up again at his whim. 

My parents eventually caved and bought us a personal computer (partly this was to contain my experimentation). It was a 386 running a primitive version of Windows. A photographer friend of my dad’s would troubleshoot the thing for us, spending hours at a time installing new software and removing programs that had gone feral and begun destroying files, such as the ones with photocopied manuals I bought from Nehru Place bootleggers. He tried to keep us up-to-date with the latest technologies, particularly those he didn’t have himself and wanted to play with. Naturally I supported his suggestions. And this was how we were eventually convinced to buy a U.S. Robotics brand 14.4K modem and a pricy account connecting us to the Internet. 

Family lore has it we that we received the 33^rd Internet connection in New Delhi. There are many caveats to this claim, it willfully ignores that the embassies and Indian government had access years before, and was likely derived from our account's name, which we got from Videsh Sanchaar Nigam Limited (then India’s national telephone company) and had the prefix delaac33. If the ‘ac’ stood for ‘account’ then it was indeed possible we had Delhi’s 33^rd commercial account. We may also have had the three-hundred-and-thirty-third account, not quite so grand a claim, but an early account all the same.

Our meager connection was text-only. There was a browser called Lynx (which still exists) that launched each expedition from the University of Kansas’ online portal. Images had to be downloaded separately as files and would resolve line-by-line and were rarely worth the hours it took to download them. The Internet was a totally different experience than the BBS, it felt as wide open as a frontier or a mountain forest waiting to be foraged. My focus shifted from trying to make sense of the system to hunting and gathering odd bits of information.

I gravitated toward text files, little nuggets of mayhem containing instructions for pipe bombs, cracking locks, spoofing telephone boxes and sabotaging cars. It was all hopelessly out of date and none of the equipment would have been available in India even if I did try one of those recipes. I grew out of those silly files quickly but I remember them well. I came across a nostalgic database of them a few years ago (someone had assembled it for a documentary called 'Textfiles'.) Reading them again they seemed to represent so much more than their content. They were like flavor crystals, and reading them was like accessing the revolutionary DNA of the Internet, a harbinger of what was about to come rumbling down the pipe. Not quite a series of tubes but glorious in a flickering, monochromatic sort of way.

On FAMiLY Leader, Homosexuality, and Crippling the Institution of Marriage

by Tauriq Moosa

I imagine that most of us are relieved to hear that Republican Michele Bachmann is going to become the first presidential candidate “to sign a pledge created by THE FAMiLY [sic] LEADER, an influential social-conservative group in Iowa.” Ms Bachmann, by signing the pledge, “vows” to “uphold the institution of marriage as only between one man and one woman.” The best is the Vow which calls for the banning of all forms of pornography. Oh and by the way, my gay and lesbian comrades, homosexuality is not only a choice but a “health risk”. 

There are number of ways to look at this. Firstly, we can look at the political machinations involved, demonstrating what the human animal is willing to grab hold of in order to maintain the velocity of power as she swings from one constitutional branch to another.  Or, we might consider the actual document itself that makes claims equally baffling and, to put it politely, arrogant. But then, we should no longer be surprised by the incredible knowledge religious people sprout since, somehow, they do have access to the inner thoughts of the Creator of the Universe (and friggin’ flamingos and tonsils, too, mind you). Neither focus in themselves is worth our time, but considering the level at which this is aimed, it deserves critical responses.

Debasing the Currency of Marriage

I’m not one for marriage or really even monogamy, but I do think personal choice matters. If I so choose to engage in polyamory or promiscuity [PDF], no one should force me into choosing only one partner; similarly, whilst I think many monogamous relationships are quite strange and, ahem, “against our nature”, I have no problem with people doing it (just as, with most things like drugs, prostitution, and suicide, they do it of their own choice, don’t unnecessarily harm others, etc.) Furthermore, data indicate that it’s better for health and longevity that many men don’t get married at all and there are similarities for females. (This seems the appropriate time to indicate having children doesn’t bring happiness. Don’t blame me, blame the data.)

Yet, discussing data while focusing on a conservative religious group is like eating ice-cream while watching a documentary about starving African children. It loses its flavour and potency in attempting to combat the problem at hand. So let’s have a quick look at the Pledge. The Preface to the FAMiLY Leader pledge reads:

Social protections…have been evaporating as we have collectively ‘debased the currency’ of marriage…in complete absence of empirical proof, that non-heterosexual inclination are genetically determined, irresistible and akin to innate traits like race, gender and eye color; as well as anti-scientific bias which holds, against all empirical evidence, that homosexual behavior in particular, and sexual promiscuity in general, optimizes individual or public health.

Wait, let’s go back. “In complete absence of empirical proof…” Did we really just read that? I can think of a few studies, for example, that PubMed quickly throws up. Whitham and colleagues did a study on 61 pairs and 3 triplet sets of people which had at least one member who was homosexual. The study was longitudinal with recruitment starting as early as 1980 and the study itself was completed in the 90’s. It also included an 18-page questionnaire. 38 pairs of monozygotic twins were found to have a concordance rate of 65.8% for homosexual orientation; dizygotic twins, as is to be expected, was lower with 30.4%. They interpreted the findings as “supporting the argument for a biological basis in sexual orientation.” Another study by Pillar and Bailey obtained similar findings, indicating even in their title that “human sexual orientation has a heritable component”.

What I doubt you’ll find is a study showing it is solely genetic. But then, as people like Steven Pinker indicate, hardly any attribute (save the obvious like eye-colour and even then…) are purely genetic or environmental. It’s a combo of both, but there’s little doubt as to genetics being a significant component (not just in homosexuality but in many things: anger, violence, intelligence, and so on). But this would be playing the Faithful’s game.

The more important question is: who cares if it is genetic? Does it matter whether someone is kind or horrible because of genetics or his or her family? Things get difficult though – and I’m epistemically unconvinced by many arguments – when we discuss things like “moments of insanity” and psychopaths. Anyway, we don’t want to make a genetic fallacy and accord some random moral criteria to the origin of homosexuality. It really is unimportant in deciding whether it’s moral, immoral or – it seems to me – amoral. But somehow, according to the document, society’s acceptance of homosexuality as genetic has led to the debasing of marriage. I don’t have the full document so I’m not sure if the Family Leader provides evidence of this. I know I’ve heard many such arguments and there are, again, two responses:

Firstly, there is little to no evidence to support such a claim that marriage is say declining or is lowered because of homosexuality (if you do find some, please alert me to it. I may not have searched hard enough). What we will have is, in fact, an advantage, since we won’t have gay people being forced into relationships they don’t care for. Even if we concede there is data supporting decreasing marriage directly related to increased acceptance of homosexuality, what you will have is less heterosexual marriages but probably ones of longer-lasting and better quality, since you won’t have men and women forced into relationships that just aren’t to their tastes (notice, even this indicates how irrelevant the genetic component is, even if it is completely Western-liberal-media-scientific fraud).

Secondly, as will be reiterated again and again: so what? Or, who cares? What is so important about maintaining marriage? This is just assumed to be some important component of a society – and not just marriage, but of course monogamous theistic marriage. And I’ve already indicated data tells us it’s nothing special and doesn’t lead to longer lives (and let me stress again, children aren’t good for you either).

Maintaining Marriage

Vow 4 says that there must not be a redefinition of marriage. It must be defended “through statutory, bureaucratic, or court-imposed recognition of the Institution of Marriage”. It’s not my fault that when I hear “institution” I think of a mental-asylum. That’s my psychology student talking, along with the usual boring epithets of wedding rings as nooses, relationships as straight-jackets, blah blah.

Anyway, the Vow claims that polyamory, adultery and so on are out the very fabulous window. This of course would follow if one believes in the sanctity of the institution of marriage. Just as not eating pork would be obvious in a list of “Don’ts” in a Muslim eating-guide. But again, there is no reason for us to accept this until we’ve good reason to maintain the specific, recent, theistic conception of marriage as the only, best and important way to conduct oneself in a relationship or indeed as the goal of relationships. Even data that indicates that marriage is unhealthy or reduces lifespans matters not at all when it is about obeying the rules god has sent down. “I didn’t ask if you like it,” he might yell through a strong American General’s accent, “I’m ordering you to do it!” Let’s not forget that if you do this there is probably some great reward: like not being forced into an eternity of companionship with Carlos Mencia’s comedic ability or Johnny Depp’s versatility.

So, data, in fact doesn’t matter; which was why I’m surprised they bother mentioning it, despite the irrelevance to the ethical argument earlier. Remember I said I don’t mind marriage as long as polyamory was allowed.

This precisely indicates the problem with sanctifying an institution of human relationship. It fails to recognise that humans are fluid, their interactions like an ocean. Sanctification of humans and their interactions, especially with their fellows, is trying to rake leaves in the wind (not my metaphor, but from the character Antoine Batiste from David Simon’s Treme). Or rather is like trying to box in a river with an open cage.

Homosexuality is a Public Health Risk

I’ll quote what I can from ThinkProgress, where I’m drawing this from.

– HOMOSEXUALITY IS A PUBLIC HEALTH RISK: Footnote 4 claims that homosexuality causes shorter life expectancy and a higher probability of a long list of sexually transmitted diseases. The Leader has previously compared same-sex marriage to second-hand smoking.

This would be an interesting statistic to obtain. But again: so what? As I indicated, there is data indicating that heterosexual marriage also leads to a lower life expectancy for everyone involved. Should we therefore ban it? Imagine we discover that being kind, generous and helping others leads to lower life expectancy: this is quite true for many who are volunteers at MSF and Aid groups that travel to disaster areas. They increase their risk of death from disease and collateral damage from simply being in the vicinity of their patients. Should that be sufficient reason to ban it? However, this Pledge doesn’t claim that a shorter life expectancy is sufficient reason to ban marriage. It is one part of many necessary factors and premises they consider leads to the conclusion that has crippled the Institution of Marriage and threatens it continually.

Ironically, I don’t disagree with them on this level. I think this is an empirical question and there is good reason to take their claims seriously: I do think that a wider acceptance of and further tolerance of homosexuality, as seen in same-sex civil unions which New York recently approved (excellent news, by the way), will run parallel to a decrease or lack of adherence to the sanctification of marriage. This seems obvious.

However, what I’m contesting and what we should all be contesting is the Family Leader's justification for making the so-called Institution of Marriage, between man and woman, the only legal version of marriage. And we can take their claims about health as one such point which is largely, um, unfounded. Indeed, the website the Leader had up proclaiming this was taken down, according to LGBT Nation. The website “asserts that homosexuality reduces life expectancy by up to 35 years and promotes the idea that homosexuality is a curable disease”.

Again, if this is so, then all manner of things should be banned, too, like smoking! But, despite all evidence telling us that smoking is bad, we allow it because we think people are adult enough to decide how they want to live their lives. Apparently, like second-hand smoke there is even an increase in cancer for homosexual men. This all baffles me. Considering I don’t have the data they’ve used, it might be a bit glib to dismiss this as complete nonsense – but considering I’ve not come across such data from more, um, unbiased sources, I’ll not take it seriously (until shown otherwise). But I need only reiterate: So what? Why can people not choose for themselves?

Sex is Better After Marriage

Vow 5 might be my favourite. Vow 5 says that the candidate must support the notion that “married people enjoy better health, better sex.” First Question: HOW DO THEY KNOW THIS? When you say x is better than y, you must know x in order to make such a judgement. So, initially it seems a worry for conservatives that any of them should even be able to make this comparison.

But of course many would have had premarital sex, then convert and repent their ways, claiming they were lost, sinners, etc., and then after forcing themselves into the haggard arms of the Institution of Marriage with some pie-making, Bible-thumping, wife with teeth as white as the picket fence outside, they will nod and agree and mutter that of course sex now is so much better.

