Brainstorm

This is one of my evolving lists of things I wish I had time to do myself.  I'm always scribbling ideas on notepads, receipts, envelopes, bar napkins ... any piece of paper nearby.  I'm also trying to add a few of the ideas here in case you find them of interest.  Some of these brainstorms involve empiricist theoretical projects in the spirit of what I call 'strategic positivism'; this is an effort to blend progressive politics with the scientific rigor and wide public legitimacy assigned to various forms of 'counting' -- simple maps, graphs, and tables, as well as more sophisticated kinds of spatial and statistical analysis.  But then other ideas are decidedly nonpositivist -- concerned with qualitative ways of understanding the history of geographical thought and the accelerating present of social, spatial, and technological change.

I am a slow researcher, but an impatient, passionate and promiscuous thinker:  I have a mounting trade surplus of ideas, but a persistent deficit of projects completed and published.  I am always grateful when students -- undergraduates, Masters, Ph.D., and those perpetually neglected 'unclassified' students of life and experience -- take my ideas and produce scholarship that's so much better than anything I could achieve.

If you're looking for ideas or suggestions for projects, and if one of these topics holds any interest for you, I'd love to chat.  It's best if you stop by my office whenever you're in the vicinity, or if you call me (my contact information is here).  This list is constantly under construction; whenever I have the time, I try to jot down a few ideas and suggestions.  And of course I have a deep archive of random sheets of paper -- yes, that wonderful old-fashioned technology of hand-written notes on old pieces of paper! -- with various brainstorms from previous years.  Oh, if I can ever find the time to dig through all of those old ideas and see which ones are still urgent, still relevant, still in need of the time, care, and passion to analyze the fascinating geographies that are always under construction around and with us!

A Few Ideas...

  • Avatar Urbanism:  The Latest Frontiers.  Read this, then notice especially the "Slenderman" section in this, and then read this story about how police agencies in cities around the world are issuing warnings about a dangerous game that might be wildly popular ... or just an illusion.  What would Louis Wirth say?  Are we living in an entirely new kind of Chicago School urbanism of cognitive-Darwinian memes?

  • Alt-Right American White Supremacy.  Read this, then watch this, and read Chapter 1, "Into the Abyss," of David Neiwert (2017).  Alt-America:  The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump.  London:  Verso.  In the Summer of 2017, Jatinder and I had the chance for a brief visit to Charleston, and it was deeply profound to stand in front of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.  (See this, this, this, and this.)  Emanuel AME is one of the city's oldest churches, and it was an historically central site of civil-rights activism in South Carolina in the 1950s and 1960s.  Discuss all of this.  What is the urban geography of resurgent nationalism, xenophobia, and White rage?  How is American 'whiteness' evolving?  Is Trump the cause or the symptom?

  • Trump.  Cities.  Discuss.  In the United States, politics has become a deeply polarized struggle between the interests of cities, and those who live in cities, versus those in suburbs, small towns, and rural  areas.  Some of this urban/rural divide is unique to America, but other facets are not.  Read this great news analysis from journalists at the New York Times, and then explore scholarly studies of urban politics in Canada, the U.S., or any other part of the world where you see stark urban/rural contrasts.
Emily Badger and Quoctrung Bui (2016).  "Why Republicans Don't Even Try to Win Cities Anymore."  New York Times, November 2.

  • Oomph. One.  Read Andrew Ross Sorkin, Too Big to Fail.  Two.  Start watching Billions.  Wrestle with this question:  what do the competitive dynamics of New York City, of Paul Giammati and Damien Hurst, tell us about the global financial services center known as Wall Street?  If what we're seeing in the heart of New York City is the future, what does that tell us?
    
  • Geographies of Resistance.  On January 20, 2017, Donald J. Trump was inaugurated as U.S. President.  All Presidential campaigns in the U.S. over the past half-century have been hard-fought, bitter contests dominated by mistrust, fear, and attempts to manipulate perception and public opinion.  But this one was especially nasty.  Trump launched his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants to the U.S. "rapists, murderers," and things only got worse from there.  Every time Trump broke the norms of decency and dignity -- mocking a reporter with a physical disability, responding to allegations of sexual assault by telling crowds not to believe it because the women making the accusations weren't attractive enough for him to have done it -- he became more popular.  He became more popular among the hardcore "base" of the Republican party in the primary election race, and eventually beat out sixteen other candidates to get the Republican nomination.  This, despite the fact that most potty-trained conservatives understood how dangerous and unstable it could be to have a deceptive, narcissistic reality-television celebrity at the head of a major political party.  But Trump went on to win in the general election campaign, with repeated and unprecedented attacks on Hilary Clinton.  A master of the industrial management of the short attention span known as Twitter, Trump spewed out harsh, simple, and memorable invectives -- he would never mention his opponent's name without adding a dismissive adjective, and so many millions constantly heard the phrase "crooked Hilary."  And he apparently understood the geography of America's bizarre political structure, inherited from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries:  the Electoral College, which apportions votes for President according to a formula that was designed to ensure the participation of less-populated and rural states -- many of them fully dominated by the institution of slavery -- in the emerging federation of the United States.  And so Trump decisively won the Electoral College and the Presidency, despite the fact that Hilary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly three million votes.

What next?  Trump took the oath of office at noon on Friday, January 20.  His inauguration speech, like his campaign, broke all the rules.  Whereas most presidents use the opportunity to try to unify, to bring everyone together after a tough campaign, Trump continued in a mean, oppositional campaign mode.

