Hello Interactors,This has been a wild week in our neighborhood. It was a car enthusiasts dream. Too bad our family’s biggest car enthusiast, my son, was busy working his summer job. It was guys like him that got America hooked on cars. And now our planet is cooked. Is it a lost cause?  As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…GET A HORSEFlying down the freeway I see a woman climb out of the sunroof of her car. She’s alone. A semi-truck pulls alongside as she leaps from the car onto the bed of the trailer. Pulling alongside the car in front of her, I see the driver put on a black blindfold. He crosses his arms across his chest like he’s preparing for a collision. Just then, the truck in front of him slams on their brakes. His car comes to a screeching halt as does the woman’s empty car behind him. The man lifts his blindfold, stares into a camera mounted on his dashboard, and gruffly states, “I guess it works.”This isn’t a stunt I watched on Tik Tok, but a Hyundai Genesis ad from 2015. It starts with a voiceover from the sacrificial stuntman in the lead car, “The challenge is to show the driver assist features in an exciting way. But you guys, it seems, are a little hard to excite. Maybe the only way is to put our own lives on the line. Proof, through jeopardy.”Our neighborhood was blocked off this week to film a Genesis car commercial. Nothing this dramatic, they just drove their luxury cars around the block. They descended a hill that features an unobstructed distant view of the Seattle skyline beyond a glistening blue Lake Washington. Fancy cars in a fancy suburb. A suburb whose name features prominently on the Costco toilet paper most of you wipe your fanny biscuits with – Kirkland. Maybe we’re not so fancy after all, but our neighborhood does have nice views.We didn’t see stunt doubles hurling themselves from the sunroofs of luxury cars that day. In fact, we barely saw a single human being. The windows were tinted black, and the streets were empty, except for the police and production assistants. I stepped on the sidewalk to walk down the street and got yelled at by a Kirkland cop. “SIR! PLEASE BACK OFF THE SIDEWALK!” They, like the drivers, were being instructed by the commercial’s director on a walkie-talkie from inside a customized SUV. It had a massive camera boom stretching from the roof over the front end – like a carrot dangling in front of a mule.The truth is, it’s not just car commercials that wish there were no pedestrians on the street. Anytime any of us get behind the wheel of a car we wish the streets were free of people. And bikes. And, yes, other cars and busses too. It’s no wonder most every car commercial features a single driver on a smooth open road…void of people and cars. What bliss. No worries, no conflicts, no delays, just me on my street going between my house and my Costco to hoard my toilet paper.But believe it or not, people needed to be convinced automobiles were useful – let alone desirable. It wasn’t a car commercial that convinced them of this. It was their neighborhood car enthusiasts. People needed to be convinced of the promise of new machines. Innovation doesn’t just sell itself. Sociologists who study social movements say innovations that shape society are framed by “ideological activists who exploit political opportunities to mobilize resources.” They participate in what sociologists call ‘meaning-work’ which demonstrates their ideology as being meaningful, valid, and appropriate.New industries become broadly legitimized only after these industry activists are successful in converting radical concepts into something useful. Elements of a larger belief system must be framed in the context of daily life. So, automobile clubs organized events that demonstrated the benefits of the automobile. This idea was taken from bicycle clubs of the 1800s who used bicycle races to demonstrate the utility, reliability, and health benefits of cycling. Most automobile clubs were born out of bicycle clubs. Both were elite modes of transport using the latest industrial technology. The first automobiles were simply motorized quadricycles. Those motors were especially useful for getting up a hill.Biking up hills is hard. Biking for long distances requires endurance. And what happens if your bike breaks down? Reliability of both bikes and horse carriages was a big deal. These challenges of everyday life were just what automobile industry activists (i.e. automobile clubs) needed to demonstrate the benefits of an automobile. So, they organized demonstration events that included hill climbs and races pitting one car maker against another to see which was the fastest and most reliable.The first was on Thanksgiving of 1895 financed by the Times-Herald. Eleven cars were invited, five showed up and only two managed to finish the event. The winner was awarded $10,000 ($350,000 today) and it went to the Duryea Brothers –America’s first automaker. Their gasoline car topped out at 8MPH in below freezing temperatures…in the snow. Reminding people of the challenges of taking a horse and buggy through the snow, the Times-Herald reported that the car made it “through deep snow and along ruts that would have tried horses to the utmost.”But these events weren’t universally convincing. In 1896, an event organized by the Rhode Island State Fair Association featured an electric car. The Riker Electric won the race and $5,000 but the crowd was underwhelmed. They began chanting, “GET A HORSE. GET A HORSE. GET A HORSE.” That refrain became a popular expression used to make fun of automobile drivers. For years people would yell as they passed, “GET A HORSE!”By July of 1905, the publication Horseless Age, declared the beginning of the American dominant car culture. After a national reliability event by the American Automobile Association (AAA), The Glidden Tour, they reported that it “proved the automobile is now almost foolproof. It has proved that American cars are durable and efficient...it has strengthened our belief in the permanence of the motor car.’’A year later, in 1906, Munsey Magazine also declared the end of making fun of the automobile by writing, the “uncertain period of the automobile is now past. It is no longer a theme for jokers and rarely do we hear the derisive expression ‘Get a horse.’” And three years later, in 1909, Charles Duryea atoned that the “novelty of the automobile has largely worn off.” Soon Ford started pulling out of demonstration events and became the first mass produced reliable car in the world. The belief system of those early innovation activists had taken hold. Their meaning-work was done. They had demonstrated and convinced the public that their once radical inventions were more useful, usable, and desirable than horses, buggies…and bikes.THE GENIE GETS OUT OF THE BOTTLEWith the public convinced and nationwide reliability events tapering off, automobile activists turned their attention to roads. The Good Roads Movement had been around since the 1880s and was started by a bicycle club, the League of American Wheelman. But in 1910 that organizations efforts were overshadowed by the Automobile Association of America (AAA). By the 1920s, automobiles were competing for space with streetcars that were ubiquitous in cities big and small across the country. Streetcar systems were so vast you could almost traverse the country by streetcar city to city. But for the first time, funds and space for public rail infrastructure had competition. Should tax dollars be spent on developing and maintaining rail for trains and streetcars or roads for bikes and automobiles?Meanwhile, large motor coaches were also being produced. One of the first manufacturers and operators in America was John D. Hertz of Hertz rental car fame. He had been operating busses in Chicago since 1916, and in 1923 started the Yellow Coach Manufacturing Company, a subsidiary of another popular name, the Yellow Cab Company. He went on to start other companies with visions of bringing busses and busing to all of America.In 1925 General Motors (GM) bought a controlling stake in Yellow Coach and changed the name to Yellow Truck and Coach Manufacturing Company.  Then, in 1926 Yellow Coach purchased the struggling New York Railways Corporation with the idea of converting it to a bus company. By 1930, the depression put added pressure on the competition for infrastructure funds. Financially struggling streetcars companies were often forced by local governments to lease street access and pay for rail maintenance and services (like snow removal). Companies were also sometimes forced to cap fare prices to protect lower income residents from getting priced out of public transportation by private firms. By the 1930s most streetcars were worn down and their companies bankrupt. It made them easy prey for companies like General Motors to buy them out.And so they did. GM started a subsidiary called United Cities Motor Transport (UCMT) with the sole purpose of buying out streetcar companies and converting them to bus lines in small cities. They succeeded in Saginaw, Michigan, and Springfield, Ohio and then tried Portland, Oregon. But the American Transit Association, a public transit advocacy group, stepped in and the UCMT was forced to dissolve in 1935. But it didn’t stop General Motors. That same year they converted a streetcar in New Jersey to a ‘trackless trolly’ – a bus attached to an electric wire that could detach to pick up passengers in lower populated areas. An idea that is alive to this day.The conversion from tracks to wheels was catching on. In 1936, two brothers in Minnesota who had been modestly busing school children and miners since 1920, either decided or were ‘encouraged’ to expand. They announced a reorganization of their company, National City Lines, "for the purpose of taking over the controlling interest in certain operating companies engaged in city bus transportation and overland bus transportation."  That same year, 1936, this tiny outfit bought 13 streetcar companies in three states in the Midwest. They pushed westward and south to three more states in 1937. They also formed a subsidiary in Oakland, California called Pacific City Lines (PCL) with the intention of converting streetcar operations on the west coast to bus lines. In 1938 they approached GM’s Yellow Coach company to help finance further expansion. By 1939 they had secured funding from not only GM, but  Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Trucks. By the end of 1939, just three years after owning and operating a couple rural busses in Minnesota, National City Lines took control of 29 local streetcar and public transportation companies in 27 cities across 10 states. By 1947 that grew to 46 systems, 45 cities, and 16 states.That also marked the end of the buying spree. In 1947 they were indicted on these two counts of conspiracy by the Federal District Court of Southern California: 'Conspiring to acquire control of a number of transit companies, forming a transportation monopoly' and 'Conspiring to monopolize sales of buses and supplies to companies owned by National City Lines.' In 1948 the case was appealed by the U.S. Supreme Court and they ordered the case be moved to the Midwest in the Federal District Court in Northern Illinois.A year later, in 1949, General Motors, Standard Oil of California, Firestone and others were convicted of conspiring to monopolize the sale of buses and related products to local transit companies controlled by National City Lines and other companies. But they were acquitted on charges of conspiracy to monopolize the ownership of streetcar and other public transportation companies. GM was fined a paltry $5000 ($62,000 today) dollars for their involvement. Their treasurer, also the director of Pacific City Lines was fined $1. That almost seems like a wink and nod more than a punishment. That one man single-handedly dismantled a $100 million electric public transportation system up and down the west coast of the United States.In Los Angeles alone, 280 million passengers a year were using the electric streetcar system. They were forced into buses or cars – if they could afford them. By 1953, just four years after the great General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy people were already complaining of traffic in LA. Within a decade, nearly four million cars were crawling around the Los Angeles Metropolitan area. The era of automobile dependency in the United States was in full swing. And there’s no getting that genie back in the bottle.SAFETY FOR WHOM?The CEO of GM, Alfred P. Sloan, wasn’t just pooling money with his cronies to buy out electric streetcar companies. Back in 1932, the same time he was conspiring to monopolize, he also created the ‘National Highway Users Conference’. He filled it with automobile, oil, and highway construction executives as a non-profit lobbying group intent on bringing an end to the government funding of mass transportation. This resulted in the creation of the U.S. Highway Trust Fund which was then used to fund the creation of the U.S. Interstate Highway System. Between 1952 and 1970 the U.S. government spent nearly two billion dollars on highways. Rail systems got just one quarter of a million.1970 also marked the year the ‘National Highway Users Conference’, ‘Automotive Safety Foundation’, and the ‘Auto Industries Highway Safety Committee’ were merged to form the ‘Highway Users Federation’. In 1995 the name was changed to the 'American Highway Users Alliance’ which to this day is “dedicated to more successful and aggressive issue advocacy on behalf of the highway community.” They went on to lead a “successful national lobbying, media and grassroots advocacy campaign to enact legislation officially designating and funding the National Highway System.” A year later, in 1996, Al Gore, the Nobel prize winner for climate change advocacy, keynoted their 40th anniversary conference. An inconvenient truth.This organization was also the member of the Global Climate Coalition from 1989 to 2001. This was the largest climate policy group in the world. It was an international coalition that opposed actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and challenged the science behind climate change. They also played a significant role in the United States denying ratification of the 1992 Kyoto Protocol.In 2004 a former U.S. Federal Highway Administration staffer, Greg Cohen, became the CEO of the organization. He was behind the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users, better known as SAFETE-LU. This George W. Bush administration bill included funding for the purchase of land in Illinois for freeway expansion. Bush worked directly with the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, on the bill. It turned out Hastert owned the very land slated for freeway expansion. The celebration of the passing of the bill was held at the headquarters of the road construction equipment maker, Caterpillar.Four months later Hastert enjoyed a 500% profit in the sale of his land and his net worth went from $300,000 to over $6 million. Hastert went on to be convicted on felony charges, but not for swindling taxpayers’ dollars. He was sent to prison for serial sexual molestation of young boys. He is the highest-ranking U.S. elected official to serve a prison sentence. Will Trump dethrone him? Just last April, the former Highway Alliance CEO, Greg Cohen, received an award by the ‘Road Gang’ (as those in the organization like to call themselves) for his “significant, exemplary contributions to the highway industry.”In 2009 the ‘Road Gang’ opposed the American Clean Energy and Security Act. This was the first U.S. bill passed by a branch of the U.S. Federal Government intent on curbing heat-trapping gases responsible for the climate crisis. The ‘Road Gang’ said the “bill will dramatically raise the price of highway fuel through a hidden tax” and that it may “raise the price of gasoline by 77 cents over the next decade.” Worse yet, they worried “none of the revenue raised will be spent on highways.”These caustic climate curmudgeons, car conspirators, tire tycoons, and oil and gas goons are the modern-day automobile enthusiast club. In sociological terms they are ideological activists who exploit financial and political opportunities to mobilize resources. For over a century their ideologically vacuous, homogenous, and one-sided promise of automobility is alive and well but it is also killing us – even as it perpetually promises to save us.Yet we still need demonstrations to convince us. Now safety and reliability are demonstrated by professional stunt drivers filmed on a smooth open road. Desirable luxury automobiles are filmed in a bucolic low-density suburban neighborhood void of cars and people. Ironically, our Kirkland neighborhood was planned and designed in the 1800s – complete with alleys designed to hide buggies, bikes, and carbon belching Buicks. Streets were public spaces where kids could play, and neighbors talked to one another. As car enthusiasts took over so did city planners and city councils hellbent on accommodating there promises. Now these enthusiasts are our elected officials, city planners, and civil engineers. In their mind, most of them anyway, the only meaningful, valid, and appropriate use of the street is for cars. A place where to be safe you need Hollywood production assistants on every corner and a cop in the intersection yelling, “SIR! PLEASE BACK OFF THE SIDEWALK!” It makes me want to yell back, “GET A HORSE!” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

The Genesis of Car Dependency

Hello Interactors,There have been huge advances in how food is grown over the last decade. A new revolution in agriculture. It just may be coming at the right time. The world’s population is skyrocketing, and more and more people are pouring into cities. We’ll need more food and more ways to make it accessible and new techniques look promising. But at what cost?As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…A BERRY BIG PROBLEMThe red dot caught my attention; hidden in the soil of a bed once forgotten. Rain drops wiggled on the fervent green leaves as I lifted the cold pale yellow-green vine with ease. It was hugging its red friend in the shadows of the sun. My fingers surrounded the plump little ball as I tugged it loose of its clutches. On to my tongue enveloped in warmth as my teeth clamped down in the darkness. A cool and wet sugary burst lit my mouth with summer’s first gift. No sooner did the strawberry’s sweet secretion burst were my eyes darting for another with thirst.In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass, she reminds us that strawberries are like “gifts simply scattered at your feet. A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present.”Like the naturally occurring strawberries of her childhood, my strawberries just appeared one year. Probably a gift from a bird. Or, more likely, a rabbit. Most years the rabbits beat me to their splendor, but not this time.I get nostalgic around gardens. I’m not sure why. I never much liked being hunched over in the sweltering humidity pulling weeds and picking beans as a kid. Bugs buzzed erratically – irritably itchy inching near my ears. Heat seeking mosquitos swarmed my sweaty shins poking their needle through my white knee-high tube socks searching for red blood. But there’s pride in growing your own food and there’s no denying it’s better for you and better tasting.We always had a large garden in our backyard. Sometimes we’d have a plot in a field in the country next to a small farm. Most of those small farms are being sold off to large commercial farmers these days. The small-town rural agriculture of my Iowa childhood in the 70s and 80s gave way to large-scale rural agriculture. The Green Revolution was just gaining speed.Between 1960 and 2000 the world’s population doubled while the output of cereal grains like wheat, rice, and corn tripled. And it did it by only increasing croplands by 30%. Improvements in genetics, fertilizers, pesticides, and mechanization were fueled by increased private capital and tax-funded public subsidies. Globalization and the Green Revolution enabled unprecedented growth in rural agriculture. Crops could easily be shipped to markets and cities far from where they were grown. For the first time, wheat produced in Mexico found its way into bread sold in Tokyo.These advances lowered the price of food and provided much needed relief to a growing world population. But it came with a cost to the environment and biodiversity. Unchecked, it will only get worse. The world’s population is expected to grow exponentially until 2050 and over 70% will live in urban areas. To feed all these people will require 56% more food than what was produced in 2010. That means an additional 593 hectares of cropland – an area the size of India. But if we were to reverse the Green Revolution and rely on smaller organic farming practices, even more land would be needed as yields are mostly smaller. It’s believed two to three times as much land would be needed to produce as much wheat, corn, and potatoes as the conventional agriculture of today. If the world switched to organic farming using current areas of croplands only one half of the world’s population could be fed.Meanwhile, the world also needs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Ten percent of which comes from agriculture – including soils and rice production, 27% percent transportation – including the transport of food and grain around the world, and 24% from Industry – including the petrochemicals needed for Green Revolution farming. We also need to use less water. The UN says agriculture accounts for 70% of the world’s freshwater. In dryer areas (like Arizona) that number increases to 90%, due to water extracted from rivers (like the dwindling Colorado River), and aquifers (like the declining Ogallala).In 2007, these worries increasingly came into focus. Within four months the price of wheat inexplicably doubled, rice prices tripled, and corn shot up 50%. Food riots broke out for the first time since the 1970s. Egypt put their army to work baking bread. Rice hoarders in the Philippines were threatened by sentences to life in prison. This marked the end of the Green Revolution as we knew it. Just as the world had grown accustomed to seemingly guaranteed cheap food, a new dynamic had set in.In 1979, according to the World Bank, the percentage of global money going to food assistance peaked at 18%. By 2004 it had dropped to 3.5%. Private donations to relief efforts relaxed. They assumed the Green Revolution had cured worldwide famine. Governments reduced spending on agricultural research assuming hunger was a thing of the past. Farmers in developed countries also dissuaded their governments from assisting farmers in developing countries fearing competition. If poorer countries began providing for themselves, they’d miss out on selling to those markets.The environmental movement had also gained momentum and status. Investors and donors began pressuring the Ford Foundation, the original seed funder of the Green Revolution in the 1950s, to reduce the use of petrochemicals in agriculture. Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, became frustrated when his effort to bring green-revolution practices to Africa was thwarted by protests by environmentalists.Then, highly populated countries like China and India began reducing agricultural exports so they could feed themselves. In 2006, India even began importing food again. Renewed concern over food security inspired governments worldwide to re-fund agricultural research. Venture capitalists fed startups keen to apply new technologies to food production. Beginning in 2010, the number of academic research papers on agricultural innovation exploded with topics like “indoor agriculture, remote sensing, vertical agriculture, hydroponic, aeroponic, aquaponic and soilless agriculture, precision agriculture, and other novel technologies.” A second Green Revolution was unfolding.BRINGING NEW MEANING TO GREENINGThe second Green Revolution aimed to be a Green Green Revolution. The original Green Revolution was born out of the 1950s institutional patriarchy found in government, urban planning, civil engineering, and agricultural. They sought, and continue to seek, to centralize, industrialize, and capitalize. These efforts led to prosperity and food security for many, but they have also balkanized, disenfranchised, and ghettoized many places in the world. Glamorized westernized ways have meticulously metastasized. Colonized earthly crust, of countries with cautious distrust, find temporary prosperity crushed when exhausted land goes from soil to dust.But the new Green Revolution, backed by a flux of venture capital greenbacks, hopes to bring agriculture’s ‘green’ sheen back. And like most high-tech ventures, these efforts are mostly urban. Researchers define Urban Agriculture as “the production, process, and distribution of food and other products by plant and/or livestock raised in and around cities to meet local needs.” By that definition, our family garden in suburban Iowa was a form of urban agriculture. My wild strawberries gifted here in Kirkland, Washington are too.In fact, after our town’s founder and chief colonizer, the British industrialist Peter Kirk, failed at attempts in the 1800s to turn Kirkland into a steel town – the ‘Pittsburgh of the West’. Kirkland then became known as a farm town. Summer fruit would be packed onto a ferry headed to Seattle’s growing urban metropolis. Soon real estate companies sold Kirkland’s agricultural land to developers. Kirkland went from a source of urban agriculture to a Seattle suburb.Seattle area farmland was also getting converted to suburban development. In the 1920s, the Picardo family, who had immigrated from Italy in 1890, secured 20 acres to continue farming. This acreage came to be called the Picardo Patch, or P-Patch. The city then bought the land in the 70s to preserve its use and the word P-Patch is now commonly used to refer to a community garden. The original P-Patch now boasts 259 community plots.But one of the more popular, and controversial, P-Patches in Seattle sits atop a parking garage below the Space Needle. Called the UpGarden, it converts 25,000 square feet of concrete into 98 gardening plots. There have been recent attempts to sweep the dirt away, but intense community protest saved it. It even inspired a rededication last summer.Both P-Patches are forms of urban agriculture researchers call Uncontrolled Environment Agriculture. They rely on the uncontrolled, or loosely controlled, variability of soil and climate conditions. The Picardo community farm resembles more traditional rural farming but in an urban environment. The UpGarden is a rooftop garden that mimics a traditional garden on the roof of a concrete parking structure. It also resembles a form of Controlled Environment Agriculture known as building-integrated agriculture.These are typically enclosed greenhouse structures inside a dedicated or mixed-use building. They’re plant factories. They draw on the innovations cited in the growing body of research literature and are a form of what some call Innovative Urban Agriculture. In dense urban areas, where space is a premium, they take on the form of indoor vertical gardens.These methods of indoor farming rely on less water and soil. In some cases, no soil at all. Hydroponic horticulture plunges roots to a small amount of nutrient rich water that can yield tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, strawberries, and lettuces. A similar method, aeroponics, suspends plants in the air and can be grown by misting them with nutrient rich compounds forced through high-pressure mist heads. Tanks or artificial streams of water can also be used to grow fish (like shrimp) and aqua plants (like seaweed). This is known as urban aquaculture. Hydroponics and aquaculture can also be combined to create aquaponics. These are systems that take nutrient rich water from aquaculture tanks to feed trays of hydroponic plants.This method, although less high-tech, has been around for centuries. Since as early at 5 AD various forms of integrated polyculture rice-fish farming took place in Eastern Asia. Evidence of this practice existed well into 13th century China. Around that same time, the Mesoamerican Aztecs built islands, sometimes movable, on top of wetlands, shallow lake beds, and canals. These methods were used to meet personal, family, and local market needs. That’s as true of innovative urban agricultural in developing countries today as it was centuries ago.The poorest people in the world today spend upwards of 85% of their household revenue on food. It’s hard to tell how much urban agriculture is done today to offset these costs. In our highly industrialized and globalized agricultural economy, there’s little interest – and thus little data – on agricultural techniques outside the norm. One 1993 study estimated 15-20% of the world’s food was produced by some form of urban agriculture. A more recent 2010 study looked at 15 developing countries and determined urban agriculture made up anywhere from 3-27% of their total yields.While there are indeed individually motivated urban farmers in developed countries today, like in backyards, front yards, decks, empty lots, rooftops, and parking lots, most commercial innovative urban agriculture is motivated by social desire and market opportunity. Some claim hydroponic systems have the potential to grow 11 times more lettuce per acre than conventional means. One study suggests 1.5 times more tomatoes could be grown. And what about those little bursting red bundles of taste bud bliss? An estimated 13 times more strawberries could be grown through these new techniques.And don’t count out rooftop gardens. If you happen to be blessed with the climate of Bologna, Italy, you could be growing heaps of food from the heat on your roof. One rooftop garden produced an estimated 12,000 tons of vegetables in a single year – enough to round out meals of 77% of urban dwellers. One study estimates that if the industrial rooftops of Montreal featured hydroponic systems, they could grow 277% of that city’s total demand – at a fraction of the cost. A 2011 study suggested a 20-story “SkyFarm” high-rise in Egypt, equipped with vertical aeroponic greenhouses on every floor, could produce 200 times as much rice as that country’s most productive conventional rice farm.HOW HARMONIC ARE PONICS?These statistics can cast innovative urban agriculture as a panacea. And it just may be. But the Green Revolution was also cast in those same terms. In fact, over the last two centuries societies have routinely been seduced by the promise of technology, the adoration of the individual “great inventor’ who will finally, once again, save us from ruin. People glamorize and valorize individualistic human accomplishment while disguising and patronizing community and environmental suffering. Hypnotized by success and desensitized to distress.There is no doubt these new approaches to agriculture show great promise. They indeed use less water and land while producing more yield for less money. They are closed systems that can be optimized for efficiency. One aquaponic experiment featured a double recirculating system. One cubic meter of recirculated water could increase fertilizer efficiency by 24% compared to conventional aquaponic methods. It even managed to produce the same quantity and quality of tomatoes per cubic meter of water. As a bonus, that same quantity of water also produced 1.5 kilograms (3.3 pounds) of tilapia fish. But all systems come at a cost.  These systems require buildings made of sophisticated construction. The growing supplies are made of plastics, processed metals, and synthetic fertilizers. Electricity to power their highly controlled climates, lights, computers, pumps, misters, and filtration systems must run around the clock and throughout the year. How clean is that electricity? Will increased yields induce profit seeking companies to package and ship even more food around the world? Few, if any, studies have been conducted on the upstream and downstream lifecycle costs of innovative urban agriculture.Furthermore, this is all new. And while there are many successful greenhouse and hydroponic companies out there selling vegetables today, cereals, grains, and proteins are also needed to balance the food basket. Aquaponics hold promise for efficiently growing diverse nutritious foods, but commercial scale is in its infancy. A 2016 survey in Europe revealed that 75% of commercial aquaponic enterprises were built on or after 2010. Nearly half of the employees were researchers working at universities. One-third were government funded, one-fifth were true commercial endeavors, but only 12% had sold fish or plants in the previous 12 months.Currently the U.S. leads in research and development of innovative urban agriculture. These investments seed similar efforts around the world in both developed and developing countries. There is no question these new forms of commercial agriculture will have an impact on how the world’s food is grown. But I also know the experience of eating that strawberry I plucked at my feet can’t be imitated. Sorry Driscoll’s.Driscoll’s strawberries, the world’s leading strawberry producer, are genetically engineered to yield a certain experience. Their farmers, or “strawberry manufacturers” as Driscoll’s calls them, all adhere to a certain standard to uphold their vision of what a strawberry is supposed to be. They ship a billion plastic clamshells of strawberries around the world. They have a room at their headquarters in California filled with monitors that track every truck carrying their red, heart-shaped berries across North America. They have two weeks to get their product from harvest to destinations across the country and around the world. They are so popular in China, their price and availability influences international trade relations.Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us that my opportunistic strawberry plant had “in fact been up all night assembling little packets of sugar and seeds and fragrance and color, because when it does so its evolutionary fitness is increased.” The more attractive nature makes that little bundle, the more likely an animal like me will eat it and spread its seeds. I guess to do my part to further this plant’s evolutionary fitness, I’ll need to poop in the nearby woods. Kids, don’t try this at home.But the Green Revolution changed these uncontrolled evolutionary elements of agriculture. The Green Revolution turned food evolution into a controlled ‘Big Ag’ volution. Strawberries are now engineered and their seeds are dispersed by ships, planes, and trucks. Once consumed, they’re flushed into wastewater treatment plants. The new Green Green Revolution, or Innovative Urban Agriculture, is the next stage in agriculture’s own technological evolution. But don’t forget, old fashioned residential and community gardens are part of it. But new technologies have the potential to maximize space, water, and energy to produce even more locally grown yummies. Perhaps we’ll even see Controlled Community Gardens.  Maybe these new techniques could transform who we are, our relationship with our food, and how we interact at a local level. It’s up to us. Perhaps food production can be made local again. New forms of urban agriculture could be a gift. Like a backyard wild strawberry. As Robin Wall Kimmerer puts it:  “It is human perception that makes the world a gift. When we view the world this way, strawberries and humans alike are transformed. The relationship of gratitude and reciprocity thus developed can increase the evolutionary fitness of both plant and animal.”If done right, I might add, maybe even the evolutionary fitness of the planet and us all. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