And, secondly, our old friend: (even if true) Who cares? Here we have another irrelevant criteria: So what? Imagine we discover that heterosexual parents often are worse parents than, say, a lesbian couple. Does that mean that there must be no heterosexual parents because lesbians are better parents? Oh wait: We’ve discovered that in fact lesbians often are better parents. Sorry heterosexual parents: give up your darlings.

Goodbye Internet

And, finally, we must get rid of the Internet's No #1 Product pornography, despite it running and shaping the modern world. If Google was a merchant, we can just imagine how empty his stalls would be. Anyway, their reason? I’m not sure whether they’ve bothered with good reasons anymore as opposed to “Things that just seem to piss us off”. There’s the usual stuff about “innocence” and “protection of women” and “promiscuity”. From an ethical standpoint, pornography is a tricky subject. Nonetheless, we may trust that many enjoy their work, are involved in various roles (like raising sex awareness) and want nothing else.

Some interviews confirm this. And there is also the automatic assumption that only women are involved, whereas there are male pornstars (I discovered that they exist after hearing one of their voices on ‘American Dad’. It is perhaps one of the most beautiful male speaking voices I’ve ever heard. Have a listen to this 38 second clip.)

 

Anyway, we need to get rid of pornography to maintain the sanctity of marriage because, as usual, people can’t decide for themselves, need to be babied and so on. There is a hint of irony in that it’s called adult entertainment, but the reason to ban it is often so childish. Just as not criminalising cigarettes hasn’t led to everyone being smokers, so the same for gay marriage, pornography, and so on.

Finally…

Unlike Aids, homosexuality is not catching; and even if it is, and even if pornography destroys marriages, and even if homosexuality is bad for your health, and so on, what does it matter? We have little reason to maintain this strange creature called the Institute of Marriage, which harbours the common cold of relationships called monogamy. Surely we want a nation of people able to think for themselves instead of being rule-worshippers who perform or refrain from engaging in acts solely for the fear of the law? As John Stuart Mill says at the end of ‘On Liberty’: “A state which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes--will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.”

Two final things.

Firstly, there is one thing this Pledge states which I 100% agree with: Reject Sharia Law. Well done – they got something right. Being something of a consequentialist, I at least can give them this conclusion, whilst disdaining their reasoning for doing so. The reason of course is that Sharia allows for all sorts of unsavory affairs between young girls that would generally upset the Christians. I’m not myself convinced of many arguments discussing pedophilia, but then, some of you may recall I’ve defended cannibalism and incest for the same reasons.

Secondly, perhaps the solution is to just get rid of State-sanctioned marriage altogether. It seems a reasonable approach, since I’ve often wondered what role a State should have between the private, consensual interactions between two (or more!) adults, that harm no one else (in a limited sense of ‘harm’). We need only have something like “civil union” for tax benefits or something of a kind; but then, this need have nothing to do with the sex or romantic relationships, perhaps. We can say even best friends can be part of a civil union because they live together in the same house, apartment or something of a kind.

The point is, we must reflect on the reasons for having the State involved at all and whether we cannot achieve it another way. If we are able to, in a secular way that is beneficial, we can easily hand over “marriage” to the religious. Then they can fit on their faith-bells and prayer-whistles, put it in a white dress of sanctity and pass it off as a viable way to engage with a fellow human beings. This doesn’t mean the rest of us would, by definition, really be that much better off, but at least we wouldn’t face criminal charges because, say, we’d become bored with our partner.

I'll leave the last word for the great Louis CK.

 

Unwieldy Property

by Misha Lepetic

“Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and tyrant, and I declare him my enemy.”
- Proudhon

Back in undergraduate days, when, if it is to be believed, my prose was even more incomprehensible than it is now, I wrote a paper on the economic history of the concept of private property ownership. After 37 pages, and having only reached JS Mill, I bowed out as gracefully as I could, and spent the next week wondering how anyone could be said to own anything at all. And yet, society’s legal and social construction of property ownership continues to be of the utmost importance in setting the course for economic development in general, and urbanization in particular.

In this sense, past commentators have looked at housing as an especially crucial area, since the larger issue of urban migration had already reached a boiling point in Europe by the mid-19^th century. The work of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is worth singling out in this regard. Originally an unapologetic Anarchist best known for the pithy aphorism “property is theft”, by the end of his life Proudhon had moderated his views considerably. Writing in the posthumously published Théorie de la Propriété,

“…property is the greatest revolutionary force which exists, with an unequaled capacity for setting itself against authority … [The] principal function of private property within the political system will be to act as a counterweight to the power of the State, and by so doing to insure the liberty of the individual.” Proudhon, quoted in Gray, p135

For the later Proudhon, the validity of property is resurrected only “if it is purged and infused with justice” (Gray, p243). Specifically, this right to property would encourage workers to defend themselves against the depredations of the State and its capitalist abettors. In contrast, the propagation of rent-based housing only exacerbated the uncertainty of their situation. It would also go a ways towards preventing slum clearance, which was as ineffective then as it is now. In fact, two decades after Proudhon’s death in 1865, Great Britain’s Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes published a report where the acknowledged that

Rookeries are destroyed, greatly to the sanitary and social benefit of the neighborhood, but no kind of habitation for the poor has been substituted… The consequence of such a proceeding is that the unhoused population crowd into the neighboring streets and courts…and when the new dwellings are complete…the tenants are not the…persons displaced [so that] those whose need is greatest suffer most acutely. (p19-20)

Thus Proudhon’s hope was that, in aggregate, the landowning proletarian class would throw up a legal-materialistic barricade against those who would otherwise bulldoze their neighborhoods and subsequently engage in the kind of property speculations that only further exacerbate income inequality and displacement of urban populations.

We shall return to this thesis, but Proudhon’s views were starkly contradicted, if not ridiculed outright, by Friedrich Engels, who responds in The Housing Question:

The whole conception that the worker should buy his dwelling rests … on the reactionary basic outlook of Proudhonism, … according to which the conditions created by modern large-scale industry are diseased excrescences, and that society must be led violently, i.e., against the trend which it has been following for a hundred years, to a condition in which the old stable handicraft of the individual is the rule, which as a whole is nothing but the idealized restoration of small-scale enterprise, which has been ruined and is still being ruined…Proudhon only forgets that in order to accomplish all this he must first of all put back the clock of world history by a hundred years, and that thereby he would make the present-day workers into just such narrow-minded, crawling, sneaking slaves as their great-grandfathers were.

Since the rise of capital (and the city, as a manifestation of capital) was an irreversible phenomenon (that could only lead to socialism), anything else must be considered an intolerable delay. In Andrew Merrifield’s words, “with a “stake” in the system and mortgaged up to the hilt, some workers become paragons of consenting citizens, stifling revolutionary spirit…the Proudhonist plan, far from bringing the working class any relief, was used directly against it” (p45).

However, Engels graciously refuses to design or suggest any future state. As with so much else of Marxism, he discusses the future redistribution of property with the following breezy statement: “As soon as the proletariat has won political power, such a measure prompted by concern for the common good will be just as easy to carry out as are other expropriations and billetings by the present-day state.” This is not helpful. On the other hand, it has led to at least one wonderfully satirical memoir attempting to describe the lunacy of navigating socialist housing in the worker’s paradise that was the Soviet Union.

It may be surprising, then, to realize that while the debate has sharpened, it has not lost its basic contours. For example, it is instructive to consider Engels’s critique in light of the current financial crisis, where homeowners with mortgages almost permanently under water simultaneously function as the taxpayers backstopping the consequences of banks’ irresponsible lending practices.

On a larger stage of global urbanization, two contemporary commentators have taken over from their 19th-century counterparts. In the Proudhonian corner, Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto argues that “the distinction between property-as-possession and property title [is] the basis for the entrepreneurial generation of wealth. The world’s poor have the former; they need the latter.” That is, the lack of a record-keeping system for titling land to squatters obviates the possibility for much further economic development; to de Soto, this is the principle difference between the success of capitalism in the west, and its failure in many other places. To this effect, his Institute for Liberty and Democracy has been consulting to governments interested in developing these kinds of databases.

But is this enough? That is, given significant enough barriers to formal property, is the formation of capital really impossible? De Soto ends The Mystery of Capital with “but for the moment, to achieve those goals [of development and social justice], capitalism is the only game in town. It is the only system we know that provides us with the tools required to create massive surplus value.” (p228)

It should now be clear where de Soto departs from Proudhon: whereas Proudhon’s workers owned their property as a bulwark against the state, de Soto explicitly relies on the state to provide protection and enforcement of property rights (admittedly, Proudhon’s enforcing entity is unclear to me). It should not be surprising that not only governments, but also companies, have been eager to create these information systems, since this is another step into bringing a large segment of the urban population into contact with opportunities for consumption and debt.

Robert Neuwirth, a journalist whose experience of living in slums around the world led to the publication of Shadow Cities, disagrees that formal titling is necessary to provide the baseline for development. Rather, people need two things: a guarantee, however tacit, that they will not be evicted; and access to politics, where residents can organize themselves into entities that are recognized by governmental institutions (see his Long Now talk, starting at 55:15). As an example, Sultanbeyli is an official sub-municipality of Istanbul, with a popularly elected mayor and services provided by taxes collected within the slum. Remarkably, no one owns title to any of the buildings in the community.

Other projects are similarly engaged: the Favela-Bairro project in Rio de Janeiro seeks to “regularize” slums by mapping them, providing better water and construction options, and, while residents are not issued property titles per se, they have tacit assurance that they will not be evicted. In these cases recognition and enforcement of claims may still be precarious, but the uncertainty seems to have been reduced to a point where dwellers are willing to invest in their communities, and in turn, the government is less keen to clear the slum wholesale.

And yet, both de Soto and Neuwirth are firmly entrenched in the belief that the global slum-city is a warren of entrepreneurship just waiting to erupt. For both, the formation of capital, and therefore prosperity, is as inevitable as socialism was to Marx and Engels. This is in itself a peculiar perspective, attacked recently and with relish by journalist Mike Davis in Planet of Slums. Punching away in Engels’s corner at the efficacy of titling, Davis’s newly empowered property owners simply evolve from slum dwellers to slumlords. In fact, this is capital formation by any other name.

An example of another objection to de Soto’s project concerns “'Informal employment,' [which] by its very definition…is the absence of formal contracts, rights, regulations, and bargaining power” (p181). This brings us to the crux of the matter. What are the economic and social relations of the people living in any of these places? As noble as it may be, what is most striking about an attempt like de Soto’s is that, once again, urban planners and theorists are tacitly concerned primarily with the built environment. This is almost as if to say that, once the built environment has been reinvented, formalized or brought into some kind of bureaucratic receivership, all social relationships will uncomplainingly evolve in a complementary fashion. (And yet, like Engels, Davis is short on recommendations. In fact, it is even worse, as Davis cannot avail himself of Marxism’s “As soon as the proletariat wins everything is gravy” attitude. Unlike Neuwirth’s Shadow Cities, which makes a gritty but optimistic case, Planet of Slums is relentless, a sort of Bleak House for our urban future.)

  So, what might informal employment look like in “real life”? In a seminal 2006 article, the New Yorker’s George Packer describes economic relations in Lagos’s informal sector:

What looks like anarchic activity in Lagos is actually governed by a set of informal but ironclad rules. Although the vast majority of people in the city are small-time entrepreneurs, almost no one works for himself. Everyone occupies a place in an economic hierarchy and owes fealty, as well as cash, to the person above him—known as an oga, or master—who, in turn, provides help or protection. Every group of workers—even at the stolen-goods market in the Ijora district—has a union that amounts to an extortion racket. The teen-ager hawking sunglasses in traffic receives the merchandise from a wholesaler, to whom he turns over ninety per cent of his earnings; if he tries to cheat or cut out, his guarantor—an authority figure such as a relative or a man from his home town, known to the vender and the wholesaler alike—has to make up the loss, then hunt down his wayward charge. The patronage system helps the megacity absorb the continual influx of newcomers for whom the formal economy has no use. Wealth accrues not to the most imaginative or industrious but to those who rise up through the chain of patronage. It amounts to a predatory system of obligation, set down in no laws, enforced by implied threat.

