September 07, 2008
Reports of Cities' Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
Top 10
In our national obsession with 'top 10 lists', we now have the Top 10 Fastest Dying Cities. Reports of our quickly approaching demise has lead to plenty of hand wringing in the maturing cities of the Great Lakes coping with aging. Civic cheer leaders find the need to write letters to our own City newspapers to remind ourselves that reports of our cities death are, to paraphrase Mark Twain, 'greatly exaggerated.'
I know of no precedent in the post-World War Two era (1950-present) where a large city has died. Natural disasters, epidemics, environmental disasters, wars, and armed conflicts have all led to the death of many people and major collateral damage on urban infrastructure. However, the suggestion or even intimation that cities die is an anthropomorphic fallacy.
By my count, there are nearly 500 cities around the world who are experiencing population loss. The number of shrinking cities (more than 10% population loss) in the United States is at least 59. Indeed, more than a quarter of all large cities worldwide have already experienced population loss.
We are not alone.
Yes, St. Louis and Detroit have lost nearly 60% of their population from their 'golden years'. Youngstown, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo have all lost 50 percent or so their population since their peak years. The rise and fall of population centers is intimately related to the relationship of our cities to the engines of the world economy. As such, cities in central and southwest England, the Ruhr region, the Saar, and in the Italian Po Valley have all experienced shrinkage. In the U.S., Great Britain, Germany, Italy, France, and Japan, shrinking cities account for one out of every three metropolitan areas.
The History of Shrinking Cities
World Map of Shrinking Cities from 1kilo on Vimeo.
Connecting the Dots: The re-invention of cities and the broadband economy
As a group, shrinking cities of the early 21st century face multiple hurdles. It is a kind of 'perfect storm'. Economic dislocation, challenges of leadership, human will, deeply seeded aversions to change and risk, combined with the enormous challenges of re-imagining, re-inventing, and re-invigorating the 'idea' of the 'new city' of the 21st century make the effort ahead daunting, to say the least. The 'new city' is locked in our mental image that the 'old city' can be re-ignited and returned to its former glory with a bit of engineering, luck, and hope.
In some cities, especially those in Asia, Portugal, Spain, and parts of Latin America, public policy and emerging new leaders have harnessed their re-invention and 'new city' projects to the generative qualities of the broadband economy. In this country, cities and federal agencies are still debating the value of a national broadband strategy. Imagine if we had the same 20 years debate over the positive impact of public support for rural electrification or the massive investment to support the build out of the inter-state highway system. Electrification, inter-state highways, ports, airports, and national transportation logistics have been inextricably linked over the past 150 years to the health and well being of cities. The same is true as it relates to the art of city-making in the 21st century.
Not withstanding the rhetoric and propaganda of the incumbent interests, inside of a decade we have gone from one of the most connected countries to barely being among the top 20 ultra broadband countries. Our bandwidth to price point ratios are no longer competitive with our traditional economic peers. More important, the emerging cities of the 21st century in Asia are leveraging the dynamic use of the 'new' transportation systems to level the playing field and enabling competitive advantages that attract talent, capital, and innovation. Citizens in these cities have 100 times more bandwidth at price points that are comparable to DSL and cable modem pricing in the United States.
Contractions of cities and their populations is a natural and predictable part of the evolution of the human condition and the economies we create. For some cities the aspiration may be to uncover the youthful elixir. For others, the rallying cry may be to return to former glory by some magic formula. There is at least one other arc of possibility. The connected-city of the 21st century may be the DNA of the 'new city'. Population size remains relevant in the connected community but does fall victim to the demographers imperative that size equals destiny. The art of designing a connected-city, especially as part of a re-invention project, may well be one of the biggest opportunities of the 21st century. Connected-cities enables learning, participation, and opportunities to re-discover the value of human ingenuity. Connected cities and their citizens and neighborhoods can export virtues like art, education, culture, and sport over the 21st century transportation system known as the Internet. Creativity, diversity, smart and green are important inputs into the connected city allowing us to better balance economic opportunities with creating livable neighborhoods, accentuating quality of life, and a more sustainable approach to the broader eco-systems within which our cities evolve.
