New and Old #144
Friday roundup and commentary
A farewell to small cars, the industrial icons that put Europe on wheels, The Economist, June 21, 2023
The story is partially paywalled. The sub-head alone is very good: “Why a continent with ever-smaller families is driving ever-bigger automobiles.” The short of it is that Europeans are at long last following Americans and opting for larger, roomier, more powerful cars, which nonetheless, as the article points out, do not seat any more people. And with European family sizes, they hardly need to.
This phenomenon where families get smaller while everything else gets bigger seems disquieting to me. Lonely. You see it with houses, stores, roads, everything. Interesting.
The Long Reach of the Walmart-Walton Empire, Civil Eats, The Editors, November 1, 2023
In some ways, those implications have been positive, raising the bar on renewable energy and making substantial gains in recycling, the accessibility of organic food and reduced dependence on pesticides.
But Walmart has also grown so powerful that the company can retool the definition of good practice just by setting the lowest bar for it, such as setting a less ambitious standard for organic.
That last point is very important. I don’t know much about the particulars of any of these issues—the only thing I really know about Walmart is how it concentrated small-town and local economies—but I think everybody should be at least uncomfortable with one private enterprise holding so much economic and political power.
Off Topic: Let people take their pictures, Reece Martin, December 6, 2023
Of course I’m biased on this topic, but it was something I thought about long before I ever made videos, and I’m not even sure I am a major victim from this policy. I remember being in “transit fan” groups when I was in high school and seeing posts about how transit employees called the cops on children because they were taking photos of trains or buses when not trespassing or endangering anyone; I can only imagine how groups who are already disproportionately targeted by police would feel about this.
This reminds me of the policy at the Reston Town Center of not allowing photos, which, because this piece I wrote exists, I obviously didn’t observe. The thing about a rule like this is it’s not meant to be strictly enforced. It rather serves as a sort of warning or threat.
Transit systems in general are pretty bad about allowing photo and video. Some places try to ban photography, which is obviously impossible to enforce; worse still, often there is no clear policy on this, and it’s left up to grumpy employees with nothing better to do than to bother harmless people passionate about the system.
Look, I bet the people making these rules are trying to tamp down people making complaints on social media, or, maybe in the case of private establishments, unannounced visitors from competitors. They’re probably not thinking about the people who just love transit stations or mixed-use developments. But still. This is one of those subtle things that pushes people to the comfort and privacy of a car.
Urban planner Richard Florida argues that cities can no longer be defined purely by geography.
When New York talent moves to Miami or San Franciscans move to Austin, new cities are being formed.
Interesting.
“Austin’s rise is best understood as a satellite of San Francisco’s long-established tech hub,” the authors wrote. “Miami is enmeshed in New York City’s finance and real estate complex.”
Remote and hybrid work now allows workers to move to more affordable or otherwise attractive locations that better fit their lifestyles and desires. But even as people leave the most expensive cities, like New York, London, and San Francisco, those cities build connections to the new places their workers end up.
In other words, where people came from matters, and you can trace the sort of essence of a place to the places where it goes.
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Ah, Richard Florida has discovered something else Jane Jacobs wrote a book on 50 years ago (in this case, "Cities and the Wealth of Nations").