Super Sonic Hydroponic Famine Tonic

Hello Interactors,We’re staying in Russia this week because the United States sticks with Russia. At least they used to. And boy did they need it. The famines that have swept through that region over the years have taken the lives of tens of millions of people. Even though Russia was home to the world’s leading seed expert. But the U.S. was always there to bail them out. If the U.S. fell into a food crisis, would Russia return the favor?As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…SEEDS OF CHANGE YIELDS DEEDS OF THE DERANGEDJoseph Stalin liked Trofim Lysenko. He grew up poor far away from Moscow just like him. Stalin was from Georgia and Lysenko Ukraine. Both identified as proletariats. They despised the bourgeoisie imperialistic West. Including highly educated and trained scientists. Lysenko was a horticulturist, studied agricultural, and then worked in the department of physiology at the Ukrainian Genetics Laboratory. But he wasn’t like other scientists. He devised his own homegrown, unproven experiments. He invented theories with pseudo-scientific names like “jarovization” or “vernalization” from Latin’s ‘vernum’ or spring. His claims became known as “Lysenkoism.” Other Russian scientists looked the other way. Russia’s most respected biologist, geneticist, and geographer, Nikolai Vavilov, thought Stalin’s new friend was a crackpot. It wouldn’t end well.Lysenko got lucky with ‘vernalization’. He tricked wheat seeds into blooming early by treating them with moisture in cold temperatures as a way to produce yields in the spring. The trick had already been performed by American John Hancock Klippart in 1857, but Lysenko gave it a name. He also believed the deceived seeds from these plants would magically inherit the ability to do the same on their own. His theory ran counter to empirical evidence and to the knowledge and experience of Vavilov. Vavilov worried Lysenko’s tricks, unproven theories, and over promises to Stalin and the Soviet government could lead to catastrophic errors and the worsening of the routine famines Russia was trying to escape.But Stalin embraced Lysenko’s folksy and unorthodox ways. He believed in his salt-of-the-earth intuition and grew suspicious of the world-renowned and respected science of Nikolai Vavilov. Vavilov was the winner of the Lenin Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in science, and was respected worldwide. He traveled the globe successfully identifying the geographic genetic origins of cultivated plants. He guest-lectured and rubbed elbows with those Western imperialists Stalin despised. Vavilov also spoke poorly of the former Ukrainian peasant come pseudo-scientist Stalin had grown fond of.In 1936 Stalin replaced Vavilov with Lysenko as the head of the Soviet Academy of Agriculture. Six years later, in 1941, Stalin sentenced Vavilov to execution on claims he was trying sabotage Stalin’s agricultural plans. His sentence was then reduced to a prison term. Vavilov, who grew up fearful of starvation in a village prone to crop failures and food rationing – a scientist who dedicated his life to eradicating famine – died in prison in 1943 of starvation. Famines had been ravishing Russia for a century already. The large-scale farm practices of today started in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But missteps led to widespread famine, displacement, and environmental damage. Technological advancements allowed expansive grasslands to be converted to cropland around the world, including Russia, Australia, Argentina, South Africa, Canada, and the United States. An explosion of European immigrants to the United States in the mid 1800s, together with The Homestead Act of 1862, pushed immigrants into prairies to the West and North. Some ventured into Canada. The Civil War ended in 1865 and four years later the Transcontinental Railroad was completed. Both increased the number of agrarian colonizers to the Great Plains.But the climatic patterns in these areas played a role in the evolution of these plains. The grasslands are arid with periods of intense rainfall followed by drought. Settlers could be deceived into believing these rainfalls were routine only to witness periods of extreme drought. Farmers in the 1870s and 1880s witnessed regular rainfall only to see it disappear in the 1890s. Instead of consulting with Indigenous farmers on how they farmed the land for millennia, the colonists instead expanded area croplands and intensity to make up for short yields. Some used the land to graze cattle leading to even more elimination of the natural grasses needed to nourish and sustain the soil. The U.S. government accelerated farm expansion by altering the Homestead Act to include larger plots of land. The rain returned in the 1920s which attracted another wave of farmers. Farmland in a section of northwestern Texas and eastern New Mexico doubled in the two decades between 1900 and 1920 and tripled in just five years between 1925 and 1930.  Russia saw similar expansions of large-scale agriculture. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, groundbreaking research by soil scientist and geographer Vasilii Dokuchaev, the father of soil science, revealed for the first time the role climate and topography play in soil health. He went on to develop the world’s first soil classification system. Some farmers, including immigrant German Mennonites, adopted drought tolerant farming practices Dokuchaev recommended.Meanwhile, most of Russia, like the United States, continued large-scale overly intensive farming techniques – though Russia lagged in mechanization. Both the United States and Russia, set on expansion, growth, and domination, gambled with the climate, soil, plants, and the crops they yielded. They ignored both emerging science and age-old sustainable practice that likely would have mitigated inevitable crop failure, famine, and long-lasting and long-ranging environmental and social devastation. Destruction so severe they compounded the effects of natural disasters.Between 1921 and 1923 extreme droughts and winters led to plant disease, insect infestation, and soil erosion throughout the converted grasslands of Russia, Ukraine, and surrounding regions. Famine ensued causing millions to die of starvation. Ravaged by WWI and the Russian Civil War, the Soviet government, then under Vladimir Lenin, was forced to import food and organize relief efforts. In 1921 Lenin called on the United States to help. The American Relief Administration, headed by future President Herbert Hoover, employed 300 Americans and a 120,000 Russians to provide relief. It was an extension to European relief from WWI. They provided daily meals for over 10.5 million people while also administering medical aid to typhus sufferers – a feverish epidemic claiming even more Russian lives.GO GREENThe relief from America worked. By 1923 the Soviet government was able to stockpile enough grain to organize their own relief efforts and the U.S. stepped away. But Russia continued to be hit with episodes of drought. In 1924 another wave hit and the Soviets were once again forced to organize relief efforts. Again, they stockpiled enough to make it through 1925 and 1926 only to be hit again in 1928. Convinced traditional farming techniques were unsustainable, the Soviet government initiated programs that mimicked industrialized farming techniques in the United States.Another drought came in 1931 and 1932 and with it more famine. Joseph Stalin had risen to power amidst the Russian Revolution. Unlike Lenin, he refused support from the outside. By 1933, when food stocks began to rise again four million more people had died from famine. But the United States would have been in no position to help this time anyway. In 1930, widespread drought spread through the Great Plains stretching from Canada to Mexico. The natural grasses that once protected soil from blowing away had either been tilled for crops or consumed by cattle. The Industrial Age had given way to industrial farming. A substantial gamble with colossal consequences. The Dust Bowl, or Dirty Thirties, a natural disaster compounded by poor agricultural practices and imperialist hubris, impacted over 100 million acres. It intensified the Great Depression. If the dust storms didn’t destroy homes and farms, failed mortgages and loans did. Between 1930 and 1940 nearly 3.5 million people evacuated the lands they had only recently colonized and practically destroyed. Including their native inhabitants.Meanwhile, back in Russia, Stalin made another gamble in 1936. He bet on “Lysenkoism”. He believed it would solve the Soviet agricultural malaise sending the one man capable of potentially solving the region’s, maybe the world’s, agricultural problems to starve to death – Nikolai Vavilov. But soon came WWII and more geopolitical disruption in a Soviet Union still trying to figure itself out. And then, in 1946 and 1947, another Russian famine emerged. Again, Stalin refused aid and two million more died of starvation.But little did Stalin know, many of the scientists that worked under Vavilov had hidden his seed collection and continued to conduct experiments in private. One esteemed plant breeder, Pavel Luk’ianenko, drafted off the work of Vavilov and bred a variety of semi-dwarf wheat seeds in 1950 that would change the course of Russian agriculture forever. By the time of his death in 1972 he was credited with breeding or co-breeding 15 different varieties of regionalized winter wheat seeds.            His work was Russia’s contribution to a larger global Green Revolution, a systematic and coordinated effort in the 1950s and 1960s between genetically modified seed breeding, chemical fertilizers, land use policy, public and private capital, and mechanized technology that massively increased crop yields. The American scientist and Nobel Prize winner credited with birthing this revolution, Norman Borlaug, said in 2000 that “Had the global cereal yields of 1950 still prevailed in 1999, we would have needed nearly 1.8 billion hectares of additional land of the same quality – instead of the 600 million that was used – to equal the current global harvest".After Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev rose to power. Khrushchev was Russian but had ruled Ukraine for a decade. He witnessed struggling farmers endure famine and invented what he called “agro-towns” – small villages in remote rural areas with a library and stores where farmers could live and be better supported. But during the drought of 1946, he had to beg Stalin for aid after over-estimating Ukrainian crop yields. It was a fissure that cost him his post in Ukraine. However, his dismissal led to a position in Moscow closer to Stalin that surely cemented his rise to power seven years later.One of Khrushchev’s first programs was “Virgin Lands”. He proposed the conversion of 25 million hectares of arid grasslands to croplands in Siberia and Kazakhstan. Within a year this region became a significant contributor to Soviet grain yields. But they soon diminished and in 1962 and 1963 came another drought. In an echo of the Dust Bowl, winds picked up and blew away most of the topsoil that had previously been secured by grassland. Again, a massive shortfall of wheat forced Khrushchev to seek foreign aid. Ten million tons of grain were imported from Canada and the United States. Quantities of this magnitude were likely the result of the crop yield successes of the Green Revolution. But they were also making up for the environmental failings of the Green Revolution.NUT JOBIt can be hard accepting curses that can come with blessings. Such is the damaging and delicious duality of modern agriculture. We can’t seem to live with it, and we don’t dare try to live without it. But we do have a choice over how large-scale agriculture is implemented. This is unlike the effects of climate change where we can’t live with them, and we don’t have a choice to live with out them. These historical environmental extremes that plagued the former Soviet agricultural lands continue to this day. In 2009, Russia was on course to export record amounts of grain. Then, in 2010, a wildfire brought on by severe drought turned acres of golden grain to ash. Vladimir Putin was forced to cancel exports. And like those before him, was forced to import food to stave off widespread famine.Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and other surrounding countries continue to adjust to extreme weather patterns. Still, much of that ‘Virgin Land’ once converted to cropland over the past 50-60 years has been abandoned due to soil depletion brought on by large-scale intensive factory farming. Just a small fraction of the original ‘Virgin Lands’ are farmed in Kazakhstan today. But they continue to learn and adjust…as we all must.The effects of climate change are global in scale, but differ in variety, intensity, and regularity at a regional and local level. So does the impact on people and place. As a result, responses to these effects must also differ in variety, intensity, and regularity. But intent matters. I’m convinced scientists like Vavilov, Lysenko, Luk’ianenko, and Borlaug were intent on saving people from starvation. They all witnessed firsthand real suffering of starving individuals and the loss of entire populations.But I’m less convinced of the intentions of politicians like Stalin and Putin. I’m also skeptical of the intentions of Western coalitions backed by corporations who prioritize capital, political control, and short-term quarterly earnings. They seem more intent on feeding growing GDP figures than the starving figures of the emaciated. Stuff pockets of greed over hungry mouths to feed. Let the soils blow away, so long as the board boosts my pay. Shrink operating expenditures amidst rising temperatures. Large-scale government schemes feed delusional utopian dreams. Avoid political disruption by funding criminal corruption. Intention matters.As an example, in 1947 the British Government wanted to increase peanut production to sell as oil on the world market. So, together with Unilever, then went to the East Africa territory of Tanganyika to convert the wooded plains to peanut farms. An area England had militarily occupied since 1916. No one involved in the project bothered to study the soil and topography. They had to remove Mvule trees to make way for croplands, but they didn’t account for their deep, stubborn, thirsty roots. Their tractors were ruined in the process. New tractors damaged the soil with their weight. Their engines were too weak to churn the hard soils. In two years, they had only cultivated 16% of what they had planned. By 1951 the British government called it quits. They had spent six times the value of the crops they had grown. The director of the program was a former Russian who applied techniques of his communist past. Leaders at Unilever demanded immediate results to fit their revenue goals. Both of their approaches were insensitive to local people and place leaving it ravaged as they wrote off the loss and flew away amidst the arid soil they had unearthed. They abandoned the people and place most impacted by their imperialistic Groundnut Scheme.A railroad was constructed to ship the elusive nuts to a harbor the British had built so they could float nut oil around the world. The port remains, but the rail was dismantled. The global transportation network is what allows those locally impacted by natural disasters to receive aid. Parts of Africa continue to be cut off from these networks. But it were not for these networks, millions more would have died of starvation over the past 200 years. The U.S. and Ukraine blame Russia for clogging those very networks today. Meanwhile, Putin blames the West for blocking fertilizer and grain imports into Russia. Both are true. And it’s also true that Russian wheat exports were up 80% in April over last year and rose 27% in May. They just may be the winner in Wheat sales this year, unless another drought hits and the fields turn to fire. But if Russia was hit with a famine inducing drought, would Putin ask Ukraine and the West for relief? Would America offer relief? What if America is hit with a famine inducing drought? Would China and Russia come to our aid?On June 27th, President Biden and members of the G-7 met in Austria to discuss a plan to massively invest in infrastructure throughout the developing world. They aim to thwart nonmembers like China and Russia from introducing future disruptions by controlling more infrastructure, like transportation. It’s a response to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Biden said, “This isn’t aid or charity, it’s a chance for us to share our positive vision for the future…because when democracies demonstrate what we can do, all that we have to offer, I have no doubt that we will win the competition.” That hubris reminds me of the British Groundnut Scheme. Will the West be applying lessons learned from the devastating and deleterious effects of centuries of colonization? Are leaders any more sensitive to the needs and desires of the local people and places these schemes are sure to impact? These investments are long overdue, and China has a head start, but they must be done with the right intentions.Lack of adequate adoption of agricultural practice and needed infrastructure is what leaves regions most vulnerable to the negative agricultural effects of climate change. The way our food is produced, distributed, and sold heavily relies on transportation networks. The millions of people who were saved from starvation in the former Soviet Union is testimony to this fact. But responses also require acknowledgment, understanding, and support of local people and place…and their governments. Whether they share a common vision with the West or not.People situated in their places possess the necessary local and practical knowledge and ingenuity needed to augment the abundance of science that rests on centuries of historical successes and failures. Capital investment from the West is needed and necessary, but not sufficient or welcomed should the intent be to strengthen power, bolster profits, and exploit people and land. In other words, to repeat history. To learn the lesson, past sins must not be repeated. Instead of killing people, animals, and plants in the interest of political ideology, we should seek their engagement and invest in their ecology. In the words of Nikolai Vavilov in 1932, nine years before Stalin issued his execution sentence: “Many historical problems can be understood only because of the interaction between man, animals and plants.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

Great Grains! U.S. Aid to Russia?

Freedom Fries and the Big Mac Attack

Hello Interactors,Where, how, and when people work continues to shift. Meanwhile, scores of people are moving to urban regions in search of opportunities. Some of which are more accessible than others. It’s putting stresses on how cities plan, how we move, and what kinds of freedoms are afforded and to whom. But hidden in the complexities of societies are patterns of hope.  As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…REMOTE CONTROLThe workplace will never be the same again. What it becomes won’t either. But don’t tell Elon Musk. He threw a temper tantrum last week accusing employees at Tesla of slacking off working from home. In a company-wide email he became the over-controlling parent and grounded everyone. He wrote, “Everyone at Tesla is required to spend a minimum of 40 hours in the office per week” and that they “must be where your actual colleagues are located, not some remote pseudo office.” He claimed had he not been on the factory floor “working alongside” his employees that Tesla would have “long ago gone bankrupt.” I’m sure every factory floor worker he has replaced by a robot might have something to say about that.Some work does require a physical presence. Teeth cleaning comes to mind. But there is something to coming together physically that is hard to replicate online. There are also many kinds of service jobs that require a physical presence, though some of those are getting replaced by robots. Last year, a Dallas restaurant turned to a Robot called Bella when they had trouble filling waiter jobs. The owner said, “They don’t complain and they’re happy to do it!” It even happily sings Happy Birthday.But even white-collar jobs require some together time. I heard one academic say he worked two years during COVID on a joint research project over Zoom. When the team finally came together physically, they accomplished more in a single day than they did in those two years.  Every company from Tesla to Target are feeling the reverberations of pandemic induced workplace alterations. Even Microsoft, a company that has long envisioned the promise of hybrid-work, is struggling through a new rhythm and workplace model. Mandatory in-office strategies like Musk tried aren’t practical. Even senior leaders are choosing to move to remote locations. Meanwhile, some high-tech teams were already distributed around the world. Despite these trends, companies continue to build new office space. Cranes loom on the horizon all around Seattle. While some of these high-rises will be housing, much of it is office space. What will they do with all this space?I met a new friend last week who is trying to figure that out. She works as a product designer for a company headquartered in Rotterdam called MapIQ. They build software and services that allow companies to optimize the space they have. She’s been busy conducting research. She talks to employees, facility managers, IT departments, human resources, and corporate realtors who are struggling with a new workplace reality. She told me one of the most acute issues for facility managers is space utilization. These companies pay a lot of money to have attractive and effective workplaces. Seeing them empty is troubling financially but also psychologically. She said, “Employees are struggling to know when it is best to come to the office. They don't want to be the only one at home in a hybrid meeting and they don't want to be in an empty office either.”Facility managers are scrambling to find ways to make the most of what they have. She said one popular outcome is subletting workspace. But even subletters will only use it occasionally and sporadically. They use software and sensors to better manage who is using it, when, and for how long. This was not how these buildings were designed and not how these companies were envisioned to be run. MapIQ has identified five trends emerging in the workplace:The office as standard. Most all employees work four or five days a week in the office.Local hybrid. Most people work two or three days a week in the office.Remote friendly. Most employees are in the office only once or twice a week.Remote first. Working in the office is completely optional with no geographic requirement.Fully distributed. There is no office at all and everyone works wherever they want.The nature of work in the foreseeable future is decidedly different than the past. It will take some time for optimizations to emerge. Meanwhile, how will this affect our built environment and how cities plan? Our roads, rails, wires, and spires, boulevards, buildings, drains and ditches were all planned and produced with a certain permanency and predictability that surrounds our economies, societies, and psychologies. These features of the physical and social landscape were assumed to be towering rocks anchored and resolute. But it turns out it was a mirage. They are made of sand and the winds of the pandemic has created a sandstorm. What shape these forms of fortune take is unknown and possibly unknowable.The landscape of living amidst this storm is hard to predict and control. The best way to know what direction we’re headed is to look where we came from. Only then can we understand how we got here. A lot has changed in how and where we live. Since the end of WWII, the world’s population has more than tripled. Over half alive right now live in urban areas and nearly three-quarters will by 2050. North America is one of the most urbanized regions in the world. In 2018 82% of the population lived in urban areas. And it’s growing every day. Europe is 74% urbanized and their cities are also growing. Half of the world’s population lives in Asia and half of those live in urban areas.Not all regions grow at the same rate. The fastest growing areas are projected to continue to be in low-income and middle-income nations. Thirty-three of the fastest growing countries between 2000 and 2020 were in Africa. Twelve were in Asia. But urbanization is both a blessing and a curse. Access to better public health, nutrition, and education improves the lives of those who suffer most, but puts increased strains on housing, transportation, energy, and other infrastructure systems. This is having widespread, varying, and compounding impacts on all who live in urban areas. But these growing pains are not equally felt by all. Understanding these sensitivities will be necessary if we’re going to find ways to solve them.SUPER SIZING THE SUPER RICH WITH SUPERLINEAR WEALTHUrban scientists have found naturally occurring mathematical patterns in growing cities. They mimic power-laws found across a diverse array of cities just as they do across plants and animals. For example, as cities grow in population their GDP, number of patents, and productivity grow at a predictable scale. However, congestion, crime, and contagious diseases also predictably grow. Doubling the size of a city will increase wages, wealth, and innovation (as measured by number of patents) by roughly 15 percent. But so will garbage and theft. Population growth has a predictable superlinear positive and negative effect on urban areas. It’s the great paradox of urbanity.There are big advantages to scale. With each doubling of population there’s also a 15 percent savings in total length of rail lines, electrical lines, water lines, and roads. This sublinear effect predictably leads to a city of 10 million people needing 15 percent less infrastructure than a city half its size. It pays to grow.But these numbers, as predictable as they are, can also be misleading. Whenever population datasets get crunched and averaged the analysis ends up crunching the realities of the average person. Hidden in the convenient clustering of ‘low-income‘, ‘middle-income’, and ‘high-income’ are varying degrees, durations, and directions as diverse as those lived experiences of the people behind the numbers. This realization has led some of those same urban scaling researchers to scrutinize their own findings. Increased wealth disparities, for example, got them wondering. If wage growth is so predictable compared to urban growth, and more people are predictably moving to urban areas, why aren’t all wages predictably growing?They wondered if there are similar scaling laws that predict income inequality based on city size. How are incomes different among the rich and the poor compared to the size of the city? After adjusting for cost-of-living differences, are poor people in a big city better off than poor people in a small city? Are rich people richer the bigger the city?To answer their questions, they broke down income brackets into percentiles. Traditional economic inequality research looks at dispersed distributions across income or wealth. Meaningful individual differences are hidden in these distributions. What they found is the wealth of the poorest 10% scales almost linearly with population size. In contrast, the top 10% shows superlinear growth. This means poor folks moving closer to the city in hopes of becoming wealthier may find themselves to be continually poor compared to those in higher income brackets. The rich get richer, and the poor stay poor.They conclude that “much has been written about the apparent increasing gains of large cities, such as greater GDP, higher wages, and more patents per capita.” But in the end, “the increasing benefits of city size are not evenly distributed to people within those cities.” For example, they found the ratio of housing costs to income is a function of city population size. The poorer the income brackets, the greater the proportion of income is spent on housing. This results in sharp increases in costs with city size. Meanwhile, in the wealthiest brackets the proportion of income spent on housing stays level.So whatever superlinear growth in GDP, innovation, and wage growth that comes with increased city size is highly concentrated in the upper income brackets. Existing research in urban scaling and innovation points to empirical evidence that these gains are due in large part to the increase in social interactions and sharing of ideas. Larger and more diverse pools of people co-located in urban areas results in an explosion of creativity, opportunity, and resources. The accumulation of shared knowledge and passion only increases the potential for innovation.This theory is found in the work of economist Karl Polanyi. In his landmark 1944 book, The Great Transformation, Polanyi gives this concept a name: embeddedness – those who share a common social context have an embedded relationship that drives a desire to provide for one another. Stanford economic sociologist, Mark Granovetter, reaffirmed the idea in his oft referenced 1973 paper, “The Strength of Weak Ties.”And one of the most influential economists in the 20th century, Austrian turned American, Joseph Shumpeter, described these acts of economic invention and innovation as ‘creative destruction’. For every new innovation that brings increased wealth another must be destroyed or devalued. Capitalists celebrate it as the unfortunate inevitability of social and economic progress while Socialists deride it as the inevitable annihilating force of capitalism.Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in their 1848 Communist Manifesto that, “Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells… In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.”This grim prognosis from one of Capitalisms only inciteful critics is, sadly, all too relatable these days. Marx would not at all be surprised to hear there’s now empirical evidence to back his 174-year-old theory. But he would probably also be shocked to see China rising as a global superpower by combining elements of Capitalism with Socialism. Markets seem to have a way of formalizing Polanyi’s notion of embeddedness. He believed we all have the desire and creative ability to contribute to each others success and well being as part of our livelihoods. It’s not just goods and services that need exchanged but also values, moral concerns, and relationships. But to do that we must remain connected.CONNECTING THE DOTS TO FREEDOMThose urban scaling researchers hypothesize that one of the reasons income inequalities are so pronounce and unfairly propagated in our wealthiest cities is because the various income brackets have become increasingly geographically and socially segregated. Like ecosystems, the less diversity there is the greater the propensity to collapse. These researchers warn that urban regions that “inhibit mixing between diverse populations, will underperform with respect to income scaling.” If lessening income inequality is a goal, the research suggests “cities that are better mixed, allowing diverse parts of the population to be exposed to one another, should be overperforming with respect to urban scaling.”Connecting diverse sets of people across urban regions seems a more productive, and fun, way to tackle income inequality than redistribution of wealth through a government program. Ricardo Hausmann is the founder and Director of Harvard University’s Growth Lab. They uncover international growth diagnostics and develop economic complexity research methodologies. In a recent interview he said,“In my mind, the real solution to inequality is not so much redistribution as inclusion – as incorporating people into the possibility of mixing what they are…that leads to a very different agenda for inequality reduction. Do you send people a check or do you connect them to the urban transport network?...Do you connect it to the labor market? Do you connect to the schooling system?”He was joined in this interview by J. Doyne Farmer. He is the Director of Complexity Economics at the Oxford Institute of New Economic Thinking. Farmer points out that when economists look at the distribution of productivity, they commonly use a statistical technique that lops off a chunk of a giant tail of the distribution curve that is seemingly inconsequential to their analysis. This gives them a distorted point of view of productivity. And to underline Hausmann’s point about the importance of diversity needed to be connected, he said, “that there's a huge diversity out there” hidden in the fat tails those distribution curves. He adds, “And we really have to cope with that because it's inherent to the economy.”   The question is, how connected physically do people have to be, how often, and for how long to achieve optimal productivity gains? These are questions being asked by companies around the world and firms like MapIQ are there to help answer them. But how many of these companies are already segregating themselves from the socio-economic diversity of their headquarters, satellite offices, or shared urban and suburban workspaces?Arjun Ramani, a Stanford economist and journalist for The Economist, said last year in an interview by Leesman, a leader in workplace research, that “people are now willing to live an hour away in exchange for a bigger house, because they don’t have to commute in every day.” He believes it’s leading to the ‘donuting’ of cities which I mentioned may be occurring in Des Moines, Iowa. Ramani also reminds us that in the 1800s 40% of workers were working from home. He said, “working from home was quite common. Workers would go into a city or to a market to get raw materials and goods and return home to work – for example in the manufacture of clothes.”Today that just may be a 3D printer in a suburban garage or a rural toolshed, but the materials would probably be delivered to their door or flown in on a drone. But there’s no question some segment of jobs will require a more centralized physical presence. I’m not yet ready to have my teeth cleaned by a robot, though it looks like that also may be around the corner too. Even farming is moving toward robots.Regardless of what kind of job is available or desired or how much physical presence needed, there is little question getting more people connected – regardless of where they live – increases the odds of diverse interactions. My own experience tells me, and mounds of research supports, diverse collections of people and ideas yield unexpectedly miraculous outcomes. It’s not always easy or pleasant working with people of differing backgrounds, beliefs, and inclinations, but out of contention come good ideas.It's also hard to imagine how we become more connected amidst increasing geographic segregation, political polarization, religious ideology, and economic disparities. This may be today’s most perplexing social dilemma. It seems each opportunity to come together is met with an excuse to move apart. Meanwhile, there are powerful forces alive today bent on suppressing individual freedoms. And yet we live in a time when personal freedoms to choose where to live and where work are reignited. But those freedoms are not afforded to all which is an unjust outcome of an unjust history. And so the struggle continues.It’s sometimes hard to remain optimistic as the sand dunes of our institutions are shaped by the unpredictable storms of change. But hidden in the complexities of distribution curves, growing populations, and the shifting sands of urbanity are predictable patterns that offer us clues – kernels of clarity and certainty; pathways to pursue, and lessons to learn. It’s the certainty we need if we want to uphold our freedoms.When Polanyi wrote about the great transformation occurring in 1944 it was during a dark time. He started the book during the depression in the 1930s and had lived through political and economic upheaval in England. A world war preceded his writing, and the book was published during a second. He recognized the complexity of society and spoke of the freedoms that come with it.In the final chapter titled, Freedom in a Complex Society, he writes,“Uncomplaining acceptance of the reality of society gives man indomitable courage and strength to remove all removable injustice and unfreedom. As long as he is true to his task of creating more abundant freedom for all, he need not fear that either power or planning will turn against him and destroy the freedom he is building by their instrumentality. This is the meaning of freedom in a complex society; it gives us all the certainty that we need.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

Another Great Transformation

Freedom To Choose or Rights Refused?