Technologies, like rural electrification, or the inter-state system were not the answer to every challenge in the 19th or 20th century. Likewise, the ultra broadband economy of the 21st century is not the answer to every challenge we face. Nevertheless, I have been among those that have attempted to articulate that a pre-requisite ingredient to the process of re-imaging and re-inventing the cluster of cities undergoing phases of contraction is taking a bold position on leveraging the thousands of strands of fiber optics that lie beneath our city streets and a long the railways tracks and other rights of way. The art of creating a connected community is not only about a broadband network that connects thousands of cities and enables trillions of transactions every day. Connected cities make possible connecting human networks, networks of cultural communities, and creating new networks of hope. The 21st century may well be viewed by historians of future generations as the century of creativity. The connected-community is a form of democratic renaissance that enables and inspires that kind of creativity. It may well be that cities facing the challenge of population loss are the very place where connected-cities of the future will be prototyped. Whether we succeed in creating a new city model for the future is one of the great challenges of the next decade here in the Great Lakes and for the new administration in Washington, DC. The stakes have never been greater.
Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, OH
September 7th, 2008
Posted by lsg8 at 11:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
September 05, 2008
Welcome Back to Campus ... Still a Privilege
It's back to school season. Every year, around this time, millions of students return to campus with their faculty colleagues to participate in one of the most enduring and symbolic democratic rituals of the past century. There was a time, not so long ago, that the opportunity to participate in the University experience was hardly a foregone conclusion.
Indeed, while nearly 90% of American adults complete a high school education, and as many 70% of those with a high school education pursue post-secondary education opportunities, attaining a college degree is still a pretty special occasion in the life of the American adult population.
The U.S. Census Bureau publishes annual data on college attainment. I've created and pasted in a gadget based on the Census data that will allow you to explore the American adult population and its achievement of a four year degree or more. In 1940 less than 5% of the adult population in the United States had a four year degree. Today that number is about 29%. While not so long ago more young adult men had at least a bachelor's degree than their female counterparts, today about 33 percent of young women 25 to 29 have a bachelor’s degree or more education, compared with 26 percent of their male counterparts.
We still have a very long way to go. The pursuit of a higher standard of living and achievement the American dream is significantly related to education attainment. Adults with advanced degrees earn four times more than those with less than a high school diploma. Workers 18 and older with a master’s, professional or doctoral degree earned an average of $82,320 in 2006, while those with less than a high school diploma earned $20,873.
The data below also suggest that achievement of education outcomes is still significantly segmented by racial realities. While in 1940, less than 1.5% of the African American adult population had a four year college education, today that percentage (of the adult population) is still only 18.5% (and 18.9% of young African American adults age 25-29).
As those of us with the privilege to work on a University campus settle in for another year of dynamic interaction and discovery with the young men and women who attend our colleges, it is important to reflect on how special that experience remains in the life of the cities within which we work and study, and the country as a whole.
Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, Ohio
September 5, 2008
Posted by lsg8 at 08:55 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
August 04, 2008
On the Nature of "Change"
The calendar has turned to August and a small twitch has returned to the back of my neck as 'back to school' is now within sight. While these pages haven't been updated through July, I thought I'd start August with a reflection of an exchange initiated by Jeff Pulver in his facebook pages. Over the weekend Jeff posed the insight that we should focus on the things we can control rather than being consumed with the 'stuff' we can't control. I started thinking about how we battle the need to control in a world that seems to be ever more 'out of control'. Below is a slightly abridged version of my exchange with Jeff. Insights and feedback, as always, welcome....
Jeff, I like this reflective impulse. When public personalities such as yourself take time to remind all of us that the very technologies that we create and consume need to be tamed in order to find and maintain balance in our lives, the light bulbs do go off.
The old Mario Andretti line that "if you feel you're in control you aren't going fast enough" is an artifact of an interesting inherited worldview.
The pursuit of control is an interesting existential need. 500 years ago, the emergent Renaissance era was largely defined by placing humans at the center of the universe. Controlling nature became the ultimate pursuit for western society and has guided much of our philosophical thiking for these past 500 years. Through multiple 'scientific revolutions', building off of each other, we have reached a proverbial inflection point. The emergent, hyperconnected 'Net is as much as any force in human history responsible for the current dislocation and sense of loss of control in the traditional centers of power.
Jeff, you are one of our generation's Galileos (heretic, storyteller, visionary). But where Galileo helped to usher in the scientific worldview, we are now in need of a new, equally compelling worldview that helps us make sense of the emergent unity of the 'Net in which we again understand that we are an intimate and active participant in the making and remaking of the universe of our own creation.