Trump's election came as a surprise to everyone -- journalists, pollsters, professional politicians and consultants on both Republican and Democratic sides, and observers in other nations around the world.  But his election also catalyzed activism to organize, and to resist.  The U.S. now has a president who has been caught on tape describing how he assaults women, boasting that because he has money and celebrity he can just "grab them by the pussy" and go into the dressing rooms to peek at under-age beauty contestants; who has proudly declared that he would bring back waterboarding and other forms of torture; who has engaged in twitter wars with the Pope when Francis questioned the Christian ethics of building a wall as a solution to undocumented immigration; who suggested banning all Muslim immigration to the U.S.; who has called climate change a conspiracy by the Chinese to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive; who repeatedly claimed that the election was "rigged" to prevent his victory, and who stated that he would only accept the election as valid "if I win"; and ... well, the list goes on an on.  Read the news -- the real news, reputable journalism of precisely the kind that Trump has repeatedly attacked, and you'll see how bad it is.  Trump attacks the New York Times, the Washington Post, and all the rest of the "mainstream media" as dishonest liars.  If you want my recommendation on what kinds of things to read, it's simple:  if Trump attacks the media outlet, then that's exactly what you should be reading.  Read the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Your mission:  read reputable news sources, and write an essay to explore this question:  what is the geography of organizing and resistance in Trump's America?  How are people organizing -- online and in marches and demonstrations, in the streets and in the tweets -- to build another kind of vision for America?  Begin by reflecting on this report, from the New York Times, on the enormous Women's March on Washington held on Inauguration Day:

"The day after what many had assumed would be the inauguration of the first female president, hundreds of thousands of women flooded the streets of Washington, and many more marched in cities across the country, in defiant, jubilant rallies against the man who defeated her.

Protesters jammed the streets near the Capitol for the main demonstration, packed so tightly at times that they could barely move. In Chicago, the size of a rally so quickly outgrew early estimates that the official march that was scheduled to follow was canceled for safety, though many paraded through downtown, anyway.

In Manhattan, Fifth Avenue became a tide of signs and symbolic pink hats, while in downtown Los Angeles, shouts of 'love trumps hate' echoed along a one-mile route leading to City Hall, with many demonstrators spilling over into adjacent streets in a huge, festival-like atmosphere.

The marches were the kickoff for what their leaders hope will be a sustained campaign of protest in a polarized nation, riven by an election that raised unsettling questions about American values, out-of-touch elites and barriers to women’s ambitions.

...

'Thank you for understanding that sometimes we must put our bodies where our beliefs are,' Gloria Steinem, the feminist icon and an honorary chairwoman of the march, told those gathered in Washington. 'Pressing 'send' is not enough.'

See Susan Chira and Yamiche Alcindorjan (2017).  "Defiant Voices Flood U.S. Cities as Women Rally for Rights."  New York Times, January 21.


  • Facebook has a "Trust Engineering" division.  Discuss.  Listen to the fascinating WNYC story, read our analysis of social networking from several years ago, and then analyze what it means for a Silicon Valley to 'engineer' the 'trust' you have when living parts of your daily life online.

WNYC (2015).  "The Trust Engineers."  New York, NY:  WNYC, Public Radio International.

Larissa Zip, Rebekah Parker, and Elvin Wyly (2013).  "Facebook as a Way of Life:  Louis Wirth in the Social Network."  Geographical Bulletin 54, 77-98.

  • In 1963, one of the most important geographers of the twentieth century, Edward A. Ackerman, delivered a Presidential Address to the Association of American Geographers.  Ackerman's address, spoken to a group of scholars who attended the conference in the recently-opened Hilton Hotel in Denver, Colorado, was subsquently published in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers.  Ackerman's lecture was titled, "Where is a Research Frontier?"  His talk was a brilliant, wide-ranging talk that discussed the status of Geography as a Science, at a time and place (the twentieth century, the United States) in which 'Science' with a capital S mean modernity, progress, and moving forward with the new technologies that would help us find all the answers to the important questions.  Ackerman's talk 1) summarizes the history of advances in the knowledge achieved by various sciences, 2) argues that Geography has generally failed to keep pace with the advancing frontier of the natural and physical sciences, and then 3) argues that we should embrace something called 'systems theory' in order to become true Scientists.

Your mission:  write a critical essay that engages with Ackerman's ideas, while also challenging him.  Consider a title to get us thinking:  "Where Are Today's Research Frontiers?"  It's a simple change, yet important.  Ackerman was writing at a time when science was dominated by positivism and modernism.  Positivism is a theory of how to acquire knowledge that emphasizes the careful analysis of externally observable phenomena in order to develop knowlege about cause-and-effect relationships.  Modernism is a wide-ranging philosophy in science as well as architecture and design that emphasizes rationality, organization, and a sort of 'form follows function' ethos (the Denver Hilton in which Ackerman gave his speech is widely regarded as an excellent example of modernist commercial architecture).  Modernism was also closely associated with 'Fordism,' a label for a certain kind of organization of societies based on the principles of industrial production (exemplified most clearly by Henry Ford's automobile assembly lines).  You can and should read the entries for "positivism" and "modernism" in the Dictionary of Human Geography, Fourth Edition, R.J. Johnston et al., editors, Malden, MA:  Blackwell Publishers.  Then also read the entries for Fordism, and then for postmodernism, post-Fordism, and post-structuralism.  We are now living in a post-Fordist, post-modernist world where many of the questions that Ackerman was asking need to be completely revised.  Most crucially, we should not be asking "Where is a research frontier?" in a way that implies a single advancing boundary zone of knowledge.  Instead we need to think of multiple dimensions of knowledge, advancing and retreating, across time and space. 