Hello Interactors, There’s but a short window of time When the dirt is in its prime Not too cold or wet Or the seeds will not set Last week the fields were lakes This week the soil bakes Gone is the mud and grime So into the tractors they all climbIt’s time to get those seeds in the ground! If you have the space. The state of Iowa, where I grew up, has this as their slogan: ‘A Place to Grow’. But those places are being displaced by homes at a record pace.As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…GROW BABY GROWWe bought our first corn on the cob this week. It’s from California. Growing up in Iowa we didn’t see corn until late summer. To get corn stalks to be ‘knee high by the fourth of July’ meant getting the seeds in the ground by the end of May. That’s now. Iowa farmers have been stressed out these last couple weeks. The planting window was closing fast and the state was getting unseasonable rain and cold temperatures. Ten days ago one farmer in northeast Iowa said he could ride his boat across his fields.Such is the life of a farmer. But the weather turned in their favor this week. They’ve been busy. On May 23rd the USDA reported 86% of Iowa’s corn crop had been planted and 47% of seeds planted earlier are already sprouting. But corn, soybeans, and oats are all behind schedule. Let’s hope the wacky weather patterns don’t wreak havoc on these weathered wonder-workers. I like my corn tortillas, tofu, and oat milk. Though, most Iowa grains and soybeans are fed to livestock, not people.And we know people like their burgers and bacon. Increased commodity prices are the number one reason some farmers give for why farmland value in Iowa is through the roof. Last year a farmer in Eastern Iowa’s Johnson County made headlines when he sold 40 acres of two 80-acre tracts for $26,000 per acre. That’s over $2,000,000 for 40 acres (the equivalent of 20 soccer fields).But that pricey southern most 40 acres is comprised of Klinger soil – a claylike sandy substrate formed by glacier tills. This soil is perfect for the native prairie grass but crops struggle. So this opportunistic farmer decided to plant a more profitable crop that has no agricultural value at all. Houses. He sold the worst soil for the most money to a developer who is expanding the sprawl of a nearby small town city called Swisher; population 914. It’s a 15 minute drive south of Iowa’s second largest city, Cedar Rapids.The conversion of farmland into housing developments is a common sight across Iowa. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) does an agricultural census every five years and the last one was done in 2017. The 2022 version is due later this year. From 2012 to 2017 Iowa lost 2,533 farms. That leaves 86,104 farms remaining. There were over 10,000 more farms in 1997 and nearly 20,000 more when I left Iowa in 1984. The amount of land dedicated to farming shrank by 59,000 acres.Much of this reduction is from consolidation. The number of large farms (&gt;2000 acres) grew 15% to 1,892 over five years. By comparison, there were barely 300 large farms in 1987. From 2012 to 2017 large farms had gobbled 10% of up mid-sized farms (500-999 acres). Small farms (fewer than 9 acres) grew 36% to 9,120. That’s a big jump in five years, but only 1000 more than 30 years ago.These figures from the USDA tell the story of farmland consolidation across Iowa since the 1980s. But to get a picture of how farmland sold to developers contributes to the sprawl of urban areas, more and more researchers are turning to satellite imagery. In 2018 two researchers from Iowa State University were lead authors on a paper demonstrating novel image processing techniques for mapping the dynamics of urban growth. They took a series of satellite images from 1985 to 2015 of a region encompassing the Des Moines Metropolitan Area. They then trained software to differentiate between the natural and built environment by looking at the color of the pixels in the images. Pixels turning from looking ‘natural’ to looking ‘urban’ over time revealed a growing gray blob of concrete known as urban sprawl.They found, with 90% accuracy, that the Des Moines Metropolitan Area urban boundary more than doubled between 1985 and 2015. Over those thirty years the area grew linearly from 58 square miles in 1985 to just over 135 square miles in 2015. Most of which, of course, was farmland. At this growth rate, it will continue to double again every 30 years.Area growth like this is usually the result of an increasing population. The Des Moines Metropolitan Area is no exception. From 2010 to 2020, the population in this area grew 17% from 606,465 to 709,466. You might imagine the city of Des Moines being at the heart of this growth given it’s the center of the metropolitan area, but you’d be wrong. Of the top ten most populated cities in the area, Des Moines proper grew the least at 5.3% and has been relatively flat for decades. The fastest growing city from 2010 to 2020 was a town just north of Des Moines called Grimes. It grew a whopping 87%. Another town to the north, Ankeny, was second at 49% and my home town, Norwalk, just to the south, grew the third fastest at 43%.These are some of the fastest growing cities in the country. Impressive. Until you consider the overall population of the state of Iowa only grew 4.8% compared to the U.S. population rate of 7.4%.It's a curious fact that the Des Moines Metropolitan Area is growing in population at a rate far greater than the state is. This means Iowans are 1) moving to metropolitan areas from rural areas, 2) between cities within a metropolitan area, or 3) to another state all together. I reached out to a friend who recently moved from West Des Moines to Des Moines after they became empty nesters. He said they didn’t need as big a house and wanted to be closer to restaurants and entertainment. His wife added that they looked at surrounding suburbs but the house in Des Moines offered the best value.I then contacted another friend who sells real estate in the area. She told me people are obsessed with new construction. Her clients repeat the same refrain, “I want a new kitchen with granite countertops, white cabinets, and a tile floor.” My friend has an eye for houses with good bones and an affinity for mid-century classics. She tries to sell their vision to her clients by fixing up these older homes, but there’s little interest. She said, “It’s like so much else in their life. Out with the old, in with the new. Why fix it when a new one will due?” So she spends a lot of time driving to the fringes showing new construction in cities like Grimes, Ankeny, and Norwalk.THE RADICAL, THE DYNAMICAL, AND THE MEGLOMANIACAL The hollowing out of city centers as people move to the fringes, the ‘donuting’ of metropolitan areas, is common. Especially in the Midwest. Detroit gets all the attention, but the rust belt is filled with them. It occurs in cities around the world.In 1969, a professor from the MIT Sloan School of Management, Jay Wright Forrester, developed a theory and computer model for this phenomenon in a booked titled Urban Dynamics. If you’ve ever played the computer game SimCity then you have Forrester to thank. The game is built on his model. We have many things for which to thank Forrester. He helped to invent random access computer memory (RAM). He was also a pioneer in computer graphics before computers; he figured out how to get a ball to bounce on an oscilloscope screen. And the current reverberations of supply chain perturbations is called the Forrester Effect as described in his 1961 book called Industrial Dynamics. Forrester is thus the founder of the field of system dynamics – the study of nonlinear behavior of complex systems over time. And cities are indeed complex systems…mostly due to the complexities of human behavior.Forrester’s book was groundbreaking but also controversial. To validate the theory with an actual city, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) – which was also five years old at the time – sponsored a two year study. Four cities were chosen as cites in 1971 and they were all within a 40 mile radius of MIT. The first experimental city was Lowell, Massachusetts.Louis Alfeld was the Director of the program. In 1994 – on the 25th anniversary of the publishing of Urban Dynamics – he reflected on the execution of the experiments and the lack of progress since. The effect of human behavior on complex systems is apparent even in the administration of the study. HUD assigned the harshest critics of the theory to be on the committee which complicated things from the start. Alfeld recalls,“Although we attempted to engage the committee in a constructive dialogue concerning the model’s utility, the members had neither the time nor the inclination to study system dynamics. Criticisms concerning data and validation techniques displaced issues of system structure and user needs. Neither side understood the other’s point of view.”Because HUD committee members were trained in traditional economics and only trusted well-cited existing academic literature, they continually dismissed and rejected every premise of systems theory. It prompted Forrester himself to respond with these words,“It is unfortunate that you have not found it possible to spend more time with us in order to better understand system dynamics and its application to the dynamic modeling of social systems. Many of the issues you raise seem to rest on assumptions that reflect practices in other kinds of modeling but which do not apply in the same way to system dynamics models. In fact, the strength of system dynamics arises from these differences.”In contrast to HUD’s skepticism, Forrester and Alfeld found the leadership at Lowell to be more open to these theories. Their city was in decay after falling ungracefully from a century of manufacturing success. Their buildings were crumbling and the city faced a persistent 12% unemployment rate. They were eager to try something new.One of the foundations of urban dynamics centers on available land as a resource. Defined as a nonlinear function, it says the rate of construction is constrained by the amount of land on which to build. New cities start out with abundant land, but being the first company to build comes with risk. Will employees follow? Will the resources be available to turn a profit? But one building can attract more buildings and if all goes well the competition for good land increases and growth, fueled by demand, explodes. This in turn inflates the price of attractive available land. Inflation then slows growth until all the land is consumed and new construction halts. Over time these buildings decay, businesses fold, and the city begins to decline economically and socially as people and customers leave. The only way a city constrained by space can maintain equilibrium in this closed system is to tear down old buildings and build anew on existing land. This was the fate Lowell faced.The city government enacted policies that reflected the theory of urban dynamics. They created incentives to local companies to remodel existing buildings and expand business. They took steps to curb further deterioration of existing housing left vacant by affluent residents who fled. This in turn made more housing accessible to lower income residents who rushed the city like a flood. These policies resulted in strict codes that forced a refurbishing and reinvestment in the city.After two years Lowell showed signs of improving. Alfeld and the city were encouraged to keep experimenting. But HUD had encouraged the city to set the parameters of the model to mimic metrics from Lowell’s previous historic economic boom the century prior. Falling short of these expectations in two years, the committee was not convinced Forrester’s theory of urban dynamics resulted in sufficient enough of an improvement to continue.Hard quantitative evidence these traditional economists demanded was indeed lacking, in part due to HUD’s inability to operate a mainframe. But in the end the committee seemed more interested in the numbers than in the positive qualitative effects evident in the city and its residents. As Alfeld grimly summarizes,“The interface gap between model and critic contributed to the communication gap. In the final accounting, neither our success in Lowell nor our outpouring of reports and papers could bridge that gap. HUD judged that we had nothing to offer and urban dynamics dropped out of academic sight, its potential contribution to resolving America’s urban crisis ignored for the past quarter-century.”THE AGING ARIAN AGRARIANThe Des Moines Metropolitan Area is not space constrained like Lowell, Massachusetts. And while the city of Des Moines has reinvigorated the downtown area, the seemingly unlimited surrounding land availability and patterns of sprawl reveal no intention to contain the sprawl, protect farmland (or natural grassland) and reinvest in what is already built. This will likely lead to each inner concentric ring of the donut hole to age and decline just as the city of Des Moines did. This will create a larger donut hole in the center as the outer perimeter of the donut continues to encroach on more and more prime farmland. Land that is owned by dying farmers.One Iowa State University study revealed that “in 2017, over half the farmland (60 percent) in Iowa was owned by people over the age of 65. This was five percentage points higher than in 2007, and twice the level in 1982. In addition, farmland owners who were 75 years or older owned a record 35 percent of all acres in Iowa as of July 2017.” A 2021 study showed that “Iowa farmland owners are older than the general population. On average, the full-time and part-time farmers in [the] study were 62 years old. The retired farmers were, on average, 77.7 years old, and the non-farmer owners were 68.7 years old.” Non-farmers can include surviving spouses who don’t farm or off-farm heirs to the land. Also, “Of the farmland [] analyzed, 29.5% was owned by full-time farmers, 12.9% by parttime farmers, 22.7% by retired farmers, and 34.9% by non-farming owners.” With 60% of farmland owned by soon-to-be retirees and a sizable portion of 35% owned by heirs who’d rather have the money than to farm, what does this say about the future of farming in Iowa?Iowa, and the country, has a farming succession problem. One study suggests that lack of knowledge transfer and co-creation of crop yields will be one of the biggest challenges facing the foodscape of the Midwest. But when it comes to succession strategies, the Iowa farmers in this study,“were on average motivated strongly by social factors—e.g., desires to maintain agrarian cultures, rural communities, and family farms. (It is worth mentioning that these sentiments could be colored by the fact that these were also established growers—e.g., those privileged by policies like the Farm Bill—who were well capitalized and could afford to focus on non-economic factors.)”That’s not to say these farmers haven’t suffered economic hardship. And the economics of farming are complicated and messy. But this researcher found new farmers to more interested in the sustainability of the land and in farming than those who inherited a farm. Those farmers are now looking to retire and their children typically aren’t interested in farming. The author continues,“Intergenerational knowledge transfer, from one generation to the next (though not necessarily within the same family), is a critical element in the creation of foodscapes populated with farms of all scales and commodity profiles and by farmers from diverse socio-economic backgrounds, including farm/nonfarm backgrounds, genders, sexual orientations, ethnicities, and religions.”This requires building communities that welcome this kind of diversity, which most do not. People from Myanmar is one of Des Moines fastest growing minority groups, but an ethnic minority advocacy group says, “It's very challenging. I talk to my friends on the coasts. People (without family here) don't want to move to Iowa…In Iowa, we don't have investments and resources for immigrants, for refugee-led, community-based groups."There are groups trying to help. For example, The Practical Farmers of Iowa have been working since 1985 to “equip farmers to build resilient farms and communities.”  Also, there’s the Women Food and Agriculture Network whose “mission is to engage women in building an ecological and just food and agricultural system through individual and community power.” Many of those fast growing small farms in Iowa fit the profile of these groups. It’s an encouraging sign for the health and diversity of small scale farming in Iowa.But there are only 600 minority farmers in Iowa. What are the odds these aging white male farmers of selling their property to a Myanmar farmer or an ambitious woman graduate from the Iowa State College of Agriculture? How likely is an aging retiree willing teach a black family from the south with farming experience how to grow soybeans in Iowa?  If a farmer isn’t willing to co-create or sell their farm to a first generation farmer who isn’t a Christian white heterosexual male who’s interested in perpetuating the ‘old-boys club’, then they’ll likely just sell it to another aging white male farmer like them. This will further consolidate Iowa farmland that will likely end up in a trust fund for their heirs. Many of whom will wait for the expanding urban gray blobs to reach their land and then they’ll likely cash in on a $2,000,000 offer from a real estate developer.And with 81% of Iowa being white, with an estimated 90% of them living in the suburban fringes away from what little diversity there is in Des Moines, you can bet the person buying that newly built white home with granite countertops will be as white as their kitchen cabinets. At the same time, it’s great these families found a good home. I grew up on fertile Iowa soil as part of Norwalk’s first round of sprawl and it benefitted me.Either way at least the seeds got in the ground on time. They can eat that yummy corn on the cob this summer with their hamburger made from Iowa beef. It will all take place on a grassy lawn that once grew the corn they’ll be eating…or the corn that fed the cow in their burger. Come to think of it, maybe their corn will come from California too…and the hamburger. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

Iowa's Gray Blob Eats Corn on the Cob

Hello Interactors,Most people think roads were planned, designed, and built for cars, but that’s not true. They’re public spaces intended to bring social and economic benefit by increasing mobility. Economically they’re successful, but socially they not only are failing us…they’re killing us.As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…WALKING AND BIKING TO DEATHToday is “Bike Everywhere Day” in the Seattle area. Once known as “Bike to Work Day”, it would typically inspire an estimated 20,000 people to grease the chain, pump up the tires, strap on the helmet, and tepidly merge into the smooth, rolling polluted river of concrete nestling up alongside menacing machines of masculinity hastily rushing to work. Commuting patterns have been disrupted by Covid the last couple years. But with the League of American Bicyclists declaring May as “Bike Everywhere Month” commuting to and from work isn’t the only reason to slide onto the saddle. If you dare to do so.According to the CDC, “bicycle trips make up only 1% of all trips in the United States. However, bicyclists account for over 2% of people who die in a crash involving a motor vehicle on our nation’s roads.” It’s important to note the CDC use the human-centered word ‘bicyclist’ to describe the victim but an object-oriented word ‘motor vehicle’ to describe the killer. It’s not the motor vehicle’s fault these people died, it’s the fault of motorists. As gun enthusiasts like to remind us, ‘guns don’t kill people, people do.’ The same is true for cars and both machines can be violent killers. The CDC report “Nearly 1,000 bicyclists dying and over 130,000 injured in crashes that occur on roads in the United States every year.” But that’s only those reported. Most cyclists, especially in disadvantaged communities, don’t bother reporting crashes. And not all police nor hospitals report or rate car-related bike and pedestrian injuries consistently…if at all. And different sources report different numbers.The Consumer Product Safety Commission reports “425,910 emergency department-treated injuries associated with bicycles and bicycle accessories in 2020.” The National Highway Traffic Safety Administrations reports “932 bicyclists were killed in motor-vehicle traffic crashes in 2020, an 8.9% increase from 856 in 2019.” The U.S. Department of Transportation announced this week that 43,000 people died on roadways in 2021 – the highest since tracking began in 1975.That’s a 10% percent increase over 2020. Pedestrian fatalities were up 13% and bicycle fatalities were up 5%. They note that during Covid speeding offenses climbed causing a 17% increase in speed-related fatalities between 2019 and 2020 and a 5% increase prior to 2019. It’s unclear how speed factors in the increase in pedestrian and bicyclist deaths during this time, but there is no denying that speed kills.The Transport Research Laboratory out of the UK compared multiple datasets of ‘pedestrians killed’ by the ‘front of a car’ (again comparing people to an object) to better understand the relationship between speed and risk of fatal injury to pedestrians. They concluded “The risk increases slowly until impact speeds of around 30 mph. Above this speed, risk increases rapidly – the increase is between 3.5 and 5.5 times from 30 mph to 40 mph.” This applies to cyclists as well. Choosing to bike on roads in America comes with a risk of dying that is nearly five times greater than choosing to drive a car. And the odds of dying in a car accident are already relatively high – 1 in 101 – the eighth largest risk just behind suicide and opioids in 2020.The ugly truth is the ongoing and rising deaths and injuries to cyclists and pedestrians at the hands of motorists is a seemingly necessary cost to uphold the freedom, comfort, and convenience of automobility that many enjoy. Our political and public administrative services care about saving lives, but evidently not if it means changing road designs, land-use policies, travel patterns, restricting access to some roads, or – heaven forbid – creating viable ways to ditch the car should you choose.But this country did once care about saving lives on the road. As the post-WWII boom in cars and roads continued to balloon so did car-related deaths. Federal, state, and local governments rallied to make cars and roads safe for motorists. The same is true for new bikes purchased for baby boomers. When kids were getting injured and killed on their bikes in the 60s and 70s due to poor design and construction, consumer protection agencies cracked down on manufacturers and the federal government almost made it illegal to bike on the street.It was a bike enthusiast out of Davis, California, John Forester, who fought for a cyclist’s right to use public roads. But as a confident cyclist, and self-proclaimed engineering expert, who prided himself on his ability to ride in traffic, he advocated for ‘vehicular cycling’ which meant treating a cyclist more like a motorist than a pedestrian. He even claimed protected or separated bike lanes were more dangerous than riding with traffic. He was making that claim up until he died in 2020. But he mostly was a bike snob who didn’t want to be burdened with having to share space with kids and slower everyday cyclists on a bike path, so he made it his lifelong ambition to tank efforts to build safer bike infrastructure. Though, it was elite bicycle enthusiasts like him we have to thank for the existence of paved American roads in the first place.A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN“Every person has an equal right to travel on the highways, either on foot or with his own conveyance, team, or vehicle. This right is older than our constitutions and statutes … The supreme rule of the road is, Thou shalt use it so as to interfere as little as possible with the equal right of every other person to use it at the same time …”This was written in 1897 by a patent attorney named Charles Pratt. He was one of three men who started the League of American Wheelman (L.A.W) in 1880. Now called the League of American Bicyclists, they’re the leading sponsor of today’s “Bike Everywhere Day.” Pratt was joined by a bike importer, Frank Weston, and writer, adventurer, conservationist, Kirk Munroe. Together they grew the L.A.W. to become one of the most influential and powerful organizations of their time. They are also the originators of America’s paved roads.In 1888 the L.A.W. members voted to fund the National Committee for Highway Improvement. Their first publication served as a textbook for road construction called, Making and Mending Good Roads &amp; Nature and Use of Asphalt for Paving. Fifteen-thousand copies were printed and sent to state legislators as well as county, city, and town officials. But they also solicited bike manufacturers and dealers, road construction and pavement companies, and equipment manufacturers. Asphalt and pavement companies eagerly offered their support and financial contributions to the effort.One of the members of the L.A.W., Civil War Colonel and bicycle manufacturer (who later made electric cars), Albert Pope, was one of the most eager supporters of what became the ‘Good Roads Movement.’ In 1889 he offered an upfront contribution of $350 with an offer to fund whatever was necessary to build good roads writing: “Go ahead with the work…and we will pay the whole or any part of the expense you desire.”        If this sounds like a bunch of wealthy cycle enthusiasts coming together to design, fund, and build public roads across America, it is. Recall this is the same model used to build the rail system across the United States in the 1840s. Federal or state funding, or government sponsorship of any public transportation, was not on the minds of elite power brokers of the 19th century…or the 18th century for that matter. Road and highway design, construction, and maintenance was believed to be the job of local governments in partnership with private parties. One L.A.W. member from New York, A.J. Shriver, wrote in 1889 that federal funding of roads was “Socialistic” and thereby “unconstitutional.”But these beliefs and attitudes were largely coming from wealthy urban elites. Bicycling, after all, was something the privileged class enjoyed as a kind of hobby. But in the rural countryside attitudes were different. Most farmers were responsible for maintaining the roads along their property and believed they ‘owned’ them. They were also leery of wealthy city-slickers offering opinions on how ‘their’ roads were to be designed, used, and by whom.The L.A.W. drafted legislation in 1889 calling for a state tax to fund the highway commission for the creation of maps and plans for the construction of ‘good roads.’ The legislation was adopted by nine states, but failed to garner the necessary votes. Farmers were speaking out against this infringement on ‘their’ property. One Michigan farming coalition wrote, “The farmers must bear the expense while bicyclists and pleasure-riding citizens will reap the larger benefits.”The defeats at the state level sent the L.A.W. back to the drawing board. They realized they needed a different approach. Their president wrote, “We must concentrate first on education, then agitation, and finally legislation.” They created a monthly publication that was an “Illustrated Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Public Roads and Streets” that hit a peak circulation of 75,000 copies by 1895.In 1898 the L.A.W. then published a 41-page book titled, Must the Farmer Pay for Good Roads?. They mailed 300,000 copies to farmers and members of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It worked. The book’s author, Otto Dorner, later wrote in The Forum magazine that,“… the farmers of the United States are beginning to thoroughly appreciate the need [for] better highways; and the work of the League of American Wheelmen in the direction of State aid is receiving much support from the more progressive among them … The Farmers’ National Congress … [commended] the efforts of the League of American Wheelmen to bring about the general introduction of the State Aid system.”The Model T was just around the corner, but it was the bicycle and bicyclists that made that corner. In 1902 these words appeared in a magazine called The Automobile:“The effect of the bicycle on road improvement has been … phenomenal in the past 10 and 15 years …” …Directly and indirectly the bicycle has been the means of interesting capital in road building to the extent of millions of dollars, and of spreading abroad more accurate and scientific data concerning road construction than was ever before done in so short a time. The bicycle practically paved the way for automobiling.”IT'S ONLY FAIRCyclists today get little gratitude for the early lobbying efforts to build smooth, safe roads. But it should also be noted that these early wealthy and influential cycling enthusiasts quickly became motoring enthusiasts. Henry Ford tends to get all the credit for automobile manufacturing, but it was the early bicycle manufacturers who converted bike factories to car factories. Henry Martyn Leland, before he created Cadillac and Lincoln, was making bike transmission parts for Colonel Pope’s bike company. A car, after all, is just a glorified motorized quad-cycle.Men like these are often portrayed as the protagonist in the power and glory of the early story of bikes, but women rode too. And it wasn’t just high-society women biking either. In 1872, Louise Armaindo, set the American long-distance record, covering more than 600 miles in 72 hours. In 1890, Kittie Knox became the first African American woman to become a member of the League of American Wheelman. She didn’t stop there. She became a successful bike racer and became the first woman to be seen racing in ‘bloomers’ instead of a skirt. Sadly, she still faced fierce discrimination. And while the bicycle plays a huge role in the liberation of women, and a symbol of the suffrage movement, women are still fighting for recognition, acceptance, and necessary leadership opportunities in a the current burgeoning cycling movement. They are also unrepresented in determining the design and use of our roads.Not much has changed since the 19th century. The design of motorized and non-motorized vehicles, and the transportation infrastructure they require, is still very much dominated by Western, mostly white, men. Just as those early bicycle and pavement businessmen came together around the L.A.W. to “organise capital accumulation, advanc[e] elite entrepreneurial agendas, and consolidat[e] urban regimes”, so too are today’s, mostly white male, CEOs of automobile, oil and gas, chemical, concrete and asphalt, and road construction companies.And they’re all in collusion with legions of civil engineers, elected officials, and administrative workers at the federal, state, and local level to provide a transportation system that perpetuates our insatiable need to make more money to buy more things; this requires more roads to move more people and more things by car or truck; which in turn creates more waste, more pollution, and more traffic-related deaths.This approach to planning public land has led to uneven urban and suburban development, perpetuated ethnic and race privilege, and is rooted in attitudes and beliefs stemming from a culture of patriarchy. As a group of transportation researchers out of Belgium observe,“…how across strikingly diverse cities, urban regimes hide and legitimize these logics by applying the discourse of sustainability, framing infrastructural investment as a largely technical and rational response to the problems of congestion or low quality of public space. Instead, approached critically, transport is an essentially political issue of distributing social and spatial benefits and costs of urban development.”That’s from their February 2022 paper, Moving past sustainable transport studies: Towards a critical perspective on urban transport. They call for a critical assessment of the study of transportation, adding that such a “perspective departs from analysing and juxtaposing specific transport modes (e.g. airplanes and private cars against public transport) and related lifestyles (e.g. mass tourism, suburban life and work against cycling and walking), and instead demonstrates their role in sustaining socio-economic structures that enable the capitalist mode of producing urban space and society. Therefore, in sum, being critical about transport means analysing it as a key component of capitalism.”They go on to prove their point by querying existing transportation research for terms like “capitalism” or “capitalist”, “neoliberalism”, “feminism”, and “race” and find there are few results. The words “equity” or “equality”, and “gender” return just 2% of existing publications found in the hundreds of thousands of leading academic transportation and mobility journals. In the larger corpus of over six million Social Science publications the percentage of reports with those three words doubles to 4%.They also point out “unravelling and analysing power and ideology underpinned and reproduced by transport in urban settings is by no means an exercise that hinges on a particular theoretical lens (Marxist, anarchist, feminist etc.) or focuses on a specific social group or factor (class, gender, ethnicity and race, age). But they nonetheless remind us that any critique of a system that has led to a climate-crisis and obscene income disparities has to be grounded in some social theory “because investigated facts are the result of human actions displayed within a given society.”Only with this analytical lens, they write, will we be able to “rais[e] the fundamental question of whether the role of public transport is to provide a public service to its passengers, or rather to generate profits for its shareholders.” We should also raise the question of whether we want to continue to use public land in the form of streets to be a place where too many people fear they will die or become injured. Is that a necessary price for our social system? Richard Van Deusen, an interdisciplinary researcher of the interaction of people and place writes: “Public space must be understood as a gauge of the regimes of justice extant at any particular moment.”Is the comfort, convenience, and luxury of car-oriented travel patterns worth interrupting in the interest of improving the lives we live, the air we breath, and the water we drink?  And for all those who are forced to live where a car is needed to earn a living wage, or those with impairments, where are the plans for fair, equitable, and just transportation and/or housing alternatives?When the freedom to choose comes with nothing to lose, the costs of social and spatial benefits diffuse. Escape the snare, get out in the air, let’s make our roads more fair. Equitable places in our public spaces means biking and walking everywhere. That may sound utopian, but as Geographer Don Mitchell once wrote, “Utopia is impossible, but the ongoing struggle toward it is not.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

Hello Interactors, Most people think roads were planned, designed, and built for cars, but that’s not true. They’re public spaces intended to bring social and economic benefit by increasing mobility. Economically they’re successful, but socially they not only are failing us…they’re killing us. As <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactor" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">interactors</a>, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation. Please leave your comments below or email me directly. Now let’s go… WALKING AND BIKING TO DEATH Today is “Bike Everywhere Day” in the Seattle area. Once known as “Bike to Work Day”, it would typically inspire an estimated 20,000 people to grease the chain, pump up the tires, strap on the helmet, and tepidly merge into the smooth, rolling polluted river of concrete nestling up alongside menacing machines of masculinity hastily rushing to work. Commuting patterns have been disrupted by Covid the last couple years. But with the League of American Bicyclists declaring May as “Bike Everywhere Month” commuting to and from work isn’t the only reason to slide onto the saddle. If you dare to do so. <a href="https://tinyurl.com/y662pfx8" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">According to the CDC</a>, “bicycle trips make up only 1% of all trips in the United States. However, bicyclists account for over 2% of people who die in a crash involving a motor vehicle on our nation’s roads.” It’s important to note the CDC use the human-centered word ‘bicyclist’ to describe the victim but an object-oriented word ‘motor vehicle’ to describe the killer. It’s not the motor vehicle’s fault these people died, it’s the fault of motorists. As gun enthusiasts like to remind us, ‘guns don’t kill people, people do.’ The same is true for cars and both machines can be violent killers. The CDC report “Nearly 1,000 bicyclists dying and over 130,000 injured in crashes that occur on roads in the United States every year.” But that’s only those reported. Most cyclists, especially in disadvantaged communities, don’t bother reporting crashes. And not all police nor hospitals report or rate car-related bike and pedestrian injuries consistently…if at all. And different sources report different numbers. The <a href="https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/bicycle-deaths/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Consumer Product Safety Commission</a> reports “425,910 emergency department-treated injuries associated with bicycles and bicycle accessories in 2020.” The National Highway Traffic Safety Administrations reports “932 bicyclists were killed in motor-vehicle traffic crashes in 2020, an 8.9% increase from 856 in 2019.” The U.S. Department of Transportation <a href="https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813298" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">announced this week that 43,000 people died on roadways in 2021 – the highest since tracking began in 1975.</a> That’s a 10% percent increase over 2020. Pedestrian fatalities were up 13% and bicycle fatalities were up 5%. They note that during Covid speeding offenses climbed causing a 17% increase in speed-related fatalities between 2019 and 2020 and a 5% increase prior to 2019. It’s unclear how speed factors in the increase in pedestrian and bicyclist deaths during this time, but there is no denying that speed kills. The Transport Research Laboratory out of the UK <a href="https://tinyurl.com/y57hcbl8" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">compared multiple datasets</a> of ‘pedestrians killed’ by the ‘front of a car’ (again comparing people to an object) to better understand the relationship between speed and risk of fatal injury to pedestrians. They concluded “The risk increases slowly until impact speeds of around 30 mph. Above this speed, risk increases rapidly – the increase is between 3.5 and 5.5 times from 30 mph to 40 mph.” This applies to cyclists as well. Choosing to bike on roads in America comes with a risk of dying that is nearly five times greater than choosing to drive a car. And <a href="https://tinyurl.com/yy2kyfdh" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">the odds of dying in a car accident are already relatively high</a> – 1 in 101 – the eighth largest risk just behind suicide and opioids in 2020. The ugly truth is the ongoing and rising deaths and injuries to cyclists and pedestrians at the hands of motorists is a seemingly necessary cost to uphold the freedom, comfort, and convenience of automobility that many enjoy. Our political and public administrative services care about saving lives, but evidently not if it means changing road designs, land-use policies, travel patterns, restricting access to some roads, or – heaven forbid – creating viable ways to ditch the car should you choose. But this country did once care about saving lives on the road. As the post-WWII boom in cars and roads continued to balloon so did car-related deaths. Federal, state, and local governments rallied to make cars and roads safe for motorists. The same is true for new bikes purchased for baby boomers. When kids were getting injured and killed on their bikes in the 60s and 70s due to poor design and construction, consumer protection agencies cracked down on manufacturers and the federal government almost made it illegal to bike on the street. It was a bike enthusiast out of Davis, California, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forester_(cyclist)" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">John Forester</a>, who fought for a cyclist’s right to use public roads. But as a confident cyclist, and self-proclaimed engineering expert, who prided himself on his ability to ride in traffic, he advocated for ‘vehicular cycling’ which meant treating a cyclist more like a motorist than a pedestrian. He even claimed protected or separated bike lanes were more dangerous than riding with traffic. He was making that claim up until he died in 2020. But he mostly was a bike snob who didn’t want to be burdened with having to share space with kids and slower everyday cyclists on a bike path, so he made it his lifelong ambition to tank efforts to build safer bike infrastructure. Though, it was elite bicycle enthusiasts like him we have to thank for the existence of paved American roads in the first place. A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN “Every person has an equal right to travel on the highways, either on foot or with his own conveyance, team, or vehicle. This right is older than our constitutions and statutes … The supreme rule of the road is, Thou shalt use it so as to interfere as little as possible with the equal right of every other person to use it at the same time …” This was written in 1897 by a patent attorney named Charles Pratt. He was one of three men who started the <a href="https://www.bikeleague.org/content/mission-and-history" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">League of American Wheelman </a>(L.A.W) in 1880. Now called the League of American Bicyclists, they’re the leading sponsor of today’s “Bike Everywhere Day.” Pratt was joined by a bike importer, Frank Weston, and writer, adventurer, conservationist, Kirk Munroe. Together they grew the L.A.W. to become one of the most influential and powerful organizations of their time. They are also the originators of America’s paved roads. In 1888 the L.A.W. members voted to fund the National Committee for Highway Improvement. Their first publication served as a textbook for road construction called, Making and Mending Good Roads &amp; Nature and Use of Asphalt for Paving. Fifteen-thousand copies were printed and sent to state legislators as well as county, city, and town officials. But they also solicited bike manufacturers and dealers, road construction and pavement companies, and equipment manufacturers. Asphalt and pavement companies eagerly offered their support and financial contributions to the effort. One of the members of the L.A.W., Civil War Colonel and bicycle manufacturer (who later made electric cars), <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Augustus_Pope" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Albert Pope</a>, was one of the most eager supporters of what became the ‘<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Roads_Movement" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Good Roads Movement</a>.’ In 1889 he offered an upfront contribution of $350 with an offer to fund whatever was necessary to build good roads writing: “Go ahead with the work…and we will pay the whole or any part of the expense you desire.”         If this sounds like a bunch of wealthy cycle enthusiasts coming together to design, fund, and build public roads across America, it is. Recall this is the same model used to build the rail system across the United States in the 1840s. Federal or state funding, or government sponsorship of any public transportation, was not on the minds of elite power brokers of the 19th century…or the 18th century for that matter. Road and highway design, construction, and maintenance was believed to be the job of local governments in partnership with private parties. One L.A.W. member from New York, A.J. Shriver, wrote in 1889 that federal funding of roads was “Socialistic” and thereby “unconstitutional.” But these beliefs and attitudes were largely coming from wealthy urban elites. Bicycling, after all, was something the privileged class enjoyed as a kind of hobby. But in the rural countryside attitudes were different. Most farmers were responsible for maintaining the roads along their property and believed they ‘owned’ them. They were also leery of wealthy city-slickers offering opinions on how ‘their’ roads were to be designed, used, and by whom. The L.A.W. drafted legislation in 1889 calling for a state tax to fund the highway commission for the creation of maps and plans for the construction of ‘good roads.’ The legislation was adopted by nine states, but failed to garner the necessary votes. Farmers were speaking out against this infringement on ‘their’ property. One Michigan farming coalition wrote, “The farmers must bear the expense while bicyclists and pleasure-riding citizens will reap the larger benefits.” The defeats at the state level sent the L.A.W. back to the drawing board. They realized they needed a different approach. Their president wrote, “We must concentrate first on education, then agitation, and finally legislation.” They created a monthly publication that was an “Illustrated Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Public Roads and Streets” that hit a peak circulation of 75,000 copies by 1895. In 1898 the L.A.W. then published a 41-page book titled, Must the Farmer Pay for Good Roads?. They mailed 300,000 copies to farmers and members of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It worked. The book’s author, Otto Dorner, later wrote in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forum_(American_magazine)" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Forum</a> magazine that, “… the farmers of the United States are beginning to thoroughly appreciate the need [for] better highways; and the work of the League of American Wheelmen in the direction of State aid is receiving much support from the more progressive among them … The Farmers’ National Congress … [commended] the efforts of the League of American Wheelmen to bring about the general introduction of the State Aid system.” The Model T was just around the corner, but it was the bicycle and bicyclists that made that corner. In 1902 these words appeared in a magazine called <a href="https://archive.org/details/automobilemaga4171902newy/page/n7/mode/2up" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Automobile</a>: “The effect of the bicycle on road improvement has been … phenomenal in the past 10 and 15 years …” …Directly and indirectly the bicycle has been the means of interesting capital in road building to the extent of millions of dollars, and of spreading abroad more accurate and scientific data concerning road construction than was ever before done in so short a time. The bicycle practically paved the way for automobiling.” IT'S ONLY FAIR Cyclists today get little gratitude for the early lobbying efforts to build smooth, safe roads. But it should also be noted that these early wealthy and influential cycling enthusiasts quickly became motoring enthusiasts. Henry Ford tends to get all the credit for automobile manufacturing, but it was the early bicycle manufacturers who converted bike factories to car factories. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_M._Leland" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Henry Martyn Leland</a>, before he created Cadillac and Lincoln, was making bike transmission parts for Colonel Pope’s bike company. A car, after all, is just a glorified motorized quad-cycle. Men like these are often portrayed as the protagonist in the power and glory of the early story of bikes, but women rode too. And it wasn’t just high-society women biking either. In 1872, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Armaindo" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Louise Armaindo</a>, set the American long-distance record, covering more than 600 miles in 72 hours. In 1890, Kittie Knox became the first African American woman to become a member of the League of American Wheelman. She didn’t stop there. She became a successful bike racer and became the first woman to be seen racing in ‘bloomers’ instead of a skirt. Sadly, she still faced fierce discrimination. And while the bicycle plays a huge role in the liberation of women, and a symbol of the suffrage movement, women are still fighting for recognition, acceptance, and necessary leadership opportunities in a the current burgeoning cycling movement. They are also unrepresented in determining the design and use of our roads. Not much has changed since the 19th century. The design of motorized and non-motorized vehicles, and the transportation infrastructure they require, is still very much dominated by Western, mostly white, men. Just as those early bicycle and pavement businessmen came together around the L.A.W. to “organise capital accumulation, advanc[e] elite entrepreneurial agendas, and consolidat[e] urban regimes”, so too are today’s, mostly white male, CEOs of automobile, oil and gas, chemical, concrete and asphalt, and road construction companies. And they’re all in collusion with legions of civil engineers, elected officials, and administrative workers at the federal, state, and local level to provide a transportation system that perpetuates our insatiable need to make more money to buy more things; this requires more roads to move more people and more things by car or truck; which in turn creates more waste, more pollution, and more traffic-related deaths. This approach to planning public land has led to uneven urban and suburban development, perpetuated ethnic and race privilege, and is rooted in attitudes and beliefs stemming from a culture of patriarchy. As a group of transportation researchers out of Belgium observe, “…how across strikingly diverse cities, urban regimes hide and legitimize these logics by applying the discourse of sustainability, framing infrastructural investment as a largely technical and rational response to the problems of congestion or low quality of public space. Instead, approached critically, transport is an essentially political issue of distributing social and spatial benefits and costs of urban development.” That’s from their February 2022 paper, Moving past sustainable transport studies: Towards a critical perspective on urban transport. They call for a critical assessment of the study of transportation, adding that such a “perspective departs from analysing and juxtaposing specific transport modes (e.g. airplanes and private cars against public transport) and related lifestyles (e.g. mass tourism, suburban life and work against cycling and walking), and instead demonstrates their role in sustaining socio-economic structures that enable the capitalist mode of producing urban space and society. Therefore, in sum, being critical about transport means analysing it as a key component of capitalism.” They go on to prove their point by querying existing transportation research for terms like “capitalism” or “capitalist”, “neoliberalism”, “feminism”, and “race” and find there are few results. The words “equity” or “equality”, and “gender” return just 2% of existing publications found in the hundreds of thousands of leading academic transportation and mobility journals. In the larger corpus of over six million Social Science publications the percentage of reports with those three words doubles to 4%. They also point out “unravelling and analysing power and ideology underpinned and reproduced by transport in urban settings is by no means an exercise that hinges on a particular theoretical lens (Marxist, anarchist, feminist etc.) or focuses on a specific social group or factor (class, gender, ethnicity and race, age). But they nonetheless remind us that any critique of a system that has led to a climate-crisis and obscene income disparities has to be grounded in some social theory “because investigated facts are the result of human actions displayed within a given society.” Only with this analytical lens, they write, will we be able to “rais[e] the fundamental question of whether the role of public transport is to provide a public service to its passengers, or rather to generate profits for its shareholders.” We should also raise the question of whether we want to continue to use public land in the form of streets to be a place where too many people fear they will die or become injured. Is that a necessary price for our social system? Richard Van Deusen, an interdisciplinary researcher of the interaction of people and place writes: “Public space must be understood as a gauge of the regimes of justice extant at any particular moment.” Is the comfort, convenience, and luxury of car-oriented travel patterns worth interrupting in the interest of improving the lives we live, the air we breath, and the water we drink?  And for all those who are forced to live where a car is needed to earn a living wage, or those with impairments, where are the plans for fair, equitable, and just transportation and/or housing alternatives? When the freedom to choose comes with nothing to lose, the costs of social and spatial benefits diffuse. Escape the snare, get out in the air, let’s make our roads more fair. Equitable places in our public spaces means biking and walking everywhere. That may sound utopian, but as Geographer Don Mitchell once wrote, “Utopia is impossible, but the ongoing struggle toward it is not.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://interplace.io?utm_medium=podcast&amp;utm_campaign=CTA_1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">interplace.io</a>