I would suggest that emergent era might be termed something like is the Epoch of Ambiguity. Those who learn to embrace ambiguity and actually strive in the multiple inconsistencies that present themselves will thrive. Mastery of ambiguity is not control. There are multiple dynamics at play, many of which are made possible by the communications and technology revolution of which you (and us) have been championing. The resulting condition not only resulted in us 'loosing' control. Control is not shifting elsewhere. What is emergent is a new (500 year?) arc of human activity and ingenuity. Examples of the new emergent condition abound. The shifting and conjunctural forms of power and alliances on the world stage, the tsunamis of population movements moving to work, the growing pervasive distribution and availability of advanced communication and technology, and the growing cross-border and 'regionalization' of people, commerce, and ideas are not only creating dislocation. I do not see this as a matter of a 'transition' from one period of 'control' to another. The permanent state of affairs is dynamic change and layers of ambiguity. Some people, geographies, and cultural heritages and traditions are thriving in the emergent era.
One of the many challenges is that when you are at the center of the receding order, it is mightily difficult to view any other dynamic as anything but the loss of control, whether that is an individual, an organization, a region, a country, or set of cross-boundary cultural practices.
I can't think of a better and more exciting time to be involved in the world of education and technology.
Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
August 4, 2008
Posted by lsg8 at 01:51 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
June 24, 2008
Freedom Is .. National Underground Railroad+Apple+U
The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center is teaming up with Apple to provide college students across the United States with the opportunity to share how they define freedom. Teams of college students can create and submit a short video (3 minutes or less) expressing the qualities, importance, and impact of freedom in their lives, today.
Through their submissions, students will connect with people around the world to share their ideas about Freedom and become facilitators in a very important, global dialogue concerning some of society’s most critical issues. Creating Freedom Awareness—at a time when we need it most—is, perhaps, the 21st Century’s greatest challenge.
Please let faculty- and student directly- know about this amazing opportunity.
The deadline for teams to register for the contest is July 6th. Thanks for getting out the word in the next week.
The contest info and rules can be found at:
http://edcommunity.apple.com/freedomcontest/
Posted by lsg8 at 07:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
June 10, 2008
Blogging ECAR Summer Symposium III -- Students and Social Networking
Each year, Educause's ECAR group conducts a national survey of students and IT. The 27,317 respondents to this year's survey were asked (for the first time) about their experience in the social networking world. Later this summer/fall, ECAR Fellows Judy Caruso and Gail Salaway will release their general findings. In the meantime, the data shared confirms broad expectations that students are significantly time shifting in favor of social networking. Understanding this situation and student self-reporting that they are interacting with one another for course-related efforts is an important insight.
For students, course management systems are really convenient ways of gathering access to formative grading and other related conveniences. Most are rather critical of their faculty colleagues use and knowledge of the technology. As the social networking platforms emerge as a major portion of the student experience and course management systems become management utilities, its important to begin asking whether we should move more and more of the 'learning' to their platform rather than demanding that they conform to ours. Knowing full well that students may well resist the convergence of spaces, over the next year or two, I suspect we will see leading edge faculty and organizations bringing value to student social networks that will begin to blur the boundaries.
Eighty-two percent of students self-reported that they spend time in the social networking world. A significant number of students report that they are spending 20 hours or more a week! in their social networks.
Eighty-nine percent have a presence in FaceBook (with only 48% having MySpace accounts).
Students report that they are using these platform technologies to keep in touch with friends (97%), sharing photos, videos and the like (67%), finding out more about people (51%), communicating with classmates about course-related activities (50%) and event and scheduling (48%).
Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
June 10, 2008
Posted by lsg8 at 06:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Blogging ECAR Summer Symposium II
B. Robert Franza is the Executive Scientific Director of the Seattle Science Foundation. Franza is a quantitative systems biologist with extensive experience managing successful collaborative and entrepreneurial start up companies. Franza was recognized by Science Watch as among the top three most referenced molecular biologists in the world. A University of Washington bio-engineer, Bob Franza addressed the ECAR Summer Symposium with the provocation that basic life science education needs to be re-invented.
Franza chose to make the case that the 3-D virtual web is an infinitely creative pedagogical learning space that allows co-creation of learning materials by students and faculty members. Immersive spaces like Second Life also make it possible for hundreds of retired science educators around the world to engage as mentors. Bob also made the case that the economics of the inherited educational institutional framwork for learning is non-sustainable in both dollar and cents terms (in terms of the waste of overbuild) and in terms of ecological sustainability. When asked about limits to this approach, Franza pushed back and suggested that its a matter of will to re-invent and make relevant the education of the next generation of life scientists.