  • "It has been a historical commodity ... and now it's making a comeback.  It has a great future."  This is a quote from the director of Agrorural, Peru's rural development agency.  When I took my very first university-level geography course, Professor Roger Downs began by emphasizing that geography was not what we had been led to believe by our experiences in junior high.  Seventh-grade geography was about memorizing rivers, mountains, the names of countries and their capitals, and their principal exports.  Roger famously called this the "Principal Products of Peru" approach to geography.  Geography was not guano, Downs told us.  And through the next weeks of fascinating lectures that kept me on the edge of my seat every day, Roger showed us that geography was about process, and the astonishingly beautiful interplay of continuity and change amongst places, peoples, and environments.  I was hooked.

That first geography course, I must admit, was quite a few years ago.  I sometimes joke about the "P-cubed" approach to geography, but in general the metaphor seemed to be a relic of the past.  And yet, if you pay attention to things long enough, what once looks old and outdated suddenly comes back into fashion.  Read this:

Bayly Turner (2010).  "Peru Mines New 'Gold' in Bird Guano."  The Vancouver Sun, October 8, B6.

and then engage with these questions:  what old, outdated concepts of geography have suddenly become relevant again?  Do we need to rethink the teleological linear concepts we've used for a century to understand world economic relations -- the idea that agriculture comes before manufacturing, and then manufacturing gives way to services, with each one displacing the other, replacing the old, pre-modern with the new, advanced activity?  Is guano the only old thing that has suddenly become new again?  And what might the old and new imply for cities -- those human creations that were once seen as so new, so threatening in the great acceleration of urbanization in the early industrial age of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?

  • "The Philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next."  This is a quote from Cynthia Dunbar, a conservative Christian activist who serves on the Texas State Board of Education, and who teaches part-time at Liberty University School of Law, in Lynchburg, Virginia.  The Texas State Board has become one of the major battlegrounds for standards governing what students in public elementary, middle, and high schools in the United States learn about history and other subjects.  Conservatives have mobilized to take over the Board, and to revise curriculum standards so that students are taught about, for instance, the inherently Christian and biblical basis of the U.S. Constitution.  Your job:  first, read Russel Shorto (2010).  "How Christian Were the Founders?"  New York Times Magazine, February 14.  Second, investigate the public proceedings and journalistic reports about the Texas Board, and analyze these questions:  What changes are the Christian activists seeking to make for the curriculum standards for geography?  Are the struggles over standards for geography any less significant than the high-profile battles over history, government, and biology?

  • "I am imported from place to place..."  Not long ago, Steven Flusty, professor of geography at York University, sent me a copy of a forthcoming book chapter.  Flusty has wide-ranging interests in social theory and urbanism, and recently has been focusing on the interrelations of socio-cultural change, societal understandings of the past and the present, and the simultaneous acceleration of custom-designed cultural commodities and travelers and tourists.  Yep, I'm overwhelmed, too, by the complexity of that last sentence, which is my lame attempt to summarize Flusty's work.  As a quantifier and a recovering positivist, I can estimate that the upper bound of the 95-percent confidence interval is that I understand no more than 10 percent of most of what Flusty writes.  But I enjoy 100 percent of it.  It forces me to stretch my imagination in ways that make my brain hurt, and that can only be a good thing.  I recommend this project only if you have met two prerequisites:  1) you've taken a third- or fourth-year class with Derek Gregory, and 2) you've completed, or at least you are currently enrolled in, Urban Studies 400, The City as an Entertainment Machine.  Your mission:  read some of Flusty's work and analyze how it refines, extends, and challenges any of the major themes explored in that course. 

A teaser from Flusty's book chapter:  "I am a credentialed reposeur, sitting ensconced in cafes while texting about what comes within range of sight.  It is a job in high demand.  In fact, merely advising distant entrepots on how to attract my sort has become a vocation in itself.  It is writ of safe passage to a well-traveled and lavishly-catered life for cadres of self-anointed urban alchemists boasting recipes for transmuting any terra incognita into a Great City of the World.  And so I am imported from place to place, myself and my thumb-scrivenings part of the regalia that effects the transmutation and simultaneously proves it has already occurred.  Would any Great City, after all, be great to begin with were we not spreading word of its greatness, or, more deliciously, any laughable lack thereof, far and wide?"  Steven Flusty (2010).  "The Emperor's Used Clothes, or, Places Remade to Measure."  Forthcoming in S. Tarrant and M. Jolles, eds., Fashion Talks:  Undressing the Power of Style.  Albany:  State University of New York Press, quotation from p. 1-2.

  • "It Would Have Been A Katrina."  Not long ago, Nicholas Dahmann sent me an essay in the history of the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA-CAN), a coalition working to protect low-income residents from gentrification and efforts to criminize poor people in LA's Skid Row.  Dahmann's eloquent essay opens with a quote from one of the organizers and mobilizers, General Dogon:  "That's what it means. We're still here. We ain't going nowhere. If it wasn't for our work at LA CAN, it would have been a Katrina. It would have been genocide down here. If you look at it from that perspective, just starting from there and look at all the things that we have done, helped with, and stopped, all that comes into plain view…LA CAN is a support system, it's a friend, and also it's a lover because we love everybody. We're all neighbors. We're all brothers and sisters because we've developed that bond through the struggle."  (General Dogon, quoted in Nicholas Dahmann [2010].  Ten Years of Struggle for Human Rights: The housing and civil rights work of the Los Angeles Community Action Network. Los Angeles, CA:  Southern California Library / Department of Geography, University of Southern California, quote from p. 1).

This got me to thinking:  in the years since the latter days of August and the early days of September, 2005, exactly what is the discursive landscape of references to "Katrina"?  How has this word come to represent natural disasters caused by political and policy disasters, racialized injustice, and mass displacement?  How has the term been used to mobilize protests and community organization?  Where has the term been used?

Your mission:  perform a media analysis of the diffusion and performative consequences of "Katrina" references.  For some tools, ideas, and references on media analysis, see this.