Bike Everywhere...If You Dare

Hello Interactors,Cities are sprawling, the climate crisis is appalling, left and right are brawling, and politicians are stalling — leaving many in a corner bawling. It’s enough to lead some star-gazing billionaires to want to colonize space. But we planned for this with cunningly precise maps. Have we always been this dim? The evidence suggests yes and no, opinions vary on why, but scaling laws offer clues on calculating a plan.  As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…GET ME OUT OF HEREI am not a happy camper. I’m only really a happy camper when I’m far away from other campers – whether they are happy or not. It’s been awhile since I’ve camped, but I prefer solitude when seeking solitude. But as regional populations grow and more people are also seeking solitude, it’s harder and harder to ‘get away from it all.’Car-camping definitely doesn’t do it for me. Especially now that most everyone has a phone blasting music through a Bluetooth speaker. I’ve seen some campers with solar panels, a satellite dish, and a TV blasting the news or sports. As night falls, and the alcohol comes out, I imagine I’d be laying there wondering where the nearest hotel is. And as the sun rises the kids start crying, hangry parents begin yelling, and cars fire up as people start heading out…presumably to get some rest.I admit it’s more fun when you’re with a bigger crowd of family or friends. The revelry is more tolerable when it’s coming from within your circle. Sure that one uncle may be a bit obscene, but he’s family. These kids running around may seem obnoxious, but weren’t we all? I can imagine indignantly brushing off our loudness with, “at least we’re laughing.”I remember as a kid growing up in Iowa camping with a friend and his family in their spacious camper-trailer. They had been doing it years and had made friends with other camper-trailer families. They’d roam together from campsite to campsite over the camping season. On the first night, around dinner time, I remember being handed a wooden spoon and sauce pan. My friend’s dad looked at me holding a skillet in one hand and a hefty metal BBQ spatula in the other, and said, “Just follow me.”He stepped out of the trailer and started banging the spatula against the skillet. I followed along with the rest of the family playfully pounding my pot. It was then I realized we were being subsumed by a cacophonous cavalcade of culinary clanging campers. As we descended upon the campsite of an unsuspecting family, I realized I was participating in some kind of tribal ritual. It turned out this was their first night camping in their shiny new trailer; another member of the tribe, initiated. After everyone retreated back to their campers for a proper use of utensils, we regathered again; but this time around a common fire. We shared and prepared ingredients for another North American tribal ritual – S’mores.The desire to come together around a campfire in the great outdoors is as old as Homo sapians. The welcoming ritual I participated in signaled cooperation; it acknowledged a trust between people who were not blood related. It’s an interaction of people and place that consecrates a common bond that is strong enough to incent people to repeat this ritual of cohabitating, and sometimes confabulating, around a fire.These people share common ideals, backgrounds, desires, and sometimes even food. But for our prehistoric hunter-gather ancestors, the gathering and sharing of food was the top priority. The concentration of other families and tribes in a common space evolved to be a worthwhile endeavor. Close proximity with cooperative individuals resulted in sharing knowledge. Locals could offer advice on growing or gathering edibles and how best to hunt animals. (or assemble S’mores)Labor could be divided, exchanges could be made, and rich – though often simple and informal – socio-economic systems could flourish amidst the interaction of people and place. Soon bonds are formed, breeding between families occurs, and the circle grows. Evolution rewarded this agglomeration of people and commiserate growth of a concentric area of shared space. It formed the basis of permanent human settlements, so long as balances were struck.Over-crowded campsites, like contemporary cities, can be annoying. People are loud, some are rude, violent or selfish, and others steal – and anyone can spread illness and disease. Conflict is inevitable. Eventually, individuals and small groups decide to break away from it all. They set out to make temporary camps far away from concentrated populations of people. They may roam and hunt and gather for themselves making temporary settlements along the way. Sometimes they’d form their own settlements, while other times remain mobile. Evidence of this exists around the globe and across the history of humankind.For centuries researchers have been uncovering evidence that leads to these theories. They’ve uncovered community plans, maps, and descriptions of place. Archeologists, anthropologists, and ethnographers have written countless descriptions and interpretations of found artifacts, ecologies, and environments from research sites around the world. Over the years these fields have agreed on what they call a ‘settlement scaling theory’ – a systematic study of the conditions leading to the population dynamics of human settlement. Research demonstrates that there are traits and conditions universally common to all of humanity, but that there are also cases of particularities and uniqueness as well.SCALE IN PLACE OR SCALE YOUR SPACE?Recently an interdisciplinary group of archeologists and urban scientists decided to contribute quantitative evidence to these theories of settlement scaling. So they compile a database of over 1000 different ethnographic studies conducted and published over centuries from around the world. In February of 2022, they published a paper called Scaling of Hunter-Gatherer Camp Size and Human Sociality that proposes a mathematical model that can be used to measure human population dynamics of settlement.They derived and observed three mathematical scaling relationships looking at both settled and mobile hunter-gatherer societies.  Super-linear Growth: As concentrated populations increase it induces a greater than proportional increase in the area of the settlement. Imagine a campsite growing in population and needing to expand to make room for others.Linear Growth: When populations remain equal (or nearly equal) the area remains equal. For example, the number of campers and the size of the site remains constant.Sublinear Growth: Despite a population growing, the area remains the same or shrinks.The first two are easy to imagine, but the last one less so. If we speculate these laws could be loosely applied to our current cities, it’s easy to point to examples where the footprint of a city grows or stays the same as the population grows or stays the same. But populations growing within an existing footprint is rare. I suppose one great example is Hong Kong. They built high into the sky to house a growing population and dug deep into ground to transport them with multiple levels of trains – all while keeping the perimeter of the city proportionally relatively constant.A more ancient example offered by the researchers was found right here in the Pacific Northwest. The Haida, Kwakiutl, Nootka and Tlingit people along the Northwest coast all built permanent or semi-permanent settlements with growing populations despite the area of their settlements growing accordingly. They write,“Mollusk collecting, harvesting of salmon and acorn stocks, organized communal hunting of sea mammals or terrestrial large game, gathering of nuts and berries, developed storage technologies, and a variety of sociopolitical and ritual institutions enabled societies on the Pacific Coast of North America to support semipermanent or permanent settlements that were inhabited for multiple years. The sublinear relationship between population and area observed in these settlements suggests that in larger settlements houses were spaced more closely together, contained more people per house, or both.”This should be a rallying cry to density advocates everywhere!These researchers claim to have included plan maps of settlements as part of their data collection, though I’m not certain how they were interpreted or coded. Sadly, most prehistoric maps are lost. Countless maps have been made by humans throughout history sketched in the dirt with a stick, marked on bark with charcoal, or inked onto animal skin. Often times maps were intended to be ephemeral or kept secret. While there are archeologists who confidently claim the rationale and meaning behind these prehistoric plan maps, some cartography historians claim they often lack the necessary surrounding evidence to be convincing.One of the oldest examples is of what archeologists have interpreted to be of a settlement along a river that are etched in the tusk of a Mammoth dating back to the Ice Age 25,000 years ago. Found in 1966 in Ukraine, the ‘map’ features four shapes that are thought to represent dwellings along the Ros River. But cartography historian Dr. Catherine Delano-Smith finds it difficult “to see a close resemblance between the features scratched onto the bone and the excavated mammoth bone dwellings whichever way the drawing is oriented.” In other words, it’s unclear whether this is really a map.A better candidate for a true surviving prehistoric map are the plan view maps from the Stone Age, roughly 12,000 years ago, in the petroglyphs of Mont Bégo in the Maritime Alps of Southern France. According to Delano-Smith these maps satisfy six or seven of the ten criteria needed to be considered a plan map by cartography historians: “Two (at least) hut signs; five enclosures (or four enclosures, one with a path across it); and three land-use signs (two forms of stippling and unstippled areas).”But another Neolithic map found on two walls in Turkey helps boost evidence of prehistoric plan maps. Delano-Smith notes that, “It would be difficult to see in this rectangular pattern anything of cartographic relevance were it not for the extraordinary resemblance of the rectangles in the wall painting to those drawn by the archaeologists as part of their excavation plan.”While Delano-Smith believes there is “no neat evolution from one type [of map] to another, either from prehistoric to historical contexts or even within the historical period,” she believes there are shared concepts and purpose of maps. This is as true for prehistorical maps as it is for, as an example, the historical medieval maps of Europe. And while there are few surviving maps from that period as well, we know more about the history that surrounds them.Of the few maps of medieval cities that remain, they all share something in common with maps that had been made for millennia prior – they feature orthogonal grids. Even the Stone Age plan map found in Turkey conforms to a loose grid. Well before surveying was invented, it appears gridded plan maps were convenient ways to virtually slice and dice land. Mapmakers, and their patrons, need not even visit the site to determine how it was to be used. One such Medieval example is a 1306 plan map of the town of Talamone in Tuscany on the west coast of central Italy.ESCAPE OR ENGAGE?As the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance, 15th century city plan maps proliferated alongside burgeoning European cities. They, and other historical artifacts, offer cultural clues that suggest elements of settlement behavior consistent throughout human history. For example, in 1551 a new residential development called The Strada Nuova was requested to be planned by a clan of nobility in Genoa, Italy. They wanted a neat little enclave tucked into a hillside where they wanted to move “in the proximity of relatives and dependents to a residential area based on class rather than blood.”Like suburban residential developments of today, these lots were drawn with generous amounts of room and were neatly arranged. These plots were designed by Bernardino Cantone, a city administrator who not only assessed the value of property but arranged them next to the streets he was also planning. You have to wonder if these wealthy elite suburbanites were wanting ‘to just get away from it all’ and escape with their friends from the riff-raff in the city center.It could be they were also seeking protection. Forty-four years after The Strada Nuova was first designed, nobleman Pietro Battista Cattaneo came along and modernized and fortified development. Cattaneo brought a new approach to urban planning that was rooted in survey technology. His plans included specific dimensions and were oriented like a proper map complete with a compass rose. His transformation plan for the Strada Nuova Development is considered the oldest surviving example of a full city plan.The complex and detailed city plans of the Renaissance are a graphical record of a built environment that a) affords privacy to concentrated settlements of unrelated people and b) regulates interactions between people and place. These two factors in the emergence of permanent settlement suggest to those urban scientists in search of scaling patterns a watershed moment “in human development that made possible the open-ended accumulation of social products, in the form of stocks of knowledge and goods.”They “conclude that longer-term camps and eventually permanent settlements require both energetically and socially favorable conditions, which can be realized in different ways in different physical environments and through cultural/social conventions/structures. Failure to realize break-even (or better) levels of energetic and social production simultaneously will lead to periods of alternating group fission and fusion.”   They also emphasize their mathematical models are just that – models. They warn against a polarizing of interpretations of human behavior that is hard to describe and explain mathematically. Nonetheless, their research, like the traditional research they drew from, “steers a course between claims of universality for common human social and cultural traits and claims of particularism and uniqueness for individual cases.”I do wonder how these scaling laws relate to the fact European cities today continue to sprawl despite their populations declining. Have they failed to ‘realize break-even (or better) levels of energetic and social production simultaneously?’ Are we seeing an alternating from the ‘fusion’ of populations in these cities starting with the Renaissance to a recent ‘fission’ of settlements that are leap-frogging from the ill effects of the so-called Anthropocene? Or are elites just seeking another Strada Nuova?And surely there’s something to be learned from those coastal tribes of the Pacific Northwest who managed to grow and prosper as a population and as a culture without increasing their footprint. Perhaps more investigations into urban sublinear scaling are what is needed for us to draw new plan maps of our cities to achieve sustainable living. If we don’t do something, none of us will be happy campers. We’re already becoming loud, rude, and annoying. And that’s before the alcohol. The plan maps of the 50s and 60s, their dependency on cars, the insistence of developing countries to emulate them, and a collective human desire to increase consumption and comfort in settlements worldwide has led to humanity exceeding the carrying capacity of our only campsite – planet earth.There are some who want to escape and colonize Mars, but I’m sticking with the evidence and opinion of these researchers when they conclude that the societal costs of agglomeration, “must be overcome through social or technological innovations.” Those innovations include “property rights, food production, group rituals, political institutions, substantial shelters, and more.” Only when these transformations occur will the “open-ended densification [of] permanent settlements [] emerge.” Only then will we be happy campers. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

Hello Interactors, Cities are sprawling, the climate crisis is appalling, left and right are brawling, and politicians are stalling — leaving many in a corner bawling. It’s enough to lead some star-gazing billionaires to want to colonize space. But we planned for this with cunningly precise maps. Have we always been this dim? The evidence suggests yes and no, opinions vary on why, but scaling laws offer clues on calculating a plan. As <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactor" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">interactors</a>, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation. Please leave your comments below or email me directly. Now let’s go… GET ME OUT OF HERE I am not a happy camper. I’m only really a happy camper when I’m far away from other campers – whether they are happy or not. It’s been awhile since I’ve camped, but I prefer solitude when seeking solitude. But as regional populations grow and more people are also seeking solitude, it’s harder and harder to ‘get away from it all.’ Car-camping definitely doesn’t do it for me. Especially now that most everyone has a phone blasting music through a Bluetooth speaker. I’ve seen some campers with solar panels, a satellite dish, and a TV blasting the news or sports. As night falls, and the alcohol comes out, I imagine I’d be laying there wondering where the nearest hotel is. And as the sun rises the kids start crying, hangry parents begin yelling, and cars fire up as people start heading out…presumably to get some rest. I admit it’s more fun when you’re with a bigger crowd of family or friends. The revelry is more tolerable when it’s coming from within your circle. Sure that one uncle may be a bit obscene, but he’s family. These kids running around may seem obnoxious, but weren’t we all? I can imagine indignantly brushing off our loudness with, “at least we’re laughing.” I remember as a kid growing up in Iowa camping with a friend and his family in their spacious camper-trailer. They had been doing it years and had made friends with other camper-trailer families. They’d roam together from campsite to campsite over the camping season. On the first night, around dinner time, I remember being handed a wooden spoon and sauce pan. My friend’s dad looked at me holding a skillet in one hand and a hefty metal BBQ spatula in the other, and said, “Just follow me.” He stepped out of the trailer and started banging the spatula against the skillet. I followed along with the rest of the family playfully pounding my pot. It was then I realized we were being subsumed by a cacophonous cavalcade of culinary clanging campers. As we descended upon the campsite of an unsuspecting family, I realized I was participating in some kind of tribal ritual. It turned out this was their first night camping in their shiny new trailer; another member of the tribe, initiated. After everyone retreated back to their campers for a proper use of utensils, we regathered again; but this time around a common fire. We shared and prepared ingredients for another North American tribal ritual – <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S'more" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">S’mores</a>. The desire to come together around a campfire in the great outdoors is as old as Homo sapians. The welcoming ritual I participated in signaled cooperation; it acknowledged a trust between people who were not blood related. It’s an interaction of people and place that consecrates a common bond that is strong enough to incent people to repeat this ritual of cohabitating, and sometimes confabulating, around a fire. These people share common ideals, backgrounds, desires, and sometimes even food. But for our prehistoric hunter-gather ancestors, the gathering and sharing of food was the top priority. The concentration of other families and tribes in a common space evolved to be a worthwhile endeavor. Close proximity with cooperative individuals resulted in sharing knowledge. Locals could offer advice on growing or gathering edibles and how best to hunt animals. (or assemble S’mores) Labor could be divided, exchanges could be made, and rich – though often simple and informal – socio-economic systems could flourish amidst the interaction of people and place. Soon bonds are formed, breeding between families occurs, and the circle grows. Evolution rewarded this agglomeration of people and commiserate growth of a concentric area of shared space. It formed the basis of permanent human settlements, so long as balances were struck. Over-crowded campsites, like contemporary cities, can be annoying. People are loud, some are rude, violent or selfish, and others steal – and anyone can spread illness and disease. Conflict is inevitable. Eventually, individuals and small groups decide to break away from it all. They set out to make temporary camps far away from concentrated populations of people. They may roam and hunt and gather for themselves making temporary settlements along the way. Sometimes they’d form their own settlements, while other times remain mobile. Evidence of this exists around the globe and across the history of humankind. For centuries researchers have been uncovering evidence that leads to these theories. They’ve uncovered community plans, maps, and descriptions of place. Archeologists, anthropologists, and ethnographers have written countless descriptions and interpretations of found artifacts, ecologies, and environments from research sites around the world. Over the years these fields have agreed on what they call a ‘settlement scaling theory’ – a systematic study of the conditions leading to the population dynamics of human settlement. Research demonstrates that there are traits and conditions universally common to all of humanity, but that there are also cases of particularities and uniqueness as well. SCALE IN PLACE OR SCALE YOUR SPACE? Recently an interdisciplinary group of archeologists and urban scientists decided to contribute quantitative evidence to these theories of settlement scaling. So they compile a database of over 1000 different ethnographic studies conducted and published over centuries from around the world. In February of 2022, they published a paper called <a href="https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/719234" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Scaling of Hunter-Gatherer Camp Size and Human Sociality</a> that proposes a mathematical model that can be used to measure human population dynamics of settlement. They derived and observed three mathematical scaling relationships looking at both settled and mobile hunter-gatherer societies.   Super-linear Growth: As concentrated populations increase it induces a greater than proportional increase in the area of the settlement. Imagine a campsite growing in population and needing to expand to make room for others. Linear Growth: When populations remain equal (or nearly equal) the area remains equal. For example, the number of campers and the size of the site remains constant. Sublinear Growth: Despite a population growing, the area remains the same or shrinks. The first two are easy to imagine, but the last one less so. If we speculate these laws could be loosely applied to our current cities, it’s easy to point to examples where the footprint of a city grows or stays the same as the population grows or stays the same. But populations growing within an existing footprint is rare. I suppose one great example is Hong Kong. They built high into the sky to house a growing population and dug deep into ground to transport them with multiple levels of trains – all while keeping the perimeter of the city proportionally relatively constant. A more ancient example offered by the researchers was found right here in the Pacific Northwest. The Haida, Kwakiutl, Nootka and Tlingit people along the Northwest coast all built permanent or semi-permanent settlements with growing populations despite the area of their settlements growing accordingly. They write, “Mollusk collecting, harvesting of salmon and acorn stocks, organized communal hunting of sea mammals or terrestrial large game, gathering of nuts and berries, developed storage technologies, and a variety of sociopolitical and ritual institutions enabled societies on the Pacific Coast of North America to support semipermanent or permanent settlements that were inhabited for multiple years. The sublinear relationship between population and area observed in these settlements suggests that in larger settlements houses were spaced more closely together, contained more people per house, or both.” This should be a rallying cry to density advocates everywhere! These researchers claim to have included plan maps of settlements as part of their data collection, though I’m not certain how they were interpreted or coded. Sadly, most prehistoric maps are lost. Countless maps have been made by humans throughout history sketched in the dirt with a stick, marked on bark with charcoal, or inked onto animal skin. Often times maps were intended to be ephemeral or kept secret. While there are archeologists who confidently claim the rationale and meaning behind these prehistoric plan maps, some cartography historians claim they often lack the necessary surrounding evidence to be convincing. One of the oldest examples is of what archeologists have interpreted to be of a settlement along a river that are etched in the tusk of a Mammoth dating back to the Ice Age 25,000 years ago. Found in 1966 in Ukraine, the ‘map’ features four shapes that are thought to represent dwellings along the Ros River. But cartography historian Dr. Catherine Delano-Smith finds it difficult “to see a close resemblance between the features scratched onto the bone and the excavated mammoth bone dwellings whichever way the drawing is oriented.” In other words, it’s unclear whether this is really a map. A better candidate for a true surviving prehistoric map are the plan view maps from the Stone Age, roughly 12,000 years ago, in the petroglyphs of Mont Bégo in the Maritime Alps of Southern France. According to Delano-Smith these maps satisfy six or seven of the ten criteria needed to be considered a plan map by cartography historians: “Two (at least) hut signs; five enclosures (or four enclosures, one with a path across it); and three land-use signs (two forms of stippling and unstippled areas).” But another Neolithic map found on two walls in Turkey helps boost evidence of prehistoric plan maps. Delano-Smith notes that, “It would be difficult to see in this rectangular pattern anything of cartographic relevance were it not for the extraordinary resemblance of the rectangles in the wall painting to those drawn by the archaeologists as part of their excavation plan.” While Delano-Smith believes there is “no neat evolution from one type [of map] to another, either from prehistoric to historical contexts or even within the historical period,” she believes there are shared concepts and purpose of maps. This is as true for prehistorical maps as it is for, as an example, the historical medieval maps of Europe. And while there are few surviving maps from that period as well, we know more about the history that surrounds them. Of the few maps of medieval cities that remain, they all share something in common with maps that had been made for millennia prior – they feature orthogonal grids. Even the Stone Age plan map found in Turkey conforms to a loose grid. Well before surveying was invented, it appears gridded plan maps were convenient ways to virtually slice and dice land. Mapmakers, and their patrons, need not even visit the site to determine how it was to be used. One such Medieval example is a 1306 plan map of the town of Talamone in Tuscany on the west coast of central Italy. ESCAPE OR ENGAGE? As the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance, 15th century city plan maps proliferated alongside burgeoning European cities. They, and other historical artifacts, offer cultural clues that suggest elements of settlement behavior consistent throughout human history. For example, in 1551 a new residential development called The Strada Nuova was requested to be planned by a clan of nobility in Genoa, Italy. They wanted a neat little enclave tucked into a hillside where they wanted to move “in the proximity of relatives and dependents to a residential area based on class rather than blood.” Like suburban residential developments of today, these lots were drawn with generous amounts of room and were neatly arranged. These plots were designed by Bernardino Cantone, a city administrator who not only assessed the value of property but arranged them next to the streets he was also planning. You have to wonder if these wealthy elite suburbanites were wanting ‘to just get away from it all’ and escape with their friends from the riff-raff in the city center. It could be they were also seeking protection. Forty-four years after The Strada Nuova was first designed, nobleman Pietro Battista Cattaneo came along and modernized and fortified development. Cattaneo brought a new approach to urban planning that was rooted in survey technology. His plans included specific dimensions and were oriented like a proper map complete with a compass rose. His transformation plan for the Strada Nuova Development is considered the oldest surviving example of a full city plan. The complex and detailed city plans of the Renaissance are a graphical record of a built environment that a) affords privacy to concentrated settlements of unrelated people and b) regulates interactions between people and place. These two factors in the emergence of permanent settlement suggest to those urban scientists in search of scaling patterns a watershed moment “in human development that made possible the open-ended accumulation of social products, in the form of stocks of knowledge and goods.” They “conclude that longer-term camps and eventually permanent settlements require both energetically and socially favorable conditions, which can be realized in different ways in different physical environments and through cultural/social conventions/structures. Failure to realize break-even (or better) levels of energetic and social production simultaneously will lead to periods of alternating group fission and fusion.”    They also emphasize their mathematical models are just that – models. They warn against a polarizing of interpretations of human behavior that is hard to describe and explain mathematically. Nonetheless, their research, like the traditional research they drew from, “steers a course between claims of universality for common human social and cultural traits and claims of particularism and uniqueness for individual cases.” I do wonder how these scaling laws relate to the <a href="https://tinyurl.com/y5ta9mlu" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">fact European cities today continue to sprawl despite their populations declining</a>. Have they failed to ‘realize break-even (or better) levels of energetic and social production simultaneously?’ Are we seeing an alternating from the ‘fusion’ of populations in these cities starting with the Renaissance to a recent ‘fission’ of settlements that are leap-frogging from the ill effects of the so-called Anthropocene? Or are elites just seeking another Strada Nuova? And surely there’s something to be learned from those coastal tribes of the Pacific Northwest who managed to grow and prosper as a population and as a culture without increasing their footprint. Perhaps more investigations into urban sublinear scaling are what is needed for us to draw new plan maps of our cities to achieve sustainable living. If we don’t do something, none of us will be happy campers. We’re already becoming loud, rude, and annoying. And that’s before the alcohol. The plan maps of the 50s and 60s, their dependency on cars, the insistence of developing countries to emulate them, and a collective human desire to increase consumption and comfort in settlements worldwide has led to humanity exceeding the carrying capacity of our only campsite – planet earth. There are some who want to escape and colonize Mars, but I’m sticking with the evidence and opinion of these researchers when they conclude that the societal costs of agglomeration, “must be overcome through social or technological innovations.” Those innovations include “property rights, food production, group rituals, political institutions, substantial shelters, and more.” Only when these transformations occur will the “open-ended densification [of] permanent settlements [] emerge.” Only then will we be happy campers. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://interplace.io?utm_medium=podcast&amp;utm_campaign=CTA_1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">interplace.io</a>

