Tag Archives: shipping

Updating the Reading List, August 2014: The New Geography of Jobs; Edge City; The Box; The Power Broker

CC image from carnagenyc.

CC image from carnagenyc.

The confluence of events in my life (new apartments, travel, wedding planning, etc) haven’t left time for much blogging recently. However, there’s always time to read. With that in mind, a few additions to the reading list (and correcting one egregious omission):

The New Geography of Jobs: Enrico Moretti (2012)

Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti delivers a concise and readable summary of the economic geography of innovative industries – the kinds of jobs that produce what Jane Jacobs referred to as “New Work” (Moretti cites Jacobs’ books on urban economics repeatedly). This transition to the ‘innovation sector’ means a profound shift in the economic geography of the US, just as past shifts from agriculture to manufacturing had large impacts on where and how we live. Moretti also explains how these innovative jobs tend to cluster together and the paradox of location and local interactions becoming more and more important in a world of globalization and ever-improving communication technologies.

Also, credit to Moretti for writing such an accessible book. In the acknowledgements, he notes that “serious economists are not supposed to write books – they are supposed to write technical papers.” Yet, such papers don’t easily spread outside of the academia bubble and into the hands of planners and policy-makers.

Edge City: Life on the New Frontier: Joel Garreau (1991)

First, a confession: despite Edge City‘s place in the urban planning canon, I had never read the entire thing (just a chapter here and there as a part of grad school assignments). With the opening of the Metro’s Silver Line through the quintessential Edge City, Tysons Corner, I wanted to correct my own reading list gap. It was also an opportunity to look at Garreau’s work nearly 25+ years after he wrote about these places.

Edge City describes the rise of the suburban office/retail node, usually located at a key transportation intersection, obtaining a critical mass of jobs and retail and pulling the business focus away from the traditional downtowns and business districts. Garreau’s description of the thought process behind development deals is insightful (as well as the impacts of unintended consequences, development following the path of least resistance, etc), but hardly limited to the suburban context of edge city.

Some statements from 1990 seem laughable now (“there is no petrochemical analyst around who thinks there is any supply-and-demand reason… that the price of oil should go higher than $30 a barrel in constant dollars in this generation.”), but others seem prescient: speaking of Tysons Corner, Garreau notes that parking lots alone represent a massive land bank, just waiting for a “higher and smarter and more economic use.”

The error, however, seems to be in thinking of places like Tysons as fundamentally decentralized, rather than strengthening centers in a polycentric metropolis. The future of an edge city like Tysons has more in common with urbanism than with the model Garreau describes. Nevertheless, his description of these places is an important element of the grand American suburban experiment.

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger: Marc Levinson (2006)

Levinson’s history of the shipping container is a fascinating look behind the scenes of how we move goods around. Consequences for cities involve containers making old break bulk piers in Manhattan, San Francisco, and other ports obsolete; lower shipping costs enabling greater trade; intermodal shipping opportunities eventually enabling all sorts of new models for trade and distribution.

Levinson documents the challenges of overcoming proprietary interests to develop a series of standards that ensure interoperability, as well as the economic and institutional challenges (from port operators to unions to shipping companies to regulators) in embracing the new model. Levinson provides an insightful account of the difficulties in implementing new systems.

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York: Robert Caro (1974)

I’m not sure how I missed including this in the reading list. It’s not a recent read for me, but reading Cap’n Transit’s post on the book and the reminder of Caro’s focus on the use of power rather than a personal, David v. Goliath struggle between the Moses and Jane Jacobs, I realized that I didn’t have it on the list. Here’s to correcting that omission.

More than just a documentation of Moses’s life and his use of the institutions to wield power, Caro’s book provides an excellent history of New York City and the background for so many of the institutions that shaped and continue to shape the city to this day. Caro’s focus on the institutional levers of power (a theme he carried through to his biographies of LBJ) gives the book applicability to any major city.

Links: Metro’s disco inferno; the power of ports

Two items worth sharing:

7000 Series Metro Cars: 

Over the weekend, WMATA released a few pictures and some videos (complete with a soundtrack that would make Michael Bay jealous) of the prototype of the 7000 series, currently under assembly in Japan.

The front end of the cars looks sharp – the black background with the white Metro logo is clean and easily read and identified at a distance.  Compare against a rendering here.

It’s unfortunate that the side doesn’t share the same clean look.  The industrial design of the car body is fine – echoing other transit vehicles (both old and new) with the corrugated steel.  The contrast against the smooth finish at the window levels provides a similar effect to the current fleet’s brown stripe.

The car interiors will feature real-time strip maps showing the next stations on the line – early commentary has focused on misspellings.

While the old paint scheme (essentially just the brown stripe) might seem a little dated, the future cars feature this “disco ball” motif around the Metro logo, both inside and out.  It’s an upgrade from the hideous “America’s Metro” debacle, but still feels like it will be dated quickly.  The large penumbra around the M means that the disco ball on the exterior is centered on the entire carbody, rather than having the M aligned with the windows, as it is now with the brown stripe.  The front end of the 7000 car shows the crisp M logo well – I’m not sure why they didn’t keep the same approach with the sides and resorted to this disco gimmick.

The importance of ports: 

As each of those new Metro cars is manufactured, they’ll be shipped to the US for final assembly – likely arriving in some large port complex. Will Doig has an interesting article on the battles over waterfront land between maritime uses and real estate interests:

The problem (if you can call it that) is that this is happening just as the maritime industry is booming, thanks to an explosion of cheapo imports from Asia. It’s conventional wisdom that urban industries are dying, but shipping isn’t one of them. Even with the recession, the container trade has doubled since 2000, and 2012 is expected to be another record-breaking year. “I think it’s great to have a park, but you can put a park anywhere,” says Hughes. “There has to be someplace to do this.”

Are cities that place? After centuries of ports fueling urban growth, some people are starting to think: Maybe not anymore. “The scale of port activity requires much more space than it used to,” says Doucet, referring to the massive container ships that require not just deep-water ports, but dry-land acreage and fleets of trucks to unload their cargo. “It’s actually much more practical for ports to be located outside the city center.”

Doig’s article only touches on the changes to the landscapes that the current state of the art of shipping has brought upon our landscapes.  The article reminded me of some excellent Mammoth posts on the subject (shipping and border control, the landscape of globalization, and the physical distribution network as a sampling), noting how the economic logic and physical requirements of this type of trade, combined with legal structures and other constraints has created entirely new landscapes.

The key point that Mr. Doucet makes in Doig’s article is that the geography of shipping today is very different from the old landscape of longshoremen working on Manhattan’s docks.  Framing the battle over this real estate has something to do with the longevity and ‘stickiness’ of land uses – but often isn’t looking forward to the changing environment such infrastructure is operating in.