  • Topographies of Torch Tensions.  In the Spring of 2008, the old familiar tradition of the Olympic torch relay catalyzed a veritable moveable feast of protest and mobilization in the months leading up to the Summer Olympics in Beijing.  While protestors advocating autonomy for Tibet may have constituted a plurality, the high-profile and transnationally mobile spectacle of the torch relay offered an irresistible target for a wide variety of concerned groups.  "The Chinese Olympic relay - from Athens to Istanbul, St. Petersburg, London and Paris so far - has created a bond among protesters, some of whom had little in common.  In Paris, at the Trocadéro plaza across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower, the human rights organization Amnesty International and the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders protested side by side with representatives from a banned underground Chinese democracy party, Taiwan nationalists and proponents of independence for Uighurs, a Muslim minority in western China."  Katrin Benhold and Elisabeth Rosenthal (2008).  "Olympic Torch Relay Through Paris Turns into Melee."  New York Times, April 7.  The ever-intensifying competition over the transnational spectacle of the Olympics had backfired, creating precisely the kinds of images that the International Olympic Committee, and prospective host nations, regions, and cities have struggled to contain.  Can they succeed?  Or is protest the inescapable, dialectical Other -- itself defined and nourished by the itinerant geography of an enterprise that has come to be defined by market competition, corporate branding, and a global media audience of unparalleled magnitude?  The tentative answer from the IOC itself seems to be a murmured "yes."  In 2009, the Committee responded to the anti-China torch protests with a new policy:  beginning in 2012, the torch would only pass through the host country of the Games.  No more international headlines following an international protest caravan, perhaps?  "Their goal was to keep crowds friendly after widespread protests accompanied the torch relay, and embarrassed China and Olympic officials, before the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Canada signed on early to the new rules but then bent them ... albeit barely," to take the torch a few hundred footsteps into the U.S. at the Peace Arch crossing.  William Yardley (2010).  "Rules are Bent a Little, and Olympic Torch Visits the U.S."  New York Times, February 9.

What is the evolving geography of protests that follow the Olympic torch relay?  What do these protests tell us about, on the one hand, social movements, and on the other, theories of urban systems and global cities?  For a brief introduction on the former, see James McCarthy (2009).  "Social Movements."  In Derek Gregory, Ron Johnston, Geraldine Pratt, Michael J. Watts, and Sarah Whatmore, eds., The Dictionary of Human Geography, Fifth Edition.  Hoboken, NJ:  Wiley-Blackwell, p. 695.  For further information on the latter, see various course materials along with the citations to published articles and books, provided in my Introduction to Urban Geography or Cities courses.


  • Tea Party Tempest.  The election of U.S. President Barack Obama enraged a vast section of the American electorate.  Many American conservatives have remained convinced -- even during times when Republicans had undisputed power and used it effectively -- that they are under siege by cadres of evil liberal elites working to transform the United States into a Bolshevik collective farm.  In the last thirty years, American politics has unquestionably veered to the right, but thanks to Frank Luntz, Fox News, and others in the conservative communications machine, most conservatives in the United States have felt disenfranchised by a vast left-wing conspiracy.  Obama's election catalyzed this fear into a powerful, indignant rage.  Not long after Obama took office, the cable-news commentator Rick Santelli offered a short but angry attack on the idea that the Obama Administration was considering expenditures that would help to ease the financial burden for millions of U.S. homeowners who owed more on their mortgages than their homes were worth -- thanks to a housing collapse caused by the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression.  Santelli urged viewers to rise up against the idea that the government might bail out their irresponsible neighbors who borrowed too much for their homes, and suggested that it might be time for another Boston Tea Party.  The Obama homeowner rescue plans, it turned out, were extremely limited:  it was much easier to convince conservative legislators to bail out multinational banks in the name of "stabilization," rather than help homeowners, many of whom had been swindled by predatory lenders.  But the "Tea Party" comment tapped into the gathering right-wing anger at Obama and all that he represented.  The approach of the federal tax deadline on April 15, 2009, brought the appearance of scores of "Tea Party" protests against taxes and big government.  The protests spread further and became ever more angry and threatening through the summer.  It has become clear that this is a social and political movement with considerable force.  But what is the geography of this movement?  Does it follow the broad regional divisions that separate Republican and Democratic loyalties in America -- a division that separates the generally Democratic cities and inner-ring suburbs from the prevailing Republican exurbs and rural areas, and that separates the Democratic North and Northeast from the mostly Republican South?  How common are the disruptive exceptions?  In a special election in January, 2010, a Republican candidate, Scott Brown, achieved a dramatic upset victory for the Senate seat held for almost a half century by Ted Kennedy before his death.  Brown achieved his victory in part by tapping into the anger of the Tea Party movement, and by downplaying the use of the word "Republican" to appeal to self-described independent voters.  What matters here is that he achieved the upset victory in territory once considered reliably Democratic -- sending pangs of fear among all elected Democrats in Washington, DC.

So, explore the question:  what is the geography of the Tea Party movement, as it (maybe) evolves into a formal political party?  Map and measure indicators of the movement's strength.  Use news sources to chart the location and estimated attendance at major rallies or other events.  Analyze the geography under construction as the movement tries to create a formal party structure, even while dealing with the kinds of internal divisions that all movements, left, right, and center, inevitably encounter.  Create some tables, grab some data from the Almanac of American Politics, read speeches from red-meat-right-wing Republicans and raving-leftie lunatics and everyone in between, and try to make sense of the evolving urban, suburban, and rural geographies of politics and power.  For some ideas on the range of groups to document in your exploration of the geographies of anger and protest, see this:

David Barstow (2010).  "Tea Party Movement Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right."  New York Times, February 16, A1. 