City Maps and Scaling Math

Hello Interactors,Do you ever walk through a neighborhood and wonder where all the people are? It happened to me last weekend. What’s worse, it was a 1960s planned development that reminded me of the suburb where I grew up. I don’t remember the streets being this quiet, but maybe these planned communities were meant to be this way. Or maybe we’ve changed. Or both.As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…A DASH TOWARD THE PASTThere it sat in the driveway, a brawny black pickup truck with an NRA sticker in the rear window and TRUMP plastered on the bumper. The protruding chrome tailpipe was gaping wide. Black exhaust dust clung to its edges. Three late-model cars were parked askew in the front lawn. Two doors down and across the street I saw a pride flag hanging next to a Black Lives Matters sign that read, “WHITE SILENCE IS WHITE VIOLENCE.” I passed more houses and heard a barking dog approaching angrily. It ran alongside a taco truck parked in a driveway with the name of a Mexican restaurant painted on the side. Two other cars were in the driveway and one in the lawn behind a chain-link fence that restrain the dog. I had walked nearly an hour in this suburban neighborhood and had yet to see a single human being.I was at my son’s track meet last Saturday in a town near Tacoma called Federal Way. I had some time to kill so I decided to take a walk. I picked a green patch on Google Maps that appeared to go down to the water and headed off to explore. The sidewalk from the High School ended 50 feet from the parking lot and I never saw another. The streets were quiet in this 1960’s neighborhood scattered with single story ranch-style homes intermixed with two-story split-level boxes.Melancholy reflected off of these beige, white, and brown painted homes. They all featured a yard, a driveway, assorted overgrown shrubs and a tree or two. These homes are identical to the homes I would run in and out of as a kid in small town suburban Iowa. They were all built as part of the post-war building boom during America’s economic heyday when ordinary, mostly White, middle class folks could buy into the American Dream.This housing development was built to accommodate a booming population drawn to jobs at the Tacoma Port, nearby Boeing factories, lumber yards, and paper mills. As the 1964 King County Comprehensive Plan states,“…certain areas in King County, such as Federal Way, will have a population boom partially due to the employment opportunities that exist or are contemplated in the Tacoma area.”Development was happening so fast that in 1958 the State of Washington purchased a 300-acre swath of land at nearby Dash Point for $185,000 to make it a state park. That’s $1.7 million in 2022 dollars and about what you’d pay for a single home near Dash Point today. Indigenous people lived on these shores before being displaced to a nearby reservation as part of the 1854 Treaty of Medicine Creek. The Puyallup people are still fighting for access to surrounding private land to fish; their lawful right as written in the treaty. Most, if not all, treaties fail to honor Indigenous notions of shared use of land and resources that fly in the face of more self-centered and guarded Western ideals and philosophies of individual property ownership and rights.The state’s 1958 purchase of the Dash Point property was from a company aptly named the “Modern Home Builders.” That same year natural gas pipelines were laid and fire hydrants were getting installed every 600 feet. In 1959 a sewer plan was revised to keep up with the rapid development.In 1960 a 600-acre “Residential Park” began showing their 650 homes to buyers – many of whom were likely war veterans who were enjoying cheap government subsidized mortgages. Churches were being erected, bowling alleys were being laid, and ‘American Concrete’ had their grand opening featuring “Free Washed Sand for the Kiddies.”This Federal Way neighborhood I was walking in wasn’t the only one going through this transformation in the 1950s and 60s. It was happening across the country. I grew up in one and benefited from it. It was easy for me to imagine these homes as brand new. I could close my eyes and smell fresh white American concrete, I could see kids riding their bikes, new cars pulling into the driveways, and smoke rising from the backyard barbeques. Life was good.By 1966, when most of this neighborhood I was walking through was built, the U.S. stock market had peaked. Nobody would have believed it then, but this marked the beginning of a long slow economic decline. The stagflation of the 1970s and the area’s shift toward software in the 1980s and 90s froze much of Federal Way in the past. Beginning in 1990 with the Washington Growth Management Act suburban sprawl was curbed, then much of Boeing left the area, mills closed, and Western Washington jobs shifted from blue collar to white.Meanwhile, today the tech industry continues to push home values across the region upward while most incomes remain stagnant. The median price of a home in Federal Way is $580,000 and has grown 16% year over year for the last five years. The estimated yearly median income between 2013-2017 was around $62,000 and the per capita income was only $30,288. That’s well below the 2020 median household income in the United States of $67,521 which had dropped from $69,560 the year prior. Federal Way may be lagging economically, but it is extremely rich with diversity. The Federal Way School District reports over 111 different languages spoken in family homes. But not in the streets where I was walking. Not a peep.This is a common sight in many suburban neighborhoods, and this one was no exception. Though, seeing one to five cars per household led me to believe these people must be home. I can imagine each of these homes filled with people glued to a screen. But should they ever leave, they’ll surely get in a car given the walkability score of 22 out of 100. Besides, there aren’t many places of interest within walking distance. Unless, of course, you’re a walking fanatic like me.  CURVESOUS CARTESIAN CUL-DE-SACSThis area, like so many others, was designed to be anthropocentric – it puts the individual self at the center. Just as cars do. America is made for cars and driving a car conjures a belief that the ‘self’ is most important. This is my car and my road so get out of my way. Automobile advertising repeatedly reinforces the image of being alone in comfort in a climate controlled moving cocoon made of metal and plastic. It’s hard to deny, a good car is comfortable. And most of them comfortably reside at these single family homes which are also designed to put the ‘self’ and the ‘single’ family first. The handful of Christian churches I walked by also stress the power of the individual. The Bible’s Book of Genesis verse 1:26 states: “God” said “Man” has “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” Does that not sound kind of creepy?Civil Engineers and Urban Planners were, and still are, the gods who hold dominion over city plans that often encourage cities to creepeth upon the earth. Federal Way itself crept out of sprawling Seattle and Tacoma. Planners made sure to plan for demand and single family homes on a large piece of land is what people demanded…and developers happily lent a hand. These demands have not receded. The 1964 King County Comprehensive Plan addressed ‘Residential Land Use’ with these words,“Over the years and especially after World War II, the continued construction and upgrading of highway facilities has consistently improved accessibility to major employment centers. Since there has been ample suitable residential land available in relation to the demand, the effect of improved accessibility has resulted in residential development being located farther and farther out from major centers of employment. From the earliest times of the history of King county, a larger percentage of its residents have shown a preference to living in single family dwellings as opposed to multi-family structures. They could always afford this preference.”They noted that in 1960 Seattle used 36 acres per 1000 persons, but by 1964 were planning to double that to 72 acres per 1,000 persons outside the ‘Urban Area’ of Seattle. They said,“In the past, the grid iron pattern resulted in more acreage in streets than recent development.”And since the 1950s and the expansion of freeways and highways there would be less need for the grid and compact development. They said,“In the future, a large percentage of the streets and highway system acreages will consist of freeway type facilities rather than local streets.”And to make sure developers, for whatever reason, didn’t attempt to build more dense housing on these sprawling acreages they included language that protected residents who may resist such attempts. They draw special attention to “URBAN CENTER DEVELOPMENT” (their emphasis), They wrote,“residential densities should decrease at greater distances from an urban center…Some areas of the County should be kept at a lower density even though close to an urban center. These areas include locations where a pattern of large lot sizes is already established or is desired and where residents need the assurance that the character of their neighborhood will be stabilized.” (my emphasis)There is a discernable distaste for uniform Cartesian grids in the language of this plan. Part of the modernist post-war vision was to move away from compact urban development of the 19th century that favored neighborhood stores, modest property allocations, and use of public transit. Multi-family structures had connotations of poor, often ethnically diverse, residents which by today’s standards are read as thinly veiled racist and classist biases. The 1950s and 60s pushed for more rural and pastoral land use that attempted to blend a growing middle class into a natural landscape connected to a freeway.They wrote,“The grid form of layout, while easy to design on the drawing board, can result in inharmonious relationships with the site. It can, however, add clarity to an otherwise confusing street pattern, but should be used judiciously to avoid monotonous rows of houses.”They instead called for more organic street and lot layout saying,“Depending on topography or other natural features affecting street design…an infinite number of variations exist in the arrangement of lots and houses and can be used to take advantage of natural features of the landscape.”The cul-de-sac is called out in the plan as one example to follow.“A third general form may be called a court, cul-de-sac, or cluster, and features a grouping of buildings which have service orientation at the street but privacy to the rear.”I grew up on on a cul-de-sac and can vouge for the design goals these planners set out to achieve. But we now know that these dead ends can lead to overly circuitous routes should people choose to walk, bike, or bus to their destinations. They were planning for the automobile as the only viable and desirable choice of transport.“residential neighborhoods should be designed with long blocks in order to avoid excessive cross streets which are costly to construct and maintain…Pedestrian crosswalks should be required only where necessary such as through blocks over 900 feet in length or where access to a school, park, or shopping area is essential.”While they did recommend providing a sidewalk on at least one side of the street, it read more as a suggestion than a requirement. Under a section titled, “Street Design Factors” they said this about sidewalks,“Even though sidewalks may be used less for walking in residential than in business areas, their hard surfaces provide children’s play areas close to home.”THE APPRAISAL OF THE SOCIO-SPATIALThe words “close to home” say a lot about these city plans and the desires and demands of home owners and builders. These places were designed and engineered by professionals from ‘above’ using maps and diagrams. They remained detached from the people and places they were planning for. And the very ‘townscapes’ these people were designing were intended to detach the occupants of these spaces from the larger, messy, and complex society that surrounded them. They made plans for homes with ‘privacy in the rear’ where children play ‘close to home’. Architects and builders designed structures that insured privacy – in the words of ‘High Modernist’ Le Corbusier – they were “machines for living.” These properties included ‘service orientation at the street’ that included a driveway leading to a garage where the other ‘machine for moving’ could be stored.This methodically mapped, measured, and mechanized ‘mecca’ is the making of well meaning men dating back to Mercator. The 17th century father of Cartography used techniques of triangulation to turn the earth into a scientific measuring instrument. The centuries old Mercator projection, which distorts northern land masses to give priority to the Dutch sailing distances between them, is still the most popular and familiar projection used today.Then came Newton who saw the entire universe as a kind of machine – “a container for objects and facts.” He married his Newtonian physics with Euclidean geometry. The philosopher Immanuel Kant, who also taught physical geography, argued “space and time were inner conditions of the human…ordered by logical categories.” Starting in 1747, and over the course of 50 years, the Cassini family drew a highly precise map of France using geodesic triangulation – the first of its kind. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) expanded on these techniques to measure and delineate land across the United States. But theses topographical maps were also used for the erasure of certain natural elements and to eliminate certain people. After all, their primary purpose was, and still is, to wage war or defend against it. These maps also remain the basis for mapping, planning, and ordering urban areas in the United States to this day.This Western anthropocentric, mechanistic, objectification of spaces, and the use of maps and drawings to represent them, is alluring and seemingly addictive. It’s also part of the reality of everyday urban life. Ali Madanipour, a Professor of Urban Design at Newcastle University, separates urban spaces into two dimensions: physical and social.The ‘physical’ is what garners the most attention, probably because it’s most visible and easy to understand. The arranging and grouping of buildings is at the scale of an urban planner and politician, the form and function of buildings are the domain of architects and developers, and the patterns and construction of spaces in between these structures, like streets, alleys, highways, freeways, and parking lots, is the domain of the civil engineer.These objects are arranged in space creating places where people interact with each other and the natural and built environment – the interaction of people and place. But these interrelationships extend to the people who build them and those who control how, when, and where they’re built. This complex, multi-dimensional, interconnected social dimension over space and time is hard to see, harder to visualize, and thus hardest for us all to understand.Madanipour summarizes,“A study of urban form therefore refers to the way physical entities, singly or in a group, are produced and used, their spatial arrangements, and the interrelationships, and also how monetary and symbolic values are attributed to them.”The way men mapped and arranged the physical entities in that Federal Way neighborhood were produced for the monetary gain of developers, the city, county, and state. The symbolic values were codified in that 1964 King County Comprehensive Plan that encouraged interrelationships between individuals to be in the home, close to home, or in a car – all while guaranteeing the ‘character of their neighborhood’ would be stabilized.It was all planned on a map that men loomed over like a god or a general staging a battle over territory. But they were also giving people what they wanted. Weyerhaeuser wanted trees for paper and profit, developers wanted stolen land in exchange for money, and people wanted what many believe is entitled to them: individual ownership of their land. After all, it’s written in the preamble of the U.S. Constitution – to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity".The GPS I used to navigate these quiet curvilinear roads, carved into the earth then cauterized with concrete, is rooted in the same Western history of cartography, science, and philosophy that assisted in building its physical urban form. But the space I was visiting was not designed to be used as I was using it. That is why, to some degree, I didn’t see a single person. This environment was not built to foster interactions between people and place, but for cars to move individuals through space.This place was designed for these people to be ‘close to home’ and in the home. These residents were probably socializing and forming interrelationships, but in a virtual environment. There were being entertained on a screen in their hand, on a desk, or on a wall. The culmination of combined technologies as old as their homes.And when they did finally decide to leave their home, they likely tapped their destination on their phone. They climbed into their ‘machine for moving’, and were instructed to drive to clusters of physical structures of their choosing. They then glided on surfaces of ‘in-between’ spaces across America’s concrete places. The American dream financed by a loan. Blessings of liberty, that has left them alone. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

Creepy Creeps Down Suburban Streets

Interplace explores the interaction of people and place. It looks at how we move within and between the places we live and what led us here in the first place. interplace.io

Hello Interactors,Beauty may be in eye of the beholder, but it’s also in the brain. We all seem to be drawn to balance, order, and predictable patterns which rulers, T-squares, protractors, and compasses have readily provided. It’s the stuff maps are made of. They’ve brought progress and good fortune to many over the centuries, but have they also lead to our decay?As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…HIGH FASHIONI can’t deny it. I’m a sucker for grids. I’m drawn to music, art, and designs that are balanced, orderly, and intelligible. Give me a ruler, a protractor, a compass, and a pencil and I’d happily make art and designs all day. Growing up I’d handcraft lettering on cards using my Dad’s plastic flowchart stencils. What can I say, I’m a product of modernity. A neat and tidy aesthete.But that attraction was called into question last week as I was watching The Hobbit. The movie’s protagonist, Bilbo Baggins, lives in an organically shaped earthen home carved into the side of hill. There’s not a Cartesian grid or plane anywhere to be found. Every wall is curved as if bored into the hillside by a giant gopher. I was so smitten that I murmured out loud to my family, “I could definitely live in that house.” Has my planar proclivity passed me by, or has the curving complexity of nature caught my eye?Neuroscience has uncovered evidence that we humans, perhaps other animals as well, tend ‘like’ and/or ‘want’ aesthetic order and balance. Evidence of elements in oddities ordered by humans abounds in centuries of found paintings, carvings, jewelry, and even cities.But firm empirical conclusions of this gray-matter matter remain elusive. Although, neuroscientists do agree on one thing: there is no single ‘beauty center’ in our brain. When hooked up to brain imaging machines, scientists observe “activity in the frontal pole, left dorsolateral cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, temporal pole, motor cortex, parietal cortex, ventral stratum, and occipital cortex, among others.” And there is ongoing work trying to tease out the order in which these activities unfold betwixt the vast network of synapsis in a brain containing as many neurons as stars in the Milky Way. A task seemingly more complex than the identification of the regions themselves.If aesthetically pleasing ordered intelligibility is indeed a universal mammalian trait, getting to that cognitive state is complex – understanding it even more so. Some scientists believe another reason concrete evidence is elusive is because the visual stimuli used across studies varies considerably.Designing and administering cognitive research requires rationalizing inputs across studies to achieve more predictable outcomes. This ‘streamlining’ of the scientific method is not only applied to studies, but to the design and manufacturing of products, and the planning, mapping, and administration of our neighborhoods, cities, regions, and states.Political scientist and legal anthropologist James C. Scott once alluded to the similarities between designing observational studies and the design of our modern urban environments writing,“The builders of the modern nation-state do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation.”Scott’s 1998 book, Seeing Like a State, is critical of what he calls High Modernism which is an over-reliance on Cartesian principles, the scientific method, and unfaltering faith in technology. While he admits these advances improved – and continue to improve – the human condition, he believes blind adherence to these aesthetic, bureaucratic, and technocratic principles may have also put us on a path toward what we now see as potential human extinction.The list of ‘High Modernists’ in art, science, design, and politics is long, but Scott created a “Hall of Fame” of geo-political modernists like former U.S. Secretary of Defense and Cold War strategist Robert McNamara known for his ‘scientific management’ style, New York commissioner-cum-urban planner and power broker Robert Moses, founding head of Soviet Russia and dictator of the proletariat Vladimir Lenin, the Shah-of-Iran who sought to modernize and nationalize his entire country and industry, and the influential architect and urban designer Le Corbusier who advocated for standardized inhumane design and erasure of historical and cultural tradition – especially in the aftermath of war.Scott’s full list includes people of not any one political persuasion. He reveals how both conservatives and progressives are capable of “sweeping, rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition.” He notes they all use “unrestrained use of the power of the modern state as an instrument for achieving these designs.” And he observes the public really has no recourse, nor often the desire, to resist it. He says,“The ideology of high modernism provides, as it were, the desire; the modern state provides the means of acting on that desire; and the incapacitated civil society provides the leveled terrain on which to build (dis)utopias.”That ‘desire’, as it were, I suspect is partially driven by the aesthetics found in the uniformity, balance, and order of ‘High Modernists.’ Parsimony, the reductive removal of redundancy, is what persuades people to purchase overpriced but simplified products like Prada. It’s what spurred Tom Wolfe to observe in his book From Bauhaus to Our House that elite modernists want to fill cities with “row after row of Mies van der Rohe.” The German architect was known for his stark rectilinear buildings made of what he called ‘skin and bone.’In addition to fashion and architecture, modernist desire was (and still is) embodied in many elements of society and popular culture from literature, to industry, to transportation. Much of this progress occurred during the Industrial Age of the 19th century. I can imagine the exhilaration of high speed movement through space over time on a bike, car, or train surely began with fright but ended in delight. Even desirable.As Scott points out, the state provided the means for this desire to manifest. He invites us to,“imagine that what these designers of society had in mind was roughly what designers of locomotives had in mind with ‘streamlining.’ Rather than arresting social change, they hoped to design a shape to social life that would minimize the friction of progress. The difficulty with this resolution is that state social engineering was inherently authoritarian.”FROM CRAWLING TO SPRAWLINGIt was locomotives that brought many colonizers to my home town, Norwalk, Iowa in the late 1800s. But the first was Samuel Snyder in 1852. He built a log cabin near an area called Pyra. He was likely on the land of the Báxoje (Bah-Kho-Je) people, or as neighboring tribes called them ayuhwa “sleepy ones” otherwise known as Iowa. Pyra was a few miles south of the state capital, Des Moines (Hartford of the West) that was incorporated just one year earlier.By 1856, four years later, Pyra had a post office and a new resident, George Swan, who made his presence known by “putting up a pretentious edifice, to be used as a hotel.” Swan was a politician and newspaper publisher who moved from Norwalk, Ohio but was born in Norwalk, Connecticut. He became postmaster in part to change the name of the town from Pyra to Norwalk.The renaming of Indigenous place names to Western names is another common act of the ‘High Modernist’, as is laying out a town in your vision. Which was the next thing Swan did.The county and the township had already been gridded and platted as part of Thomas Jefferson’s squaring of a nation, but it was Swan’s ‘authoritarian’ vision that allowed for the ‘social engineering’ of the town I grew up in. He was aided by a handful of settlers including Jesse Huff and Mary Huff. One of my best friends came from the Huff family, his uncle was our baseball coach, and his grandpa was the long time Norwalk city manager. That’s three generations of city administration aided by the modern state’s ‘means of acting on the desire’ to ‘level terrain’ so they may build their ‘utopia.’It took until the 1950s and 60s before Norwalk become a true suburb of Des Moines – an expansion beyond what Swan could ever have imagined. Its population sputtered growing modestly between 1900 and 1950 from 287 to 435, but then grew 205% between 1950 and 1960 to 1,328. The town didn’t expand beyond Swan’s initial footprint until 1969 and it’s been sprawling ever since. It’s now hard to discern the border between Des Moines and Norwalk. When I lived there in the 60s, 70s, and 80s corn and soybean fields provided a visible gap.Despite these well-intentioned ‘High Modernists’ sprawling attempts around the world at carefully planned and engineered social utopias, scholarly literature reveals what Scott suspects. Research across economists, geographers, and planners suggests this general consensus:“urban sprawl as a multidimensional phenomenon [is] typified by an unplanned and uneven pattern of urban development that is driven by a multitude of processes and which leads to the inefficient utilisation of land resources. Urban sprawl is observed globally, though its characteristics and impacts vary.”The words ‘uneven’ and ‘multitude of processes’ and ‘inefficient utilization’ resulting in ‘varying impacts’ don’t fit the exacting premise promised by enlightened ‘High Modernists.’ This study I’m quoting was done in reaction to the fact that despite the populations of European cities declining, their footprints have continued to sprawl since the 1970s. They say, “There is no sign that this trend is slowing down and, as a result, the demand for land around cities is becoming a critical issue in many areas.” This is the essence of urban sprawl.The ordinal origins of sprawl are synonymous with their historic modernist and economic origins – the Central Business District. The shape and pattern of the impending sprawl in the United States and Europe is like a spider spinning it’s web from the center out. Causes are often oversimplified by a focus on the economic trade-off between housing prices and commuting costs. Importantly, this economic function is a result of the modern state’s role in ‘providing the means of acting on the desire’ of select individuals to live ‘elsewhere.’There are other factors that determine the shape, resolution, and scale of sprawl. A 2006 study determined that“sprawl in the USA between 1976 and 1992 was positively related to groundwater availability, temperate climate, rugged terrain, decentralised employment, early public transport infrastructure, uncertainty about metropolitan growth and the low impact of public service financing on local taxpayers.”Other studies include another big factor in the United States, ethnicity: that same 2006 study found “that increases in the percentage of ethnic minority populations within cities and rising city centre crime rates both led to a growth in urban sprawl.” Curiously, a similar study focused on Europe “confirmed the positive impact of higher crime rates on sprawl, but observed the opposite effect for the impact of ethnic minority populations.”I HAVE A CITY IN MINDSprawl isn’t just happening in the U.S. and Europe, but in developing countries as well. Since opening up in 1979, China has seen unprecedented sprawl in conjunction with their rise in socioeconomic development. Urbanization increased “17.92% in 1978 to 59.60% in 2018, and scholars predict it will reach 70% in 2035 and 75% in 2050.”As is the case in the United States and Europe, “the expansion of urban land mainly sacrifices rural land, especially cropland, which produces negative effects such as ecological degradation, water and land loss, and soil pollution.” This study concludes that “urban land expansion has garnered much attention, and studies have focused on land transition monitoring, effects analysis, and mechanism identification. However, discussions on suburban development and its subsequent effects remain insufficient.”These researchers draw attention to three commonly used dimensions in studying sprawl:Administrative - Administrative boundaries such as towns close to a city.Spatial - Location, Density, and Spatial Activity adjacent and within commuting distance of the city.Social - Attributes such as classes, races, and ethnicities of residents that distinguish cities and suburbs.A primary thrust of ‘High Modernism’ are found in those first two dimensions. ‘High Modernists’ seek to ease the ‘administrative’ costs through the reduction of ‘spatial’ complexity. There’s actually nothing modern about that, really. Unless you consider the 5th century BC Greek polymath Hippodamus ‘modern’. He is considered the ‘father of European urban planning’ beginning with his grid plan of the Greek port city Piraeus that remains today. But being a mathematician, he no doubt was seeking spatial parsimony for city administrators.The economist Herbert Simon (who studied decision making in large organizations) describes the ‘administrative man’ this way:“Administrative man recognizes that the world he perceives is a drastically simplified model of the buzzing, blooming confusion that constitutes the real world. He is content with the gross simplification because he believes that the real world is mostly empty – that most of the facts of the real world have no great relevance to any particular situation he is facing and that most significant chains of causes and consequences are short and simple.”Simon elucidates how the first two dimensions of the effects of ‘High Modernist’ urban sprawl, – ‘administrative boundaries’ and remote measures of ‘spatiality’ – are ‘gross simplifications’ of the ‘buzzing, blooming confusion that constitutes the real world.’ This ‘real world’ may be better evidenced in the third dimension of measures, ‘social attributes such as classes, races, and ethnicities of residents that distinguish cities and suburbs.’But even these attributes can remain removed the real world if viewed from a map or table of data. We need only look at Redlining as an example of how ‘social’ dimensions can be used to negate, subjugate, frustrate, dictate, alienate, arbitrate, automate, and attempt to eliminate certain classes, races, and ethnicities through actuated, calculated tax rates, interest rates, and loan rates through a slate of mandates from magistrates of the city-state, state-state, and nation-state.The French Philosopher, Michel de Certeau, observes in his book The Practice of Everyday Life how Walking in the City, despite its gridded plans, results in people defiantly deploying practical and tactical shortcuts despite attempts by centuries of ‘High Modernism’ to control them. He writes that ‘the City’,“provides a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties.”But he also wonders if this concept of the city is decaying. He reflects on the strength, resiliency, and tenacity of humanity despite the potential erosion of ‘High Modernism’ and asks,“Does that mean that the illness afflicting both the rationality that founded it and its professionals afflicts the urban populations as well?”He invites us to not turn our “bewilderment” of ‘High Modernism’ in ‘catastrophes’” of its undoing but instead,“analyse the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay…”As much as I like the ordered, gridded aesthetic, I’ve come to better appreciate the beauty in our ‘microbe-like’ natural world. Modernity may be defined by the analytical geometry of Descartes, but I can’t help but wonder if the work of another 17th century mathematician may come to shape our future.His name is Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the German mathematician who invented, perhaps along with Isaac Newton, calculus. Leibniz is also credited with discovering self-similarity which forms the bases for Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractals. Mandelbrot’s geometry, his ‘Art of Roughness’, describes the mathematics behind branching systems found in fern leaves, cauliflower, trees, and coastlines as well as our circulatory system, nervous system, bronchial system, and maybe even Bilbo Baggin’s hobbit home in the hill. If it wasn’t for the fractal-like nature of the gray-matter of our brain, it wouldn’t be able fold upon itself to fit within the small cavity of our cranium. Even its network of neurons, and the synaptic patterns they form as we fawn over beauty, follow the mathematical laws of Leibniz and Mandelbrot. Our world may not need be ordained by Cartesian order because it’s already organized. We just need to understand it and follow its lead.As neuroscientists continue to map the brain in search of what draws us to order and balance in objects as well as cities, perhaps they could consider the conjecture of British physicist and distinguished professor of the Santa Fe Institute, Geoffrey West when he writes:“…because the geometry of white and gray matter in our brains, which forms the neural circuitry responsible for all of our cognitive functions, is itself a fractal-like hierarchical network, this suggests that the hidden fractal nature of social networks is actually a representation of the physical structure of our brains. This speculation can be taken one step further by invoking the idea that the structure and organization of cities are determined by the structure and dynamics of social networks……In a nutshell: cities are a representation of how people interact with one another and this is encoded in our neural networks and therefore in the structure and organization of our brains.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

