High quality service provision is an economic development tool
“The most important economic development tool in a municipal government’s toolbox is to do what you’re supposed to do: provide public services and do it well.” - Dr. John Matthews, in class tonight.
Forget tax incentives and selling your city’s soul for a Mercedes plant; firms are increasingly attracted by good roads, good police, good schools, good sewerage, and good anything else that makes for a well-run city.
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Atlanta suburb elects white Republican to city council! Trust me, it’s newsworthy.
Doraville [map, official, wiki], a suburb of Atlanta, has elected Brian Bates to city council. He meets three of the criteria for being a suburban politician in our state: he’s 1) white, 2) male, and 3) a Republican.
He’s also gay.
I’ve suspected real social progress would occur in Atlanta’s suburbs over the next decade, I just never expected it to happen this soon. I’ll try not to read too much into Brian Bates’ victory; at the very least, however, it tells me that Republican voters in Doraville are adults.
Some pictures, a map, and a list.
1. Where has collected the best urban photography among recent Ffffound! finds.
2. I love advocacy group Global Voices’ map of online censorship (and anti-censorship) efforts around the world. Be sure to check out their gallery of national blockpages.
3. Deputy Dog has given us his choices for top 5 ‘deserted city’ scenes in film. I’ve always been awed by that empty London scene from 28 Days Later.
David Axe, on urban life in Mogadishu
David Axe, a good friend and fellow blogger, recently sent me the following guest post from Mogadishu [map, wiki].
Imagine a city with all the usual gripes: a growing population, ethnic tension, strained utilities, crime. Now cut off essentially all spending for 17 years. That’s right: no meaningful investment of any kind. No road repair. No new power plants. No sewerage. No garbage collection. Oh – and fire off a couple million bullets and shells, too.
You’d think such a place would be unlivable, but you’d be wrong.
Welcome to Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, still teeming with people despite being the main battleground in a string of conflicts stretching back to 1990. It’s a ghost town that just happens to have a lot of people in it.
There’s no glass in the windows. There are potholes in the roads the depth of moon craters. There are mountainous heaps of garbage where goats and children scavenge for food. And in every former house, apartment, shop and government building, there are squatters that, over time, have more or less become legitimate tenants.
Who’s going to argue with them, anyways? All those buildings’ former owners are dead or living abroad. Beginning in 1990, everyone with money or a marketable skill who could get out of the country left. Meanwhile, drought and economic collapse hit rural communities hard, driving former farmers into a city that, despite being this close to Hellish, is still better than the countryside.
The old Mogadishu was a fairly cosmopolitan place, with hotels and restaurants, industry and nightlife and foreign embassies with their diverse staffs. The new Mogadishu is a sprawling farming village dropped atop a couple hundred square miles of rubble.
There are islands of order and relative luxury: a handful of hotels cowering near the headquarters of an African Union peacekeeping force. They provide most of their own services: generators, cars, heavily armed security guards. All the food is flown in from Ethiopia. One night on a king-size bed, plus three meals and laundry will set you back $100. At night the hotels seal their gates and post the night watch. And that’s when the shooting starts, gunshots echoing off the ruined walls of a city that looks like it’s ten thousand years old, but isn’t.
Cultural guerilla entrepreneurs restore Parisian clock
A group of underground “cultural guerillas” broke into the Panthéon in Paris and restored its clock. The allowed themselves to be locked in one night, found an unattended entrance, and set up shop in Autumn, 2005. It took the group, who call themselves Untergunther, one year to restore the famous clock.
The hardest part of the scheme was carrying up the planks used to make chairs and tables to furnish the Untergunther’s cosy squat cum workshop, which has sweeping views over Paris.
The group managed to connect the hideaway to the electricity grid and install a computer connected to the net.
After they’d completed their work, they told the administrator, who lost his job when the brass worried too much about the breach in security (and not enough about the positive atmosphere he’d created for citizen participation).
“We would like to be able to replace the state in the areas it is incompetent,” said Klausmann [the group’s leader]. “But our means are limited and we can only do a fraction of what needs to be done. There’s so much to do in Paris that we won’t manage in our lifetime.”
All hail our Turkey overlords
Turkeys are invading our suburbs and cities. And they’re wild. The seven million wild turkeys in the United States, once thought to be suited only to wide expanses of unbroken forest, are adapting to urban environments better than biologists predicted. While the wild turkeys I’ve seen seemed pretty spooked around people, Chris Leahy, of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, claims today’s turkeys are similar to yesterday’s:
“If you look at records going back to the Pilgrim [era], turkeys moved in large flocks and they were quite fearless—or clueless—and people could basically walk up to them and bop them on the head.
“Turkeys have not been particularly afraid of humans and have been readily accommodating to our habits and ways of living,” he said.
“So it’s not terribly surprising that we find them wandering in the suburbs or the streets of Brookline [in Massachusetts] and sort of catching meals where they can.”
See also my post linking to a story on owls in Charlotte, North Carolina, that seem to think the city is an old growth forest. Happy Thanksgiving.
Someone is trying to tell you something
Someone is trying to tell you something: written on the city.
Language in Common posts snippets of conversation found on urban screens. Is most graffiti in English? I remember riding around Berlin and seeing a disproportionate amount of graffiti written in English. Maybe English looks better scrawled across a brick wall and German looks better in illuminated manuscripts.
Some pictures, a map, and a list.
1. Some pictures: Brisbane’s brightly painted traffic signal boxes.
2. A map: The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops hosts a well-done interactive map of poverty within the United States.
3. A list: the most expensive cities for expatriate employees. New York has fallen to 15th, London climbs to second, and Moscow holds fast atop the board.
I’m sure Dem Boom Dip Shropshire Boyz has already been taken
Stepney Posse
L.or.D
Brixton Yard Manz
Superstar Gang
These are some names of gangs in London; there are many more at The Generic Glob’s partial list of London gang names (which first appeared in The Evening Standard). I’m guessing that part of the fun of starting a criminal organization is the naming of it, but most of these names are uninspiring; almost none are scary and nearly all are overly-descriptive.
What would you name your gang?
Capturing Berlin, in fashion photographs
Like Look at Me in Moscow, Stil in Berlin captures young, neon-clad Berliners dressed for a night out in Kreuzberg [map, wiki, official]. They’ve got a Flickr page, too, full of many other great photographs of nightlife in Berlin.