See also

Frank Rich (2010).  "Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged."  (Op-Ed).  New York Times, February 27

It keeps getting even more interesting; see

Kate Zernike (2010).  "Coffee Party, with a Taste for Civic Participation, is Added to the Political Menu." New York Times, March 1.


And now, yikes!  Donald Trump out-Tea-Partied the Tea Party, and his chief strategist Steve Bannon diagnosed what he called a "Global Tea Party Movement."  To look inside his mind, read the transcript of a speech he gave at the Vatican:

J. Lester Feder (2016).  "This is How Steve Bannon Sees the Entire World."  Buzzfeed, November 15.

  • Geographies of the Public Household.  A number of years ago, I drew on the work of Susan Hanson, Gerry Pratt, and Dolores Hayden to develop a theory of the "public household."  My concern was the interlocking relations between gender roles, private household social dynamics, and the intensified marketization of every corner of human life.  I undertook an analysis of the geography of the public household in different neighborhoods of Minneapolis-St. Paul between 1970 and 1990.  I haven't found the time to do the logical follow-up on this project.  We need to update the analysis for the Twin Cities in 2000 (with decennial census data), to extend the approach with the continuous-measurement model of the American Community Survey, and to evaluate contextual contrasts with other U.S. cities.  We also need to adapt the framework for an empirical investigation of Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and many other cities.  We also need to coordinate the analysis with labor organizers, to map the geographical contours for campaigns such as the recent effort in Albany to win the right to organize for private household workers in New York State.  (My original analysis of Minneapolis-St. Paul appears in Elvin K. Wyly [1999].  "Continuity and Change in the Restless Urban Landscape."  Economic Geography 75(4), 309-338.).

  • Large-Cap Shotgun and Camelback Houses.  Some time ago, I adapted a simple technique to measure the fine-grained neighborhood patterns of housing speculation -- using a benchmark that is similar to a price-earnings ratio for stock market analysis.  When we apply this indicator to debt-financed housing purchases, we can map the geography of highly-leveraged, debt-enabled speculation.  I ran the numbers for New York City.  I think it's a fascinating map.  I'd love to see how the patterns appear in other cities.  I'm especially curious about Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Detroit.  And New Orleans, too.  On shotguns and camelbacks all built in the sinking backswamps behind the natural levees, see Pierce Lewis, 2003.  New Orleans:  The Making of an Urban Landscape.  Santa Fe, NM:  Center for American Places.

  • Rent Gap Gaps.  Neil Smith's rent gap framework has shaped thirty years of gentrification research, but has also proven extremely difficult to measure.  But certain data offer the potential for new insights on the rent gap and its role in neighborhood transformation.  In particular, surprisingly few gentrification researchers have used the individual, loan-level records, each of them tied to census tract codes, from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data.  I would love to see these data used, along with other relevant databases, to distinguish house value, capitalized ground rent, and potential ground rent.  If these concepts could be operationalized (and I am not suggesting that it would be easy), then we could evaluate how the rent gap changes when it is produced not just by increases in potential rent amidst decreases in capitalized rent -- but also when potential and capitalized rent are both declining or increasing (but at markedly different rates).  Why does this matter?  Pro-gentrification advocates, most prominently Andres Duany in his "Three Cheers for Gentrification" in the right-wing American Enterprise, argue that places like Detroit and Cleveland need all the gentrification they can get.  A strategic positivist evaluation of rent gap dynamics in declining vs. expanding cities would help to illuminate the role of disinvestment in creating profitable, gentrifiable spaces in different kinds of inner-city contexts.

  • Instruments of Racialized PlacesA few years ago, I refined a common technique to map the contextual variation of racism against African American and Latino/Latina homebuyers and homeowners.  The approach built on an analysis done by Sam Myers and his colleagues in the early 1990s, subsequently refined by my good friend Steve Holloway.  I applied the approach to a narrow category of inner-city neighborhoods in about two dozen cities, in order to reveal the contextuality of racism -- the regional and local variation in bigotry that we must always recognize as we continue the Civil Rights Movement.  We need to apply this technique to other cities, and to evaluate changes over time.  (See Elvin K. Wyly and Daniel J. Hammel [2004]."Gentrification, Segregation, and Discrimination in the American Urban System."  Environment and Planning A 36, 1215-1241).

  • Subprime Slime.  Not long ago, I had the disarmingly simple, naive, and (some might argue) silly idea to undertake a classiification of the different landscapes produced by subprime mortgage lending.  For twenty years there has been a growing academic and policy literature on the subject, of course, but until recently it's been specialized, obscure, and ignored by most folks.  In the Spring and Summer of 2007, however, investors began to understand the full severity and prevalence of abuses and exploitations committed against millions of homeowners and homebuyers -- who eventually wound up defaulting in ever larger numbers as it became impossible to keep up with the mounting payments of sophisticated (and dangerous) loan products.  Alan Greenspan's respect for the innovations of the market notwithstanding, there are some "exotic" instruments -- such as the much-discussed NINJA loan (No Income, No Job, No Assets, but we're happy to give you a loan!) -- that never should have been invented.