The Synaptic Map of the Cartesian Trap

Hello Interactors,Last Sunday I ‘rabbit-holed’ on the origins of Easter. That led me to Passover, and then Ramadan. The origin stories all involve the movement of people, or their ephemeral equivalents, through space over time. And they all share a ‘common interest’ in one of the most ancient cities on the map — Jerusalem. Is there a map for that?As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…MAPPED OUTSpring has sprung, Easter Pass(ed)over, and Ramadan lingers on. Last week Christians celebrated the rising of their messiah from a tomb, Jewish people celebrated the exodus of their people from slavery, and Muslims continued to gather, contemplate, and fast. It’s rare these three holidays occur at once. The Islamic calendar of 354 lunar days cycles with the moon through the 365 solar days of the Christian calendar allowing the these three religious holidays to coexist every three decades.The histories of these religious traditions are all rooted in the interactions of people and place. Ramadan celebrates the night the Quran was passed down from above, Easter stems from the Germanic goddess Ēostre who rises to coax the sun to return, and Passover is from the Hebrew word pasha meaning “he passed over” commemorating the angel of death passing over them.People pass over terrain every day around the world. As Ēostre rises the sun warms the earth and people begin agitating, moving, traversing, and colliding like molecules being heated by the sun’s radiation. As the earth rotates waves of interactions between people and place rise and fall with the sun, rolling across the earth’s surface in perpetual motion.And yet our maps sit still. They are static moments of effervescent daily life frozen in time. Google Street View offers snapshots of people living their lives; unforgiving they strive, pixels blurring their eyes. But our world is anything but static. And yet our lives depend on fixed representations of us and all that surrounds. Take electoral district maps as an example. Every ten years, when the U.S. census is taken, the federal and state governments are required to reapportion the number of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and State Legislatures to match the current population. Accordingly, they’re also required to map numerically equal districts in the spirit of neutrality in a process called redistricting. Here’s an interactive redistricting map from FiveThirtyEight.It is seemingly impossible to be impartial in the remapping of these districts. Various subgroups of the general population are advantaged while others lose out. The system tends to bias regions with economic vitality because they typically attract the most people. Those people most advantaged economically are also those who are most mobile. Those less mobile tend to be more economically disadvantaged and are usually low-income, minorities, less educated, and skilled laborers in declining industries and geographies.The rich get richer, the poorer get poorer. Those who are mobile, move; and those stuck, are out of luck. One piece of research from 2019 by two political geographers reveals that “that districts with the fastest rate of growth have a higher level of affluence.” This means the ‘winners’ will gain house seats while the ‘losers’ lose seats. Their research looks at the 89 U.S. House seats that have shifted due to redistricting since 1960. Their results shows that,“Rewarding population growth means rewarding certain interests that produced it, the converse is true for punishing population loss. This is an underappreciated point among the many who think that a population basis for apportionment is problem-free and self-evidently superior to any other scheme.”WIGGLE ROOMThere are many rules applied to generating electoral district maps by the states, but according to the Loyola Law School the most common is Contiguity. There are 45 states that stipulate districts must be contiguous. In other words, a district can’t have an island floating inside another district. Borders must be adjacent. The next most common rule is adherence to Political Boundaries “to the extent practicable”. Thirty-four of the states have this as part of their state constitution or statute. This means a district map has to attempt to align its boundaries to county, city, or town lines.Compactness is another rule or guideline. They say, “scholars have proposed more than 30 measures of compactness” and that, “32 states require their legislative districts to be reasonably compact; 17 states require congressional districts to be compact.” Idaho appears to have the most specific definition of ‘compactness’ stating officials, “should avoid drawing districts that are oddly shaped.” I honestly have yet to see an electoral district map that is not oddly shaped. It turns out ‘compactness’ is a matter of opinion. Just look at Texas!Communities of interest also commonly show up in districting rules. There are 15 states that consider keeping “communities of interest” whole when drawing state legislative districts; 11 states do the same for congressional districts.” Those with a ‘common interest’ are people who share the same interest in a given piece of legislation. Just last May Kansas reinstated their guidelines and criteria stating:“There should be recognition of similarities of interest. Social, cultural, racial, ethnic, and economic interests common to the population of the area…should be considered.”Given these popular rules, it’s not hard to see how poor people and ethnic and racial minorities are literally excluded from representation. It’s also easy to see how redistricting amplifies political partisanship. The U.S. Constitution says little about how to limit these powers. And while the Supreme Court have stated excessive partisanship is unconstitutional, they’ve also “explicitly blessed lines drawn to protect incumbents, and even those drawn for a little bit of partisan advantage” Moreover, they’ve said they will not consider claims of extreme partisanship claiming there is no legal way to determine how much is ‘too much’.But I’m not certain there is a fair way to map representation using static maps that assume constituents somehow live, work, pray, or school within an electoral district. Perhaps it’s possible in some rural areas, but I go through three congressional districts and four state legislative districts just to get to the airport. To be ‘contiguous’ and ‘compact’ the district lines go down the middle of Lake Washington. Do the people I see on the other side of the lake really have different ‘community interests’ than mine?It was Thomas Jefferson who pushed to violently displace or exterminate Indigenous people, possess their land, and then grid it up to be sold (or given for free to homesteaders), farmed, and then taxed. After all, he was a farmer with an agrarian vision of colonial settlements across the country featuring schools, churches, and a government seat within ‘political boundaries’. You can read just how easy it was for settlers to grid their own property in a piece I wrote last year called, Make Your Own Survey in Under a Day.While these people mobilized across the country, farmers and settlers were not that mobile relative to today. Early settlements were naturally ‘compact’. ‘Common interests’ were instilled through fear. Settlers banded together despite their ethnic or religious differences because they fretted over when and where the original occupants of the land they were farming may return hostile and violent demanding their stolen land be returned. And ‘contiguity’ would have been easily achieved given the rectilinear plots they platted.Territorial and electoral mapping became more complicated the more complex American societies became. Trains, streetcars, and bicycles made it easier for people to travel longer distances to live and work. The ‘common interests’ became more diffuse with each advance in transportation and wave of immigration. I can see how a politician might wish to squiggle the square on a map to wriggle toward voters to tap.Wriggle as they may, their constituents wiggled more. Now we have evidence that mobility and affluence are linked to partisan political maps that advantage the advantaged at the expense of ‘others’. We also know that lower income people are often priced out of affluent areas to suburbs, exurbs, and even rural areas. They are forced to live in areas often very different than where they work. Are their ‘common interests’ really relevant to their legislative representation?For example, if poorer people must rely on public transportation to get to and from work or school, are local, state, and congressional politicians in suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas really going to listen to their complaints about equitable transportation? Will they get fair ‘legislative representation?’And increasingly, for some, the pandemic has made it possible to live and work in wildly different places. What does ‘compactness’ or ‘communities of interest’ or ‘contiguity’ look like on a map under these dynamic conditions? Mapping for the purpose of political representation, taxation, and even urban and transportation planning assume built environments are as permanent as the physical earth in which they arrange themselves. Even a decennial census admits to a certain pace of life that is inconsistent with the increase in mobility, technology, and, unfortunately, climate change and economic inequality.MAPPING SPACE AND TIMEThere are some who have been calling for a shift from this stiff short shrift. From as early as the mid 1990s, a leading voice in this choir of change is Michael Batty. He is an urban planner, geographer, spatial data scientist, and professor at the Bartlett School of Planning at University College London. In 2002 he wrote an editorial in the Journal of Environment and Planning titled Thinking About Cities as Spatial Events.In it he writes,“It is possible to conceive of cities as being clusters of `spatial events', events that take place in time and space, where the event is characterized by its duration, intensity, volatility, and location. There may be interactions in time and space between events, leading to clusters and other aggregations, but the dominant way in which these descriptions are characterized is clearly temporal.”He defines duration as being as short as ‘trip making’ — measured in minutes or hours, to ‘living at a residential location’ — measured in months or years. Intensity could the intensity in which an event impacts people or place. It may be correlated with the ‘compactness’ of people involved in ‘common interests’ relative to those around them. Volatility is the variation in intensity and may be correlated with duration. A white collar worker with a predictable routine (or working from home) would measure as less volatile than a gig worker taking part-time jobs across a given region, country, or the world. Location, then, is the traditional measure and mapping of the terrestrial as well as population scale, size, and density.In his 2018 book, Inventing Future Cities, Batty dedicates a chapter to The Pulse of the City. Here he talks of a,“’liquid city’: a place where physical desires, face-to-face contacts, and digital deliberations provide a new nexus of innovation. Flows, networks, and connections, rather than inert structures, dominate this physicality as infrastructure comes to represent this new liquidity built on layer upon layer of flux and flow.”He isn’t the only voice challenging traditional static notions of place, Doreen Massey was another. She was a British social scientist and geographer and Professor of Geography at the Open University in the UK. She began her career in the field of economic geography where she focused on social and economic inequities that create stark divisions between regions and social classes. This led her to reconceptualize the sense of space.In a 2013 interview, she talked about how space is often the afterthought when considering ‘time and space’ in the social sciences. Time is given much attention as ‘the dimension of change and dynamism’ and space is relegated to inert earth ‘out there’ that we ‘cross-over’, ‘devoid of temporality.’ She points to a well held historical position in academia that if the field of history is about time, then geography must be relegated to space. Throughout her career, she worked to change that.Her research and writing aimed, “to bring space alive, to dynamize it and to make it relevant, to emphasize how important space is in the lives in which we live, and in the organization of the societies in which we live.” She offers this scenario as an example: When we are ‘crossing-over’ ‘inert land’ ‘out there’ in a car or train and glance out the window, we acknowledge we are moving through space and the physical geography is indeed part of it. But our eyes and brains also capture snapshots of people walking across a street, ordering food from a street vendor, or strolling in a park. These moments, like those on Google Street View – these interactions of people and place – are also part of the space.She surmises that,“Space concerns our relations with each other and in fact social space, I would say, is a product of our relations with each other, our connections with each other.”Mapping these concepts and phenomena is as complicated as explaining it, but dynamic mapping continues to make strides in mapping complex spatial processes. One of the most visceral examples is this 2014 video of 30,000 airplanes flying in Europe’s airspace over the course of a single day.And there are tools that help analyze air traffic flow data like this.Companies like INRIX have been studying traffic flow data on the ground for decades. Their software allows for traffic flow analysis and visualizations using real-time data from vehicles.When I take the bus I use an app called OneBusAway that shows in near real-time the location of a bus on route from origin to destination.There are also companies like StreetLight Data who buy anonymized and aggregated location data from mobile phone providers that probabilistically determine traffic flows generated from cars, bikes, and pedestrians.These are examples of dynamic cartography that approach articulations of Batty’s ‘liguid city.’ They are baby steps toward representing the dynamism Massey sought to better understand our relations and connections with each other. But they lack the richness census data provides and we’re a long way from trusting governments to track us 24/7 365 days a year as part of their routine census collection. Many people already view the census as a personal violation of privacy.At the same time, our methods are stuck in the past. When Jesus was believed to be rising from his tomb, the Israelites fleeing Egypt, or Muslims fasting as the Quran was handed down it was all happening in cities they believed to be as permanent as the religions they birthed. In the case of Jerusalem, it was. That certainty came under question during the dawning of the Enlightenment and the spread of colonialism. The Industrial Age accelerated the pace of change and innovation in technology and urban design. Society’s pace quickened and cities, and connections to them, acted as civic accelerators.In 1914 Scottish cartographer and geographer John Bartholomew created an Atlas of Economic Geography for King George V. It included a map that showed how long it would take to get to various places around the globe. It would have taken King George several weeks to traverse the boundaries of his British Empire. You can now do it in a day.There is a disconnect between the open-ended superexponential growth of ‘political boundaries’ that accelerate our pace of life and the process of determining who governs them. Representative governments are determined by methods of mapping from a bygone era. What does this say about our future?I’m with Michael Batty when he says,“I think there is much we need to say about cities as we come to terms with a world that is intricately connected and where information underpins our every act.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

Hello Interactors, Last Sunday I ‘rabbit-holed’ on the origins of Easter. That led me to Passover, and then Ramadan. The origin stories all involve the movement of people, or their ephemeral equivalents, through space over time. And they all share a ‘common interest’ in one of the most ancient cities on the map — Jerusalem. Is there a map for that? As <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactor" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">interactors</a>, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation. Please leave your comments below or email me directly. Now let’s go… MAPPED OUT Spring has sprung, Easter Pass(ed)over, and Ramadan lingers on. Last week Christians celebrated the rising of their messiah from a tomb, Jewish people celebrated the exodus of their people from slavery, and Muslims continued to gather, contemplate, and fast. It’s rare these three holidays occur at once. The Islamic calendar of 354 lunar days cycles with the moon through the 365 solar days of the Christian calendar allowing the these three religious holidays to coexist every three decades. The histories of these religious traditions are all rooted in the interactions of people and place. Ramadan celebrates the night the Quran was passed down from above, Easter stems from the Germanic goddess <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%92ostre" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Ēostre</a> who rises to coax the sun to return, and Passover is from the Hebrew word pasha meaning “he passed over” commemorating the angel of death passing over them. People pass over terrain every day around the world. As Ēostre rises the sun warms the earth and people begin agitating, moving, traversing, and colliding like molecules being heated by the sun’s radiation. As the earth rotates waves of interactions between people and place rise and fall with the sun, rolling across the earth’s surface in perpetual motion. And yet our maps sit still. They are static moments of effervescent daily life frozen in time. Google Street View offers snapshots of people living their lives; unforgiving they strive, pixels blurring their eyes. But our world is anything but static. And yet our lives depend on fixed representations of us and all that surrounds. Take electoral district maps as an example. Every ten years, when the U.S. census is taken, the federal and state governments are required to reapportion the number of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and State Legislatures to match the current population. Accordingly, they’re also required to map numerically equal districts in the spirit of neutrality in a process called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistricting_in_the_United_States" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">redistricting</a>. Here’s an interactive redistricting map from <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redistricting-2022-maps/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">FiveThirtyEight</a>. It is seemingly impossible to be impartial in the remapping of these districts. Various subgroups of the general population are advantaged while others lose out. The system tends to bias regions with economic vitality because they typically attract the most people. Those people most advantaged economically are also those who are most mobile. Those less mobile tend to be more economically disadvantaged and are usually low-income, minorities, less educated, and skilled laborers in declining industries and geographies. The rich get richer, the poorer get poorer. Those who are mobile, move; and those stuck, are out of luck. One piece of research from 2019 by two political geographers reveals that “that districts with the fastest rate of growth have a higher level of affluence.” This means the ‘winners’ will gain house seats while the ‘losers’ lose seats. Their research looks at the 89 U.S. House seats that have shifted due to redistricting since 1960. Their results shows that, “Rewarding population growth means rewarding certain interests that produced it, the converse is true for punishing population loss. This is an underappreciated point among the many who think that a population basis for apportionment is problem-free and self-evidently superior to any other scheme.” WIGGLE ROOM There are many rules applied to generating electoral district maps by the states, but according to the Loyola Law School the most common is Contiguity. There are 45 states that stipulate districts must be contiguous. In other words, a district can’t have an island floating inside another district. Borders must be adjacent. The next most common rule is adherence to Political Boundaries “to the extent practicable”. Thirty-four of the states have this as part of their state constitution or statute. This means a district map has to attempt to align its boundaries to county, city, or town lines. Compactness is another rule or guideline. They say, “scholars have proposed more than 30 measures of compactness” and that, “32 states require their legislative districts to be reasonably compact; 17 states require congressional districts to be compact.” Idaho appears to have the most specific definition of ‘compactness’ stating officials, “<a href="https://legislature.idaho.gov/statutesrules/idstat/Title72/T72CH15/SECT72-1506/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">should avoid drawing districts that are oddly shaped</a>.” I honestly have yet to see an electoral district map that is not oddly shaped. It turns out ‘compactness’ is a matter of opinion. Just look at <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redistricting-2022-maps/texas/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Texas</a>! Communities of interest also commonly show up in districting rules. There are 15 states that consider keeping “communities of interest” whole when drawing state legislative districts; 11 states do the same for congressional districts.” Those with a ‘common interest’ are people who share the same interest in a given piece of legislation. Just last May Kansas reinstated <a href="https://redistricting.lls.edu/wp-content/uploads/KS-Proposed-redistricting-guidelines.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">their guidelines and criteria</a> stating: “There should be recognition of similarities of interest. Social, cultural, racial, ethnic, and economic interests common to the population of the area…should be considered.” Given these popular rules, it’s not hard to see how poor people and ethnic and racial minorities are literally excluded from representation. It’s also easy to see how redistricting amplifies political partisanship. The U.S. Constitution says little about how to limit these powers. And while the Supreme Court have stated excessive partisanship is unconstitutional, they’ve also “explicitly <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=10666646694560165014" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">blessed</a> lines drawn to protect incumbents, and even those <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6090361490276671133" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">drawn for a little bit of partisan advantage</a>” Moreover, they’ve said they will not consider claims of extreme partisanship claiming there is no legal way to determine how much is ‘too much’. But I’m not certain there is a fair way to map representation using static maps that assume constituents somehow live, work, pray, or school within an electoral district. Perhaps it’s possible in some rural areas, but I go through three congressional districts and four state legislative districts just to get to the airport. To be ‘contiguous’ and ‘compact’ the district lines go down the middle of Lake Washington. Do the people I see on the other side of the lake really have different ‘community interests’ than mine? It was Thomas Jefferson who pushed to violently displace or exterminate Indigenous people, possess their land, and then grid it up to be sold (or given for free to homesteaders), farmed, and then taxed. After all, he was a farmer with an agrarian vision of colonial settlements across the country featuring schools, churches, and a government seat within ‘political boundaries’. You can read just how easy it was for settlers to grid their own property in a piece I wrote last year called, <a href="https://interplace.io/p/make-your-own-survey-in-under-a-day?s=w" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Make Your Own Survey in Under a Day</a>. While these people mobilized across the country, farmers and settlers were not that mobile relative to today. Early settlements were naturally ‘compact’. ‘Common interests’ were instilled through fear. Settlers banded together despite their ethnic or religious differences because they fretted over when and where the original occupants of the land they were farming may return hostile and violent demanding their stolen land be returned. And ‘contiguity’ would have been easily achieved given the rectilinear plots they platted. Territorial and electoral mapping became more complicated the more complex American societies became. Trains, streetcars, and bicycles made it easier for people to travel longer distances to live and work. The ‘common interests’ became more diffuse with each advance in transportation and wave of immigration. I can see how a politician might wish to squiggle the square on a map to wriggle toward voters to tap. Wriggle as they may, their constituents wiggled more. Now we have evidence that mobility and affluence are linked to partisan political maps that advantage the advantaged at the expense of ‘others’. We also know that lower income people are often priced out of affluent areas to suburbs, exurbs, and even rural areas. They are forced to live in areas often very different than where they work. Are their ‘common interests’ really relevant to their legislative representation? For example, if poorer people must rely on public transportation to get to and from work or school, are local, state, and congressional politicians in suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas really going to listen to their complaints about equitable transportation? Will they get fair ‘legislative representation?’ And increasingly, for some, the pandemic has made it possible to live and work in wildly different places. What does ‘compactness’ or ‘communities of interest’ or ‘contiguity’ look like on a map under these dynamic conditions? Mapping for the purpose of political representation, taxation, and even urban and transportation planning assume built environments are as permanent as the physical earth in which they arrange themselves. Even a decennial census admits to a certain pace of life that is inconsistent with the increase in mobility, technology, and, unfortunately, climate change and economic inequality. MAPPING SPACE AND TIME There are some who have been calling for a shift from this stiff short shrift. From as early as the mid 1990s, a leading voice in this choir of change is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Batty" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Michael Batty</a>. He is an urban planner, geographer, spatial data scientist, and professor at the <a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Bartlett School of Planning at University College London</a>. In 2002 he wrote an editorial in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environment_and_Planning" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Journal of Environment and Planning</a> titled <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23541290_Thinking_about_Cities_as_Spatial_Events?enrichId=rgreq-e4e66f4c3880950dd980d7d337a02129-XXX&amp;enrichSource=Y292ZXJQYWdlOzIzNTQxMjkwO0FTOjMxMzc1MDk5MTYzODUyOUAxNDUxODE1NDczMjM2&amp;el=1_x_3&amp;_esc=publicationCoverPdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Thinking About Cities as Spatial Events</a>. In it he writes, “It is possible to conceive of cities as being clusters of `spatial events', events that take place in time and space, where the event is characterized by its duration, intensity, volatility, and location. There may be interactions in time and space between events, leading to clusters and other aggregations, but the dominant way in which these descriptions are characterized is clearly temporal.” He defines duration as being as short as ‘trip making’ — measured in minutes or hours, to ‘living at a residential location’ — measured in months or years. Intensity could the intensity in which an event impacts people or place. It may be correlated with the ‘compactness’ of people involved in ‘common interests’ relative to those around them. Volatility is the variation in intensity and may be correlated with duration. A white collar worker with a predictable routine (or working from home) would measure as less volatile than a gig worker taking part-time jobs across a given region, country, or the world. Location, then, is the traditional measure and mapping of the terrestrial as well as population scale, size, and density. In his 2018 book, <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/inventing-future-cities" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Inventing Future Cities</a>, Batty dedicates a chapter to The Pulse of the City. Here he talks of a, “’liquid city’: a place where physical desires, face-to-face contacts, and digital deliberations provide a new nexus of innovation. Flows, networks, and connections, rather than inert structures, dominate this physicality as infrastructure comes to represent this new liquidity built on layer upon layer of flux and flow.” He isn’t the only voice challenging traditional static notions of place, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doreen_Massey_(geographer)" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Doreen Massey</a> was another. She was a British social scientist and geographer and Professor of Geography at the <a href="https://fass.open.ac.uk/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Open University</a> in the UK. She began her career in the field of economic geography where she focused on social and economic inequities that create stark divisions between regions and social classes. This led her to reconceptualize the sense of space. In a 2013 interview, she talked about how space is often the afterthought when considering ‘time and space’ in the social sciences. Time is given much attention as ‘the dimension of change and dynamism’ and space is relegated to inert earth ‘out there’ that we ‘cross-over’, ‘devoid of temporality.’ She points to a well held historical position in academia that if the field of history is about time, then geography must be relegated to space. Throughout her career, she worked to change that. Her research and writing aimed, “to bring space alive, to dynamize it and to make it relevant, to emphasize how important space is in the lives in which we live, and in the organization of the societies in which we live.” She offers this scenario as an example: When we are ‘crossing-over’ ‘inert land’ ‘out there’ in a car or train and glance out the window, we acknowledge we are moving through space and the physical geography is indeed part of it. But our eyes and brains also capture snapshots of people walking across a street, ordering food from a street vendor, or strolling in a park. These moments, like those on Google Street View – these interactions of people and place – are also part of the space. She surmises that, “Space concerns our relations with each other and in fact social space, I would say, is a product of our relations with each other, our connections with each other.” Mapping these concepts and phenomena is as complicated as explaining it, but <a href="https://tinyurl.com/y68jvz66" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">dynamic mapping</a> continues to make strides in mapping complex spatial processes. One of the most visceral examples is this 2014 video of 30,000 airplanes flying in Europe’s airspace over the course of a single day. And there are tools that help analyze air traffic flow data like this. Companies like INRIX have been studying traffic flow data on the ground for decades. Their software allows for traffic flow analysis and visualizations using real-time data from vehicles. When I take the bus I use an app called <a href="https://onebusaway.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">OneBusAway</a> that shows in near real-time the location of a bus on route from origin to destination. There are also companies like <a href="https://www.streetlightdata.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">StreetLight Data</a> who buy anonymized and aggregated location data from mobile phone providers that probabilistically determine traffic flows generated from cars, bikes, and pedestrians. These are examples of dynamic cartography that approach articulations of Batty’s ‘liguid city.’ They are baby steps toward representing the dynamism Massey sought to better understand our relations and connections with each other. But they lack the richness census data provides and we’re a long way from trusting governments to track us 24/7 365 days a year as part of their routine census collection. Many people already view the census as a personal violation of privacy. At the same time, our methods are stuck in the past. When Jesus was believed to be rising from his tomb, the Israelites fleeing Egypt, or Muslims fasting as the Quran was handed down it was all happening in cities they believed to be as permanent as the religions they birthed. In the case of Jerusalem, it was. That certainty came under question during the dawning of the Enlightenment and the spread of colonialism. The Industrial Age accelerated the pace of change and innovation in technology and urban design. Society’s pace quickened and cities, and connections to them, acted as civic accelerators. In 1914 Scottish cartographer and geographer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_George_Bartholomew" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">John Bartholomew</a> created an Atlas of Economic Geography for King George V. It included a map that showed how long it would take to get to various places around the globe. It would have taken King George several weeks to traverse the boundaries of his British Empire. You can now do it in a day. There is a disconnect between the open-ended superexponential growth of ‘political boundaries’ that accelerate our pace of life and the process of determining who governs them. Representative governments are determined by methods of mapping from a bygone era. What does this say about our future? I’m with Michael Batty when he says, “I think there is much we need to say about cities as we come to terms with a world that is intricately connected and where information underpins our every act.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://interplace.io?utm_medium=podcast&amp;utm_campaign=CTA_1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">interplace.io</a>

Dynamic Cartography

Cartography Gets Radical 

Hello Interactors,This post is part three of my three week experiment. I’ve divided my topic into three parts each taking a bit less time for you to read or listen to. They each can stand on their own, but hopefully come together to form a bigger picture. Please let me know what you think.Maps are such a big part of our daily lives that it’s easy to let them wash over us. But they’re also very powerful forms of communication that require our attention and scrutiny. If we don’t, we run the risk of being hypnotized and even deluded.As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…THE GIPPER AND CAP MAKE A MAPOn the top of the geography building at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) was a high security floor the CIA helped to fund…or so I heard. I never set foot in there, but I know both the CIA and the FBI routinely recruited geography students when I was there in the late 80s. They still do. The geography department was, and still is, buzzing with research in cartography, satellite imaging, and Geographic Information Science (GIS). I remember learning how to detect a hidden nuclear missile silo camouflaged in the Russian landscape using stereoscopic glasses pointed at two LANDSAT images produced from orbiting satellites. Special imaging software was also being developed at the university to better filter and detect these patterns, and more, in remote sensing imagery.But the kind of mapping I was most interested in was thematic mapping. I was mostly interested in computer graphics and animation, but I could also see the allure of bending cartography to serve creative means. For my senior project I converted a digital USGS topographic map of Santa Barbara into a 3D model so I could fly a camera over the terrain as a logo rose from behind the foothills. It was used as an intro animation for videos made for the newly formed National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA). This was, after all, the real focus of the geography department – and the U.S. government.The influential chief geographer for the U.S. State Department from the 1920s through the 1940s, Samuel Whittemore Boggs, had settled on this cartographic dichotomy I was experiencing as a student. He surmised maps could be either rhetorical tools of delusion and propaganda (like fancy 3D animated video bumpers) or scientific instruments of knowledge and understanding (like Geographical Information Science). These two sides of a single coin were present 40-odd years later as I was studying geography at UCSB.By the time I was studying cartography as an undergrad the Cold War was well embedded into the culture of all Americans, including institutions and universities. Some of my youngest memories as a kid were nuclear fallout drills at school. They weren’t all that different from tornado drills common to Iowa kids, but the films they showed us of the effects of nuclear blasts made me wish tornados were our only worry.I also have memories of propaganda making its way into our school work as well. I remember math problems that compared missile lengthy between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. – a nod to male anatomical one-upmanship. Our culture was infused with geopolitical agendas and competitions pitting Americans against Soviets. I recall the ‘Miracle on Ice’ when the U.S. hockey team unexpectedly beat the U.S.S.R. in the 1980 Olympics. That was when the U-S-A chant was popularized. I was 15 and remember having a basketball game that day. The gym was electric with pride.We all lived under constant fear and threat that the Soviet government could launch an intercontinental ballistic missile at any minute, so anything that felt like a victory was celebrated. The fear was all well communicated and orchestrated using cartohypnotic techniques Boggs had warned of. This fear mongering wasn’t unique to the United States. University of Richmond professor Timothy Barney writes, “An ominous arrow-filled 1970 map forecasts the logistics of a Greece and Turkey invasion, while another encircles Denmark and Northern Europe. The secret Warsaw Pact exercise ‘Seven Days Over the River Rhine’ from 1979 used cartography extensively to chart, complete with red mushroom clouds strewn about the continent, an all-too probable nuclear clash between Cold War powers.”The United States has a long history and practice of thematic political cartography dating back to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. This inspired the formation of a thematic mapping division in the State Department. After World War II, in concert with the Department of Defense, Cold War propaganda elevated to a new level — including in cartography. It was cartohypnosis through government sponsored osmosis that created widespread prognosis of Soviet-American neurosis.When Ronald Reagan became president in 1980, he had campaigned on increased military spending to ward off what he believed to be encroaching communism and military threat from the U.S.S.R. Reagan’s Secretary of Defense was his California friend, businessman, and politician Casper Weinberger, or ‘Cap’ as he was called. Weinberger shared the same fear Reagan did over evidence that cash-starved Russia was pouring much of their GDP into military spending.To convince the American public that Reagan’s so-called ‘small government’ required ‘big spending’ on defense, he pulled a page from the 1918 State Department assembling a team of researchers, artists, illustrators, and cartographers to build his own ‘Inquiry’ into Soviet military weaponry and strategies. They produced a 100-page pamphlet called ‘Soviet Military Power’ out of the U.S. Defense Department that was intended to ‘alert’ the public to the ‘threat’ of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Armed Forces.  The first publications were distributed in 1981 across the country and were sold in Post Offices for $6.50 or $20 today. These were printed every year from 1981 to 1991 as what some government officials refer to as ‘public diplomacy’. However, scholars use ‘public diplomacy’ and ‘propaganda’ interchangeably because it’s often hard to discern which is which.The fact is, these publications worked. They were a perfect compliment to Reagan’s public speeches that routinely referred to his Reagan Doctrine which was “to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth.” This included funding overt and covert anti-communist resistance groups around the world – many of which illegally used acts of terror.The Iran–Contra affair provided ample evidence of the malicious intents and actions behind Reagan’s Doctrine – funneling money from Iranian missile sales to fund militant guerilla fighters overthrowing the government in Nicaragua. Fourteen people in Reagan’s administration were indicted. Weinberger was indicted on five felony charges including accusations he lied to Congress and obstruction of investigation. Another four charges were brought against him but his cases were never tried. He was pardoned by then President George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s former Vice President.Many of these sovereign nations the United States involved themselves in were seeking independence from reliance on foreign powers like the U.S. and the Soviet Union. However, because their forms of government often leaned toward social and communal inspired governments, Reagan assumed they’d fall under the control of the communist Soviet Union. It also meant Western corporations could lose out to state sponsored corporations.The U.S. State Department had been attempting to spread Western economic and political propaganda around the world from at least the 1950s. President Truman’s Point Four Program (funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations) and the Chicago Boys (programs involving neoliberal University of Chicago economists, including Milton Friedman) were efforts to spread right-wing libertarianism around the world. That included backing a military  dictatorship in Chile.REVERSING CARTOHYPNOSISBy the 1980s these strategies helped instill fear in Americans that the Soviet Union could one day envelope the world. Decades of claims that communism spreads like a disease – Latin America today, Anglo America tomorrow – laid the groundwork in the 1980s for the ‘Soviet Military Power’ propaganda publications to have maximum impact. The fear in many is still there to this day and is heightened by Putin’s aggression via the Kremlin. Another example of an imperialist state department aggressively meddling in the business of a sovereign nation seeking their independence from an all-powerful overlord.Author Tom Gervasi spent years in the late 80s researching the government’s claims made in these publications. He read the CIA’s annual reports to Congress, Military Posture Statements of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sworn testimony from chiefs of the military services and Defense Department officials before the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees of Congress, as well as documents provided by NATO governments. He also consulted the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Federation of American Scientists, and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.In 1988 he republished the 1987 issue of Weinberger’s ‘Soviet Military Power’ with annotations in the margins debunking many claims made by the U.S. State and Defense Departments. He also highlighted salient examples and techniques of propaganda, including cartohypnotic maps.One shows the land mass connecting Europe with the former Soviet Union. The Soviet territory is covered with a blue blob overlaying its boundaries. Flowing south into Europe are massive arrows encroaching on Europe. The map gives the impression the U.S.S.R. not only has the opportunity to expand by land into all of Europe but that they also have the means to do so and a plan to do it.Gervasi comments in the margins asking us to “Imagine opening a book and seeing the arrows going the other way, thrusting deep into the Soviet Union. The average American or West European reader would feel surprised and quite possibly indignant, finding it a complete misrepresentation of our intentions. That is how the average Soviet citizen would feel opening this book to this page. But this is powerful propaganda, immediately imprinting on our memory the vision of one possibility, without imprinting the reverse possibility, and so reinforcing allegations of Soviet intent made repeatedly, without any evidence to support them.”And in echoes of Boggs’ suggestion that cartohypnosis can be reversed, Gervasi reminds us that “Indeed, images like the ones below are so deeply ingrained in the American psyche that if the propagandists can ever be silenced, it will take several decades of raising clear-sighted new generations to erase all our artificial fears and suspicions of the USSR.”Another map shows the entirety of the former U.S.S.R. in a simple outline with radiant cones stretched in every direction emanating from Moscow and other major cities. The title of the map is Ballistic Missile Early Warning, Target-Tracking, and Battle Management Radars. It suggests the U.S.S.R. had advanced radar systems ready to defend against attack.Gervasi notes, “This may give the impression that only the Soviets have such radars. A splendid map could be drawn of the U.S. radar system, stretching from Scotland to Hawaii, including the 12 large phased-array radars of our Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, the four large phased-array radars of our PAVE, PAWS system, the 75 radars of our DEW Line and North Warning System, our Perimeter Acquisition Radar Attack Characterization System, the three radars of our Navy’s Space Surveillance System, the 16 radars of our Air Force Spacetrack and other systems, and of course, our over-the-horizon backscatter radars. All of these are already fully operational, whereas the Soviet system shown here, as the text below acknowledges, will not be operational until the mid-1990s at the earliest.”Gervasi isn’t the only one to critique claims made in these publications. Even the conservative think-tank, The National Interest, debunks the ‘Pentagon’s exaggerations’ made in the these publications. In 2016 they took aim at what became Reagan and Weinberger’s pride and joy, the Strategic Defense Initiative – or as its was commonly referred to as, Star Wars. This was a space and ground-based laser program envisioned to obliterate threatening Soviet nuclear missiles. They write that Weinberger’s,“Soviet Military Power made ominous predictions about Soviet lasers, lasers powerful enough to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles, or disable satellites in orbit…[the publication stated] ‘in the late 1980s, (the Soviet Union) could have prototype space-based laser weapons for use against satellites.’ It went on to imply that there were working anti-satellite lasers at [a] Soviet research complex…”In 1989 a group of Americans, including engineers and physicists, visited this research site. They concluded the Soviets could only produce a two-kilowatt laser beam. For comparison, experts claim 250 kilowatts are needed to destroy a weapon. It took until last year, 2021, for the U.S. to demonstrate a 300 kilowatt laser weapon. But means to consistently control this device keep it from being deployed.The representative from Virginia, Jim Olin, a former electrical engineer at GE was on that tour in 1989 and said, “It seems to me it pretty clearly is not a power laser and doesn’t represent any threat as a weapon.”In 1942, the librarian at the American Geographical Society, John Kirtland Wright, who is an authority on the history of geography, wrote on the power of maps: “Like bombers and submarines, maps are indispensable instruments of war. In the light of the information they provide, momentous strategic decisions are being made today: ships and planes, men and munitions, are being moved. Maps help to form public opinion and build public morale. When the war is over, they will contribute to shaping the thought and action of those responsible for the reconstruction of a shattered world. Hence it is important in these times that the nature of the information they set forth should be well understood.”We live in a time when someone can go to their favorite search engine, type ‘map of Bering Straight’, copy and paste the image into an image editor, type in big red letters “RUSSIA” on one side of the maritime border and “USA” on the other, and voila…a map made to persuade public opinion. They can then feed it into the social media mass distribution machine and off it goes through a global network to be seen by more eyeballs than Casper Weinberger and Ronald Reagan could ever have imagined. If Boggs thought maps could be weaponized as hypnotic mind benders in the 1940s, imagine what he’d say now?We’ve reached a point where making your own map has never been more accessible. And it’s only going to get easier. I’ve dwelled on the negative aspects of maps as propaganda, but I’m inspired by Boggs’ notion of reverse cartohypnosis. The threat of physical war has never been more real than it is today as the West continues to push an unpredictable dictator into a corner. A corner defined on territorial maps drawn in 1919 by American’s that defined boundaries between Russia and Ukraine. Maps that were made to persuade. Putin is a man deluded by attachments to past maps that drew borders around a union of socialist republics. He has grown hateful of those who challenge that past, him, or his beliefs. His delusions are so grand that he may only be satisfied when he ‘wins’ or everyone else ‘looses’.Like Biden and most presidents before him, he is both a victim of and an contributor to decades of cartohypnotism and through waring propaganda between two super powers seeking imperial domination.With maps as weapons of war in an global battle for information superiority, I ask that we check our own delusions, aversions, and desires before becoming entranced by the seduction of a map. Arm our self-made mental radar and defense systems that warn us of intentions to exaggerate, placate, and sedate our vulnerability to bombs of persuasion. And should we decide to become a cartographer and make our own map one day, make sure we’re doing our best to reverse the effect of cartohypnosis. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