The Seattle Science Foundation itself is an immersive convening collaboration space for physicians, scientists, technologists, engineers, and educators, fostering in a world class training facility, to improve healthcare through professional education. As we think about modeling, event-based collaborative research and learning spaces, the Seattle Science Foundation is an intriguing model of active researchers and educators engaged in important and pressing activities.
Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
June 10, 2008
Posted by lsg8 at 01:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Greening IT in NEOhio
We are long overdue in having a broad regional conversation about a consolidated or even cloud-based approach to "Greening IT in Northeast Ohio". Our IT data centers produce more CO2 then our airline industry. The silence in our region has been deafening.
In the release of its path breaking report released last week, the Brooking's Institute "Shrinking Carbon Footprint of Metropolitan America" calls on Washington to develop a new policy framework to create incentives to reduce the country's carbon footprint. I have pasted below the profile of NEOhio.
According to the study,
Federal policy could play a powerful role in helping metropolitan areas—and so the nation—shrink their carbon footprint further. In addition to economy-wide policies to motivate action, five targeted policies are particularly important within metro areas and for the nation as a whole:
* Promote more transportation choices to expand transit and compact development options
* Introduce more energy-efficient freight operations with regional freight planning
* Require home energy cost disclosure when selling and “on-bill” financing to stimulate and scale up energy-efficient retrofitting of residential housing
* Use federal housing policy to create incentives for energy- and location-efficient decisions
* Issue a metropolitan challenge to develop innovative solutions that integrate multiple policy areas
It's this last recommendation that peaked my interest and I want to share with other technology and facilities leaders in NEOhio. Can we architect a common Green IT approach for NEOhio following the successful model we developed 5 years ago for connecting NEOhio with ultra broadband through OneCommunity? Later this summer, I'd like to invite those interested to a working session on the topic with an eye to issuing some principles for further exploration on a regional basis.
Here is the report synopsis for our community...
Shrinking the Carbon Footprint of Metropolitan America
Metro Area Profile: Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor, OHThe report “Shrinking the Carbon Footprint of Metropolitan America” quantifies for the first time the amount and most significant sources of carbon emitted—from highway transportation and residential
energy consumption—by the 100 largest metropolitan areas in 2000 and 2005. Substantial variation exists among these “carbon footprints” of metro areas, due in part to their development patterns, rail
transit, freight traffic, carbon content of electricity sources, electricity prices, and weather.To access the entire report, see www.blueprintprosperity.org
Per Capita Carbon Footprints, 2000-2005
Trends. Metropolitan Cleveland’s per capita footprint from transportation and residential energy use increased 4.28 percent between 2000 and 2005. The average per capita footprint of the 100 largest metro areas and of the nation increased 1.1 percent and 2.2 percent during this time, respectively.
The transportation portion of Cleveland’s per capita footprint increased 3.1 percent between 2000 and 2005, compared to an increase of 2.4 percent in the 100 largest metro areas. The residential portion of Cleveland’s per capita footprint increased 5.4 percent between 2000 and 2005, compared to a slight decrease of 0.7 percent in the 100 largest metro areas.
Snapshot = 2005. The average resident in metropolitan Cleveland emitted 2.235 tons of carbon from highway transportation and residential energy in 2005 (rank 31st). This compares with 2.24 tons of carbon emitted by the average 100-metro resident and 2.60 tons of carbon emitted by the average American from transportation and residential energy.
From highway transportation. The average Cleveland resident emitted 1.072 tons of carbon from highway transportation (rank 12th). The average 100-metro resident emitted 1.310 tons and the average American emitted 1.44 tons from highway transportation.
The average Cleveland resident emitted 0.842 tons from autos (rank 11th) and 0.230 tons from trucks (rank 21st), compared to 1.004 tons from autos and 0.305 tons from trucks from the average 100-metro resident.
From residential energy use. The average Cleveland resident emitted 1.163 tons of carbon from residential energy use (rank 74th). The average 100-metro resident emitted 0.925 tons and the average American emitted 1.16 tons of carbon from residential energy use.
The average Cleveland resident emitted 0.694 tons from electricity (rank 52nd) and 0.468 tons from residential fuels (rank 73rd). This compares to 0.611 tons from electricity and 0.314 tons from fuels from the average 100-metro resident.
There's an opportunity for the IT community to lead the region in raising the challenge of greening our industry.
Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
June 10, 2008
Posted by lsg8 at 11:42 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)