    But indeed these sorts of products were invented, because they were profitable


    Years ago, of course, defaults and foreclosures were bad for everyone involved -- borrower, bank, and community.  But in the new world of "structured finance," where mortgages are sold to investors and debt obligations are chopped up into all sorts of different commodities, the situation is very different.  After making a loan, for example, lenders often sell the debt itself to investors.  They often sell the "servicing" rights -- the nitty-gritty details of processing the monthly payments and calling borrowers when the due date arrives but the payment has not.  Special servicing firms usually earn most of their revenue from things like late payments, creating a powerful incentive to 'lose' a check for a few days in order to trigger a late charge.  Meanwhile, the loan obligations themselves are packaged into carefully-designed Mortgage Backed Securities (MBSs) offered to investors on Wall Street.  Investors obviously demand higher returns for loans of higher risk, so investment banking firms over the last decade found ever more sophisticated ways of providing higher returns for ever more risky loans, and lenders and brokers responded by aggressively making more and more loans that could quickly be sold into the MBS market.  As a result, the old incentives no longer apply:  we're not talking about a local banker anymore, who is concerned that a particular borrower should be able to make the monthly payments on a long-term, sustainable basis.  Instead, we're talking about brokers and lenders eager to make as many loans as they can, and then the loans are pacakged into securities, divided up into a variety of collateralized debt obligations, multiple-tranche bonds with callback provisions, interest-only strips, and so on.  Confused?  Yeah, me too.  And so is nearly every major institutional investor on the planet.  (Indeed, the 'Subprime Slime' title is not my own, but is a quote from a financial analyst explaining why investors were running away so fast even from mainstream bank stocks in August, 2007.)  The point is that for a time, as long as house values continued to rise, ever more risky practices could be profitable for those who made the loans, and for those who invested in them, even as more and more borrowers defaulted on the loans.  Especially in the refinance market -- where most of the subprime push has been concentrated -- it's possible to extract a lot of profit by using deception to make loans with high fees and terrible terms to poor people who are almost certain to default in a few months.  When they do, come back to them, offer to refinance, pack in another batch of hidden charges, and pocket another bonus.  Eventually, all the home equity is down to zero -- the borrower owes as much as, or more than, the value of the house.  But if you foreclose before that very last stage, when the borrower is in default but there's still some home equity, you can still extract one last round of profit.  In other words, irrational, unhealthy, and dangerous loan transactions became profitable.  It became profitable to make loans destined to fail.  The industry created a game of musical chairs that provided lucrative fees to everyone, with surprisingly low risks for brokers, lenders, and investors.  Unfortunately, borrowers consistently wound up on the short end of these aggressive deals.  If you're still not convinced, read some of the historical literature on when this happened to the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), and also take a look at the expose of West Outer Drive, Detroit, published by that notorious left-wing rag, the Wall Street Journal


    But back to my silly idea.  How do we come to terms with the many different ways that this new form of financial risk interacts with the many different housing markets and neighborhood settings across the American urban system?  The combinatorial possibilities are endless, but of course we do need to find some way of classifying things to make sense of them, and to formulate plans for organizing, activism, litigation, and regulation.  This applies no matter what you think of the industry that has sprang up to serve B-and-C borrowers:  whether you think it's the magic of risk-based pricing, or the exploitation of predatory lending.


    So I had this simple idea, and one day in early 2007 on the way home from work, in the spare moments when the bus wasn't going over any bumps, I jotted down this.  I eventually wound up playing around with the 2004 HMDA data -- a best-case scenario, as it turns out -- and expanding the primitive scribbled notes into the  rather verbose first draft of "Mapping and Mobilization."  When it was sent out for anonymous peer review, one of the referees raised the predictable objection:  "Not all subprime lending is predatory."  Yes, that was a cutting-edge insight about ten years ago.  In any event, the referee's comments inspired me to redesign the analysis from the ground up to address this concern, in what could be regarded as a new inference approach, in "Subprime Mortgage Segmentation in the American Urban System."


    But the original classification impulse remains, no matter how embarrassing it is to stand out there in the field and hack the pumpkin apart like a lunatic (see the original Mapping and Mobilization to understand what I mean by this).  What I need your help on is this:  what are the absolutely crucial measures of city and neighborhood conditions that we should use to define the space of today's Wall-Street subprime slime?  Precisely how do we analyze the linkages among racial-ethnic inequality, regional variations in the historical legacy of the housing stock that is (and has become, through filtering) affordable to lower-income homeowners?  How can we best measure the velocity of change between 2004 and 2006?  We also need in-depth narratives, based on deep local knowledge of particular neighborhoods shown in various clusters and taxonomies.  Also, I need you to undertake a full-fledged study of metropolitan areas in Puerto Rico, which have been almost completely ignored in the redlining, discrimination, and predatory lending literatures.  But I know there's an important analytical and strategic story to be told there, in part because the comparatively low rate of subprime penetration can be traced to the strong governmental subsidies for affordable homeownership on the island.


































*



CopyLeft 2018 Elvin K. Wyly
Except where otherwise noted, this site is
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License
Being of sound mind and aging body, I freely confess that I immediately thought of my own mortality when I read Charles Wrigley's posthumous reflections on the cluster-analytic mind of Robert Tryon.  The tyranny of time once killed the possibilities for certain kinds of studies that can now be done in seconds with the fast processing speeds of your desktop, laptop, or hiphop flat-top Ipod.  "At that time, all computations had to be done by hand; Tryon was later to speak of his mis-spent youth, because too much of his time had been spent with a desk calculator.  In the 1950s the practice of cluster analysis was restated in computer terms to enable the investigator to escape from hand calculations.  Tryon and Bailey therefore planned this book to be the definitive account of postcomputer cluster analysis.  The manuscript was almost finished when Tryon died suddenly in 1967."  And yet automation has its limits.  It has killed the craft guild of certain kinds of social-scientific inquiry.  It enables but by no means guarantees advances in the kinds of questions that can be asked, the narratives that can be written and spoken, and the strategic mobilizations that can be constructed.  And it can strip us of our agency and creativity if we're not careful.  What are we do to, what role is there for us, if our mental processing power is only a fraction of the computing power one is likely to find in the average kitchen appliance?