Hello Interactors, This post is part three of my three week experiment. I’ve divided my topic into three parts each taking a bit less time for you to read or listen to. They each can stand on their own, but hopefully come together to form a bigger picture. Please let me know what you think. Maps are such a big part of our daily lives that it’s easy to let them wash over us. But they’re also very powerful forms of communication that require our attention and scrutiny. If we don’t, we run the risk of being hypnotized and even deluded. As <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactor" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">interactors</a>, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation. Please leave your comments below or email me directly. Now let’s go… THE GIPPER AND CAP MAKE A MAP On the top of the geography building at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) was a high security floor the CIA helped to fund…or so I heard. I never set foot in there, but I know both the CIA and the FBI routinely recruited geography students when I was there in the late 80s. <a href="https://career.ucsb.edu/career-paths/law-government/fbi-and-cia/discover-options" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">They still do</a>. The geography department was, and still is, buzzing with research in cartography, satellite imaging, and Geographic Information Science (GIS). I remember learning how to detect a hidden nuclear missile silo camouflaged in the Russian landscape using <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoscopy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">stereoscopic glasses</a> pointed at two <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landsat_program" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">LANDSAT</a> images produced from orbiting satellites. Special imaging software was also being developed at the university to better filter and detect these patterns, and more, in remote sensing imagery. But the kind of mapping I was most interested in was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thematic_map" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">thematic mapping</a>. I was mostly interested in computer graphics and animation, but I could also see the allure of bending cartography to serve creative means. For my senior project I converted a digital USGS topographic map of Santa Barbara into a 3D model so I could fly a camera over the terrain as a logo rose from behind the foothills. It was used as an intro animation for videos made for the newly formed <a href="https://www.ucgis.org/history" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis</a> (NCGIA). This was, after all, the real focus of the geography department – and the U.S. government. The influential chief geographer for the U.S. State Department from the 1920s through the 1940s, Samuel Whittemore Boggs, had settled on this cartographic dichotomy I was experiencing as a student. He surmised maps could be either rhetorical tools of delusion and propaganda (like fancy 3D animated video bumpers) or scientific instruments of knowledge and understanding (like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_information_science" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Geographical Information Science</a>). These two sides of a single coin were present 40-odd years later as I was studying geography at UCSB. By the time I was studying cartography as an undergrad the Cold War was well embedded into the culture of all Americans, including institutions and universities. Some of my youngest memories as a kid were nuclear fallout drills at school. They weren’t all that different from tornado drills common to Iowa kids, but the films they showed us of the effects of nuclear blasts made me wish tornados were our only worry. I also have memories of propaganda making its way into our school work as well. I remember math problems that compared missile lengthy between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. – a nod to male anatomical one-upmanship. Our culture was infused with geopolitical agendas and competitions pitting Americans against Soviets. I recall the ‘<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_on_Ice" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Miracle on Ice</a>’ when the U.S. hockey team unexpectedly beat the U.S.S.R. in the 1980 Olympics. That was when the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-S-A!" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">U-S-A chant</a> was popularized. I was 15 and remember having a basketball game that day. The gym was electric with pride. We all lived under constant fear and threat that the Soviet government could launch an intercontinental ballistic missile at any minute, so anything that felt like a victory was celebrated. The fear was all well communicated and orchestrated using cartohypnotic techniques Boggs had warned of. This fear mongering wasn’t unique to the United States. University of Richmond professor <a href="https://rhetoric.richmond.edu/faculty/tbarney/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Timothy Barney</a> writes, “An ominous arrow-filled 1970 map forecasts the logistics of a Greece and Turkey invasion, while another encircles Denmark and Northern Europe. The secret Warsaw Pact exercise ‘<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_to_the_River_Rhine" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Seven Days Over the River Rhine</a>’ from 1979 used cartography extensively to chart, complete with red mushroom clouds strewn about the continent, an all-too probable nuclear clash between Cold War powers.” The United States has a long history and practice of thematic political cartography dating back to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. This inspired the formation of a thematic mapping division in the State Department. After World War II, in concert with the Department of Defense, Cold War propaganda elevated to a new level — including in cartography. It was cartohypnosis through government sponsored osmosis that created widespread prognosis of Soviet-American neurosis. When Ronald Reagan became president in 1980, he had campaigned on increased military spending to ward off what he believed to be encroaching communism and military threat from the U.S.S.R. Reagan’s Secretary of Defense was his California friend, businessman, and politician <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspar_Weinberger" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Casper Weinberger</a>, or ‘Cap’ as he was called. Weinberger shared the same fear Reagan did over evidence that cash-starved Russia was pouring much of their GDP into military spending. To convince the American public that Reagan’s so-called ‘small government’ required ‘big spending’ on defense, he pulled a page from the 1918 State Department assembling a team of researchers, artists, illustrators, and cartographers to build his own ‘Inquiry’ into Soviet military weaponry and strategies. They produced a 100-page pamphlet called ‘<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Military_Power" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Soviet Military Power</a>’ out of the U.S. Defense Department that was intended to ‘alert’ the public to the ‘threat’ of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Armed Forces.   The first publications were distributed in 1981 across the country and were sold in Post Offices for $6.50 or $20 today. These were printed every year from 1981 to 1991 as what some government officials refer to as ‘<a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/public-diplomacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">public diplomacy</a>’. However, scholars use ‘public diplomacy’ and ‘propaganda’ interchangeably because it’s often hard to discern which is which. The fact is, these publications worked. They were a perfect compliment to Reagan’s public speeches that routinely referred to his Reagan Doctrine which was “to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth.” This included funding overt and covert anti-communist resistance groups around the world – many of which illegally used acts of terror. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Iran–Contra affair</a> provided ample evidence of the malicious intents and actions behind Reagan’s Doctrine – funneling money from Iranian missile sales to fund militant guerilla fighters overthrowing the government in Nicaragua. Fourteen people in Reagan’s administration were indicted. Weinberger was indicted on five felony charges including accusations he lied to Congress and obstruction of investigation. Another four charges were brought against him but his cases were never tried. He was pardoned by then President George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s former Vice President. Many of these sovereign nations the United States involved themselves in were seeking independence from reliance on foreign powers like the U.S. and the Soviet Union. However, because their forms of government often leaned toward social and communal inspired governments, Reagan assumed they’d fall under the control of the communist Soviet Union. It also meant Western corporations could lose out to state sponsored corporations. The U.S. State Department had been attempting to spread Western economic and political propaganda around the world from at least the 1950s. President Truman’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Four_program" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Point Four Program</a> (funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations) and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Boys" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Chicago Boys</a> (programs involving neoliberal University of Chicago economists, including Milton Friedman) were efforts to spread <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-libertarianism" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">right-wing libertarianism</a> around the world. That included backing a military dictatorship in Chile. REVERSING CARTOHYPNOSIS By the 1980s these strategies helped instill fear in Americans that the Soviet Union could one day envelope the world. Decades of claims that communism spreads like a disease – Latin America today, Anglo America tomorrow – laid the groundwork in the 1980s for the ‘Soviet Military Power’ propaganda publications to have maximum impact. The fear in many is still there to this day and is heightened by Putin’s aggression via the Kremlin. Another example of an imperialist state department aggressively meddling in the business of a sovereign nation seeking their independence from an all-powerful overlord. Author Tom Gervasi spent years in the late 80s researching the government’s claims made in these publications. He read the CIA’s annual reports to Congress, Military Posture Statements of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sworn testimony from chiefs of the military services and Defense Department officials before the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees of Congress, as well as documents provided by NATO governments. He also consulted the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Federation of American Scientists, and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In 1988 he <a href="https://archive.org/details/sovietmilitarypo0000gerv/mode/2up?view=theater" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">republished the 1987 issue of Weinberger’s ‘Soviet Military Power’</a> with annotations in the margins debunking many claims made by the U.S. State and Defense Departments. He also highlighted salient examples and techniques of propaganda, including cartohypnotic maps. One shows the land mass connecting Europe with the former Soviet Union. The Soviet territory is covered with a blue blob overlaying its boundaries. Flowing south into Europe are massive arrows encroaching on Europe. The map gives the impression the U.S.S.R. not only has the opportunity to expand by land into all of Europe but that they also have the means to do so and a plan to do it. Gervasi comments in the margins asking us to “Imagine opening a book and seeing the arrows going the other way, thrusting deep into the Soviet Union. The average American or West European reader would feel surprised and quite possibly indignant, finding it a complete misrepresentation of our intentions. That is how the average Soviet citizen would feel opening this book to this page. But this is powerful propaganda, immediately imprinting on our memory the vision of one possibility, without imprinting the reverse possibility, and so reinforcing allegations of Soviet intent made repeatedly, without any evidence to support them.” And in echoes of Boggs’ suggestion that cartohypnosis can be reversed, Gervasi reminds us that “Indeed, images like the ones below are so deeply ingrained in the American psyche that if the propagandists can ever be silenced, it will take several decades of raising clear-sighted new generations to erase all our artificial fears and suspicions of the USSR.” Another map shows the entirety of the former U.S.S.R. in a simple outline with radiant cones stretched in every direction emanating from Moscow and other major cities. The title of the map is Ballistic Missile Early Warning, Target-Tracking, and Battle Management Radars. It suggests the U.S.S.R. had advanced radar systems ready to defend against attack. Gervasi notes, “This may give the impression that only the Soviets have such radars. A splendid map could be drawn of the U.S. radar system, stretching from Scotland to Hawaii, including the 12 large phased-array radars of our Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, the four large phased-array radars of our PAVE, PAWS system, the 75 radars of our DEW Line and North Warning System, our Perimeter Acquisition Radar Attack Characterization System, the three radars of our Navy’s Space Surveillance System, the 16 radars of our Air Force Spacetrack and other systems, and of course, our over-the-horizon backscatter radars. All of these are already fully operational, whereas the Soviet system shown here, as the text below acknowledges, will not be operational until the mid-1990s at the earliest.” Gervasi isn’t the only one to critique claims made in these publications. Even the conservative think-tank, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_National_Interest" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The National Interest</a>, <a href="https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/how-the-pentagon-exaggerated-russias-cold-war-super-weapons-16468" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">debunks the ‘Pentagon’s exaggerations</a>’ made in the these publications. In 2016 they took aim at what became Reagan and Weinberger’s pride and joy, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Strategic Defense Initiative</a> – or as its was commonly referred to as, Star Wars. This was a space and ground-based laser program envisioned to obliterate threatening Soviet nuclear missiles. They write that Weinberger’s, “Soviet Military Power made ominous predictions about Soviet lasers, lasers powerful enough to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles, or disable satellites in orbit…[the publication stated] ‘in the late 1980s, (the Soviet Union) could have prototype space-based laser weapons for use against satellites.’ It went on to imply that there were working anti-satellite lasers at [a] Soviet research complex…” In 1989 a group of Americans, including engineers and physicists, visited this research site. They concluded the Soviets could only produce a two-kilowatt laser beam. For comparison, experts claim 250 kilowatts are needed to destroy a weapon. It took until last year, 2021, for the U.S. to demonstrate a 300 kilowatt laser weapon. But means to consistently control this device keep it from being deployed. The representative from Virginia, Jim Olin, a former electrical engineer at GE was on that tour in 1989 and said, “It seems to me it pretty clearly is not a power laser and doesn’t represent any threat as a weapon.” In 1942, the librarian at the American Geographical Society, John Kirtland Wright, who is an authority on the history of geography, wrote on the power of maps: “Like bombers and submarines, maps are indispensable instruments of war. In the light of the information they provide, momentous strategic decisions are being made today: ships and planes, men and munitions, are being moved. Maps help to form public opinion and build public morale. When the war is over, they will contribute to shaping the thought and action of those responsible for the reconstruction of a shattered world. Hence it is important in these times that the nature of the information they set forth should be well understood.” We live in a time when someone can go to their favorite search engine, type ‘map of Bering Straight’, copy and paste the image into an image editor, type in big red letters “RUSSIA” on one side of the maritime border and “USA” on the other, and voila…a map made to persuade public opinion. They can then feed it into the social media mass distribution machine and off it goes through a global network to be seen by more eyeballs than Casper Weinberger and Ronald Reagan could ever have imagined. If Boggs thought maps could be weaponized as hypnotic mind benders in the 1940s, imagine what he’d say now? We’ve reached a point where making your own map has never been more accessible. And it’s only going to get easier. I’ve dwelled on the negative aspects of maps as propaganda, but I’m inspired by Boggs’ notion of reverse cartohypnosis. The threat of physical war has never been more real than it is today as the West continues to push an unpredictable dictator into a corner. A corner defined on territorial maps drawn in 1919 by American’s that defined boundaries between Russia and Ukraine. Maps that were made to persuade. Putin is a man deluded by attachments to past maps that drew borders around a union of socialist republics. He has grown hateful of those who challenge that past, him, or his beliefs. His delusions are so grand that he may only be satisfied when he ‘wins’ or everyone else ‘looses’. Like Biden and most presidents before him, he is both a victim of and an contributor to decades of cartohypnotism and through waring propaganda between two super powers seeking imperial domination. With maps as weapons of war in an global battle for information superiority, I ask that we check our own delusions, aversions, and desires before becoming entranced by the seduction of a map. Arm our self-made mental radar and defense systems that warn us of intentions to exaggerate, placate, and sedate our vulnerability to bombs of persuasion. And should we decide to become a cartographer and make our own map one day, make sure we’re doing our best to reverse the effect of cartohypnosis. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://interplace.io?utm_medium=podcast&amp;utm_campaign=CTA_1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">interplace.io</a>

Maps Made to Persuade: Part 3

Hello Interactors,This post is part two of a three week experiment. I’ve divided my topic into three parts each taking a bit less time for you to read or listen to. They each can stand on their own, but hopefully come together to form a bigger picture. Please let me know what you think.Maps are such a big part of our daily lives that it’s easy to let them wash over us. But they’re also very powerful forms of communication that require our attention and scrutiny. If we don’t, we run the risk of being hypnotized and even deluded.As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…Both World Wars exemplified the hauntingly prescient title of that 1904 paper by England’s eminent geographer and burgeoning politician, Sir Malford MacKinder – The Geographical Pivot of History. And his most famous simplified world map depicting the Natural Seats of Power inspired derivatives all around the world. That was especially true at the conclusion of World War I and the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.Peace preparations by the United States began the same month they declared War on Germany in April of 1917. By November a team of researchers, writers, lawyers, and cartographers moved from the New York City Public Library to the third floor of the American Geographical Society. Surrounded by a collection of maps and books the team set work on what was called the Inquiry.One of the primary geographers assigned to this effort was Mark Sylvester William Jefferson. He was a professor at the Michigan State Normal School at Ypsilanti and specialized in the thematic mapping of population distribution. He even invented a term for it – anthropography. The distinguished professor emeritus of geography at Southern Connecticut State University, Geoffrey L. Martin says, “His maps were accurate, attractive, and invariably ingenious in design.”These maps for the Paris conference were to convey reams of physiographic and demographic information regarding Europe and surrounding regions. Martin notes, “Jefferson had the remarkable ability to simplify complexity, to inspire ingenuity of cartographic expression, and to display such manual dexterity with economy of line that his leadership, long hours, and indefatigable fascination with the enterprise insured success for the mapping effort.”Jefferson, and his team of cartographers, joined a select group, including President Woodrow Wilson, on board the USS George Washington headed to France in December of 2018. By the middle of December the Inquiry team assembled in a hotel in Paris, including Jefferson and his twenty-five draftsmen. The team grew in size requiring them to knock down a wall at the Hôtel de Crillon, one of Paris’ finest hotels on the Champs-Élysées.Martin, pulling from Jefferson’s diary writes, “By February of 1919 Jefferson’s team of cartographers spanned five rooms, an engraving apparatus was provided, and armed guards were posted at the door.”During the proceedings, Jefferson sat on the geographers’ commission. Other geographers and attendees were impressed and overwhelmed by the cartographic prowess of the American delegation. Chatter in the halls, parks, and hotels centered on the role maps played during the convention. They were not only the common denominator amongst a diverse delegation, but also the premiere communicator and persuader.Martin concludes, “The value of maps had been recognized prior to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, yet at Paris the map suddenly became everything.”The momentum from this event followed those involved in the Inquiry back the United States. The State Department experienced firsthand the influential power of cartography and established their own geographic division and the Office of Geographer. The division’s maps and collections started with those made during the Paris Peace Conference. They were organized by Colonel Lawrence Martin who served under Woodrow Wilson and became the first head of the department in 1921.Martin retired in 1924 and selected Samuel Whittemore Boggs to replace him. Boggs came to New York in 1914 and worked compiling and editing maps. In 1921 he began a Master’s program at Columbia studying under two professors who were also cartographers at the Paris Peace Conference. These men, like many of those involved in preparing for the conference, left idealistic that maps could lead to a fair and just conclusion of international territorial disputes.Boggs embodied that spirit coming out of college and combined it with imaginative approaches and highly academic, technical cartography skills. It made him well positioned for the role political geography and cartography was about to play as territorial pieces continued to shift around the earth’s spherical chess board.That proverbial board was also shrinking as the airplane became an increasingly important element of war and travel. The Library of Congress map librarian and geographer, Walter Ristow, called this ‘air age geography.’ The war, and the proliferation of maps, inspired interest from the public in world geography.In 1942, three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took to the radio in a Fireside Chat he called “On the Progress of War”. Pearl Harbor was a vivid reminder to the American public that air-age globalism had clearly arrived. He said,“This war is a new kind of war. It is different from all other wars of the past, not only in its methods and weapons but also in its geography. It is warfare in terms of every continent, every island, every sea, every air-lane in the world.”But then he did something I suspect no other president had done prior or since and asked the American public to pull out their own world map and following along with him. It’s an indication of just how pervasive and commercialized mapmaking had become.  He continued,“That is the reason why I have asked you to take out and spread before you (the) a map of the whole earth, and to follow with me in the references which I shall make to the world-encircling battle lines of this war."Maps as a tool of communicating geopolitics had hit the mainstream. By the 1940’s Boggs had recognized that maps he and others were producing could do one of two things: either ‘delude the public’ or ‘inform them.’ Being the idealist he was, he worried most about the risks of delusion.He wrote an article in 1947 in The Scientific Monthly titled, Cartohypnosis. Referring to maps he used in territorial disputes in the deserts of Afghanistan he says,“Map-conscious people, however, usually accept subconsciously and uncritically the ideas that are suggested to them by maps. In part because maps appear to represent facts pertaining to mother earth herself, veracity and authority are frequently attributed to them beyond their deserts.”He continued,“In what might be called ‘cartohypnosis’ or ‘hypnotism by cartography,’ the map user or the audience exhibits a high degree of suggestibility in respect to stimuli aroused by the map and its explanatory text.”In what could be seen as now as a critical indictment of the U.S. government by an employee of the U.S. State Department he says, “And frequently a sort of mass hypnotism is practiced by men who attempt to delude the public.”All the while, he seemed to remain idealistic reminding us that, “Sometimes self-hypnotism and illusion occur quite innocently…[and] may also be used effectively to dehypnotize people…we should therefore consider what maps may be made, and how they may be used to awaken people to an intelligent understanding of the world and the problems of our times.”Thank you for reading Interplace. This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

Hello Interactors, This post is part two of a three week experiment. I’ve divided my topic into three parts each taking a bit less time for you to read or listen to. They each can stand on their own, but hopefully come together to form a bigger picture. Please let me know what you think. Maps are such a big part of our daily lives that it’s easy to let them wash over us. But they’re also very powerful forms of communication that require our attention and scrutiny. If we don’t, we run the risk of being hypnotized and even deluded. As <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactor" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">interactors</a>, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation. Please leave your comments below or email me directly. Now let’s go… Both World Wars exemplified the hauntingly prescient title of that 1904 paper by England’s eminent geographer and burgeoning politician, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halford_Mackinder" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sir Malford MacKinder</a> – The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geographical_Pivot_of_History" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Geographical Pivot of History</a>. And his most famous simplified world map depicting the Natural Seats of Power inspired derivatives all around the world. That was especially true at the conclusion of World War I and the 1919 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Peace_Conference_(1919%E2%80%931920)" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Paris Peace Conference</a>. Peace preparations by the United States began the same month they declared War on Germany in April of 1917. By November a team of researchers, writers, lawyers, and cartographers moved from the New York City Public Library to the third floor of the American Geographical Society. Surrounded by a collection of maps and books the team set work on what was called the Inquiry. One of the primary geographers assigned to this effort was Mark Sylvester William Jefferson. He was a professor at the Michigan State Normal School at Ypsilanti and specialized in the thematic mapping of population distribution. He even invented a term for it – anthropography. The distinguished professor emeritus of geography at Southern Connecticut State University, Geoffrey L. Martin says, “His maps were accurate, attractive, and invariably ingenious in design.” These maps for the Paris conference were to convey reams of physiographic and demographic information regarding Europe and surrounding regions. Martin notes, “Jefferson had the remarkable ability to simplify complexity, to inspire ingenuity of cartographic expression, and to display such manual dexterity with economy of line that his leadership, long hours, and indefatigable fascination with the enterprise insured success for the mapping effort.” Jefferson, and his team of cartographers, joined a select group, including President Woodrow Wilson, on board the USS George Washington headed to France in December of 2018. By the middle of December the Inquiry team assembled in a hotel in Paris, including Jefferson and his twenty-five draftsmen. The team grew in size requiring them to knock down a wall at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%B4tel_de_Crillon" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Hôtel de Crillon</a>, one of Paris’ finest hotels on the Champs-Élysées. Martin, pulling from Jefferson’s diary writes, “By February of 1919 Jefferson’s team of cartographers spanned five rooms, an engraving apparatus was provided, and armed guards were posted at the door.” During the proceedings, Jefferson sat on the geographers’ commission. Other geographers and attendees were impressed and overwhelmed by the cartographic prowess of the American delegation. Chatter in the halls, parks, and hotels centered on the role maps played during the convention. They were not only the common denominator amongst a diverse delegation, but also the premiere communicator and persuader. Martin concludes, “The value of maps had been recognized prior to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, yet at Paris the map suddenly became everything.” The momentum from this event followed those involved in the Inquiry back the United States. The State Department experienced firsthand the influential power of cartography and established their own geographic division and the Office of Geographer. The division’s maps and collections started with those made during the Paris Peace Conference. They were organized by Colonel Lawrence Martin who served under Woodrow Wilson and became the first head of the department in 1921. Martin retired in 1924 and selected <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2561354" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Samuel Whittemore Boggs</a> to replace him. Boggs came to New York in 1914 and worked compiling and editing maps. In 1921 he began a Master’s program at Columbia studying under two professors who were also cartographers at the Paris Peace Conference. These men, like many of those involved in preparing for the conference, left idealistic that maps could lead to a fair and just conclusion of international territorial disputes. Boggs embodied that spirit coming out of college and combined it with imaginative approaches and highly academic, technical cartography skills. It made him well positioned for the role political geography and cartography was about to play as territorial pieces continued to shift around the earth’s spherical chess board. That proverbial board was also shrinking as the airplane became an increasingly important element of war and travel. The Library of Congress map librarian and geographer, Walter Ristow, called this ‘air age geography.’ The war, and the proliferation of maps, inspired interest from the public in world geography. In 1942, three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took to the radio in a Fireside Chat he called “<a href="https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/february-23-1942-fireside-chat-20-progress-war" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">On the Progress of War</a>”. Pearl Harbor was a vivid reminder to the American public that air-age globalism had clearly arrived. He said, “This war is a new kind of war. It is different from all other wars of the past, not only in its methods and weapons but also in its geography. It is warfare in terms of every continent, every island, every sea, every air-lane in the world.” But then he did something I suspect no other president had done prior or since and asked the American public to pull out their own world map and following along with him. It’s an indication of just how pervasive and commercialized mapmaking had become.  He continued, “That is the reason why I have asked you to take out and spread before you (the) a map of the whole earth, and to follow with me in the references which I shall make to the world-encircling battle lines of this war." Maps as a tool of communicating geopolitics had hit the mainstream. By the 1940’s Boggs had recognized that maps he and others were producing could do one of two things: either ‘delude the public’ or ‘inform them.’ Being the idealist he was, he worried most about the risks of delusion. He wrote an article in 1947 in The Scientific Monthly titled, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/19200" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Cartohypnosis</a>. Referring to maps he used in territorial disputes in the deserts of Afghanistan he says, “Map-conscious people, however, usually accept subconsciously and uncritically the ideas that are suggested to them by maps. In part because maps appear to represent facts pertaining to mother earth herself, veracity and authority are frequently attributed to them beyond their deserts.” He continued, “In what might be called ‘cartohypnosis’ or ‘hypnotism by cartography,’ the map user or the audience exhibits a high degree of suggestibility in respect to stimuli aroused by the map and its explanatory text.” In what could be seen as now as a critical indictment of the U.S. government by an employee of the U.S. State Department he says, “And frequently a sort of mass hypnotism is practiced by men who attempt to delude the public.” All the while, he seemed to remain idealistic reminding us that, “Sometimes self-hypnotism and illusion occur quite innocently…[and] may also be used effectively to dehypnotize people…we should therefore consider what maps may be made, and how they may be used to awaken people to an intelligent understanding of the world and the problems of our times.” Thank you for reading Interplace. This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://interplace.io?utm_medium=podcast&amp;utm_campaign=CTA_1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">interplace.io</a>