It is difficult to square this set of socio-economic relations with de Soto’s embrace of capitalism as “the only system we know that provides us with the tools required to create massive surplus value.” In fact, what Packer describes is a proto-capitalistic system; its currency is fear and debt, not trust and credit. This is emergent economic behavior in its most elemental form, and not some fairy-tale story of a microfinance-funded nail salon. It takes an extraordinary leap of faith to think that titled property rights will displace such a brutish, protean system, or even to assume that somehow these two phenomena are mutually exclusive. In fact, it is much easier to imagine that informal systems of such wicked adaptability could survive alongside, or indeed be nestled in, a formalized system of property rights. It is easy to then further extrapolate that the corrupting influence of money and power generated by the informal system will constantly threaten the formal system. On this topic, de Soto himself recently published a trenchant article entitled “The Destruction of Economic Facts.” Its subject? The undermining of the US property title regime by the banks and the federal government.

Citizen Pavey

by Jenny White

At precisely 9:03 am on Friday, May 24, 1996, the attractive blonde woman on track thirteen at the Zurich station slipped into the gap between the platform and the moving train. Şafak Pavey was a nineteen-year-old Turkish art student. She had recently arrived in Zurich to study and to live with her new husband, a British musician. When she entered their apartment, instead of her husband, she found a note explaining that he was leaving her. A few days later, a musician friend of her husband appeared at the door. In an advanced stage of leukemia, Mira was on his way to Geneva to try a last-ditch treatment they had found for him. He had traveled a long way in fragile health, and he was broke. Şafak took time off from her morning job at a cafe and accompanied the frail man to the train station to arrange his ticket. A dancer friend would meet him in Geneva and take him to the treatment center.

When they got to the station, Şafak left Mira on a bench and went to buy his ticket. When she returned, she found Mira trying to board the train. She ran to him, taking him in her arms to help him up the stairs and into the coach. Şafak was reaching the ticket up to him when suddenly the train began to move, its doors still open. Mira leaned forward to grab the ticket and Şafak, afraid he would fall out, pushed him inside. When she tried to step back onto the platform, a baby carriage blocked her way and she fell into the gap between the platform and the moving train.

In those early photos, Şafak is charismatic, insouciant, her eyes a brilliant blue, hair bouncing about her face in blonde curls. In the accident, she lost her left arm and leg, a particularly serious amputation because with both limbs missing on the same side, as she once pointed out to me, you have no stability at all. Her mother, Ayşe Önal, a journalist famous for her courageous reporting of taboo topics like corruption and government violence, took her young son Mehmet to live first in Switzerland and then to England to care for Şafak through a series of grueling operations and experiments with ill-fitting prostheses. Turkey was out of the question – it does not have a basic prosthetic sector at all, except in military hospitals. Handicapped people are considered a source of shame for the family and kept out of sight. Marriage within the extended family is a common cause of genetic disability, and people fear being stigmatized. No accommodations are made for the disabled, and government policies are a work in progress. A young woman like Şafak would have had no independent life at all in Turkey. She tried for a time to resume her studies in Istanbul, but found the city entirely inaccessible. Instead, she pursued her education in England. It is all the more remarkable that last Sunday, after fifteen years of living abroad, she was elected to the Turkish parliament and returned to her country as Istanbul representative for the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP).

Right after the accident, Şafak and her mother wrote a book about their experiences. Track Number Thirteen became enormously popular in Turkey. I watched Şafak at a book signing in Istanbul the following summer. The line of young women, some in jeans and others in headscarves, clutching her book and waiting for her signature stretched out the door. By the late 1990s, Şafak Pavey had her own political interview show on Turkish television. Driving slowly through Istanbul’s crowded lanes with her mother at the wheel, people would sometimes poke their heads in the car window and ask either, “Are you Ayşe Önal?” or “Are you Şafak Pavey’s mother?” In a radical move for Turkish society, Şafak posed as a model on the cover of one of Turkey’s major fashion magazines. She attended the London School of Economics first in a wheelchair, then with a newly fitted prosthesis. She studied nationalism, ethnicity and minority rights, topics that had animated her long before Zurich, when she was one of a handful of non-Armenians writing for the Armenian-Turkish newspaper, Agos. The editor was a family friend, Hrant Dink, who was assassinated in 2007, shot in the head by Turkish nationalists on the sidewalk in front of his office.

Şafak struggled with her vulnerability and restrictions; it was not always easy to be upbeat and to keep going. I remember that her infectious laugh was sometimes forced and desperation lurked about her eyes, especially when yet another prosthesis began to chafe and she had to move about in a wheelchair or be carried like a child. But her iron will (and that of her mother) and a fundamentally irrepressible sense of fun kept her tethered to the world.  A finely honed understanding of injustice propelled her into a career promoting human rights, particularly of refugees and disabled people, in which she has been both daring and spectacularly successful. She became coordinator of public relations and strategic communications in the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, or UNHCR, where she was responsible for policies on child rights and education. She worked with UN goodwill ambassadors and supporters like Mick Jagger, Ben Affleck and Angelina Jolie to promote minority and social rights around the world. Occasionally I received emailed photos of Şafak arm-in-arm with Nobel Prize winners or the pop idol Tarkan. Discovering that the UN hired very few people with disabilities and had no policies regarding disabled peoples, she and her team developed employment policies for UNHCR to recruit disabled staff around the world. She visited me in Boston a couple of years ago, the first stop in her campaign to push the UN to pay heed to people with disabilities that included buttonholing influential people at Harvard University, in Washington, DC, and at a gathering of Nobel Laureates in California. On that visit, she insisted on being dropped off in Harvard Square and returned with mission accomplished as well as a chic dress and handbag from a local boutique. The UN General Assembly adopted a new human rights convention in 2006 that supports the rights of people with disabilities and Şafak led the establishment of a UN-wide group that oversaw its implementation. She has written three books and edited a volume on law with Nobel Peace Laureate Shirin Ebady.

Her work required extensive travel. On UN missions, she lived in Jordan and Algeria and worked with Sahrawi refugees. One of her most difficult periods were the two years that she spent in Iran as external relations officer covering the Afghan and Iraqi refugee situations and repatriation programs. In a country with so many handicapped people from the Iran-Iraq war, she said, it was remarkable how invisible they were. She was often harassed as a woman and because of her disability, especially at the airport where security would sometimes demand that she remove her prostheses and, in one case, tore open her prosthetic leg with a knife to “see what was inside”. In Bushehr Airport in southwestern Iran, “they took away my passport and said they wouldn’t let me on the flight unless I took off my leg.” The UN removed her from that post early because they couldn’t guarantee her safety. Şafak also had a frightening experience at Kennedy airport when a security guard shouted at her and then pulled out her gun and pointed it at Şafak because she refused to raise her arms. The guard didn’t understand Şafak's repeated explanation, shaken and finally weeping, that she couldn’t raise her arm because it was a prosthesis.

She experienced harassment in many countries, including Turkey. She was invited to Turkey in 2003, the European Year for Disabled People, to receive the Presidential Award for outstanding person with disabilities. But Turkish Airlines agents denied her request for disability assistance and a wheelchair, arguing that she wasn’t disabled enough. Puzzled, she explained that she was on her way to receive an award for being a successful disabled journalist. In a line straight out of Kafka, the airline explained that the Turkish government had a new definition of disabled: you must have a disability on both sides of the body, that is, to have lost two of the same appendages, in order to be considered disabled. Şafak started a rights campaign against the airline and sought a report from a Turkish doctor only to find that it too stated that she wasn’t disabled enough to benefit from any disability assistance. She and her mother pursued this issue to the highest levels in Turkey (even speaking to Prime Minister Erdoğan about it), but found no one interested in the subject or willing to consider changing it. They concluded that this might have been a cost-saving measure on the part of the government, or that it allowed the government to claim a lower “handicapped rate” (and thus a higher rate of full benefits) for EU accounting purposes. They accumulated an extensive paper trail of the history of these regulations and their effects, as well as political denials, but no Turkish newspaper or columnist they approached was interested in taking up the issue.

Turkish regulations were adjusted in 2006 to take account of this bizarre new definition with the effect of kicking many people off the disabled rolls altogether. A person classified as more than forty percent disabled is entitled to benefits. Before 2006, a person with one eye was considered 41 percent disabled and thus eligible for a certain level of assistance. Under the new regulations, one eye is classified as 25 percent disabled. In Turkey, there are about 900,000 people with one eye.

In January 2007, the wildly popular singer and musician Sezen Aksu, who has been called Turkey’s Edith Piaf, became guest editor-in-chief of a major newspaper for a day. She published Şafak’s campaign letter against Turkish Airlines as one of her “Five Shames in Turkey” that included violations of child rights, women’s rights, and nature and animal rights. This brought the issue to public attention, but only briefly, as Hrant Dink was assassinated a few days later and, as Şafak put it, “life stopped for us all.”

It is in this context that Şafak Pavey’s election to parliament last Sunday is a remarkable step for Turkey and a great achievement for Şafak who will at last have a voice in protecting the rights of the disabled in Turkey. She plans to do so as part of a human rights campaign, rather than the present model based on social rights and charity or, as she put it, “not just distributing Pampers and creating isolated disability centers”. The human rights concept in Turkey, she observed, has been narrowed down to just a few political topics. She hopes to shift the thinking to a rights model that encompasses all of the UN Rights Conventions, including the rights of children, women, and migrants, the rights of those subjected to enforced disappearances, torture, and so on. But she will start with disability rights. Her first goal is to get non-disabled MPs to claim ownership of the issue. In the meantime, she will continue to model in the public eye a new unapologetic vision of life as a disabled person who is a full participant in society. Her campaign poster shows a self-confident young woman with a wide smile, her hand outstretched as if ready to grapple with the next issue. The logo states, “I know the value of my vote. Because I'm an active citizen.”

Pakistan: The End of the Affair?

by Omar Ali

We have been here before, but it is being said that the unhappy marriage between the Pentagon and GHQ  has deteriorated further and once again, those watching this soap opera are wondering if this union can last? Writing in Al-Arabiya, GHQ’s own Brigadier Shaukat Qadir says that the US appears to be “gunning for Pakistan’s top generals”, who are said to be bravely resisting this latest perfidious American plot against General Kiyani.  And why is the US trying to undermine the good General? Because at a meeting with President Obama he made clear  “ that this soft-spoken, laid-back, easy-going general, far from being overawed by the privilege of meeting President Obama, would still give back better than he got.”

This interesting article (I highly recommend reading it twice to get the full flavor) can be read in a number of ways, all of which are worrisome. One is to assume that Brigadier sahib means exactly what he is saying. That there is some core Pakistani interest that General Kiyani bravely insisted on defending, and for that sin, he is now being systematically undermined. Note that Pakistan’s elected government did not decide what this core interest is supposed to be, nor was it consulted before General Kiyani decided to defend this core interest against US imperialism. In fact, Brigadier sahib hints that the elected regime may include “powerful individuals who have no loyalty to this country and its people”. No, this core interest, for which Kiyani sahib is supposedly willing to risk a clash with the United States (and by extension, NATO, Japan, etc) is defined by GHQ, as it has been for decades.

“Strategic depth”, it seems, is alive and well and we can live with bombings, insurgencies, electricity shortages and all sorts of economic and social crises, but we cannot live without strategic depth.  For the sake of this strategic depth, we kept the Taliban alive and made sure the new American-installed regime in Afghanistan would not stabilize. And when the Americans leave (something that everyone in GHQ seems convinced is happening very soon), we will restart a civil war in Afghanistan, with “our side” led by the Haqqanis and Mullah Omar.