Wrigley, Charles.  1970.  "Preface."  In Robert C. Tryon and Daniel E. Bailey, Cluster Analysis.  New York:  McGraw-Hill, v-x, quote from p. v. 
I went to downtown Las Vegas and looked up, July 2006 (Elvin Wyly)
My Approach

I might be best described as a sort of "recovering positivist."  Put simply, I began with a reverence for careful, rigorous social science about the facts of inequality and injustice in the world -- only to realize that in a world where the Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year is "post-truth," sometimes other methods are required to fight violence, discrimination, and the pervasive structural evils of planetary, cybernetic cognitive capitalism.

Woof, lots of big words.  To explain what I mean, consider a description of my approach that was on this page for several years:

I am an empirical urbanist with a deep reverence for critical theoretical inquiry.  In other words, when I read impressive works of social theory I am always wondering about applications, examples, case studies, and other kinds of systematic empirical inquiry that could extend, refine, or strengthen the particular theory at hand.  The goal is not just to illustrate stuff, but to mobilize critical theory with the rigor and credibility of positivist spatial science.  I seek to elaborate the contextual, empirical parameters of critical theory in order to provide guidance for activism, mobilization, regulation, or litigation.  To swipe shamelessly from McLuhan and Gramsci, I would suggest that mobilization and measurement constitute medium, message, and mobilization for anyone committed to the role of the organic intellectual.

For an example, consider my reaction when I first read Don Mitchell's astonishingly powerful theory of municipal laws against begging, panhandling, sleeping or urinating on sidewalks and in other public spaces.  For his title, Mitchell reworked a famous nineteenth-century globalization phrase -- "The annihilation of space by time" -- and developed a theory to link contemporary homelessness with the material and rhetorical imperatives of globalization:  "The annihilation of space by law."  Many of the laws and police practices affecting the panhandler we pass on the sidewalk, the homeless man we see curled up on a blanket and sleeping atop a steam vent, the tattered and battered woman on the street asking for food -- all of these policies are increasingly used to cleanse the public spaces used by tourists, middle-class and wealthy residents and visitors.  As cities aggressively compete to make themselves attractive places to live and invest, they are more willing to impose harsh penalties on those people seen as undesirable by wealthy visitors, tourists, shoppers, commuters, and investors.  Municipal ordinances and police practices are mobilized to criminalize behavior that is offensive or unpleasant to the elite and middle classes.  But of course the seemingly benign discourse of urban "quality of life" becomes a process of dehumanization.  It seems quite logical and reasonable to pass a local ordinance that bans pissing or shitting in public.  But it is only reasonable for those who have regular, reliable, convenient access to a private place (i.e., a home) where they can perform these inescapable, fundamental biological functions.  But if you don't have this access, then such prohibitions take on very different meanings.  They criminalize your very right to be, to live, to exist.

My reaction to Mitchell's magisterial theoretical contribution was empirical, and perhaps even empiricist.  Can we map the contours of this vicious, anti-homeless regime?  Can we classify cities and suburbs according to the injustice imposed on the poor and the homeless?  Is there any connection between the mean, heartless treatment of the homeless and the creation of new landscapes of wealth and privilege in the gentrifying inner city?

My answer to all of these questions was yes -- after spending a lot of time with my friend Dan Hammel painting a multivariate canvas using pigments drawn from databases on neighborhood poverty, housing conditions, mortgage capital flows, homeless population estimates, and of course the "Prohibited Activities Chart" developed by the National Coaltion for the Homeless and the National Law Center on Poverty and Homelessness.  This is the chart you should consult to know whether you will be arrested in a particular city if you have to relieve yourself in an alley, if you have to sleep on a sidewalk, or (in the notorious case of that city once described as "too busy to hate," Atlanta) if you walk across a parking lot.  If you are interested in the empirical, strategic positivism Dan and I offered to engage with Mitchell's theory, see one or more of these items:




This kind of work is still important.  But in recent years I've become even more intensely interested in the interplay between past and present in the history of ideas, in more explicitly qualitative, theoretical,  and literature-based methodologies.  Two main factors have driven this re-assessment.  The first involves the discovery of hidden histories in positivism.  Typically understood as the objective application of the scientific methods and quantitative techniques to uncover universal, physics-like laws, the philosophy of positivism is actually a lot more complicated than most people realize.  Positivism actually has a lot of potential affinities with many of today's most exciting philosophies of emancipatory knowledge and social-justice political movements.  To be sure, though, positivism did have a lot of very serious problems, reflecting the wider historical circumstances of its emergence in the nineteenth century, and then its formalization in the takeover of the social sciences by the U.S. military industrial complex in the 1950s.  Today, some of the worst parts of the positivist legacy are today being automated by cybernetic systems of communications and social media, and by the widespread proliferation of machine learning artificial intelligence algorithms.  This is what I call "automated (post)positivism."  For more on this, see: 

Automated (Post)Positivism.  Urban Geography 35(5), 2014, 669-690.

Abstract: With a mantra that ‘nobody is as smart as everybody,’ Google maintains giant databases that enable unprecedented quantitative analysis of a social world that is now majority urban. A Wall Street web-based broker offers an App that promises to turn ‘thoughts into trades.’ Economists and marketers now use evolutionary theory in ‘neuroimaging’ brain scans of consumer behavior. The United States Air Force now trains more joystick-maestro drone pilots than old-fashioned Do-the-Right-Stuff human fighters and bombers. In this article, I suggest that these trends signal a troubling reincarnation of an aggressive Right-wing (post)positivist zombie reanimated by global, digitized neoliberalism. The long-forgotten revolutionary project launched by Auguste Comte in 1822 was hijacked and corrupted after his death, and now we confront a hybrid cyborg zombie, a dehumanized, automated adaptation to the post-structuralist situated knowledges of consumer sovereignty. #Comtebot: The positivist era is right now; the question is what kinds of politics it will have.

