No Place Like Home? New Localism in America

An interesting piece from Joel Kotkin at New Geography who suggests that America is seeing the emergence of a ‘new localism’.

Those in the UK who’ve kept up with the debate on communities over the past few years will be familiar with new localism –New Labour have viewed it as a means to avert community breakdown and what they view as excessive individualism. Kotkin also talks of “rootlessness and anomie” and associates spatial mobility with social disintegration and of America becoming "a society coming apart at the seams."

The article highlights a number of trends that emerged before the recession and have consolidated since. The most important are: -
· the collapse in "spatial mobility". In the 1970s 20% of people moved annually; by 2006, it was 14 percent, the lowest rate since the 1940s;
· the "boomerang kids" trend as children’s financial reliance on their parents continues well into their 30s and 40s as job options and the ability to buy houses diminishes; and
· the rise in working electronically at home full time which by 2015 is forecast to be more than those using mass transit.

Kotkin’s basic premise is that the longer people stay in their homes and communities, the more they identify with those places, and the greater their commitment to helping local businesses and institutions thrive. Home-based workers will eat in local restaurants, attend fairs and festivals, take their kids to soccer practices, ballet lessons, or religious youth-group meetings. While there are some important differences, some of Kotkin’s arguments appear to echo those of the new economics foundation and the Transition Towns movement in the UK.

While we might welcome the freedom to choose to work at home, to what extent can localism more broadly be viewed as a positive development? Were cities not the means to escape the constricted environment of the village? Can we really be that positive about living more locally, especially if it is the result of less opportunities to sell houses and find new employment?

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The Dilemmas of Growth - “minimizing the maximum regret”

World Development Report 2010: Development and Climate Change published last week by the World Bank looks at development in the context of a changing climate. It argues that future strategies for urban growth should take account of the idea of “mini­mizing the maximum regret”.

If we unscramble this somewhat opaque expression, we find an important indication as to how economic growth and urban development are now viewed. Maximising growth was once widely accepted as a primary aim for national economies and cities. Not only was prosperity welcome in its own terms, but it was accepted that growth helped urban communities exert more control over their circumstances. As the authors note (p8), “adverse climate trends…. do not discriminate by income, but better-off people and communities can more successfully manage the setbacks”.

Yet elsewhere the report goes on to largely reject this logic. For example, after two decades of impressive growth, China has created significant new infrastructure throughout the country. Yet the Bank questions the benefits of such growth by recalling that many migrant workers were left stranded in the unexpect­edly intense snow storms in January 2008. A similar logic is used to interpret Hurricane Katrina; decades of steady prosperity do not always produce good outcomes.

Today growth is often linked with an increase in cities vulnerability to climate change, and the focus is less on growth than on the “well-being” of current and future generations. For the Bank the development model needs to be reworked as one of creating “resilience”. Planning becomes an exercise in contin­gency rather than optimisation, less concerned with maximising development and more with minimising future risks. The “tolerable windows” approach advocated by the Bank uses “guard­rails” to set limits to development at levels thought acceptable according to expert judgement.

The term “minimizing the maximum regret” is adopted from post-war statistician Leonard Savage. But how useful is this approach for planning cities? While it sounds very scientific, there are arguably two important problems. Firstly, the frameworks which govern the work of planners (or urban statisticians?) necessarily reflect our fatalistic times. Thomas Homer-Dixon argues that today “it is not undue pessimism that is dangerous, but undue optimism”. The result is a tendency to speculate on worst case scenarios and lower the bar in terms of what is acceptable development. Secondly, urban planning becomes an exercise in deferring to statistics rather than an attempt to develop and then impose our ideas as to how the future should be. Rather than an exercise in statistics, the urban designer Edmund Bacon argued that ‘the city is an act of human will’. Is he right? We will return to this question over the coming weeks and months.

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