 This war we expect to win in very short order, after which we will move on to our Central Asian Nirvana. Having antagonized all the hardore jihadis by siding at least partially with the US, we are now to antagonize the US and its allies by sticking by the Taliban. This is known as GHQ's "Sau Gunndey tey Sau CHittar" strategy". * The problems with this approach are manifold and include:

1. “The imperialists” are unlikely to leave as soon as imagined. This alone puts the whole strategy in question because as in Kargil, there seems to be no plan for the possibility that the "enemy" may not do what we expect it to do.
2. “Our side” is unlikely to win all of Afghanistan even if the Western imperialists leave according to our timetable.  Given the opposing interests of many regional powers, that struggle is likely to be even more prolonged and bloody than the last attempt to fill the Afghan vacuum.
3. “Blowback” from this war will be worse than the blowback from the current confused operation. The Taliban refused to cooperate with us against anti-Shia terrorists even in the good old days of the nineties. This time around, they will be much more difficult to control. We cannot even control the current (relatively small) Islamic Emirate of Waziristan. To imagine that we will control the much larger and more fractious Islamic emirate of the future seems to be a pipe dream.
4. Any exit of the imperialists and return of the Taliban will inevitably be followed by a house-cleaning of Western “fellow travellers” in Pakistan. That cleansing may not be on the army's immediate agenda, but pressure to Islamize Pakistan will be hard to resist once the Islamists are winning. The establishment may then find it expedient to try and get rid of the ANP, Pakistani liberals and other riff-raff that the army has tolerated in the Sulah e Hudaybia phase. Naturally the Americans will respond with retaliatory measures of their own and a liberal efflux will have some modest but detectable negative impact on the economy and the state; the final outcome, in a weak and fractious state, may not even be up to North Korean standard.

But that is only one interpretation of Brigadier sahib’s views. There is another; it may well be that cooperation with the United States is set to continue, but the haze of lies that surrounds the relationship now needs to be raised to new heights.  Pakistan’s deep state is highly “Westernized” in very practical ways and has always been a willing and even eager partner of the CIA and the Pentagon in the region. But both the state and its American minders have been operating with  the view that those who matter will calculate profit and loss, and everyone else can be kept suitably entertained with our own peculiar version of Jihadi kool-aid (a uniquely Pakistani mix of Islam, militarism and the “two nation theory”).

In one of the more spectacular “own goals” in history, this convenient and previously useful propaganda has now created a large constituency within the rank and file of the armed forces and the semi-educated middle class. How now to tell them the truth, smack dab in the middle of a crisis? Better to just update the kool-aid, pray to Allah, and keep going while hoping for a miracle. In this version, no breach with America is intended or desired, but the natives are restless and the Jihadi/Paknationalist credentials of the supreme commander must be burnished to prevent any unpleantness, hence the article and others like it. The problem with this version is that it means the state will continue its policy of trying to appease both the Islamists and the Americans and this only postpones the day we fall between two stools, it does not alleviate that risk.

Yet another version holds that this is simply more of the “controlled burn” strategy, the aim being to get the Americans to cough up more money by raising the threat of a “rogue” nuclear state (a strategy with which we have long years of practice by now). The problem with this version is the one pointed out by Mr. Lincoln a long time ago; you cannot fool all the people all the time. What happens if someone decides to call our bluff?

It is hard to say which of these theories is correct. If I had to pick, I would pick the last one because I am a cynical person, but there is little objective evidence based on which an outside observer can decide between these theories. It is even possible that all three (and others I have failed to imagine) are ALL simultaneously true. Pakistan’s biggest curse and the army’s most treacherous gift to the nation is its culture of secrecy and double-dealing. Domestically, the army (and particularly its intelligence agencies) have thoroughly undermined the credibility and effectiveness of politicians, civil bureaucrats and the media by decades of behind the scenes manipulation. They have done the same thing abroad by keeping foreign policy under their opaque control. This is fertile ground for conspiracy theories of every stripe (including the three I have managed to outline above) and the truth is impossible to know for sure ("loose change" aficionados will no doubt feel it’s the same in the United States, but the murkiness in Pakistan is an order of magnitude above anything an American can imagine). And the same opacity and confusion may now extend to the supreme command; it is possible that not only are we unable to discern what is going on, the corps commanders who meet every month are equally clueless and confused. Not being the best and the brightest, and acutely conscious of their intellectual shortcomings but determined to stay in charge no matter what, they may be flying blind too….this final irony raises the disturbing possibility that the past may not be an adequate guide to the future and very nasty black swans may be swimming just beyond the next bend in the river. Perhaps India should prepare for an influx of Pakistanis seeking refuge from chaos that even the worst enemies of Pakistan may not have imagined. Being our cousins, and with a bureaucracy not known for its boldness and vision, one doubts that India will have a policy adequate to the needs of this mother of all black swans. The rest of the world may be equally unprepared. The Chinese, supposedly used to thinking one hundred years ahead, may be our only hope.

* "Sau Gunndey tey Sau CHittar strategy": Literally, one hundred onions and one hundred lashes. A man was to be punished and was given the choice of eating a hundred onions or getting a hundred lashes. He opted for the onions but after 3-4 onions, he thought this is too hard and switched to lashes. But after 5 of those the pain was too much, so he switched again to onions..he ended up with a hundred of both. GHQ runs the risk of being punished by both sides to the full extent of the law. Picking one poison might have been a more rational choice.

Post Script: Sufi masters in upstate New York have sent a sufi teaching story that they claim has some relevance to why the hapless civilian regime is having so little success in Pakistan; It is not known if these are true sufis or impostors, so the story may or may not apply. Halva strategy: The Mongols were coming and the capital was in a state of panic. A holy man showed up and his followers claimed he had magical powers and could stop the Mongols. He was invited to take over and do his thing. He took over command and ordered the ministers to prepare the finest halva. They did so, he ate and let others eat as well. Next day, they said the Mongols are only 100 miles away, what now? He asked for more halva. It was done. This went on for days, every day the Mongols got closer and he asked for more of the best halva. Finally the Mongols arrived at the gate. He packed up his sleeping bag and said "I am off, do what you can to save yourself". Everyone screamed “But what about the your magic”? He said "dudes, I came for the halva and I had lots of it and it was indeed good. The Mongols are your problem. Good bye."

Writing for Machines

by James McGirk

Writers are anxious about the Internet and all things electronic, as we worry these newfangled ways of entertaining ourselves might someday obviate our own work. The solution, perhaps, lies in understanding and adapting to this new medium. Consuming enough that we can master its complexities and render appealingly intelligent confections for our readers. But who are these readers? Are they different online than they are in print? Some of them aren’t even human. There is a new form of reader browsing the Internet. For this is no longer just the age of mechanical reproduction; we now have to contend with mechanical readers as well.

William Gibson, who coined the term “cyberspace” imagined it as a mass consensual hallucination, rendered as a cityscape, the prominence of each shape on the horizon an index of how much data was passing through a single point; a point which in 1982 a reader might have thought of as a mainframe computer, and what today, nearly thirty years later, we might identify as an html address or site. On Gibson’s Internet Google would glow the brightest, soar the highest; be an Empire State Building to the Internet’s Manhattan. Most users don’t look at the Internet by volume, however, they read it pane by pane, navigating from bookmarks or through searches, feeding keywords into an ‘engine,’ a series of algorithms, to retrieve lists of linked addresses to the information they seek. These lists are customized to the user, the results tweaked by the user’s location and previous searches. The more searches you make, the more information about yourself you reveal, the more customized the experience becomes.

From a content provider’s point of view (as opposed to a more passive content user’s point of view) an ideal Internet browser might render something close to Gibson’s landscape of crystalline data sculptures, were there a way to capture such information in real time. But commercial users would rather see traffic than the mere through-output of bits and bytes. Who consumes what information, when and why is much more important to commerce than mere bandwidth. Though online sales have grown to become big business, the Internet remains a popularity contest. The real currency of the online world is attention. Being able to read the flow of attention online would mean mastering it, and reaping the ad money that comes along with that attention. But instead of trying to follow where everyone is going all at once, content providers are instead attempting to clone their readers’ minds. 

As you navigate the Internet, the Internet – which is to say the entities using the Internet – navigate you. This isn’t a benign process. They want to learn as much about you as possible to snag your attention; not only by viewing content, but by diverting your time into loops of advertisements and possibly even pushing you through a point-of-sale and taking your money directly. They do so by gleaning information about you. Where you go, what you search for, what type of computer you are using… Websites leave small tracking codes on your computer called cookies, and each of these transmits data back to home base. 

Keywords (also known as index terms) are the most interesting and valuable traces left by users. Cookies record the terms users use to come across a site. An entire industry has sprung up to interpret these keywords, and another to optimize content online so it can be better read by search engines (this is called Search Engine Optimization). The data they gather is a crude simulacrum of their users; an inscription of their desires for an instant. Almost like a section of brain tissue. A clue. And en masse a hologram of their users collective desires. 

All writers crave attention and respond to their readers’ desires. Charles Dickens used live audiences as focus groups for his serialized fiction. Newspapers and magazines have always had to respond to circulation numbers. Electronic texts simply speed up the process. Text online can be altered immediately. There are even advanced analytics packages that use keywords and cookies to anticipate what readers want and automatically generate ‘content’ for users in response to what they ‘perceive’ readers as wanting. Other companies use similar algorithms to assign stories to human beings. When you hear the term content farms, that’s what’s going on. 

Google tweaked its search algorithms a few months ago, which trimmed back the custom-generated content that had begun to choke its search results like kudzu. But beyond the first or second page of results, it comes sneaking back and you will still find page after page of sites that copy the content of other sites, or ones loaded with all the correct terminology of whatever it is you seek, but arrayed in such a way that these phrases convey little or no meaning. As replications of our desire, these simulacra are incomplete. It would take an infinite amount of data (and a correspondingly infinite amount of time to collect this data) to accurately model a human being’s wants and desires. But machines are getting closer and closer. 

There are gaps between reader and author in a traditional text too. Enormous ones. Between the platonic ideal an author holds in his or her head, the text he or she extrudes into type and the reuptake and processing that takes place in a reader’s head, there is plenty of room for strange, unexpected effects to creep in. William Gibson described the cyberspace generated by a child’s calculator as a grey infinity utterly empty but for a string a few basic arithmetic equations (slim structures of liquid crystal one imagines). This unnameable sea of grey emptiness is not neutral. More of a field or something we project into and allow things to assume shape. And distended from the platonic ideal and warped by exterior forces these things become strange. Even arithmetic has its unexpected, subjective aspects. Many a calculator screen has been reversed to spell mild profanities. 

Knowledge builds on memory, and all information builds off what we already know. Reading works by drawing parallels with memories, essentially unpacking an archive into that grey arithmetic field mentioned above and letting it take new forms. The way a machine reads, in this respect, is no different. Software has an archive of its own, a database that it is adding or subtracting from. It 'reads' by comparing its archive to a text, and then updating itself. An author can access this archive with his or her text; and the more sophisticated it is, the more he or she can manipulate it; perhaps even creating an aesthetic experience. 

Literary forms are beginning to emerge in response to automated reading systems, searches, and databases. Online, an era somewhat akin to the pamphlet-strewn amateurism of18th Century America is in bloom. The most exotic forms can be found on the Internet’s wild fringe, in its anonymous and pseudo-anonymous chat sites. Here there is a frantic economy of monikers, memes and spoofed identities. In online forums such as the semi-anonymous Somethingawful users compete to create the catchiest, most innovative forms – most often an evolution of an earlier idea, name or other fragment of an idea. The best innovators become famous within their tiny little spheres. Other forums are anonymous and ephemeral – the most famous of these being the notorious 4chan/b ‘Random’ board – where the only recognition earned is the sheer longevity of a creation. A post can only survive as long as it is replied to. Then it is gone forever.