The second factor involves a growing realization of the catastrophic loss of important human voices and human creativity.  Several trends coalesce here.  More and more communication is being mediated, and often taken over by, automated agents.  I spend too many hours of my day dealing with emails sent by automated robotic systems; so do you, and so do hundreds of millions of workers and consumers.  The extraordinary computational power of everyday devices and apps is being used in all sorts of troubling ways.  The ubiquity of grammar- and spell-checking routines in word processing software and cloud-based systems like Grammarly, for example, presents me with a painful question every time I read something:  how much of this was written by a human being?  In an age of friendly chatbots and artificial-intelligence systems -- from Apple's Siri to Amazon's Alexa -- we're in a post-human world.  Sorry.  I like humans.  And I'm getting to the age where every day I am losing more of the humans who have inspired me with their work, their lives, their personalities, their words.  I am now daily trapped by bittersweet blends:  inspiration and pain; memory and nostalgia poised against the terror of forgetfulness; the passion of trying to pick up where a previous generation left off, balanced against the exhaustion that sets in when the day is done and the only things accomplished have been filling out the infinite forms of the digital flood of bureaucracy.

Combine emotional turbulence with a bit of reading, pen and paper, and scribbles jotted down when ideas flowed during some fascinating travels, and you get something that looks like this:

Where is an Author? City 19(1), 2015, 5-43.

Abstract:  If you're reading these words on a digital device, we are not alone: our encounter as author and reader is taking/making place in and through an uneven, evolutionary planetary digital infrastructure of cognitive production, measurement and monetization. Five and a half millennia after symbolic discourses of literacy and authorship co-evolved with the first urban revolution, the material, embodied phenomenological encounters of planetary urbanization have arrived at the precise moment of explosive contingency in the scalar nexus between cities and literacy. ‘What is an author?’, Foucault asked in a brilliant lecture in Paris in February 1969. Today, if we put Foucault's question into an intertextual dialogue with contemporary critical urban theory as well as earlier elements of Comte, Marx and Kant, we gain fresh insight into the ways reading and writing are being reconstituted through partially automated constellations of quantification and commodification of human consciousness. Foucault's genealogy of the ‘author function’ has become an increasingly contested and lucrative circuit of accumulation as Marx's concept of the ‘general intellect’ has materialized through the transnational urban networks of what is now widely described as ‘cognitive capitalism'. The growth and evolutionary adaptation of socially networked cultures of reading, viewing, sharing and writing are now performing a new neo-Kantian time-space construction of sense perception in a planetary version of Harvey's ‘urbanization of consciousness', putting individual authors into constitutive conversation with global knowledges once imagined by Comte as the ‘Great Being’ of collective intergenerational inheritance of post-theistic human knowledge.

So there you have it.  Two very different modes of analysis.  One involves a fascinating with quantitative measures of empirical processes, understood through the lens of powerful critical theories.  The other is much more qualitative and biographical, and treats the words and ideas of humans as the most important data of all.














*
Random Crazy Brainstorms

Is Lena Dunham's Girls the positivist gaze of Comte staring down from the arches of the Social Research Building at the University of Chicago? Is this The City (Park, 1925) for the twenty-first century after urban theory went from Chicago to LA (Dear), and then New York's creative class brought it to the City that is always defined by the definite article?  Is Lena Dunham the Robert Park of the ecological complex of post-postindustrial global New York City, when all gazes now are postpositivist, situated standpoint (intro)spection?

Comte's figure is still there, the stone eyes looking down.  But now we know that this should have included Clotilde as well.  She lived on through Comte's transformation.  She shaped him, the way parents shape their children -- through socialization, culture, the resources for intergenerational security and mobility.  That's why he had that 'serious cerebral disturbance.'  It shook his world, and her 'temporal' versus 'positive' existence shifted. 

The Times's assessment of Girls could almost have been written by Burgess himself, describing the equilibrium of human communities in the metropolis:  "The economy fluctuates, neighborhoods blossom or decay, but men never cease to disappoint."  Almost, but not quite:  these might very well have been the words of Clotilde de Vaux, or perhaps Comte's first wife.

  • Gentrification Everywhere?  "Gentrification" is a term coined by a sociologist in the early 1960s to describe the curious way that older, lower-income neighborhoods near the centers of old cities suddenly seemed to be transformed by an influx of middle-class and wealthy people.  Ever since then -- for half a century now -- many people have been greatly concerned with gentrification, in many cities around the world.  It has been a source of enormous controversy, in part because when rich people move in, poor people are forced out into an ever more hostile and competitive market for a place to live.  Recently, I've begun to think about the process in different ways.  Most scholars who study the process -- as well as most journalists and activists who write about it, and most developers and investors who profit from it -- regard the process as fundamentally local.  In this view, gentrification happens to specific urban neighborhoods, like New York's Greenwich Village, London's Covent Garden, or Vancouver's Mount Pleasant, that underwent a long period of sustained decline and disinvestment before things turned around. 

Yes, this is an important element of the process.  But seeing the process as fundamentally local creates a number of problems for interpretation as well as policy and action.  So I've been thinking about gentrification in a much wider, dynamic view.  In this new formulation, gentrification is less about the specifics of geographical location and more about the dynamics of competition.

If you want to see how my thinking is evolving on these subjects, see some of my scribbles below.  A few ideas came to me as we were in the midst of travels.  You can see that our flight was from Winnipeg to Toronto.  Ah, Winnipeg in January!

These notes are a sequel of sorts to a book chapter that you may wish to take a look at:

Wyly, Elvin (2017).  "Gentrification," in John Rennie Short, ed., A Research Agenda for Cities.  Cheltenham, UK:  Edward Elgar, 113-124.