Maps Made to Persuade: Part 2

Hello Interactors,This post is part of a three week experiment. I’ve divided my topic into three parts each taking a bit less time for you to read or listen. They each can stand on their own (maybe), but hopefully come together to form a bigger picture. Please let me know what you think.Maps are such a big part of our daily lives that it’s easy to let them wash over us. But they’re also very powerful forms of communication that require our attention and scrutiny. If we don’t, we run the risk of being hypnotized and even deluded.As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…Someone posted a map on Facebook recently showing just how close Russia is to Alaska. The post read, “This should make you 😳 America. My kids were not taught as much geography and history as I was growing up. This probably needs to be shared to remind us all. For those who think Russia is all the way on the other side of the world [it is] only 53 miles at the Bering Strait’s narrowest point. Like us driving from Cedar Rapids to Waterloo.”The comments to the post echoed this worry with words like, “Too many don’t realize this.”; “There are small islands 25 miles apart.”; “OOOOOOOOO scary.”; and “I’ll admit that I didn’t realize this.”   They probably didn’t realize this either: the United States and Russia not only share the largest maritime border in the world – a line stretching 1600 nautical miles dividing the Chukchi Sea to the north and the Bering Sea to the south – but it cuts straight through two islands called the Diomedes. On one side is Russia’s Big Diomede – actually part of Chukotka Autonomous Okrug a federal subject of Russia – and just two miles west is Little Diomede which is part of Alaska. Both have small fishing villages, one settled by Russians and the other Americans.If folks are scared by the geographic proximity of 53 miles, two miles must really freak them out? And they’d best be sitting down for this little tidbit…there is no ratified treaty in place between the United States and Russia that enforces this boundary.The last attempts made to negotiate a deal with Russia was in 1991. The person who chaired the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations was none other than Senator Joe Biden from Delaware.Biden addressed the committee with these words,“…today the subcommittee meets to consider a measure that constitutes one small step down that path of cooperation. This measure, the U.S.-Soviet Maritime Boundary Treaty, represents the attempt of the two sides to resolve an important dispute through negotiation, compromise, and mutual pledge to abide by the solemn obligations of a bilateral treaty and international law.”The dispute this treaty would lay to rest concerns the sovereign rights and jurisdiction of the United States and the Soviet Union in the seas between Alaska and Siberia. The treaty would govern each country’s right to manage fisheries and to conduct oil and gas exploration and development in a vast maritime area.”In 1990, then Soviet Union leader, Mikhail Gorbachev sought to resolve the ordeal. But the Russian parliament believed he was acting in haste. The Soviet Union was beginning to crumble and they believed Gorbachev was giving away too much fishing, sea passage, and oil and mineral rights to the United States in exchange for other provisions. The USSR collapsed in December of 1991. This left Biden’s sixth month old efforts under the George H. W. Bush administration unanswered. No administration since has attempted to ratify the treaty and I doubt Putin is in the mood for Biden to resume talks.The area maps referred to as Russian America, a piece of land nearly the size of Texas, is what we now call Alaska. It had already been colonized by Siberian fur trappers in the 1700s and the Russian Orthodox Church was already busy trying to convert Indigenous people to Christianity. By 1800 the Russian-American Company was established – organized by Emperor Paul I of Russia. By 1850, 300,000 sea otters were hunted to extinction. Seventeen years later, in 1867, amidst a fur market slump from over hunting, the end of the U.S. Civil War, a Russia battered by the Crimea war ceded Russian America to the United States as part of the Alaska Purchase. It didn’t become a U.S. state until 1959.Russia sold Alaska to the United States for $7.2 million or $134 million in 2022 dollars. Russia feared they couldn’t defend the territory from the British who were busy trying to colonize Canada and had just defeated the Russians in the Crimea war with the help of the French. So, they expressed interest in selling it to the then U.S. Secretary of State William Seward who had already offered to buy it just a few years prior and was happy to negotiate the purchase.Biden gave reference to the purchase in his Foreign Relations subcommittee pre-amble by joking, “the 1867 Convention, by which Russia ceded Alaska to the United States, made it possible for Mr. Murkowski to become a U.S. Senator.” The Maritime Boundary Agreement this committee aimed resolve, but never did, “these conflicts by: One, declaring that the 1867 Convention line is the maritime boundary between the United States and the Soviet Union; two, establishing a precise geographic description of the line; and three, providing for the transfer of jurisdiction and Russia rights in four special areas.”The first American to map the new state of Alaska may take issue with Biden’s use of the words ‘precise geographic description.’ Land wasn’t the only thing the U.S. got for their $7.2 million, they were also handed maps and charts of the region drafted by Russian mapmakers. These were promptly handed over to the man who was soon to become the head of the Pacific branch of the Office of United States Coast Survey, and premiere geographer of the time, George Davidson.He excelled at geodesy and astronomy coming out of Girard College in 1845. By 1850 he was on the California coast determining accurate latitude and longitude of coastal features. He worked his way up the Pacific coast to Oregon and Washington mapping much of the Puget Sound and naming many of the Olympic Mountains on the Olympic Peninsula. Mt. Ellinor is named after his soon-to-be wife, Ellinor Fauntleroy. The Fauntleroy ferry in Seattle takes you from the Fauntleroy Cove to Vashon Island. Mt. Constance is named after her sister, and the two side-by-side mountains, The Brothers, are named after her two brothers.His triangulation and astronomical observations were regarded as the highest precision geodesy recorded to that date. The baselines required to accurately triangulate and map the Pacific coast states are named after him – the Davidson Quadrilaterals. And before those Russian maps had been handed over to him, he had already been asked to make maps of the physiography and natural resources of Alaska by the U.S. Congress. Most maps were copied from Russian maps and others drawn by an Indigenous Chief who knew more about the land than the Russians. A 1937 biography claims “Davidson always got on with Indians—he treated them as men.” These maps were included in a report to a congressional committee that resulted in a unanimous vote for America to purchase Russian America from the Russians.Davidson was mapping Alaska at 51° to 71° latitude north amidst the mosquitos in August of 1867, but less than a year earlier the Office of Coast Survey had sent Davidson down to 5° to 7° latitude north, in January of 1867, to map a potential site for the Panama Canal.The Office of the Coast Survey was started by Thomas Jefferson in 1807 and still publishes the nautical maps of the U.S. – including the annually published 10 volume publication, United States Coast Pilot. Historically, these guides relied on local mariner knowledge and newspaper articles. They were a practical necessity for private, commercial, and governmental mariners. But in 1858 George Davidson was the first to provide his own accounts making this issue the first official United States Coast Pilot by the Office of the Coast Survey.Davidson went on to become the president of the California Academy of Sciences, a University of California Regent, and the University of California, Berkley’s first geography professor. He was the department chair from 1898 until 1905.Davidson defined the essence of what map making was at the time. It served the desire and need Jefferson had for precision, utilizing the best surveying and geodesic instruments and techniques of the time. Naturally these were used for exacting territories for colonizing, capitalizing, and exploiting. The United States had become an exuberantly expansionist, empire-building country. But by the middle of the 19th century through the start of the 20th another kind of map was entering its golden age – thematic mapping.Thematic maps use information not readily observed but are nonetheless part of the geography. For example, maps depicting the weather or statistical information like demographics. They can also include strategic and political information.The beginning of the 20th century saw the emergence of the United States as a global superpower and the start of the decline of England’s dominance. New territories, like Alaska, were not only getting mapped but were also helping to shift geopolitical dynamics. The world was sufficiently mapped such that world leaders need not send ships afar to determine political strategies.One of the first and most influential of these geopolitical thematic maps came from England’s equivalent of George Davidson, Sir Halford John Mackinder. In 1904 he wrote a paper that included a map in The Geographic Journal called “The Geographical Pivot of History.” In the introduction here he writes,“In 400 years the outline of the map of the world has been completed with approximate accuracy…But the opening of the twentieth century is appropriate as the end of a great historic epoch…The missionary, the conqueror, the farmer, the miner, and, of late, the engineer, have followed so closely in the traveller’s footsteps that the world, in its remote borders, has hardly been revealed before we must chronicle its virtually complete political appropriation.”His map is an oval shaped Mercator projection that puts continental Europe, Africa, and Asia in the middle. Its shape gives it a spherical illusion. The map’s title is The Natural Seats of Power and features three crescent shaped concentric zones. At the center is what he called Pivot Area – which is most of continental Europe, some of Asia and what became the Soviet Union, the next ring is labeled Inner and Marginal Crescent – which is more of Europe, the British Isles and Japan, and furthest from the center are the Lands of Outer or Insular Crescent – which include continental America, most of Africa, and Australia.Part of Mackinder’s goal was to not only illustrate to an island country — that came to power by sea — just how connected the world is by land. He also simplified the complexities of detailed coastal charts and topographic maps into easy to understand centers of power. Timothy Barney, an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communications at the University of Richmond (and self-proclaimed map-nerd) wrote in the Routledge Handbook of Mapping and Cartography that, “Mackinder was prefiguring a social, economic, and political shift in the twentieth century towards a globalized world, all on the flat page of the map.”Mackinder would not have known it then, but his ‘Pivot Center’ indeed became the focal point of not one, but two world wars that drew powers from all three of the Natural Seats of Power on his map. But he also put thematic geopolitical mapping at the center. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

Hello Interactors, This post is part of a three week experiment. I’ve divided my topic into three parts each taking a bit less time for you to read or listen. They each can stand on their own (maybe), but hopefully come together to form a bigger picture. Please let me know what you think. Maps are such a big part of our daily lives that it’s easy to let them wash over us. But they’re also very powerful forms of communication that require our attention and scrutiny. If we don’t, we run the risk of being hypnotized and even deluded. As <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactor" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">interactors</a>, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation. Please leave your comments below or email me directly. Now let’s go… Someone posted a map on Facebook recently showing just how close Russia is to Alaska. The post read, “This should make you 😳 America. My kids were not taught as much geography and history as I was growing up. This probably needs to be shared to remind us all. For those who think Russia is all the way on the other side of the world [it is] only 53 miles at the Bering Strait’s narrowest point. Like us driving from Cedar Rapids to Waterloo.” The comments to the post echoed this worry with words like, “Too many don’t realize this.”; “There are small islands 25 miles apart.”; “OOOOOOOOO scary.”; and “I’ll admit that I didn’t realize this.”    They probably didn’t realize this either: the United States and Russia not only share the largest maritime border in the world – a line stretching 1600 nautical miles dividing the Chukchi Sea to the north and the Bering Sea to the south – but it cuts straight through two islands called the Diomedes. On one side is Russia’s Big Diomede – actually part of Chukotka Autonomous Okrug a federal subject of Russia – and just two miles west is Little Diomede which is part of Alaska. Both have small fishing villages, one settled by Russians and the other Americans. If folks are scared by the geographic proximity of 53 miles, two miles must really freak them out? And they’d best be sitting down for this little tidbit…there is no ratified treaty in place between the United States and Russia that enforces this boundary. The last attempts made to negotiate a deal with Russia was in 1991. The person who chaired the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations was none other than Senator Joe Biden from Delaware. Biden addressed the committee with these words, “…today the subcommittee meets to consider a measure that constitutes one small step down that path of cooperation. This measure, the U.S.-Soviet Maritime Boundary Treaty, represents the attempt of the two sides to resolve an important dispute through negotiation, compromise, and mutual pledge to abide by the solemn obligations of a bilateral treaty and international law.” The dispute this treaty would lay to rest concerns the sovereign rights and jurisdiction of the United States and the Soviet Union in the seas between Alaska and Siberia. The treaty would govern each country’s right to manage fisheries and to conduct oil and gas exploration and development in a vast maritime area.” In 1990, then Soviet Union leader, Mikhail Gorbachev sought to resolve the ordeal. But the Russian parliament believed he was acting in haste. The Soviet Union was beginning to crumble and they believed Gorbachev was giving away too much fishing, sea passage, and oil and mineral rights to the United States in exchange for other provisions. The USSR collapsed in December of 1991. This left Biden’s sixth month old efforts under the George H. W. Bush administration unanswered. No administration since has attempted to ratify the treaty and I doubt Putin is in the mood for Biden to resume talks. The area maps referred to as Russian America, a piece of land nearly <a href="https://www.thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTY1ODczNTk.MTAwODYxMjU*MjQxMDYzMzk(MzAwMjEzNzg~!CONTIGUOUS_US*MTAwMjQwNzU.MjUwMjM1MTc(MTc1)MA~!IN*NTI2NDA1MQ.Nzg2MzQyMQ)MQ~!CN*OTkyMTY5Nw.NzMxNDcwNQ(MjI1)Mg~!US-TX*NTI2MjU0Nw.MTUyNDA0NDU)Mw" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">the size of Texas</a>, is what we now call Alaska. It had already been colonized by Siberian fur trappers in the 1700s and the Russian Orthodox Church was already busy trying to convert Indigenous people to Christianity. By 1800 the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian-American_Company" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Russian-American Company</a> was established – organized by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_I_of_Russia" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Emperor Paul I of Russia</a>. By 1850, 300,000 sea otters were hunted to extinction. Seventeen years later, in 1867, amidst a fur market slump from over hunting, the end of the U.S. Civil War, a Russia battered by the Crimea war ceded Russian America to the United States as part of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Purchase" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Alaska Purchase</a>. It didn’t become a U.S. state until 1959. Russia sold Alaska to the United States for $7.2 million or $134 million in 2022 dollars. Russia feared they couldn’t defend the territory from the British who were busy trying to colonize Canada and had just defeated the Russians in the Crimea war with the help of the French. So, they expressed interest in selling it to the then U.S. Secretary of State William Seward who had already offered to buy it just a few years prior and was happy to negotiate the purchase. Biden gave reference to the purchase in <a href="https://tinyurl.com/y7av8yyk" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">his Foreign Relations subcommittee pre-amble</a> by joking, “the 1867 Convention, by which Russia ceded Alaska to the United States, made it possible for Mr. Murkowski to become a U.S. Senator.” The Maritime Boundary Agreement this committee aimed resolve, but never did, “these conflicts by: One, declaring that the 1867 Convention line is the maritime boundary between the United States and the Soviet Union; two, establishing a precise geographic description of the line; and three, providing for the transfer of jurisdiction and Russia rights in four special areas.” The first American to map the new state of Alaska may take issue with Biden’s use of the words ‘precise geographic description.’ Land wasn’t the only thing the U.S. got for their $7.2 million, they were also handed maps and charts of the region drafted by Russian mapmakers. These were promptly handed over to the man who was soon to become the head of the Pacific branch of the Office of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._National_Geodetic_Survey" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">United States Coast Survey</a>, and premiere geographer of the time, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Davidson_(geographer)" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">George Davidson</a>. He excelled at geodesy and astronomy coming out of Girard College in 1845. By 1850 he was on the California coast determining accurate latitude and longitude of coastal features. He worked his way up the Pacific coast to Oregon and Washington mapping much of the Puget Sound and naming many of the Olympic Mountains on the Olympic Peninsula. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Ellinor" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Mt. Ellinor</a> is named after his soon-to-be wife, Ellinor Fauntleroy. The Fauntleroy ferry in Seattle takes you from the Fauntleroy Cove to Vashon Island. Mt. Constance is named after her sister, and the two side-by-side mountains, The Brothers, are named after her two brothers. His triangulation and astronomical observations were regarded as the highest precision geodesy recorded to that date. The baselines required to accurately triangulate and map the Pacific coast states are named after him – the Davidson Quadrilaterals. And before those Russian maps had been handed over to him, he had already been asked to make maps of the physiography and natural resources of Alaska by the U.S. Congress. Most maps were copied from Russian maps and others drawn by an Indigenous Chief who knew more about the land than the Russians. A 1937 biography claims “Davidson always got on with Indians—he treated them as men.” These maps were included in a report to a congressional committee that resulted in a unanimous vote for America to purchase Russian America from the Russians. Davidson was mapping Alaska at 51° to 71° latitude north amidst the mosquitos in August of 1867, but less than a year earlier the Office of Coast Survey had sent Davidson down to 5° to 7° latitude north, in January of 1867, to map a potential site for the Panama Canal. The Office of the Coast Survey was started by Thomas Jefferson in 1807 and still publishes the nautical maps of the U.S. – including the annually published 10 volume publication, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Coast_Pilot" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">United States Coast Pilot</a>. Historically, these guides relied on local mariner knowledge and newspaper articles. They were a practical necessity for private, commercial, and governmental mariners. But in 1858 George Davidson was the first to provide his own accounts making this issue the first official United States Coast Pilot by the Office of the Coast Survey. Davidson went on to become the president of the California Academy of Sciences, a University of California Regent, and the University of California, Berkley’s first geography professor. He was the department chair from 1898 until 1905. Davidson defined the essence of what map making was at the time. It served the desire and need Jefferson had for precision, utilizing the best surveying and geodesic instruments and techniques of the time. Naturally these were used for exacting territories for colonizing, capitalizing, and exploiting. The United States had become an exuberantly expansionist, empire-building country. But by the middle of the 19th century through the start of the 20th another kind of map was entering its golden age – <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thematic_map" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">thematic mapping</a>. Thematic maps use information not readily observed but are nonetheless part of the geography. For example, maps depicting the weather or statistical information like demographics. They can also include strategic and political information. The beginning of the 20th century saw the emergence of the United States as a global superpower and the start of the decline of England’s dominance. New territories, like Alaska, were not only getting mapped but were also helping to shift geopolitical dynamics. The world was sufficiently mapped such that world leaders need not send ships afar to determine political strategies. One of the first and most influential of these geopolitical thematic maps came from England’s equivalent of George Davidson, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halford_Mackinder" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sir Halford John Mackinder</a>. In 1904 he wrote a paper that included a map in The Geographic Journal called “<a href="https://www.iwp.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/20131016_MackinderTheGeographicalJournal.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Geographical Pivot of History</a>.” In the introduction here he writes, “In 400 years the outline of the map of the world has been completed with approximate accuracy…But the opening of the twentieth century is appropriate as the end of a great historic epoch…The missionary, the conqueror, the farmer, the miner, and, of late, the engineer, have followed so closely in the traveller’s footsteps that the world, in its remote borders, has hardly been revealed before we must chronicle its virtually complete political appropriation.” His map is an oval shaped Mercator projection that puts continental Europe, Africa, and Asia in the middle. Its shape gives it a spherical illusion. The map’s title is The Natural Seats of Power and features three crescent shaped concentric zones. At the center is what he called Pivot Area – which is most of continental Europe, some of Asia and what became the Soviet Union, the next ring is labeled Inner and Marginal Crescent – which is more of Europe, the British Isles and Japan, and furthest from the center are the Lands of Outer or Insular Crescent – which include continental America, most of Africa, and Australia. Part of Mackinder’s goal was to not only illustrate to an island country — that came to power by sea — just how connected the world is by land. He also simplified the complexities of detailed coastal charts and topographic maps into easy to understand centers of power. <a href="https://rhetoric.richmond.edu/faculty/tbarney/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Timothy Barney</a>, an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communications at the University of Richmond (and self-proclaimed map-nerd) wrote in the Routledge Handbook of Mapping and Cartography that, “Mackinder was prefiguring a social, economic, and political shift in the twentieth century towards a globalized world, all on the flat page of the map.” Mackinder would not have known it then, but his ‘Pivot Center’ indeed became the focal point of not one, but two world wars that drew powers from all three of the Natural Seats of Power on his map. But he also put thematic geopolitical mapping at the center. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://interplace.io?utm_medium=podcast&amp;utm_campaign=CTA_1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">interplace.io</a>

Maps Made to Persuade: Part 1

Migration: A 'My Nation' Fixation

Leave Polarization Behind, By Simply Being Kind 

Hello Interactors,The 80s band Tears for Fears released a new album recently. Their biggest hit, Everybody Wants to Rule the World has new meaning this week. What is it about empire building sociopaths in the West and the East that makes everybody want them to stop trying to rule the world?As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…CHRONICLING THE TRUTH OF THE RUSRurik, a Norse Viking prince, made his way south from present day Denmark, to establish a ruling government in Novgorod in what is now Russia. He was invited by Slavik and Finn-Ugrik people to apply his governing skills to their feuding tribes.Rurik then extended his presence further south to a city called Kiev in 850. It took another 1000 years for Kiev to be pronounced Kyiv in Ukrainian. In Russian it’s still pronounced Kiev. This outpost became the center of what became the Kievan Rus; a loose collection of Slavic, Baltic, and Finnic peoples of Eastern and Northern Europe. The city was well positioned on a visible bank on a northern edge of the Dnieper River. Its convenient and defensible position allowed Rurik to reign over what became the Rurik Dynasty.The people of modern-day Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus all stake claim to this origin story.Rurik was replaced in 882 by his kinsman Oleg. It was Oleg that declared Kiev to be the capital of the Kievan Rus. Given the nexus of trading activity in Kiev it became a contested region. Oleg led many wars against semi-nomadic tribes from the south and the east.One hundred years later one of those leaders from the east, the Byzantine ruler Basil II, came asking for money. Then leader Vladimir of Kiev agreed so long as he could marry his sister. Basil II gave his sister over on the condition Vladimir, a pagan, convert to Orthodox Christianity. He not only agreed, but insisted everyone in the region convert as well. He baptized the people of Rus in 988 and just like that Christianity was spread throughout the region.This Rus-Byzantine religio-political arrangement was no doubt influenced by the Roman Catholic Church who sought influence over this important Eurasian borderland. By 1054 there came an East-West schism in the church. Eastern Orthodox churches in Constantinople and those in Rome each viewed the other as drifting from the ‘true church’. They split between Orthodox Catholics of the East and Roman Catholics of the West. Though they both continued to largely share the same beliefs and practices.There is no central Orthodox Church in Ukraine any longer. It has since splintered into a variety of denominations along with a myriad of other religions. It’s estimated 75% of Ukrainians believe in a Christian God. But another East-West schism has emerged this week as Putin and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill seek to pull Ukraine back from the allure of the West. They both seek a centralized Russian Orthodox Church under Kirill and a central government under Putin. A forced religio-political unification of the people of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine under a single language, religion, and government. Echoes of Oleg and Rurik and historic east-west tensions – Vladimir of Kiev meets Vladimir Putin.In 1113 a document called The Primary Chronicle was written from which this history is documented. The first sentence reads, “These are the narratives of bygone years regarding the origin of the land of Rus’, the first princes of Kiev, and from what source the land of Rus’ had its beginning.” Seventy-four years later came another source of regional history, the Hypatian Chronicles, and with it the first printed occurrence of the word Oukraina – Ukraine.The etymology of this word is debated to this day. The most popular interpretation comes from a Slavic word for ‘borderland’ or ‘frontier region’ but others argue it’s more possessive as in ‘territory’. Perspectives are as variable as their lineages.A Dutch map from 1645 shows the word Okraina in the middle of wilderness. Wild indeed. By this time in history this region was known to be wild with wars fought over its land, riches, and strategic position between Europe and Asia. From the days of Rurik to today territories in western Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova have cyclically been claimed by Germany, Astro-Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. These boundaries have been contested, drawn, and redrawn since the invention of maps.Maps played a significant role in attempts to ‘permanently’ define the boundaries of territories, and so did the proliferation of books that defined their historic narratives. The Gutenberg press, invented in the late 1400s, offered those with power and money to write and disseminate narratives coincident with territorial boundary maps that fit their view of the world and of history. This was the world’s first use of mass-media to control a particular geo-religio-political narrative and competing counter-narratives concerning regional communities. Many of which were communities of the imagination.NATIONALISM; JUST IMAGINEImagined Communities is the title of a book by a Cornell political scientist, Benedict Anderson. He addresses the still vague notion of ‘nationalism’ – a squishy idea with a powerful force. He argues for a definition that transcends historical attempts to define it by self-interested ideologues. The word ‘nationalism’ was not widely used until the 19th century. It has since become a term we insist on ascribing to every human just as we do gender, race, or ethnicityThe Scottish political theorist Tom Nairn wrote, “’Nationalism’ is the pathology of modern developmental history, as inescapable as ‘neurosis’ in the individual…and largely incurable.’”Anderson proposes this definition of nation: “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” By imagined he means even the most sparsely populated nation will include enough people that one will ever be able to know, meet, or even hear their fellow residents. And yet, everyone claims to be able to imagine who they are. The British-Czech social anthropologist, Ernest Gellner succinctly writes, “‘Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.’”Imagined communities became sovereign nations during ‘The Enlightenment’. Faced with historical dominion by religions while simultaneously discovering the multitude of religions in the world, even the most devote elite came alive with dreams of their own imagined free nations – accepting they must also fall under the guise of a given God. Hence the existence of the United States – one nation under God.A God that some interpret as encouraging, excusing, or mysteriously ignoring communal inequalities and exploits in the name of national identity and comradeship that runs as deep as it does wide. As Anderson surmises, “Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.”One of the unifying elements of these imagined communities is language. In the 18th and 19th century the people of the northern Balkans witnessed the invention of a number of literary languages. In the 18th century the Ukrainian language was ‘tolerated’ by the more dominant Russian speaking population as a folk language spoken by yokels in Ukraine – or “Little Russia” as it was called.But in 1798 Ivan Kotlarevsky, a Ukrainian writer, wrote a poem in Ukrainian about life in Ukraine. It became very popular. Six years later, in 1804, the Kharkov University was founded and became the literary hub of Ukraine. In 1819 the first publication of Ukrainian grammar was printed. Russian grammar was defined just 17 years prior.By 1830 more Ukrainian writers were published in their native language. This is the date that established the language as a bonding element of Ukrainian nationalism. In 1846 the first nationalist organization was founded. And not by a politician with a sovereign agenda, but by a historian.Language invention was happening in many places during this time. In 1820 Finland, for example, an interest in Finnish tradition and culture emerged and was written in Latin and Swedish. This created a groundswell of nationalism by writers, teachers, pastors, and attorneys. They stitched their collective past stories and dialects and published dictionaries and grammar guides. They forge a more confident and self-determined government and national identity defined by their borders and their language.These writers, lexicographers, folklorists, and composers were not acting solely out of national pride, but to feed a burgeoning print market. And who were they selling to? Affluent and powerful families. Only half of the most advanced states in Europe were able to read in 1840. Over ninety percent of Russians could not read.But it wasn’t just the old ruling classes and nobility that were becoming literate. A rising middle class was emerging. Former plebes and appendices amassed wealth and become professionals in a growing worldwide commercial and industrial economy. And with it a growing number of wealthy upper class – the nouveau bourgeoises.As the number of capitalist and wealthy land owners increased through the rise of the industrial age, so did the number of languages they spoke. Latin was displaced by local dialects. This enhanced the bond between commercial and political elite separated by distant cities but united by their language, national identity, and status. Status is what they shared with those in other nations that may not speak their language. Whether it was across a border or an ocean, they knew they were dealing with another well-educated, wealthy man beaming with national pride just like them.And with this growth in wealth and status came increased investment, bureaucracy, and debt in budding nation states. Infrastructure, civil and social services, and militaries were needed. Between 1830 and 1850, Russia’s expenditures grew 44 percent, 75 percent in America, and over 90 percent in Netherlands. All amidst the proliferation of print media in a local vernacular aimed to strengthen the bonds of a growing population of literate masses; imagined communities forged together in a shared belief of an illusory nation, identity, and an expected entrenched in-group allegiance to an irregularly shaped border drawn on a map by someone invested in securing it.TRUST EMPATHYThe national borders of Ukraine were absorbed into the larger Soviet Union in 1944. The Dnieper River forms a natural east-west boundary that also divides ethnicities. Putin has strategically captured those cities in Ukraine that already have sizable ethnic Russian populations. These cities have a long history of bouncing back and forth between more ‘western’ or ‘eastern’ ruling nation states.My brief version of this rich and complex history cannot be reduced to east versus west, good versus evil, or Russian versus Ukraine. And yet that’s what mass media does every single day. Our brains seek efficiency, our short attention spans lead us to crave easy answers – a team to root for, a nation to blame, a person to hate. An imagined community which to affiliate.Whether it’s The Primary Chronicle of the early Rus, the dissemination of Gutenberg pressed books, invented languages, or mass-media pumping out sound bites they all share a common goal. They propagate propaganda from a group of selected, elected, or protected imperialists and (usually) capitalists invested in perpetuating, protecting, and expanding imagined nations. They speak, act, and plot on behalf of a group of diverse collections of people; portions of whom believe they share something in common, a common identity, an imagined community. Nationalists.But another portion of whom see these imaginary nations as vacuous, illusory, and increasingly weakened by a growing global cyber-connected mass of humanity. They are introduced to, awakened by, ‘woke’ to the widespread voices of the historically squelched, discarded, sidelined, and suffering. Individual lives directly impacted by powerful, greedy, and imperialistic power brokers.The three most dominant modern-day authors of nationalism, select sorcerers of imagined communities, and cunning cartographers of calculated cartesian colonies are China, Russia, and the United States.Their influence can come in three flavors:Formal geo-politics by academics, intellectuals, and think tanks. One example is The Pentagon’s New Map of 2004.Practical geo-politics by politicians. For example, Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ or Obama’s ‘world without weapons’ – a drone policy that targeted and killed innocent people in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia.Popular geo-politics by filmmakers, artists, and musicians. These geo-political messages target ordinary people in books as inert as Readers Digest or as overt as James Bond books and films. Not to mention the more obvious Captain America.These catalysts of nationalism contain messages that create unhealthy biases in ways that only neuroscience can detect. Neuroscientist Emile Bruneau dedicated his academic and professional career to achieving peace in the world by understanding the negative effects of bias, often fed by governments through media, can have on behavior.As an undergrad he worked as a counselor in Ireland with a non-profit that brought troubled youth riddled with the historic tensions of their Protestant and Catholic upbringing. After a week of successful trust building between these kids, the staff were patting themselves on their altruistic backs for a job well done.And then, unexpectedly, a fight broke out between two boys. The next thing they knew all 129 kids were wailing on each other. He left that experience convinced he and his fellow counselors had somehow made their condition worse. He sought neuroscience to help him uncover the biological evidence behind what he experienced.What Bruneau’s novel research techniques have revealed are three aspects of our intuition that we should evaluate with care, caution, and suspicion: trust, empathy, and dehumanization.Trust: For the first time those Irish kids trusted each other despite their differences. But the instance that trust was broken betrayal set in and with it violence toward the perpetrator. The greater the trust, the greater the fall at the first sign of betrayal. Altruism isn’t always true nor is it always permanent.Empathy: Having empathy is a prized virtue especially in intergroup conflict. Western media has clued into this. Muslim terrorists are portrayed as violent and selfish sociopaths who lack even an ounce of empathy for others. And yet the first woman Palestinian suicide bomber, Wafa Idris, was one of the most caring, sensitive, and selfless members of her community. She even trained as a volunteer medic. Bruneau discovered the measure of one’s empathy is not a predictor of violent behavior. But what is a consistently strong predictor is the gap between empathy for your own in-group relative to the empathy for the out-group.Dehumanization: The sure fire way to reduce empathy for an out-group is to dehumanize them. History is ripe with nation states bombarding their imagined communities with images and words depicting their enemies as animals. As the British colonized Ireland they portrayed the Irish as monkeys. The Germans portrayed Jews as rats. The US pulled, and continue to pull, from a veritable zoo of animals to portray Japanese, Germans, Iranians, Mexicans…the list is embarrassingly long.When the U.S. was negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran Mike Huckabee was quoted as saying, “I think we underestimate the radical nature of these animals who run Iran.” The accompanying graphic, presumably from Fox News, included an illustration of a sewer drain over Iran with insects streaming from it.Bruneau used this occasion to conduct an online experiment. He presented Americans with a picture of the evolution of humans from the hunched chimpanzee to upright homo sapiens. Beneath it were three sliders; one for Americans, Europeans, and Iranians. He then asked them to slide the slider to the appropriate stage in evolution from animal to human for each group. Iranians fell 13 points shy of the reportedly 100% human Americans and Europeans.He conducted similar experiments while people’s brains were being scanned by an MRI machine. When people were shown imagery of out-groups or people in social classes lower than their own, like the homeless, the same region of the brain was activated for those people as for animals.But here’s the good news. Bruneau said he can find small sets people where these effects are minimized. They’re people whose occupations lead them to have empathy for out-groups. For example, Israeli peace activists brainwaves match those of Palestinians. They’re indistinguishable.Bruneau discovered that just five minutes of explaining what happens in our brains is enough for people to shift their behavior toward empathy for members of an out-group. If you reveal the fact that bias exists in all of us, we’re motivated to overcome it.As we continue to be inundated with words and images by academics, intellectuals, think tanks, politicians, pundits, broadcasters, artists, cartoonists, mapmakers and other creators of mass-media, be mindful of how they portray Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians. Know that Russian, Ukrainian, American, and European political and commercial institutions have a vested interest in preserving their imagined communities.Those representing the interest of the geo-political states of Russia, China, and the United States will, as always, be using dehumanizing tactics as a way to reduce empathy for members of out-groups while boosting empathy for their own in-groups. It’s this gap, Emile Bruneau warns, that we need to mind.I feel pressure every day to take a side in this war, but I’m trying to resist. Putin must be stopped, that much I know. But if I must choose, I choose ordinary people and other members of our animal world. I choose empathy for the Russian mother whose son is being forced to commit crimes against humanity; empathy for the Jews throughout Ukraine who have experienced extermination attempts at the hands of both Russian and Ukrainian hate groups over the years; empathy for those fighting for their lives in Ukraine, seeking asylum in other lands, and the brave souls who continue to share real images and stories from a living hell brought on by yet another sociopathic imperialist.I am suspicious of attempts by governments and corporations that ask me to trust them, to side with them, given centuries of betrayal. Yet I need government and companies to live a safe and comfortable life. And I need them to act on behalf of the living world and not imagined communities. I seek empathy for all creatures who feel depressed, suppressed, or oppressed by their political and commercial institutions, contained by their imaginary borders, and routinely manipulated through dehumanizing mass media propaganda that only serves to widen humanity’s collective empathy gaps.It is believed that the Slavic people seeking peace in their land said to Rurik, 'Our land is great and rich, but there’s no order in it'. Those words have never been more true. Though, I suspect a Viking ruler lacked empathy for out-groups. But, then again, it was Christians who painted horns on the helmets of Norse sailors to dehumanize them as the devil. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

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