The best memes were once charted on the now-defunct Encyclopedia Dramatica. But now there is no reason at all to create but sheer artistic thrill. Although ‘board lore’ has developed a concept somewhat akin to ‘duende’ – a dark, nihlistic reward in the form of amusement known as ‘lulz.’ 

The evolution of the online literary form could well come from manipulating these mysterious semantic mechanicals. They offer the opportunity to make writing dangerous again. With the proper keywords, information is taken up into automatic readers belonging to some very interesting entities, to the point where there can be real world consequences. As a way of experimenting with this form I created a series of posts with keywords that I imagined might appeal to some of the more peculiar gleaners out trolling for information online. I posted lists of oil rigs, information about espionage, created a consulting company specializing in complex shipping orders in the Arabian Ocean, wrote about electronic warfare, and laced my work with other ‘edible’ keywords. I received visits from hedge funds, multinational banking concerns, the department of defense, oil companies, environmental organizations, the Pakistani government, the Kuwaiti government, the Iranian government, the Russian government, an unacknowledged US military facility, and a few mysterious hits from ‘Cabin John, Maryland’ (a park across the river from CIA headquarters).

I don’t think my posts ever stirred more than a few pixels. All I did was conjure another layer of anxiety about the online world, but for a writer paranoia is far better stuff than anxiety over obsolescence.

The Elusive City

I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades' curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1974, p4

 

In the headlong rush to lead us to the promised land of the “Smart City” one finds a surprising amount of agreement between the radically different constituencies of public urban planners, global corporations and scruffy hackers. This should be enough to make anyone immediately suspicious. Often quite at odds, these entities – and it seems, most anyone else – contend that there is no end to the benefits associated with opening the sluices that hold back a vast ocean’s worth of data. Nevertheless, the city’s traditional imperviousness to measurement sets a high bar for anyone committed to its quantification, and its ambiguity and amorphousness will present a constant challenge to the validity and ownership of the data and the power thereby generated.

We can trace these intentions back to the notoriously misinterpreted statement allegedly made by Stewart Brand, that “information wants to be free.”* Setting aside humanity's talent to anthropomorphize just about anything, we can nevertheless say that urban planners indeed want information to be free, since they believe that transparency is an easy substitute for accountability; corporations champion such freedom since information is increasingly equated with new and promising revenue streams and business models; and hackers believe information to be perhaps the only raw material required to forward their own agendas, regardless of which hat they happen to be wearing.

All three groups enjoy the simple joys of strictly linear thinking: that is to say, the more information there is, the better off we all are. But before we allow ourselves to be seduced by the resulting reams of eye candy, let us consider the anatomy of a successful exercise in urban visualization.

A classic example of the use of layered mapping to identify previously unknown correlations occurred in London in 1854. An epidemic of cholera had been raging in the streets of London, and Dr. John Snow was among the investigators attempting to pinpoint its causes. At the time, the medical establishment considered cholera transmission to be airborne, while Snow had for some time considered it to be waterborne. By carefully layering the cholera victims’ household locations with the location of water pumps, Snow was able to make the clear case that water was in fact cholera’s vector.

This anecdote is by no means unknown, having become a favourite warhorse of epidemiologists and public health advocates; it has now been gladly co-opted by information technology aficionados as an example of a proto-geographic information system (GIS). However, it is worth a further unfortunate mention, as described by Martin Frost, that:

After the cholera epidemic had subsided, government officials replaced the Broad Street Handle Pump. They had responded only to the urgent threat posed to the population, and afterwards they rejected Snow's theory. To accept his proposal would be indirectly accepting the oral-fecal method transmission of disease, which was too unpleasant for most of the public.

Thus even the starkest illuminations by data may yet find little purchase among the policymakers for whom it is ultimately intended.

Another point worth mentioning about Snow’s discovery is that he found exactly the result for which he was seeking. He was, in fact, testing a hypothesis, and not engaging in a cavalier quest for serendipity. The lynchpin of the exercise’s success was the fact that Snow was mapping not just the street plan, but also the locations of the shallow wells. The map did not include any of the other aspects of urban infrastructure, which might have obfuscated the sought-after relationship. On the other hand, without including the wells, what might the map have taught the health authorities? That Broad Street required quarantining?

Even more importantly, the good Dr. Snow put down his quill and went into the field, where he was able to interview residents and understand how the deaths that were further afield of the contaminated pump were in fact connected to it: the residents simply considered it to be better water, and, much to their misfortune, considered the extra effort to go to a more distant well to be worth the trouble.

Several conclusions should be clear from this exceedingly elegant (and therefore admittedly rare) result: 1) It helps to know what it is you are looking for; and 2) The initial hypotheses indicated by the data can only be validated by field-level observation and correlation. These traits – falsifiability and reproducibility – are two hallmarks of the scientific method. Armchair technologists need not apply.

So how replicable is Snow's example? In this "scientific" sense, Richard Saul Wurman, founder of the TED Conference and all-star curmudgeon, questions our ability to even understand what a “city” is. For example, he posits that we do not have a common language to describe the size of a city, or of how one city relates to another, or what an “urban area” is. If there are six different ways of describing Tokyo, and those six ways lead to boundaries variously encompassing populations of 8.5 million to 45 million people, which is the “real Tokyo,” and of what use is the concept of a “border”? We have no unified way of showing density, collecting information, no common display techniques, and no way of showing a boundary. We have no common way of talking about a city. Accordingly for Wurman, the consequence is that ideas cannot be built on one another, and urbanists forego benefits of the scientific method. However, if we consider Snow’s process, the map was a means to an end, a supporting role in the scientific discourse, and was not meant to be anything more than that.

Of what use, then, is the deluge of data, and the pretty pictures that we draw from it? One can find endless examples on the Web of beautiful visualizations derived from datasets that are either partial or self-selected, with results that range from the obvious to the quixotic to the inscrutable. During the Cognitive Cities conference, held in Berlin in February of this year, more than one presenter was asked the question that went more or less along the lines of “Well, that is very nice but it does not tell me anything I don’t know already. What has surprised you about your findings?”

***

While the end results may be oftentimes trivial, and the lack of Wurman’s standards of measurement worthy of our best Gallic shrug, there is far more unease concerning how and where urban data is being generated, and for whose benefit. At the aforementioned Cognitive Cities conference, Adam Greenfield delivered a powerful keynote which struck a stridently skeptical note towards the various technologies that are rapidly contributing to the manifestation of the networked city. He goes through an increasingly disturbing catalogue of “public objects” whose technologies harvest our participation in public space, creating rich data flows for the benefit of advertisers or police or other bodies, and this generally entirely without our knowledge.

For example, certain vending machines in Japan now have a purely touch-screen interface, but the available selections are selected by algorithms based on the machine's sensing the age and gender of the person standing before it. Therefore, I might see the image of a Snickers bar while you might see the image of a granola bar. The ensuing selections help to refine the algorithm further, but a great deal of agency has been removed from the consumer, or, in the words of Saskia Sassen, we have moved from “sensor to censor”.

Even in initiatives where the public’s initial voice is sought and respected, technology has a way of subverting its alleged masters. Greenfield documents how residents of a New Zealand city voted in a public referendum to allow the installation of closed circuit TV (CCTV) cameras for the purposes of monitoring traffic and thereby increasing pedestrian safety. It was an unobjectionable request, and the referendum passed decisively. However, a year later, the vendor offered the city government an upgraded software package, which included facial recognition functionality. The government purchased the upgrade and installed it without any further consultation with the public, bringing to Greenfield’s mind Lawrence Lessig’s axiom “Code is Law:”

...the invisible hand of cyberspace is building an architecture that is quite the opposite of its architecture at its birth. This invisible hand, pushed by government and by commerce, is constructing an architecture that will perfect control and make highly efficient regulation possible. The struggle in that world will not be government’s. It will be to assure that essential liberties are preserved in this environment of perfect control. (Lessig, pp4-5)

Greenfield’s remedy to make public objects play nicely is problematic, however; his requirement for “opening the data” starkly contradicts significant economic trends. As a simple example, it is doubtful that advertisers will do anything but fight tooth and nail to keep their data proprietary, and given the growing dependence municipalities have on revenue generated by private advertising in public spaces, it is difficult to see the regulatory pendulum swinging Greenfield’s way.

Instead, we see a further complexification of the terms of engagement. Consider the popular iPhone/Android application iSpy, which allows users to access thousands of public CCTV cameras around the world. In many cases, the user can even control the camera from his or her phone touchpad, zooming and panning for maximum pleasure. In this sense, at least, we have succeeded in recapturing aspects of the surveillance society and recasting them as a newly constituted voyeurism.

And yet, there are signs that the radical democratization of data generation is alive and well. Consider Pachube, a site devoted to aggregating a myriad varieties of sensory data. Participants can install their own sensors, eg, a thermometer or barometer, follow some fairly simple instructions to digitize the data feed and connect it to the Internet, and then aggregate or “mash” these results together to create large, distributed sensory networks that contribute to the so-called “Internet of things.” Lest one consider this merely a pleasant hobby, consider the hard data that is being generated by the Pachube community built around sensing radiation emitted during the Fukushima nuclear disaster (and contrast it with the misinformation spread by the Japanese government itself).

The broader point worth emphasizing is that communities appropriate and aggregate sensor data to serve specific purposes, and when these purposes are accomplished these initiatives are simply abandoned. No committee needs to publish a final report; recommendations are not made to policymakers. There is no grandiose flourish, but rather the passing of another temporary configuration of hardware, software and human desire, sinking noiselessly below the waves of the world’s oceans of data.

Cities are and have always been messy and defiantly unquantifiable. Because of this – and not despite it – they are humanity’s most enduring monuments. In this context, our interventions do not promise to amount to much. Rather, these interventions may be best off as targeted, temporary and indifferent to a broader success which would be largely dependent on the difficulties of transcending context. Should it surprise us that cities, which manage to outlast monarchs, corporations and indeed the nations that spawn them, are ultimately indifferent to our own attempts to explicate and quantify them? And, upon embarking on an enterprise of dubious value and even more dubious certainty, are we not perhaps better off simply asking, What difference does a difference make, and acting accordingly?

 

* Brand’s actual statement was “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine---too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.” Viewed in its entirety, there is really very little to disagree with. We should add that, since it was originally formulated around 1984, it has aged extremely well.

Letter From Be’er Sheva

By Jenny White

I remain convinced, despite my anthropological training not to generalize, that every society has an aesthetic, a particular repetition of pattern, that informs its material manifestation. In contradiction to the anthropological view that you must delve under the surface to understand a place, I’m going to suggest that this aesthetic is most powerfully visible to the uninitiated. The observant tourist, for instance, who sees everything through a child’s indiscriminate and unfiltered gaze. Patterns pop out to the uninitiated. For locals, by contrast, patterns harbor familiarity, wholeness, comfort, rootedness. Patterns are woven into the everyday, felt, but no longer seen. On my first visit to Japan, I was struck by the layered rows of boxes I saw everywhere, in the arrangements of windows, proportions of houses, the way images were arrayed on fliers and ads, far beyond what I would expect by accident or convenience. I experienced the boxes as a powerful imprint on my surroundings wherever I went. Perhaps I was wrong. A friend who is a specialist on Japan doesn’t see it. Does the forest have a shape without its trees? Nonetheless, I will continue with my conceit, on the justification that I am also a writer and writers gleefully play with any patterns they see, even if an anthropologist would tell them that without context, there is no meaning. No writer believes that; her job is to create meaning, not analyze it.

I am now in Be’er Sheva in the Negev desert, teaching a three-week course at Ben Gurion University. A driver brought me from Tel Aviv airport to my residence in a ten-story building that towers over the neighborhood. The streets near the residence are little more than rows of cement rooms with walled-in tile forecourts. Behind them loom three- and four-story apartment buildings of unfinished cement without ornamentation or color. There is little attention to detail and the buildings are crumbling, festooned with wires and rusting grates. They remind me of bunkers with blank walls and slits for windows. That is the only pattern I see beyond the ubiquitous lack of ornament. But it is a pattern.

On the Sabbath I set off toward the high rises I could see in the distance. I had heard about a mall – the only one – that was open on Saturdays because the owner was Russian. I trudged for an hour and a half along wide utilitarian roads unrelieved by vegetation and then through a deserted industrial area until I reached the mall—a strip of boxy shops arrayed in a horseshoe around a parking lot and the Hillel Café, which to my great relief was open. After an invigorating pasta salad, I returned home by another route. Nothing I saw diminished my first impression. The buildings were higher and better built, but pale, bunker-like, with wide, narrow windows, and without detail.

There is little color in Be’er Sheva, even in people’s clothing. I am told that many eastern Jews live here who are observant. Some of the women wear long skirts or tunics and little caps over their hair. Others dress in shorts and t-shirts. Observant or not, it's a low-key, cheap-jersey world. Sidewalks are cracked, littered. Things are jury-rigged. In some ways the city reminds me of Turkey in the 1970s, but without the colors. In those days, even the poorest Turkish house was whitewashed or painted blue against the Evil Eye and flowers planted in recycled oil cans brightened balconies and doorways. In Israel it seems as if color might tempt the Evil Eye rather than ward it off.

The university is an oasis to which I gratefully return after each expedition. Its buildings are attractively modern, set like sculptures within artfully designed greenery through which snakes a gurgling stream. It is full of cafes, like a little Tel Aviv. The students on campus look like the students on any US campus. But the buildings also have something of the bunker about them, thick cement expanses, narrow windows, no color. I was told that if anything threatening happens, there were bunkers in the basement, but that simply stepping into an inner room would likely be safe enough. The common room in my residence also doubles as a bunker. There is a reason, of course, for bunkers. Not long ago, Grad rockets fired from Gaza reached Be’er Sheva and one landed on a university dormitory.

Jerusalem gave me the impression of monumental fortifications, by which I mean less the Ottoman city walls, but the vast settlements, enormous cliffs of structures rising from hilltops and extending into the distance like impregnable walled forts. I also visited Sderot last year, one of the towns that bears the brunt of Hamas-inflicted rockets. Sderot is nothing but a bunker. Even the bus stops are bunkers where the riders wind themselves into cement walls to wait. The city representatives met us in their underground command bunker and told us about their traumatized populace.

Tel Aviv boasts celebrated modernist structures in the cubic Bauhaus style. But when I visited Tel Aviv for the first time last year, I saw a city of square, unadorned cement buildings with balconies, their cladding peeling like bad sunburn, shots of color provided by the occasional orange trumpet vine. The boardwalk along the sea was bleak cement. Friends who live there see an entirely different city; they see cafes, the sociable homes of friends and family, intellectual and economic exchange, a vivid life projected onto these otherwise unremarkable surfaces like hot-pink bougainvillea. I didn’t think “bunker” in Tel Aviv, but I did think “impermanence.” This is a clue, I think: structures built not from a tradition or for posterity (except in a defensive sense), but also not built as a tradition in the making. The statement seems to be a practical “get on with it”, set in a no-nonsense present that eschews investment in an uncertain future.

Yesterday I asked one of my university colleagues here why there was so little color or ornamentation. He explained that early Israeli architects brought with them the Bauhaus style and that modernism remained the building norm. In the 1950s and ‘60s Israel’s population increased so rapidly that buildings were thrown up as quickly as possible with “no time for nonsense.” The modernist style and the lack of ornament and color, he added, were also a rejection of the East. It was a way for Israelis to say, “We are Western.” Indeed, houses in Bedouin towns on the outskirts of Be’er Sheva and in Palestinian Ramallah, which I visited last year, were notably more ornate with large arched windows and rooftop crenellations that looked less like battlements than crowns.

In Ritual and its Consequences, Adam Seligman et al. suggest that repetition of pattern in the world we construct around us is closely related to ritual, that is, stylized repetitive interactions that relate the self to the world. These exist in both religious and secular domains. Ritual isn’t an external expression of the world as it actually is, nor is it simply the expression of an internal state. Instead, it supersedes the individual by providing an “as if” world that makes it possible for very different groups of people to share a social world. Rituals, I would add, are acts by which we calm ourselves, rehearse who we are and who we would like to be as a society, despite our differences. Israel’s national pattern might be called the blast wall, a defensive structural skin that protects the family within.  It shows little concern for structural details or exposed public space, but places all its emphasis on what is inside. My otherwise bleak walk to the mall, for instance, was relieved by a colorful head-high billboard as long as a city block that showed a series of ordinary faces of men, women, children, couples. People are displayed in bright hues, whereas structures and actual people on the street are wrapped in protective coloring.

There are, of course, instructive exceptions. In suburbs inhabited by professionals, houses are shaded by lush gardens. Tel Aviv is said to be a city of cafes – individuals practicing public simultaneity and open display. Contradicting the Israeli pattern with such alternate rituals cracks open the “as if” world of Israeli public identity and reveals the different groups within. Last year, the Zionist head of an illegal West Bank settlement told my visiting group with some disgust that “those people in Tel Aviv who sit around in cafes and drink cappuccinos” had forgotten their Zionist heritage. They had become soft, he complained, and would no longer be able to defend the nation.

The lens through which Israelis see the world is that they are a people under existential threat (it is common to hear people say, “they hate us because we’re Jews”). Patterns of material culture evince that fear with a repetition of defensive walls and an unwillingness to draw attention through ornament, color or public display. Instead, Israel as a nation emphasizes Jewishness and the physical presence of Jews and their families, the fertile yolk within a hard, white shell. There is little “Israeli” material culture. You won’t find  tourist artifacts that represent Jewish Israel (rather than the many other cultures that reside here). Other than religious artifacts and Dead Sea bath salts, there is nothing “Israeli” to buy in the areas tourists frequent or the airport shops. Jewishness and Jews are the portable treasures.

There are signs of change, the confidence to tempt the Evil Eye. The newest building on campus has a vulnerable glass skin under a cement awning. A new housing complex has Moorish arches over its windows. Delicate nods to the future from a haunted present.

Imagining an Expat Aesthetic

by James McGirk

I was born beside Sigmund Freud’s London townhome, and spent the next eighteen years ferried between Europe and Asia. Nominally American, it was not until I was seventeen-years-old that I could actually call the U.S. home, and even then I was so jangled from the shock of moving from India to a mountainous midwestern state, that I felt as if I had arrived from another planet. This was more than mere discomfort, I was so confused and unsure of who I was and what my role was meant to be I lost the ability to speak for months. Many years later – as a freshly minted Master of the Fine Art of fiction writing – one of my deepest anxieties stems from this dislocation and lack of authority. I lack a homeland to plunder for deep, meaningful memories from. Flannery O’Connor had Savannah, Georgia and generations of roots feeding her creations, Saul Bellow had Chicago, and Alice Munro has Southwestern Ontario. My own memories seem too fragmented and distant for the deep aesthetic dives they take, unless there is such a thing as expatriate literature. Could there be such a thing? 

Immigrant fiction has a long, rich tradition that is not quite the same as expatriate fiction. Perhaps the difference has to do with authority. Migration has always been part of the human experience. For millennia we have been herded about and forcibly relocated. Immigration is active. To uproot your home and set it down elsewhere is a story. There is conflict and action built into this experience, so it lends itself to fictionalization. But being an expatriate is a completely different level of engagement than being immigrant. You either arrive as an agent or you arrive as a tourist. Either way you remain aloof; tethered elsewhere, staying at the whim of a foreign government, in a role where any intervention on your part is an imposition of some sort. Expatriate action either lacks agency, or is pure adventure and thus politically moot. What authority can an expatriate writer possibly have when compared to a national or an immigrant’s perspective? Outside of nationalist chauvinism, their only claim to some sort of special authority would be data based, such as technical expertise – the expatriate as consultant or mercenary; or as a gleaner of information – the expatriate as a journalist or spy.

Marco Polo, the great 13^th Century Venetian traveler, was all of the above. He was a representative in the court of Kublai Khan and an agent of his family business concern.

 His account of his voyages through Iran, China, India and beyond – The Travels of Marco Polo – was as much intelligence briefing as it was aesthetic creation. Travels is a collection of descriptions, bordering on the anecdotal, others architectural, others merely practical. Farming practices share the page with improbable descriptions of local customs. Much of it was impossible and had to have been invented or at least embellished. Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities imagined Marco Polo keeping the emperor Kublai Khan entertained, telling him story after story describing the cities he had traveled to, all of which were simply different facets of Venice.  The idea of cities existing as layers upon layers overlain has a sort resonance with the expatriate experience; there is something undeniably architectural about it. The projection of home onto a foreign substrate. Or conversely finding and assembling traces of some far away place (that may never have existed at all) in a foreign city. 

An unfamiliar skyline is a vivid reminder that you are not home. If a postcard is an index, physical proof of your presence in another city, it cannot be coincidence that architectural detail is among the most popular choice for an image sent home. And to find home you have to superimpose the familiar onto an alien architecture.

Marco Polo may have been the original expatriate author, but if there were a patron saint of the genre, it would be J.G. Ballard. Ballard was born and grew up in China, as the son of a British manufacturing executive. He lived a cloistered, comfortable life in Shanghai until about the age of 13, when the Japanese invaded China and he was sent to a Japanese interment camp. Later Ballard studied medicine and flew in the Royal Air Force. His stories are science fiction, set in dystopian ruined worlds, scientific outposts, vacation complexes and non-spaces like airports and freeway overpasses. To the true rootless cosmopolitan like Ballard – who was born a Briton in the ‘Shanghai International Settlement,’ a foreign enclave that has completely ceased to exist – those non-spaces might seem like home, or at least version of it. And perhaps this was true for Ballard. He eventually, and rather notoriously given his reputation as a strange, transgressive thinker, settled in Shepperton, a middle class suburb in Surrey (England).

That non-space is what I remember most, what I felt the most emotion recalling: the chubby shape of a jetliner, fins swirling within a cone of turbine, the jolt of connection when I heard English spoken by an American or Briton. There were also the brands, the international megabrands that at the time felt so reassuring, as if they were secret messages sent from home. But those memories don’t actually have the same punch as I can imagine a physical place having. For one they are constantly in flux, and also, as I came to actually living in the developed world, where my home supposedly is; I have seen so many of my idols humbled and desecrated. In the United States McDonalds is not the lusted after status symbol as it was in my junior high school in New Delhi (where the richest students would buy frozen McDonalds burgers by the gross in Singapore and have their cooks fry them up for parties back home); and even back then I understood that these symbols were never really mine.

What lies beneath all of that non-space is a sort of geometry, one I seek out instinctively. I can navigate a foreign city cold most of the time, sensing the diplomatic enclaves and bureaucratic zones that once contained my version of home. And I guess the gap where that geometry comes undone and things start to become sinister and broken is what I am most drawn to writing about. That would make the patron saint of expatriate writing Paul Bowles. 

Density, destiny and other convenient anagrams

by Misha Lepetic

“The architect is primary… is the real cornerstone of any culture, of any society.”
Frank Lloyd Wright, 1958

What is the responsibility of the architect or designer within the contemporary context of urbanism? If we’re to begin with the preceding quote, taken from an interview with an astonishingly anti-urbanist Frank Lloyd Wright, it is an unconditional, Roarkian supremacy. If these sentiments had prevailed, of course, Le Corbusier would have ensured that today’s Paris would look very different.

Wright, his avatar Howard Roark, and Le Corbusier exemplify extreme, or perhaps extremely self-aware, instances of one of the great struggles in architecture: the uncomfortable fact that the world is full of people, and that architects are primarily educated in the total discourse of buildings. However, the increasing urbanization of the human race relegates the efficacy of architecting individual buildings as, at best, proofs-of-concept and as, at worst, vanity projects. And many such buildings placed in proximity to one another do not add up to a coherent urban solution.

This is not to say that architects and planners have not frequently thought on a comprehensive, urban scale. Christopher Wren’s plans for London following the Great Fire, mostly unrealized, and Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s revision of Paris, mostly enacted, show us otherwise. But these plans revolved did not concern themselves with the citizenry as such. In the case of Wren, the self-interest of the merchants and landowners in fact prevented the plan’s execution. And despite the net benefits, the social consequences of Haussmann’s plan for Parisian identity are still hotly contested: the destruction of over 20,000 houses and buildings was not just about making room for the wide boulevards, but also led to the displacement of untold thousands of the poor to the suburbs of Paris, while speculators grew wealthy from flipping the new apartments to the rapidly rising bourgeoisie (see Balzac’s The Rise and Fall of César Birotteau for a particularly wonderful account of pre-Haussmannian property speculation and bankruptcy).

Haussmann’s plan anticipated what has become a major concern of modern urban planners and theorists: the concept of density and what is to be done about it. The growth of cities as incubators of commerce, culture and innovation has become the dominant urbanist rhetoric of our time, perhaps best characterized by Edward Glaeser and, to a less imaginative extent, Richard Florida. The libertarian Glaeser revels in the riot of complexity and interaction that can only be created by a dense urban area, and notes that one of the surest signs of a city in decline is a decreasing population. Consider these reports on Detroit:

The flight of middle-class African-Americans to the suburbs fueled an exodus that cut Detroit's population 25% in the past decade to 713,777, according to Census Bureau data released Tuesday. That's the city's lowest population level since the 1910 census, when automobile mass production was making Detroit Detroit...

“While we expected a decline in population, we are confident these figures will be revised,” Mayor David Bing said in a statement. He told reporters that if the city could account for a total of 750,000 people, it would meet a threshold for receiving more federal and state money.

Detroit is perhaps an unfairly obvious example. So consider David Leonhardt’s comments on the consequences of de-densification of Cairo and its connection to development:

It would be easy to look at the images coming out of Cairo over the last few weeks and think of Egypt as a highly urbanized society. It would also be wrong.

When Hosni Mubarak took power in 1981, Egypt was indeed more urban than the rest of the world. About 44 percent of its population lived in cities. In East Asia, by comparison, only 26 percent of people lived in cities.

Since then, the cities of Asia have expanded rapidly, drawing in millions of peasant farmers looking for a better life — and, more often than not, finding it. Almost 50 percent of East Asians now live in cities. And Egypt? It is the only large country to have become less urban in the last 30 years, according to the World Bank. About 43 percent of Egyptians are city dwellers today.

This urban stagnation helps explain Egypt’s broader stagnation. As tough as city life in poor countries can be, it’s also fertile ground for economic growth. Nearly everything can be done more efficiently in a well-run city, be it plumbing, transportation or the generation of new ideas and businesses. “Being around other people,” says Paul Romer, the economist and growth expert, “helps make us smarter.”

If we consider the role of architects and planners to be one of enabling play rather than bounding relationships, we can proceed to move away from the ideological rigidity of Wright and Le Corbusier’s. In the words of Robert K. Steel, Deputy Mayor for Economic Development, City of New York, “Our job is not to find the next thing, but to create the conditions to make sure that it happens in New York City” (RPA, at 41min 51sec). However, this leaves us with the even stickier question of, Up until what point do we design? 

A possible indication of attitudes toward density is the way in which any given city solves the problem of mobility. In Cities for a Small Planet, Richard Rogers proposes the idea of the Compact City, in which density is encouraged within a polycentric context, and overlapping activities and multiple transportation options are meant to de-emphasize the importance of the automobile. These are virtues that Jane Jacobs would clearly recognize and applaud.

Rogers elaborated his principals in a proposed master plan for Lu Zia Sui, an area across the river Huangpo from the center of old Shanghai. Originally, the site was meant to be a single-use financial district, à la Canary Wharf in London, and the development was envisioned as not dissimilar to Le Corbusier’s and Wright’s tower-in-a-park typology. Rogers took the opportunity to create a vision that was dramatic and well-informed. Six of these “centers” are arranged in a radial fashion around a large central park, with careful consideration given to pedestrian and bicycle modalities as well as an underground mass transit system linking the six centers to one another and to Shanghai in general. While a quick look at Google Maps shows Rogers’s plan, like Wren’s for London, as mostly foregone, more planners are evaluating the malleability of a city’s functionality by means of reforming its transportation network.

The work of Fabio Casiroli’s group, Systematica, is an excellent example of calling attention to the importance of mobility in planning. Systematica tries to understand the “size” of a city as a function of its accessibility via automobile and via public transit. By setting a 45-minute travel time as a criterion, the design consultancy generates “heat maps” that radically reshape urban boundaries based on the access that different modalities enable. This in turn provides great insights for planners who are trying to understand how residents interact with the urban environment, and where opportunities for further densification might lie.

It is important to emphasize a major difference between Rogers’s vision of Lu Zia Sui and Systematica’s work, since the former was proposed as a greenfield development, whereas the latter is more concerned with retrofitting existing cities. Similar to my earlier contention concerning the utility of designing individual buildings, greenfield development of new cities will be experimental or bizarre, but in any case certainly infrequent.

The fact is that the cities we have now are the ones that are already dense, and becoming ever more so. Edward Glaeser, during the keynote address to the recent Region Planning Association annual meeting, noted that a direct proxy for density is the relationship between the number of local building permits granted and the prices paid for housing (RPA, at 29min 31sec). He points out the quite astonishing irony that, as a result of Jane Jacobs’s beloved Greenwich Village being utterly “encased in amber,” now only “billionaires need apply” for the townhouses where she and her neighbors once shared such a rich urban life. But I would contend that Greenwich Village, like Chelsea in London, or the Marais in Paris, is doomed to remain this way forever, and should be considered an outlier – a stubborn inflection of whatever curve economists like Glaeser enjoy drawing. Of greater interest are the aspects of the city that are still heaving with growth and development.

A recent joint study by IIED and UNFPA on urban density points out an intriguing phenomenon. Evaluating several Karachi settlements of varying informality, the authors found that dense neighborhoods organically created their own economies, and the vast majority of inhabitants either had or intended to run their own businesses, either from within their own homes or by renting out spaces in the neighborhood, preferably in the same building. The original settlements, generally of one or two stories, then become gradually extended upwards and outwards, as families grew and wealth accumulated. The inhabitants of these neighborhoods continue to express the preference to live close to where they work, which should not surprise us as it is really no different than city dwellers most anywhere else. Since the majority own their homes, they are free to build upwards – exactly what Glaeser would like to see.

The fact that these results may not be on a breathtaking scale, or aesthetically jaw-dropping, would be missing the point – a point better made by the World Bank’s disastrous development project in Dharavi, one of Mumbai’s most extensive (and best-studied!) slums. In this case, the World Bank constructed blocks of rental flats without any commercial space available on the street level. The flats themselves are poorly built and badly maintained, and the residents have no stake in ownership; they now have the additional hardship of having to commute to their old places of employment. In essence, the World Bank has successfully built a bedroom community inside a slum, repeating the same mistakes made by public housing planners the world over.

In contrast, the IIED study’s authors recommend working within the community to help builders and homeowners develop their expansions responsibly and safely, thereby avoiding the massive disruptions caused by slum clearance and dispossession (à la Haussmann), and preserving the identities that people construct for themselves as recent urban dwellers. It is a reasonable recognition that these communities are not only permanent features of the contemporary urban landscape, but are in addition resourceful and necessary and therefore should be respected in the own right, and made to function well within the larger urban context.

So where do planners fit in? One possible answer goes back to Robert Steel’s remark – that the responsibility is for planners to mold density into opportunity, that is, density must become an asset and not a liability. Designing for mobility is a perfect response to this need, although certainly not the only one. As a final example, consider the benefits that the recently implemented Metro Cable (gondola lift) systems being developed in Medellín and Caracas, which have effectively begun integrating the hilltop favelas with the more established portions of these cities and are now regularly transporting tens of thousands of people on a daily basis. While it is still too early to judge their ultimate impact on their respective cities, more Metro Cable systems are being planned for other cities in similar circumstances, such as Kohima, India.

The premise is both simple and elegant: whereas the slum regions of cities originally had no choice but to occupy the less desirable geographies – steep hillsides without services, prone to landslides and crumbling if not non-existent roads – the Metro Cable paradigm wholly reverses this liability and turns it into an asset. Suddenly slum dwellers are connected via a rapid transit system that elides the need for automobiles. In fact, the higher the hill and the more densely populated the neighborhood, the likelier that a favela will receive a station. Furthermore, it instantly generates the kind of polycentricity that Rogers sought in his Shanghai design, but without the need for a wholesale master plan or the destruction of existing settlements. The capital costs are not insubstantial, but the benefits may well be long-lasting and unanticipated. Only time will tell to what extent the Metro Cable stations themselves become anchor points for local commerce, banking and socializing. At a minimum, the design of such structures promises to create a new field of play for inhabitants to further construct their own economic and social identities. And perhaps Haussmann himself might have recognized these boulevards in the sky as sharing a certain kinship with the ones he brought to fruition on the ground.

Book Review: Tide Players by Jianying Zha

by Wayne Ferrier

The dichotomy of economic globalization and traditional culture is contributing to a worldwide identity crisis. But crisis and change often go hand-in-hand together. In China change is happening on an unprecedented scale. And, when the tide rushes in, as in all places, individuals rise to the challenge and play that tide. Fifty years of Soviet style communism has left a bad taste in China’s mouth, so it has turned its face to the West. But this isn’t a face that wants to be Western. It isn’t a blank slate either. It is a Chinese face and behind that face is a Chinese identity.

One of Mao’s little red children, who grew up in China and in the United States, is Jianying Zha, self-proclaimed Beijinger and New Yorker. She belongs to a generation that embraced democratic liberalization when China opened its doors to the West in the early 80s, and became disillusioned after Tiananmen Square. Zha received her BA from Peking University, and then applied to the University of South Carolina where she got her M.A. Later she got her M.Phil at Columbia University. Now Jianying Zha is an author, a writer, a media critic, and a China representative of the India China Institute. Her latest book is titled Tide Players published in the US by The New Press. Some of the chapters were previously published in the New Yorker.

While Tide Players is a collection of stories—stories of the entrepreneurs, the street revolutionaries, the elites, and the intellectuals who played the tide—Zha reflects, at the end of her work, that some philosophers and historians, such as Li Zehou and literary critic Liu Zaifu, have observed that attempts to bring sudden radical change in China has either resulted in tyranny or disaster. Zha is aware that China is too enormous in size, its numerous problems too complex, that incremental reform is more preferable right now rather than the instant change her own brother advocates. Her brother, Jianguo, spent several years in prison as a dissident and revolutionary. Zha acknowledges economic progress as the first step of reform, while individual freedom, social justice, and democratic liberalization will follow. Still she feels for her brother who, she once felt, threw his life away for a dream that couldn’t come true. She is comforted by her liberal friends, who have told her that it was people like her brother that set the parameters; people like Jianguo tested the water and alerted the rest what was too dangerous water.

Zha also bemoans what she sees as a lack of dialog between Chinese and American writers. She states that Americans fall into one of two schools of thought; those who fear China and those who are inspired by it. What we see in Tide Players is a China surfing economic materialism yet fearing the sharks who will steal away its soul in the process. Confucius was China's first great social critic. He did not refrain from life's pleasures; he sought balance between the extremes, and to avoid excess. His way of life was based on the golden mean of equilibrium. From beginning to the end in Tide Players, Zha weighs the pros and cons of everything she has witnessed and thought about. As Confucius is claimed to have said “Balance is the perfect state of still water. Let that be our model. It remains quiet within and is not disturbed on the surface” even as the tide rushes in.

After the Death of David Foster Wallace

by Robert P. Baird

In a recent review of The Pale King, David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published “novel,” Garth Risk Hallberg writes:

In the end, Wallace’s body of work amounts to an extended philosophical experiment. Can “morally passionate, passionately moral” fiction help free us from the prisons we make? To judge solely by his suicide, the experiment would seem to have failed.

Of course Hallberg doesn’t end there; he goes on to say that “watching [Wallace] loosed one more time upon the fields of language, we’re apt to feel the way he felt at the end of his celebrated essay on Federer at Wimbledon: called to attention, called out of ourselves.” This is fine stuff, and credible: Hallberg is a serious and intelligent critic, and what he says about the fragments assembled into The Pale King fits the expectations established by Wallace’s earlier writing.

Still, it’s the earlier sentences that interest me more. In identifying a philosophical, even therapeutic aspiration in Wallace’s work, Hallberg is cashing out Wallace’s famous assertion that “fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.” Hallberg draws a line from Wallace’s art through his life to his death, a line we can trace with almost syllogistic precision: if Wallace’s life was the test of his art, and if his suicide marked a failure of his life, then so, too, must his death stand as a capital judgment on his art.

I admire this formula, even as I find myself troubled by it. I admire it because it lays out in especially stark terms a dilemma whose presence has imposed itself, often in unresolved and unsettling ways, on most of the reviews and reminiscences written in the runup to and aftermath of the publication of The Pale King. Hallberg’s great service is to name the question that all of us face in the wake of Wallace’s suicide: namely, how should his death affect the way we read his books?

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It’s easy to smirk at this question, easy to take refuge in the old New Criticism and say that Hallberg’s got hold of the issue the wrong way around. After all, we don’t let it it affect our appreciation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to recall that Tennessee Williams choked to death on an eyedropper. We don’t let the knowledge that Kurt Gödel died of starvation arouse any reconsideration—besides, perhaps, a glib and guilty joke—of the Incompleteness Theorem.  We all know that Hemingway, Woolf, and Berryman committed suicide; who, now, would judge any of their work diminished by that fact?

And yet while the line Hallberg draws between Wallace’s life, death, and art might rankle our critical sensibilities, there was a time—a long time, in fact—when such a connection would have seemed a truism. In Spirit in Ashes, the philosopher Edith Wyschograd describes the persistence of a centuries-long consensus about the meaning of death in the West. From Socrates to Kant, with significant detours through Christianity and possible extensions into existentialism, what Wyschogrod calls a “paradigm of authenticity” held that the mark of a good life was a good death. Within this paradigm, “The actions of a person’s last days are interpreted as the touchstone for determining his or her value as a moral being.” (It's for this reason, if you grew up Catholic, that you learned to ask Mary to pray for you at the hour of your death.)

What counted as a good death was subject to local variations, but Wyschogrod leans on Phillipe Ariès to argue that the core of the authenticity paradigm was a conviction that a good death was a “tamed death”—an experience of dying that was free of fear and anxiety. This was Socrates saying, in the Phaedo, that “the true disciple of philosophy…is ever pursuing death and dying; and if this is true, why, having had the desire of death all his life long, should he repine at the arrival of that which he has been always pursuing and desiring?” This is Epicurus, writing to Idomeneus on the day of his death, “My continual sufferings from strangury and dysentery are so great that nothing could augment them. But the cheerfulness of my mind, which arises from the remembrance of our past conversations, counterbalances all these afflictions.”   

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The upshot of Spirit in Ashes is that we don’t generally think like this anymore. On Wyschogrod’s reading, the terrors of the twentieth century caused the thorough dismantling of the authenticity paradigm. Concentration camps, mass killings, and nuclear weapons made it not just impossible but unthinkable to calmly and rationally prepare for the moment of our passing. 

There is, however, a decent case to be made that something like the authenticity paradigm survives in the way we talk about Wallace’s work in the aftermath of his suicide. “Something like”: I hedge because to get from Wyschogrod to Hallberg we have to give the screw another turn, to link death to life and then, further, life to art. But once we make that jump, once we admit the transitive property, it’s not hard to see how Hallberg’s reading fits the tradition Wyschogrod sketches. 

The idea that Wallace’s art maintains a deep relation not just to his life but also to the manner of his death (and vice versa) is one that so far seems impossible for us to shake. Hallberg’s, while clearest, is hardly the only example of this tendency. You can sniff it in Lev Grossman’s claim, in Time, that the “formidable interpretive challenges [of Wallace’s work] have only been exacerbated by the complicated emotions surrounding Wallace's death.” You can hear it in Maria Bustillos’s suggestion that Wallace, a bit like Jesus, taught, suffered, and died for the idea that “those who are unsure of themselves and suspect themselves of the worst falseness and wrong, bad things are to be not only pitied but loved, identified with and known.” You can see it in John Jeremiah Sullivan’s admission that despite his desire “to resist romanticizing [Wallace’s] suicide” he is convinced that

there remains a sense in which artists do expose themselves to the torrents of their time, in a way that can't help but do damage, and there's nothing wrong with calling it noble, if they've done it in the service of something beautiful. Wallace paid a price for traveling so deep into himself…

Even Jonathan Franzen, who knew Wallace well, argues that the trouble his friend had with his writing was not incidental to his death: 

Fiction was his way off the island, and as long as it was working for him…he’d achieved a measure of happiness and hope for himself. When his hope for fiction died, after years of struggle with the new novel, there was no other way out but death.

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The New Critical refrain that the life is the life and the art is the art is usually good interpretative counsel. But the reasons why we’re so regularly tempted to blur our readings of Wallace the man and Wallace the work are not difficult to discern. Forget for a moment that Zadie Smith said he had no equal among living writers, that Lorin Stein said he “changed the way we write and read,” and that George Saunders called him “first among us. The most talented, most daring, most energetic and original, the funniest, the least inclined to rest on his laurels or believe all the praise.” Forget that Sullivan discerned in Wallace’s suicide not just a loss for his family, friends, and fans, but a loss for the entire English language. (“Here’s a thing that is hard to imagine: being so inventive a writer that when you die, the language is impoverished. That's what Wallace's suicide did, two and a half years ago. It wasn't just a sad thing, it was a blow.”)

Above all that, beyond all that, there was something else. Wallace belonged to that slim class of writers—Frank O’Hara, Annie Dillard, and Martin Amis are three more—who knew or discovered or learned how to project intimacy with a force that felt literally telepathic. Wallace called it peeling back his skull; through some dark magic he seemed able to climb in and describe the state of what we used to call our souls. 

The effect is especially obvious in Wallace’s nonfiction, but it’s waiting for you in the fiction, too. At Wallace's memorial Saunders described it this way:

Something about the prose itself was inducing a special variety of openness that I might call terrified-tenderness: a sudden new awareness of what a fix we’re in on this earth, stuck in these bodies, with these minds. This alteration seemed more spiritual than aesthetic. I wasn’t just ‘reading a great story’ – what was happening was more primal and important: my mind was being altered in the direction of compassion, by a shock methodology that was, in its subject matter, actually very dark.

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Wallace believed that one aspect of fiction’s magic was, as he told David Lipsky, its ability to capture “what the world feels like to us, in the sort of way that I think that a reader can tell ‘Another sensibility like mine exists.’ Something else feels this way to someone else.” (Of course, Wallace was too good a magician and too good a philosopher to believe his own illusions. He knew that “we all suffer alone in the real world," knew all too well that "true empathy’s impossible.”)

It was Wallace’s special gift—or, okay, one of about three dozen of his special gifts—that he could work this magic on people who generally considered themselves too sophisticated to fall for rhetorical tricks. He cultivated charm on the page, even as he recognized that his efforts could very quickly “become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire [me] instead of an exercise in creative art.”

Whatever the dangers, the magic succeeded. Readers responded to Wallace in exactly the ways he wanted them to. They plied him with the kind of intense emotional allegiance usually reserved for the earnest young fans of movie stars and delivered an extravagant counterproof to James Woods’s bone-stupid assertion that “no one has ever claimed to be moved by him.” As Bustillos put it, “Wallace gave voice to the inner workings of ordinary human beings in a manner so winning and so truthful and forgiving as to make him seem a friend.” 

For many readers the effect was even more intimate. What Timothy Kreider wrote to McSweeney’s was something you often heard privately before Wallace’s death and publicly after: 

When I first read him, I thought that here was exactly the writer I would be if only I were much smarter, and a much better writer, reading his more recent work I felt that David Foster Wallace was the person I would be if I were less intellectually lazy and more honest and conscientious, kinder and truer to myself.

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If you’ve read anything about Wallace, you’ve heard similar things before. But usually lost in these discussions is the fact that Wallace himself was wary of the link between art and life that so many of his bereaved fans have tried to draw out. In his review of a Borges biography he took issue with “the idea…that we can’t correctly interpret a piece of verbal art unless we know the personal and/or psychological circumstances surrounding its creation.” 

One trouble with making Wallace’s art answer to his life—and, even more problematically, to his death—is that we risk ignoring all the other things his work was about. A bigger danger is that each word he wrote starts to look like a symptom in need of diagnosis. Already it’s started happening. Already we've seen stories that once bewildered critics with their involutions and opacities spun into transparent allegories of Wallace’s depression and addictions. Already we've watched his carefully constructed halls of mirrors razed and rebuilt as glass cathedrals where each of us can bend a knee to the horror of his suffering. 

Consider, for example, James Lasdun's review of The Pale King in The Guardian. Lasdun writes that “at a certain point it becomes impossible to resist the thought that under all the high talk about the place of boredom in modern life, what Wallace was really writing about was depression.” To support the point, Lasdun quotes this passage from the unfinished novel:

Ed Shackleford turns a page. Elpidia Carter turns a page. Ken Wax attaches a Memo 20 to a file. Anand Singh turns a page….Ken Wax turns a page. David Cusk turns a page. Lane Dean Jr rounds his lips and breathes deeply in and out like that and bends to a new file. Ken Wax turns a page…

Lasdun’s interpretation of boredom as depression sounds plausible until we remember that Wallace, in Infinite Jest, was careful to distinguish the kind of vague anhedonia that characterized “the lively arts of the millenial U.S.A.” from the kind of depression that kills people. Here's how Wallace described the latter:

It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it…a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence…a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels…an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self.

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It has fallen, somewhat oddly, to the person in perhaps the best position to prove the link between Wallace’s art and his death to argue most strenuously against it. Wallace’s widow, the artist Karen Green, told The Guardian recently that her fear for The Pale King is that it will be read as an extended suicide note. She explicitly rejected the notion that Wallace’s art and his depression shared a common source: “People don't understand how ill he was. It was a monster that just ate him up. And at that point everything was secondary to the illness. Not just writing. Everything else: food, love, shelter…”

I’m not suggesting, and I doubt Green is either, that we can or should stop asking questions about depression and suicide when we talk about Wallace. The point is that we have a choice about where to look for answers. As Henry James wrote in “The Death of a Lion,” 

The artist’s life’s his work, and this is the place to observe him. What he has to tell us he tells us with this perfection.…It’s the course to which the artist himself at every step, and with such pathetic confidence, refers us.

By yielding to the “vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz” that Wallace mocked in Infinite Jest, by guessing at the kind and quality of his addictions, by raiding his archives for the secrets of his depression, we end up denying him his own best commentary on his suffering. We let his suicide be his last and loudest word. 

But can’t we repay his confidence better than that? The least we can do is try.